by Richard Fox
“Wait. Can we back up? How is any of this possible?” Shelton said.
Tony rolled his eyes and went back to his keyboard.
Ritter leaned closer to Shelton. “During the Cold War, when DC was high on the Soviet’s to-nuke list, Congress passed a law mandating that a copy of every document the federal government ever produced be backed up so whatever government survives has a bureaucratic primer to start from. So, there are repositories, vast storehouses of microfiche, digital tape, and servers buried under a few select mountains across this great land of ours. When we need to, we tap into it. No pesky warrants of Freedom of Information Act requests to bother with.”
“Why haven’t I ever heard of it?” Shelton asked.
“Let’s say some government employees thought they could cover up some malfeasance by destroying their hard drives or deleting e-mail from a server. The repositories are a nice little gotcha for those types,” Ritter said.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Shelton said.
“I’m sorry, Greg. This ear is bad. Too close to a car bomb in Mosul.” He turned his attention from Shelton with a wink. “Tony, what else?”
“Whoever scrubbed Garcia scrubbed someone else out of the system at the same time,” Tony said. “I’m still working on that other person. I found Garcia because he has a hit in both systems.”
“Where can we find Mr. Garcia? His prints are on the bullets used in the assassination of Bendis. I’d say he deserves a visit from us,” Ritter said.
“Garcia had a GPS tracker on his ankle after he made bail from his ‘first’ arrest. I say ‘had’ because he cut it off this morning.” Tony pointed to a map of Washington, DC, a red pin in a southeast neighborhood. “That was the location of the last ping on his tracker. Cutting it off generated an automatic arrest warrant, so the local DC police are keeping an eye out for him.”
“So we’ve got to find a meth addict somewhere on the streets of DC,” Ritter said, a bit dejected.
“Tony, druggies are creatures of habit. Can you find his dealer or where he used? Meth houses he’d frequent?” Shelton asked. This would come down to old-fashioned police work. There was no need for whatever cloak-and-dagger nonsense Ritter might have planned.
Tony’s hands cupped his chubby face. His voice squeaked, “What am I, a frigging amateur? Here.” Tony pulled a greasy sheet of paper from under his keyboard and handed it to Ritter. “Start at the top of the list and work down. I ranked them from most to least likely. You’re welcome. You and your beard can bring me some Five Guys burgers when you come back.” Tony put on a pair of headphones and started mumbling as he turned his attention to his monitors.
Ritter opened a desk drawer and tossed a wrapped stack of dollars to Shelton. Shelton ran his thumb over the top of the stack, two inches of twenties and hundreds.
“Snitch money. Incidentals. Whatever we need,” Ritter said. He stuck an envelope of bills into a jacket pocket from the same drawer.
“Eric, this…Don’t I have to sign something?” Shelton asked. Spending cash in the course of an investigation was a very painful affair in the FBI. Receipts, acceptable-use policy statements, quarterly refresher training, and invoices of all expenditures were needed for every source meeting where so much as a cup of coffee was purchased. Despite all these restrictions, agents still got caught spending their operating funds at strip clubs and for home improvements.
“Again, with your rules. If you need more, we have more. Shall we?” Ritter walked out the door and opened the room next door.
“Wait. We need a warrant for Garcia in the death of Bendis,” Shelton said.
Ritter hit the lights, and a room full of cages came into view. Firearms, ranging from small pistols that could fit into his palm to kitted-out M4s with the latest red-dot sights and infra-red target designators, were in the cages on top of loaded magazines and grenades still in their shipping tubes. Shelton’s jaw went slack as he took in the arsenal.
Ritter opened a cage and pulled out a worn set of warm clothing. He opened a drawer and took out a plastic bag full of loose bills in small denominations.
“Eric, what is this place?” Shelton peered into a cage, where a pile of C4 plastic explosives in thick plastic sleeves sat below a rack of tailored Armani suits and tuxedos.
“A bit cliché, I know, but we have to be prepared for everything. You want some hollow-point rounds for your sidearm? Get some actual stopping power?” Ritter stripped down to his underwear and pulled on a pair of stained pants. Ritter had more scars than Shelton remembered: a nasty pucker of pale scar tissue covered his right deltoid, a bullet wound if Shelton had ever seen one.
“No, hollow-point rounds are illegal in Virginia. You want to bring me up to speed on what you’re planning?” Shelton asked.
“Greg, one doesn’t simply walk into a drug house dressed like an FBI agent.” Ritter strapped a pistol to his ankle and an Applegate-Fairbairn combat knife to his forearm.
****
Lying on frozen ground wasn’t new for Jefferson. Being homeless taught a number of survival skills his time in the army hadn’t. A flattened cardboard box and crumpled newspaper beneath his clothes did wonders to keep his body heat from the winter soil’s heat sink.
In a few more minutes, he would shake off the cold. There was a warm tent and a stash of granola bars waiting for him at the park. Just a few more minutes until retribution. He and his target had a schedule to keep.
A branch snapped in the distance. Jefferson turned his head slowly toward the noise; sudden movement demanded attention from the human eye. A doe and her fawn picked their way past an icy stream bed, unaware of his presence. Not that they had anything to fear from him. Nature, perfect in its chaos, was beyond his judgment.
One hundred and seven million dollars—that was how much the leech, Guy Allesio, had made from the war. One hundred and seven million dollars peddling twenty-dollar rolls of toilet paper and eighty-five-dollars-a-plate meals of frozen chicken paddies and locally bought cans of soda that increased 5,000 percent in price before they made it into the hands of a deployed soldier.
The war profiteer had gouged the American taxpayer for every cent he could, but all that wealth couldn’t stop the grind of time on his body. His dialysis treatment had ended twenty minutes ago, and he always came straight home afterwards.
It had taken him three hours to dig up the gravel road shoulder with a pickax—minutes more to drop the bomb into the crater and cover it back up. There were a few more homes down the road the profiteer used; he hadn’t the time or effort to determine whether the fat cats deserved to pay for their crimes. There would be plenty of time to get to them once the revolution began, but for now his focus was only on the profiteer.
The rumble of a car engine sounded in the distance. The deer lifted their heads, searching for the source of a potential threat.
A cherry-red civilian Humvee rumbled down the winding road, taking the curves slowly. There was the profiteer, a pasty old man with liver spots on his gnarled hands. A steel-gray bouffant of hair poked over the dashboard from the front-passenger seat. The profiteer went to his appointments alone. Who was with him?
Hands opened and closed without his conscious effort. Should he wait until his target’s next trip? Get him alone? No, the profiteer had never moralized over how much blood money he’d made from the deaths in Iraq. Jefferson would afford the same mercy.
He slithered back into the morass of bushes concealing him from the profiteer’s approach and knelt next to an electric wire running from the ground to a string of modified Christmas lights. He hooked a nine-volt battery into the wire and scooped up the wire, careful not to break any of the bulbs. The Humvee’s tires would crush the bulbs and complete the circuit, triggering the fifty pounds of explosives he’d buried next to the asphalt road.
The wire went across the road, and he ran into the woods beyond it. He slid over a ravine and hugged the earth wall. The gas-guzzling engine grew louder.
Any s
econd now.
He frowned and took a step away from the wall. He couldn’t see the road or his target. Had the crush wire failed?
The explosion rattled the last desiccated leaves from the forest and sent the Humvee twenty feet into the air. It rolled in the sky, shedding tires and doors to centripetal force. It crashed to the ground, the axel snapped with the sound of a shattering bone, and it rolled down the slope straight toward Jefferson.
He looked for an escape, frozen in indecision as the Humvee barreled toward him. Pure instinct drove him against the ravine wall a half second before the Humvee sliced through the place where he’d been standing.
The Humvee crashed to a halt against a stand of trees. The fractured windshields were covered in blood, a single hand stuck in the steering wheel.
Jefferson spat and ran back up the slope.
****
Ritter scratched at his ratty field jacket. The thing was a forest-pattern camouflage and looked like the one Osama Bin Laden had worn in more than one of his propaganda videos. Based on the smell of mothballs, Ritter suspected the coat might be a veteran of the Gulf War.
He glanced over his shoulder at the street corner. Prostitutes meandered on the roadside, smoking cigarettes and trying to keep their exposed legs protected from the cold by fishnet stockings or nothing at all. They stayed warm by standing over a grate venting steam. Men in heavy coats stood nearby, pimps or drug dealers servicing the same intersection.
There were bad neighborhoods in the world. Ritter had once tracked an Algerian arms dealer to a banliue outside Paris, where the North African drug gangs and Roma smugglers ruled the residents like chattel through fear and violence. Compared to the southeast neighborhood in Washington, DC, that banliue was like Beverly Hills. The murder rate for this neighborhood block area was three times the national average. He wondered whether the district’s strict gun laws kept the rate high, because the innocent couldn’t defend themselves from criminals, or lower than it could have been since fewer guns were available.
The first drug house they’d investigated had burned down a month ago. The next place, according to Shelton’s police contacts, was still up and running. The target location was two blocks ahead and across an empty lot.
“You okay out there?” Shelton said through Ritter’s earpiece.
“I didn’t know you cared,” Ritter said under his breath.
“You were awful quiet for a second. What’s your emergency phrase?” Shelton said.
“Help, help. I’m being stabbed?” Ritter said. He passed a liquor store with bars on the windows and a gigantic bouncer at the door, who glared at Ritter as he shuffled by. A pristine white panel van with dark-tinted glass sat on the curb. Ritter used the rearview mirrors to check to see whether anyone was following him. He saw two rail-thin black men moving toward him with purpose.
“Might have a problem,” Ritter said. He quickened his pace.
The white van grated against Ritter’s instincts. No one would leave a vehicle like that exposed for long in this neighborhood. Theft or vandalism was assured as soon as the local spotters knew it was unoccupied. Local police wouldn’t come in here with anything less than a platoon squad of officers. Whoever was in that van bothered Ritter more than the two men behind him.
“Hey, you!” came a voice from behind him, and his threat assessment changed.
Ritter undid the button on his jacket cuff and grabbed the hilt of the fighting knife on his forearm. He crouched slightly, got off the sidewalk, and stepped into the empty lot. Litter and the detritus of a failing neighborhood were scattered over the frozen dirt.
“Give me your cash, junkie!” Rough hands grabbed Ritter from behind and slammed him against a wall. The two men, their faces corrupted by addiction, looked at him with wide, jaundiced eyes.
One poked him in the chest, pressing the finger against Ritter’s pectoral. The other brandished a shank, something that looked like it had been smuggled out of prison: a sharpened hunk of metal with a tapered handle.
“I’ll fucking cut you!” the other man shouted with more volume than conviction.
Ritter just smiled at them.
He unsheathed his combat knife and brought the blade across the man’s body with the same motion. It severed the offending finger with ease. Ritter snapped a kick at the knife wielder and hit him just below the kneecap; the joint popped and sent the man down. Ritter grabbed the man’s head on the way down and slammed it into his rising knee. The knife wielder went limp.
Ritter turned his attention back to the first man, who was looking at the blood spurting from his exposed knuckle, too shocked to scream. Ritter flipped his knife to a forward grip and stomped a foot.
“Boo,” he said.
The nine-fingered man turned and ran; he had no care for his partner or his digit twitching in the dirt.
“Ritter, what’s going on?” Shelton said through the earpiece.
“Nothing,” Ritter said. He looked at the white van; he could make out figures behind the tinted glass in the front two seats. Neither seemed interested in the fight they had witnessed. Ritter memorized the license plate number and cut across the lot. The meth house, a three-story cinderblock building with broken windows, lay on the other side of the wooden fence.
The smell hit him first, a vile concoction of flammable vapors. They must be cooking meth on the upper floors, he thought. He squeezed through a gap in the wooden fence and almost stepped in a frothing yellow puddle. A woman, wearing little more than rags, lounged against the building, heedless of the cold or pollution around her.
“Suck your cock for a hit,” she said.
“Sometimes I miss Iraq,” Ritter said. He went around the corner and knocked on a door behind a heavy iron gate.
A peephole slid open. A pair of eyes looked him over, lingering on the fresh blood splatter on his coat.
“You use here, you buy here,” said the voice from behind the door.
Ritter nodded, adding facial ticks to his performance.
“Twenty-dollar entrance fee.”
Ritter pressed a bill up to the window; deft fingers snatched it away. The smell of cat urine and paint thinner hit him as the doorman let him in. Yellow lights, those that worked, cast feeble light through the building. A counter at the far end of the floor had an impatient-looking Hispanic woman, her hair up in a severe bun and prison-quality tattoos up and down her bare arms. She beckoned Ritter over. Two men, gang tattoos from their wrists to the bases of their chins and long-rifle AK-47s slung over their chests, flanked her.
“What you want?” she asked. She opened a cigar box, full of baggies of what looked like chunks of soap. “I’ve got clean needles. Oxy in case you need to come down.”
Ritter pulled a photo of Garcia from a pocket and set it on the counter. “I’m looking for my brother. Is he here?”
The dealer smacked her lips and looked at Ritter. Ritter put five twenty-dollar bills on the counter. She tapped the bills, and Ritter shelled out three more.
“Upstairs. He’s been here for a couple of hours. You going to be a problem?” she asked. One of the guards shifted in tune with her question.
“No, just need to talk to him,” Ritter said. He turned away and brought a hand over his mouth. “You get that?” he mumbled.
“Roger, I’ll…wait,” Shelton said. “Three squad cars just went by…and a SWAT van. I think you’re going to have company.”
Ritter hurried up a set of rickety stairs, careful not to touch the handrails with his bare skin. A junkie lay against the railing, a needle dangling from an arm riddled with scabs. The second floor stank worse than the first. Men and women lounged against the walls, their brains floating in a chemical embrace.
“That can’t be right,” Tony said through the earpiece. “The SWAT team is at a domestic dispute three miles away from you. Are you sure you saw cops? There’s nothing on the scanners or on my trackers.”
“Then who the hell were the bunch of guys in the uniforms that read S-W
-A-T? Wait. What trackers?” Shelton asked.
Ritter reached under his watchband and pushed a switch that shut off his earpiece.
He spotted a man who might have been Garcia underneath the filth and a week-old beard. He was on his hands and knees next to a broken window, peering over the sill.
“Hey, buddy, can you help me out?” Ritter asked.
“Fuck off. They’re out there, man. They’re out there, and they’re after me,” the tweaker said. Paranoia was common among meth addicts, which didn’t make Ritter’s job any easier.
Ritter glanced out the window and saw the white van.
The tweaker looked at Ritter and froze. “Oh shit. I saw you like ninja those two guys. Don’t ninja me, bro,” he said.
“Is your name Garcia?” Ritter asked, kneeling next to the man.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m Garcia.” His words came out like bullets from a machine gun. He nodded with equal ferocity.
“Who’s after you?” Ritter asked.
Garcia scratched his face like a dog working at a flea. “Hell if I know, man. They came looking for me, bunch of men in black types, where I sleep near L’Enfant Station. Roughed up my lady friend. I bugged out and cut off my tracker. I don’t need that shit, not when I’m trying to get clean, you know?”
“You come with me, and I’ll get you someplace safe, okay?” Ritter said.
“Wait. Did the Iranian send you?” Garcia asked, he looked at Ritter with hope
Ritter learned early in his career as a spy that ties work best when they can hide between truths. He knew nothing about this Iranian, but if he could coopt Garcia with a falsehood, then so be it.
“Of course he sent me, how else did I know your name?” Ritter asked.
“Cops! La policia!” rang out from the bottom floor. Garcia bolted to his feet and raced across the floor before Ritter could grab him. Ritter tried to get up, but a skeletal man who’d been lying against the wall in a drugged out stupor prior to that point grabbed onto his coat and started screaming nonsense at him.