Seven forty-four is actually a minute long, and sixty seconds is a long time to kill when you’re trying to look natural in a strange place. Kellner paced himself to arrive at the corner precisely at 07:43:60, and was pleased to see that he was not the only punctual one.
A pretty young thing in her early twenties approached from the opposite end of Main Street and made too much of a show about not making eye contact as they closed in on each other. If this had been a couple of years ago in Kabul, Kellner would have had his left hand on his pistol as he passed on the right, and as the distance closed to within feet, his heart jumped a beat. Had he made a mistake? He didn’t know this contact from—
As they passed, he opened the fingers of his right hand, and the young lady pressed what felt like a plastic ball into his palm. She never broke stride. With a little tweak to her body language, she would have made a good operative.
One key to this line of work was to never review the received message in public. He didn’t even look into his palm until he was back into his car. The girl had handed him what could have been a miniature container of Silly Putty, a black plastic ball that split in two. It had been wrapped in tamper-proof tape and clearly had not been opened.
His curiosity piqued, Kellner started his Expedition and drove to the parking lot of the Walmart he’d seen on the way into town. If ever there was a place to hide in plain sight in America, it was in the parking lot of a Walmart, where the corporate policy invited weary travelers to spend the night parked outside their store.
Using the folding knife from his pocket, Kellner cut the tape and peeled the tiny egg open to reveal the contents as a flash drive. He lifted his laptop from the slot where he kept it between the driver’s seat and the center console, opened it up, and inserted the drive. It was encrypted, of course, so it took nearly a minute to run it through the program that would make it legible.
As the computer worked its magic, Kellner checked his mirrors and craned his neck to make sure that this wasn’t some kind of a trap. Finally, the plain language message appeared on his screen.
Change your appearance asap. Facial recognition software is looking for you. Visit Claude at 134 Simpson there in C-pep. Pass=I’ll be just fine. Your choice on Claude’s tomorrow.
Next event must be huge, then we go dormant for a while. Check out Capital Harbor. Halloween, 21:23. Shoot for 100.
Text new burner when able.
Eliminate your street contact. Details attached.
Iceman.
“Well, shit,” Kellner said aloud to his truck. Somehow, he’d been made, and he still had lots of work to do.
* * *
In his line of work, Kellner had come to expect every illicit contractor to be old, twitchy, and male. They were the kinds of people who grooved on the notion of the killing business but never wanted any actual blood on their hands. Sort of like gamers, he supposed—men who give themselves lethal-sounding names and arm up with enough virtual guns and ammo to blow up the virtual world and feel powerful while doing it, while in fact having never once been punched in the face.
He was surprised then—no, call it shocked—when the resident of 134 Simpson Drive turned out not to be Claude, but rather Claudette, and she was anything but old or twitchy. In fact, she was pretty hot in a plus-size Ellie May Clampett kind of way. Big country-girl blond hair, western shirt that emphasized her God-given gifts (as Kellner’s mother used to refer to boobs), and blue jeans, but without the rope belt from the television show.
His surprise must have been evident because she laughed when she opened the door to her 1940s-era farmhouse and saw him standing there. “Can I help you?” she said.
“I, uh . . .” He found himself stammering.
“Can I help you.” This time she said it as a statement rather than a question. She was prompting him.
“I’ll be just fine,” Kellner said. The pass phrase.
She held out her hand for him. “Call me Claude,” she said. “I know you ain’t got no name, but I got to call you something, so how’s Wilbur?” She didn’t wait for an answer but rather stepped aside and motioned for Kellner to come in.
“I hope you got cash,” she said, “because checks and credit cards ain’t welcome here.” She laughed when she said it, but the humor escaped Kellner.
“Is it the boobs?” she asked as she led him deeper into the tiny house. All the rooms were small, and there had to be five of them on the first floor, separated from one another by archways.
“Excuse me?”
“The look on your face. Was it the boobs? Not what you were expecting?”
“I, uh, I guess not,” Kellner said.
“So, how much you need?” Claude asked. She was still walking, leading him to a doorway under the stairs. Sensing his hesitation, she added, “My workshop isn’t the kind of thing that should be visible through the windows, don’t you agree?”
“I suppose,” Kellner said.
Claudette opened the door and flipped the switch for the single exposed lightbulb that barely illuminated anything. “You didn’t answer my question,” she said. “How much do you need?”
“I didn’t answer it because I didn’t understand it,” Kellner said.
“You’re after a disguise, right?
“Right.”
“So, who are you trying to hide from? If it’s just cameras, that’s a whole different animal than if you’re trying to hide from family or the laws. With them, you gotta change everything from face to posture to walk to voice. Ain’t impossible, but ain’t easy, neither.”
Okay, so maybe Claudette was a little bit twitchy.
“I guess I’m mainly just going for face,” he said. They were in the cellar now, and it looked like something from a horror movie. Claudette flipped on another switch, and brilliant light erupted to reveal droopy latex faces, stands draped with wigs, and little plastic containers filled with teeth, eyeballs, and fingernails.
“Business must be good,” Kellner thought aloud.
“I do a lot of theater work in addition to . . . well, in addition to this kind of work.” She walked to a full-length makeup mirror on the far wall, lined with bare lightbulbs all around the top half of the frame. “Come over here and let me take a look.”
Kellner did as he was told. Claudette swung in behind him and for a few seconds they stared at him together.
“Okay, Wilbur,” she said, smacking Kellner on his ass. “Take off everything but your underpants.”
“What? Why?”
“If you want, you can take those off, too,” Claudette said. “You ain’t got nothin’ that I ain’t seen a lot of over the years.” To emphasize her point, she winked and bounced her boobs.
“No, I’ll be fine, thanks,” he said. Except he really wasn’t. As a wearer of old-fashioned boxer shorts, once the restraining compression of his jeans was removed, his arousal was plainly evident.
Mostly naked now, he returned to the mirror, and they stared together again. “Well,” Claudette said with another playful spank, “at least I know you like me. But don’t even think of unsheathing that thing at me.”
Unsheathing?
“Folks like you are a challenge,” Claudette said. “You’re fit, you got a six-pack, angled features, and one great big eyebrow. And we gotta change all of that. Go have a seat in the chair and give me a bit to work my magic.”
“How much is this going to cost?” Kellner asked.
“Does it matter?”
The starkness of her question startled him. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”
“Then go sit down and quit askin’ stupid questions. I’ll have my back turned in case you want to jerk that thing off. I promise I won’t look.”
Kellner gaped at her. As did Little Fred.
Claudette leaned back and launched a hearty laugh. “I’m just kiddin’ you,” she said. “You go spunkin’ in here and we’re done. I just like getting’ young men like you thinkin’ about not havin’ a hard-on ’cause that just makes �
�em harder and every one of you blush like schoolgirls when it happens.”
Okay, twitchy and crazy.
Over the course of an hour, Claudette cycled Kellner four times from the chair to the mirror. She took studied dimensions with a tape measure, and then she’d pinch bits of skin and have him strike various poses. He suspected that half of the pinches and poses were more for her entertainment than for professional reasons, but the weirdness of it all had come to feel less weird, and that eliminated a lot of the stress.
“All right,” she announced. “We’re finally about done. Now, unless you want me traveling with you doing whatever it is you’re going to be doing—for all I know, you could be one of them terrorists that’s been shootin’ people and blowin’ them up, right?—you’re gonna need to know how to put all this stuff on.”
It started with shaving off the middle of his unibrow, and then resculpting the remaining brows to look different. He learned how to make wrinkles appear in his face and how prosthetic teeth, combined with latex chins and cheeks, changed all the outlines. And perhaps most important of all, he learned how to feather the makeup from the appliances onto his skin in a way that would look normal even under close scrutiny.
Throughout the entire lesson, though, Kellner had difficulty concentrating. He needed the knowledge—it was about his own survival, after all—but it troubled him that once he was certain that he’d milked Claudette for all the skinny he could get, he would have to kill her. That was the problem with talkative people. They never knew when to shut up. As soon as she made her little joke—was it really a joke?—about the possibility of him being one of the Retribution killers, she’d sealed her fate.
Iceman must have had his doubts about her, else why would he have written, “Your choice on Claude’s tomorrow”?
In his heart, Kellner didn’t believe that she had any kind of inside knowledge of him or of Retribution, but the penalty assessed if his intuition proved wrong was simply too high. He could take no chances on this one. For all he knew, his poker face wasn’t the wonder that he believed it to be, and at the mention of the shootings and the bombings maybe something had registered in his eyes.
Even if it didn’t strike her now, maybe it would strike her in the future. And she was the only other person on the planet who had any idea what he looked like!
Such a shame. The death penalty for talking too much.
Claudette’s body language told him that they were about done, so as she turned back to her worktable to arrange her things for the last time, Kellner rose from his seat. He’d try to make it quick, maybe take her out before she could—
It was the quick hitch of her shoulders that gave her away.
Kellner knew that she’d grabbed a weapon before he saw it just from the way her stance changed, and that half-second bought him a chance. When Claudette spun around, she led with a pistol, a little purple Kimber 1911-style pocket gun, and from the way she held it, he knew that she knew how to use it.
She brought it around at face height from Kellner’s left, but he got his hand out in time to catch the gun in his fist, between the hammer and the front sight. As the pistol fired, the flame of the muzzle flash hurt like shit, making him wonder if maybe she’d got him in the hand. What he knew for sure was that he’d kept the slide from cycling completely and that the shell casing was stove-piped in the breech, effectively transforming the weapon into a paperweight.
In the same motion, two seconds into the fight, Kellner pulled Claudette in closer, then slammed his right elbow into the bridge of her nose. As blood erupted and she backpedaled into her worktable, she left her little Kimber in Kellner’s hand.
He cycled the action, cleared the spent casing, and leveled the muzzle at Claudette’s forehead.
She cowered, bringing her hands up in front of her face. “Please don’t,” she said. Only, her voice was different. Lower. Manly. “I only tried to shoot because I thought you were going to kill me. I saw it in your face.”
“You’re a guy,” Kellner said.
“I’m a makeup specialist,” he said. “I was trying a new persona. Please don’t shoot.”
Kellner shot the makeup specialist through his left eye. “Yeah, well, I’m a killer, so . . .”
As Kellner gathered his new toys and gadgets and started back up the stairs, he wondered how long it would take before someone found Claude(tte)’s body.
Chapter Twenty-one
Jonathan hated waiting. Yes, it was part and parcel of his military years, but back then he’d be waiting for orders from others. This kind of waiting—hanging around for another shoe to drop—was torture to him. It had been twelve hours since they’d nailed down Fred Kellner’s face, and no one had yet to see the son of a bitch.
During his dinner meeting with Wolfie the night before, after he’d dropped the bomb about their facial recognition discovery, Director Rivers at first showed anger. “You should have told me before now,” she said.
“I am telling you,” he countered.
“How do you know that the face belongs to Kellner?”
Jonathan relayed the logic without throwing Derek Halstrom under the bus. He was grateful but not surprised that she didn’t press for details. In all their many years of working together, Wolverine had adapted to the fact that Jonathan and his team had access to means and methods that they had no right to.
Jonathan said, “If you can re-create an evidence trail, you can probably still use it.”
She cocked her head and gave him that look. “I have always admired your deep knowledge of the law and prosecutorial standards.”
He winked and took a sip of his martini. The site of their dinner—Café Renaissance in Vienna, Virginia—was a new one for them, and he liked it. The old-school charm and outstanding food were a surprise, given its location in an out-of-the-way strip mall on Glyndon Street, but it was quiet, and the owner was kind enough to give them an even-quieter table in the back where they would not be overheard.
The Tweedle brothers occupied the only other table in this section of the restaurant. When Jonathan caught the eye of the taller one—Brooks, he thought—he blew him an air kiss.
“Why are you such an ass with my security team?” Irene asked, exasperation obvious.
“Because they’re so friggin’ self-righteous,” Jonathan said. “And because they have a shitty job that they want everyone to think is a cool job.”
“It’s not cool to protect me?” Irene asked the question with a smile. No offense had been taken.
“Merely being in your presence is an honor, Madam Director.” They clinked glasses. Hers held a vodka tonic. “Now, back to the issue of stopping crazies, can you at least send agents to Kellner’s known former residences and see if they can track him down?”
“Sure, I can,” Irene said. “I’m not sure what that end game would be.”
“We have to make certain assumptions,” Jonathan said. “One is that Kellner is the right guy, and two, that he’s still involved in this Retribution thing. If we can find him, then we have a good idea of where the next event is going to be. Or, you can follow him to see where he’s going.”
“No, I can’t.” The annoyance was back. “I can’t justify a surveillance team without a warrant—or at least a reasonable likelihood of getting one. You’re talking a dozen or more agents just for one target.”
“You’ve got a more important case than this one, do you?”
“Jesus, Digger, it keeps coming back down to your own words: fruit from the poisonous tree. Without probable cause, I’ve got nothing. And you’re right, this is the most important task before us right now, and I’m not going to redirect resources away from operations that I know will pay off.”
“Do you have other suspects on the radar?”
“Yes, we do.”
“Did you know about Kellner before I told you about him?”
Irene grew uncomfortable and cleared her throat. “We certainly knew about the security footage.”
; “I know that,” Jonathan said. “You sent it to us.”
“But we didn’t have a name, and we couldn’t make the facial recognition work. Which is another reason why I can’t divert resources for your guy.”
Jonathan scowled. “I don’t get it.”
“I’m not sure I believe your results,” she explained. “Mother Hen is very good at what she does, but am I really to believe that she has access to better technology than the FB friggin’ I?”
Jonathan recognized the question as an opportunity to expound, but he didn’t take the bait. He made a show of opening his menu. “I understand that this Café Renaissance makes the best Irish coffee on the planet,” he said. “Be sure to save room.”
The rest of the night with Irene was largely non-case-related small talk because neither one of them had information that the other was cleared to hear. Just as well—
“We’ve got a hit!” Venice yelled with a war whoop. “He’s in Culpeper, Virginia!”
Jonathan shot to his feet. “Kellner?” He hurried out of his office to join Venice in hers.
“The one and only,” she said. “Yesterday morning.” She leaned in closer to her screen. “Time stamp says seven-fourteen. This image is from an ATM across the street.”
“Across the street from where?”
“From where Kellner is.”
Jonathan pointed to the far wall. “Bring it up on the big screen.” While she tapped the keys, Jonathan picked up the landline that sat at his station at the conference table. He punched four digits and listened to the ring.
A familiar gruff voice answered, “Fortress of Solitude, Kent speaking.”
“Come back to the War Room,” Jonathan said to Boxers. “We’ve got something.” Big Guy had been down in the basement armory, truly his happy place. Jonathan made a second call, and Gail picked up on the first ring. He delivered the same message to her.
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