None of it excuses his sins—and there are many. But nobody’s the bad guy inside his own mind.
I focus on one of the bad memories. Tyler once stomped on a guy’s knee until it folded the wrong way. The guy was on the floor of the bar, about ten feet and twenty months from where we are standing now. He’d given Tyler some smart-ass comment. Tyler doesn’t even remember what, but the guy walks with a limp to this day, and everyone remembers the incident. There’s a glow of accomplishment surrounding the memory, and he hears Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” on his personal soundtrack every time he thinks of it.
That helps. That helps a lot as I duck under his final weak attempt at a punch and elbow him hard in the back of the skull.
He hits the ground face-first, not even putting up his arms to soften the blow. He’s done.
Without pausing, I reach under my shirt and take out my gun. I point it at the bartender before she can aim the shotgun at me.
Kelsey gasps. She didn’t see the bartender coming. She was too busy watching the fight. But I’ve said it before: it is nearly impossible to sneak up on me.
The bartender figured she’d bail Tyler out as she’s done in the past—they’re business partners, after all. Now, looking down the barrel of the Walther, she’s questioning the wisdom of that idea.
“Go back inside,” I tell her. “Leave the shotgun.”
She thinks about it for a second.
“Jesus, is there something in the water in this town? I said leave the shotgun, Mona. You don’t want to die today.”
Using her name finally wakes her up.
When I feel that she’s gone, I step over to where Tyler is snuffling and bleeding into the gravel. He’s beginning to come around, but he won’t be able to get back on his feet for some time.
I shift him onto his side—he’s going to puke at least once—and fish his wallet and car keys out of his jeans.
I pop the trunk of Tyler’s car, a nearly new Ford Mustang that he’s already filled with empty beer cans, dirty clothes, and the wrappers from a few hundred Extra Value Meals.
I find the ziplock bag of cash under the spare. There’s a ten- to twenty-year sentence worth of meth in the trunk as well, plus a few guns wrapped in old towels.
I also find a bag of his second-most-popular product: Oxy. A lot of his customers use it to take the edge off a meth high.
I grab that, along with the ziplock full of cash, and slam the trunk closed.
“Mission accomplished,” I tell Kelsey. “Let’s go.”
Kelsey looks at the bag of pills, then at me.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“Let’s talk about it in the car, all right?”
“Jesus Christ, all of this—did you do all this just to score drugs?”
“I need it,” I tell her.
She doesn’t say anything. Just looks down at Tyler, still barely moving on the ground.
This isn’t the place for this conversation. I feel like shouting, the adrenaline still surging through me from the fight. But she’s not the enemy. I keep my voice under tight control. “It’s not the same,” I tell her. “Believe me, you do not want me to lose it, and these”—I hold up the bag of pills—“will keep that from happening.”
She looks uncomfortable and turns away quickly. “Let’s just get out of here,” she says.
She walks around the side of the bar, headed for the SUV. I don’t read her thoughts. I don’t have to.
I start to follow. But for some reason I’d rather not explore, I reach into the ziplock and pull out a couple of twenties. I drop them next to Tyler.
At least he’ll be able to buy his mom her smokes.
[17]
I walked away after Bagram. I’m sure there are some people who would have quit the moment they saw that body bag being hauled out of the room. Or at any time before that, when they knew for a fact that they were being used, when their conscience couldn’t take it anymore.
I’m not quite that stupid. You don’t tell the commander of a black-ops unit to take his job and shove it inside a secret prison seven thousand miles away from the right to due process.
I didn’t wait long, though. I made the call to Cantrell from the airport as soon as I got back to D.C.
“I’m done,” I told him.
He was less than thrilled. “You seriously think you can quit?”
“Pretty sure I just did.”
He sighed, and I could tell he was thinking of the right way to phrase what he wanted to say, given that we were on an unsecured line.
“I told you to get your head on straight. Get back to me when you’ve had a little more sleep.”
“I’m wide awake now. I don’t need any more time. You need to believe me on this: I have had enough.”
He made a noise. Almost like gagging. “Oh stop it. You going to tell me you’re getting misty over that little stain we left on the floor? Bullshit.”
“Too many stains. Too much blood on my—”
Cantrell cut me off before I could finish the sentence.
“No. You don’t get to make that speech. You want out? Then go with God. You’ve done your time, and I’ve had damn few complaints about you, which is more than I can say for most of your fucked-up brethren. But don’t use this as an excuse. You’ve seen worse. Hell, you’ve done worse.”
“Not when the other guy was in handcuffs.”
“You want a fair fight now? Be honest. You haven’t been in a fair fight in your life.”
He had a point. But he wasn’t about to change my mind.
“Tell me something,” I asked him. “You think what we did in that room was right?”
“Fuck yes, I do. No, he wasn’t Osama bin Laden or a Taliban warlord. Yes, he was weak and young and pathetic and stupid. But he was still the enemy. He had chosen to take up arms against the force and power of the United States military and he was absolutely going to die for it. He was born to be a corpse. Now, personally, I’d rather watch him die strapped to a table than have him out in the desert waiting to put a bullet in my skull. Maybe you’d feel better if a Predator dropped a Hellfire missile on his ass from twenty thousand feet. But the result is the same. There’s no such thing as a fair fight, John. There’s just us and them. Today there’s one less shithead for the enemy to throw at us. Bottom line, I can live with whatever road we took to get there.”
I knew that if we were face-to-face, I would get absolute certainty from him. I couldn’t read him over the phone, but I knew. There was no question in his mind.
And there were too many questions in mine. Maybe it was selfish. But I was done being Cantrell’s weapon.
“I can’t,” I said.
There was a long pause on the line. For a moment, I wondered if he’d hung up. And then Cantrell’s voice came back. His southern accent had thinned, which was how I knew he was deeply angry.
“You’ve been the beneficiary of a lot of investment. We’ve put a great deal of time and training into you. And we’ve trusted you with a lot of—well, let’s call them trade secrets. Now, you can understand why we’d be reluctant to allow you to leave, given all that you’ve got in your head.”
“You don’t want to send people after me.”
I heard a fat, happy chuckle over the phone. “Do I hear an ‘or else’ at the end of that sentence? You think it’s gonna be like Rambo? Lot of body bags, is that it?”
“I was thinking more like Night of the Living Dead. Only a lot less living, a lot more dead.”
He laughed at that. His way of buying time. Then he made his decision.
“You’ve seen too many movies, John. We try to do right by our people. You did your bit. Uncle Sam’s got no more legal claim to you. You want to walk away now, I promise, there’s no need to look over you
r shoulder.”
“I never need to look over my shoulder. Remember?”
“Don’t lecture me, son. I know everything you’re capable of, better than you do.”
“Then we’re done?”
“What do you want, a going-away party and a cake? We’re done.”
I believed him, even if I couldn’t read him over the phone line. I suddenly wasn’t sure what to say. He filled in the gap for me.
“Just remember this: you’ve had us clearing the way for a long time. You might not like it out there on your own.”
That sounded like a threat again. I didn’t like it.
“Hey, Terry,” I said, using his real first name, the one he didn’t ever tell anyone. “I’ve always wondered, why the hell do you use that accent? You’re from New Jersey.”
That made him laugh out loud. “Shit, John,” he said, accent thick as molasses again. “Shut up before you make me miss you.”
He hung up.
BY THE TIME I got back to our apartment, Whitney was gone. Her closets were empty, and her side of the bathroom was so clean it looked sterile. At some point while I was out of town, she’d made the decision to move on with her usual ruthless efficiency. For her, there was never any sense in hanging around after she’d planned her exit strategy. There wasn’t even a note.
I never saw it coming.
She didn’t vanish from the face of the earth. I admit, I’ve run her name on Google late at night. She’s the director of a think tank and the wife of an up-and-coming congressman who swept into office as part of the backlash against Obama.
But I’ve always wondered about the timing. Did she leave because she knew me so well? Did she realize before I did that I’d reached my expiration date?
Or did she leave because someone told her what happened at Bagram, and it was time for her to get out? Was she always a minder from the Agency, or someone else? Did they decide I wasn’t worth her time if I wasn’t with Cantrell’s group anymore?
I don’t know. That’s the kind of useless paranoia that crawls around in your head when you’ve been in the community for any length of time. You tend to ask yourself a lot of questions that will never have a good answer.
Either way, it didn’t really matter. She was gone.
And just like that, I was alone, out in the world, for the first time in my life.
I CONSIDERED MY options. I could have gone back to being a soldier, only for a private corporation like Blackwater. I could have used my talent for blackmail or gambling, like so many people have suggested. I could have found a normal job, stuck behind a desk or a counter somewhere, dealing with all the mouth-breathing, slow-witted people like you, every day of my life, until I finally put a gun in my mouth.
But I knew what I really wanted. I wanted to be alone. And I wanted to have enough money to do it in style.
There are a lot of other guys with my military training. I’d met some of them. They rented their skills and their lives to the very rich, solving problems that the One Percent didn’t want to trust with the proper authorities. That is the point of having money, after all: you get to hire someone to deal with the inconvenient things. Rich people don’t have to scrub their own toilets.
I had the same skills as those other guys, plus one definite market advantage. So I went to work for myself.
I moved to Los Angeles because I was sick of bad weather. In a short time, I got clients. Word gets around among the very rich. I bought some good suits and a decent place to live. I even put a little cash away for the day when I’d finally retreat completely from the world.
It all seemed to be working out pretty well.
Until now, anyway.
But I’m not dead yet. And as smart as Preston is, even with the CIA and the government and a billion dollars on his side, he’s still only human.
I’m not.
It’s time for me to remind him just what that means.
[18]
Kelsey’s hand is clenched around my forearm tight enough to hurt.
“This is never going to work,” she whispers at me.
We are both in the best suits we could buy at Ross Dress for Less. We showered and changed at a Motel 6, and we’ve got two cheap wheeled suitcases behind us as we walk from long-term parking to the entrance of Philadelphia International Airport. We look like a couple of ordinary professionals on their way to a conference or a sales meeting.
We get all the way to the doors of the terminal before Kelsey freezes up.
“Just relax,” I tell her. “Just breathe.”
She sucks in a deep lungful of jet-fuel-scented air, but she still gives me a look.
“This is where you start to question me? After everything you’ve seen me do?”
“This isn’t some backwoods meth head, or a bunch of guys with guns. I know you can handle that,” she says. “This is an airport, for Christ’s sake. They don’t even let you bring a water bottle on the plane.”
“You’re right,” I tell her. And she is. This should be absolutely impossible.
Everyone is supposed to be on full alert these days, if not for terrorists, then for the random lunatics who decide that the airport is the place to work out their issues against the government and the IRS.
But in reality, 9/11 was a long time ago, and human beings are wired to think short term. Passengers care more about getting to their flight than they do about terrorism. The security guards, in turn, just want to get everyone through the line with a minimum of pissing and moaning and threats of litigation. So everyone in the airport is already distracted, preoccupied. They want routine. They want order. They want everything to go as expected. And their brains will work overtime to make sure that illusion becomes a reality.
They’re going to do most of the work for me. I’ll only have to give them the smallest push.
Preston’s machines—and through him, the CIA—are the real problem. He’s got his software looking for me and Kelsey in every digital form possible. His programs know our purchasing patterns, our travel history, our seat preferences. Even if we use new credit cards, his algorithms will identify us by matching us to habits we don’t even realize we have. If we try to avoid credit cards and use cash, we’ll automatically be flagged as drug dealers, and that will raise our profile as well. If we use fake photo IDs, our pictures will still be on them, and the facial-recognition software will pick us out of the crowd better than most humans.
So I decided to bypass all that. We’re not going to show any ID. We’re not even going to buy tickets.
We’re going to just walk past the TSA and get on the plane. I’m even going to bring my gun with me. And nobody will say a word or stop me.
At least, that’s the plan.
WE’RE BLOCKING THE doors. Other travelers move around us with barely restrained sighs and curses. We’re being noticed. That’s not what I want. I gently lever my arm out of Kelsey’s grip: we’re not playing husband and wife here. “Let’s go,” I say.
I pick up my carry-on and start walking confidently toward the security checkpoint.
At least I’m confident. This is where Kelsey is closest to freaking out. She’s almost humming with anxiety, like a high-tension wire. She hesitates and then crosses the threshold into the airport, like she’s just stepped onto a minefield.
I think she was less worried when people were actually shooting at us. But she was raised in a polite family. Her respect for the rules goes deep. To her, this is like stealing, cutting in line, and cheating on a test, all rolled into one.
It’s understandable. Completely annoying, but understandable.
She has to relax. If she doesn’t, she’ll draw additional attention to us, and that could be a problem.
“I’m fine.”
“Yes, it will,” I whisper.
We stop for a moment s
o I can scan everyone in uniform. Quickly, I sift through all their thoughts. I don’t want the good agents. I don’t want the alert and conscientious employees, the ones who take their jobs seriously. I want the guy at the end of his shift, the one who drank too much coffee on his last break and now really has to go to the bathroom.
And there he is. I steer Kelsey over to the line that’s the longest. When we reach the TSA agent checking boarding passes, he looks up at us.
He’s irritable and tired. He fought with his son this morning, and his mind is still back there.
Then he sees Kelsey.
I didn’t need to worry about her. When the moment hits, she’s perfect. Her anxiety vanishes. She’s calm and confident. She gives him a heart-stopping smile.
The agent straightens up a little, wonders if she notices his receding hairline.
I hand over two perfectly blank pieces of paper to the agent. At the same time, I push a message into his head, as hard as I can. I actually picture myself taking it in one hand and hurling it at his brain like a fastball at the strike zone.
He looks hard at the paper, then looks at me, his face suddenly grave.
For a long instant, I worry I’m losing my touch.
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