by Barry Eisler
Gillmor glanced at him, then back to me. “Who sent you? Was it Horton?”
“Call it back,” I said. “The drone.”
“No.”
“Call it back,” I said, my voice flat-lining. “I won’t ask again. I will shoot you in the head.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I die,” he said, nodding. “The mission will still succeed.”
Okay, I thought, and shot him in the head. The HK kicked, there was a crack about as loud as the thump of a sewing machine, and a hole appeared in his forehead. His body shuddered, his knees buckled, and he folded to the ground on his back.
“Jesus Christ!” Kanezaki shouted. “How are we going to stop the drone now?”
“Check the truck!” I said. “And stay alert.”
I heard Dox chuckle. “Cop’s freakin’ out. He’s wondering, ‘Who were these four guys who were charging me, and why did their heads all suddenly uncork?’”
I rushed to Gillmor’s body and examined the laptop. Two joy sticks, telemetry readouts, a video feed that looked like it was coming from a camera in the drone. I recognized the terrain from the maps we’d been reviewing. The east/west rural highway we’d driven in on from Lincoln. The river just south of it.
Oh shit, he’s programmed it to go straight for—
Gunshots to my right. I spun. Kanezaki was down. I saw movement at the far end of the truck.
I charged for the granary.
No time to think about Kanezaki. I hoped he’d taken the hits in the Dragon Skin, but I didn’t know. “Dox,” I said into the commo boom as I got to cover, “Gillmor’s down, but he’s programmed the drone to go straight to the school. I think he set the Hellfires to go at the last minute and then for the drone to follow them in, or maybe for them to detonate on impact with the drone. It’s coming at you from due east. ETA three, maybe four minutes. Can you take it down?”
“I don’t know. Where are its avionics?”
I darted my head around and back. Three gunshots rang out from the far side of the truck and rounds struck the granary wall. Chunks of dislodged concrete hit me.
“I don’t know, I didn’t design the fucking thing! The nose, I guess.”
“Guess you can’t ask Gillmor?”
Another gunshot, another spray of concrete. I was distantly aware that if the shooter was firing even when I didn’t show myself, he couldn’t be that good.
“Gillmor’s dead!” I said.
“Well, under the circumstances and assuming we don’t have any other drone architecture experts on hand, I’d have to call that a fail.”
Unless, I thought, the shooter was covering for someone coming in from my left. I moved out to the other side of the granary, the HK up. “Treven, Larison, you need to clear out of there now.”
“I’m going in,” Treven said. “They have to evacuate.”
“You don’t have time!”
“Gotta try.”
There was a pause.
“Goddamn it,” Larison said. “I knew this was going to happen. I’m going in, too.”
“Use the sides,” Dox said calmly. “If you come around to the front, you will have to engage a very upset police officer.”
“Roger that,” Treven said.
“Going in,” Larison said. “Goddamn it.”
The other side of the granary was clear. It was just the one guy, then. And he wasn’t that good. I wondered if I could charge the truck from here.
“Dox,” I said. “Do you see it?”
“Not yet, but I’m looking.”
I heard Treven and Larison shouting, “There is a bomb in the school! This is not a joke and it is not a drill! Everyone needs to evacuate now and scatter to at least one hundred yards! Move! Move!”
“Come on, baby,” I heard Dox say. “Where are you? Come to Dox.”
I sucked in a deep breath and blew it out, readying myself to charge the truck. I counted one, two—
I heard three soft cracks, then a gunshot. I tore around the side of the granary and straight for the truck.
There was no need. Kanezaki was on his feet, to the left of the truck, the HK up at chin level and angled to the ground, smoke drifting up from the muzzle of the suppressor. I dropped down and looked under the chassis of the truck. There was a prone body on the other side.
“Is he dead?” I called out.
“I think so.” He sounded like he was in shock.
“Well, fucking make sure!”
I heard another soft crack. Then, “He’s dead.”
Dox, in my ear: “Goddamn it, I am taking fire.”
He said it so calmly it took me a minute to understand what it meant. “Someone’s shooting at you?”
Treven and Larison were still shouting. Sounded like pandemonium inside the school.
“Yeah,” Dox said, “it’s that cop. He must have seen me. Good eyes. He’d need a hell of a lucky shot to hit me from there, but still I’d be grateful if someone could knock him down or something. I’d prefer not to shoot a police officer. Treven, Larison?”
“I’m on it,” Larison said.
“Thank you,” Dox said. “Still no sign of the drone. Kids are all running out of the school, though. Nice work there.”
A few seconds went by. I heard a sound—half thud, half crunch—and Dox said, “Thank you, Mister Larison! Ooh, that had to hurt.”
“What happened?” I said.
“Clubbed the cop,” Larison said. “Took his gun.”
I heard him say, “Here, I’m sorry about that, sir. We’re from the government, we’re not here to hurt anyone. The school’s under attack and you need to run away from it before the bomb blows up, do you understand? Just run with the kids, they need you.”
“I see it,” Dox said. “Going pretty fast. Gonna have to lead it some.”
Kanezaki and I ran to the drone controls. “You all right?” I said.
“He hit me in the vest. Knocked me down. I’m okay.”
Gillmor, on his back, his legs folded under him, his eyes staring and sightless, was still holding the controls. We looked at the screen. I could see the school through the drone’s camera. The drone was heading right for it.
I heard a soft crack. The image on the screen shuddered, then stabilized. “Hit it, but not on the nose,” Dox said. I heard a series of additional cracks. The screen image shuddered violently, but stabilized again.
“The hell’s that thing made of?” Dox said. “I just put sixteen rounds in it. All right, switching magazines.”
“Larison, Treven, get the fuck out of there,” I said. “You’ve done all you can. There’s no more time. Go!”
The school was at the center of the screen and rapidly expanding. I thought the drone couldn’t be more than a few seconds from impact.
“All right, sweetheart,” I heard Dox say. “Come here. Come take what I’ve got for you.”
There was a methodical drumbeat of cracks. The image of the school shuddered. It shook. It stabilized, filling the whole screen—
And then the camera veered and began to spin wildly.
“All right!” Dox said, jubilation creeping into his normally supercalm sniper tone. “Score one for the home team.”
The sky flashed past on the screen, then the ground, then everything was moving so fast I couldn’t make out any features at all. A moment later, the screen went dark.
“Where did it go down?” I said.
“Not the school,” Dox said. “The parking lot, though. Hot damn, that was close. Nobody hurt, I don’t think.”
“Did the warheads detonate?”
“No, sir. Gillmor must have had them set to blow on nose-first impact.”
“Treven, Larison, you all right?”
“Fine,” Larison said. “Walking away southeast.”
I heard sirens in the background. “Same,” Treven said. “Could use a pickup. Feeling a little conspicuous at the moment.”
“Go to the bug-out,” I said. “Dox, you especially. That cop is going to r
eport sniper fire coming from your position. We’ll rendezvous in twenty minutes. Or less, the way Kanezaki drives.”
I expected Treven and Larison would be able to ghost away just fine in the tumult outside the school. But it wouldn’t be long before coherent witnesses came forward and described them to arriving police. And Dox needed to get far from his hide.
Kanezaki pulled out an iPhone and took photographs of Gillmor’s body and the controls on top of it.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“This is our proof.” He started moving the phone in a small circle, talking as he did so. I realized he must have switched to video mode.
“We need to go,” I said.
He held up a finger. “The man on the ground is the new head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Dan Gillmor, who was controlling the drone that attacked a school in Lincoln today. This is Palmyra, Nebraska, about twenty-five miles away.”
He walked over to the guy he’d shot and took his picture, too, then filmed the truck and its license plates, talking the whole time, dates and coordinates and identifying details. Then we ran back to the van, which he proceeded to drive as though the trip out were just a warm-up. We reached the bug-out point, a church a mile from the school, in under fifteen minutes. Kanezaki cut his speed and pulled into the parking lot.
“It’s us,” I said into the commo, and Dox, Larison, and Treven melted out from behind a dumpster. They got in the van and we drove off at a normal speed.
I climbed in back. Everybody shook hands. I said to Dox, “Good shooting.”
“Hell,” Dox said, “if it had been good, I would have dropped it on the first shot.”
“Hey,” Treven said, “you put it down. That’s all that counts.”
“Well,” Dox said, looking at me, “I don’t want to blame anyone else for how long it took me, but I don’t think the avionics in that particular model of drone are in the nose, unless they’re severely hardened. I finally just shot the shit out of the thing, and hoped I’d hit something vital. Which apparently I did.”
We all laughed. “Tom,” Dox said. “Are you all right? Did I hear you say you were hit?”
“In the vest,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“You’re going to be sore later,” I said. “But the hell with that. Nice shooting.”
“You shot Gillmor?” Dox said. “I thought that was Rain.”
“No, his security,” Kanezaki said.
“Who had me pinned down,” I added.
“Oo-rah!” Dox said. “Somebody give me that man a cigar. Was that your first kill?”
“I guess it was,” Kanezaki said.
“You guess,” Dox said. “That’s funny. Well, you know what they say. You never forget your first. Glad he was shooting back at you. That’ll make it a little easier later.”
I looked at Larison. “Thanks for listening to me.”
He paused, then said, “I was having my doubts on the way into that school a minute ahead of a couple of Hellfire missiles. But…yeah.”
He turned to Dox and said, “Don’t ever fuck with me again about being in your sights. Ever. You understand?”
I thought, Christ, here we go again. But Dox just grinned and said, “All right, all right, I was just trying to relieve the tension. Message received and I will not do it again.”
He held out his hand and, after a moment, Larison shook it.
“Where are we heading?” I said. “The airport’s the other way.”
“I want to get the hell out of Nebraska,” Kanezaki said. “Let’s just keep driving and we’ll figure it out as we go.”
“My God, not another road trip,” Dox said. “I’m still recovering from the last one.”
We all laughed at that. I realized I didn’t even care where we were going.
We only made it as far as Des Moines. The parasympathetic backlash against a combat adrenaline surge is ferocious, and we were all exhausted already. As soon as we knew we were safely outside Lincoln, we started to flag. We pulled over at a highway motel, and checked into two adjoining rooms. We watched the news for a while, but it was all extremely confused. Overall, it was being presented as a failed terror attack, which on one level, of course, it was. As things stood, it seemed like it was going to help the plotters’ aims, albeit not as much as a successful attack would have. But people were still panicking about the ostensibly new threat, and how they couldn’t send their children to school anymore, and how the government had to do more to protect them. Maybe with the emergence of evidence of what happened, including Kanezaki’s photographs and video, the narrative might change. And, of course, maybe Horton would do something to steer things in the direction he said he wanted them to go in. But overall, the whole thing was dispiriting. We watched until we couldn’t take it anymore. Then we all passed out.
When we woke, we turned on the television again, and it seemed the narrative had indeed changed. Now there was talk about a group of secret commandos who had killed the jihadists and foiled the plot and evacuated the children. I wondered what was next.
Kanezaki uploaded his material to Wikileaks. Without more, it might get dismissed as fringe conspiracy theory stuff. Some anonymous spokesman would explain how Gillmor had been operating the drone to take out the terrorists; that the terrorists had learned of his position and gunned him down in cold blood, causing the drone to crash; but that his resourceful men had still managed to eliminate the terrorist threat, even as their brave leader lay dying.
I found I didn’t care all that much. We’d done what we could. And we’d done it well. Now all I had to do was find a way to slip out of the country and enjoy my twenty-five million.
Kanezaki’s sat phone buzzed. It was Horton. Kanezaki handed the phone to me.
“Thank you,” he said. “I do not deserve to be the beneficiary of your acts, but I am.”
“How so?”
“I’m certain that very soon, I will be sent to hell, one way or the other. But in the meantime, you have given me the tools I need to redirect this thing as I always hoped, and to turn it into a force for good.”
“All the people who were killed in those attacks,” I said. “I’m glad it’ll have been for the greater good.”
I felt vaguely hypocritical saying it. On the other hand, I’d never bombed a bunch of innocents.
“It would have been worse if it had been for nothing,” he said. “Or for less than nothing.”
“Well, then, you got what you wanted.” I thought, but didn’t say, you’re still going to die. But I supposed he knew that. He’d already acknowledged as much.
“There are two things I want you to know,” he said.
“All right.”
“First, I have introduced into proper channels the notion that you four men were inadvertently placed on the president’s kill list. That your presence there was due to an intelligence failure that itself was the result of your intrepid penetration of the organization sponsoring these attacks. That in fact it was you, all of you, who ignored the danger of a mistaken nationwide manhunt to continue your mission and save the children at that school. You will face no further hostilities from any American military, intelligence, or law enforcement personnel, or otherwise.”
I wished I could believe him. “I thought you said you didn’t have that kind of juice since you resigned.”
“Given my background and since my speech, I am not without influence. And my influence is set to grow.”
“You knew that at the time. When we had your daughter. But you didn’t say anything.”
“You wouldn’t have believed me. And besides, you needed to give me something to work with. Which you have. The wreckage of that drone is currently in the custody of local Lincoln law enforcement. The federal government will have a hard time taking it away from them and disappearing it, given the magnitude of what just happened in their community.”
“There’s more evidence on the way,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Photo
s and videos of Gillmor. All uploaded to Wikileaks. You couldn’t stop it now if you wanted to.”
“Stop it? I welcome it. In fact, I have uploaded my own judicious trove of information to the good people of Wikileaks, who will see to its proper dissemination more faithfully than the New York Times or Washington Post ever would.”
“What information?”
“Hard evidence of who was really behind this coup. Along with some unrelated but probably even more damning evidence of the sexual and financial improprieties of the individuals identified. With more such evidence to come.”
I thought back to what he had told me about Finch, about how he was an information broker. Had Horton somehow acquired…?
And then it hit me. “You,” I said. “You’re the information broker. Not Finch.”
“That is correct.”
I wasn’t connecting the dots. “Explain.”
“The best way to tell a lie is to conceal it in a lot of truth. Which is why throughout this thing, nearly everything I told you has been true.”
“Then why did you have us kill Shorrock and Finch?”
“Because they were trying to stop the coup, of course.”
I thought for a moment. “And they thought you were, too.”
“That’s right. But we wanted to stop it in different ways. And at different times. And besides, they were the only ones with knowledge of my direct involvement. If I hadn’t had them removed, then when I became America’s hero by declining the president’s offer as I did, they would have been in a position to contradict me. As it stands, I can make clear that they were in fact killed by the plotters because they were trying to stop the coup.”
“But they were killed by the plotters. By you.”
“I recognize there’s some irony at work here.”
“So the reason you needed them to die of what looked like natural causes—”
“Was twofold. First, I didn’t want Finch to conclude from Shorrock’s death that he might be targeted for opposing the coup, too.”
“Because that would have made him harder to get to.”
“Yes. And second, because when the president named me his new counterterrorism advisor, I couldn’t have any questions about whether I might have had something to do with Finch’s death.”