Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  Maybe it was my imagination, but her eyes seemed to soften a little when she saw me. Or maybe she just wanted me to see it. “Hi, Jeff,” she said.

  “Mia,” I replied. “What, exactly, are you doing here?”

  A look that might have been a combination of amusement and irritation crossed her face. “Renton isn’t entirely comfortable meeting you in the middle of nowhere alone,” she said. “He thought that I’d be a familiar enough face to provide him a little backup without exacerbating your paranoia further.”

  He really doesn’t know me as well as he thinks he does, I didn’t say. Mia might be a friend of sorts, but her presence wasn’t going to ease my paranoia any.

  “Heads up,” Larry called. “Company’s coming.” I followed his gaze to see the dust cloud of an approaching vehicle on the road.

  I drew my .45 and leaned against the trunk of the car, making no effort to conceal it. Let the tone get set right away.

  I couldn’t help but think that the little Toyota RAV4 looked like a plastic toy as it pulled up, its fancy green paint job covered in trail dust. The little SUV came to a stop about twenty yards away, and Renton got out.

  He was a thoroughly unimpressive-looking man. Neither conspicuously fit, nor fat, he had sandy brown hair, a tan slightly lighter than Mia’s, and a touch of five-o’clock shadow. The first time I’d met him, he’d successfully disguised himself as a Basra Provincial Police Force officer, despite having no Arab blood, that I knew of, in his ancestry. He was what a spy was supposed to be—a gray man, moving quietly, unnoticed, through the shadows. And he was good at it; he’d effectively disappeared out of the Intelligence Community a number of years before to work for the shadowy Cicero Group, the same people who had employed us several times now, and the same group that I no longer trusted farther than I could throw his car.

  His gray eyes flicked down to the 1911 in my hand. He was composed, but his eyes were wary, and I was pretty sure he was packing heat, himself. This wasn’t shaping up to be the friendliest meeting, and I didn’t mean for it to be.

  “Is that how this is going to go?” he asked, standing a few yards away.

  “Depends on you,” I replied shortly. “You came alone, which is a point in your favor. You understand that I’m not in a particularly trusting or complacent frame of mind at the moment, given that Jim’s dead, Little Bob’s missing, and what looks suspiciously like a larger version of Janson’s wannabe SWAT team just drove us out of The Ranch and into the hills.”

  He shook his head angrily. “The Group didn’t send that task force, though it was certainly raised as a possibility, after that loose-cannon stunt you pulled in Pueblo. Between the bloodbath you started down there, and its aftermath, there are some powerful people in the Group who are beginning to think that you’re too much of a liability.”

  I confess I sneered. “Really? We’re a liability? Last I checked, we weren’t the ones leaking assets’ targeting information to cartels. We were the ones getting set up to have our own people murdered in our own fucking backyard!”

  “And if you’d contacted me instead of flying off the damned handle, we might have handled it without throwing the door wide open to the kind of people who get off exploiting dead bodies in residential neighborhoods!” he snapped. “Do you have any idea what your little set of raids has led to?”

  “I was supposed to trust you and your people, after what happened last time?” I replied. “Your organization is leaky as fuck, and I still can’t be sure that Janson or Sherman or one of those assholes didn’t put the narcos or these black-helicopter fucks on us, to remove the ‘liability.’” I stabbed a finger at him with my non-firing hand. “Your people made damned good and sure that this was the only option open to us after the way they fucked us in Mexico, Renton.”

  “He’s right, Renton,” Mia said suddenly, “and you know it. Face it, we knew this was coming, and we didn’t move fast enough.”

  His shoulders sagged a little. I saw an echo of the dead, defeated look in his eyes that he’d worn after I’d called Janson’s bluff and forced him to back down, the day that our relationship with the Cicero Group had become a few degrees colder. It was the look of a man treading water and starting to feel a cramp.

  “Janson’s on the outs with the Group as it is,” he said quietly, “and Sherman didn’t order the raid. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that nobody in the Group had anything to do with giving the cartels the target package that kicked this off, either.”

  “Then who did?” I asked coldly.

  “And if I tell you?” he asked sharply, looking me in the eye. “Then what? Another bloodbath? A few more steps toward the edge? Do you have any idea how fragile the situation here Stateside is right now?”

  “That’s the second time you’ve said that,” Larry pointed out. “Maybe you’d better elaborate a little for those of us who have been running and fighting for our lives for the last couple of weeks.”

  Renton reached into his pocket. I tapped my trigger finger against the slide of my 1911, just to make it clear that pulling anything lethal out would be a very, very bad idea. He noticed it, but studiously ignored it.

  He came out with a smartphone. When I raised an eyebrow, he snorted. “This thing isn’t what it looks like. It’s encrypted six ways from Sunday, and if anyone was actually, by some magical tech wizardry, able to tap its IP, it would show up as being somewhere in the middle of Lake Superior. And anything they could get off it would still be gibberish. Give me a little credit.”

  He tapped at the screen, then stepped closer and held it out. To his credit, he came to me, instead of trying to make me cross the distance to him. Maybe I’d gotten a bit too sensitive to little power and manipulation tricks, but when you’re a trigger puller in a world of spooks and manipulators, you get that way.

  Taking the phone, I looked down at the screen. It was set to a social media page, entitled “The People of Color Revolutionary Front.” The cover photos were about what you might expect from a group with that name; lots of pictures of masked young people waving their fists in the air, banners calling for “Revolution Now!” “Fuck the Police!” and “End the White Race!” along with several stylized portraits of the likes of Che Guevara and Malcom X.

  Below the banner of images, the top posts were a series of gruesome photos, including several of the cartel assholes we’d waxed in Pueblo. Several of the others were obviously nowhere near Pueblo; I thought I recognized one from Mexico about three years before.

  Accompanying the photos were lurid descriptions of a cold-blooded, house-to-house massacre of Hispanics in Colorado. It had very little to do with what had actually happened, but to someone who had no idea, it certainly would sound like some kind of white supremacists had decided to start purging the Latinos from the US, beginning in Pueblo of all places. It really didn’t make a lot of sense, but in my experience, propaganda rarely does. It relies on emotion and outrage to override the reader’s or hearer’s reason, and to the unprepared reading this, it would sure do the trick.

  “That’s only one example,” Renton said grimly. “There’s been a full-court push in the last ninety-six hours, ever since you finished your hits in Pueblo. And it’s getting traction; there are enough people out there who already believe this kind of thing that they’re primed for it.”

  “What kind of traction?” I asked, handing the phone to Larry.

  “What kind do you think?” was the answer. “Demonstrations in a dozen major cities, several of which have already turned into riots. Entire city blocks are being burned down. Several cops and other public figures have been assassinated already, and at least twenty random people who happened to be the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time have been dragged out into the street and beaten to death. At least one was doused in gasoline and set on fire.”

  I frowned, studying the images and thinking about what he’d said. “That’s awfully fast,” I pointed out.

  “No faster than the Ferguson shit-show a
nd the rest that followed it,” he replied, “if slightly more intensely violent.” He ran a hand over his face. He seemed a little calmer. “Granted, this isn’t unprecedented. Social media has been known to be a major tool for propaganda and coordinating street action for a long time. And like I said, the pump was primed a long time ago. The people behind this were just waiting for an opportunity, an opportunity that you handed them on a silver platter.”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” I snapped, getting angry again. “If we had to walk on eggshells because of the possibility that bad guys would use what we did for propaganda purposes, we’d have been even more paralyzed than we have been for the last twenty fucking years. They’ll always lie, always twist things to make us out to be monsters, no matter how justified we might be. Hell,” I added, pointing to the phone in Larry’s enormous hands, “half of these pictures aren’t even from Pueblo. I recognize a few of them from the intel reports on Mexico a year ago, and that one’s from Gila Bend; it’s not even a cartel shithead. It’s one of that sheriff’s family.”

  “My point is, that regardless of your intentions, you’ve provided some very unscrupulous people with a made-to-order atrocity, whether it really was one or not,” he said heavily. “I told you a while back that there were people dead-set on sowing chaos at home and abroad, mainly to forward their own agendas, mostly by consolidating power and influence behind the scenes. Well, it looks like this is their golden opportunity.”

  “You said it yourself, Renton,” Mia said. “This was an opportunity. If it wasn’t this, it would have been something else. And I’m not going to get my panties in a knot over some dead cartel reps in Pueblo, not when they sent Mara Salvatrucha gangsters after me, too.”

  Renton shot her a glance. She wasn’t really providing the backup he’d been expecting her to, though she made a good point.

  The fact was, I realized that part of why I was getting my back up was that in a way, Renton was right. We’d gone south half-cocked, pissed off, and hungry for blood. We’d lucked out and accomplished the mission without losing anyone, but we’d made life a lot harder for the Pueblo PD in the process, and I was still trying not to think too hard about all the ways that op could have gone horribly, horribly wrong. Vengeance is rarely a good motive for operations; it’s an emotional response and leads to poor planning and occasionally poorer decisions.

  Renton’s anger at our killings was only highlighting some of my own growing misgivings about my own motives and actions. I hadn’t quite done anything I regretted, yet. But I was starting to realize how close I was getting to that line, and Renton was reminding me of it.

  “It looks like we’re not the only ones providing fodder for the Outragey Outrage Patrol,” Larry said suddenly. He was studying the phone, and had apparently gone digging further. He held it up. “It seems the Three Percenter types are getting stirred up over that task force in our backyard.”

  “Let me see that,” Renton said, holding out his hand. Larry handed him the phone. He studied it, then tapped the screen a few times, presumably doing some further checking of his own. “Hell,” he muttered. “This might be it.”

  “Maybe you should share with the rest of the group,” I said sarcastically.

  “Yes,” Mia said sternly. “Maybe you should lay out what we know before going on a tear, Renton.”

  I shot her a look, even as I noticed Renton look a little shamefaced. “What do we know, Renton?” I asked, my voice low and dangerous. I still hadn’t holstered my pistol, and the look in Renton’s eyes when he met my gaze told me he’d noticed.

  “We didn’t get any indicators in time to warn you,” he said wearily. “Trust me, if we had, I’d have been blowing your phone up every thirty seconds until I got in touch with you. This caught me as flat-footed as it caught you.

  “I told you about the back-room power struggle that’s been going on. The Project in Iraq and Syria was part of it. Other parts of it were wrapped up in the El Duque fiasco; you helped uncover some of them. The whole thing is a lot more complicated and murky than anything you’ve ever imagined; there are no set battle lines, and different groups and personalities can be deadly enemies one day, then bosom buddies the next, before going back to hating each other. It’s all a matter of momentary advantages. But we’ve generally identified two fairly nebulous factions. They’re related by social and money networks, not ideologies. There are hard-core right-wingers and frothing leftists on both sides, and some that skip back and forth depending on the situation at the moment. There are also a lot of foreign influences, sometimes asserted through donations to non-profits and NGOs, sometimes through connections with trans-national corporations and trade agreements.

  “A few of us have started calling these two factions ‘Marius’ and ‘Sulla.’ ‘Marius’ seems to be the more hawkish group, relatively speaking, while ‘Sulla’ has more connections with ‘revolutionaries’ and organized crime. Again, none of these are hard and fast categories; the connections and rivalries vary depending on the situation and the people involved.

  “We’ve been able to determine that it was mostly ‘Marius’ behind The Project. Both factions had their fingers in the El Duque mess. Both factions have reason to want to see you gentlemen out of the picture, and it appears that both decided to move against you within days of each other. I’m pretty sure the task force that just beat down your door was put together by somebody within ‘Marius,’ somebody with enough money and clout to get the legitimate authorities to look the other way. ‘Sulla’ beat them by a couple weeks, preferring the more deniable avenue of meeting with a convocation of cartel leaders who were concerned about the precedent set by letting a bunch of gringos dismantle a cartel without retribution, and providing them with a target package.”

  “Who the hell are these people?” I asked. “If they don’t really give a shit about politics, then what are they organizing around?”

  “Like I said, carving out their own little virtual fiefdoms,” he replied. “Politics is only an end for the people they use. To them, politics and ideological crusades are only means to the end, namely being rich, powerful, and important. Patriots and revolutionaries alike are little more than useful morons to these people. Most of what organization exists consists of personal friendships, patronage, business connections, and blackmail. Who knows who, who gets money from who, and who has dirt on who.”

  “That sounds an awful lot like a conspiracy theory,” Larry pointed out. “Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission sort of stuff.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Renton replied. “But just because most of the conspiracy theories floating around the internet are insane doesn’t mean there are no conspiracies. They’re just generally far less competent, less over-reaching, and less disguised than people expect. Hell, most of this shit happens in plain sight, and gets papered over by partisan so-called ‘journalism’ on one side or another.”

  “So, when you said, ‘this might be it,’” I ventured, “what exactly did you mean by ‘it?’”

  He paused. For a moment, the quiet of the wilderness was broken only by the wind in the grass and the distant scream of a hawk.

  “There are indicators,” he said slowly, “that certain movers and shakers among ‘Marius’ and ‘Sulla’ have developed enough of an antipathy for each other that they might begin resorting to violence to remove one another as obstacles. One of our probable COAs has been sowing violent unrest as a cover for other actions, such as raids and assassinations.” COA was a military term, standing for Course Of Action. “This is starting to smell like that. It might not have been the initial plan; in fact, I suspect it wasn’t. Taking you guys out because you knew about too many skeletons in too many closets was almost guaranteed to be the primary objective, but when that went awry, ‘Sulla’ saw an opportunity.”

  “Do they realize how this could spin out of control?” Mia asked.

  “Of course not,” Renton snorted. “They’re the smart ones, remember, so much better than the stup
id dupes whose strings they pull. It didn’t spin out of control after the Black Lives Matter fiasco, so they’re sure they’ve got it figured out.”

  “That’s what you’re really worried about, isn’t it?” I asked. “If these ‘Marius’ and ‘Sulla’ fucksticks start offing each other, who gives a shit? Good riddance. But if they start a firestorm to cover it…”

  He nodded wearily. “It’s been a long time coming, but after decades of mob politics, this country is a fucking powder keg. You’ve got two-thirds of the population hating each other with every bit of intensity as the Shi’a and Sunni in Iraq. These assholes have pushed and pushed and pushed, stirring up the mob at every opportunity, because it’s the easy route to votes and money, and besides, once you’ve got the mob stirred up, you don’t dare back down or it’ll turn on you. So, here we are. Maybe we can stop it, maybe the US turns into Sierra Leone writ large.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” I asked, already having some suspicions of my own. Unfortunately, if he said what I thought he was going to say, it was going to line up with about the only workable plan for our own survival that was forming in my own head.

  He sighed. “I don’t know for sure. Short term, the hope in the Group is that if we can take down the worst of ‘Marius’ and ‘Sulla,’ then the provocations will die down, and we can at least put a lid on the kettle for a while longer, maybe long enough for calmer heads to start to prevail. Long term, I really don’t know.”

  Which was about what I’d expected him to say. Maybe I was getting better at reading the spook’s spook. Or maybe he wasn’t really the master manipulator that he appeared to be, but just a guy trying to do a job in murky and ever-shifting circumstances.

  Rather like us.

  Even so, I couldn’t afford to think like that. Renton was still a client, not a friend. And when your business is violence, it’s just as bad an idea to let your guard down around clients as it is around enemies. Sometimes the line between the two gets pretty damned thin.