Against All Enemies

by John Gilstrap

  “Assuming he’s in Venezuela,” Boxers said. “Mrs. Boomer never confirmed that.”

  “She never denied it, either. I think it’s worth the risk.”

  “And how are you going to get there?” Venice asked.

  “We’ve got time left on our access to Mannix’s Lear.”

  “Too much time,” Boxers said. “It’s like flying a tuna fish can.” Free access to the Lear had been part of Jonathan’s fee when repatriating Mannix’s daughter from a religious cult a few years ago. It replaced a much more spacious Gulf Stream from a previous mission, and Boxers had a hard time getting comfortable in the tight environs of the flight deck.

  “A first world problem,” Jonathan said.

  “But you’re going to a third world country,” Venice added. “How are you going to pull that off?”

  Jonathan said, “We’ve contacted friends on both sides of the border.” It was tough going for a while after the United States surrendered the Canal Zone to Panama in 2000 in accordance with the deal engineered by Jimmy Carter twenty-odd years before, but now the country was finally rebounding, and Jonathan maintained personal relationships with a number of Panamanians who retained good feelings about their distant northern neighbor. Truth be told, as Darmond’s America drifted away from its traditional philosophical underpinnings, it was more difficult for Jonathan to find allies in Washington than it was to find them abroad.

  “Did you obtain clearance for your weapons, too?” Venice asked.

  “The weapons, too,” Jonathan confirmed.

  “We are what TSA agents have heart attacks over,” Boxers said with a laugh.

  “Do you have a plan?” Venice asked. “I mean a meeting place is different than a plan. How are you going to make contact?”

  “I’m going to stand there and wait for him to come to me,” Jonathan said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s the only way I can think of,” Jonathan explained. “He knows that the Community is looking to hurt him. If I arranged a dead drop or something else that’s spooky, he’d never sniff the bait. He’d assume that we’d be watching the site because that’s exactly what we would be doing. Nothing shows vulnerability quite like standing out in the open.”

  “Even you admit that he probably killed those CIA agents, Dig,” Venice said. “Are you really comfortable making yourself another target?”

  “He won’t be alone,” Boxers said. “I’ll be watching.”

  “You can’t shoot a bullet out of the air,” Venice said.

  “Boomer won’t snipe at me,” Jonathan said.

  “You’re assuming,” Venice said. “And betting your life in the process.”

  “There’s no reason for him to,” Jonathan said. “He’s got no beef with me. I’m hoping Christyne will make it clear that we come in peace. If he doesn’t trust us, then he just won’t show up. He’s got no reason to kill me.”

  Venice looked to Boxers. “Then why will you be ready to snipe Dylan Nasbe?”

  “I’m just there to finish any fight that Boomer starts,” Boxers said. “I agree with the boss, though. There’s no reason for him to come at Digger. There’s certainly no reason to piss me off. He knows that I would make a very bad enemy.”

  “So he’s afraid of you,” Venice said.

  “He respects me,” Big Guy corrected. “I’m confident that he’s scared shitless of what I can become with the proper motivation.”

  Jonathan smiled at his partner’s words. Boxers was one of a small handful of people on Earth who could say stuff like that and make it sound like a casual part of doing business.

  “So, your plan is just to fly into Panama City International Airport—or whatever it’s called—and drive off?” Sometimes, Venice underestimated Jonathan’s abilities to plan things without her assistance.

  “That’s where those friends come in again,” Boxers said. “There are some old Spec Ops sites that still have life in them.”

  “But you’re still going to get picked up on radar, right?” Venice pressed. “I mean, you can’t just invade a sovereign nation and not be detected.”

  Jonathan and Big Guy shared a smile.

  Ian had lost track of where he was. Riding in the backseat of the Kia Sorento, he knew that they’d headed west on Interstate 66, spent a little time going south on I-81, and then it was westward again into the mountains. After that, turns onto small two-lane roads led to more turns onto two-lane roads, and occasionally, the two lanes looked more like one lane. Little drove while Biggs rode shotgun. While they didn’t treat him as their prisoner—they were polite if guarded, and no guns were pointed in his face—he felt like a prisoner nonetheless. Perhaps that was what happened when you were being driven to an unknown place by unknown people, all of whom shared a secret that was worth killing for.

  West Virginia was a beautiful state. Green and lush—wild and wonderful, just as the license plates advertised—these hills and the people who lived in them were the very soul of the United States. Continuing west and south for hour after hour, Ian knew that they were entering Coal Country. The woods were so thick and tall that the Kia drove two or three miles at a stretch without ever catching a glimpse of unfiltered sunlight.

  Ian enjoyed the company of people like those who lived in these parts—God-fearing patriots whom the Northeastern elites—President Darmond and his crowd—dismissed as ignorant rednecks. The residents of these woods might never in a lifetime see the money that an ex-secretary of state could earn in a single speech to a trade association, but they found a way to manage and thrive. They laughed with their children and partied with their neighbors, and did their best to cope with the crap that the elites flung their way from Washington. These mountain people, along with their kindred spirits in the Southeast and the Midwest and the Southwest and the Northwest—the hundreds of millions of people who never dined in a five-star restaurant and never cared to—were the backbone of this nation, and they were being railroaded by bureaucrats who derided them.

  The anger among residents of Coal Country and the Rust Belt was palpable. Ian had heard from hundreds of them through the Uprising boards. How, they wondered, could the government care so little about them? Was it really as simple as punishment for the fact that residents here rarely voted for people of President Darmond’s party? Work here was already scarce. For the people of Coal Country, where savings accounts were stripped bare, unemployment meant foreclosure. And foreclosure meant humiliation because people who actually worked for a living still prided themselves in their responsibilities to provide for their families.

  After all, what did a senator from New York care about starving children in West Virginia or in Louisiana or in Indiana? The fact that the starving children in West Virginia were mostly white—and therefore outside any usefulness in reelection campaign advertising—made them doubly forgettable.

  As Ian and his keepers drove deeper into Coal Country, Ian was pleased that General Brock and his team had either been reading his Uprising posts very closely, or, more likely, that the general had drawn similar conclusions to his own. It was significant, he believed, that whatever planning the general had put into place would be focused in the heart of areas most oppressed by the Darmond regime.

  During the drive, he’d made some assumptions that he hadn’t bothered to confirm because he’d know soon enough whether he was right. The first assumption, building on the presence of Little and Biggs, was that the general was building an army. If the general had been reading Ian’s posts, he would know that the army needn’t be a big one. One hundred, two hundred fifty soldiers at most. And they would need training. Training, in turn, would require a training location, and what better location than the Coal Country of West Virginia? Country folks knew to keep to themselves. Other people’s business was not their own.

  Yet somehow, because the communities were small, word always leaked. People in small towns learned things that star reporters from the New York Times would never be able to pry out of
the locals. And therein lay the real genius of placing the training operation in the middle of the communities that were most oppressed by Washington. If word leaked—no, when word leaked—it would be the rare bird in this part of the world who would pick up a phone and call the authorities.

  “How close are we?” Ian asked.

  “Have you got someplace else to be?” Biggs asked back.

  “Well, technically yes, but I can only assume that General Brock will make sure that I’m not brought up on charges of desertion.” Actually, the charge would be absence without leave, but he preferred the comic value of desertion.

  “I’m pretty sure that the general can make happen just about anything he wants to make happen,” Little said.

  “There’s also the matter of needing to use the bathroom.”

  “When we get to a turnout I’ll pull over.”

  “Thank you. And you never answered my question. How close are we to our destination?”

  Neither of the men in the front seat said anything.

  Chapter Ten

  Our Lady’s Chapel in Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in downtown Washington, DC, was the most acoustically pristine spot in North America, thanks to renovations a few years ago that were sponsored by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the leadership of Irene Rivers, who had served as director for ten and a half years, and had just scored a second ten-year appointment from President Darmond. Thanks to a unique combination of insulation, scanning, and jamming, sound generated inside this space could not escape to the rest of the world.

  Jonathan Grave was one of precious few people who knew that the space existed, and while he was annoyed by the long drive from Fisherman’s Cove to the District, he felt the same tug of excitement that he always felt when he visited here. In a town like Washington, which valued secrets more than gold, some things could not be discussed in official spaces, and some people could not be logged in to official buildings.

  Jonathan and Irene went way back, to the days when he was still in the Army, and she was still a field agent for the Bureau. They’d broken a lot of laws together over the years, but always for the right reasons. Irene was among the last of a dying breed of bureaucrats who understood that true justice often lay in the white spaces between the lines of codified laws, and she was willing on occasion to work with contractors to secretly accomplish tasks that the government could not officially sanction. Ever since Darmond and his gang had taken office, every operation was a cause for a press conference.The man had an insatiable appetite for cameras and microphones.

  Irene rarely called press conferences, and Jonathan never did.

  The sharp contrast between bright sunlight and sudden darkness blinded him as he entered the cathedral, enough that he had to stand still for five or ten seconds to let his senses adjust. When they finally settled, he allowed himself to be taken in by the beauty and grandeur of the place. A nominal Catholic since birth, Jonathan had sine-curved in and out of the faith and currently found himself more in than out, hoping that at the end of his days, God would understand the righteousness of what he did for a living. As a lover of beautiful things, he could not help but be overwhelmed by the opulence of the cathedral.

  Once he could see, he pivoted his head to the right, toward where he knew the chapel to be. If he counted right, this was his fourth, maybe fifth visit to this spot for a similar purpose. Two rod-straight toy soldiers in business suits stood astride of the chapel, so directly out of the Central Casting catalog for security detail that they might have been wearing T-shirts from The Bodyguard Store. Jonathan recognized one of them from a previous meeting, but if the guy remembered—the one on the left—he made no indication.

  “I’m sorry, the chapel is closed,” said the one on the right as Jonathan approached.

  “I’m here to see an old friend,” Jonathan said. “I believe she’s waiting in the chapel for me.”

  The bodyguards exchanged a glance. “And what’s your name?”

  His neck bristled. “Is the director expecting a lot of visitors?”

  Color invaded the bodyguard’s face. Before he could say anything, a familiar voice from beyond them said, “Let him in, fellas.”

  The fellas were not pleased, but they knew an order when they heard one. They parted in unison, like automatic doors, to let him pass and then they closed ranks again.

  Irene Rivers rose from her chair in front of the Virgin Mary as Jonathan entered the chapel. Attractive for a woman of her age, Irene wore an elegantly tailored dark blue suit, her strawberry blond hair pulled back in a ponytail that had never seen a television camera. Her smile was as bright as polished marble. There was a beauty about her that somehow escaped the lens when she was photographed.

  “Hello, Scorpion,” Irene said. “You look well.”

  “As do you, Wolfie.” Her Wolverine handle went all the way back to the first time they’d worked with each other. Jonathan always sensed that she sort of liked it.

  “Please have a seat.” Irene gestured to the assembled hard-backed chairs as if they belonged to her.

  Jonathan waited until Irene selected a seat, and then chose one in the same row, two to the left.

  “It was so nice to hear from Dom,” Irene said. “A phone call from him often means that my day is going to become interesting.” Jonathan’s long-time friend and confessor Dominic D’Angelo had first introduced him to Irene, and as the nature of his professional relationship with the FBI director matured, all face-to-face appointments between the two were arranged by Dom. While all calls to Irene’s office were logged, and her cell phone data was subject to subpoena, the discussions between even the FBI director and her priest were beyond legal discovery.

  “How is Venice?” Irene went on. “It’s been so long. And how are Mama and Roman?”

  Small talk was part of every meeting everywhere. Something to be endured before getting down to business. “They’re all fine,” he said. “I think Roman is closing in on fourteen now, and Mama still thinks she runs the world.”

  Irene laughed. “Mama does run the world.” In Fisherman’s Cove, there was only one Mama. Like Oprah, she was a one-named force of nature to whom everyone showed respect. Not because she was frightening, but because she was so damned nice. And frightening.

  “You know that one day I’m going to lure Venice away from you and into my shop, right?”

  “Trust me. Uncle Sam can’t afford her salary,” Jonathan said. There was also the fact that Venice had never liked Irene. She’d tried to explain it to him a couple of times, but he didn’t get it. Actually, he couldn’t swear that the explanation had ever held his interest all the way to the end.

  “I imagine you must be pretty busy,” Jonathan said.

  Irene laughed. “Enough with the small talk, eh? All right, then, down to business. You want to know about one Mister John Doe.”

  “I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Haynes Moncrief is an old friend of mine, and he’s heard a rumor that I have connections.”

  Irene’s features darkened. “Rumors? From where?”

  Jonathan waved her off with a flick of his hand that might have been shooing a fly. “Relax, Madam Director. Not that kind of rumor. The three of us occupied the same space a couple of years ago at the Fairmont Hotel. A cocktail reception before the Resurrection House Foundation dinner.”

  Recognition dawned. “Of course,” she said. “Sorry for the flash of paranoia.”

  “These are paranoid times.” He held out his arms as if to display the room. “Note the venue.”

  She offered a teasing smirk. “It’s nice to know you approve. Now, about your John Doe. As you had been led to believe, he doesn’t exist.” Irene said that with a full stop. As in, end of story.

  “He’s a real corpse,” Jonathan said. “He’s got real bullets in him that made him truly dead.”

  “At least as dead as Julius Caesar,” Irene agreed. “But according to official records, the fellow w
ho once occupied the bag of skin that is now his corpse in fact never walked the Earth.”

  “How about according to unofficial records?”

  “Ditto.” Irene crossed her legs. It was a sexy leg-cross that never failed to get Jonathan’s attention. “The man that Haynes Moncrief shot might just as well have been you or Big Guy. He was never born.” As she said that last part, Irene’s face turned stony.

  “Are you telling me that the assassin was a military operative?”

  “No,” Irene said. “I’m telling you that he is invisible to a level that is nearly impossible to achieve without the involvement of key elements of the federal government.” She shot her eyes toward her bodyguard, and lowered her voice. “And I’ll tell you that there are disturbing similarities between the attempted murder of Senator Moncrief and the successful murder of Congressman Blaine. The press hasn’t picked up on it yet, but they will before long.”

  Jonathan wasn’t buying. “You’re telling me that the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States can’t determine the real identity of a man they made disappear in the first place?”

  “I don’t think you realize how good we are at these things. You in particular should be encouraged by that. I can tell you for certain that he was not a Justice Department asset—or, at least we were not the ones who effected his identity change.”

  “Who does that leave, about a thousand alphabet agencies?”

  Irene glanced at her guard again. “You need to understand that over the past four years, the intelligence-gathering community has evolved into something very strange. As the administration gets a free pass on spying on our own citizens, the bad guys seem able to peek under our national skirts at will and examine lots of dirty bits. What they can’t find on their own, somebody on the inside leaks out from our end. People are dying from this, Dig, and I don’t see the political will to do what’s necessary to stop it. The will doesn’t exist because the people aren’t forcing anybody’s hand. Honest to God, it’s getting to the point where I don’t recognize the country anymore. That leaves it to the dedicated professionals to limit the scope of the damage. For some of our most important HUMINT assets, that means total, irreversible destruction of their true identities. If the records don’t exist, they can’t be hacked or stolen.”