Jackboot

by Will Van Allen

  CHAPTER 22

  JULY

  Spokane, Washington

  He replayed the messages on the answering machine. The first from Marissa reminding him that he owed her. Geronimo whined, pawed at his knee.

  “She’s gone, buddy,” McConnell said. But she wasn’t. Vanilla, citrus and the sea still lingered. A paranoid part of him wondered if it was intentional.

  The dog had warmed to her immediately and she had taken to him with a razz of his ears. She had been in form-fitting blue capris and a zip-up. Adidas read the silvery label on one hip. Her cheeks were rosy, like her sister’s had always been. She seemed a little bouncy.

  “Sorry. Still got that endorphin buzz from kickboxing class. Just got out of the shower,” she had explained, tossing her damp ponytail back and forth, filling the room with her fragrance. Like peeling a Jaffa orange for breakfast on an Andalusian beach.

  She had cocked her head. “Wow. Your beard ran away. You call the Humane Society?”

  He didn’t remember her being funny as a kid. Honestly, he barely remembered her as a kid at all.

  She cocked her head the other way. “And some weight ran away with the spoon, too.”

  “A little,” he conceded.

  “More than a little.” Gold-flecks danced in her emerald eyes.

  He remembered why she was there. “Should just be a week. Maybe ten days.”

  “Where you going again?”

  Portland. To kill the man who raped and murdered your sister.

  “Boise. For work.”

  Maybe he didn’t murder her directly. But why split hairs.

  “Mon Dieu! Boise? C’est dommage.” She pretended to weigh it over. “Well, I’ll watch your critters but on one condition: When you get back you owe me dinner.”

  “You don’t mean a date?”

  “No, John, I do not mean a date.” She rolled her eyes. “But a girl’s gotta eat, right?”

  “Right. Okay. Perhaps when I get back we’ll do dinner.”

  She arched an eyebrow.

  “Dinner sounds great. I’m looking forward to it,” he amended.

  He never had any intention of honoring that amendment. There were lines in this world he wouldn’t cross, and some of those were the delectably curved of Anj’s little sister.

  Second message was Carrie’s reprimand regarding his neglect of his only daughter and why the hell wasn’t he returning her calls?

  He had left his cell of course; he wasn’t going through all those precautions just to be tracked by cell towers.

  Carrie was right about Katie’s behavior needing to be nipped in the bud. If his mom or grandpa—Jesus, perish either thought—knew Katie was running wild dressed fit for a shoot for teenvixens.com and smoking pot…? But how to start that conversation. He and Katie couldn’t be in a room for thirty seconds without one chomping at the bit to tear into the other.

  He took a morning run with the dog along the river, watched the sun turn lead into a ribbon of sparkling jade, contemplated what he had done, considered what he should do, and upon returning to the house was none the guiltier nor wiser.

  He checked the TV news again. Still no mention of Odom. It had been three days. Maybe they hadn’t found the body yet. Then again, maybe they had. Maybe the cops were quietly working the evidence, following some thread he had overlooked, leading them slowly, inexorably to his doorstep. He half-expected a knock on the door, if not SWAT just busting it down, but not a rap, not even a phone call. He went over it all again and couldn’t find the other end of that thread. Anj was the only link, and she wasn’t talking. If he had missed something he deserved what came.

  He clicked the TV off. He had things to do today, and that’s what he was good at, the doing of things.

  He stopped by the credit union, emptied his security box into his laptop bag. Easy come, easy go.

  “One of us better get a job soon,” he said to the dog as they cruised the sun-soaked highway towards Elk. The dog snorted. Wasn’t going to be him.

  As he approached the porch, Mitch rose from his seat, hand blocking his eyes as he staggered backwards.

  “Good Lord. It’s the eye. The eye of Sauron!”

  “What?”

  Mitch pointed to his own dull graying hair.

  “Oh.” McConnell had forgotten about his own dye job. “It’s Desert Sunrise. All the kids are doing it. You looked in a mirror lately?”

  Mitch wore a brown and blue striped bathrobe that dated back to when Brenda and Dylan were an item.

  “It’s my Thinking Robe. Lends clarity,” the hacker confessed.

  They talked some over Mountain Dew and iced tea on the porch.

  “Didn’t want to wait for the rifle, huh?” Mitch finally asked.

  “Nope.”

  “You left your phone?”

  Referring to today not Portland. He didn’t want anyone tracking McConnell out to his house.

  “Yep.”

  Mitch nodded, peeled at what was left of the paint on the railing. “Nothing on the web,” he said mildly.

  “Wouldn’t know.”

  “Quit crying. You can still browse your Heather Thomas fan pages.”

  “What joy.”

  “By the way I fixed your alibi, or rather provided one. You’re planning skills inhale wind.”

  They shared a look, toasted their drinks, said “Mrs. Graham.”

  Mitch handed him a green folder from under his chair. “Your road trip to Glacier.”

  “I went to Boise.”

  “Did you do accountable work there? Didn’t think so. You needed to get away from it all, your brother’s death, so Montana called. It’s better. Bigger. More empty.”

  Inside the folder was a spreadsheet with an itinerary of stops; gas stations, fast food restaurants, steakhouses, motels, with fields for location, date, time and dollar amount.

  “These won’t hold up without receipts or proof of real charges.”

  “Who says they’re not real charges?” Mitch shrugged. “There’s gaps of course, we don’t want to be too perfect. It’s pretty easy to do, really. Card companies store at a central DB, it’s usually a simple SQL injection. You’d be amazed—well, you probably wouldn’t, but most people would be. About fourteen hundred bucks out of your pocket but not too steep a price to keep you out of the pokey.”

  Page two was a MapQuest printout of a route from Spokane across the panhandle of Idaho and into Montana, down through Glacier National Park and back. Mitch was thorough.

  “Memorize that,” the hacker said. He looked around the yard, leaned forward conspiratorially. “So it went okay?”

  “Why are you whispering?” McConnell whispered back.

  Mitch looked around again, offered a sheepish grin. “I don’t know why. Subject matter I suppose. Did he suffer?”

  “I’m not going into the details.” But Mitch had earned the right to know. “Yeah. Not enough in my opinion.”

  “You okay with it?”

  “I am. You?”

  The hacker puffed out his cheeks, pressed his glasses up with a finger. “Oddly enough, I find that I am.”

  They sat quietly taking in the magnitude of what they had wrought.

  “You still want the rifle?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’m still digging.”

  McConnell wasn’t sure if he believed him. Mitch picked up on that but wasn’t more forthcoming. He stood, laid his robe reverently across a chair and gestured to follow him. This time they took a walk to the barn. Mitch pulled open the wide, white doors on creaky hinges. Inside was an old U-Haul trailer, hitch laying in the dirt, the walls covered with lathes and saws and drills, dusty but in good condition, the blades and bits sharp and ready.

  “Your dad left all this?” McConnell asked.

  “He took what mattered. The table saw, that piece of shit old Mustang he never got around to fixing up. His guns. My brother has a better shop anyway, and he should, since I’ve paid for it, and no, my dad doesn’t
know. Your stuff’s in the trailer.”

  McConnell rolled the trailer door up. In the shadows lay a long, dark olive case, five-foot by two-foot and two feet deep. Behind it were cardboard boxes stamped “M118LR” in declarative black lettering, and on top of those a smaller plain white box and a manila envelope.

  “I didn’t realize your ask was for a marine sniper rifle,” Mitch said. “The M40A1 is discontinued, I got you the M40A3. Straight from the marine armory in Quantico, completely untraceable. That suppressor there is stock, it’s a, uh, OPS INC. or something. No Unertl scope, they’re being refitted, but that white box is supposed to be better anyway, a PVS-10 day/night gizmo, all the rage in Iraq these days, according to my MS-13 sources.”

  “MS-13?”

  Mitch picked up a stick and poked at the dirt. “They’re a gang, a large one, more a conglomeration really, based out of L.A. Mostly Salvadoran though really from all over Central America. FBI’s been focusing so hard on terrorists that Mara Salvatruchas grew like weeds in our own backyard. In thirty states and counting, mostly illegals. When they get deported to whatever third world hellhole they crawled out of they set up franchises. Business is mostly drugs, racketeering, kidnappings and of course the occasional gunrunning.”

  “And you deal with them?”

  “Don’t judge me. You’re the one asking for a rifle and five hundred rounds of ammunition. Why’d you ask for a marine sniper rifle, anyway?”

  “My dad said you couldn’t go wrong with a M40A1. And I’ve never been in the military.”

  Mitch nodded approvingly. “Meaning they’ll be looking for someone who has. Well played, sir. I’m sure since I asked for one MS-13 took the opportunity to steal twenty of the things. They have a lot of guys in the military. We do have the biggest Latino army in the world.”

  Sean had shared that same joke. “So why do they think you wanted it?”

  “It’s a goddamn sniper rifle, John. What else is it good for? Don’t worry. We’re three anonymous hops from MS-13.” They stood a moment looking it all over.

  “Well?” Mitch asked. “You gonna make sure it’s what you wanted?”

  “Yep,” McConnell replied, flipping the latches and raising the gun case lid.

  The rifle was assembled. Plain army-green fiberglass stock, the barrel black steel with the twelve-inch suppressor can at the end midnight blue. It boasted the reliable Remington 700 short action, and nestled into the soft foam beside it was a Harris bipod and a small plastic case with the words M40A3 DEPLOYMENT KIT USMC carved in relief.

  “Looks deadly enough,” Mitch observed dryly.

  McConnell removed the weapon, hefting it for weight. The A1 model specked out around fourteen and a half pounds without scope but this one felt two to three heavier. He turned and sighted out across the garden and into the woods beyond the back of the house. It felt good. A little blocky—the cheek needed adjusting—but it was comfortable. Its craftsmanship gave the impression it was dependable.

  He placed the rifle back in the foaming, made sure it was secure, then closed the case and latched it shut. “I can’t believe they handed it over without the cash first.”

  “Of course they didn’t. I paid up front, I knew you were good for it. The envelope’s got the rest.”

  McConnell emptied the envelope contents into his hand: IDs from five different states and two passports, American and Canadian.

  “It’s not too late to turn back, you know.”

  “Tell me what you found.”

  “I don’t know yet.” The hacker pushed his glasses up in agitation. “I’m still aggregating the data.”

  “Aggregating the data?”

  “This ain’t Sneakers. The DOD aren’t the simple nut they used to be.”

  McConnell wasn’t buying that either. He eyed the contents of the trailer. “Just going to take a case of the ammo, leave the rest. That alright?”

  “Sure thing, boss. You staying for lunch?”

  They ate sun-dried tomato tortillas stuffed with basil chicken and Fontina cheese and a Greek cucumber salad amid the battle on the dining room table. Midway through rhubarb-strawberry pie McConnell set thirty-two thousand between a band of orcs and an elven war party.

  “Perfect. I needed groceries,” Mitch said.

  Later they drank beer in the shade of the porch.

  “You should come into town for a beer.”

  “That Luddite Desmond still around?” Mitch snorted. “Pass, thanks.”

  “I didn’t say come have a beer with a Luddite. Come over to my pad. We’ll throw some steaks on the barbie. I’ll invite Mrs. Davis over.”

  “I’m not sleeping with a married woman.”

  McConnell shrugged. Neither was he. Though the temptation was growing.

  “Will the body turn up?” the hacker asked abruptly.

  He shrugged again. “It’s not hidden. Just out of the way.”

  “You get rid of the file I sent you?”

  “Ran a low-level format, zeroed out the drive, the whole bit.”

  The afternoon waned. Mitch replaced their empties with cold ones. “You were right, you know. It needed to be done.”

  Whether true or not, McConnell had nothing more to say about Alan Odom. He was doing things. He felt no compunction to dwell upon them. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  The shadows began to creep from beneath the pines as the sun slipped into the west.

  Mitch started to say something, thought better of it. He gave the bigger man a sideways glance. “Just one more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Stay golden, Ponyboy.”

  CHAPTER 23

  JULY

  Elk, Washington

  Mitch dropped unsteadily in front of his monitors. Not much of a drinker, really, McConnell had knocked down three beers before he had finished sipping the last draught of his first. The beer had been warranted; they had killed a man after all, well, McConnell had, though he had played his part. He wasn’t proud of it. And yet he was. What did that say?

  Not like we’re the first two in the world to conspire upon murder.

  And if he shared what he had discovered they were likely to conspire again.

  He frowned. McConnell was no fool, not a complete one anyway. He had been holding back. Odom had been a localized evil, a wicked wrong that needed redress, an achievable imperative. Gunnery Sergeant Sean McConnell’s killers, juxtaposed, were a distant mission impossible. They were at the Rubicon, and he was intently, warily peering from its bank. That big dolt McConnell would blindly splash in with his oversized, clunky clodhoppers if Mitch didn’t keep him in check. Maybe that was unfair. But they weren’t playing at Chutes and Ladders.

  He blew out his cheeks, took a drink of Dew. He poked the cat. Grabbed a snack from upstairs. Turned on the TV, turned on the sound on the TV. The blonde was reporting again. She had cut her hair, was still damn cute. A nonsense story. She needed a scoop. He should send her something. Anonymously. He could send her something from his Trapper Keeper, lots of juicy newsworthy tidbits in there. Or he could send her flowers—

  Stop procrastinating.

  “Okay.” Arguing with himself, now. Great.

  He brought up the Visio that contained his flowchart and Venn diagrams.

  He blew out his cheeks again.

  Discovering what lay beyond the Rubicon had not been terribly difficult. There was a map of sorts if you knew where to look. And how. And, of course, he did.

  He started his journey with a tweak of an Israeli facial recognition program to compare Nielsen’s plates with license plates displayed across the web, focused primarily on photo sharing sites often used by soldiers. The crawl executed on some abandoned servers left running at the University of Oklahoma. It wasn’t a very accurate program. But it was a first step.

  That done, he prepped some conchiglie ripieni.

  Next, accessing the General Directorate of Traffic in Baghdad. It was child’s play, Arabic translation aside. The UN had ov
er eight hundred vehicles registered in Iraq. None of them matched Nielsen’s plates. No surprise there.

  He looked into Automatic Number Plate Recognition in Iraq. License plate scanning technology had been around since the seventies, was used stateside more than Americans knew—well, most Americans. Sure enough ANPR was in use at several bases and checkpoints by both US military and contractors, running weak security to boot, outside both NIPR and SIPR. A query of Nielsen’s plates came away with several hits and one very lucky break. A checkpoint in the Green Zone tracked VINs as well as plates. He now had the plates and the correlating Vehicle Identification Numbers for both vehicles.

  He gave himself a B+ on the conchiglie; the fusion of shiitake, spinach, prosciutto and ricotta not as pleasurable to the palate as one might think.

  Running a search for those VINs in the US and EU he found a white Toyota SUV manufactured in Princeton, Indiana, and a Volkswagen diesel truck out of Wolfsburg, Germany, both 2004 models. The SUV was registered that year commercially in Houston by Post, Green and Wooden. Everyone knew PGW, the defense arm subsidiary of big oil Norton Industries. He had perused their financials a time or two.

  So how did these vehicles end up in Iraq, more specifically in service with the United Nations? Were they falsely marked as UN and using counterfeit plates? Or were they legit and just hadn’t been registered in the Iraq DMV’s database for any number of reasons?

  If the vehicles were the only information he would have called up Occam, borrowed his razor and settled on the last option. Shit happens.

  But there was a dead marine at the end of the equation. Murdered from the sound of it. And the military didn’t care. They had silenced Nielsen. That didn’t jibe with shit just happens.

  Chewing it over he waited for his crawl to complete while working that lazy-brained McConnell’s alibi one credit charge at a time. At least he was no shirker.

  His crawl came away with garbage, save one seventy-percent probable, the photo of the truck taken by a National Guardsman on walkabout in Basrah sometime in 2006.

  Undaunted, he raided the PGW Houston office and came away with a blank. The purchased Toyota just fell off the radar. The truck out of Germany was disappeared, too.