THE PLATFORM CLOCK in Washington DC's Union Station read 23:37 as Jeremy Waller walked into a quiet, almost empty terminal. Thirteen haggard-looking passengers followed him without words. None of them carried luggage or newspapers or books. They wore close-cropped hair and plain street clothes, trying to hide the rabid intensity of men consigned to a mission.

Waller pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, then pushed his hands into his pockets, straining his eyes left and right for signs of countersurveillance. He noted an off-duty conductor flirting with a woman at the information desk and a group of European backpackers sleeping in chairs near the D portal, but nothing stood out as suspicious.

Deep breath, he told himself. Just let 'em go. Jeremy slowed his steps, allowing some of the other men to hurry past. Hunger gnawed at his stomach and sleep deprivation clouded his thinking, but there was no point in rushing. Something deep down told him that this night would end better with caution than with speed.

Halfway through the station, Jeremy stopped at a souvenir shop, feigning interest in a display of White House paperweights and CIA T-shirts. He waited patiently as the last of the stragglers disappeared behind him; their reflections faded across the shop's tinted plate-glass window. Jeremy had been sent to work alone tonight, independent of his otherwise closely knit team.

Good, he thought. The people who sent him did not tolerate mistakes. Success would depend on attention to detail, creativity, and design, three things he had never really trusted in others.

Once he was sure everyone had gone, Jeremy found his way to the historic train station's front door and emerged into a grand, shadowed portico. The midnight air spit out something that felt more like snow than rain, sending chills through his six-foot-four, 185-pound frame. Though Jeremy was fit and muscular, his low body fat worked against him here, offering little insulation against the cold. It didn't help that days without sleep and food had stripped away clarity of thought and made it hard to remember even basic tradecraft.

Jeremy backed himself into a dark corner, trying to hide while he assessed his surroundings. The parking circle looked abandoned except for its ring of sodden flags hanging lifelessly at parade rest and an occasional beggar shuffling by in search of warmth. Two DC Metro cops sat quietly drinking coffee in a radio car off to the left. A taxi driver shuffled in his seat, working a crossword. With Congress out for winter recess and the president in Texas, the city felt dead.

The quiet traveler hunched up his shoulders and stomped his feet, trying to stop the shivering long enough to concentrate on his mission. He had just over an hour to move from Union Station to the Egyptian embassy. Sometime after 1:00 AM, a smoke-gray Cadillac STS bearing DC tags would pull up to the embassy gate and flash its lights. All he had to do was record the license plate number, document the embassy's security response, and return to the train station undetected.

Simple, he decided, rubbing his hands against the cold. Simple except that they'd given him nothing to accomplish the task. He had no money, no map, no car. With the exception of the calling card PIN he'd memorized and his wedding ring, they'd stripped him of all identity.

The following is an individual event of indeterminate duration, the selection coordinator had instructed. Your objective is to move surreptitiously to an observation post and gather essential elements of intelligence without getting compromised. Under no circumstances will you divulge your identity to anyone other than HRT personnel.

The orders came with no directions to the objective, no address or route reconnaissance. None of this surprised him. This was selection, after all, to the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, an organization that picked just a handful of new operators each year. Jeremy had waited his whole life for a night like this.

"Thirty-five twenty-one International Court," he whispered under his breath. The selectee shifted his weight, trying to stay warm. He looked around, scanning for evaluators. HRT personnel drove SUVs, mostly -- big Suburbans, Explorers, and Dakotas. If they were out there, he couldn't see them.

"Thirty-five twenty-one."

He mumbled the address, which he'd obtained through directory assistance from a pay phone on the train. Memorizing the street number would have been simple under normal circumstances, but physical exhaustion had hampered even basic mental tasks. Each day of HRT tryouts started well before dawn and stretched long past dark in an endless marathon of ten-mile runs, high-angle obstacle courses, and full-contact fighting. Each night, some nameless operator would wake the selectees with a flashbang grenade or a siren's yelp. Within moments, they'd be thrown into a live-fire shooting situation in a place HRT called the "Kill House." By dawn, they'd be back in the mud, racing against their own ability to survive.

Half the selection pool had already dropped out or fallen to injuries. The survivors couldn't remember their own names.

Jeremy waited at the edge of the portico until a black Town Car pulled up to the curb; then he folded a discarded Post over his head and ran out to meet it. The Egyptian embassy lay somewhere out there in the rain -- a six-mile trudge in better weather, but Jeremy had no intention of walking. Going hypothermic in a winter downpour proved nothing but stupidity. HRT wanted thinkers; that's what they'd get.

Waller smiled at his own cleverness as he ran. After a quick call home from the train's pay phone, his wife, Caroline, had contacted a limo company and hired a car. The solution seemed so obvious, he wondered if he'd overlooked something.

Jeremy reached the door just as the driver opened it for him. "Good evening, sir." It was midnight, but the Pakistani driver seemed strangely alert.

"Thirty-five twenty-one International Court, Northwest," Jeremy said when they were both inside. "I'm in a hurry."

The driver nodded, sensing from Jeremy's tone that this passenger preferred no conversation. He probably thought it strange that this man carried no luggage and wore only light clothing in such awful weather, but everything had been paid in advance and the driver was glad not to have to get out and open the trunk. This was just another passenger, a fare on a miserable night.

The driver checked his rearview mirror and pulled away from Columbus Circle as Jeremy tried to warm himself in the back. The car looked pretty good for its mileage. Glass tumblers rested on dark red napkins. Evergreen air freshener. Coltrane at low volume. Caroline had specified something anonymous, and Washington was full of black Town Cars with tinted windows. They looked understated, every bit as common as a Joseph Bank worsted.

Waller slumped back into the leather seat and closed his eyes. Just a moment's rest, he thought. Five minutes of sleep for a thirty-one-year-old FBI agent caught far from home. Surely they were following him, wondering what in hell he was doing, but that didn't matter now. They couldn't see in through the tinted windows, and by the time they figured it out, he'd be safely back on the train to Quantico.

•  •  •

"WE ARE TO here, sir, please," the driver said some indeterminable time later.

Jeremy flinched in his seat and sat bolt upright as the small man smiled and pointed toward an imposing stone structure. He rubbed his eyes and cursed himself for falling asleep.

"You would like me to pull up to the gate?" the driver asked.

"No . . . no, just park over there." Jeremy pointed to an open spot across the street. HRT wouldn't want to cause any real-world alarm with this little exercise, so when the Cadillac passed, it would probably stop only briefly. He'd have a small window of opportunity to meet his objective.

The embassy looked eerily still in the early morning mist. Tall gates opened inward from a guardhouse. Two uniformed security officers sat inside watching monitors and looking bored. An eight-foot stone wall ran left and right into trees that blocked Jeremy's view of the sides and back. He began to sketch on a pad of paper from the courtesy basket, making little arrows to indicate cameras and countermeasures -- stick figures for guards.

"This car behind us. Is someone you know?" the driver inquired after a few minutes.

Jeremy glanced over his shoulder as a car slowed and pulled to the side of the road. All he could see through the rain were headlights, but they flashed twice. This had to be the mark.

"I think they are doing signal to us, sir. You want I should back up?"

The car stopped fifty yards behind them, too far for Jeremy to distinguish color and make.

"No, stay here until . . ." He leaned onto the armrest, careful not to expose his face in the window, and watched as a smoke-gray Cadillac STS accelerated past them, close enough to touch.

JNG445. The license plate glowed as brightly as neon.

Jeremy wrote the number on his notepad as the taillights drifted down toward Massachusetts Avenue and disappeared. He looked back toward the embassy in hope of seeing some activity worth noting, but there was no movement. No lights flickered. The guards never even noticed.

"OK, bud," he said when he felt sure he had fulfilled his mission. "Take me back to the train station." There was no reason to explain. The chauffeur was paid to drive, not ask questions.

Jeremy fell back into the luxurious seat and smiled broadly. Finally, he could really sleep. Fifteen minutes in the car, an hour back to Quantico, maybe a little shut-eye before dawn. The tension flowed from his body as if a giant spring had been uncoiled within him.

The driver started the car, and his high beams flashed on, cutting through the drizzle like houselights after a captivating show. Jeremy started to lean forward to ask the driver to put on some different music, when his eyes seized open in astonishment.

Out of nowhere, a tall, angular man appeared between the headlights and crouched down behind the distinctive front sight of an AK-74.

The driver screamed, threw open his door, and launched from the front seat.

What the hell? Jeremy wondered. He instinctively reached to his right hip before remembering that HRT had taken his Bureau-issued Glock 23 prior to selection. Glare from the dome light made him squint as he turned back toward the embassy for some kind of reference. But it was too late. Both rear doors flew open at the same time. Guns appeared out of the darkness.

"Freeze, asshole!" someone yelled. The cold steel barrel of a 9mm Uzi settled, rock steady, three inches from the tip of Jeremy's nose.

The rest happened so quickly, his sleep-deprived mind could barely keep up. Someone climbed in behind him and shoved his face down into the seat. Well-trained hands wrenched his arms behind his back and ratcheted steel cuffs onto his wrists, high up behind the metacarpal vestige. They'd done this before.

The man with the Uzi forced Jeremy down onto the limo floor as his partner twisted the cuffs, using steel-on-bone leverage to move him. One of the men stomped his heavy boot into Jeremy's spine as the other screwed the weapon's flash suppressor into his temple. Three doors slammed shut in rapid succession. The engine raced. The dome light faded. Jeremy felt the sharp prick of a hypodermic needle, then the car shuddered beneath him as his captors stole him away.

•  •  •

"WHAT IS YOUR name?"

Jeremy awoke in a narcotic haze and blinked his eyes, trying to adjust to the brilliant light around him. There were no windows. One door. Cinder-block walls, stained dark at the margins. Water flowed across the concrete floor. He sat in a steel chair, the sort he'd seen in government office buildings. This one was bent so badly he had to balance to keep from falling backward.

He might have thought this a drug-induced hallucination if not for the pain. His hands had gone numb from lack of circulation. His shoulders throbbed from the way they'd tied him. The thin, metallic taste of blood stuck to his tongue. He remembered Roger Glover sucker punching him in the eighth grade. These knuckles were smarter; sharp enough to cut without breaking teeth.

"What is your name?"

Jeremy heard the voice as if through a tunnel, distant and monotone. His head fell forward, but someone sprayed him with water so cold it straightened his back. A garden hose snaked in through the door. His shirt lay in rags on the floor.

What the hell? he wondered. Anger rose up in his gut, overpowering the fear and the pain and the complete incomprehension of what had happened.

"What's your name?"

Caroline's face appeared in front of him. They hit him with another blast of icy water. Then the kids. Maddy, Chris, Patrick. He shivered against the cold.

Whack! Another blow, heavy and blunt, hit him somewhere in the front of his face.

He dropped his head and blew mucus out of his nose, onto his chest. He started to retch, but there was nothing in his stomach to vomit. His eyes welled up uncontrollably as a clot of blood loosened behind his lower lip and spilled out of his swollen mouth.

Who are they? he wondered when the fog cleared long enough for rational thought. Egyptians? Why the hell would they care about some guy in a rented car? Americans? Who? Couldn't be the FBI. They didn't work like this.

Wait a minute, Jeremy thought. He carried no credentials, no badge, no ID of any kind. Maybe they didn't know who he was. The revelation prompted Jeremy to open his eyes and lift his head. These people had simply made a terrible mistake.

"Stop . . ." His voice seemed to lose itself. "Stop. My name is . . ."

But the words caught in his throat. Maybe it was the convulsive shaking from the ice water, or the way his tongue stuck between his broken lips. Something froze in his wandering mind long enough to keep him from announcing his identity. Maybe that's what they wanted -- for him to admit he was . . .

ZZZEEEEEEEE!

A high-frequency wail shot him bolt upright in his chair. It raged in his ears, loud as the flashbangs HRT threw, only sustained, like a tooth drill, undulating and burning in his skull. He tried to shake it out of his ears, but it stuck to him.

"What is your name?" someone yelled, point-blank.

My God, what is happening? Jeremy's mind started to run from him.

"He ain't talkin'," one voice said. Boston accent. "Give him the water board."

There was movement, then hands, a table, and he was lying flat on his back with his head over the edge. Two men held him as another clamped a thick leather strap over his forehead. They pulled it taut, wrenching his head backward, almost perpendicular to his body.

"Last time. Who are you?"

Jeremy's eyes darted back and forth, searching for reference, as a short, dark figure emerged from the other room. The man stepped in from the right and stood over him a moment. He wore a green T-shirt and had long hair. His eyes stared down through Jeremy's exhaustion and pain and fear to a place reserved for nightmares.

"My name is George," he said, almost endearingly. "I need to know yours."

Jeremy tried to call out, but the leather strap stretched his neck at a cruel angle, making it almost impossible to talk. He tore at the restraints, uttering unintelligible grunts. No one else spoke. The room fell so quiet, Jeremy could hear water flowing out of the hose and into the drain.

The dark man placed a towel over Jeremy's eyes, and all light faded to a vague gray pall. He waited for the pain, rigid as a child in a dentist's chair, but there were no blows. Someone pressed a cloth against his face while another poured some kind of fluid down his throat.

Jeremy choked, completely bewildered at the sensation. The fluid erupted in his nostrils as he seized against the tonic, bucking, lurching, helplessly sucking more of it down his windpipe into his searing lungs. His body started to spasm, tearing at the restraints as the liquid raged in his chest, stealing the air, shutting out the voices, all sound, the light.

Images of his family flashed through the agony as he choked. He remembered strange things: a Slinky moving down stairs, the smell of honeysuckle, Cap'n Crunch for breakfast . . .

The whole room glistened steel white, then disappeared. Into black.

•  •  •

WHEN HE AWOKE, Jeremy found himself fully clothed, cleaned, and free of all restraints. He sat in an overstuffed parlor chair with his arms out beside him. An Art Deco chandelier hung from the center of the room, filling the space with warm, diffuse light. A television blared next to him: Pat Sajak introducing a Wheel of Fortune contestant from Ojai.

Jeremy looked around, trying to recover his bearings. Walls covered in brocade fabric and marked by ogee moldings and brass sconces rose to tall ceilings. Hotel, probably, he thought. Expensive.

Closer, seven of the thirteen other HRT selectees rested quietly on couches and comfortable chairs, staring blankly at the floor. They looked broken, devoid of personality and ambition. Two other men stood near the door: Jeremy's Pakistani driver and the man with the AK-74.

Jeremy licked the inside of his swollen lip to make sure his mind was not playing tricks on him. Every instinct urged him to get up and run, but something in the look of his fellow selectees stilled his legs. None of them seemed intent on leaving. Maybe they knew something he didn't.

"Give me an R!" one of the contestants said. Vanna moved to turn three letter cubes.

The Pakistani driver chuckled. "They love that friggin' R, don't they?" he asked no one in particular.

Suddenly, two HRT operators entered the room. They spoke briefly to the doorkeepers; then the selection coordinator, a thick man named Quinn, moved to the center of the room. He spoke benignly, as if the faces staring back in amazement were nothing more than furniture.

"The following is an individual event of indeterminate duration," he announced. "Your next objective . . ."

You thought you had proven yourself, but you never had.

Copyright © 2004 by Christopher Whitcomb