The Collective

by Jack Rogan

  “Sir, if you’ll consult the officers around you, you’ll find that the local authorities have received their orders and have released the deceased into our custody. And now I’m afraid we have to go. We’re expected.”

  The driver turned again and started toward the front of the truck. The passenger smiled at Chang and did the same.

  Josh drew his gun, the sound of it sliding from the holster strangely loud amidst the noises of the crime scene. Chang muttered a curse and followed suit, taking aim along the other side of the van, where the passenger must be.

  “Don’t take another goddamn step!” Josh said.

  The driver froze, put up his arms, turned to face him, then slapped the side of the white van twice. The back doors popped open and the two soldiers who’d climbed in with the body bags held small semi-auto pistols aimed at Josh and Chang.

  Cops swore and drew their weapons. Shouting erupted. Some of the onlookers couldn’t seem to decide who they should be aiming at. The driver opened his door and slid behind the wheel, slamming it shut behind him.

  “Fuck!” Josh snapped. He lowered his gun as he raced alongside the van. One of the soldiers crouched in the back tracked him with a sweep of his semi-auto but didn’t pull the trigger, and then Josh was out of sight.

  He tried the door, found it locked, then stepped back and aimed at the driver through the half-open window.

  “Don’t let this go any further!” he barked.

  “Whatever happens is on you,” the driver said, cranking the engine to life. “But it seems to me you’ve got a lot of people in the line of fire back there.”

  Then he put the truck in gear and it started rolling forward. Josh swore at him again, his finger twitching on the trigger, knowing there were a dozen armed men and women behind the van wondering if they were supposed to open fire, knowing a lot of them would get shot if any of them did.

  Josh followed, running after the van. The cop who’d moved his car to let the first white van out hadn’t moved it back into place. At the cordon down the street, they would have no idea what was going down and would let the bastards out. They had their orders.

  “Goddammit!”

  He stopped running, turned around to a sea of clueless expressions, and stalked over to the nearest Medford cop.

  “Radio the cordon. Do not let that van get by them!”

  The dough-faced, fortyish cop gave him a dubious look. “Why? I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t have to get it!” Josh yelled. “Those bodies are about to vanish—including your dead Detective Jarman—and then none of us will ever know what really happened here. Stop the fucking van!”

  The bit about Jarman got the guy moving.

  “Josh!”

  As the cop whipped out his radio, Voss came running up with Turcotte and Chang. Monteforte and Coogan weren’t far behind, and they were followed by a coterie of agents and cops. Josh started to shout to his partner, but he swallowed his anger and hurried to meet her instead. Too many people to overhear, too many potential leaks.

  “We’ve gotta move!” Josh said, grabbing Voss’s arm and running for their car.

  “What the hell?” Turcotte called, he and Chang racing after them.

  Monteforte kept pace, racing for her own car, blue bubble flashing on the roof. She flung the door open and shouted to them, “Get in!”

  Josh didn’t hesitate, diverting Voss to Monteforte’s car. She ran around to get into the passenger seat and Josh climbed in back. Turcotte caught the door before he could close it.

  “It’s my goddamn case, Hart. Tell me what’s going on!”

  “It’s being pulled out from under you, and not by us. Get in the car!”

  Turcotte took an angry look around, then turned to Chang and Coogan, who were waiting behind him.

  “Lock it all down,” he snapped. “No one in or out. I’ll call you in two minutes.”

  As Turcotte climbed in, Monteforte put it in gear and hit the gas, the car leaping forward. She swerved around the nose of a patrol car, nearly hit an unmarked FBI vehicle, and then they were rocketing up the street toward the police cordon.

  Voss turned around in the front seat. “Talk to me, Josh!”

  “Those guys were SOCOM,” he said quickly. “Arsenault and Norris are gone. All of the bodies were just taken out of here in unmarked vans and the cops did nothing. They were all acting under orders.”

  “Orders we didn’t get,” Voss said, glaring at Turcotte. “Did you know about this?”

  The fury in his eyes said it all, but Josh knew he wouldn’t admit he had been made a fool.

  “All the bodies?” Monteforte said, knuckles white on the steering wheel. “They’ve got my partner’s body?”

  “I don’t think they made exceptions,” Josh said.

  “No,” Monteforte said, pain ravaging her face. “No more of this!”

  She floored it, hit the siren, laid on the horn. Up ahead a cop was just pulling his patrol car back into place—they had let the van through—but he reversed and pulled back out of Monteforte’s path.

  The detective skidded the car to a halt. “Which way?” she shouted out the window.

  Several of the cops pointed straight across the traffic circle.

  “Headed toward Route 16!” one of them called.

  Siren screaming, Monteforte floored it, tearing through the traffic circle and nearly hitting a woman out walking her dog. The car hugged the road as it raced along a narrow street with cars lining both sides. The light ahead was red but Monteforte barely tapped the brakes before she shot through.

  “This is insane!” Voss said. “SOCOM’s not even supposed to operate on U.S. soil. Why would Arsenault do this?”

  Josh glanced at Turcotte but neither of them answered.

  Monteforte didn’t hesitate. “Obviously he’s got something to fucking hide!”

  Turcotte had pulled out his cell phone, apparently to call Chang as he’d promised. Now he leaned forward.

  “What’s this direction, Detective? Where do you think they’re headed?”

  But even as he asked they came to another light, and beyond it they could see the interstate. Josh spotted the van off to the right on a road parallel to the highway.

  “If they get on 93 going south, my guess is the airport!” Monteforte said.

  Josh stared at Voss. “We can’t let that happen.”

  “No,” Turcotte agreed. “We can’t.”

  In the dashboard light, Lynch looked almost cadaverous. He had to be exhausted. Cait figured something must be keeping him running and, given the absence of coffee cups or empty energy drink cans, she guessed pills. It frightened her to have her daughter in the backseat of a car driven by a guy this wired. She had offered to drive for a while but Lynch had grunted “No, thanks,” and she didn’t have a lot of options. At least his hands were steady on the wheel and, though the circles under his eyes had deepened and darkened, he stayed awake.

  The guy turned purpose and determination into raw energy, and Cait would have to do the same. At least Leyla had quieted down again. When the baby had started crying, Cait had clambered into the back and given her a bottle of formula and a clean onesie that Leyla had chewed on for a few minutes before draping it over her face and falling back to sleep.

  They were on Route 84 now, a few miles across the Connecticut border, but they had both gone silent. The engine hummed and Lynch scanned newsradio stations in search of any mention of her name or the bloodshed they had left behind in Massachusetts. She wanted to shout at him to leave it alone, to stay on one station, but the guy seemed fanatical about the radio so she said nothing. He had been on the run before, had killed people and had killers pursuing him. She had to trust that he knew what he was doing.

  It was just that trust was so damn hard to come by right now.

  “Watch the speedometer,” she said. “The Connecticut State Police are brutal.”

  Lynch sniffed. “I’ve been driving longer than you’ve been alive.�
� But he did ease up on the gas.

  Cait had cut the go-phone from its plastic casing and put the detritus on the floor. Having decided she wasn’t likely to shoot Lynch anytime soon, she had stashed her gun in the glove compartment next to the pack of Marlboro Lights. But the go-phone seemed to weigh more than the gun. She clutched it in her right hand, trying not to look at it, trying to tell herself it couldn’t possibly weigh that much. Plastic and a battery—a few ounces, that was all.

  But the weight of a gun came as much from possibility as it did from metal and bullets, and this phone was much the same.

  Streetlights flickered across the windshield. Cars whipped by in the opposite direction, nighttime people with nighttime lives. There were only a handful of people she could even think of calling, and most of them would be asleep now. As much as she wanted them to know she was all right, she had decided that calling Auntie Jane and Uncle George might actually put them in danger, so that was out. She wondered about Hercules. Sean had made her commit the Hot Line number to memory. She had been calling him when Lynch had thrown her cell phone out the window, but now she hesitated. Sean had trusted him completely, but Herc had lied to her about the circumstances of her brother’s death. She knew it. Maybe he had to be careful what he said—maybe others were listening—but could she trust him?

  Despite the air conditioner whispering its chill, her hands felt clammy.

  “Fuck it,” she muttered. Doing nothing was no better than giving up.

  And there was one person she knew she could call, who had always had her back. Lynch started changing radio stations again, voices mixing with the static, sports and L.A. gossip and weather and politics.

  Cait held the phone in front of her and dialed Jordan’s cell phone number. But when it clicked over to voice mail, she disconnected the call, heart pounding. Leaving him a message might be a mistake. The cops would have started interviewing people already—or maybe the Feds—and they would have found out how close she and Jordan were.

  So who else could she call?

  A smile flickered across her lips, and she dialed quickly, from memory. She needed him to answer, because there was no one else to call. Her pulse raced when it began to ring. She tried to get herself under control, tried to control her shaking hand. Then the answering machine clicked on and she heard Ronnie Mellace’s voice, and she knew she had done the right thing.

  “Ronnie, it’s Cait,” she said. “If you’re there, pick up. Please, please pick up.”

  A beat. Then another. And just as she feared she would be cut off, a click.

  “Cait? It’s like a quarter to one—”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. Don’t be,” he said, his voice a familiar, comforting rasp. A nighttime desert voice, a whisper accompanying the hiss of blowing sand and the thunderous silence of dormant guns.

  “What’s wrong? Can’t sleep?” Ronnie asked. And then, after a moment, “What phone are you calling from? Did you get a new cell?”

  They had promised to watch out for each other, she and Jordan and Ronnie. But that had been in Iraq, where death had been their constant companion. Would it still hold true now that they were home? He’d said it would. He’d called to check on her earlier tonight. Now she would find out.

  “Cait? Hello? You still there?”

  “I’m here,” she said, glancing at Lynch. The old man kept his eyes on the road but his knuckles were white on the wheel. “Ronnie, I … I need you.”

  She could almost feel him snap to attention.

  “Tell me.”

  “Some people … I can’t get into detail right now, but some people are trying to kill me and Leyla.”

  “Jesus!”

  “There were guns. My friend Miranda, who was at my place earlier? She’s dead.”

  “Cait, where are you? I’ll come right now.”

  A soft smile touched her lips. Lynch was with her, but Lynch was a stranger. Ronnie made her feel like she wasn’t alone after all. Now she just needed Jordan. Just the thought of him eased her mind a little.

  “I’m coming to you,” she said. “I’m on 84 right now. There’s crazy shit going down, man. You’re gonna think my brains got mashed, but you’ve got to believe me. Conspiracy shit. I’ve got no one to trust.”

  “You’ve got me,” he said, voice so strong.

  “I know. And I need you to get Jordan, too. He knows some of this already,” she said. “He’s probably freaking out right now. I tried calling but got his voice mail. Track him down, Ronnie. Tell him I need him.”

  “I’ll grab him and meet you. What’s your ETA?”

  She tried to read the signs flashing by outside. “Less than an hour. But that’s a guess.”

  Ronnie rattled off directions to a Wendy’s just off 84 east of Hartford. Easy enough. The mere thought of seeing them—especially Jordan—lifted her spirits. If the people hunting her baby found them again before Cait could vanish with Leyla, she wanted to know she had backup she could rely on.

  “If I get Jordan in the next few minutes, we can meet you there in two hours,” Ronnie said.

  “Two hours. See you then,” Cait said. “And Ronnie? Come strapped.”

  She hit END, but kept staring at the phone. More than anything, what she wanted was to know who she was up against, who wanted her baby. Lynch’s rant had indicted everyone but ninja assassins, though she figured he would get around to them eventually. She had to know what was true, how widespread this really was, and if there truly was no help to be found.

  Sean had trusted Herc. The question wasn’t if she trusted Brian Herskowitz, but how much she trusted Sean. Making up her mind, Cait started to dial the Hot Line.

  “I hope you’re right about this phone being harder to—”

  Lynch shushed her, turning up the volume on the radio. When Cait heard her own name, she forgot to breathe.

  “… instant debate over whether McCandless is a troubled veteran who simply snapped or is actually working in conjunction with domestic terror groups. Police will say only that she is wanted for questioning related to two shooting deaths at her Medford apartment earlier tonight and that they would like to speak with her about her connections to domestic terror groups in Florida and the Midwest. A spokesman for Boston’s Channel 7, where Sergeant McCandless is employed, has said the station will release a statement shortly.

  “Meanwhile, the one person who is speaking about Sergeant McCandless tonight is former Boston College football star Aaron Traynor, whom the media has dubbed ‘A-Train.’ McCandless reportedly stepped in on Saturday night when, police allege, Traynor became violent with his wife, Alina. Worse than the broken bones he suffered, A-Train has endured days of humiliation over the YouTube video of the fight and has threatened to sue McCandless.

  “ ‘I hope they track her down and throw her in jail. I’ve got issues I gotta get under control, yeah. I’m in anger management classes, all right? Tryin’ to pick a rehab place right now, get the alcohol situation taken care of. But I ain’t no terrorist. I’m not out shootin’ folks.’ ”

  Cait closed her eyes, sucking in a deep breath. People had tried to kill her and take her baby. Sean was dead, and they were calling her a terrorist. A-Train was whoring himself out to the media over beating the shit out of his wife and getting his ass kicked by a girl.

  “Turn it down,” she said.

  Lynch obliged, but the radio voice droned on.

  “Photos of McCandless are available on our website, along with the number for the police tip line—”

  “Turn it off!”

  He did. She clutched the phone in her hand and turned to gaze out the window. In the green glow of the dashboard she could see her face reflected in the glass, expressionless, bereft of all emotion.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  She pressed her forehead against the glass, not bothering to try to wipe away the tear that slipped down her cheek, tasting the salt on her lips. With the hum of the engine and the hiss of t
he A/C, she could not hear Leyla breathing. She wished the baby would wake up, would cry, wished the morning would come and she could get out of this damned car and hold her little girl in her arms and feel the summer sun on her skin.

  But where could she do such a thing, now that the whole country would recognize her face and think they were seeing a monster?

  “Caitlin?” Lynch ventured.

  “Drive,” she rasped. “Just drive.”

  A rap on the glass made Herc jerk upright behind the wheel of his Camry. He tried flinching away from the window but was held in place by his seat belt. A figure loomed outside the car and it took a moment before he realized it was Terry Stanovitch.

  “Christ!” Herc wheezed.

  Hunched over, Stanovitch raised his fist to bang on the glass again. Pulse thudding in his temples, Herc cracked the door open.

  “Get in, for fuck’s sake. You scared the piss out of me.”

  “What are you, paranoid?” Stanovitch said, nervous irony draining the blood from his face. He glanced about, then skittered around the front of the car and slid into the passenger seat.

  “You’re a funny guy,” Herc said.

  Stanovitch pulled the door shut and both of them stared at the light above the rearview mirror, waiting for it to go dim and bathe them in the privacy of darkness.

  “Nothing about this is funny,” Stanovitch told him.

  Terry had blue eyes and orange hair and freckles he inherited from his Irish mother. Not very inconspicuous for a CIA operative, Herc had always thought. But it just showed how little he really knew about the business he worked in. He gathered intelligence via satellite photography, but in truth he knew almost nothing about real espionage. Despite his friendship with Sean, how it all really worked remained a mystery to him. The number one thing Sean McCandless had taught him was that he didn’t really want to know more than he already did. And if he had ever needed to be reminded of that, Sean’s death had done the trick.

  “What’ve you got?” Herc asked.

  Stanovitch glanced around as though tempted to search Herc and the car for a wire.

  “Come on!”