by R. A. McGee
Thirty-Four
Once the plane came to a stop at the jetway, Clark unstrapped his seatbelt and handed his trash to the flight attendant who was coming through the first-class cabin.
“Well, you weren’t lying about not bothering me, were you?”
“See? A little vodka and I’m out of your hair.”
“Have a good visit to our nation’s capital, sir.”
“Let’s hope so,” Clark said, holding out an upturned hand for Miri to walk in front of him.
The pair walked up the ramp of the jetway and into the concourse. They hopped a train and went to the exit—no need to stop at the checked carousel as they had no bags.
“Where is Lucy meeting us?” Clark said.
“Outside the security checkpoint, there's a little restaurant.”
“Good. I’m feeling a little exposed. Is she bringing us anything?” Clark said. His waistband was empty and he was unarmed for the first time he could remember.
“I asked her to. Either way, we should be okay.”
“Famous last words,” Clark said.
The two passed through the flow of people exiting the concourses and followed the smell of steak to a small chophouse. Its location ahead of security meant that you didn’t need to be a passenger to eat there, absolving Lucy of the need to buy a ticket just to have a meeting.
Clark looked at the menu posted on the board outside, but his concentration was broken when he was slammed into. His mind already orienting itself to the attack as he started to move, he realized just in time the assault was actually a hug.
Wrapped underneath his armpits, squeezing like a powerlifter, was Lucy Gordon. Clark gently squeezed back. “Hey, Lucy.”
“What am I, chopped liver?” Miri said.
“I just saw you a couple days ago, Miri. And nobody says ‘What am I, chopped liver’ anymore,” Lucy said, her voice muffled by Clark’s chest. She pulled away and pushed her glasses up on her nose, beaming from ear to ear.
“How are you? How was Mexico? Did everything go okay? Where’d you get this lousy T-shirt? Oh my God, is that blood on your arm?”
Clark looked down to see a red stain forming at the site of his injury. “It’s nothing. What have I told you, huh? Lay off the coffee so late in the day.”
“Shut up. Which one of you is buying me lunch?”
The three of them walked into the restaurant and were seated in the back, per Miri’s request. A quick hello from the waitress and an entrée order, then they were alone, away from prying ears.
“So,” Lucy said, reaching into her messenger bag. “I told you what I found with the prepaid phone, right?”
Clark nodded. “Miri told me. It was bought somewhere in the DC-Virginia area.”
“Yep. Did she tell you how I found out? I hacked past a firewall, then dropped a trojan—”
“Lucy?”
“Come on, Clark. You aren’t going to let me tell you what I did? It’s really good stuff.”
“You know how he is,” Miri said. “You talk technology and he gets confused.”
“I don’t understand it, but why do I need to? I don’t understand how to do a triple bypass surgery. If the doctor says I need one, I’ll trust that he’s—”
“Or she,” Lucy said.
“Right. He or she’s smart enough to know what they’re talking about. Lucy’s like the technology doctor. I don’t need to know what she knows, I just need to listen to her.”
“That’s actually really sweet, Clark,” Lucy said.
“Don’t get used to it.”
“No chance of that happening.”
The waitress came by, dropping the food off, and there was a short pause in the conversation as everyone arranged and dressed their meals. A rare bit of normalcy among the conversations of the moment.
Lucy paused, mustard bottle in her hands. “So, the phone was bought in Virginia. But that’s not what’s so weird. I was thinking about what you said, Miri.”
Miri raised her eyebrows. “What I said about…”
“Butterfield. I went back into everything, but instead of taking the things I found at face value, I dug a little deeper. See, the trail was there in my face. All the bank records, the VPN log-in codes, everything. But I started wondering if I could trace some of the code that I found in—”
“Luce. Please,” Clark said.
“I hate you sometimes, you know that? How can I say this without using any words that are remotely technological? I think the evidence I found was planted by someone. I’m not entirely convinced anymore that those deposits into his bank account were legit. They might be, but I’m not sure.
“Think of it like this,” Lucy said, choosing her words carefully. “If you walked into a house and I asked you what color the paint was, you would be able to give me an answer, right? No problem.”
Miri stopped short of another bite. “Maybe for Clark. He doesn’t know his colors too good, do you, buddy?”
“But what if you popped the crown molding off, and saw that there might have been a different color there before? Close to the same color, but maybe a shade lighter. That’s how this is. Once I start looking deeper, there may be another color.”
“And in this analogy, another color is…” Clark said.
“A different set of information, left by another hacker.”
“So if a hacker left the info, we can’t be sure what’s real or not?” Miri said.
“Nope. Not unless we find the person and ask them.”
“Where the hell would we even start?” Clark said.
“You’d start by asking me.” Lucy pulled out a map printout of a location with coordinates written on it, as well as a thumb drive. “I think I found them.”
Thirty-Five
“Just like that?” Clark said. “Are you sure?”
“First you don’t want to know how I do things, now you want to know how the sausage is made? I thought I was the heart doctor, huh?”
“I’m not questioning you, it’s just a lot for me to process,” Clark said. “I just found out about this and we already have a lead?”
Lucy pushed the paper and thumb drive across the table to him. “These are directions to the IP address that planted the information. This thumb drive is a record of everything I found. All of it. So you guys need to decide what we’re going to do about this.”
“We?” Miri said. “What do you mean, ‘we’?”
“If you're going to talk to the hacker who pulled this off, don’t you think you should bring me too?”
Clark put his hand on her shoulder. “Lucy, have you stopped and thought about what all this means? If this is true, then that means McHenry set Miri up. The phone number Miri gave you to run? We got it from a drug lord named César, who swears McHenry gave me up. If that’s true, he got Sam killed.”
“I know, but—”
“But nothing. Things are gonna get much, much worse. I don’t want that for you. What if you just go back to work and pretend like you didn’t find any of this and let us handle things?”
“What about Miri? She still works at Blackthorn, and I don’t see you asking her to go to work. Besides,” Lucy said as she checked her watch, “the office is almost closed for the day. No one is expecting to see me until morning. I can go with you guys and still be back in time to play it cool at the office.”
Clark looked to Miri. “A little help here?”
Miri shrugged. “I have no idea what the hell is on that thumb drive. We could use a super-nerd to help us communicate with the other super-nerd. Like an interpreter or something.”
“I choose to view the term ‘super-nerd’ as a compliment,” Lucy said, a tinge of pride in her voice.
Clark decided to give it up, knowing that it would be hard enough to deter Lucy, and impossible if Miri was aligned with her. “Okay, fine. You’re going. So we talk to the hacker, then we go find Butterfield?”
“The only reason I want to see him is to put a bullet in his eye,” Miri said. �
��That piece of shit set me up.”
“Maybe,” Clark said. “Maybe not. Don’t you think we need to be open to the possibility that he was just a patsy?”
“Patsy or not, I’m not talking to him,” Miri said. “He’ll say something stupid like he always does, and I won’t be able to control myself.”
“Okay,” Clark said, putting his napkin on the table. “Why don’t we split up? You two go talk to the hacker and I’ll go talk to Butterfield. That way, you don’t have to see him and I don’t have to get the hives from all the coding talk.”
Miri frowned. “Think it’s a good idea to split up? We’re better together.”
“Are you saying you’d miss me?” Clark said. “You need me around, is that it?”
“Forget I said anything, asshole.”
Clark stood up. “I gotta hit the head. When I get back, let’s get out of here.”
Clark pushed his chair in and paused a moment. A feeling that someone was looking at him crept up his neck, but he turned and saw no one. He went around a half-wall, and into the vestibule with the restrooms. He shouldered into the door and went into a stall. He always used a stall, even for a piss.
No sense in letting someone walk up behind him.
He finished up and opened the stall door. Standing at the sink counter was a man looking at himself in the mirror. The man was as tall as Clark and similarly muscled. The man had dark skin, was completely clean-shaven, and flashed a big smile full of bleach-white teeth into the mirror at Clark.
Clark walked up to the sink next to him. “Lester. What’s it been, five, six years?”
“It feels like just yesterday.”
“I guess it would. What are you doing here?”
“Getting ready for a fight, and thought I’d get a bite.”
“A fight? That’s what you’re here for?” Clark said.
“Did I say fight? I meant flight, of course. Getting ready for a flight. Then, I say to myself, that looks like my old buddy Clark, just a-chomping away on a burger. Sitting with some high-quality pussy, if you don’t mind the compliment. I figured, why not say hello?”
“In the bathroom? You have a shit sense of timing,” Clark said, ignoring the remark about Miri and Lucy.
“You know, that isn’t the first time I’ve heard that,” Lester Keever said. “How have you been keeping yourself?”
Clark finished washing his hands. “I’m always squared away, you should know that. You on the job?”
“Might be,” Keever said.
“Something we need to deal with right now? I got a few minutes in my schedule.”
“Never said you were the job, Clark. There are millions of other people in the world. That’s part of your problem, you think you’re more important than you are.”
Clark nodded, his hands held casually in front of him. “That’s assuming we agree I have a problem.”
“Oh, you have a problem.”
“You sure about that? Because you remember what happened last time you caused me problems, right?”
Keever smiled.
“That’s what I thought. Let me tell you what your problem is: you look like a struck match.”
“Now, that’s below the belt, Clark. We all didn’t come out all light-skinned like you.”
“Take it up with whoever your real father is; I’m sure you’ve never met him. Also, I can’t quite… can’t quite tell which way you’re looking. You looking at me, or the stall over there?”
Keever clenched his jaw.
“That’s why I kicked your sorry ass off the team. You kept walking into walls. Pretty unsafe, don’t you think?”
Clark watched as Keever balled and released his fist a few times. Clark tensed, ready for action. After several moments, Keever unclenched his fist again, this time taking several steps backward. “It’s been really nice to catch up, Clark. We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
Clark held the door for Keever, ushering him out first. Instead of going toward the front of the restaurant, and the exit, Keever turned left into the kitchen and disappeared. Clark stood in the small hallway for nearly ten minutes, waiting to see if the man would come back, then gave it up and went back to his table.
“Damn, Clark, everything come out okay in there?” Lucy said.
“We have an issue,” Clark said.
“I think they make a tablet you can take if things are running slow,” Miri said with a smile.
Clark waited a few moments for his friends to realize he wasn’t joking. “I just ran into a guy named Keever in the bathroom. He’s a problem.”
“Did you…?” Miri drew her finger across her neck.
“I wanted to, but it’s not the time or the place. Thing is, he shouldn’t have been in that bathroom.”
“Maybe it was a coincidence?” Lucy said. “This is a big airport, he could have been just using the bathroom.”
“No such thing as coincidence, especially with Keever. I tried to rattle him, see if he’d lose his temper and tell me what he was up to, but it didn’t work. He’s changed a little, I guess.”
“What do you want to do?” Miri said.
“He saw me with you guys, so splitting up is sounding better.”
“Just wait for a second,” Lucy said. “Who is Keever and why are we running from him? I don’t get it.”
Clark stood and looked over the top of the half-walls of the restaurant. He saw nothing. “Keever is SAD, or at least he was when I knew him. He—”
“What’s he so sad about?” Lucy said, chuckling to herself. Facing the stony stares of both Clark and Miri, Lucy hung her head. “I’m sorry. I say dumb things when I get nervous and right now I feel like I could shit a brick.”
“SAD is the Special Activities Division. Wet work, black op assassinations, you name it. Keever’s a killer, Lucy. Plain and simple. If he’s following me, that can only mean a few things.”
“McHenry,” Miri said.
“Exactly. He talked to the Director and borrowed some of his guys. I don’t know of another reason the CIA would have an assassin following me.”
“So we split up?” Miri said.
Clark motioned for Lucy’s bag, which she handed to him across the table. The bag sagged in one corner and Clark reached his hand in, feeling a pistol. “Just one?”
“That’s all I could get my hands on,” Lucy said. “It’s not easy for me to get into the armory.”
“It’s good enough. Miri, you take it. There’s a cache not too far from here.”
“I don’t know about a cache close by,” Miri said.
“It’s a personal one.”
“You have personal stashes?”
“A few.”
“How many?”
“Enough,” Clark said. “I’m going to walk out of here. You guys wait twenty minutes and then come out. You go get in Lucy’s car, then go out to see her nerd friend. I’ll go talk to Butterfield and we’ll meet up later. Good?”
“Here,” Lucy said, sliding the thumb drive across the table. “We might as well split the information up. Since we're going to the source, we don’t need the copy of what I found. You keep this, in case you need it.”
Clark palmed the thumb drive and stuffed it in his pocket next to the burner phone from César in Mexico. “Okay, we good?”
“Yeah, we’re good. If you run into trouble or get jammed up, you call and we’re coming back. Savvy?”
Clark smiled. “Yeah. I savvy.”
He put a hand on each of theirs, gave them a thin smile and walked out of the restaurant. He went out of the concourse, to the exit door and then to the sidewalk. Seated on a concrete bench, reading a real estate booklet, was Lester Keever.
“How is the market right now? I’ve been renting, but I think it’s time to buy, don’t you?”
Clark forced a smile and sat next to the man, pulling the booklet from his hand. He patted Keever on the back with his right hand then, after the second pa
t, grabbed him by the base of his thick neck, squeezing just hard enough.
“Listen here, you weird fuck. This is the second time I’ve seen you today. Nobody is that unlucky. If I see you again, I’m going to assume we have a problem and deal with you accordingly. Do you get what I’m saying?”
Keever smiled a blinding smile. “There’s no need to get rough.”
“Really? Don’t think I forgot. I should have killed you back then and I didn’t. If you want to see me get rough, you know I will. I don’t want to catch a peek of you ever again.”
Clark stood and looked down at the man, then smacked the book into his chest, letting it fall into the man’s lap. “Have a good day, Lester.”
Thirty-Six
Clark walked into the middle of the crowded terminal drive, hailed a taxi, and hopped in. He should be heading toward his cache near the heart of the city, grabbing what he needed, and then finding David Butterfield.
But seeing Lester Keever for the first time in years had recalibrated his thinking. If McHenry thought he’d just bring in a guy like that to shake Clark up, he was dead wrong. Clark told the cabbie to head toward Reston, Virginia.
The Blackthorn headquarters.
He knew he should find Butterfield, but he needed to know. Right then and beyond a doubt, Clark wanted to know.
It would be a quick fifteen-minute ride across the western part of town. Traffic would be pouring out of the DC area and into the suburbs at this time, so there wouldn’t be as much traffic heading the opposite direction from the airport.
Clark watched out the window, hearing but not listening to the oblivious cab driver as he prattled on in broken English, acting as an impromptu tour guide.
The light was still hanging in the sky but was beginning to dip lower. Clark watched as the scenery rushed by, trying to finalize his course of action.
The fact was, if McHenry had Keever following him, then he must have suspected that Clark had uncovered something in Mexico. McHenry would expect Clark to go to ground, staying in the shadows for an indeterminate length of time.
In reality, Clark preferred a more head-on approach, one he guessed McHenry wouldn’t be expecting.