The Brig reminded Bream of a utility shed. Decorated, barely, with a pair of model ships, a dartboard, and three beer company posters, it smelled of low tide even though the tide was now high-because the jukebox was out of order and the six solitary patrons weren’t speaking to one another, Bream could hear the waves slapping the top of the pier.
Glad of the opportunity to be alone with his thoughts, he climbed onto a stool at the warped bar and ordered his Bud.
He found himself stealing glances at the young woman in a Princeton sweatshirt at the other end of the bar, as exquisite a specimen as he’d ever seen. Aphrodite with green eyes and a damned good attendance record at the gym.
What the hell, he wondered, was someone like her doing in a place like this?
Cliche be damned, he wandered over and asked.
“Waiting for you to come to this side of the bar.” She flashed two fingers to the bartender. “But just because you’re the only man here who wouldn’t be a shoo-in for the cast of a zombie movie, don’t think I’m going to be easy.”
“That makes two of us,” Bream said. “I’ve already got an old lady.”
“But you want a young one, don’t you?”
Bream didn’t say no. Maybe what he really needed was to take his mind off work. Settling on the stool next to hers, he asked, “So you got a story?”
At twenty-three, she said, she was over the hill as a fashion model. Tonight she was drinking herself into grudging acceptance that she would start law school in the fall. She had eschewed the Ivies for the University of Alabama so that she could help take care of her grandma, who lived nearby.
He was charmed. Three beers later and it was probably clear to everyone in the bar, even the guy facedown at the table beneath the dartboard, where this was heading.
Everyone except Bream. He was haunted by the thought that, as a consequence of the washing machine aboard his cabin cruiser, this latter-day Aphrodite would be transformed into red mist tomorrow.
He thought back to the conference in Miami in March 2005. He was a round peg then, trying to act square enough to work for Air Force Intelligence. And he was succeeding. He’d received a spate of plum assignments, the latest of which was an appointment to an interagency force to protect America from weapons of mass destruction smuggled aboard small oceangoing vessels.
The October 2000 al-Qaeda small vessel assault on the USS Cole had made it clear that waterborne attacks were high on bad guys’ to-do lists. Such an operation in the United States wouldn’t even have to be “successful” insofar as taking out a target. If it just shut down a single port, anxiety would spread through the global financial marketplace. For starters.
The director of the interagency force was a pompous Pentagon bureaucrat in desperate need, in Bream’s opinion, of a punch in the face. And that was before the ignoramus hypothesized that modern surveillance technology rendered human intelligence obsolete. His measures mollified a naive public and Congress, but utterly failed to safeguard American ports and waterways. The rest of the committee proved a bunch of bobbleheads. Or, viewed another way, proficient bureaucrats: All reaped career laurels. All except Bream, who, after one long and excruciating day of meetings in Miami, finally punched the boss in the face.
The washing machine would deliver an invaluable lesson-a costly one, but Mobile was not Manhattan. More lives had been lost in single battles in Vietnam than would be tomorrow. It didn’t hurt that Bream would nearly become a billionaire in the process. The money was of little consequence compared to the vindication, though. Imagining the expression on the Pentagon man’s face when he had to answer for what had happened, Bream worked himself into fine spirits.
“Another round?” Aphrodite offered.
“I’d love to, sugar.” He slid off his bar stool. “Thing is, I’ve got a big day tomorrow.”