The First Casualty Read Online Free PDF Page B

longer would his wife, Laurin, worry about his frequently unannounced absences to places he could not mention and from which he stood a good chance of not returning. If his artistic success continued—and the galleries in the aforesaid cities had no reason to think it would not—Laurin would soon retire from her Washington lobbying firm. Her largest client was the U.S. Army, whom she represented before the various Congressional committees in the ongoing interservice rivalry for funds.
    It was tragic but not accidental she was in the Pentagon that morning. She had just stuck her head into the cubicle that served as Jason’s office.
    â€œHi, soldier! Buy a girl a cup of coffee?”
    Jason glanced at the coffeepot behind his desk, a device that produced a viscous fluid more akin to motor oil than a drinkable beverage. “Sure. Let me finish up here a minute. Go on down to the canteen and I’ll meet you there.”
    â€œBetter yet, I’ll step and fetch. Be back in a minute.’
    He watched her turn around. His interest in what he described as the world’s most beautiful ass had not diminished in the six years of marriage. He wondered sometimes if birth of the child she was carrying—but not yet showing—would change that.
    He never saw her again.
    Almost as bad—they never identified her body.
    Unlike most 9/11 families, he had no grave to visit, only the very contemporary memorial erected on the west side of the Pentagon. Whenever he was in Washington, he took time to visit, leave flowers with a card bearing her name, knowing they would be collected and discarded by the grounds crew at the end of the day. It was the only way he had of giving Laurin back her identity, if not her life.
    The gaping hole in his soul filled with a burning hatred of terrorists of any stripe and a mounting frustration of his inability to strike back. That opportunity came out of the blue a month or so later when he was invited to visit the Maryland offices of Narcom, a secretive company whose sole client was the U.S. intelligence community. Narcom took on jobs too politically sensitive, too dangerous, or those requiring plausible deniability.
    The assignments paid obscenely well. Better yet, all Narcom’s fees, and hence Jason’s, were, by special agreement, tax-free. Aware of the suddenness with which political winds shifted and bearing a healthy distrust of government in general and the IRS in particular, Jason had made his accumulation of wealth as hard to find as possible.
    The best part of the job, though, had been the work. Assassination, kidnapping, any sort of dirty trick devised by the warped minds in Washington. Most directed at the same ragheads responsible for Laurin’s death, those who violently mindlessly perverted a religion and culture that was perfecting algebra when Europe was still burning heretics.
    Job satisfaction indeed.
    But the work hadn’t exactly made friends. Revenging honor was a driving force among friends, associates, and relatives of those Jason had dispatched to their reward of seventy-two virgins. Although he no longer worked for Narcom, extremist nut bags had long memories.
    From time to time, he had taken the occasional assignment, more out of boredom than need. That had caused problems with Maria, the Italian volcanologist and ardent pacifist, who, from time to time, shared his life. Now, as was frequently the case, she was on an expedition, this time to study an eruption in Indonesia, leaving Jason to the care of Mrs. Abigail Prince, his grandmotherly housekeeper.
    Mrs. Prince had a genuine fondness for Maria, although her Anglican background viewed the relationship as sinful. Hardly a day passed some reference was not made to marriage, in spite of both Jason’s and Maria’s clear disinclinations to commit matrimony at this point. Though she scolded constantly, the woman also held an affection for Pangloss, a large, shaggy, and nondescript dog