Talion Justice

by Rick Bosworth

  We all sat together on this crisp, clear day at the zoo, bathed in the radiant heat of a December sun, and listened to the handler as she finished her presentation.

  “Also called the timber wolf, gray wolves are the largest members of the canine family. Devoted parents, they are also among the most social carnivores.”

  She paused as she looked over her audience. Teddy stared past her, entranced by the wolves in the enclosure.

  “A ‘lonesome howl’ is a shortened call that rises in pitch and is used by a wolf that is separated from its pack,” the woman continued. “If answered, the wolf switches to a deep, even howl to inform the pack of its location so that it may be found.”

  I beheld Teddy, Sarah, and Quinn.

  I had been found.

  Chapter Forty

  December 6, 2016

  Parkview Market

  Petworth, NW WDC

  According to the FBI, the most common method of entry in a burglary was still forcible entry, such as kicking in a door. A method used in almost sixty percent of the burglaries at the time I’d committed my first burglary. But this low-tech method was not available to us on that pitch-dark night, four days into a new moon, at the back door to the Parkview Market.

  We had caught a break of sorts, however. The market had a commercial wireless DIY security system. Doyle had seen the control panel by the big steel door, and based on his description we were able to figure out the manufacturer and model. We all figured Prisha had gone with this unsophisticated solution for its anonymity and privacy. It was certainly effective to keep out all the neighborhood amateurs and door-kicking bandits. And it also kept curious snooping teenage boys upstairs at night.

  Luckily for us, Doyle had added a pro to our team tonight. Some guy who knew a guy Doyle trusted. He was from Philly and never gave us his name. A thin, high-strung guy who barely said a word. But he was Irish and an expert B&E man, which was enough. His job was to get us into the market undetected, and get us out of there alive. The guy would do the break-in, defeat the steel door lock, then wait in the white panel van outside. It sounded simple and easy. It never was.

  The DIY system was vulnerable to a pro, like our guy from Philly, because all wireless alarm systems rely on radio frequency signals, sent from door and window sensors to the control panel, that trigger an alarm when any of these entryways are breached.

  Using a cheap wireless remote available on Amazon, these radio signals could be jammed by sending radio noise to prevent the signal from the sensor to the control panel. That was what we intended to do.

  We all wore black head to toe and stood stacked and silent by the back door of the market. It was me, Doyle, Darryl Robinson, and the Philly guy. I shivered at the biting wind that occasionally whipped around the back of the market. At least I hoped it was the wind that was giving me the shakes.

  Doyle gave Philly guy the go sign, and he got to work with the Amazon remote. Blind trust was not my nature, but he certainly seemed to know what he was doing. Smooth, no hesitation. We gave him room to operate. He put the remote away and picked the back-door lock in minutes. He turned to Doyle and nodded. Doyle gave him the thumbs-up sign. The guy reached for the doorknob. I held my breath. The door opened and—silence. I exhaled, switching from flight to fight mode. We were going in.

  We crept into the bodega, tiptoeing around all the clutter. Philly guy was in the lead, followed by Doyle and Robinson, with me at rear guard. Doyle guided Philly guy to the big steel door. He pulled out a scrap of paper and entered Prisha’s five-digit numerical code into the door lock. A tinny metallic click for each number entered. My senses were acute and everything sounded loud. I looked up at the ceiling. The boy’s light had been on tonight, as it had been every night we’d surveilled the market in the run-up to this operation. One of the many risks we had to live with this night.

  On Doyle’s go-ahead, Philly guy turned the door latch and gently tugged. We had no way of knowing if this door was independently wired. I braced myself for a loud siren and got ready to run back to the van. The door swung open silently. Another victory. Doyle patted Philly guy on the shoulder. He turned and casually walked back through the bodega and out the back door. Mission accomplished. He was just our getaway driver now.

  I took first position at the door. I drew my pistol, then took my mini-flashlight in my weak hand. I popped the dead man’s button at the butt of my flashlight and saw that this fortified door did indeed lead down into a basement, as we thought it would. I started down the stairs. My first step caused the ancient wooden staircase to groan. I held up my hand to halt Robinson and Doyle. I stood in place for a long moment, listening. Hearing nothing, we continued to descend the stairs in a slow, exaggerated fashion. Stepping as lightly as possible. Doyle closed the steel door behind us. It took us over two minutes to get to the landing at the bottom of the stairs. I raised my weapon upon reaching the landing. I was ready to use it.

  My flashlight pierced the darkness, sweeping left to right across the space. It was crowded and crammed with stuff, but different stuff than upstairs. Instead of food and beer and diapers, the basement had workbenches, computers and loads of electronic gadgets strewn about. And unlike the chaos upstairs, everything down here was organized and orderly, arranged precisely by someone who took great care to do so.

  I entered the basement space. Doyle came up from behind and joined me. He held his gun and flashlight as I did. We passed through the lab to a ten-foot wall opening that led to a back supply room, which was also packed with equipment. My eyes fell upon a neon green curtain at the far corner of the room that appeared to be covering a closet. My stomach clenched when I noticed a pair of shoes, toes out, behind the curtain in the one-foot gap between the bottom of the curtain and the floor. I turned and looked at Doyle over my shoulder, jabbing my finger towards the curtain. His eyes widened when he saw the shoes.

  I hand-signaled us into place, both of us stacked to the left of the curtain. I held three fingers up to Doyle, then gave myself the count. One, two, three. I whipped the curtain aside, gun up and finger sliding to trigger. No legs in those shoes. Just a large oversized closet, with some hanging clothes and a roll-away cot tucked against the wall. Someone was pulling some late nights down here. I paused a few beats for the adrenaline dump to dissipate. I turned to Doyle; his face was pale, and he was breathing heavily. We smiled. We had cheated death—for now, anyway. We were in the basement, undetected. So far, all was to plan. I checked my watch: 12:19 a.m. I activated the chronograph stopwatch. Time to get to work.

  Doyle and I hustled back to Robinson, still stone still at the foot of the basement stairs. He wore a thick canvas vest covered in pockets, like a fisherman’s vest, and carried his laptop in a soft case under his arm. He also had a large LED hiker headlamp strapped to his forehead. I motioned him into the basement and whispered for him to make it quick. I had only met Robinson a few days ago, in preparation for tonight, but I liked him enough so far. Mostly I respected his skill. He was the real deal. He went to work. Like Philly guy, it was all blind trust with Robinson too.

  Robinson pulled a bunch of thumb drives and tools out of his vest pockets and set upon the electronic equipment. He rushed from computer to computer, carrying his laptop everywhere. Doyle and I stood at ready gun at the foot of the stairs, the only way in and out of the basement. We alternated looking up into the darkness of the stairwell, then to the jerky circles of light from Robinson’s headlamp as he flitted from workbench to workbench.

  After a few minutes, I noticed the light had stopped moving, that Robinson had been working on the same computer for an inordinate amount of time. He flipped his headlamp up on his head and approached me and Doyle.

  “We got a bit of a problem,” Robinson whispered. He explained that he had been able to copy plenty of good evidence of Prisha’s criminality with ODYSSEUS, but that he couldn’t get his tracking virus software to load. I told him to try again. He shook his head no; he’d already tried it twice. It wasn�
�t going to load tonight. He said maybe he could patch the software and we could try to load it another night. Doyle and I said no, that we had only one bite at this apple. It was too risky to do a second entry.

  I pressed Robinson for a Plan B. He thought a moment and pulled another thumb drive from his vest. He said it contained a doomsday virus, that it would torch the ODYSSEUS local network set up in the basement. The bad news was that we would also lose our ability to monitor or retrieve any further data. Robinson assured me we already had enough good evidence secured on his laptop. He gave me and Doyle a few examples. I liked what I heard. We decided that nuking the basement network was our best available option. Robinson said it would take about ten minutes to load the virus. I told him to do it. He rushed back to the workbench and got started.

  As he worked, I turned my head towards the top of the basement steps, listening. I had heard the faint murmur of voices when we’d made entry into the bodega. They came from upstairs, and from their cadence I’d surmised the boy was watching late night television at low volume. I now heard that faint murmur again, but different voices and cadence. I closed my eyes to listen more intently. I definitely heard voices, and they appeared to be getting louder. Approaching.

  I grabbed Doyle by the arm and pointed up the stairs. I rushed to Robinson. Grabbed his arm, whispered for him to be absolutely quiet. I strode back to Doyle, careful to not make a sound. I stood stiff, straining to hear, blood pulsing in my ears. The voices had stopped. I began to think maybe I was hearing things, paranoia creeping in. Then the unmistakable sound of the market’s front door being unlocked and opened. Multiple voices. Upstairs in the market.

  The squeak of footfalls tracked across the basement ceiling and towards the basement door. I heard a woman’s laughter, coming closer now. I tapped Doyle and pointed to the supply room, pushing him ahead of me. We collected Robinson as we ran, careful to make no sound. The metal clicks of the numeric lock. We rushed into the supply room. The sound of the steel door opening. I pushed open the neon green curtain and we crowded in behind it. Closed it tight again. The creak of the first staircase step. I swatted at Robinson to turn off his headlamp.

  The voices were loud now; they were making no attempt to hide their presence. They switched on all the basement lights, which cast a spotlight under the curtain and into our closet hideaway. We shuffled away from the curtain and stood shoulder to shoulder, backs pressed up against the wall.

  I fingered back the curtain a sliver. Two men and a woman. They were in the basement now. I got a good look at them. The curtain shook in my hand. I dropped my hand to my side. Fuck. It was Khabir Ahmad, the tech. And Henrik Karlsson, Hewitt’s killer. And Prisha Baari. My brain wouldn’t believe what my eyes had seen. I checked again. I saw the same thing.

  I whispered it in Doyle’s ear; he in turn relayed the news to Robinson. I saw with dismay that Robinson’s eyes were watering, and feared the man would start crying and give us all away. I reached across Doyle and shook Robinson’s arm, then held a finger to my lips. He nodded, unconvincingly.

  I watched and listened. I saw and heard Karlsson best, as he sat directly opposite me, not fifteen feet away in my line of sight through the opening to the supply room. Prisha and Ahmad chose seats out of my view behind the wall. Their voices were casual as they spoke amongst themselves, but their words came to me mostly garbled, too low to be made out. I did hear ODYSSEUS mentioned a lot, and President Mo Udell’s name as well. Prisha dictated to Ahmad, as an exasperated boss does to a subordinate. Ahmad’s replies were short and brusque through his pronounced Arabic accent. Karlsson didn’t speak much. Twice he looked through the supply room directly at our curtain. Twice my sphincter puckered tighter than a snare drum. Thankfully, Karlsson made no move to get off his seat to investigate. Maybe, just maybe, we might all survive this yet. Maybe what I was watching would be a quick visit. It was well past midnight. Tomorrow was a workday. Maybe we’d get lucky. We stood dead still and quiet in the darkness behind the neon green curtain. Waiting for Lady Luck to roll her dice.

  But luck would not be a lady tonight. Instead, it was an obstinate man named Murphy, whose law defies the best-laid plans of mice and men: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Our old friend Murphy was kin to something I was all too familiar with from my army days: FUBAR—fucked up beyond all recognition. I was the one who had done our ops plan for this bodega basement break-in. It was me who was responsible for searching the shadowy corners where Murphy liked to lurk. It was my job to keep FUBAR on the sidelines. This was what I’d excelled at in the army. Why they’d given me that big medal. I had beaten Murphy many times at his own game. He picked the worst night to settle the score.

  I had planned for everything. Everything but allergies, that is.

  I didn’t plan for the three of us to be huddled together in a cramped closet for twenty minutes. I didn’t know that Robinson was allergic to wool. I didn’t notice that the neon green curtain that shielded us from our enemy was made of one hundred percent wool.

  I saw it all. His head jerk triggered my peripheral vision. His eyes slammed shut; his mouth gaped wide. My hand clamped around his mouth, but it was too late. Robinson let loose a full sneeze, the sound loud and unmistakable. I knew instantly we were done.

  I whipped back to the curtain and looked out. All conversation had stopped. Karlsson was now most definitely looking directly at us, eyes squinted. He slowly rose and walked into the storage room, hitting the light switch on. My eyes fought to adjust to the brightness as he crept closer. Karlsson was three steps away. I let go of the curtain and pushed Doyle and Robinson back a step. I raised my gun high to ready position and waited.

  The curtain flew open in a blur. I raised my gun on target.

  “Hands up!” I heard myself shout.

  Karlsson’s eyes went wide but he quickly recovered. I took a step forward, he backwards. We did it again. I was out of the closet now. I sensed Doyle at my side, gun drawn. I told Karlsson to keep going. I heard shouting coming from the other room. In this way, Karlsson walked backwards, hands up, into the main room of the basement. Doyle swung his weapon on Prisha and Ahmad. There was a lot of shouting. With difficulty, I got everyone quiet again.

  I put Karlsson on his knees, then flat on the floor on his belly, feet crossed at the ankle. He smirked the whole time, never taking his piercing eyes off me. I then told Doyle to cover him while I put Prisha and Ahmad on their bellies too. Told Doyle to kill Karlsson if he moved, which was performance art for Karlsson’s benefit, as I already knew Doyle would kill him.

  All three were now on the floor, heads straining upward to see us standing in front of them. I told Doyle to disarm Karlsson and then motioned for him to pass me his weapon, which he did. Then he approached Karlsson from my opposite side, leaving me a shooting angle. Doyle bent down and frisked Karlsson’s waist, finding big-caliber Ruger tucked into the front of his pants. Doyle tucked it away and rejoined me. I gave him back his gun.

  “Hello, Frank,” Prisha said with a smile. “I am oh so happy to see you after all these years.”

  Prisha’s lilting voice made me retch. I saw the pistol shake in my hand. I really, really wanted to shoot her in the head. I forced my thoughts back to the mission. We had made a lot of noise down here, and I had no idea whether the kid and his parents would come down and investigate. Or if Prisha had sent the bat signal already. Either way, we had precious little time.

  “Shut up and listen, Prisha,” I said evenly. “I’m only gonna say this once. You’re through. ODYSSEUS is over. Your network is toast, all your data corrupted. But not before we copied what we need to put you in prison for a long time.”

  This wiped the smile off Prisha’s face. Her dark shark eyes darted back and forth, seeking a card to play.

  “So here’s the deal. You’re—”

  “You need to think this through, Frank,” she said. “You may think you have the upper hand here, but I assure you, you are mistaken.”

  “You’r
e gonna write me a letter,” I continued, ignoring her, “saying my termination was a mistake. That I should be put back in good standing—”

  “You did all this for an apology, Frank?” Prisha laughed. “Okay. I apologize,” she said mockingly. “Now stop pointing that gun at me and get the hell out of here.”

  “You’ll have my full benefits package restored—”

  “You want your old job back?” she said, incredulity creeping into her voice now.

  “—and you resign from CIA.”

  Ahmad tried to respond. Doyle told him to shut up or he’d put a bullet in his leg.

  Karlsson was calm as ice, still wearing the same smirk. It was unnerving. Our eyes locked.

  “I assume there’s a ‘but’ in here somewhere?” Karlsson asked me. “Get to it. I’m not lying on this floor all night.”

  I turned back to Prisha. “I get my money and reputation back, you resign from CIA, and I won’t tell anyone what I know about you and ODYSSEUS.” I took a half-step closer to her, leaned down to give her a good look at my face. “You fail to do this, and I’ll expose everything. I’ll ruin you, Prisha, as you did me. Eye for an eye. You’ll go to prison. And we both know that’s no place for woman like you.”

  “You’re actually serious,” Prisha said with a dismissive shake of her head.

  Ahmad shouted something in Arabic that sounded like cursing. Karlsson told him to shut up.

  Prisha tried charm now, stalling for time. I repeated my demand. She feigned ignorance, tried the this-is-all-one-big-mistake thing. Then made excuses and shifted blame. I got terse; she grew emboldened. Doyle tapped the face of his watch. Robinson spoke up and shared a few key pieces of evidence he had copied off the server. Prisha’s face dropped. I pressed for her answer. She agreed to my demands but argued for time. I gave her one week, which she said was impossible, that I should know that the government doesn’t move that fast. We agreed on two weeks. I would have my money and CIA letter by December 20. My Christmas present, she said.