Unleashed

by David Rosenfelt

  “And an operating cell phone has been at that location all day?”

  “Yes,” Eli says.

  I send them back to the bunker, with instructions to let me know if the cell phone’s location moves. That leaves Laurie and me to try and figure out what our next move should be.

  “Andy, whatever they might be planning, that is most likely their base of operations.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you going to call Muñoz?” she asks.

  “No. You’re going to call Marcus.”

  I simply cannot rely on Muñoz at this point. He has other priorities, and I’m not even saying that he shouldn’t. But I have to defend my client, my friend, to the best of my ability. And right now the only way I can do that is by finding out for myself who is on the other end of that phone.

  Marcus is at the house in fifteen minutes. Using the Internet, we actually can get an idea of what the camp looks like, or at least what it used to look like. Laurie finds pictures of the place that former campers have nostalgically posted on social media sites, and Google Maps gives us an overhead view, which is no doubt more recent.

  The place almost looks like a small army post. Since invading army posts is not a specialty of mine, I let Laurie and Marcus work out a plan for us to execute.

  I really need to balance my representation of Sam with the public good, and I come up with a way I think will enable me to do that. I call Muñoz, who is not my favorite person these days, and leave a message that it’s an emergency. He calls me right back.

  “This is your lucky day,” I say.

  “Yeah, I’ve had a whole bunch of those lately. What do you want?”

  “What I want is for you to kiss my ass. But what I’m going to do is make you a star.”

  He doesn’t sound thrilled yet. “How are you going to do that?”

  “I don’t know what the conspiracy is yet, but whatever it is, I’m going to give it to you on a silver platter.”

  I tell him to get a bunch of agents, including a SWAT team, and have them in Thompson, New York, tomorrow morning at seven o’clock. It’s about ten minutes from the campsite.

  “What the hell is going on?” he asks.

  “You’ll know tomorrow morning. I’m going to do something with some friends. If we succeed, or if we don’t, you’ll be the first to know. Just be ready to move when I call you.”

  “You’d better not be wasting our time.”

  “Hey, it’s Memorial Day. Either way you can be home for your barbecue.”

  The drive to the camp location takes about ninety minutes. We take two cars, for no particular reason other than there might be a time when we’d need them. Laurie drives with Marcus, and I go alone. I’ve found a motel about twenty minutes from the site. There are closer motels, but just in case someone at the site is familiar with me, we want to make sure we’re not seen.

  I get there at eleven o’clock, rent two rooms, and settle in to wait for Laurie and Marcus. They are going to drive close to the camp, to scout out the area and make any revisions in the plan that are required.

  Marcus has night-vision goggles and binoculars. It’s good that he does, because the closest I have to that are 3-D glasses that I got when Laurie and I went to see Avatar.

  I start worrying at about one o’clock in the morning, and by the time the two of them arrive at close to three, I’m a nervous wreck. During that time I question my decision not to just turn this over to the FBI about four hundred times.

  The plan is for us to enter the camp at five o’clock, when it’s still dark and we hope most of the occupants will be sleeping. That’s just two hours away, so the possibility of getting any sleep ourselves is out of the question. Speaking for myself, there is no way I could sleep anyway.

  We gather around a table, and Marcus and Laurie draw a layout of the camp as they’ve now seen it. It’s very similar to what we had before, with the notable difference that they think they now know which buildings are occupied.

  They are estimating ten people in three buildings, as well as two guards patrolling the perimeter. According to Laurie, patrolling is overstating it; the guards are sitting in chairs, getting up only every twenty to thirty minutes to walk around.

  “The key to it all,” Laurie says to Marcus, “is for us to eliminate the guards silently. Can you do that?”

  “Yunh.” He says it casually, as if Laurie has asked him if he could pick up a quart of milk at the grocery store.

  “Just so we’re clear, ‘eliminate’ is a euphemism for ‘kill’?” I ask.

  “It is.”

  “Any chance we can just knock them unconscious?”

  Laurie thinks about that for a moment and says, “It probably increases the risk fivefold to try it.”

  “You know, I’ve made some educated guesses here, based on phone calls Diane Glennon made. What if these are guys out fishing, and she was calling her uncle Charlie to find out if he caught any marlin?”

  “Marlin in Monticello?” Laurie asks.

  “You may not be focusing on my key concern.”

  “The guards were carrying AK-47s, Andy. This is not a fishing trip. But if you have doubts, now is the time to pull the plug. Because Marcus can’t just knock those guys out, and we don’t have the time or materials to bind and gag them. Leaving them alive to come up behind us is too dangerous.”

  I take some time to think about it, going over in my mind why I believe that Diane Glennon was lying to us, and the implications of it. If we’re wrong, if I’m wrong, we’re in very deep shit.

  Not only is it deep shit, it’s deep illegal shit. The law has a tendency to frown on those who kill innocent campers.

  Of course, even if I’m right, we’re not exactly tiptoeing through the tulips. There are probably ten armed and very dangerous people in that camp. We are three people, and one of them is me.

  Two against ten usually does not work. Of course, Laurie is a trained police officer, and Marcus is Marcus.

  “Let’s do it,” I say, turning to Marcus. “If you can, knock them out cold. If not, do what you have to do.”

  We arrive just outside the camp at four fifteen. For us to be successful, we are going to need to know exactly how many people are in there and where they are. Our assumption is they are occupying three buildings, which brings us to the weakness in our plan.

  I am going to be responsible for one of those buildings.

  But the only way we can get the information we need is for Marcus to go in and thoroughly scout out the area. And the only way he can do that is for him to take out the two guards.

  “Good luck,” I say.

  “Yunh,” says Marcus, and he’s gone.

  For the next thirty minutes, Laurie and I wait, not hearing anything at all except for this really loud drum, which I finally realize is my heartbeat.

  I take the silence as a good sign. If Marcus was detected by the bad guys, they would have no reason to react silently; by now all hell would have broken loose. Marcus failing actually isn’t the worst thing that could happen; the worst is if he succeeds and it turns out the guards were not actually bad guys.

  Suddenly Marcus is there, standing next to us. He was so silent that I had no idea he had arrived, which probably is not a good sign for the two guards.

  “We set?” asks Laurie.

  “Yunh.”

  “Were you able to just knock them out?” I ask.

  “Nunh.”

  Oh.

  We go over the plan for the last time, based on the information Marcus has accumulated. Fortunately, one of the buildings has only one person in it, and therefore that’s the one that will be my responsibility.

  We’re ready to go, and Laurie kisses me. I’ve got a hunch she doesn’t do so because I’m adorable but rather because it could be the last time we’ll ever get to do it.

  That would be a shame.

  Marcus doesn’t kiss me, which is just as well, but he does give me the handgun I’ll be using. He had shown me how
to use it in the motel—basically just pointing and pulling the trigger. If I have to use it, I may add in some moaning and whimpering, just to jazz it up.

  Marcus leads us onto the campgrounds. I almost trip over one of the dead guards and make the mistake of looking at him. His body is pointing north and south, but his neck is east and west. It’s a sight I won’t soon forget.

  We can see the three buildings. There are others farther down the road, but I can only assume, and trust, that Marcus has determined they are empty. If they’re not, we’ve got a problem.

  I know which building is mine, but Marcus points it out to me just in case. My overwhelming feeling is fear, on behalf of all of us, but creeping in is a sense of responsibility. I simply cannot screw this up.

  I go over in my mind exactly what I’m supposed to do. Marcus and Laurie, while knowing the plan, will probably wind up operating on instinct. I can’t do that, because my instinct is to be at home petting Tara.

  We get to our respective doors, and the silence is deafening. Marcus had said he believed the doors were unlocked, but he couldn’t be sure. He had shown me on the motel door where to shoot the lock if the door wasn’t open.

  I’m rooting for it to be open.

  The buildings that Marcus and Laurie are covering are fairly close together, while mine is set apart some. For that reason there is not going to be a signal to move; I’m to do so when I hear the noise.

  And then comes the noise, guns firing and loud shouting. It’s magnified, coming against the previous complete silence, and it jars me even though I knew it was coming. I turn the doorknob, and the door opens.

  Thank you.

  I burst into the room, screaming “HEY! HEY! HEY!” over and over. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it makes noise, and I’m not going to get graded on content.

  I also, as instructed, fire one bullet into the ceiling. It turns out that I am not coordinated enough to shoot and yell “HEY!” simultaneously, but the sound of the shot is so loud that my voice would have been drowned out anyway.

  There is enough light from the moonlight coming in through the window that I don’t have to search for a light switch. There is a bed, more of a cot, set up across the room, and a man has woken up and is now standing, his eyes trained on me.

  It’s amazing, but I think something has finally turned out as I expected. If my deductions and suspicions are correct, this is Richard Glennon.

  I point the gun at him and say, “Sit back down, Richard. Or this time you will stay dead.”

  It’s not a great line, but it’s better than “HEY! HEY! HEY!”

  The gun feels like it weighs four hundred pounds. I’m holding it with two hands away from my body, pointing right at Glennon. It’s the way I’ve often seen it done in the movies; I just wish there was a director around to yell, “Cut!”

  “No way you’ll shoot me,” says the man, who has not denied being Glennon.

  “From this distance, it would be pretty tough to miss.” He must know something I don’t, because he seems a hell of a lot more confident than I am.

  There are two desks in the room, placed side by side, with three computers and a bunch of files on them. Whatever they were doing, this is command central. I would love to go over there; I’ve got a feeling that’s where the answers are. But I can’t take a chance.

  “Who were you going to kill?” I ask.

  He laughs. “It would be quicker to tell you who we aren’t going to kill.”

  “It was for the money?”

  “Amounts you can’t imagine,” says Glennon.

  “Paid by who?”

  “By you. Every time you put gas in your car.”

  “Foreign terrorists?”

  “That’s not how they see it. They see it as defending themselves. And if I don’t do it for them, someone else will. They’ll keep coming.”

  Where the hell is Laurie or Marcus? I want to get over to that desk, and I want to put this damn gun down.

  “You want to get in on the money?” Glennon asks. “It would be the easiest thing in the world.”

  “Actually, the easiest thing in the world will be putting you in a cell for the rest of your life.”

  Finally Laurie comes in, pointing her own gun at Glennon.

  “Nice work, tough guy,” she says to me. “You really know how to handle yourself.”

  “I could open a law practice in Dodge City.” Then, “Meet Richard Glennon.”

  “So you were right.”

  “For once.”

  “You were right about something else, too,” she says. “This was no fishing trip.”

  “Where are the others?” I ask.

  “Marcus.”

  Enough said.

  “Why don’t you take him to be with his friends?” I point to the desk. “I’m going to check out that stuff.”

  Suddenly Glennon lunges at us. I move into a state of frozen panic, but Laurie shoots him in the shoulder, and he hits the ground, moaning.

  She keeps the gun pointed at him. “Get up,” she says. If she feels guilty about shooting him, she’s hiding it well. It’s something for me to remember if we ever have any domestic spats.

  Laurie leaves with Glennon, and I head over to the desk. It takes about ten seconds for me to have an idea what I’m looking at, so I stop and call Muñoz.

  “This better be good,” is how he answers the phone.

  “You have no idea,” I say and quickly tell him where we are. I glance again at the desk while we’re talking. “Muñoz, get here as fast as you possibly can. This defines life and death.”

  It’s a ten-minute drive from where Muñoz and the other agents are to the camp, and it takes them seven to get here. In the meantime, I check on the others. Marcus and Laurie have the camp’s occupants in one of the buildings, lying side by side on the floor, on their stomachs. Another one is lying on his cot, a large hole in his chest.

  I go back to Glennon’s room, and I’m there when Muñoz and the others arrive. “What the hell is going on?” he says.

  “Richard Glennon is alive,” I say and point to the desk. “But if you don’t hurry up and deal with this, nobody else will be.”

  Muñoz goes to the desk and starts looking at the material. “Holy shit,” he says.

  I couldn’t have put it better myself.

  He yells out for another agent to come join him, and I leave to find Laurie. The other agents have taken over the job of watching over the bad guys, leaving us with little to do other than hang out.

  Within a half hour, what seems like a hundred people arrive, some FBI and some Homeland Security. There are also a couple of ambulances, though Glennon is the only one with any medical issues that need treating. The rest are either unharmed or Marcus has assured that they will never need medical treatment again.

  In any case, the camp has more people in it than at any time since parents’ visiting weekend. The main focus is on Glennon’s building and the material on that desk, but when I attempt to walk back in, two agents block me from doing so.

  “Nobody enters this building.”

  “You’ve got some nerve,” I say. “I invited you guys into this building. I’m the reason you’re here. This is my building.”

  “Not anymore,” the agent says.

  How quickly they forget.

  There is really nothing for us to do here now, and we’re probably the only people in the country who don’t have a clue what is going on out in the world.

  I tell Laurie that she and Marcus should go back home and that I’ll call her later. I’m sure we’re all going to be questioned intensively about what went on here, but right now nobody seems inclined to do that. They have other things on their plate.

  I am not leaving until I talk to Muñoz.

  It’s another three hours until I see him. A helicopter lands on what must have been the camp baseball field, the third one to do so. For a couple of reasons, I figure it must have some big shots on it. First of all, I don’t think small shots
travel around on helicopters. Second, Muñoz immediately comes out of the building and walks in that direction to greet them.

  I walk up alongside Muñoz and say, “You forgot to thank me.”

  He looks at me for a moment and then nods and says, “You did good. Thank you.”

  “Now it’s your turn.”

  “There are still things more important than Sam Willis.”

  “No. Right now nothing is more important than Sam Willis.”

  I get home just as the televised press conference is about to begin. The secretary of Homeland Security is announcing that a terrorist plot has been foiled. On the podium with him are the attorney general of the United States, the FBI director, and Special Agent Ricardo Muñoz.

  I’ve made Muñoz a goddamn star, and Sam Willis is sitting in a cell.

  The secretary comes right to the point. There were to have been between fifteen and twenty assassination attempts on politicians, in conjunction with Memorial Day festivities. At this moment, all the targeted individuals are safe, and extra security has been assigned to them.

  In eleven of the cases, the alleged assassins have been apprehended, and the FBI is actively pursuing the rest. The situation is fluid, and because the investigation is in its earliest stages, the department will not be commenting further at this time.

  The media are actually well out in front of the government revelations, as they usually are. Alarm signals went off loud and clear when parades and speeches were suddenly canceled all over the country, and reporters have been digging at the story ever since.

  Sources within the FBI had revealed, anonymously, that this was a terrorist reaction to the American practice of targeted killings, mostly by drone strikes, in remote corners of the world. Since the United States does not acknowledge and never comments on this strategy, no one will confirm it on the record.

  Laurie and I watch the coverage for a while longer, but it’s all becoming a blur to me. I’m exhausted; we got no sleep last night, and I’ve always found conducting armed invasions of summer camps to be particularly tiring.

  “Where does all this leave Sam?” Laurie asks.