The man in the blue jacket was still fifty yards away when he waved his arms and yelled, “Hello, friend! Do not worry about me. I am not here to hurt.”
Evers had heard the same Pakistani accent—if not the same voice—thousands of times over the years. “Do I know you?”
Blue Man had stopped his approach. “No, Mister Arthur Evers, but we will soon be friends.”
“I’ve got enough friends.” Evers didn’t like the guy’s approach, didn’t trust him.
“Suppose I can make you a very rich man?”
Evers launched a laugh. “You a Nigerian prince with nineteen million dollars you’ve got to get rid of?”
Blue Man looked confused. “No, I am not Nigerian.”
Interesting way he put that. “But you’ve got the nineteen million?”
Blue Man’s face didn’t change much. “Can we please sit and talk? My business is not the kind that should be shouted.”
Evers reeled in his line, put his rod down on a deadfall, and turned uphill to head back to the cabin. Without looking back, he beckoned for Blue Man to follow.
The cabin had a dead bolt on the door, but if there was a key, Evers had never seen it. Presumably one was not needed out here, at least until such time as bears figured out how to turn knobs and pull doors open. Inside, the place was . . . rustic. No running water, but he had plenty of kerosene and firewood. A tiny gas-powered generator provided enough electricity for a dorm fridge and a toaster oven. Other cooking was done on the woodstove that doubled as his central heating system. He enjoyed the isolation.
Which was why he was not keen on having a stranger stop by.
Blue Man was still outside when Evers snagged his little SIG Sauer P365 off the drainboard and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. Next, he pulled two Bud Lites out of the fridge, stripped the cap off one, and had the other at the ready for Blue Man when he crossed the threshold.
The visitor stopped just beyond the doorjamb and held up his hands as if to surrender. “I think you know that my religion does not allow alcohol,” he said. His tone sounded light. If he took offense, he didn’t show it.
“Well, you know we Americans aren’t allowed to make assumptions about such things anymore. Trigger warnings and all that.”
Blue Man looked confused again.
“Never mind,” Evers said. “Say your piece.”
“May we sit down?”
“Nope. For all I know, you’re some Jihadi assassin here to kill me. I want some maneuvering room if it comes to that.”
“Of course. My name is Amal Al-Faisel. I come from Pakistan to make you a very rich man.”
Evers’s gut tumbled. “Oh, God,” he said. “The proverbial nineteen million.”
“Only eight, I am afraid,” Amal said. His face showed only earnestness. “May we sit now?”
And so it began. Amal and some unnamed associates had drilled down on Evers from his board posts. The opportunity he offered could not have been simpler: terrorism by proxy, to be codenamed Retribution. For the sum of eight million dollars, Evers would manage all aspects of launching exactly three multifocal simultaneous mass killings. All the killers would have to be American, and all attacks needed to carried out in Middle America, where complacency ruled. The body counts needed to be high, but the absolute value of hearts stopped mattered less than the elegance and thoroughness of the execution.
Amal’s presentation took fewer than ten minutes to deliver, and when the man was done, Evers stared back at him. He literally did not know what to say.
“I need you to agree,” Amal said.
“I don’t know that I’m ready to do that,” Evers said.
Amal groaned. “That’s troubling,” he said. “Having laid this out, I don’t know how I could walk away without a deal.”
“You want to kill me?” Evers said. He stood. “Give it your best shot. We’ll see whose body gets fed to the coyotes.”
Amal threw back his head and laughed. It was a hearty, phlegmy thing. “I love you Americans and your swagger. You all learned to speak by watching Bruce Willis movies.”
“That’s a lot of talk in the middle of a fight, Mister Amal.”
“Sit, sit, sit,” Amal said. “I am not here to fight you. Nor will I engage in a fight if it starts.” He leaned in. “If I’m being honest, I am not very good at fighting with my hands.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Or with guns.”
Evers waited for the rest.
“Sit back down, Arthur. I promise you that there will be no violence here today.”
“I can’t make that same promise,” Evers said.
Amal continued pointing at Evers’s chair with an open palm. “Please hear me out.”
Evers didn’t like it. To make his position clear, he removed the SIG from his pocket as he sat and rested the pistol on his knee. Muzzle pointed to a neutral spot, his finger off the trigger.
“Here’s how this works, and why you will say yes to getting rich. I’m going to reach into my pocket now, so don’t shoot.” Amal moved very slowly as he unzipped his parka and withdrew a manila mailing envelope. It had no markings that Evers could see. Amal dangled the envelope with two fingers from its corner as he handed it over.
“What is this?” Evers asked. It felt like paper.
“Good old-fashioned photographs, I’m afraid.” He waited until Evers was pulling out the contents to expound, “I’ll bet you can guess what you’re about to see. Your brother and your sister, their respective spouses, and their collective eight beautiful children.”
Evers felt his bowels rumble. “Why are you showing me these?”
Amal gave him a coy smile and wagged his finger at him playfully. “You’re not a stupid man, First Sergeant Arthur Evers. You know why I show these to you, but I suppose it’s fair that you want to assume nothing. Very well. If you do not perform your mission as directed, these are the people who will die at the hands of my compatriots, and they will die with all the imagination that the West has come to expect from my part of the world. Surely, you have seen the videos.”
Oh, God, yes, he’d seen them. Heads sawed off with dull knives. People burned alive. People drowned in cages.
Evers said nothing as he slid the pictures back into the envelope and handed them back.
“No,” Amal said. “I think you should keep them. Look at them whenever you need encouragement to continue.”
“I . . . I don’t understand why you want me to do this. Why don’t you do the killing yourselves with all the flair you want?”
Amal stood. “Because I want you to do it,” he said. “I’m paying for a service. You do not need to know why.” He took a huge breath. “I need you to decide. Two beautiful families await your answer, even if they do not know that yet.”
And the decision was made.
In the ensuing weeks and months, as he carefully recruited his team from among disgruntled former soldiers, he came to understand without asking why Amal had chosen him for the attacks. It didn’t matter that Arthur Evers, per se, lead the effort. Rather it mattered that the attacks be led by America’s fallen heroes. Even if the public never discovered their identities, the team members themselves would know.
There was a symbolic satisfaction to knowing that they had successfully turned America on itself.
If he were a more introspective man—or a less wounded one, physically and psychologically—he supposed he would feel traitorous in his execution of Retribution, but given the inevitability of his participation, he’d come to think of it as just another mission. And like every other mission he’d led in his lifetime, he committed himself heart and soul to exacting maximum carnage. At the end of the day, killing was killing, and he was an expert at it.
His team members were all expert at it, and they were proving their worth.
This next thing—the biggest hits of all—would be the end for him. With three million dollars nestled in a bank offshore, when the smoke cleared—the other five million would be distribut
ed among his ad hoc army—he would be on his way to the Caymans. He had no choice but to count on Amal to keep his word about leaving his family alone after the missions were completed, but just to be on the safe side, Evers had every intention of disappearing again, but this time he’d disappear deeper.
If Amal Al-Faisel could not find him, then he would have no reason to leverage his family again. Evers would be rich, free, and able to afford whatever healthcare he wanted, without having to jump through all the goddamn hoops.
The chirping of an incoming message broke him from his ruminations. He turned from the window and settled in behind his computer. He had a new email on his personal account, and his heart jumped when he saw the source. “How did Porter Brooks get this address?” he wondered aloud.
Evers hesitated before opening the email, wondering if this was some kind of virus sent by Brooks as retribution for the way he had spoken to him during their last encounter. Then he figured, what the hell? There was a reason why he paid a commercial service to backup all that data. He opened the email.
The text read, “This is your guy. I think your operation is deeply compromised. No record on the guy through facial recognition software, but got a fair match with the face in the attached article. Have fun with this.”
He’d attached a photo of a man and woman talking. It looked like they might be in a park. He recognized the woman to be Irene Rivers, director of the FBI, but she was not the focus of the photo. The picture presented remarkably good detail of a fit, good-looking guy, probably in his forties.
When he clicked the link below the picture, he opened an article from the Washington Tribune that showed a gaggle of men and women in formal wear chatting in the blazing red environment that could only be the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. When he zoomed in, he got a better image of a familiar-looking man rocking a tuxedo, chatting with a stunning lady in a clingy red dress and stiletto sandals. The caption identified the man only as Jonathan Grave, president of Security Solutions, located in Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia.
This is your guy, Brooks had said. This is the guy who’s been shoving sticks into the spokes of his operations.
The attached article confirmed that the locale was the Kennedy Center and the stuck-up event was a fundraiser for the Resurrection House Foundation, also located in Fisherman’s Cove.
“Fisherman’s Cove,” he said, tasting the words. He’d heard of the place, but he’d never been there. A few taps of the keys, and there it was along the Northern Neck of the Potomac River. What was that, an hour, hour-and-a-half drive from DC?
“I think it’s time for a nice autumn drive,” he said to the room. But first, he had a few administrative details to take care of.
Chapter Twenty
Fred Kellner hadn’t expected the next operation to start so soon. The others had been separated by weeks, but now only three days had passed before his dedicated burner buzzed in his pocket. A text message read merely, “p23 t91.” Of the two numbers, the second was by far the most disturbing. T91—tango nine-one in Kellner’s mind—meant that something was wrong and it was time to burn the burner phone. Without hesitating, he powered the phone down, tore open the plastic body and ripped out the SIM card, the brain of the phone. He dropped them all onto the concrete floor of the garage in his rental house in Herndon, Virginia, and crushed them one at a time with a hammer.
The first number in the message—papa two-three—represented one of four Dark Web sites whose numeric URLs he had memorized long ago. The sites were dormant—that is, nonexistent—until Iceman brought them up, and then they lived for only a short period of time. Kellner didn’t know how long that period was, but he’d never pushed it past eight hours.
Kellner made his way to the Herndon Public Library and planted himself behind one of the public access computers. For reasons he couldn’t begin to understand, the county let just anyone work at a computer station, even without benefit of a library card. They thought they were making life easier on county residents, but apparently never considered how easy they made things for people like him.
He was in and out in under ten minutes. The website featured a series of geometric angles, dots, and boxes that would mean nothing to anyone unfamiliar with the cryptic cipher of the Freemasons. For those who were familiar with the cipher, the figures would still be nonsensical because the message they presented was likewise encrypted. Kellner snapped a picture of the screen with his phone, then closed the site and double-checked to make sure that his search was not retained in the computer’s cache.
His town house in Herndon would have been a nice starter home for a newly married couple. Located on Elden Street, arguably the main drag through the once-charming town, the narrow brick attached homes soared three stories over street level, and they provided garage parking for any vehicle smaller than a clown car. At least Kellner’s Ford Expedition was partially sheltered by the second-floor deck. The twelve-hundred-square-foot floor plan was divided into three floors of four hundred square feet. Kellner couldn’t stand the place.
But small rooms meant thin walls, which in turn meant a virtual shopping mall for wireless internet servers. The strongest signals came from routers that were “secure,” but he got into the Beachum House network by typing in the word password as the WEP key, and he was in. He linked with a computer in Dubai, which then linked to a server in Croatia.
When his signal was scrambled, Kellner ran the Freemason cipher through the decryption site that Iceman had established. He’d never had to jump through this many security hurdles just to get to a message—not even when his jobs in the Sandbox dealt with the kinds of secrets that could topple nations.
When the decryption was finished, he had a series of letters and numbers:
38D 28 21.70Nx77D 59 74. 00 W 0744 1028
That was all of it. No description. Something about the pattern looked familiar, but the rest made no sense. As he leaned back in his desk chair, he opened a bottom drawer, withdrew a bottle of George Dickel, stripped off the cap, and took a pull. Iceman was not one to send gibberish—certainly not with this much effort—so the meaning was there. All he had to do was figure—
He saw it. The first bit of the message was GPS grid coordinates: 38 degrees, 28 minutes, 21.70 seconds of north latitude, by 77 degrees, 59 minutes, 74.00 seconds of west longitude. It looked strange because the Freemasons did not allow for degree markings. Deal with this stuff long enough and you get a feel for where longitude and latitude locations are, and this one was pretty close, he thought.
He entered the numbers into a commercial mapping program, and he came up with the northwest corner of Main and Culpeper Streets in Culpeper, Virginia.
The rest was just a guess, but he imagined 0744 to be a time of day, albeit unusually specific. Since today was October 27, he was going to roll the dice that 1028 meant tomorrow. That was a damned early time to be at a place that was easily an hour away, but he’d be going against traffic.
As a final step before leaving the Beachum family alone, he checked his offshore bank account. Sure enough, additional money was there. Soon, it would be time to go hot again.
* * *
Kellner left Herndon at 06:00 to make the one-hour drive to Culpeper. At its face, that seemed like a lot of lead time, but in the Washington Metro area, traffic was always a crapshoot. All it took to lock things up for hours was for one asshole to check his text messages at the wrong moment. Kellner wasn’t sure what would happen if he blew a deadline set by Iceman, but his gut told him that it would be unpleasant. In his experience, people who had those kinds of financial resources also had formidable human resources at their disposal.
Resources like the rest of Team Retribution.
As it worked out, Kellner arrived in Culpeper with nearly an hour to spare. As modern small towns went, this one still seemed to have a lot of life in it. There were the obligatory coffee and trinket shops, but he also saw shingles for insurance companies, law offices, and more than a
few antique stores. The retail establishments hadn’t opened yet for the day, but the Culpeper Diner seemed to be doing impressive business.
The business district was a few blocks square, beyond which he saw older-style homes that ultimately gave way to what he figured was farmland.
The corner of Main and Culpeper Streets was remarkable for its lack of remarkableness. The northwest quadrant, the specific geospatial point he’d been given, didn’t even have a building on it. Rather, it was a parking lot, itself largely unoccupied, surrounded on three sides by a low brick wall.
He drove slowly past the assigned point in space, looking for some clue of what might lie ahead. And he saw it. Good thing he was Old School in his tradecraft. Someone had placed a ten-inch-long white chalk stripe at about thigh height along one of the redbrick walls. In Kellner’s corner of the Special Forces community, that meant there’d be an old-fashioned brush pass at an hour to be otherwise determined. A yellow stripe would have meant to check a dead drop at a predetermined location.
Of course, it could also mean that kids had been playing with chalk, but under the circumstances, that seemed unlikely.
He drove to one of the two-hour parallel slots on Main Street, opposite Antigone’s Antiques and parked. Now came the tricky part. There was no surer way to draw attention to yourself than to sit alone in a car on an otherwise unoccupied street. People would wonder if you were sick or if you were up to no good. Either way, that knock on the window by a cop wouldn’t be important in real time, but it would give the cop something to remember in the future.
With a half hour left till his commitment, he decided to peek into the diner and grab a cup of coffee and a muffin, both of which were outstanding. No wonder the place was so crowded. When it was time to go, he paid his bill, added a generous tip, and headed down the street.
Kellner hadn’t practiced basic tradecraft in a long time, but there wasn’t a lot that could go wrong with a basic brush pass. Even if he fumbled the pass or dropped it, this wasn’t exactly East Berlin in the 1970s.
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