The Fourth Option

by Matt Hilton

  He pushed his hair back into place, chiding his vanity, and looked down at the porcelain sink. It was blotched crimson, as if some redneck hunter had gutted a kill in it. When he looked back at his reflection, all trace of humour had left him. Other than surviving a supreme ass kicking, what had he to be happy about? Earlier, he’d reported to his bosses, claiming with 99.9 per cent confidence that Mercer was dead, despite the sudden and eternal loss of his teammates, and had been applauded for his success. However, within two hours, his handler had gotten back to him with an alternative report. A team dispatched to clean up the battleground had found Vince’s fallen comrades — including McMahon, gunned down several hundred yards away — but no other bodies. Until he could show them Mercer’s corpse, the job was incomplete, and he was on warning that his continued failures would not be tolerated much longer. Earlier in the day, while squeezing Sue Bouchard for information on Mercer’s whereabouts she’d made a foreboding prediction that’d given Johnny Scott a moment’s pause: Vince had brushed it off, but not entirely.

  There was once a time when Stephen Vincent had set his sights on a career in federal law enforcement, and as a FBI special agent he’d distinguished himself in the field of undercover work. Having assumed several mantles, he’d excelled as a white trash, racist hillbilly cat, who had proven invaluable to Arrowsake who required an inside man to help manipulate a domestic terrorist plot to suit their agenda, and he’d been recruited. As Vince Everett, he’d played fast and loose with the FBI motto of “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity,” adhering to each component only when it suited his mission, but he still felt he was imbued with each of those admirable traits. See, as Vince, he had the capacity to switch his morals on and off as befitted the task at hand: in the guise of Vince he did bad things, usually to bad people, but it didn’t make Stephen totally bad. Maybe it would have been better if he had totally separated himself from his former identity during this mission, rather than allow Stephen Vincent to creep back in. As Vince he disliked Hunter. As Stephen he envied him, but also held the man in high regard: he wouldn’t want to attain credibility by superseding Hunter if he didn’t respect his abilities. There was a tiny, he grudgingly accepted, spot of hero worship in his heart for Hunter, and it was this that had caused him to stay Vince’s murderous instincts whenever they’d met before. Now, given the alternative, he must put aside Stephen’s pussy ways and get Vince’s head firmly back in the game. The point being, whose head did he value most?

  ‘Yours, my man,’ he concluded, as he met the dead-eyed stare of Vince in the mirror.

  He left the bathroom, returning to the room where he’d earlier overseen the torture of Sue Bouchard. The chair in which she’d been restrained, and the polythene sheet Johnny Scott had used to smother her were still in evidence. None but the keenest eye would identify the room as a crime scene, but teamed with the blood he’d dripped all over the house, and left puddled in the bathroom sink, it’d raise the pecker of even the most jaded of detectives. He made a mental note to have Arrowsake dispatch their cleaners here to scrub away every trace of his and Sue’s presence in the house. In the meantime he began collecting whatever belongings left there by his team he could use, including a spare shirt and jacket belonging to Wayne Davis to replace his own. After dressing and tucking the voluminous shirt into his jeans, he shrugged into the jacket, finding it roomy too, but useable and nearest his size. Dressed in either McMahon or Scott’s clothing, both much bigger men, he’d feel like a child playing dress up in their dad’s suit. He took any items that would readily identify his dead team, but with no intention of using them; he’d bin them in a trashcan many miles away. He holstered his pistol, shoved ammunition into a backpack, and rewound his garrote around his left forearm, having taken it off while dressing and cleaning his wounds. The steel string, weighted at each end, was a comforting weight under his sleeve. Lastly he retrieved the satellite phone used during his communications with Arrowsake, and stuffed it in the backpack. He’d only summons a clean up team once he was on the road, and well out of reach of anyone else they might decide to send along uninvited with the cleaners.

  32

  I took my turn on stag duty, watching over my friends as they slept. Having gotten around three hours of shut-eye, Rink spelled me and I dragged my weary butt to bed. Bed wasn’t a comfortable divan, but a bare space on a bedroom floor of the ranch house, but it didn’t matter: I slept like the dead and didn’t rouse until summoned by the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. I found Rink and Harvey in the kitchen, presiding over the remnants of the supplies Harvey brought back from his trip last night. There was no sign of Mercer, but from another room I heard a flushing toilet and assumed it was he. I needed a leak too, but more so, I needed coffee.

  ‘Get your laughing gear around that, mate,’ Rink said, in a fair impression of an English accent. These days my Yank buddy could approximate something that sounded less Dick Van Dyke more Jason Statham.

  Grateful, I accepted a steaming mug of coffee from him, and drank deeply. It was strong and black and unsweetened, just the way I liked it.

  ‘Top me up?’ I asked, after less than ten seconds.

  Rink wielded the jug, sloshing more coffee into my cup.

  ‘I hope you’ve saved some of that for me.’ Jason Mercer entered the kitchen. He moved gingerly, but was apparently finding moving a tad easier than before. His shirt hung open, and underneath was a compression bandage where somebody had strapped his damaged ribs: I assumed it was Harvey’s handiwork.

  I made room so that Rink could serve him a steaming mugful. Mercer dumped in several spoonfuls of sugar and a glug of half-and-half from an open carton. He drank as eagerly as I had my first cup. Then he joined me in digging into the food Harvey had brought. As crude as it sounds, most soldiers follow the maxim to sleep, eat, drink, piss and shit whenever you could, because you didn’t know when the opportunity might arise again. As soon as I was sated, I headed off in search of the toilet.

  On my return to the kitchen, I found another round of coffee on the go, and took a third mug, then joined the other guys at the counter. They were making an inventory of weapons and ammunition. Between us we had four pistols — I still had the gun I’d discovered in Sue’s tote bag after Vince grabbed her — and a rifle. We had enough bullets to stage a gas station robbery, but too few to go to war: a situation that must be rectified soon. We discussed our next moves, unsure what or how we were going to do anything without compromising our liberty. We judged the merits of staying put and using the ranch as a base to moving on to somewhere where we could launch a counter strike against our enemies. Then and there, most of those ranged against us were unknown, faceless entities, except for Vince. Killing Vince was on several of our agendas, but he was but one enemy among who knew how many others.

  Over the years, Rink and I had come into contact with some of the men and women behind Arrowsake, and we’d noted their identities should we ever be pushed into a similar situation as this. I thought some of the older ones could have passed on by now, or be too feeble politically to cause us any problems, but we lacked intelligence on the current crop. It seemed inevitable that we must go again, cap in hand, to Walter, to beg the names we needed, and hope he’d steer us correctly. I was the one elected to make the call, but before doing so, I joined the general kafuffle, milling with the others around the kitchen as we avoided the elephant in the room, or more correctly our murdered comrade in the parking garage.

  Mercer went a bit quiet. At first I thought it was because he felt out of odds with the three of us, old pals, with plenty to talk about, but that wasn’t it. I watched his eyes grow glassy, and a faint tremble in his hands appear, and realised that he was contending with more than a gunshot, and grief, he also was suffering from his older wounds. He hung his head and fell silent. Then began a slow shamble, elbow pressed to his ribs towards the door.

  I matched him for a couple of steps until he became aware of my presence.

  ‘I’m gong to go out an
d check on Sue,’ he said.

  There was the opportunity for a quip about her not going anywhere, but it would’ve been in bad taste at any time. I thought he just needed some space, and visiting Sue’s body was an excuse. An excuse was unnecessary. ‘Sure thing,’ I said, and walked with him through the living room to the exit door. We were safe there, for now, but someone should watch his six. Outside, I checked around. It was the first I’d seen of the exterior in daylight. Beyond the ranch was a wilderness of trees, grass and bogs, and further on the river. To the front the lawns had been kept short, somewhat parched now by the sun, and more trees bordered the drive up to the house. At a glance the ranch was off the beaten track, but wasn’t as far removed as it looked. Traffic noise could be heard from FL-71 just beyond the close horizon, and something bigger, an agricultural behemoth of some type, worked in a field somewhere closer. There was no hint of a strike team about to launch an attack, but who knew if there was a sniper laid up with us in his gun’s sights? If that was so, there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t progress beyond the front stoop, only watched Mercer climb down off the porch and angle across the front yard to the large parking garage. The shutters were down but there was a regular access door to one side, to which he headed. I watched until he was safely inside.

  As a bird flew, I was probably no more than twenty miles from Mexico Beach, but the little town I’d called home felt out of reach at that moment. There, up against the Apalachicola River, there was no sign of the hurricane that had recently devastated my community. This could be another land entirely separate from the vistas of sand and twinkling waters of the Gulf I was used to seeing. Standing there, in the morning warmth, surrounded by the distant noises of innocent activity, it was hard to imagine that the last two days had consisted of running battles and violent deaths. If there were a benevolent God, perhaps He would look kindly on us for a while and allow us to exist a little longer in this peaceful, safe haven. No. What was I thinking? Better for us if He was a wrathful, Old Testament war-god who’d give us the strength to strike down our enemies and tear down their tyrannical empire.

  I took out my cell phone and brought up Walter’s number.

  As per usual, my call was bounced around before connecting, and I listened while the phone rang and rang. I was on the verge of hanging up when Walter picked up.

  ‘Sorry, son, you’ve kind of caught me on the hop.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘It’s good of you to ask, Joe. I’m fine. Not sure how much longer that’ll last.’ Walter told me about his visit from Spencer Booth, and how the former Assistant Secretary of Defence for intelligence had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: Booth gave Walter the choice between betraying us and saving his own life, to which there could only be one outcome. ‘I killed that motherfucker dead,’ he announced with uncharacteristic venom.

  ‘Jesus, Walt,’ I said.

  ‘The sanctimonious son of a bitch tried to convince me I was as guilty as the rest of them for what happened in Sierra Leone, and the only way I could protect my ass was to help them brush it all under the carpet. That in simple terms means silencing Mercer, Rink and you, son, and I mean permanently. He must have thought I just fell out of a stupid tree, because there’s no cleaning house without silencing me too, or the rest of them for that matter. I got things started with him, and good riddance.’

  ‘What happened?’

  He told me in broad terms, without embellishment. ‘Let’s just say he’s no longer a threat. Booth and his security detail are tucked up nice and secure in the panic room under my fishing lodge. They’ll stay there for now, out of sight and mind.’

  ‘You killed his security detail too?’

  ‘Had to,’ he said, ‘out of an act of kindness. Couldn’t have them dying of thirst locked down in my bunker, could I?’

  He was attempting to lighten the mood, but it wasn’t working. I could tell he found the deaths of Booth’s bodyguards regretful, even if necessary to his — and our — survival. I changed the subject.

  ‘Tell me you’re no longer there.’

  ‘I already did. I said you’d caught me on the hop. I’m currently twenty thousand feet in the air above Pennsylvania en route to Langley.’

  ‘You’re going to CIA headquarters?’

  ‘Safest place I can think of to be right now,’ he said. ‘Besides, there’s some stuff I need to get my hands on there, that might prove useful to us in the coming days.’

  ‘Surely you’re walking into a hornet nest?’

  ‘You forget, son, I’m CIA first, Arrowsake second. In fact, can’t say as I’ve anything to do with them now, seeing as they made my position clear. Don’t worry about me, I’ve more allies in Langley than I have enemies.’ His logic made sense. It was unlikely that anyone would try to harm him while he was at the heart of CIA headquarters.

  Back when I was drafted into it, Arrowsake was a top-secret coalition taskforce, primarily funded by black budget money, but there was always a layer of congressional oversight involved. In later days, it morphed into something else. Black budget funding was still its mainstay, but it also garnered funding from several anonymous multi-billionaires, and as such was now a private rather than governmental unit, with its own autonomy. Government projects are subject to scrutiny, and freedom of information requests, whereas private entities are under no obligation to share their secrets. It has been said that when diplomacy and military intervention fails, the third option is the intelligence community. Arrowsake offered a fourth option: complete denial. This was where they had gone wrong, because with no oversight or fear of reprisal, they had come to believe they were untouchable. These days they were more about the interests of their leaders, the destabilising of competitors, the procurement of the almighty buck, and their methods went beyond criminal: blackmail, coercion, and murder by proxy of dangerous mercenaries and assassins. It had surprised me to hear that Walter had taken such extreme action against Spencer Booth, but not that he might strike out to defend himself. Before Walter was a mover and shaker in the CIA, he had been a field agent, and had operated in wars ranging from Vietnam up to the first Gulf War. Beneath his slightly comical exterior was a hardened operative who could kill as easily with an innocent piece of crockery as with a smart bomb. His killing of Booth was a reminder to Arrowsake not to prod a sleeping wolf; killing Booth was akin to ancient times, when sending back the head of an emissary showed the terms offered were unsatisfactory.

  I could have almost gotten teary-eyed over Walter choosing us over them, but I was under no illusion, this was mostly about him. Not that I held it against him, because at base level, when their survival instincts kick in, many individual’s believe their life is more important than anyone else’s. Walter was fleeing back to the bosom of the CIA because there were people within its ranks who’d help him, people that might enjoy the dissolution, the destruction, of the untethered beast that Arrowsake had become.

  I’d told him earlier about our failure to rescue Sue, and told him now how we wished to avenge her. I also asked that he send someone to collect her body, and see to its safe and dignified storage until a proper funeral could be held for her. After finishing up, I added, ‘I understand you need to protect yourself, but we also need to know you’ve got our backs in this fight, Walter.’

  ‘We are on the same page, son. It’s in all our interests that the threat from them is permanently off the table. Here’s my promise to you: whatever’s mine is yours.’

  ‘It’s good to hear,’ I said, and meant it. ‘So, here’s what we need from you, Walt.’

  33

  Three days and eight hundred plus miles later found Rink, Mercer and I seated in a panel van near Williamsburg, Virginia. We were alongside a tributary of the York River, not far from where it spilled into Chesapeake Bay. Earlier we’d been smuggled in via a landing strip on a Naval supply flight, organised for us by Walter: Yorktown Naval Weapons Station dominated a good stretch of the land east of Williamsburg. F
urther up river there were state parks, several golf courses, and a proliferation of small churches, vineyards, farms and even a county jail. We weren’t interested in any of those, but had done recon so that we knew the lay of the land, and possible exfiltration routes.

  It was dark. We were parked at the head of a hiking trail, off the approach road to a private residence seated on the bank above the York River, which I scanned with a pair of infrared binoculars. The house was an ultra-modern feat of architectural excellence, complete with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a huge sun deck, and glass walls, some overlooking the riverside to make the most of the views. It sat at the northern end of several acres of manicured lawns, one of which incorporated stables, paddocks and a gymkhana. To the south there was a large fishing pond, bordered by the wilder expanse of a national park. There were outbuildings, one of them a huge parking garage, while another housed a bar, a lounge and a games room for when, I guessed, the frequent parties held there must be taken inside. There was also what amounted to a bunkroom that housed the on-site staff. There was ample outside parking space for dozens of vehicles, although right then there were only four cars and a van not dissimilar to ours in evidence. Also there was a helipad, on which sat an executive level Airbus H145.

  The presence of the chopper made me regret sending home Harvey. He still took on private investigation work for pocket money, but it was his second income these days. In the 75th Ranger Regiment he’d flown everything from MH-6 Little Bird’s, through Blackhawks and up to MH-47 Chinooks and now in civilian life he had made a sightseeing business out of shuttling tourists around Little Rock in his personal helicopter. If the shit hit the fan and we needed rapid exfil, Harvey in the pilot’s seat of that H145 would’ve been ideal. However, this was our battle and not Harvey’s: he’d already given more to us than what we’d asked and we would ask no more of him for now. Nobody in the enemy camp knew of Harvey’s involvement back at the hostage exchange, and we’d rather things stayed that way. Harvey, being a generous and loyal friend, had argued against leaving us but in the end he saw sense, and understood we were thinking about the best for him. As it were, we weren’t totally without Harvey’s back up. Along with Raul Velasquez, he was now a recipient of copies of the “stuff” Walter had gotten his hands on, and would make use of it should our more hands-on plan to destroy Arrowsake go pear-shaped.