The Patriot Paradox Read online

  He found his coffee was ready and filled his favorite mug to the rim. Armed for the morning, he took the coffee and the letter and ambled into the dining nook, located by a large bay window with a view of the back yard.

  His curiosity got the best of him; he set the coffee aside and pulled the tab on the envelope. He looked inside and didn’t see anything. He turned the envelope upside down and knocked it against the table. A small flash memory card clattered out onto the table.

  “Huh?” He picked up the card and inspected it. It was a Secure Digital card, the same model he had in his digital camera. His curiosity was piqued. He looked over his shoulder, searching for the laptop they kept in the kitchen. It had a flash reader.

  He spied the machine buried under a pile of magazines on the counter. The battery was probably dead, but it was worth a try. The other alternative was to go up to his study and use his office computer.

  Two minutes later, the computer was booted and ready. Kurt slid the memory card into a slot on the right side and waited for it to be recognized. When it was ready, the computer created a new folder on his desktop with lettering underneath indicating two items. Kurt double-clicked on the folder.

  It popped open in a new window, and he saw that it contained one file, along with another directory. The second directory contained 1,342 items.

  Kurt double clicked on the file, titled Listen-to-me-First.mp3, and took a sip of coffee as his audio player started up. “Kurt. It’s Mike. If you’re listening to this, then things have gone terribly wrong.” His brother’s voice was low and calm, the way Kurt remembered it.

  Kurt pressed pause and sat back, stunned. He checked the time stamp on the file. Three days ago. The same day Mike had died.

  He pressed Play. “I’ve gotten involved in something…something that I should have never touched. The people I work for, they’ve taken an idea that should have remained buried in a vault, and they’re trying to make it real.” There was a long pause, and Mike’s voice resumed, this time a little less steady. “Tell Amy that I’m sorry and that I love her. Tell her I was a good man—that I tried to do the right thing. Tell mom and dad that I love them, too. And Kurt—I’m sorry to drag you into my problems when you’ve been to hell and back. I really need you, one last time. You need to get this information to Amanda Carter in London. She’ll know what to do with it.”

  Time slowed to a crawl as he stared at the computer screen. Then, without warning, it sped back up and crashed over him like a rogue wave. He let out an anguished moan and slammed his fist down on the kitchen table so hard the computer jumped in place.

  This is Mike’s last message, he realized, his last will and testament.

  He pushed back from the computer, unsure what to make of the whole thing. Who is Amanda Carter? What’s in the other folder? Moreover, why did Mike send it to him rather than going straight to her?

  As he thought about the recording, turning it over repeatedly in his mind, he was hit by a sinister realization. They’ll come for me next.

  Kurt leapt up and dashed over to the bay window. He stood to one side and peered out, trying to appear as casual as possible. He didn’t see anything. With a quick yank, he closed the blinds. He repeated this process throughout the house, everywhere except Heidi’s room. He still couldn’t go in there.

  Satisfied no one could see in, he returned to the computer. He replayed Mike’s message, listening for anything he had missed. There was nothing.

  He moved on, opening the other folder. A new window opened, displaying an enormous alphabetical list of files. They appeared to be of many different types, Microsoft Word documents, MPEG video files, and even some more mp3 files. He clicked on one of the video files at random.

  It took a few seconds to load. The video was grainy and showed what appeared to be a campsite somewhere in the mountains. The camera panned and settled on the face of a young man with a long, scraggly beard, not unlike the one Kurt had just shaved off. The man spoke in a language Kurt didn’t understand. He watched the video for a few more seconds, skipping ahead several times, but it didn’t make any more sense, so he closed it.

  He picked a Microsoft Word file at random. The file popped open, and he began to skim through it. It contained a long list of financial transactions between offshore accounts. He paged through the document to the end. That was it. He was getting frustrated, but an idea was forming. He selected search from the menu and entered his brother’s name. Nothing. He scratched his head.

  He decided to push the search a little farther. He minimized the document, returned to the main window, typed Mike’s name into the search box, and hit Enter. A list of twenty-six files opened. Kurt sucked in his breath and chose the first one.

  He blinked, unable to believe what he was seeing. It was Mike’s CIA personnel file. He yanked his hands from the keyboard as if he had received an electric shock. The classification level on this information was so high that even Mike wouldn’t have been able to view it. Probably not even the President, Kurt thought, without congressional authorization. Yet, there it was. Kurt drummed his fingers on the table, considering what to do next.

  “What the hell did you get yourself into?” he whispered.

  Kurt spent the next several minutes scanning his brother’s records, absorbing all of the gory details concerning the secret life his brother had led for the past ten years. The last entry in the record, however, was the most intriguing, and at the same time, the least informative. It noted a transfer to a new program, yet the program was unnamed.

  It listed his supervisor as a man named Jack Carson. Kurt knew the name. From where, he wasn’t sure, but he had heard it on more than one occasion. He filed the information away and moved on to the next document.

  He continued until he had plowed through all of the documents that contained his brother’s name. As he finished the last document, he sat back in his chair and let out a deep breath. At first glance, it appeared Mike had been intimately involved in some type of money-laundering effort between the CIA and a separatist organization in Chechnya, the breakaway Russian republic. The details were murky, but the amount of money involved, in the tens of millions of Euros, was staggering.

  Kurt checked the clock over the microwave and leaped to his feet, cursing. He was due at the funeral in two hours, and he was not at all ready. Now he had a new dilemma. How could he keep a straight face at the funeral with this information? How could he act as if Mike’s death was a tragic accident when it might have been an assassination? Mike had sent him the information for a reason. He had run out of people to trust, and he had circumvented all security channels.

  Kurt scanned the room for a good place to stash the information. If whoever had killed Mike knew he had it, he wouldn’t get much of a warning before they came after him. The only thing that made sense, he decided, was to keep the memory card on his body. That way he could react if someone came after it, and maybe buy himself enough time to figure out what else was there.

  As a contingency, he created an encrypted partition on the laptop drive and copied all of the files into it. He secured it with AES 256-bit encryption, which as far as he knew, was still unbreakable, even by the NSA.

  He stuffed the memory card into his pocket and raced upstairs to get dressed. Fifteen minutes later, the garage door rumbled open, and he eased his vintage silver Porsche 911 to the edge of the driveway. He looked both ways, and then took off with a screech.

  Seven

  Kurt punched his accelerator and shot across the highway into the church parking lot, skidding to a stop beside a shiny Mercedes SUV. Although he didn’t like to think of himself as wealthy, it was hard to deny reality. His great grandfather, Augustus Vetter, had been an early pioneer in oil-extraction technology, and his patents had generated an enormous fortune for the family over the past hundred years. After that initial burst of wealth-generating effort, Augustus’ descendants had diversified, going into a host of other businesses and eventually ending up as members of the pol
itical and financial elite. The result of this ancestral entrepreneurship was that Kurt and his family had more money than they could ever spend.

  He climbed from his Porsche and gazed toward the cemetery, the same cemetery that held Amelia and Heidi. He looked away.

  “Kurt!”

  Kurt followed the call and saw his mom bustling through the door of the church and heading his way. His father was right behind her, struggling to keep up. He strode toward them, but before he could get halfway, his mother closed the gap in a shuffling run.

  She flew into his arms and threw her head against his shoulder, breaking into a fresh round of sobs. “Kurt—I’m so glad you made it,” she gasped.

  “I’m here, Mom.” He patted her on the shoulder. Looking up, he nodded at his father. “Dad.”

  “Son.”

  Kurt disentangled himself from his mother and took a step back. After being on the road for so long, his sense of personal space was a bit out of adjustment. He held his hand out for his dad, who took it, before pulling him into an awkward embrace.

  “Is everyone here?” Kurt asked, not knowing what else to say. His mother wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. She isn’t taking this well, he observed. But how could she?

  His father showed no emotion as usual. He stood ramrod straight, watching his wife blubber on, yet offering no condolences of his own. “We start in a few minutes,” he said.

  Kurt looked toward the church. At the same time, his father reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a pack of cigarettes—Camel, unfiltered. He held out the pack , and when Kurt shook his head, his father shrugged, knocked one out for himself, and lit up.

  “Is everyone here?” Kurt asked again. Before his parents could answer, the door to the church swung open again and Amy, Mike’s widow, stepped out. She had a determined smile on her face, which brightened a bit when she saw Kurt. She waved and started across the lot.

  “Kurt,” she said, as she approached. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  Kurt bit back the tears that were straining to break loose. He knew exactly what she was going through. “I’m so sorry, Amy,” he said, opening his arms.

  Amy melted into his embrace, molding herself to him. “He was so young, so full of life…” she sniffed. She was past the initial shock and probably well into the acceptance phase. The funeral was the worst part, everyone trying to comfort you, telling you everything would be all right. Fuck them. They have no idea.

  Amy pulled back and gazed into Kurt’s eyes. “This must hurt so much for you. Mike was such an amazing brother. I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”

  Kurt stared down at his feet, and then looked back at Amy. “Yeah.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He felt the same sense of loss, but unlike her, he was still in shock and acceptance was a long way off.

  “Can I talk to you afterward?” he asked in a low voice, so no one else could hear.

  “Sure.” She gave him a quizzical look.

  “Shall we?” his father interjected, gesturing toward the church.

  Amy nodded. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  As a family, they entered the church. The funeral flew by, as they always did in Kurt’s experience. Thankfully, Kurt didn’t have to deliver a eulogy, although he would have done it if asked. Instead, Amy and his father carried out the duty, and admirably so.

  The burial ceremony passed without incident. Mike was in the ground, and Kurt was the last remaining Vetter child. Immediately afterward, the family and guests regrouped and convoyed to Amy and Mike’s house for the wake.

  Kurt didn’t stop to visit Amelia and Heidi’s graves. That would come later, when he was alone.

  The majority of the guests clustered in the living room, with some spilling onto the grand front porch that wrapped around the house. Mike and Amy’s children, Emily and Philip, four and six respectively, wandered in and out of the proceedings, blissfully unaware of the full context.

  “Uncle Kurt?” He turned and found Philip standing behind him dangling a miniature lacrosse stick from his little fist. His heart broke a little more as he gazed down at the little boy. He couldn’t help but recall a vision of Heidi, several weeks before the accident, playing hide and seek with Mike’s children. It had seemed so permanent at the time, as if the children had all the time in the world. He blinked the image away.

  Kneeling down, he put himself eye to eye with Philip. His pain was no match for what this little man would go through over the next several years. “How are you, Phil?” he asked, holding out his hand.

  Phillip took it and gave it a good shake. “Will you play with me, Uncle Kurt?”

  “Sure! Do you have another stick?”

  Philip beamed, obviously delighted to have someone to keep him company. “On the back porch!” He spun around and dashed towards the rear of the house. Kurt got back to his feet and took off in pursuit of his nephew. He hadn’t had a chance to speak with Amy yet, and he figured this would help keep him occupied while he waited for an opportunity to do so.

  He spent the next half hour tossing a ball back and forth with Philip. They had the backyard to themselves, stopping briefly to wave at Amy’s sister Jessica, who was in charge of the children for the afternoon. The boy’s skill with the ball impressed him. Deep down, he hoped Philip would channel the pain of his father’s death into success on the game field. It had to go somewhere, after all.

  The day was getting late, and Amy still hadn’t shown her face. Kurt realized he couldn’t hide out in the back yard with the six-year-old forever. It was time to go back inside and find her, and try to get some answers. “One more throw,” he announced.

  Phillip looked disappointed, but Kurt knew he would get over it.

  “Why don’t you go find your sister, see what she’s doing,” Kurt suggested. “I bet she’d like to play outside for a while, too.” Philip’s face brightened at the idea. He was still at the age when playing with his sister was an option. Kurt knew the boy had only a few more years before he developed a group of his own male friends, and that dynamic would be lost forever.

  Once Philip was gone, Kurt made his way to the front of the house, searching the small knots of people for Amy’s face. He was surprised and startled to find her sitting alone, staring into a cup of coffee, on a couch near the front door.

  He took a seat beside her. “Amy,” he said in his most respectful voice. “How are you holding up?”

  She looked up, and Kurt realized she had been crying, not a lot, but enough to smudge her makeup. Amy dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and forced a wan smile onto her face. “I’ll survive,” she replied, blowing her nose. “Did you still want to talk?”

  Kurt nodded. “Is now a good time?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think any time is going to be good for a while.”

  Kurt shifted in his seat. She was right. “Okay, then… I was wondering if you noticed anything different about Mike before he died? Was he acting strange? Mood changes, late night phone calls, sudden trips, stuff like that?”

  Amy blinked and shifted on the couch, putting some space between them. “Maybe, now that you ask. But that was Mike, you know?”

  Kurt leaned in closer. “I’m not sure I understand...”

  “Well, he was really moody in the last month or so, more than I’ve seen in a long time. Some nights he wouldn’t come to bed until two or three in the morning.” Her gaze wandered somewhere over Kurt’s left shoulder, as if she was afraid to look him in the eyes. “Sometimes it seemed as if he was somewhere else entirely, as if he wasn’t the man I had married.” Her eyes met Kurt’s again.

  “Was it work?”

  “It had to be. Things were going really well for us for a change…”

  Kurt smiled. It was common knowledge in the family that Mike and Amy had had a stormy relationship from the start. “Mike told me you guys were going through a rough patch,” he admitted. “Just before I left town.”

  Amy looked away again. “I figured.
He never was very good at telling me what he really felt about things—about anything. He kept everything locked up so tight; it pained me to watch him sometimes. I guess it was because of work, but I don’t know. Whatever it was, I had had enough. I told him he had to either figure out how to talk to me, to let me inside, or I was leaving.” She tucked a stray strand of blond hair behind her ear and continued. “We found a therapist in Alexandria. It was tough at first, tougher than I expected. We both learned a lot. It turned out the problem was with both of us. We made real progress, damn it! However, after a few months—BAM! It was back to the old Mike. He was gone.”

  Kurt pressed harder. “Did he say anything about what he was doing at work? Any hints?”

  Amy thought for a moment, shook her head. “Nothing. He was a stone wall.”

  Kurt rolled his shoulders and shifted on the couch. The tension of the day was killing him. “Was he traveling? Spending time alone?”

  “Yes. He did take several trips. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say where. You know how he was about work.”

  Kurt filed that away for later. It wasn’t unusual in itself. It wouldn’t be a stretch for Mike to go out of the country on short notice. “Would you mind if I poked around his office?” he asked. He knew he was going out on a limb with that.

  Amy didn’t hesitate in her response. “No. Not at all.” She got to her feet and led him through the house to Mike’s office. He passed his parents on the way and noticed that his father appeared well on the way to a self-medicated oblivion, courtesy of Johnny Walker.

  They walked down a long hallway in the southwest wing of the house. As they reached the ornate French doors leading to Mike’s study, Amy stopped and turned to face him, stepping uncomfortably close. She stared up at Kurt’s eyes for a long moment, and he had the feeling that she was waiting for him to kiss her. She needed someone to hold on to. He took a step back, hoping to defuse the awkwardness.

  “Thanks, Amy. I’ll leave it as I found it.” The moment passed, and Amy was back to normal. She smoothed her hair and made a point of looking down the hall past Kurt, then she walked away.