Nelson had never felt more exposed in his entire life. He felt as though the word traitor was emblazoned on his chest, like the scarlet letter in the classic Nathaniel Hawthorne novel that he had been forced to read in high school.
Now, though, he knew exactly how poor Hester Prynne must have felt. It seemed to Nelson that everyone was staring suspicious-ly at him as they walked or jogged past. He knew that wasn't actually happening; in fact, no one was paying the least bit of attention to him. The exposed feeling was just his overactive imagination playing games with his nerves, but knowing it logically and accepting it emotionally were two completely separate issues.
After ten long, silent minutes, Nelson picked up his contact's briefcase. He had been given very precise instructions, and he had been told he must follow them to the letter when making the exchange. There had been no or else attached to the instructions, but none had been necessary. Nelson knew that the people he was dealing with did not play by the same rules as everyone else, and if he expected to see the sun rise tomorrow morning, he had best do exactly as he was told.
Nelson risked a glance at the man's face. He looked completely at ease, like any of the hundreds of other people enjoying the park on this Monday afternoon. He never even returned Nelson's glance, just continued sitting with his legs stretched out, watching the girls pass by as if he could spend the rest of the day enjoying the sunshine and doing absolutely nothing else. Nelson figured maybe he could.
With the new briefcase clutched in his sweating hand, all Nelson wanted to do was sprint out to his car and race back to the office; the urge to escape was almost overwhelming. Somehow he forced himself to stand and walk through the park at the leisurely pace that had been demanded of him by the stranger.
After an eternity, Nelson reached the parking lot and the safety of his car. He didn't think he had ever been as relieved to slide into the stained and torn cloth driver's seat as he was right now.
He fired up the engine, avoiding even a single look into Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Park as he drove out of the lot, then continued the short distance to the Pentagon.
Nelson had not eaten lunch and normally would be starving by now, but he had never felt less like eating in his life. He was queasy, and he could feel acidic bile rising into his throat. A headache, the seeds of which had been threatening to bloom all day, continued to worsen and showed signs of morphing into a full-blown migraine.
All he could think about was getting back to his office.
Nelson W. Michaels, traitor.
He could not get that sickening thought out of his head, and it made him feel weak and shaky. He couldn't understand why murder would be required to shut up Lisa Jensen when he had sold only innocuous bits and pieces of harmless information. That was all. It wasn't like he had trafficked in nuclear weapons or anything truly dangerous. that.
That's what he told himself. He was scared to death and hoped it would make him feel better. It didn't work. Nelson W. Michaels was miserable.
Chapter 6
Tony sat on the park bench watching the fat fuck waddle away and couldn't make up his mind whether he should laugh his damn fool head off or puke his guts out. It had been so easy to acquire the information he wanted that if he actually gave a crap about his adopted country, he would have been appalled.
All it had taken to select his mark was a little judicious Internet research into the personal lives of a few likely Pentagon candidates.
It was amazing how so much of people's private lives was out there in the breakdown lane of the information superhighway just waiting to be discovered if you knew where to look. And inside of two days, he had narrowed down the list of potentials to three, eventually settling on Nelson W. Michaels as the most likely stooge.
A "chance" meeting at Pimlico, where Nelson spent an inordinate amount of his free time, a little friendly commiseration over mounting gambling debts, a few innocuous e-mails, and within weeks Tony had the man dangling expertly on his hook.
Nelson was valuable to Tony because as a purchasing special-ist at the Pentagon, he had unfettered access to the information Tony needed. For his part, that information had seemed harmless enough to the midlevel bureaucrat that he had agreed to part with it for a measly ten thousand dollars. Tony had been prepared to go much higher if necessary. He had chosen wisely, however, when he selected Nelson to bribe and had gotten off cheaply, not that it mattered to Tony either way. It wasn't his money.
Nelson's briefcase rested on the ground next to Tony's feet, exactly where the Pentagon staffer had left it. Tony passed the time observing the pretty American girls, all of whom appeared self-absorbed and shallow, pressed from the same mold. He watched with the emotionless dead eyes of a shark and chuckled thinking about the just completed rendezvous. To say Nelson had been nervous would be an understatement. The fact of the matter was that Nelson had been about ready to shit his pants in terror and had done a lousy job of hiding it.
For a few minutes, Tony had thought that maybe the frightened amateur was going to stroke out right there on the bench.
He pictured Michaels holed up somewhere counting his unmarked bills, thanking his lucky stars for the good fortune of meeting a man who had been willing to pay him so much money for such harmless information, and he chuckled again.
He wondered what Nelson thought about the fact that Lisa Jensen was dead. He must have heard by now; even in a building as massive as the Pentagon, the news that an employee had been killed probably didn't crop up every day. It had to be the talk of the building.
The automobile accident had been a stroke of luck. Eventually the authorities would discover Jensen had been murdered. For now, all the damage the beer truck had inflicted on her body was probably still masking the gash he had hacked into her jugular, making the injuries appear as nothing more than additional tragic damage attributable to the severity of the accident.
But in the meantime, Nelson would be left to wonder whether Lisa's death had been a fortuitous accident or whether Tony really had been able to make their problem disappear that quickly. He pictured Nelson trying to puzzle out how Tony had managed to engineer a horrible car wreck and chuckled a third time, and when he did, an overweight middle-aged woman in Lycra shorts and a tight cropped T-shirt shot him a half-fearful look as she raced past.
He watched her with amusement and took that as his cue to go.
Tony Andretti, formerly of Syria and Afghanistan and now living in the United States of America, picked up the battered brown leather briefcase without bothering to look inside it--he had no doubt whatsoever that the information he had paid for was safely tucked inside because Michaels did not have the balls to screw him over--and strolled through the park in a direction opposite the one Michaels had used when he left a few minutes ago. It was just a picture-perfect afternoon, and Tony feasted his eyes on the scenery, taking his time because his workday had just ended, and he had nowhere else to be for a while.
Chapter 7
The artificial cool of the Pentagon's climate-controlled interior was ordinarily a welcome relief to Nelson on humid days. Today, however, the air-conditioning did little to control his heavy perspira-tion, which ran in rivulets down his face and neck, trickling under the collar of his shirt and spreading in an ever-expanding arc under each armpit. Nelson tended to perspire a lot anyway, but after the extreme stress of the illicit meeting with . . . well, whoever the guy was, Nelson felt as though he had been through the wringer. So he continued to sweat. A lot.
Navigating the labyrinthine interior of the building with its confusing and seemingly random office-numbering system had always reminded Nelson of an experiment where scientists send rats through a maze with different rewards as enticements to facilitate the learning process. He saw this building as perhaps some great cosmic experiment, filled as it was with thousands of people scur-rying to and fro, each absorbed in completing his or her own task.
He had long ago mapped out the optimal route through the building to get to his office, and after
breathing a sigh of relief and sinking into his chair, Nelson had tossed the briefcase onto his desk, preferring to get his pounding heart and racing pulse under control before examining the inside of the case to verify that the agreed upon ten thousand dollars was actually even there. First things first.
25
Nelson laid his head on the cool surface of the maple desk, instantly turning it slick with his sweat. Still breathing heavily, he tried to force himself to relax, clear his mind, and convince himself he had actually gotten away with it.
He only now realized that he had half expected a bunch of grim-faced FBI agents or military police to surround him as he exited the park or entered the Pentagon, forcing him spread-eagled onto the pavement while they patted him down for weapons, perp walking him in front of dozens of television cameras and newspaper reporters to a waiting police car before whisking him off to jail.
But then when he had walked through the wrought-iron park entrance and encountered no angry police and no rabid reporters and no television cameras, Nelson had been surprised but thril ed, rushing back to the office, moving faster than he probably had in years.
Now he felt completely drained. Between the physical exer-tion and all the stress, Nelson wanted nothing more than to drive home, where he would toss his jacket and tie over the back of a kitchen chair and go straight to bed. Unfortunately, it was only one o'clock in the afternoon, and guys like Nelson at the lower middle level of management didn't just take an afternoon off, even if they had successfully completed a very busy lunch hour of treasonous activity.
Finally he raised his head, feeling the earliest traces of a tension headache building in the base of his skull. Rising slowly--
God, he was sore; could he really be that out of shape?--Nelson shuffled to his closed office door and thumbed the button on the knob, locking it from the inside.
He knew he was probably overdoing the cloak-and-dagger stuff a bit. Not many people had occasion to visit Nelson in his cramped little office on an average workday. Most of his communication was conducted via telephone or increasingly e-mail, so it was rare for anyone just to drop in on him. And it wasn't like he had a steady stream of friends stopping by to shoot the breeze. In fact, now that he thought about it, it wasn't like he even had many friends at all, either at work or outside of it.
Still, you could never be too careful. It wouldn't do for a coworker to waltz in for whatever reason and find Nelson wading hip deep in the wads of unmarked bills spilling out of his briefcase, like some overweight bureaucratic version of Scrooge McDuck in his counting house. Even the most dim-witted of government drones would realize something was amiss in that little scenario, so Nelson wasn't taking any chances.
Settling back into his desk chair, he took a deep breath and held it for a moment, dizzily certain he would open the briefcase only to discover it was empty. Then he exhaled noisily and popped the brass clasps and lifted the top of the case, instantly breaking into a satisfied treasonous smile.
Piled neatly inside, rubber bands holding them snugly together, were stacks and stacks of used, nonsequential bills in small denominations, exactly as promised. The rich green tint of all the twenties and fifties provided a dazzling contrast to the faded red felt of the briefcase's interior. He didn't stop to count the money, not right here at his desk inside the Pentagon for crying out loud--
Nelson may have been a traitor, but he wasn't an idiot--but judging by the size and number of stacks, the full ten thousand dollars had been delivered.
The sense of relief Nelson felt at not being stiffed was palpable.
He still couldn't figure out how he had gotten so incredibly lucky, managing to bamboozle that idiot from the park into trading a boatload of untraceable cash for a small amount of trivial information regarding the pending transportation of military hardware and the specific route the truck ferrying that hardware was going to take.
Now he would be able to replace a large portion of the money he had gambled away at the track and other venues in the past year or so. He had withdrawn the cash from his retirement nest egg while conveniently forgetting to inform his wife. Nelson had been on a losing streak for months, and every good gambler knew that the time to start betting heavily was when you were losing, as nobody could lose forever, and every successive loss meant a win was now that much closer to reality, statistically speaking.
That was Nelson's theory on the subject of gaming, anyway, and he was still convinced it was a good one, even though it had not yet worked out in his favor. But he was certain Joy would disagree with him regarding this theory, especially given the results.
The couple had had several knock-down-drag-outs over the years on the subject of Nelson's gambling habits, and he knew Joy would be more than a little bit pissed off if she found out he had siphoned thousands of dollars of retirement money into unsuccessful wagers at the racetrack and on various sporting events year-round. But Joy just didn't understand. He knew he was on the verge of hitting it big; he just had to stick to his guns a little longer.
But even a full-fledged optimist like Nelson had started to get nervous when the losses continued mounting and the IRA totals continued dwindling. Sooner or later Joy was going to find out--
how long could he reasonably expect her to go without checking the balance of the damned thing? Now, through an incredible stroke of dumb luck followed by some shrewd negotiating (if he said so himself), Nelson had managed to recoup enough of his losses in one day that even if Joy discovered he had been gambling with their retirement money, she wouldn't be able to complain too much.
Nelson knew he was still overdue for a win at the track, so another huge payday was undoubtedly right in the offing. Soon they'd be rolling in dough, and his money troubles would be just a distant memory. A humorous one, probably.
Feeling much better now about his situation and about life in general and sufficiently relaxed that he had nearly stopped sweating, Nelson stuffed the stacks of twenties and fifties he had been admiring back into the briefcase and then snapped it closed. The exhaustion he had felt just a few minutes earlier had magically been replaced by an almost narcotic-like state of euphoria.
He walked across his office with a spring in his step and unlocked the door, opening it again to the world or at least to the dreary corridor with the institutional green vinyl floor tiles, then returned to his desk revitalized, prepared to finish out the workday.
Chapter 8
Tony pushed open the door to a large but anonymous private garage located on a large but anonymous private lot in suburban Washington. The property had been purchased for a song by Tony several years ago because, not to put too fine a point on it, the lot wasn't in one of the area's most desirable neighborhoods.
In fact, at the time Tony made the cash purchase (another reason the price had been so low), the garage was in the middle of a ten-square block the local authorities had virtually given up on as unsalvageable. Crime was rampant; gangs and guns and drugs and prostitution were everywhere. Tony didn't care about any of that. He wasn't in the business of urban redevelopment, but he was in the business of protecting his valuable assets. So after buying the property, Tony undertook the laborious process of introducing himself to the local underground entrepreneurs, the ones trading in the guns, the drugs, and the prostitution, and convincing them it was in their best interest to leave him the hell alone.
After a fashion--and a brutal weeding-out process that involved the disappearances or the agonizing and very public deaths of many of the entrepreneurs--an uneasy agreement was reached.
The local gangs would be permitted to continue trading in their areas of specialization provided they gave Tony's property a wide berth while they did so. In exchange for leaving his property undisturbed, Tony would permit the gang members to live.
Once all the details had been ironed out, it was an arrangement that worked more or less to everyone's satisfaction, with the exception, of course, being the young men who died during the early phases of the
negotiating process.
Tony walked through a sturdy metal door with a blacked-out Plexiglas window between the double bays of the ancient two-car garage that opened into his organization's workspace and found himself staring into the gaping double barrels of a Mossberg shotgun. Holding the weapon was Brian Waterhouse, a blond twenty-five-year-old, who sat at the far end of the cement structure on a high, hard-backed stool.
When Brian saw who had entered, he lowered his weapon.
Giving Tony a sheepish grin, he said, "Sorry about that."
"No, it was perfect. Unless and until you know exactly who is coming in that door, you should always be prepared to blast them straight to hell." Tony crossed the garage, placed the briefcase on a battered gunmetal desk, and lowered his bulk with a satisfied sigh onto a metal folding chair behind it.
Although it was still midafternoon on a beautiful sunny spring day, row after row of fluorescent lamps hung suspended from the ceiling, casting the interior in a harsh, almost antiseptic, artificial brilliance.
Weapons of all types littered the workspace. Semiautomatic rifles and pistols--most altered to full auto--revolvers, even some single-shot rifles and shotguns like the big Mossberg that had been aimed at Tony when he had entered took up one entire wall. A locker filled with hunting and tactical combat knives was placed at an angle in one corner, and next to it a row of shelves held an array of grenades and other explosive devices as well as an impressive as-sortment of Tasers and nightsticks.
Stored along the wall directly opposite these weapons were racks of electronic equipment--GPS units, walkie-talkies, police scanners, cell phones, and shortwave radios.
The back wall was home to a mountain of tools, including welding equipment and automobile batteries, tires, and spare parts.
The garage, in addition to serving as an office and staging area for Tony's small team, was exactly what it looked like: a mini supply depot for a deadly paramilitary organization.
Final Vector Page 3