No Fortunate Son Read Online Free PDF Page A

name? Is it Esmeralda?”
    His head was spinning, and he was fighting the bar stool as if he was riding the mechanical bull in the corner. The only thing that penetrated was the name.
    Woozily, he said, “You know her?”
    “Yes. I do.” The Irishman smiled, not looking nearly as drunk as he had a moment ago. “Sorry, bud. She’s not coming.”
    Curtis started to slide off the stool and felt someone grab both of his arms. Then he feltnothing.

DAY FOUR
    The Panic

5
    C olonel Kurt Hale could barely make out the words through the sobbing in the phone, the hitches of his sister’s voice making her incoherent.
    “Kathy, calm down. Take a deep breath. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
    He heard sniffling and looked at his watch.
Running out of time.
    “Kathy, listen, I have a meeting I have to be at in thirty minutes and it’s all the way across town. I’ll give you a call back when I’m done.”
    The hitches stopped and he felt the heat through the phone. “Meeting? I’m talking about your
niece
. She could be lying in a ditch or dead. Jesus Christ, she loves you better than her own father, and you’re not even giving her the time of day.”
    “Okay, okay, calm down. What’s he doing about it? Did you call him?”
    He knew the answer before she even spoke. Kathy’s ex-husband, a Wall Street bond trader, was a philandering, narcissistic jerk. Kurt had always wanted to punch the smirk off his face, but it had taken Kathy five years to figure out his true stripes. Kathy now used him only to provide for her daughter, like paying for Kylie’s student exchange to England.
    “That asshole just offered money. He can’t do anything anyway.”
    “Kathy, neither can I.”
    “Bullshit! You work for the CIA or something. You can find her. You’re the only person I know. Nobody else cares. Maybe you don’t either.”
    He rolled his eyes up in frustration. He loved his sister dearly, but her views on how the world worked were distinctly different from his. She was a pacifist, to the point that it had taken seven long years before she’d even speak to him again after he’d joined the Army. When he started working in classified assignments, she naturally defaulted to thinking he was some Black Ops assassin and—even when he told her he was in a Special Forces unit—she believed it to be the CIA. She believed
everything
was the CIA. For twenty years he’d listened to her conspiracy theories, and, ironically, if he told her what he was doing now, all her fears would be realized.
    He deflected the line of discussion, saying, “Kathy, look, it’s only been twenty-four hours. There’s probably a simple explanation. Maybe she’s just out partying. Shit, she’s grown up now. A college kid. You remember what that was like.”
    “Kurt, that line of BS would work when we were her age, but not now. She’s got a cell phone, Instagram, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Lord knows how many other means of communication. All of them have been stagnant. Her cell phone goes straight to voice mail, and she’s not posted a thing when she usually does that four or five times a day.”
    Which were the first words his sister had said that made Kurt pause. The first clear signal that this wasn’t a college drunken blackout.
    Kathy spoke again, the rage gone, replaced by fear. “Kurt, I don’t know anyone else to call. She’s not important enough for anyone to care. She’s just another lost American. And she’s in trouble. I know it as a mother. You’ve got to help me. I have no one else.”
    He said nothing for a moment, then: “Okay, Kathy. Send me an email with all of her information. Don’t forget all that social media stuff. Let me get this meeting over with and I’ll see what I can do.”
    *   *   *
    Driving across the Key Bridge, George Wolffe finally broke the silence. “Hey, you going to let me in on what’s going through that head? You thinking about those missing soldiers, or are you