The Hit

by Patrick Quinlan

  Taken as an intellectual exercise, Gant said yes, he thought maybe it could be done. There’d have to be collateral damage to cover up the purpose of the attack, and that meant innocent people would have to die. Also, a bomb wouldn’t work because you’d never get it past security and into the building. But an airborne biological agent in the ventilation system – highly concentrated, highly virulent anthrax, for instance – that might do the trick.

  OK, his audience said, but could he, Gant, pull it off?

  He wasn’t sure, even then, if the job was for real. Maybe it was just some people blowing off steam by fantasizing about something they wanted to see done, or might want to see done. Maybe it was a set-up, a sting, someone somewhere had been turned by the government, and the FBI was listening to every word. Gant didn’t know. In fact, even now, he still wasn’t sure. But at the time, despite the uncertainties, he decided to treat it as if it were real. If it were a sting, then he was looking at a lot of time, possibly the rest of his life, in prison. But he took the gamble anyway. Fortune favors the bold.

  ‘I need a microbiologist,’ he said to Monty one evening. They were walking, as they often did, among the Friday night crowds in downtown Charleston. They moved along streets lined with multimillion-dollar pre-Civil War homes into Battery Park, where the breeze off the harbor and the chatter from the gawkers would surely thwart any attempt to listen to their conversation.

  ‘A microbiologist?’ Monty said. ‘I didn’t suspect Tyler Gant even possessed a word that long in his vocabulary. That’s a six syllable word. What, pray tell, do you need one of those for?’

  ‘That’s classified. But I need a good one. And I need him or her to have a certain, shall we say, moral flexibility.’

  Monty became serious, as he always did when he realized that Gant wasn’t kidding around, or that an opportunity had presented itself. ‘It could cost you some money, finding a person like that.’

  ‘I’m prepared to pay money.’

  Monty nodded. ‘Let me see what I can do.’

  The next conversation took place a month later in the parking lot of a closed rest area off the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway in West Virginia. It seemed like a long way to go to have a chat, but Monty insisted on it. They parked their cars about fifty yards apart. Gant walked across the asphalt to the rental sedan Monty leaned against. The pavement was cracked and broken. The rest area itself was high up in the mountains. The view of the valley far below and to the west was wide open. You could forget to breathe while looking at it. The view south along the ridgeline was probably the purple mountain’s majesty the children used to sing about. The wind howled incessantly, and immediately Gant knew why Monty had picked this place to talk.

  Gant glanced only once at the rest area building – in some distant past it had been home to bathrooms and maybe a restaurant or gift shop. It was boarded up now. One of the wooden boards that covered the front doorway had been pried open a crack. Gant peered at the darkness between the board and wall – it wasn’t out of the question that people were living in there. It wasn’t out of the question that vampires lived in there. It looked like a place where they would hide out in the daytime.

  Monty had a single sheet of paper in a manila folder. Neatly typed on the page was a name, an address and a telephone number. That was all.

  ‘Davis Foerster,’ Monty said, his voice just barely audible above the wind. ‘The CIA has been watching him from the time he was fourteen. He won a prize from the National Science Foundation that year, for a project that demonstrated ways of accelerating the growth of cancer cells. The following year he jumped to computer science and won another national contest, this time for a paper arguing that in our lifetimes, artificial intelligence would become smarter than man, and would bind all the networked computers in the world together into a single, hyper-intelligent entity that would quickly make humanity obsolete. This entity would then go on to use the available computing capacity on earth to unlock the secrets of the universe.’

  ‘The CIA?’ Gant said. ‘You work for the CIA?’

  ‘I work with all kinds of people.’

  ‘For the job I’m thinking of, I’m not sure a CIA man will do.’

  Monty shook his head. ‘As far as I know, the CIA has never touched Foerster. They were interested in him and that’s all. They did a psychological assessment on him. What you have to understand is this guy is eight different kinds of bad news. He’s unstable, from an abusive upbringing. He’s considered deeply neurotic and possibly delusional. He’s consumed by rage and feelings of powerlessness and persecution. He’s been in and out of various facilities, juvenile detention and mental hospitals, for the past seven or eight years. His first stay in juvie came when he was sixteen – a group of ten-year-olds were outside his window taunting him, so he went outside and sliced one of them up with a razor blade.

  ‘He seems to lack empathy for other living things, human or animal. He tortured stray cats as a child. He conducted experiments on them, like some kind of grammar school Josef Mengele. As an adult, he’s believed to be a serial rapist, and his M.O. is most likely blitz attacks with blunt objects on defenseless victims, like old women or women who are asleep. In fact, it’s likely that at one time or another he’s killed a woman or women in the initial attack and then had sex with the corpse. Of course, by now he may have graduated to more sophisticated methods.’

  ‘If they know all this about him,’ Gant said, ‘why is he still on the street?’

  Monty shrugged. ‘You’re the ex-cop war hero. Go and arrest him if you want. But I suggest you hire him for the job. He can do whatever science you need, and he has the moral flexibility you described. Keep him close while the operation is ongoing. Afterwards, I think you should dispose of him. He’s not the kind of person you want out there knowing your secrets.’

  Monty smiled then, his white teeth gleaming. ‘And, as I’m sure you realize, the world will probably be a little better off without him.’

  In the end, Gant took half of Monty’s advice. He hired Foerster. Afterward, he paid him handsomely and sent him on his way. Why had he done that? For one, Foerster seemed a lot more stable in person than Monty made him out to be. He was a jerk, of course, almost unbearably obnoxious at times. But he was no drooling psycho. He worked long hours without complaint, living on take-out food and very little sleep, and when it came to the science he knew exactly what he was doing. There was trial and error, sure – he had never grown anthrax before, weaponized or not – but he mastered the intricacies of it in short order.

  There was something creepy about Foerster, but the operation was a huge success, and he was part of that success. It might have been bad judgment, it might even have been short-sighted selfishness, but Gant figured that if he ever needed a microbiologist again, Foerster was his man, so it was better to keep him alive. And it was even more than that. Gant recognized something in Foerster. In a sense, they had some things in common, were almost kindred spirits.

  They both kept secrets.

  ***

  ‘You can’t keep hiding out here forever.’

  It was her mother talking. That morning, Katie had evacuated to her mother’s tidy house in Beaufort, about an hour away by car. Now, in the late afternoon, she was still there. She had no immediate plans of leaving.

  She’d eaten lunch with her Mom, and as the sun waned they were enjoying a few Margaritas on her Mom’s back patio. It was pleasant enough, sitting at the table and putting a buzz on. The patio looked out on her Mom’s backyard and garden. They were more modest, certainly, than Katie’s, but still pretty nice. It had rained a lot down here this summer and even now, in November, the whole backyard – the trees, the bushes, the hanging vines – were as dense and lush as a rainforest. It seemed to Katie like a magical place out of a fairy tale. And the strong drinks didn’t hurt either. They put a filter between Katie and her Mom’s more annoying commentary.

  It was good to be there in one important sense – Tyler had arrived hom
e and found her gone. In fact, he had called about an hour ago, wondering where she was and what he ought to thaw out for dinner. Of course, he knew exactly where she was – both their cars were outfitted with GPS units mounted inside the dashboard, which he could monitor from his laptop computer. It was very convenient. If the cars were ever stolen, he could find them again with just a few clicks. And if Katie ever used her car to run away from home, he could find her again the same way.

  Tyler also knew what he ought to make himself for dinner. He was a big boy and had lived on his own for many years before they met. He had called her to send a message. Although their conversation was brief, and polite, he was in effect telling her: I’m home now and you should be, too.

  But she wasn’t home and she wasn’t coming home. Not tonight. See, two could play at this game of being absent without leave. He thought he could come and go as he pleased and she was supposed to stay home and play wifey, but she was done with that. It was over. Certainly, she would make it look good for public consumption – for instance, she was organizing their annual Halloween party as she always did – but privately, she would make him feel how she felt.

  Katie’s mother went on. ‘I mean, it seems like every few days you’re sleeping over here, and I doubt it’s for my benefit. If you’re having these sorts of problems, maybe you should go into counseling together.’

  She looked at her mother, really soaking her in. She was a woman in her late fifties. She was careful about sun exposure. She drank eight glasses of pure spring water a day. She followed a mainly vegetarian diet, though she wasn’t a fanatic about it. At Katie’s insistence, she had taken up yoga about ten years ago, and had retained some of her youthful flexibility and strength. Her eyes were bright and alert, even after a few drinks. About the only obvious clue to her age were the crow’s feet around her eyes, and the wrinkles on her forehead and neck – she refused to consider plastic surgery, though many women she knew had already gone for it two or three times.

  Still, Katie’s father had died five years earlier and his death had taken its toll. Her Mom she wasn’t as vigorous as before – wasn’t quite the queen of the ball she had once been. She had diminished without him, and had become thinner and more fragile. She was still passionate about gardening, and about her charity work. She still lived life and gave herself to it. If anything about her had outwardly changed, it was that she no longer traveled the way she and Katie’s father had loved to do together. But that was par for the course now anyway – few people were traveling like they once had. Even so, her mother was getting older, and it was happening right in front of Katie’s eyes. She could almost picture her mother in another ten years, and she didn’t like what she saw.

  ‘Mom, would Dad have ever gone to marital counseling?’

  ‘Well, we never needed counseling, as far as I know.’

  ‘That’s not really my point. My point is, would he have gone?’

  Her mother gave a gentle shake of her head. ‘I don’t think certain men of your father’s generation would go in for that kind of thing. Many did, but some men were holdovers from an earlier time. They weren’t very touchy-feely. They held their pain inside and didn’t talk much about it.’

  Katie took a sip of her Margarita. It was fruity and delicious. She was about to score one on her mother and took the time to savor it. ‘Exactly my point. Tyler is a man from Dad’s generation, and I’d say he qualifies as a holdover from an earlier time. Like maybe the Great Depression.’

  Her mother made a pained expression. ‘I’m not the one who told you to marry a man your father’s age.’

  ‘Nobody told me to do it. He’s the man I fell in love with.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake, Katie. A younger man, a more modern man, would be better able to deal emotionally with the problem you’ve had. A younger man would be more open about it, would be more willing to talk about it, and then maybe the two of you could move on from being stuck in this place.’

  ‘Mom…’

  Her mother held up a thin hand. To Katie, this was the first indication that her Mom had crossed the line from tipsy to drunk. ‘No, I’m going to say it. Tyler wanted to have children, his own children. He wanted to have them with you. But you can’t have children, and what’s worse, you can’t have them because of your own flagrant behavior. OK, you were young, but that doesn’t change the facts. You ruined your body by sleeping around.’

  ‘Jesus, Mom,’ Katie said. What she thought was: Fuck you, Mom.

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it? How is an old-fashioned person like Tyler supposed to deal with that? He can’t talk about it. He probably can’t even think about it without getting upset. Personally, I think your marriage is doomed.’

  With that, she stood on unsteady legs and gathered their glasses. ‘Are you having another drink?’ It came out ferociously, almost an accusation.

  ‘Sure, why not?’ Katie said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  Her mother went inside and Katie sat, watching the light begin to fade from the sky. She never watched the news, but even she knew that many people thought the world was ending. The weather was changing. The economy was collapsing and millions of people were out of work, or had lost their homes. None of these hardships had touched her life, but she felt them somehow, like they were all around her, in the air she breathed, on the empty highways she drove, in the gated communities where she and her mother both lived.

  And she had her own hardships, didn’t she? It was a painful thing, not being able to bear a child. She had lost that ability years ago, at the age of twenty-five, without even knowing it. Back in her Dewey Beach days she had picked up a case of gonorrhea. Worse yet, she apparently had it for months before any symptoms appeared. Even worse, she got it during a time when she was particularly active, partying too much, and she wasn’t even sure who it came from. She was horrified by it, of course. Who wouldn’t be horrified by a foul-smelling, painful discharge coming from their body, especially that part of their body? But she had gone to a medical clinic and a round of antibiotics had knocked it out in a few days. Katie was good at forgetting unpleasant facts, and a short time later it seemed that the whole episode had happened to somebody else.

  Then, two years ago, she had miscarried a baby. It was early into the pregnancy, less than two months. These things happened. Then, last year, it had happened again. A battery of tests quickly revealed something she hadn’t even suspected. Her uterus had been scarred by the gonorrhea. As a result, her pregnancies were ectopic – meaning the fetus lodged each time in one of her fallopian tubes, and grew there for a little while. But the tubes were too narrow. They weren’t designed for growing a baby, so her body expelled the fetus in self-defense. This was one impromptu anatomy lesson that she hadn’t wanted to learn.

  The good news was that there was no threat to her overall health, and she could enjoy a normal, active sex life with a willing partner. The bad news was that she could never carry a baby to term. The worst news was that there was no way to explain her past to Tyler in a way that would make sense to him, or that he could accept. She had never felt like a whore before – not until the day they found out why she couldn’t have a baby, and not until she looked into her husband’s eyes.

  She remembered how some weeks afterward he wasn’t home one night, and she wandered the big house, thinking that she might start cleaning. Instead she poured herself a glass of wine and went into the living room. She sat on the leather sofa across from Tyler’s chair. She could see the indentations his body had made. It was like he was sitting there, invisible. When the grandfather clock chimed nine, she began to cry. There wasn’t much force behind the tears, and she regained herself. Maybe she was reaching the point where she was all cried out. She hoped so.

  She remembered another time when he left the bed in the middle of the night. She padded down the stairs, looking for him. She found him in the living room, slouched in his chair, whiskey glass in hand. His eyes were open, staring straight ahead. He looked up w
hen she came to the doorway. Those eyes were hard. She saw no caring there, no warmth, just cold intelligence measuring her. He could have been a creature from an alien race, come to take specimens back home. He stared at her a long time.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Tell me how much you love me.’

  There was nothing she could do, nothing she could say. Things were never OK between them. They had moments when they were easy together, like they used to be, but those moments became increasingly rare. It was quiet in the house, and she felt his anger most of the time, rather than saw it. He shut her out. She suspected that when the time was right for him, he would put an end to the marriage. Right now, Katie, flawed as she was in his eyes, fit his purposes. Appearances were important to Tyler, and in their community they still seemed the perfect couple – a wealthy, successful and very fit older man with a stunning young wife. But she imagined a day would come when his purposes changed, and then he would make her go away. Maybe he would find himself another young woman. For all she knew, maybe he already had.

  He blamed her, of course. He blamed her for those men who came before him. She had always been vague about her past love life. But that luxury was gone. He extracted confessions from her regarding each and every man that came before him. When she told him about Ray, she could swear she saw Tyler’s heart break. He got drunk and slapped her that night, for the first time ever. It didn’t hurt, but it surprised her and she cried.

  Good for you, she told him in her mind as the tears rolled down her cheeks. You should be the one with the broken heart for a change.

  Now, her mother came out the sliding glass doors with the next round of drinks. ‘Mom,’ Katie said. ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t live like this anymore.’

  ***

  Foerster was dead tired.