by Bright,R. F.
“Yes, a few blocks away.”
“How’s late afternoon? Around four?”
“That’s fine. I’ll be here. Oh, and how will the . . . how?”
“One of our guys, Trooper MacIan, will assist you. I think you’ve met.”
“Yes. We’ve met.”
“Well then, I’m going to mark everything OK and he should arrive up there in a few hours.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, my dear. If there’s any problems, you call me. I’m Cassandra. OK? I mean it, you call me.”
“OK, thanks,” said Camille, and hung up.
She looked at her notes: Murthy. Harbinger International. Her leg muscles were throbbing and her neck ached. She walked to the living room. The smell of burned toast made her mouth water and her stomach churn. The living room was big enough for her to turn figure eights if she kept her steps close. A little movement might help.
She walked the first figure eight in chirpy little steps. The second, much faster with a short stutter step. The third was dancy, the rest free form. In five minutes she felt great. She twirled up to the windows, searching for her reflection, then jockeyed into the best light. She tossed her hair, turned a dramatic shoulder to the glass and made her Lauren Bacall face — “Yes. We’ve met.”
13
MacIan circled the Village of Lily, then landed on the identical spot he’d landed on before. Pastor Scott stepped forward, shadowed by Max, wearing the tattered pea-coat, and Fred. MacIan pulled the Peregrine closer to the crowd this time. Pastor Scott reached out to Max for the pouch. Fred stepped between them, glowering, “Are you crazy?” Pastor Scott shrank back, apologetically.
MacIan poked his head out as the wind-dome lifted and motioned for Max to come. Max ran to the Peregrine, holding the pouch out to MacIan.
“I have to go to New York. Wanna come?”
Max looked to his father.
Fred shooed him off with both hands. Go on. Go.
Max clutched the pouch to his chest, jumped in, and away they went.
Once in the air, MacIan pointed. “Gager’s courier pouch?”
Max held it up.
“Hang onto it till we get there.”
MacIan scrolled down the list of Recent Destinations, then tapped > Gutenberg N.J. The Peregrine took control. It was faster without human interference, and within an hour they were dropping down into Camille’s parking lot. A hearse was waiting, as was Camille in a beige trench coat.
She watched Arthur’s body coming off the Peregrine and into the hearse. It was mortifying, but the initial blow had come and gone and she would now do what was expected. The hearse drifted away, and she aimed her hollow eyes across the parking lot and caught a second look at MacIan. From this distance, he filled his frame just right. He was better looking than she remembered, certainly an outdoors type. There was nothing cute about him, and that was OK. He was a soldier, not a model. She dragged herself forward, legs heavy, clearly exhausted. “You have some papers for me to sign, no doubt,” she said, pleasantly.
“Sorry,” said MacIan.
“It’s not you. It’s the system,” she said, trying to be funny as she took the clipboard and pen. MacIan motioned to Max to hand over the courier’s pouch.
“This is Max. He’s the one who found your father.”
Max stepped forward wearing a pink face and a dopey grin. He raked off his crude hat and extended his hand. Camille brushed past it and wrapped him in her arms.
“Thank you. Thank you so much,” she said. The clipboard slipped from her hand and hit the asphalt. All three bent for it, clumsily. Max prevailed and handed it to her, then the courier’s pouch.
Camille held the clipboard in one hand, the courier’s pouch in the other. It was too much. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said, and led the way up to her place.
Once inside, Max went straight for the windows, overwhelmed by the panoramic view. Camille put her things down and took off her trench coat. MacIan waited and watched and couldn’t help but notice how she’d transformed. She was a good bit taller than he remembered, and slender but by no means skinny. She wore black gabardine slacks and a charcoal-grey cashmere sweater. Hair neatly combed, but a little windblown. She looks nice, he thought. Really nice.
Camille felt unusually safe with these rustic creatures standing before her billion-dollar view. It was pleasantly surreal. How should she break the ice?
“Max, it’s Max, right?”
Max turned his guileless face to her and smiled.
How beautiful, she thought. Strong but innocent. “First things first,” she said, and headed toward a red leather loveseat in the far corner. “Come with me.”
Max looked to MacIan. They made querulous faces at each other, and followed.
On the loveseat’s arm sat a book, Reality Is Broken, which she lifted and flipped to a page where the text included a few numbers. “He tells me you’re the good guys, right?” she said, nodding at MacIan. “So I guess it’s OK to show you this.” She tapped on the numbers, and said to Max, “You’re a hunter, I hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The loveseat swung away from the wall. “Then you’ll like this.” A panel behind the loveseat slid open and a part of the floor slid into the wall, revealing a short staircase. “How old are you, Max?”
“I’ll be eighteen in a few days.”
“Can you read?”
“Of course,” he said, regretting his tone.
“Of course you can. Where are my manners? Home school?”
“Yes, my mom, before . . . my dad. Some neighbors.”
“I have something for you. For finding my dad.” She motioned for Max to come along. He followed her down three tight steps, and peered into a large gun cabinet overflowing with top-of-the-line hand weapons. He had only dreamed of this.
“Pick one,” she said. “Arthur, my dad, would have insisted. I know he would.”
Max stood paralyzed, eyeballs flashing from the gun cabinet, up the stairs to MacIan, and back to Camille.
“You a big gun bouncin’ on your hip kind’a guy?” She pulled a long barreled nickel-plated revolver out, spun its cylinder, closed one eye and squinted down the chamber, and handed it to him. “Or, are you more of a 9mm in an ankle holster secret agent guy?” She pulled a fancy case out and flipped open the lid to reveal the sleek semiautomatic Beretta 9mm, and all its accessories. “I’ve got plenty of ammo for both. Check ’em out.”
Max’s heart leapt from his chest.
MacIan hadn’t seen anything this admirable in a long while. Camille’s smile was generous and sincere. She was having more fun than Max. Without her saying a word, Max knew everything he had to know about her.
Camille came up the steps poking a finger at MacIan. “I got something for you, too.” Max slumped onto the steps behind her, plagued by this agonizing choice.
Camille moved to her computer and nodded for MacIan to have a look as she scrolled through a list of spreadsheets, stopping on one marked > Active Clients. She reached behind the computer and pulled out a cell phone. “I found this hidden in my father’s desk,” she said. “It was totally outside our system. He paid for it from a shell account he’d set up to cash checks he didn’t want me to see.”
MacIan arched his eyebrows suspiciously.
“No, no, no. He was trying to protect me. If he thought one of his deals would bring him a little too close to the edge, and he did lots of things over the edge, he’d keep it to himself.”
She picked up the cell phone and pointed to the computer screen. “The call history on this phone is dominated by one number,” she said, typing that number into a search box. “That number, as you can see, is associated with one of our active accounts . . . Harbinger International. We’re on the clock right now. Tick funkin’ tock.”
The screen flashed and a detail page popped up. “I called that number. Turned out to be Representative Mahesh Murthy’s office. No extension, so Arthur only talked
to the person who answers the phone. Some staffer. I searched Murthy, and came up with pages and pages of stuff — a truly retail politician. He’s on every respectable hate-list. And he’s connected to Harbinger by his buddy, Representative Al Thomka. Thomka owns Harbinger and is the plaintiff in the Tuke civil suit.”
MacIan tapped the screen. “Coincidence?”
They grinned at each other skeptically. “Let’s have a look inside the courier’s pouch,” she said.
They walked back to the living room, where Camille had left the pouch on the kitchen island. “What’s in it?” she asked.
“Don’t know.”
“You didn’t look inside?”
“It was your father’s. Max, and his dad, went back up to where they’d found him when the snow melted and dug it out from under a rock. It belongs to you.”
Camille chuckled. “You really are not,” she made air-quotes with both hands, “from around here. But you’re big and strong and healthy.”
“Pick of the litter,” he said, with a self-deprecating smile.
She had never been a fan of the rugged type, at least the ones from around here. They always seemed to be hiding some tragic insecurity. But MacIan was clad in an iron-willed confidence unlike anything she’d seen before. She couldn’t find a fault, not yet.
“Where have you been?” she mumbled.
“Far away.”
“Well, you’re here now, and I gotta know who you are. This is stacking up to be a fracas of the first magnitude, and I don’t intend to be hobbled by some goody-two-shoed Boy Scout.”
Tough as nails and cute as a pin, he thought.
“We might go outside the lines a little,” she said. “I know Murthy, or Harbinger, is responsible for my father’s death.” She paused to make certain he’d taken full measure of that. “And! I’m gonna get ’em for it.”
“You sure?”
“Look, Shorty,” she said, rising up on her toes and staring straight up his nostrils. “Already I can see you think this sort of thing is all fisticuffs and hairy balls. Well, I worked with Arthur Gager for fifteen years, and you wouldn’t make a patch on his ass.”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t,” he said. “But I’ve been given this case, by my boss, Commander Konopasek, NPF. I’m official.”
Camille picked up the courier’s pouch. “If you think your authority is an asset, you’re more naive than I thought. Your NPF status means you have to play by the rules these assholes wrote. You’ll be playing their game. A game you can't win.”
“What makes you think the NPF is part of the corporate state? We pretend to be, but that’s just a way to buy some. . . time.” MacIan wanted to put a hand on her shoulder; she was shaking like a leaf. “We both want the same thing,” he said in a comforting voice.
She slowly exhaled, wondering if Trooper MacIan was an honorable man, or was she seeing what she wanted to see? She leaned closer, recalling the statement at hand, something about wanting the same thing. “Really? And what’s that?”
His unswerving eyes smiled into hers. “Revenge.”
She put her left hand on his chest and gently pushed him away, after a delightfully telling pause, then stepped back and made a sweeping presentation of her right hand. “I’m in.”
MacIan took her hand and gently shook it. “Where do we sign?” she said jokingly, smacking the trust out of the moment.
“Never signed. Never broken,” he said.
“I’ve heard that cliché a thousand times, mostly from very shady people. What the hell does it mean?”
“William Penn. He never pledged or signed any contract and never broke a promise.”
“Your hero?”
“Definitely.”
“You believe in promises?”
“Promises rule the future.”
She wanted to challenge that, but it was too reasonable; sarcasm would have to do. “So how’d that work out for him? William Penn.”
“Pretty much died in prison, without a penny.”
Camille looked disappointed, but such noble sentiments didn’t sort with the sedition welling up in her heart. “That account in there, on the computer. The job my father was working on for Harbinger. It’s still active.” Her brows arched. “We’re going to give these bastards the witch-hunt they asked for, with a complimentary enema — make ’em bleed. Bleed money.”
“Sounds a little too . . . proctological.”
“Worse, oh, much worse,” she said. “That’s a Jersey Girl promise.”
He made a comical frown, hoping to lower the estrogen level, but she was snuggling into a blanket of cozy hate. She strode out into the middle of the living room, looked across the river, then turned and aimed a finger at him. “We’re going to bring these assholes down,” she said, adding with tremendous pride. “And! We’re going to bill them for it.”
Max came up from the gun safe weighing his choices. It came down to the original two. Camille knew her guns. The Smith & Wesson Magnum 50 caliber revolver, legendary hand-cannon. Or the Beretta Cheetah — sleek, laser sights, reliable. And! The Beretta was cool. James Bond cool. He’d read all the Bond thrillers. He was happy to find Camille and MacIan at the kitchen island, but the choices still echoed in his head: small, sleek and cool vs. blow your head off every time.
Camille enjoyed Max’s lovely predicament. “Well? Got a favorite?”
Max held up the Beretta, sheepishly. Camille nodded. “My personal favorite.”
But Max was torn. “I like this one best, but I know my dad would go crazy for this one.” He held up the huge Magnum revolver.
“You’re going to . . . share it . . . with your dad?” she asked, drowning on each word.
“We found the, well, we did . . . together,” mumbled Max, fearing his words were making her emotional. “We share everything anyway. So. Well, ah. Doesn’t matter . . .”
“Sweetheart. Please. Forgive me. Take them both. Please. Please,” she said, angry at herself.
Max grew more perplexed. He had no experience with soft, warm, good-smelling females. He put an arm around her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Miss Camille, everything’s gonna be all right. I promise.”
Camille dabbed at her eyes with the cuff of her sweater. “He was a sonnova bitch, but he was my dad. I loved him. Now he’s gone.”
Max looked to MacIan for help. MacIan had none to offer. He had taken Max with him hoping to show him a world beyond Lily. This was part of it.
Camille shook herself straight. “Guess I forgot my manners, again. Take them both,” she said adamantly.
Max breathed a sigh of relief as the suffocating choice lifted from his chest.
“They’re both yours. One for you, one for your dad. That’s fair.”
Max could only stare.
She nodded to MacIan, and then to the gun safe. “How about you?”
MacIan grinned. “I already have one of those,” he said, pointing to the Magnum, “more or less.”
“Really?” said Camille. The 50 cal. was highly sought after and extremely hard to get.
“It’s old, but it’s mine.” He reached into a pocket-slit in the leg of his uniform and pulled out a tattered Smith & Wesson Special Issue 50 Caliber, the fully automatic version.
Camille’s jaw dropped. “Desert Eagle. Not easy to get one of those.”
“This one was particularly hard to come by.”
Camille changed the subject by tossing the courier’s envelope onto her desk and pretending she hadn’t heard him. She yanked open a junk drawer and dug out what looked like a small flashlight. She turned the pouch until she found the corner with a tiny barcode and waved the flashlight over it before rotating the zipper-lock’s combination. “There’s an exploding ink bag in here. This little scanner disarms it.”
MacIan pivoted onto one of three tall stools, where he could see Max reflected in the giant windows carefully arranging his guns in their cases for transport back to Lily.
Camille pulled a large manila envelope from the courier
’s pouch. “And what is this?” she said, holding the hefty envelope up to MacIan. It was stuffed full. She shook it next to her ear, bounced it in both hands, shrugged her shoulders and unwound the flap-string.
MacIan was enthralled. Her movements were delicate, yet deliberate, strong and graceful.
She tilted the envelope to see inside and shook the contents, looking for danger. Finding none, she set the envelope on the countertop and removed a stack of photocopies from it. She lifted one and studied it.
It was a letter. Very old and handwritten, in Dutch. She took another. A copy of a deed from 1648, also in Dutch.
MacIan touched her shoulder. “Let me see that one.”
She handed him the deed.
He dropped it back on the countertop for both to see and put his finger under the only word they both could make out — Tuke.
On the flight back to Lily, Max held the two gun cases on his lap, imagining his father’s reaction. He could scarcely wait. In the back seat sat two bricks of ammo for each weapon. Camille assured him that when he needed more he had only to ask, and he was sure she would never lie to him. She was the smartest, toughest, most beautiful woman he had ever met. Except for his mom, of course.
MacIan tapped the phone icon on the dashboard, and said, “Barracks.”
Cassandra picked up, “Nationalpolicebarracks, Bedford.”
“Trooper MacIan.”
“What’s up, Shorty?”
“Commander there?”
“Hang on.”
He could hear some crackles and then the Commander was on the line.
“Commander, you were right. Everything points to Tuke.”
The Commander laughed. “Of course it does. Why else would Levi drop off the face of the earth?”
“Don’t know. Camille Gager is searching for a lead to his whereabouts.”
“Camille Gager?”
“The deceased’s daughter.”
“My condolences,” said the Commander with growing agitation. “When will you be back?”
“I’ll drop Max off in Lily, then I’ll be right there. Maybe an hour.”
“Who the hell’s Max?”