by D L Barbur
“Five minutes,” she said and hung up.
With Robert’s help, she’d sneaked back up to the tree watching Rudder’s ranch. Now with the aid of a climbing belt and some improvised spikes, she’d climb the tree, and disconnect the camera from its antenna that was aimed at the sky.
Right on schedule, a guy wearing jeans, a t-shirt and sandals came outside. He was carrying a coffee cup and looked up at the antenna on the roof. After shaking his head, he went back in and we heard voices coming from inside.
Another guy came out. He was tall and fit, probably in his late thirties or early forties, and wore tactical pants with a holstered pistol. He unfolded the antenna of a satellite phone almost identical to my own and had a brief conversation. We were too far away to tell what he was saying but the conversation was short, and mostly one-sided. He did more talking than listening.
He went back inside and after a few minutes emerged with two other men. There were all virtual clones: all white, same age, almost the same clothes. They were either military, former military or cops, and didn’t even bother trying to hide it. They carried backpacks and rifles and piled into the truck. We listened to the fading sound of the truck’s engine for a few minutes, then huddled up.
“Let’s go in,” Bolle said.
I nodded. We’d formulated a plan earlier and now we executed it. Eddie and I circled to the back of the house. It took us almost half an hour to do it, but we figured we had plenty of time. The guys in the truck would have to drive to the back side of Rudder’s ranch and walk at least a couple of miles to the camera so they could fix it.
Eddie was surprisingly quiet for such a big guy, but you could tell the woods weren’t his natural environment. He was getting better at moving through the brush without making noise, and how to pick the most efficient route.
We paused right at the tree line. There were about twenty yards of open space between us and the back door of the house. I keyed my radio microphone twice and was rewarded with two answering clicks in my earpiece. Bolle and Dale were in position as well.
I dashed across the open ground to the wall of the house while Eddie covered, then he followed. He covered the back door while I crept from window to window. The place was mostly empty. There were sleeping bags and duffel bags in the bedrooms. The living room was full of plastic equipment cases. A folding table was covered with monitors and electronic gear that looked almost identical to the stuff we had in our trailer back at Rudder’s.
The guy in the t-shirt was sitting with his back to me, watching a pornographic movie on his laptop. I didn’t see anyone else inside.
I gave Eddie a thumbs up. He pointed his rifle at the back door while I went over to the generator. I found the kill switch and pressed it.
The sudden silence was broken by a “shit” from inside and the guy stepped out the back door, to find the fat suppressor on the end of Eddie’s rifle pointed right at his face.
“Whoa,” he said, and put his hands up.
“We’re Federal Agents,” I said. “Who else is inside?”
“Nobody,” he said.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He took a long time to answer and looked like he was thinking way too hard.
“John,” he said.
“John what?”
“John Smith. I want to talk to an attorney.”
I slung my rifle so it was hanging across my back, took two steps forward and round kicked him in the leg just above his left kneecap. His leg buckled and he dropped like a sack of shit.
He gave a moan and grabbed his thigh. I’d blasted the kick right into his common peroneal nerve, and right now his leg probably felt like it was on fire.
I leaned over and grabbed a handful of lank hair in my gloved hand.
“That’s funny,” I said. “My name is John Smith too. The other funny thing is, your three buddies that just left in that truck bear a striking resemblance to the guys that drugged me and tried to kill me a few nights ago, so I’m taking this kind of personally. I don’t think there are really any lawyers available in this neck of the woods, but I do see a rusty ass shovel leaning against the wall over there, and quite a few places I could dig a hole to bury you in. So you want to try this again?”
“Fuck! You can’t do this dude.”
“You know, my moral compass has been pretty defective lately, so if you want to try me, I’m more than willing to show you what I can do.”
I picked him up by the hair and was contemplating whether to slam his head into the side of the house or throw him across the yard.
“Ok! Ok! My name is Walter. I’m just a technician. I swear! I’m here on a contract.”
I stifled the rage I hadn’t even been aware I’d been carrying with me and set him down.
“Excellent choice Walt.”
I prodded him inside. I pulled the chair into the center of the room, away from any place he could grab a weapon and sat him down. Dale and Bolle came in the front door.
Bolle gave Walter a salesman’s grin and sat on a folding camp chair. We’d agreed ahead of time that I would be the bad cop and Bolle would be the good cop.
“Walter, pleased to meet you. Why don’t you tell me all about how you came to be in this godforsaken place.”
“I told that guy I wanted a lawyer. If you guys are really cops you should get me one.”
“Walter, have you ever really read The Patriot Act?” Bolle asked. “It’s actually quite fascinating to read the thousands of pages, but in the interests of time, I’ll paraphrase for you.”
He leaned in close.
“Basically, it says I can do whatever the fuck I want with you. I can keep you locked in a windowless cell until I get tired of hearing you scream. I can even lock you in a room with my friend over there. Do you know that I once saw him beat a man so bad he lost the vision in one eye?”
Apparently we’d gone from “good cop/bad cop” to “bad cop/worse cop.”
Walter swallowed hard.
“I’m just a contractor,” he said. “I flew in two nights ago. I’m here to babysit some camera equipment watching some ranch. I got it all up and running and I’m supposed to fly out tonight.”
“You’re making much better choices Walter. Tell me about the three men who just left in the pickup truck.”
Walter shrugged. “They’re door kickers. I guess former military, but they don’t tell me anything. They call each other Mr. Black, Mr. White, and Mr. Green.”
“Obviously Tarantino film buffs. Who else Walter? Who else have you seen here?”
“An old guy. And a woman.”
Bolle pulled out his phone and scrolled through pictures.
“This man?” He showed him a picture of Hubbard from our security cameras back at Wapato.
Walter nodded. Bolle scrolled some more.
“And her?” He showed her a picture of Diana.
Walter nodded again.
“Excellent.”
As they talked, Eddie and I had been searching the house while Dale kept watch for traffic coming up the road. The equipment cases I opened had foam cutouts for rifles and pistols that were empty. There was quite a bit of ammo still in boxes, food, cooking gear, radio equipment, and some medical gear. It all looked pretty familiar from my own deployments in the Army, although this was better, lighter, and more expensive stuff.
I opened one last case and paused. Inside was one of the dart guns like we’d taken off Diana. There were cutouts in the foam for two guns. One was missing, along with a container of darts.
I showed it to Bolle.
“Fascinating,” he said with a lifted eyebrow. “We’ll be taking that with us.”
Eddie walked back into the living room.
“Nothing back there but bedrolls and dirty underwear,” he said.
He leaned back in towards Walter.
“Now Walter, you’re a bright boy. I assume you were recruited because of your military background. I’m guessing you were in signals intelligence,
something like that?”
Walter nodded. His eyes danced from me to Bolle.
“Now, I’m guessing there are some things you haven’t told me,” Bolle said. He held his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “We are this close to me letting you get in that SUV parked outside and drive away, but you could still fuck it up and wind up locked in a room with my associate over there, so it’s important that you be honest. Do you understand?”
Beads of sweat were popping out on Walter’s face. He gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“Tell me about the cell phone you’ve been monitoring for your client.”
Walter blew out a breath. “I localized the two ends of the conversation. One is at that ranch the cops have surrounded. The other is there.”
He jerked his chin at the now blank monitor.
“Excellent. Were you able to read the messages?”
“We could. Somebody named CRYPTER.”
I tried to keep my face impassive. Hubbard knew about CRYPTER.
I’m not going to lie. I took a great deal of pleasure in smashing all the equipment in the house. We’d considered just burning the damn thing down, but we didn’t need the attention. We relieved Walter of his cell phone and searched the SUV for any other means of communication before sending him on his way. We had little doubt he would contact Hubbard eventually, but it would take a while.
We discussed ambushing the three contractors when they came back, but didn’t want to risk a gunfight, for very little gain. The three were most likely contractors just like Walter. Granted, what they were doing was illegal, but I’d been around the block enough times to know people like them were useful to people like Hubbard. The only difference between using their skill sets in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan and using them in the US was the price.
So we left all the electronic gear in pieces, cut up the sleeping bags out of spite, and pitched all the food into the backyard before we hiked back to our vehicle. I put the case holding the dart gun behind the seat of Dale’s truck and climbed in.
We were all silent for a while as we jounced down the bad road. I enjoyed the scenery out here, but I was starting to miss smooth pavement.
“Hubbard knows about the money,” Eddie said.
“I suspect Hubbard has always known about the money,” Bolle said. “And very soon he will know that we know. It will be interesting to see how this changes things.”
“I get tired of all this spook shit,” Dale said as he navigated around a particularly deep rut. “Can we arrest the son of a bitch?”
“With our unlawfully obtained evidence?” Bolle asked. “No. But Mr. Hubbard may still get his comeuppance yet.”
“You think he’s working with Marshall?” I asked.
“I think it’s more likely that Marshall is Hubbard’s tool. Nothing ever points directly at Hubbard, but he’s always around, on the periphery. I think many people dismiss him as a mid-level functionary at CIA, but I’m beginning to suspect that there’s more to him than that.”
I mulled that over for a while. One question I’d been chewing on for quite a while was exactly how far this investigation should go. How many people would we have to pick off before we got to the top? It seemed like this could go on forever, and Bolle, in his messianic zeal, would probably keep on trucking until he either died or he was convinced he’d rooted out every last participant in the conspiracy.
I wasn’t so sure I was on board with that. I wasn’t quite sure when I would be done, but I hoped I’d know it when I saw it.
“Now what?” I asked.
Bolle looked at his watch. “I would imagine Walter will have found a way to contact his boss by now. I’d like to see how Hubbard reacts. He doesn’t take setbacks well.”
I wanted to ask Bolle how he knew Hubbard, but I knew I’d likely get some kind of bullshit, evasive answer. I was so sick of these people.
Instead, I just leaned my head back against the seat and tried to relax, thinking about a day when I would be in the driver’s seat of my own life again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Alex was petting a horse when we pulled in. It stuck it’s head out over the split rail fence so she could scratch it between the eyes. While the others went in the trailer and the bunkhouse, I just stood there and watched her for a minute in the fading light of sundown. She was wearing jeans and an unbuttoned plaid shirt over a tank top. Her hair blew in the evening wind and I realized anew how much I loved her. I felt a lump in my throat, and the distance between us hurt so bad it was almost a physical ache. I felt a moment of panic and just wanted to run, try to get to a place where she wasn’t. I’d been shot at, nearly strangled, and blown up in the last few months, but what I was afraid of more than anything was her turning around and telling me she didn’t want to see me again.
For some reason, I was oddly reminiscent of the first time I’d stood in the door of an airplane and prepared to fling myself out. I swallowed hard and made myself walk up to her.
“How’d it go?” she asked, without turning around.
“Ok,” I said. I stood there with my hands in my pockets, feeling like I was back in middle school again, all tongue-tied and awkward.
“Didn’t shoot anybody?” she asked.
I didn’t say anything for a minute, trying to keep myself from getting pissed.
She turned around and put her hands on her hips.
“I’m sorry. That came out snarkier than I meant. I was joking.”
“Ok,” I said. Part of me wanted to step closer to her, maybe take her in my arms, but I stubbornly refused to make the first move.
“Besides,” she said, softly. “I was sitting there in the radio room with my medical kit, in case somebody really did get shot.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “In case you got shot.”
I blinked, realized my eyes were wet.
“Thanks,” I said around the lump in my throat. “Good to know you’ve got my back.”
She took a step towards me, and I finally gave. I pulled her to me and hugged her close. I realized that one of the reasons she was wearing the un-tucked shirt was to hide the gun she had on her hip. Part of me was glad she was armed, even in our supposedly safe little compound. Part of me was still able to realize how messed up it was that we were constantly armed.
“I don’t want it to be this way,” she said. “In some ways, I wish we’d never gotten together. I just don’t want to lose anybody else. But I can’t imagine things without you either, because you’re all I have left.”
I just stood there and held her as the sun went down. The horse, bored with our human drama apparently, wandered off and started chomping at grass.
“Let’s pretend we’re normal,” I said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Let’s go get in the car, go have dinner, and talk about something normal.”
She pulled back and looked me in the eye.
“I’m not even sure how to do that anymore.”
“See? When we’re together, what do we spend most of our time talking about?”
“All of this,” she said, waving her hand to take in the trailer and everything around us.
“Ok,” I said. “I won’t talk about it if you won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Pinky swear.” I held up a pinky and tried to look solemn. She giggled, and put a hand over her mouth, a gesture that I remembered from when she was much younger, and much more self-conscious. We touched pinkies and walked toward our car, holding hands.
“What are we going to eat?” she asked.
“No idea. But around here I’m guessing it will involve beef and potatoes.”
There was little point in trying to talk on the rough gravel road that led from Rudder’s place, but once we hit the blacktop it was quieter. I tried to think of something to say, thought of several things only to reject them, and wound up sitting there in silence, waiting for her to say something. It reminded me again so much
of high school I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
She gave that laugh again, and I had a flashback to the first time I’d seen her, all those years ago. I’d been sitting on her dad’s back porch, nursing a beer and icing some bruised knuckles as I debriefed with her dad a fight that had happened the night before.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “We can’t talk about work, so what should we talk about? I think that’s kind of sad.”
I nodded.
“And a little scary,” she said more quietly.
I felt like it wouldn’t take much for the mood of the evening to flip and go straight to hell. Things felt so tenuous that I was afraid one wrong word would be the undoing of us. Usually, at times like this, I got quiet and refused to talk. That had cost me more relationships than I could count, so I resolved to do something different this time. If I was going to go down in flames, at least it wouldn’t be because I repeated the same old mistakes.
“I don’t want to talk about work,” I said, holding up the pinkie I used to swear with. “We could talk about after, though.”
“After?”
“After all this is over, and I hand Bolle these credentials I’ve got in my pocket and walk away.”
“You really think you’ll do that?” she asked.
I held up my pinkie. “I’ll swear to it if you want.”
She looked out the window. I was headed towards Lehigh Valley. A plan was forming in my head. It wasn’t the best plan, but maybe it would work.
“I don’t want to go back to Portland,” she said. “I want to go somewhere else. Somewhere small, maybe with mountains.”
She spoke slowly, haltingly, like each word cost her a drop of blood. I found myself nodding.
“Me too,” I said. “I was maybe thinking of traveling around for a while, seeing the country and finding a place that felt like a good fit.”
“That sounds fun,” she said. “I don’t want to deal with dead people anymore.”
“Me neither,” I said. I rolled that idea around in my head for a minute. What if there would be a time when I would see my last dead body, and I wouldn’t have to see any more after that. It sounded nice.