Grey Lady

by Paul Kemprecos

  He rose from his seat, still holding the rifle on me, reached onto the cot, and picked up something that looked like a pistol of the future. I guessed it was the pressurized hypodermic because he moved closer and pointed it at my chest.

  “I’ll be humane about it. You’ll be unconscious and won’t feel a thing.”

  My mouth got very dry, but I managed to get out a simple declarative sentence.

  “Chernko’s plan is dead in the water.”

  The pistol hand froze, but the muzzle was still aimed my way. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Volga sank. The swarmbots malfunctioned and attacked the yacht instead of the ferryboat. The Coast Guard picked up Chernko and his Chinese pals. The CIA has been brought in, so it won’t be long before the FBI is knocking on your door.”

  “You’re bluffing,” he said.

  I was, but I said, “Do you want to take that chance?”

  Michael Ramsey, the ruthless but rational businessman, would have said no. But Ramsey did a quick switch into his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde mode. I was dealing with the genetic and insane resurrection of William Swain. With the clarity that comes with impending death, I knew that Ramsey was Swain and Swain was Ramsey.

  “Yes,” he said in that peculiar hissing voice. Again, I felt a chill run along my spine, but this time it was caused by the door opening and letting in the wind and rain. I heard Lisa’s voice.

  “Michael!” she screamed. “What are you doing?”

  I had been staring into Ramsey’s, or Swain’s, cold blue eyes, trying to anticipate his next move. He shifted his gaze for an instant as his brain processed the new development. I grabbed his wrist with both hands, but my palms were slippery with rainwater. I stood up and used my body’s leverage to twist the hypodermic from his grasp. He let out a yelp of pain. Both hands were on the sniper rifle, bringing it around to shoot me.

  Our eyes locked for an instant, and then I shot him in the face with the hypodermic. The jet hissed out of the muzzle at supersonic speed. He screamed in agony and dropped the rifle so he could bring both hands to his eyes. He staggered blindly around, and knocked over the lamp on the table. His flailing arms hit the gasoline lantern. It smashed to the floor, splashing its contents onto the kerosene lamp.

  There was a whump sound and gasoline flared up around his knees. By then, the drugs kicked in and he crumpled to the floor.

  I turned and saw Lisa standing there, transfixed.

  I grabbed Daggett’s arms and pulled him up. “Help me with your grandfather!” I yelled.

  She snapped out of her trance and took Daggett by the ankles. We carried him out of the cottage and into the rain where we set him down on a dune around fifty feet away.

  I ran to the cottage and tried to get through the front door, but the combination of old wood and the mix of kerosene and gas was too potent for the rain to extinguish. The blistering heat drove me back.

  I returned to where Lisa was standing over her grandfather. She would have stared at the burning shack until it went to ashes, but I said. “We’ve got to get him out of the rain.”

  She nodded numbly, then we dragged the old man along the dune path. The house was illuminated by the flashing lights of a police car.

  A police officer came over and said, “We’re investigating a call from someone named Gomes. What happened to the old guy?”

  “There was a fire in an old beach cottage,” I said. “He tried to rescue someone who was inside.”

  The officer quickly got on his hand radio. Two fire trucks and a couple of ambulances showed up fifteen minutes later. Firemen and EMTs raced toward the glow from the beach. A pair of EMTs stayed behind to check out Daggett inside one ambulance. They said he needed to go to the hospital. Lisa asked if she could ride in back. Before the doors closed, I saw her mouth the word, “Thanks.”

  The ambulance passed more incoming fire trucks and police cruisers. I looked around at the pandemonium, and was reminded of the fire that had destroyed my boat and launched me into this madness. Then I staggered to my apartment, locked the door, found a bottle of bourbon, and drank most of it before I crashed onto my bed in a drunken sleep.

  CHAPTER 41

  It was not the chirping of the cardinal family outside my window that woke me out of my brain-dead sleep, but a deep voice that said, “You dead, or dead drunk, Soc?”

  I rolled over, slowly opened my right eye, then the other. I squinted against the hard morning sunlight streaming through the window. Flagg stood at the foot of the bed holding a steaming coffee mug.

  I let out a groan. “I know I’m not dead because I can feel little men hammering on the inside of my skull, my tongue is made of cardboard and you’re not an angel. How’d you get in? I thought I locked my door.”

  “You did.” He lifted the mug. “There’s coffee in the kitchen. Still some whiskey in the bottle in case you want a little hair of the dog that bit you.”

  I gave him a look. I was suffering from more than a simple dog bite. My stomach reacted with a silent protest when I rolled out of bed. I stood on wobbly legs waiting for the room to stop spinning. I made it to the bathroom, put my head under the faucet and drank a gallon of water to replenish what was lost to alcoholic dehydration. Then I stripped down, took a long hot shower, and after I had toweled my body dry, got into clean shorts and T-shirt. I padded out to the kitchen. Flagg prefers coffee the color of unrefined petroleum, which was fine with me.

  I carried my mug out onto the deck where Flagg sat having his coffee. The rains had stopped, and the clouds had cleared out, leaving a bright azure canopy over an ocean of jade. I shaded my eyes to keep the strong sunlight out of my sensitive eyes. Flagg handed me his aviator glasses.

  “You need these more than I do,” he said.

  I slipped the sunglasses on and inhaled a deep breath of fresh air. The smell of burned wood came to me on the breeze.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “Bad hangover?”

  “I’ve had worse. I just remembered last night.”

  “I heard there was quite the ruckus around here. Care to fill me in on what happened?”

  “I’m not exactly sure I can tell you exactly what happened,” I said. “But I’ll give it a try.”

  I drank more coffee and began a reconstruction of the events of the night before, starting with my damp walk into town from the Coast Guard station, going on to the craziness with Ramsey at the beach shack and finally, my unwise decision to dive into a whiskey bottle.

  “Close call, Soc. Good thing for you Lisa showed up at the beach shack.”

  “No argument there. Did you see any sign of her when you pulled in?”

  He shook his head. “I saw the fire trucks and cruisers. Talked to Mrs. Gomes who said old man Daggett was taken to the hospital and his granddaughter was still with him. So I came looking for you. Glad you’re okay.”

  I paused for a moment in thought, then said, “It could have gone badly for me even after Lisa distracted Ramsey. I had grabbed the injection gun and had it pointed at Ramsey, but I hesitated. I couldn’t shoot him in the face. But then it was no longer Ramsey’s face and it was Swain instead, looking as if he wanted to have me for dinner. Scared the crap out of me. I froze. But my body took control from my mind and sent an order to my trigger finger. Does that sound crazy to you?”

  “This whole thing is crazy. First, Daggett thinking he was two people, then Ramsey trading places with his ancestor. Maybe this stuff is catching.”

  “Maybe. From what I know, Ramsey seemed ambivalent about the swarmbots. One minute he’s backing Chernko’s mad scheme to the hilt. The next he’s backing out. Wonder if his two personalities were battling each other.”

  “The Jekyll and Hyde thing? You got me, Soc. Here’s what I do know. The Coast Guard picked up a life raft wit
h some people from the Volga on it.”

  “Chernko one of them?”

  “No word yet. I’ll let you know.”

  Flagg said his colleagues from Washington had been delayed coming in because of the weather, and when they finally arrived, the de-briefing had gone into the wee hours. He caught a power nap at the station, and when he woke up, drove out to my place.

  “Main reason I came by was to see what you wanted to do about your cousin.”

  Alex. “Hell, Flagg, I forgot all about him in the excitement. We’ve got to do something. Chili gave me twenty-four hours to bring in a million dollars.”

  Flagg glanced at his watch. “We’ve got time for breakfast. You can fill me in over scrambled eggs. I’ve got one important question now, though.”

  “You want to know where I’m going to get a million dollars?”

  “Hell, no, Soc. Okay if I use the chirizo you’ve got in the fridge?”

  Forty-five minutes after we’d wolfed down eggs scrambled with Portuguese sausage, Flagg and I were crawling through the thicket of tall grass near Chili’s house. Flagg was moving slower than I was because he was dragging his heavy satchel with him.

  At one point, he stopped and belched. “You know something, Soc, we never should have had that chirizo.”

  “Hey Flagg, that was your idea.”

  “I know, man, but that was before I knew we were going to be crawling around on our belly like a couple of lizards.”

  Whining is unbecoming from a man built like a bulldozer. I told him I’d buy him a bottle of Maalox, then squirmed through the grass a few more yards and raised my hand in a stop signal. Flagg moved up beside me and parted the grass enough to peer through it.

  “Pretty quiet,” he whispered. “You sure this is the place?”

  “Positive. I saw Chili and his pals the last time I was here.” I pointed to the Tahoe which was pulled off the shell driveway onto the grass.

  “Nice wheels.”

  “Check out the name on the license plate.”

  “CHILI. Guess that nails it,” he said.

  “You see the problem,” I said. “This is as close as we can get without being seen. Anyone approaching the house is walking through a kill zone.”

  “That’s why we’re not going to do anything that dumb. We’re going to make them come to us.”

  He dragged the satchel closer, rolled onto his side and opened the bag. He reached inside and extracted the portable rocket launcher he had showed me earlier. Next, he pulled a missile from the bag and slid it into the breach.

  “You can’t use that thing on the house, Flagg. They’ve got Alex inside.”

  He gave me his sad-eyed look. “How long have you known me, Soc?”

  “Sorry. Okay, I trust you. Just be careful! What do you want me to do?”

  “Cover your ears,” he said.

  He got up on one knee, squinted through the launcher’s tubular sight and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud whoosh and a white streak leapt from the front of the tube toward the Tahoe, magically transforming two tons of steel into a fiery red and white sunburst of flames.

  It took only seconds for the front door of the house to fly open. Chili burst out, followed by his Jamaican pals and Chernko’s Mutt and Jeff thugs. All of them were armed with AK-47s. The weapon dangled at Chili’s side as he stared at the smoky blaze where his SUV used to be. He began to dance around as if he’d stepped on a hornet’s nest. He tried to get closer to the vehicle, but a secondary explosion drove him back toward the house.

  The Russians were babbling with excitement at each other, but the Jamaicans behaved with a deliberate calmness that suggested they’d had some military training. They held their AKs at waist level, pivoting their bodies, scouring the woods and grass around the house. Flagg waited until they were looking away from us and then he went hunting again.

  There was another whoosh. The pick-up truck on the other side of the driveway exploded in flames. Flagg set the launcher aside and had his Sig Sauer in hand, prepared to lay down a line of preventive fire in case they started back to the house. Watching the second vehicle transformed into molten steel convinced Chili and his friends that they were over-matched. Rather than go back into the house, they ran up the driveway and disappeared around a bend in road.

  Flagg was laughing so hard tears streamed down his wide cheeks.

  I took my heart out of my mouth where it had been while Flagg was destroying vehicles, and got to my feet. While Flagg kept watch, I trotted between the blazing vehicles to look for Cousin Alex. I found him in a bedroom, lying on a dirty mattress, tied hands and feet. I got a knife out of the kitchen where I saw stacks of small packages wrapped in white paper, cut him loose and asked if he was okay.

  “I’m a little stiff,” he said as he rubbed the circulation back into his wrists. “Boy, am I glad to see you.”

  I patted Alex on the back, then hustled him back to where I had left Flagg. He was watching the woods behind us in case Chili and his friends figured things out and tried to cut us off on our way back to the car.

  I told him about the packages I’d seen and suggested Chili and his friends might venture back for their stash. We made double-time back through the woods to our car and didn’t let our breaths out until we were in the clear.

  The billowing black smoke must have been visible for miles because we passed a police cruiser and fire truck both going in direction we’d come from. For insurance, Flagg made a cell phone call to a friend at the DEA suggesting that the agency might like to talk to Chili after the police got through with him. Chili might still try to implicate Alex, as he’d threatened, but it was unlikely that his word would stand against a respected young lawyer. With any luck, Alex’s old pal would have another ten years or more to put his cooking skills to use at a federal prison. Maybe Chernko’s goons could teach him some Russian recipes.

  Flagg hung up and turned to me. “That was fun. You got any plans for the rest of the day?”

  “Not much has been planned with me lately, Flagg. Things just sorta happened. Why do you ask?”

  “I was just thinking. I saw a couple of rods and reels back at your place. I still got the Zodiac under rental. What say we go fishing? You, me and Cousin Alex.”

  Alex had been silent up to then, probably still in shock, but he said, “Go fishing? After all this stuff we’ve gone through? He’s got to be kidding, Soc.”

  “Not at all. It would be a good way to put some of that stuff behind us.”

  Alex laughed, a good sign. “I’ll buy the beer.”

  I must have been feeling better because I said, “And I’ll drink it.”

  CHAPTER 42

  As it turned out, the fish lived to bite another day.

  The operation had gone off with surgical precision. Flagg rounded up the boat. Alex got the beer. I bought the Italian sub sandwiches. We piled into the Zodiac with our supplies and fishing gear, and motored to a quiet part of the harbor. The lines went in the water. The beer cans popped, except for the Mountain Dew for Flagg, and we dug into the sandwiches.

  Then Flagg’s cell phone trilled. He stuck it in his ear, listened intently and muttered, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  He clicked off and shook his head, a look of chagrin on his face.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said.

  “Yup. I have to save the world again. Got to leave immediately. Sorry, guys.”

  “Serves me right for having the Man from U.N.C.L.E. as my fishing buddy.”

  “Haven’t told you the good news. That was Chernko they picked up in the life raft. Some Chinese guys were with him.”

  “What about the crew from the yacht?”

  “Some made it. Some didn’t.”

  “What are they going to do with him?”

&
nbsp; “Here’s the problem, Soc. Yacht’s on the bottom, blown to smithereens. Malloy is going back to work for the navy on super-secret stuff. The fact that Chernko had Chinese guys on board was no big deal. Anyone can go out for a ride with their pals. Thanks to you, Ramsey’s history so we can’t use him. Surviving crew from the yacht aren’t going to talk, and my people don’t want them blabbing about what they saw anyhow.”

  “If we can’t prosecute Ivan, can we send him back home?”

  “Might be hard. Chernko’s still got friends at State who think he’s got connections with the top brass in Moscow. They’d need a reason.”

  “Let’s give them one. The DEA puts the squeeze on Chernko’s thugs, the guys who were working with Chili, and they may get them to connect their boss to the drug deal and the murder of Viktor Karpov. Maybe they can use that to kick Chernko out of the country.”

  “What’s that going to accomplish?”

  “A lot. Chernko is heavily in debt to his KGB pals. He did the drug stuff to keep the gas tank full on his yacht. The swarmbot deal with Ramsey was going to bring in cash he could use to pay off his debts. He was trying to sell cutting edge military technology to the Chinese instead of the Russians. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone made an example of Mr. Chernko.”

  “I’d be more surprised if they didn’t,” Flagg said.

  “Then that settles that. There’s a big lunker of a striper out there just waiting for Alex and me to haul him in.”