Friendly Fire (18 page)

“Somebody's got to think the big thoughts so we can make the big bucks,” Jonathan said.

“That's why you don't mind this piece-of-shit sardine can of an airplane,” Big Guy grumbled.

Jonathan didn't answer. He just waited for Boxers to squeeze himself into the pilot's seat—it really was a comical thing to watch, a little like watching a calf crawl back into its mother's womb—but he dared not laugh at the spectacle. For reasons that Jonathan had never cared to explore, Big Guy was oddly sensitive about his size. Once the pilot was in place, Jonathan maneuvered his way around the center console and settled easily into the right-hand seat.

Jonathan wasn't entirely useless on the controls in an emergency. Boxers had taught him enough over the years that he could land the beast in a pinch, but only if the weather was clear. He had no business flying on instruments. And zero desire to do so.

Ten minutes later, they were airborne.

“So what about you?” Boxers asked once the intensity of departure radio traffic had died down. “Did you accomplish anything with the hot young detective?”

“I told her that she was on the right track about Ethan,” Jonathan said. “And I gave her the name of her John Doe.”

Boxers gave him a look. “Was that wise? I thought Wolfie wanted you to keep that close to the chest.”

“You heard Ven the other day. He's been pretty thoroughly disappeared. Having the name isn't going to help them much.”

As Jonathan was unfastening his seat belt to head back to the passenger compartment, Boxers said, “Hey, Boss. What are your intentions with this Falk kid?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, as an anything-but-disinterested observer, it seems to me that you're as preoccupied with him as you are of doing what we need to do for Wolverine.”

“That's because I think we can do both.”

“Nope, not buying it. You deliberately showed your face to the detective who's investigating the deaths of people we killed. You know I don't pull your short hairs often, but that was reckless. As the guy on the other gun that night, I want to know what your intentions are. From the very beginning, my single ground rule was that I am not going to jail.”

“Nobody's going to jail,” Jonathan said. “We are no more traceable now than we've ever been. But I cannot sit still while Ethan Falk is dismissed as a looney tune when I know the reality.”

“The reality is that we saved his life,” Boxers said. “We gave him eleven years of freedom that he otherwise would not have had. He chose to kill a guy who wasn't doing anything wrong. Not then.”

Jonathan sighed loudly. “Are you going to look me in the eye and tell me that you would not have done the same thing?”

“Of course I would have done the same thing. But I wouldn't have taken care of business in front of a world full of witnesses.”

“So, he's too much of a rookie at the whole vengeance thing,” Jonathan said.

“Clearly.” Boxers took a couple of seconds to adjust a control that Jonathan couldn't see. “You know, I'm not even a cheap imitation of Dom, but there's something else. I think you should consider telling me what it is.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I'm not here to analyze you, Dig, and I sure as hell am not here to judge you, but I
am
the guy whose life depends on you having a solid head on your shoulders. There's something eating you up. What is it?”

Jonathan kept about a thousand different drawers in his head locked at all times. That was for good reason. Emotions only became real if you spoke of them. Otherwise, they remained fully deniable. Deniability was important to him. On the other hand, no one had a greater stake in Jonathan's activities than Boxers. If there was a chance that he would not perform at one hundred percent when the shit got thick, then he shouldn't be doing what he did.

“You know I love what we do, right?” Jonathan said. “We're damn good at it, and we've saved a lot of lives.”

“Yes, we have,” Boxers said. “And we've taken a lot of lives, too.”

“And I don't give a rat's ass about most of them.”

“You're not shedding angst for those assholes you offed at the motel the other day, are you?”

“Oh, hell no,” Jonathan said. “Wake 'em up and I'll shoot 'em again.” A beat. “Don't you ever worry about this stuff getting too easy?”

Boxers said, “We've never killed anyone who didn't need killing.”

“That's not true,” Jonathan said. “I wish it was, but it's not. That op in West Virginia was a total goat rope. A lot more people were killed and wounded than needed to be.”

“That wasn't us,” Boxers said. “That was Jolaine. Who knew she'd turn out to be psycho?”

A while ago, Jonathan and his team—which had expanded to include a former personal security specialist named Jolaine Cage—invaded a terrorist compound in West Virginia, and the resulting slaughter had been nauseating.

“That was my team,” Jonathan said. “Our team.”

“I thought you settled all of this with Dom,” Boxers said. “You kicked her off the team, and now it's all square.”

“No, it's not square,” Jonathan said. “She's a murderer and she's free. No justice at all.” The irony of his own words did not escape him. According to the law, his whole team was an assembly of mass murderers, but that was different. While often outside the law, he was rarely on the wrong side of it.

Boxers took his time asking his next question. “So, do you want to quit?”

“You know better than that.”

“I don't know that I do. I mean up until five minutes ago I thought I did, but now I'm wondering. Because you know, if you even consider the possibility of defeat—”

“—defeat is guaranteed,” Jonathan said, finishing Big Guy's statement. “Yeah, I know. I'm the one who told you that. This isn't like that.”

“What
is
it like, then?”

Jonathan struggled to find the right way to put it. “Remember that snatch-and-grab we did outside of Islamabad? The Puzzle Palace needed a tribal leader to grill?”

Boxers' whole demeanor darkened. He didn't say that he remembered, but thanks to the body language, he didn't have to.

“That little girl—a guard's daughter, we figured—stepped out to protect her father just as your round was leaving the muzzle.” The result was a double-kill, but the damage a 7.62 millimeter bullet inflicts on a little girl is far more profound than what it does to an adult. Boxers went to a very, very dark place for quite a while after that incident.

“It's a little like that,” Jonathan went on. “Sometimes this shit just slips through the filters. You deal with it and then move on.”

Jonathan chose to stay in the cockpit through the ensuing silence. Boxers was probably pissed that he dredged up that old memory, and he didn't want to leave it unresolved.

“So, what does any of that have to do with the Falk kid?” Boxers said after a couple of minutes.

“He's collateral damage. Just like the little girl in Islamabad, and just like those poor souls in West Virginia. Only, unlike those, we have a chance to fix the damage.”

Boxers gave him a long, hard look. “How?”

Jonathan gave him a wry smile. “I haven't quite figured that part out yet. But I promise I won't be reckless.”

“I don't even know what reckless means in this context,” Boxers said.

“It means that I'll figure out a way to help Ethan Falk without you getting sent to jail.”

“What about you getting sent to jail?” Big Guy said. He seemed bothered by where this was going.

“I figure I've got nothing to worry about,” Jonathan said with a smile as he arose from his seat to head back to the cabin. “If I get sent to jail, I've got you to break me out.”

Chapter Eighteen

T
hree hours later, Jonathan and Boxers were back on the ground in Braddock County, maybe a half mile from the Caf-Fiend Coffee Shop where all of this began. With Konan's help, Venice had done an analysis of Stepahin's movements in the last hours of his life, based on the cell phone data that she'd been able to obtain. It was scary what one could learn from a SIM card, even when the location services were disabled.

Stepahin had spent his last night at the Governor Spotswood Resort about ten miles from here. It wasn't a high-end place, but it was no slouch, either. It was the kind of place a business owner would take midrange clients to, perhaps the banker who holds his loan. Built in the eighties, the place featured a lot of indoor water features and an elaborate indoor/outdoor pool, but the real pull of the place for most was the golf course. In Jonathan's experience, avid golfers would suffer all means of discomfort and ugliness so long as they got to spend four hours chasing the little white pill around freshly mowed grass. He didn't understand it himself, but he knew that among men his age, he was in the minority.

According to information hacked from the BCPD, Venice learned that Stepahin had used the alias George Magruder when he'd checked in to the hotel, and that he'd stayed there for only the one night. Because he'd opted for automatic checkout, there was no way to know when he'd left. If the police department had determined his departure time, they hadn't posted it to any source that Venice could tap into.

From there, Stepahin had driven around for a while, rather aimlessly, to Jonathan's eye. “I think he was in evasion mode,” he said to Boxers as they reviewed the course tracks uploaded to his laptop. They'd traded the Learjet for the Batmobile, and were parked in the far corner of a church parking lot. When looking for a secluded spot on a day that was not Sunday, church parking lots were always reliable. “Look at all the random turns and switchbacks.”

The computer displayed Stepahin's route as a bold red line laid over a map. A tiny red dot indicated the places where he'd stopped for more than a minute or so, and by clicking on the dot, you could pull up a time and date stamp. As one with a keen interest in remaining untraceable, Jonathan found it disconcerting that such tracking capability was available on the public market. Venice assured him that their communications were so encrypted that such tracking was not possible, but it still gave him pause. He took solace from the fact that Stepahin's other phone—presumably his business phone—was likewise untraceable.

As for phone calls made from the device Venice had hacked, every one of them seemed innocent. Restaurants, mainly. The data he accessed dealt primarily with news sites and online reservations. It seemed that the murdering asshole was also quite the foodie. The police were wearing out a lot of phone lines and shoe leather tracking those leads down, but in his gut, Jonathan sensed that they would go nowhere.

“Look here,” Boxers said, pointing to a spot on the screen where Stepahin had spent a lot of time. The screen in that spot was a red smear. “What is that, a park?”

Jonathan scrolled in closer. “Yeah, but it's not much of one. But you're right. Look how many times he visited it. The time stamps are all over the place.”

“And it's four blocks from the coffee shop.”

They locked eyes and said it together: “Dead drop.”

* * *

Spike Catron pulled his cherry 1974 Corvette into a slot in the rear of his headquarters building. The faded sign out front declared this to be a Moose Lodge, but there hadn't been a moose sighting in many a year. Cosmetically, the place looked like it should have been torn down years ago. Weeds and vines had taken over the front lot, and now were threatening to tear apart the brick façade. Located along a once well-traveled road that had been rendered irrelevant by the construction of a cross-county parkway, the lodge was nearly invisible to passersby.

It wasn't until you got close that you'd notice the heavy-duty steel doors and the concrete-set steel bars in the windows. The property belonged to a company called Bright Skies Environmental, Inc., which was a third-level shell belonging to Spike's masters in Yemen. Blue Skies likewise paid for the upgrades and the utilities. Soundproof and bug proof, the headquarters for al-Amin in America was as secure as any bank physically, and many times more secure electronically because electronics were not allowed. No cell phones, no computers, no data terminals.

Spike was first introduced to al-Amin while working as a clandestine asset for the US State Department in Yemen. Like every other beating heart in the Middle East, the members of al-Amin were suspected of planning terrorist strikes in the United States and among our allies. Less affiliated with any religious cause than they were to cash, al-Amin specialized in extortion, with a special emphasis on ransom. They would accept payment from another radical group—hell, from anybody—and in return, they would snatch a target from the street or from their sleep and deliver it to whoever placed the order. They got paid only for live deliveries, though living and injury-free were entirely different things.

At the time, he'd been impressed that a terror organization could operate under such a pure a business model as profit and loss. Operations were much simpler to plan when they were not driven by ideology.

As Spike's time in the Sandbox evolved, he became progressively more familiar with al-Amin's client list, and he was surprised to discover just how much of their kidnapping schedule was driven by the interests of the US government and its allies. It turned out that in the eyes of the Alphabet Agencies, the drawdown of American assets did nothing to reduce the need for intelligence data obtained the hard way, occasionally one fingernail at a time. Anyone who received a paycheck from Uncle Sam would face prison time for doing such a thing, but with enough attention to detail, it wasn't that difficult to sub the dirty work out to guys who had been in that business for the last two thousand years.

About two years ago, a fact crystalized in Spike's mind, and clarified his worldview. War was about money. It was about the cash paid to mullahs and warlords for their ever-negotiable loyalty. It was about the money paid to the Beltway contractors, and about the money in campaign war chests on both sides of the conflict. Al-Amin existed in large part because of secret money paid to them by Uncle Sam.

Spike figured what was good for his Uncle was good for him as well, so why not follow the boss's lead and offer to extend al-Amin's reach to American soil for a fee? Those Arab assholes would sell their left nut to get their hands on Americans snatched from US soil and cut off their heads—or drown them, or burn them alive, or whatever sick method of killing they could think of. But it wasn't worth the risk of trying to set up shop here.

Guys like Spike—and Bill Jones and Phil Marks and Paul Maroni, and the rest of his oh, so red-blooded American team—had no trouble getting as close as they needed to pull off whatever needed to be done. Up until now, they'd focused mainly on abducting corporate bigwigs and sending them to Mexico, where al-Amin was tight with a couple of the cartels, but now the heat was ramping up, and with it, the audacity of what the unnamed Sandbox Sheik wanted from them.

They wanted high-profile soft targets, the favorite among them being the children of elected officials, who wandered through their lives unprotected. The plan was pretty simple: snatch the kids, drug them, and hand them off to a designated foreign official who then shipped them home as diplomatic baggage. The diplomatic status was a particularly brilliant touch, Spike thought. And man, was the pay good!

A few months ago, the plan took an odd turn when the sheik demanded that the US complement of al-Amin expand into a new line of business, one that Spike considered to be reckless, but that he was nonetheless honor-bound to execute for fear of being outed by his Middle Eastern masters. They wanted a real terror strike somewhere in the heartland of the United States, the kind that would shake the country to its knees.

It was one thing to drop the Twin Towers and make a hole in the Pentagon, but those were symbolic strikes that Mr. and Mrs. Mid-America had difficulty bonding with. People who chose to live in big cities accepted the risks that came with it. In the Heartland, people felt comfortable that they lived their lives under the radar, perpetuating the illusion that the War on Terror churned in areas that didn't concern them.

But suppose a bomb detonated in the middle of a high school football game in Iowa? The panic—the
terror
—would be sublime. The stock markets—the symbol of American wealth that seemed to piss off the camel jockeys worse than any other—would plummet. The government would be overwhelmed with demands for action that they could not possibly respond to, and when the people lost faith in the political system, chaos would rule. And if there was one condition in which history had proven that zealots could thrive, it was in the midst of anarchy.

Since the end of World War Two, it had been the
illusion
of American invincibility that had driven American power. Once the nation was shown to be as vulnerable as any other nation, then American leadership would dissolve. One cannot lead, after all, when no one is willing to follow.

Spike had feared that his troops would consider such a high-profile operation to be distasteful, too reminiscent of a suicide mission, but much to his surprise, they had embraced it with verve. The challenge, they all agreed, was to inflict the greatest possible damage while at the same time provide the greatest opportunity for evasion and escape. If the scope were large enough, and they left a big enough hole in the fabric of the community they attacked, then this would by definition be their last mission in the United States. No one on Spike's team carried the suicide gene of the average jihadi.

As they reviewed their options, they determined that the Iowa model, as they called it, was unworkable. Being in the middle of the country made escape to the border far too difficult. That meant that it was important to stay near one coast or the other. Since their home base was located in Virginia, the East Coast was the most logical point of attack, and the Old Dominion the simplest location from which to launch it. As they reviewed their options, they concluded that Northern Virginia offered the best of all options. It was the part of the state where the police were most constipated by matters politically correct, and where the local law enforcement agencies were enjoined from performing the kinds of stop-and-question operations that the rest of the country found instinctively appropriate.

That invited even more questions for consideration. Close-in jurisdictions like Fairfax or Arlington Counties teemed with federal law enforcement types and enjoyed a tax base that allowed them to deploy armored personnel carriers and massive firepower with only minutes' notice.

As they looked farther south and west, the population densities thinned to the point that even a massive strike could only do so much damage—until you got to the military-dense Tidewater areas, where the federal presence again became a problem.

All things considered, they'd determined Braddock County to be the best compromise. Real estate agents liked to call it a Washington suburb, but that was a stretch. It had a police department, but it was short on technology thanks to a tax base that could not afford to live closer in. The fire departments in the county were still volunteer, and the back-up long guns in most of the police vehicles were pump-action shotguns. Some of the units had AR-15 variants, but they were spread wide throughout the area. Superior firepower meant everything to Spike and his team.

Until a couple of days ago, Spike believed that all systems were go, and that they were closing in on a D-day that was maybe three weeks out. Now, though, with one operator dead, and a Haji team encroaching on their turf, he had an uneasy feeling about things on a number of fronts.

The parking lot in the back of the lodge looked fairly full as Spike nosed into a spot two spaces away from the nearest vehicle. There was a strong argument to be made that a man in his line of work should drive only the most inconspicuous vehicles, but as far as he was concerned, there was nothing quite as suspicious as a single man under forty who chose to drive an inconspicuous car. Besides, he was a car guy, and the seventy-four 'Vette was a slice of engineering beauty. He always figured that he would die young, and with that being the case, he was going to die happy.

Entering the lodge building required entering a twelve-digit random cipher and turning an eight-inch dead bolt. No one was allowed to answer a knock at the door. You either remembered the cipher or you were done. Short of using explosives—and quite a lot of them at that—police or anyone else would have one hell of a time serving any warrants in this place. And as soon as they arrived to try, the occupants would disappear though a network of tunnels that led to various friendly basements throughout the area.

The perfectly balanced door pulled easily considering its four hundred pounds, revealing an interior that looked pretty much as Spike imagined it did back when moose roamed free. It could have been a time capsule from 1985. Ceiling fans churned the air below suspended acoustic panels, and beige linoleum tiles covered the floor. A sagging Formica bar stood in the far right-hand corner, its face constructed of the same knotty pine paneling that covered the walls. The assembled members of al-Amin in America sat in random clusters, either at the bar or at the long folding tables that were lined up cafeteria-style, as if to play a rousing game of bingo. Everyone Spike saw at first glance was nursing some kind of beverage, mostly beer, but a few were enjoying hard liquor. On a day like this, Spike fantasized about beer. Herb Townsend even read his mind as Spike entered, and was already pulling a Blue Moon from the tap to hand to him.