The motel was a square U-shaped building with the open end of the U facing Central Avenue. The ice and Coke machines were located midway along the center leg of the U, in the laundry room, and could only be accessed with his room key. Carl held up a small plastic trash bag he’d brought from his room and filled it with ice. When he got back to his room, the boy-girl was silent and for a moment he seemed to have fallen asleep. Carl grabbed a white towel that looked like it had been in use since before the turn of the new century and sat on the bed. The young man opened his pretty hazel eyes and watched him. Carl felt like he was gazing into a lovely girl’s face. He pulled back the blanket and told him to roll onto his back.
“I’m going to raise up your blouse so I can put ice on your tummy, okay?” He nodded and Carl gently pushed his silk blouse up. He could see his bra was padded, making him look like he had small breasts when he didn’t.
“I’m not a doctor, but it doesn’t look like you have any broken ribs.” He could see a slight discoloration, a deep purple tint, in his flawless caramel-brown skin. “But you’re going to be sore for a few days. When you get home, I want you to take a bunch of Ibuprofen, okay? Then ice your bruises every day.”
He laid the thin towel across the young fellow’s upper belly, so the bag of ice wouldn’t freeze his skin, and gently put the ice in place. “Let me know if that’s too cold.”
The boy-girl nodded again and Carl smiled back. He pulled the blanket back over his lower body. Looking at him up close, Carl could tell he was a lot younger than he originally thought, maybe twenty, so Carl instinctively shifted into the role of parent. As he looked at the young man lying before him, Carl felt a deep sense of guilt and shame. He could have—should have—stopped the assault sooner. Instead, he had allowed his own prejudice to prevent him from doing what he knew was the right thing. It shouldn’t have mattered that the victim was a gay boy or a cross-dresser, or whatever. None of that mattered. He should have acted sooner. If he had, he could have defused the situation without killing those men. Not that he cared one whit about those bullies.
He reflected on his new self. The one defining factor that made him a badass was that he didn’t care about killing. Somehow he’d lost the moral distinction that prevented normal citizens from killing other people, just in the last month. Everyone in a modern civilized society knew killing or hurting people was wrong. It was fraught with consequences, and people were conditioned to avoid it, to feel guilty about doing it. Even cops and FBI agents and military soldiers, though trained to use deadly force when necessary, sought to avoid it unless there was absolutely no other choice.
Up until last month, Carl was the same as the millions of other citizens. Now, he was different. The thing that made people normal—a moral compass—was now missing from his soul. In the last month, he’d killed cops and FBI agents and federal officers and drug cartel members and even a foreign army officer. None of it bothered him in the slightest.
Less than an hour ago, he shot those three men, not because he wanted to do the right thing and save a boy-girl from being assaulted. He killed them because he was angry at them. He killed them because they were bullies. Now, he acknowledged he’d killed them for the wrong reason. That the victim was ultimately saved was a fringe benefit. That was why he felt guilty. It should have been about the boy-girl, but it hadn’t been. Carl stroked the smooth skin of the young man’s cheek with his palm.
“What’s your name?”
“Rainey.”
“I’m Carl. I’m sorry this happened to you. I should have stopped it sooner.” He hesitated a long moment, then said, “The same kind of thing happened to me, Rainey. I got done in by bullies recently. It’s why I carry this.”
Carl patted the shoulder holster inside his jacket. In his case, it was the TER agents who kidnapped him and tortured him for information, and they had enjoyed his pain a little too much. He remembered the smug doctor smiling as he went about his task to inflict unimaginable chemical and electrical pain on Carl. He smiled at the memory. That doctor had been the first man he’d killed with his bare hands, and it hadn’t been all that hard, either physically or morally. In fact, it felt good. It felt real good.
“What you’re feeling right now,” he said gently. “It will pass in time.” He wasn’t completely convinced he was telling the truth. In reality, one had to let go of the anger and the feeling of helplessness and vulnerability for it to pass completely. Clearly, Carl hadn’t let go of his own emotions yet. His experience was too recent.
He looked at Rainey again and was surprised at the sudden well of emotion he felt. It had been the same with the president’s daughter after rescuing her, and it had been the same with Julia Reyes, the innocent stepdaughter of the drug lord who kidnapped Melissa. Maybe that kind of empathic connection was his super-power. Maybe his mission in life was to save kids, or something like that.
A lot of people say they’d kill someone who messed with their kids, but normal people don’t have the skills or the tools to actually do the deed. Normal people couldn’t step outside their moral fabric. Carl could. Without hesitation, the new Carl Johnson could kill anyone who messed with his kids or with anyone else of importance to him. He wasn’t afraid of getting shot or killed. He wasn’t afraid of anything. He couldn’t be hurt anymore. He warmed at the thought of having an empathic super-power. He could envision the comic book written about him in a couple years.
Some super-heroes had energy beams or Hulk strength. Carl, on the other hand, had a broken moral compass, an emotional detachment to match his empathic super-power that enabled him to kill some people without remorse and save others.
Crazy.
When he refocused on his new companion, he found Rainey watching him. He smiled again.
“Roll over and let me check your back.”
He wanted to make sure Rainey didn’t need to be in the emergency room. He pulled the ice bag from his belly and removed the towel. Rainey grimaced when he rolled onto his belly, and again when Carl’s fingers probed the wounds where the men had kicked him in the middle of his back and on his tailbone.
The back wound was a fist-sized bruise. The discoloration would last a few days, but the pain would likely recede in a day or two. The tailbone injury was more serious. The man had kicked Rainey hard enough to cause a two-inch gash. The blanket had almost stopped the bleeding, but when the he rolled over the gash reopened. Carl held a corner of the towel against the cut and kept pressure on. Rainey might need stitches.
After a few minutes, Rainey started trembling and Carl realized he was crying. He seemed so feminine it was hard for Carl not to think of him as a young woman.
“God, I’m so stupid,” he said between sobs. “Why did they beat me up?”
Carl pulled Rainey’s head and shoulders onto his lap and hugged him. He stroked his hair and rubbed his shoulders and neck as Rainey pulled his legs up. He cried for a long time, but Carl knew it wasn’t because of the assault or the pain of his beating. It was because there was no meaning to the violence. It was because he had been powerless to stop what had happened. Carl understood those feelings of vulnerability intimately.
Finally, he said, “They did it because they could. Because they were bigger and stronger than you are. They did it because they didn’t think anyone would stop them.”
Why it had happened to Rainey was no different than why the US government had done what they had to Carl. The government had the law on its side and it was bigger than he was. They tortured him because they could. Because no one would, or could, stop them.
Until he fought back. Until he started killing and torturing them in return, doing the same thing to them and being labeled a terrorist because of it.
He shuddered at the thought of what those bullies might have done to Rainey if he hadn’t been there. If he had let that man kick Rainey in the face, the young man might have died, or been disfigured or crippled for life.
He supposed it was just human nature that the strong prey
ed on the weak. Maybe that was Carl’s new purpose in life—protect the weak. Save the kids. Maybe that was why his dark side had been brought out by his transition into the abyss. He liked the intense emotional attachment he felt for Rainey, Melissa Mallory, and Julia Reyes. He liked being able to help them. He liked being an empathic superhero. It gave him a purpose. It channeled the anger that sought to consume him, and he desperately needed an outlet for that anger.
Chapter 7
2030 hours EST Thursday
Washington, DC
August Spoke touched his forefinger to his earpiece to activate it and waited for Rainman to respond.
“Report.”
“As Mr. Scallow surmised, the intern didn’t obtain any electronic copies of the email or any other documents, and didn’t write anything else down.”
“You must be absolutely sure of this.”
Spoke glanced at the dead intern beside him.
“I am sure.”
He and the dead man occupied the second bench seat of the old minivan. The intern’s boyfriend, who had not been hard to find soon after Aurelio had gone missing, lay bound and gagged on the first bench seat. Spoke’s two imposing muscle-bound men sat in the front seats. It took only the brief application of severe pain to the boyfriend for the intern to open up. At that point, Agent Spoke got answers to all his questions in the ten minutes it took the driver to get the minivan to a relatively deserted stretch of industrial shoreline.
They pulled into the parking lot behind a boat shop. There were shoreline berths where the shop employees could tow a customer’s boat purchase down a ramp and into the water of the Potomac. The driver pulled the minivan to the head of one of the ramps. Eventually, the vehicle and the bodies would be found, but not within Rainman’s one-day window of vulnerability.
“How in the world did you find him?”
Spoke smiled in the darkness. “It’s easy to find a needle in a haystack if you have a very sensitive magnetometer.”
Rainman clearly didn’t get the metal detector humor because he remained silent, so Spoke said, “I knew where to look. There are very few places in this city where one can truly disappear. Those motels are in the seedy part of town, and a nicely groomed white man like our intern stuck out like a sore thumb. People remembered seeing him. He was not hard to find at all.”
Rainman said, “Conclusions?”
“He called a man named Stephen Peoples. They had a one-night-stand a few months ago. Peoples is, or was, gay curious. He’s married with children, but felt the need to try something different. Apparently, his curiosity was satisfied, much to Marcus Aurelio’s discontent, because Peoples broke it off real quick and told our boy not to call ever again.”
Spoke paused, but Rainman must have recognized the pause for the silent concern that it broadcast.
“Don’t make me ask the question.”
“Stephen Peoples is a fairly high-level field agent with the Terror Event Response agency. If I eliminate him, we will have a trail of missing people that may form a trend. The TER has a lot of smart thinkers that do nothing but look for trends, and with the events of the last week, they’re on high alert over there.”
“Agreed. Meanwhile, are all witnesses disposed of?”
Spoke looked out the side window and made a good show of passing his gaze over the dark water of the river like he cared what was out there. He felt the driver’s gaze on him in the rear view mirror. He’d hired the two guys, but not for any contribution they might add to his hunt or to the interrogation of the intern. He was well capable of attending to those tasks himself. He hired them simply because they looked threatening where he did not.
He wasn’t at all dissatisfied with his outward appearance. He stood a shade under the six-foot mark and weighed one-sixty. Plain and simple, he was well trained and extremely capable, but he just didn’t look scary. The two guys he’d hired looked very scary. Both weighed well over two hundred fifty pounds. He brought them along so the intern, when they found him, wouldn’t try to run or scream or put up a fight.
The muscle had accomplished the task. Their mere presence had sobered Aurelio quickly and Spoke had sensed the exact moment when the man surrendered—right after he looked over Spoke’s shoulder and saw the men in the doorway of the fleabag hotel.
“Stand by.”
Spoke still held the silenced gun he’d used on the boyfriend’s kneecaps. He shifted his aim and fired two shots through the headrests of both front seats. He had anticipated this particular task, so he’d hand-packed his nine-millimeter shells extra light on the powder. The two men’s heads snapped forward, but both bullets stayed inside their skulls. There was no mess to clean up. Not that it mattered. He was simply going to let the minivan roll into the river and sink.
“The task has now been completed.”
“Good,” Rainman said.
All four men were now dead, each shot through the head. He got out of the minivan through the passenger sliding door and walked around to the driver’s door. He opened it and hit the electric switches to roll down all the windows, then went to the back and popped open the rear hatch. It wouldn’t take the vehicle long to sink with the interior air evacuating through the open windows and hatch.
Spoke went back to the open driver’s door and pressed his foot on the brake pedal, put the console-mounted gearshift into neutral, and stepped back. As he watched the minivan roll down the ramp and gently into the water, he unscrewed the suppressor from the disposable, untraceable gun and tossed both pieces into the water, as far away from the shore as possible. Then, he peeled off his latex gloves and dropped them into the water. They were immediately swept away by the slow-moving current.
“What do you want me to do about Agent Peoples?”
“Leave him to me. We’ll kill two birds with one stone.”
August Spoke had no idea what that meant, but he wasn’t about to question his orders. Besides, the beep in his ear informed him Rainman had closed the channel.
Chapter 8
0300 hours EST Friday
Undisclosed TER Op Station, Virginia
“There’s a cab pulling up out front, Miss Palmer,” Agent Stephen Peoples said. “That might be Director McGrath.” The three hours late part remained unsaid.
The security warning had chimed from Peoples’ position at the management console, and Agent Nancy Palmer ceased pacing the floor between the wall monitors and the three analyst workstations. In the time she’d known McGrath, he’d never been so much as ten seconds late for a meeting. Now, he was late for his shift by three hours and fifteen minutes. And he hadn’t answered his cell.
She said, “Have the guard issue challenge protocols, just in case.”
Peoples had known that particular security safeguard was going to be put into play, and Palmer noticed he’d already started to transmit the order to the guard’s terminal even before she finished giving the instruction. It was standard access policy when someone was unexpected or late in arriving.
Normally, personnel were admitted into the secure facility after checking their government ID cards that were embedded with a biometric chip. Those were extremely hard to forge or duplicate, but not totally impossible.
A person’s biometric data—height, weight, eye color, blood type, photo, and even a digital voice recording and DNA sample—was stored on the chip. Not only could a person be positively identified onsite, but that data could also be compared with stored data on some of the government’s most secure computer networks. Trending data was also constantly updated for each biometric ID card. For example, a person couldn’t enter one facility if they hadn’t been logged out of another facility. Similarly, a person couldn’t log out of a facility in Virginia and an hour later, log into a facility in California. The personnel computers would easily track those trends and raise red flags.
Since no system was completely infallible, a protocol of security challenges was developed for each field office when it opened, and that data was not stored
off-site in any DoD computer. Retinal scans were matched, as well as fingerprints. Five security questions were asked and each question had two answers—one normal answer and another answer to be used in duress. Advanced algorithms would measure the stress level of the person being challenged. Minute levels of agitation would be detected by a presumed imposter who was almost sure he had the right answers.
Aaron McGrath passed his challenge perfectly and was admitted into the facility. When he entered the living room of the house serving as the ops center, Palmer froze in mid-pace and stared at the man. Monroe, who was on duty with Peoples, stopped giving his report and gawked at McGrath.
“Whoa, Boss. You look like shit…um, sir.” Monroe stood and stepped beside McGrath. “You want a Red Bull, or maybe some strong coffee?”
“Coffee would be good.”
Monroe started to step past the man, but hesitated and pointed at the man’s chest.
“You’re, um…you’re missing a button there, Boss.”
Palmer eyed the man with concern. His striped button-down shirt’s collar button was mismatched into the next lower button hole, and the V-neck pull-over sleeveless sweater was pulled more over his right shoulder than his left, like he’d pulled it on and forgotten to even out the shoulder seams. His shirt cuffs were unbuttoned and one was rolled up to his forearm while the other hung loose at his wrist. He looked like he’d slept in his clothes.
McGrath’s hair was a mess by normal standards, and his eyes were red with deep shadows and bags under both.
Peoples eyed McGrath as he walked into the op center. He walked slowly, like he was tired or in pain.
Palmer said, “You don’t look so good, Aaron.”
After Melissa was delivered to the hospital at Las Cruces, McGrath and the president had been driven to Holloman Air Force Base where they had boarded Air Force One to get back east in time for her six-o’clock speech to Congress.
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