by Paul Heatley
“Both.”
“On the night, two.” Texas was hit hardest. Of the twelve (official) deaths, six of them were in Texas. “Since, I’ve had about four say they’re out.” Ben does not include Anthony and Alejandra in his numbers, not to Jake. To himself, though, they’re there all the time.
“That’s bad, but it isn’t the highest I’ve heard. One of our handlers lost all his charges, all his informants, after it happened. None on the night, but that didn’t matter. Didn’t even matter whether they were with Nazis or not, they got out.” Jake presses a finger down onto a paper, the one with all the names on it. The dead names. “We have to find who’s responsible for this, Agent Fitzgerald.”
Ben nods. He understands.
“It could be someone within the FBI. It could be a hacker. I don’t care where they came from, I don’t care what their affiliation is, I want them found. And as soon as possible.”
Ben gets to his feet. “Got it.”
“Fast, Ben,” Jake reiterates. “This doesn’t look good for any of us. We’ve got to tidy it up.”
Ben leaves the office. Outside, other agents pass him in the halls, nod greetings. Ben returns them. He doesn’t go straight back to his office. He has somewhere else he needs to go.
9
Ben gets his laptop, takes it to Gerry Davies. Gerry is their senior computer analyst. He’s in his early thirties, has worked with computers all his life. There’s nothing about them he doesn’t know. He’s in his office, sitting behind his desk and tapping away. He wears a creased shirt, the collar rumpled. There are earphones pumping music into his ears, and he doesn’t look up when Ben enters, doesn’t look up until he reaches the desk, puts the laptop down on it.
Gerry looks at the laptop first, then up at Ben. He pulls out the earphones. Ben can hear the music blasting. It’s a wonder Gerry hasn’t gone deaf.
“Got it a little loud, don’t you?” he says.
Gerry grins. “I like it loud,” he says.
“What’re you listening to?” Ben asks, as if he’ll have any idea what it is. He’s too busy to keep up with music.
“Ministry,” Gerry says. “You a fan?”
Ben is surprised to find he has heard of them. “I’m unfamiliar with their music.”
Gerry taps something on his keyboard, and the earphones fall silent. “But you didn’t come here to discuss industrial metal, did you?” He reaches out for the laptop. Ben hands it over. “What seems to be the problem with this?”
Ben doesn’t answer right away. He goes back to the door, locks it. Gerry watches him, confused. Ben returns to the desk, but doesn’t take a seat. “What I’m going to tell you, what I’m about to ask of you, it doesn’t leave this room.”
Gerry looks at him, says nothing.
“You got that?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“You know about the recent massacre of our undercovers.” Ben takes a seat. He doesn’t phrase it as a question. Of course Gerry is aware of it. Everyone is.
“Course I know about it,” Gerry says. “Who do you think they’ve got trying to find the source of the leak? And then who do you think’s gotta plug that leak?”
“Have you found anything?”
“Not yet, but I will. It’s just a matter of time and patience.” Gerry looks pleased with himself, the look of a man who knows he’s never failed his duties yet, and is confident in his abilities.
“There might be more than one leak to plug.”
Gerry cocks his head; his expression falters. “How do you mean?”
Ben taps his laptop. “They took information from this. Information only I had.”
Gerry doesn’t understand. He leans across the desk, speaks in a low conspiratorial way. “How are you so sure?”
“Because they were details that were only on my laptop. No one else had them; no one else knew about them.”
“Are you talking about off-the-books stuff?”
Ben thinks about Anthony. About Alejandra. He never met her, but he’s seen her picture since. Can’t get her face out of his mind. “Yes. I had an undercover in one of the cells. There was no record of him anywhere else, no correspondence of him anywhere, except for on this laptop.”
Gerry looks at it like it’s a bomb. “Shit,” he says. “Why wasn’t he official?”
“No time. I got some intel; I needed to move fast. An opportunity presented itself, and I took full advantage of it.”
Gerry looks at him, raises his eyebrows.
“It’s not by the book, but sometimes when we’re dealing with these kinds of people, we have to bend the rules a little.”
“That’s a big bend.”
“And I have to live with the consequences.”
“Makes me wonder how many other unofficial undercovers may have been killed that night,” Gerry says.
“That’s crossed my mind too.”
“No one else has brought me their laptop.”
“Maybe they’re too afraid, and for the same reason I’m about to say this to you – this is between us. You and I, and no one else. Is that clear?”
Gerry nods.
“Someone hacked my laptop, and they took information pertaining to all of my undercovers, but the one you’re looking at is Anthony Rollins. He was the unofficial.”
“They kill him?”
“They tried.”
Gerry blinks. “He’s still alive?”
“Last I heard. But he lost things much more precious than his life.”
Gerry frowns, doesn’t understand.
Ben isn’t going to explain it to him. “Are you clear what I need you to do?”
“Yes,” Gerry says. “I’ll do everything I can, but I make no promises.” He says this, covering his back, but Ben hears that same earlier confidence of a man knowing he can do this.
“I trust you.” Ben unlocks the office door, leaves.
Inside, there is a storm raging. It tightens his chest, flips his stomach, makes him feel queasy. He bites down on the inside of his cheek again, tastes the familiar coppery tang of blood.
“Hey, Ben.”
He looks up. Agent Carly Hogan is coming down the hall toward him. She’s smiling. Ben forces one back. “Hello.”
“I heard you got stuck with the Night of the Long Knives Part Two investigation.”
Ben winces. “I don’t think Jake would appreciate it being referred to as such.”
“Well, Jake ain’t here.” She winks. She wears a black pantsuit; her blonde hair is tied back, clipped tight at the back of her head. It’s a plain uniform, but she pulls it off well. She pulls everything off well – her uniform, a towel, his oversized shirts when she stays over, nothing at all. “How’s it going so far?”
“I just got started.”
“So nothing at the minute.”
He doesn’t tell her about the laptop. He won’t talk about it with anyone but Gerry. “Nothing at all.”
Carly looks at her watch. “I’m on my way to lunch,” she says. “You wanna join? You can bounce ideas off me.”
“That sounds good.”
“Then walk with me.” She begins striding off on her long legs. Ben keeps pace. “Don’t stand too close,” she says. “I might feel the urge to reach out and pinch your butt, and we don’t want anyone getting jealous now, do we?”
Despite himself, Ben can’t help but laugh.
10
The commune is hidden through woodland. This isn’t where Jeffrey Rollins has always lived. Before this, when Tom and Anthony were growing up, his home had been in an area more desert than green. He’d raised his boys alone, after the death of his wife, their mother, Mary. Cervical cancer took her. It hit Jeffrey and his boys hard, but he persevered. Did the best he could.
Tom and Anthony continued to go to school, but on evenings and weekends, Jeffrey would teach them other skills – how to hunt, fish, track, camp. How to load and fire guns. How to properly hold a knife, how to cut with it, and how to stab. They hoarded tinned fo
od, lived off it, only rarely venturing to the grocery store to purchase things they couldn’t hunt for themselves or get for free in the wild.
Survivalist skills.
Doomsday prepping.
Jeffrey didn’t leave that home until after his boys had moved out, and he met Sylvia. They got in touch through a like-minded message board. They married a couple of years later, and Jeffrey left his fortified home and moved into the commune where she lived.
Now Tom makes his way to it down a dirt road. He takes his time, the car bouncing up and down and side to side, throwing him around a little. His hands are tight on the steering wheel. As he approaches, the sickly feeling he’s carried all the way from Arizona is beginning to fade a little, with the knowledge that soon, very soon, he will have the answers to all his questions.
The road is wide enough for only one car at a time. If anything comes from the other direction, he’s not sure what they’re supposed to do. In the woods, out of the corner of his eye, he spots movement. He slows the car more, but not enough to be suspicious. Watches without turning toward it directly. There’s a man there, behind a tree, behind some bushes, almost invisible in his camouflage. The man is armed. He watches Tom pass by. He raises an arm, a walkie-talkie, speaks into it. Warns the commune that someone is headed their way.
Tom remembers what his father said about people being jumpy. In all his worry over Anthony and Alejandra, he forgot about this statement, has spent no time wondering why they might be so.
At the end of the dirt road, the commune comes into sight. Before he can pull out from the trees, three men emerge from the bushes, waving him down. They’re armed, dressed similarly to the man hidden in the trees. Their automatic weapons are raised. They motion for him to get out of the car.
Tom keeps his hands in view. He gets out of the car, raises his arms. “Calm down, boys,” he says. “I was invited here.”
The man in the middle steps forward, gun still raised, pointed at Tom’s chest. “Who are you?” he says, jabbing with the rifle to punctuate his words. He’s short, heavy in the middle, has a thick red beard, and his hair is likely the same, though it’s concealed by a camouflage cap. “And what’re you doin’ out here?”
“You didn’t hear me the first time?” Tom says. “I was invited. My dad called me. Jeffrey Rollins. Since when did this kind of welcome become standard practice with y’all? This is the first time I’ve been held at gunpoint when I’ve come to visit.”
The two men behind the one asking all the questions don’t point their guns at Tom, but they hold them close, their fingers on the triggers. One of them is white; the other is black. The black one clears his throat, says, “Jeffrey did say his oldest son was on the way.”
The other agrees. “Said we oughtta just wave him straight on through.”
The leader shouts back at them over his shoulder without ever taking his eyes off Tom. “Either of y’all ever seen Jeff’s oldest kid? ’Cause I ain’t. What’s there to say this is even him?”
Tom looks the leader over. He’s being purposefully belligerent. Tom knows the type. He has a little bit of power – in this instance, being in charge of the entrance to the commune – and he’s loath to relinquish it, wants to shake his dick around a bit first. Tom smiles, is polite, respectful. “I’ll wait right here while you go and get him,” he says. “That shouldn’t take too long.”
The leader continues to be difficult. “We oughtta look the car over,” he says. “Check it. See if he’s got anything hidden.” He steps closer to Tom, raises the gun so it’s pointing in his face now. “You got anything in there you don’t want us seeing?”
Tom looks down into the barrel of the gun, then back at him. He can feel his patience evaporating. He has driven a long way to get here. His back is aching, and he’s worried about Anthony and Alejandra. “If you don’t lower this gun and calm yourself down, I’m gonna take it from you and stick it up your ass.” He stares into the man’s eyes. “This is the only time I’m gonna warn you. I’m done being polite.”
The leader’s eyes blaze. “Who the hell’d you think you are, talkin’ to me like that?”
Tom doesn’t answer him. He’s had his one warning. Tom disarms him, shoves the rifle out of his face while snatching it out of the man’s hands, spins him around and clamps an arm around his neck, pulls him close to use him as a shield. “You two,” he says to the men staring, dumbfounded, amazed at how fast he moved. “Go and get my dad. Me and your buddy will be waiting right here.”
Conscious of the guard he saw further back in the woods, Tom presses himself up against the car to protect his back, still holding onto the leader. He places the rifle he took from him down into the footwell, then gives him a little choke, just to hear him make a noise. Tom grins, puts his mouth close to his ear and says, “Warned you, didn’t I? You caught me on a good day – you keep struggling, and I’ll follow through on that promise to stick your gun where the sun don’t shine.”
The leader goes very still.
Jeffrey arrives shortly after with the other guards. He grins at the predicament he finds his son in, shakes his head. “Put that asshole down and get over here,” he says. “Come give your old man a hug.”
11
Tom drives along to his father’s home, Jeffrey in the passenger seat beside him. Jeffrey and Sylvia’s place is deep in, toward the rear of the commune’s layout. Tom observes the houses as they go. It’s grown since he was here last. A lot of the homes look like they’ve been thrown together, hastily erected. Gives the place an almost shanty-town quality.
There’s another new addition. Encircling the commune, closing it in, is a chain-link fence, barbed wire atop it. Tom points it out to his father, who chuckles. “That ain’t the half of it,” he says. “There are claymores around the perimeter. No one’s getting in here who shouldn’t.”
“There a reason for all this?” Tom says, slowing as some children run across in front of him. “I ain’t seen it like this before.”
Jeffrey nods. “There’s a lot of folk here get jumpy. They wanna keep this place quiet, on the down low. They don’t want anyone to know they’re here ’cause they ain’t supposed to be here.”
“Yeah? Where they supposed to be?”
“Behind bars, a lot of the time. We got bail jumpers and fugitives hiding out here, and I suppose that gives them a right to be jumpy.”
“Guys like the one on the gate?”
“He’s always been an asshole.”
Tom changes the subject. “What’s happened to Anthony?”
“Got himself in some trouble.”
“Shit. It bad?”
“Yeah.” Jeffrey’s voice is solemn. Tom doesn’t like the sound of it.
“How bad?”
Jeffrey doesn’t answer. He grits his teeth.
12
Anthony is in the back room of the house. He lies on the bed, his head wrapped in bandages, a cast on his left arm. Sylvia is with him, sitting on a chair by the side of the bed, tending to him. She presses a moist towel to his face, rests it on his forehead. Anthony is unconscious. He whimpers in his sleep.
“Jesus,” Tom says, looking down at his brother.
Sylvia stands when she realizes they have entered the room. She leaves her post, comes over and embraces Tom. “It’s good to see you,” she says. “How’ve you been?”
“Better than Anthony,” Tom says, unable to take his eyes from him.
“He’ll pull through,” she says. “He’s got a fever right now, but it’ll break.”
“He looks like he ought to be in a hospital.”
“He should,” Jeffrey says.
Tom turns back to him. “Then why ain’t he?”
Jeffrey and Sylvia exchange a look.
“You ain’t told him yet?” Sylvia says.
“It’s a short drive from the entrance to here,” Jeffrey says. “Ain’t like I had the time.”
Sylvia returns to the chair, the bed, her moist cloth. Jeffrey beckons Tom
to join him outside the room, where they can talk.
“He’s got a broken arm and a fractured skull,” he says, by way of beginning. “The skull’s got him knocked out, like he can’t focus. Says he can barely see, when he ain’t sleeping.”
“Then why ain’t he in the hospital?” Tom says.
“I’m getting to it,” Jeffrey says. He motions for Tom to take a chair, but Tom doesn’t want to sit. He was sitting a long damn time to get here. He remains standing.
“Suit yourself,” Jeffrey says, then lowers himself into a wooden chair. The house is made of wood, with corrugated steel on the roof. All the furniture in the house is made of wood, too.
“One morning I wake up, and there’s a box on my doorstep,” Jeffrey says. Tom folds his arms, listens. “I open the box, and you know what I find inside? A phone. I pick it up, and before I can even tell Sylvia what it is, it starts ringing. So I answer, and there’s this voice on the other end, a voice I don’t recognize, telling me that Anthony is in danger, that he’s in hospital, that he’s a sitting duck. I try to interrupt, try to ask questions, but the voice just keeps going, like it’s sticking to a schedule. It tells me which hospital he’s in – all the way in Texas – and then it tells me, If they find him, they’ll kill him.”
“You don’t know who it was?”
“Not a damn clue. Anyway, I try to call Anthony. I don’t get any answer. I don’t hang around. I haul ass down to Texas, to the hospital the voice told me. Sure enough, Anthony is there. Told me he’d been in a car crash. A bad one. I check him out, bring him back here with me. While I was gone, Sylvia told the commune about the phone, how it got here. How someone must’ve snuck in during the night, past the guards, and left the box there for me to find. The folks around here, they weren’t happy about that, that someone got in undetected. They ramped up security. By the time I got back, the commune had become what you see now. We’re still on high alert.”
“Who’s Anthony at risk from?”