Some Die Nameless

by Wallace Stroby

  “I’m armed,” Farrow said.

  “Come around.”

  Farrow stepped out from behind the bar, hands at his sides. Devlin saw the gun in his waistband. “On the bar.”

  “Right.” He used two fingers to draw out a snub-nosed revolver by its grip, set it with the other guns. “Didn’t expect to see you again so soon, Ray.”

  The Glock felt heavy. His palm was slick against the grip. He had to keep control of the situation, knew it could go bad quick.

  He looked at the other men.

  “You four.” He nodded toward the open bathroom door. “In there.”

  “No way,” Holly said.

  Devlin moved the Glock to cover him. They’re waiting to see what I’ll do, he thought. How I’ll handle it.

  To Farrow, he said, “Is your family home?”

  “Why?”

  “I guess that’s a no,” Devlin said, raised the Glock, and fired once into the low ceiling. Cody back-stepped fast, dragging the kid with him. The others didn’t move.

  Bits of acoustic tile drifted down. Devlin’s right ear rang.

  “Was that necessary?” Farrow said. Some of his cool gone now.

  Devlin pointed the gun at the others again. “Bathroom.”

  They stayed where they were. Farrow said, “Go ahead. I’ll deal with this.”

  Cody and Ryan went in first. Dillon next, watching Devlin the whole time. Holly was last.

  “Shut it,” Devlin said. “I see that knob turn before I tell you to come out, I’ll start firing through that door.”

  Dillon reached past Holly, pulled the door closed.

  Farrow exhaled. “What is it you want, Raymond?”

  Devlin aimed the Glock at him. “You shouldn’t have gone after the woman.”

  “What woman?” He reached for a pack of cigarettes on the bar top. The one in the ashtray had gone out. “You mind?”

  He took out a cigarette, put the pack back down, and got out his lighter. He lit the cigarette, gestured at the gun. “You want to be careful with that. Those Glock triggers can be touchy.”

  “Might solve a lot of problems if I just put a bullet in you now.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” He turned his head, exhaled smoke.

  Devlin nodded at the cellphone on the bar. “Are you waiting for a call?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Did you send them after her?”

  “After who?”

  “The reporter. The one who wrote about Acheron. About you.”

  Devlin watched for his reaction. His expression didn’t change.

  “Did something happen to her?”

  “Something did. But she’s fine. The cops have the two men who attacked her. I’m sure you’ll be hearing about that.”

  “Why? I had nothing to do with it. I have a problem with reporters, I call a lawyer. That’s what I pay them for.”

  “Then who sent them? Kemper?”

  “I’m still not sure what you’re talking about. But if I had to guess, I’d say yes.”

  “Step over there by the couch.”

  When he did, Devlin moved behind the bar. He could hear the men talking in the bathroom, their voices low.

  “You the one put the tracker on me?” Devlin said.

  “You blame me?” Farrow said. “You’re a bit of a loose cannon these days, Sergeant. I felt inclined to protect myself.”

  Devlin took Cody’s gun from his pocket, set it with the others. He put down the Glock he’d taken from the kid, fieldstripped the other three automatics. The firing pins and magazines went into a jacket pocket, the rest of the parts into a wastebasket. He dropped the stun gun on the floor, stamped down on it twice, cracked the plastic.

  “Chances are one of my neighbors heard that shot,” Farrow said. “Police could be on their way. That’ll be tough for you to explain, won’t it?”

  “You’ll think of something.” He put Farrow’s .38 in his other jacket pocket, picked up the Glock again.

  “I’m starting to think you came here without a plan,” Farrow said. “That you’re making this up as you go along. And you’ve got no idea how it ends.”

  “Who tried to kill me?”

  “I heard about that. I don’t know.”

  “Not good enough, Gordon. Not by a long shot.”

  “I’m a businessman. Would I risk everything I have on a stupid move like that, hire someone to pop off at you in public, other people around?”

  “You tracked me.”

  “That was in my own best interest, don’t you think?”

  “Is that how they found me?”

  “Kind of trail you’re leaving, it wouldn’t be hard. But it wasn’t me. Now, can we sit down, have a civilized conversation? I can’t handle all this standing anymore. I’ll tell you what I know, but I need to sit.”

  Devlin nodded at the couch, came out from around the bar. Farrow sat. “Grab that ashtray.”

  Devlin took it from the bar, set it on the coffee table, stepped back. He held the Glock at his side.

  Farrow pulled the tray closer, ashed his cigarette. “You know who Lukas Dragovic is?”

  “No.”

  “He works for the old man. Not for Unix, more of a private thing. He’s a Serb, grew up here in the States, but he comes from a town called Knin, part of what used to be Krajina, a Serb republic inside Croatia.”

  “So?”

  “In ’95 the Croat Army swept through there, shelled the city, killed a lot of people, mostly civilians, drove the rest out. Then they burned all the houses, to make sure no one came back. They were settling scores, doing the same things the Serbs had done to them elsewhere, and worse.

  “Roland saw some news footage of refugees leaving the city, a long line of them on a dirt road, mostly kids and old people. There was one boy, eight, maybe nine, all cut up, covered with dust, carrying a stuffed bear. Had that thousand-yard stare already, you know? Old man saw this kid, and it got to him for some reason. Maybe he felt guilty about the role we’d played over there, I don’t know. He sent me to find him.

  “It took a while. Town was shot to shit, bodies everywhere. You couldn’t get away from the smell. Finally tracked him down to an orphanage they’d set up outside the city. Kid’s whole family bought it in the attack. He was so shell-shocked, he couldn’t even remember their names. But he still had that bear.”

  “You brought him here?”

  “Roland chartered a plane for us. He’d started funding some aid organizations for orphans and refugees on both sides of the fighting. He sponsored a group of them himself, brought them over, found homes for them. But Lukas was always his favorite. He took him under his wing, practically raised him. Paid for his education, gave him a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Whatever needs doing. Knowing the old man, he probably saw something he could take advantage of. Nine years old, that kid was already hard-core.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “No emotions, at least that I ever saw. Roland had him in a boarding school here in Virginia when he was a teenager. Kid was catching a lot of grief there—weird name, foreign accent. You can imagine. Apparently, he was getting bullied by some upperclassmen. They had a hazing thing where they’d grab the smaller, younger kids, toss them into an old scummy pond behind the school. Just kid shit, you know. For laughs.

  “One day Lukas got word he was next. You gotta remember, this kid’s like thirteen, looks ten. Easy prey. Sure enough, that night they come busting into his room, try to drag him out of bed. But this kid—gotta give him credit—had taken a combination lock from the gym, put it in a sock, and tied it off, had it with him in the bed. He started whaling on them. Got the first boy, the ringleader, good. Fractured his skull. Lucky he didn’t kill him. Sent the other ones running.

  “Anyway, Roland had to pay a lot of money to smooth it over. Kid got kicked out, of course, but Roland had the charges dropped, paid off anyone he needed to. He found another boarding school took h
is money and didn’t ask any questions. He paid for it all. College too.

  “The kid’s smart, have to give him that. Pull a trigger on you without blinking, though. All the shit he saw growing up, no surprise he came out the way he did. Still, he isn’t like you or me. We did what we had to do and got paid. This kid loves his work. If Roland sent someone after you, it was probably him.”

  “He kill Colin?”

  “He did.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Risk reduction.”

  Devlin felt his patience slipping away. “Talk sense.”

  Farrow leaned forward, put out his cigarette.

  “You still don’t get it, do you? What was going on in San Marcos, what we did there.”

  “I was there. I saw.”

  “You saw some of it. Just another job, right? Help the locals along. But Roland was selling them weapons too, and that shit was straight up illegal, as far as Uncle Sam was concerned. They blind-eyed some of it—they wanted Herrera gone too—but at one point there was a shipment of Stinger missiles involved, and that got everybody nervous. Washington was worried they’d end up in the hands of the cartels, or Shining Path or somebody worse.”

  “I never saw any Stingers.”

  “We kept you guys away from all that. That was a separate deal. Once Ramírez took over, he offered to sell them back to the U.S.—at two hundred grand a pop, still in their crates. Everybody made out on that one. Trouble was, once he was in power, he wasn’t so good at staying there. He still needed us.”

  “For what?”

  “People were in the streets almost as soon as he took office. Everything he’d spent would be wasted if he couldn’t keep his own people under control. So we helped target some of the opposition, take them out. Kept the ship of state running smoothly, raking in that oil and gas money. He had cash to spend, and Roland was happy to take it.”

  “I didn’t know this.”

  “You were out of the picture by then, stateside with broken legs and a faceful of shrapnel. Bell and Roarke went back, though.”

  “To do what?”

  “Those grassroots resistance movements fall apart if you put enough pressure on them right away. The trick is not to wait, let their momentum build. Kill a couple students, priests, show them you’re serious, and the rest fall in line. Once they realize it’s not a game, their revolutionary fervor tends to fade.”

  “Were you in charge of that too?”

  “It was my job. I’m not proud of it, the part I played. But it was the mission at hand.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself?”

  “Raymond, I am the most self-aware motherfucker you will ever meet. I knew exactly what I was doing. We put Ramírez in power, and kept him in power. Which made some people very happy, and some people very rich. But you want to know what the most ironic part was?”

  “What?”

  “We were selling to Herrera’s people too, at first. Then Ramírez came to us with the better deal.”

  “That’s what it’s always about, isn’t it?” Devlin said. “The better deal.”

  “What do you think? Hell, after you left, we did shit you never even knew about. Somalia, Libya, the Ukraine, a dozen other places. San Marcos was just another war.”

  “To make a buck.”

  “That’s why all wars are fought, Raymond. If you think different, you’re being naive.”

  “Why come after me and Colin? Why now?”

  “Hand me those smokes?”

  “Later.”

  “You want to hear what I have to say, or not?”

  Devlin took the pack from the bar, tossed it onto the table. Farrow took out another cigarette, lit it.

  “I wasn’t totally forthright with you last time we spoke, Raymond. I wasn’t sure where you were coming from, who you might be working for.” He blew out smoke.

  “You’re talking about Mata?”

  “We set him up here, and for a long time he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Then a few months ago, when things in San Marcos start jumping off again, he decided to make some noise, saying he had a story to tell about what happened over there, and unless we ponied up some cash, he was going to tell it. He wanted five hundred thousand, you believe that? He got a message to me finally, which is the stupidest thing he could have done. You can guess what the old man’s response was.”

  “He sent Lukas.”

  “Yeah. Can’t feel sorry for Emilio. Got what he deserved finally, the treacherous fuck. The body being found, though, that was just bad luck.”

  “That’s why he wanted Mata dead. Why Colin? Why me?”

  “You guys knew too much, saw too much. What happened in that village, especially. Mata said he had documents, photos, to prove what Acheron had done there. He had your names too. For all we knew, you and Roarke were in on it with him.”

  “We weren’t.”

  “I didn’t think so. And that’s what I told Roland. He said he couldn’t take the chance, there were too many things going on that would be endangered. Unix has contracts coming up worth billions. If any of this came out, what happened back then, it could torpedo the whole thing, keep the company from eventually going public. You know him, the way he thinks. If anything, he’s more paranoid now than ever.” He blew out smoke.

  “Were there documents?”

  “Lukas didn’t find anything at Mata’s place. He torched it anyway, just in case. Odds are Mata was bluffing. Didn’t matter, though. Had to be done. You see what’s going on over there now?”

  “Ramírez is in trouble again,” Devlin said.

  “It’s been brewing for a while. When you’re all stick, no carrot, things fall apart. He and Roland made a deal to send another team over in a couple weeks, help him get his shit squared away again, before it’s too late.”

  “Kill some more students? Priests?”

  “From the news, I’d say Ramírez is getting a head start on that already.”

  Devlin felt light-headed. He sat in the chair, the gun in his lap, thinking it all through.

  “It was a waste,” he said finally. “All of it. There was no need.”

  “Tell that to the old man.”

  “None of us would have talked.”

  “He needed to be sure. Bell was supposed to deal with you, then Roarke. But that never happened, because you dealt with him first.”

  “So you sent this Lukas to finish the job.”

  “Not me. Roland. His idea. I was never on board with it. We were a team, after all. But I understand his logic. Maybe one of you sees the news, has a sudden attack of conscience, calls up the New York Times or whatever. It would be the end of him, the end of Unix. The end of everything. Far as he was concerned, the three of you were an unsustainable risk.”

  “You saw as much as we did. More, even.”

  “He’s needed me up until now. But I don’t fit in with his current political aspirations. I’m a grunt, like you, a reminder of what he wants to forget.”

  “You took his money all these years,” Devlin said. “You could have gone to someone, talked, blown the whole thing wide open. You could have warned us.”

  “Could I? That’s easy to say now. You weren’t in my position. We all do what we have to do. When you’re in, you’re in. There’s no good guys and bad guys in war. Everyone’s a bad guy soon enough. Innocent people get hurt. You know that more than anybody.”

  “Where’s Kemper now?”

  “He left the States. He’s on his way to the island.”

  “What island?”

  “Doesn’t have a name. Piece of property he owns in the eastern Bahamas, off Green Turtle Cay in the Abacos. Not much of an island, really. It’s only about seven acres, mostly rock. The house he’s building there isn’t even done, but I guess he thought it’d be a good place to lay low for a while, wait for this thing to blow over.”

  “It won’t.”

  “Don’t be so sure. He’s got a lot of friends and deep pockets, and he’s been doi
ng this for a long time. But the first thing he’ll try to do is tie things up here. That means you and me. That’s where Lukas comes in.”

  Devlin looked at the bathroom door. The men inside had gone silent. He took out the .38, held it for a moment, then tossed it onto the couch. He waited to see what Farrow would do.

  “That a last gesture to a comrade in arms?” Farrow said. “Or are you hoping I’ll reach for it?”

  “Maybe both.”

  Farrow leaned forward, put out the cigarette.

  “I’ll know soon if what you’ve told me is true,” Devlin said. “If not, we’ll see each other again.”

  He tucked the Glock in his belt. He wanted a weapon with him now.

  When he was at the door, Farrow said, “Raymond, can I make an observation?”

  Devlin turned back to him.

  “You’re not a killer, Ray. Not like the rest of us. You never were. Be thankful for that.”

  Thirty-Five

  T​here was no alarm on the garage window. Tariq had played the penlight beam along its inside edges, looking for wires or contact blocks. Then he’d used a small screwdriver to rock the window out enough to slip the latch. Together they lifted the window out of its frame, the metal damp from the fog, and set it in the grass.

  Lukas shone his own penlight inside. Two vehicles, an SUV and a compact, which meant the woman wasn’t alone. No dog bowls, no cages. A refrigerator, recycling buckets, and a bundle of newspapers bound with twine. He fanned the light over the far wall, saw the door that led into the house.

  Tariq went in first, Lukas boosting him, the window just wide enough. Lukas followed, swung his legs inside, touched down on the concrete floor. They waited, listening for any sound from beyond the connecting door.

  Tariq took out his lock-pick tools, moved to the door, and knelt on the single step there, went to work on the dead bolt. Lukas stood behind him, shining the penlight over his shoulder. A series of scrapes and clicks, and then Tariq twisted the tension wrench, and the lock came open.

  Lukas could feel the adrenaline now, pulsing inside him. They listened at the door. After a few moments, Lukas nodded, and Tariq tried the knob. It turned easily.