Redeeming Factors (Revised)

by James R. Lane

  “I shot each one twice, right there,” and she brought a dainty pearled clawtip to within an inch of Crosby’s surprise-widened right eye. “When the one Jack shot didn’t immediately fall I guessed that he was wearing some kind of—what do you call it?—body armor. Since the only uncovered parts of their bodies were their eyes I placed my shots there.”

  The man blinked and drew back, saying, “Bang-bang, bang-bang, bang-bang? Like that? To their right eyes?”

  She solemnly nodded, pointing an imaginary gun and going through the motions of shooting the three men. All three cops noticed how quickly she pantomimed the action, like a video run at double the normal speed. “They carried their guns in their right hands,” she explained, “so I guessed they would be right-eye-dependent.”

  “I told you back at the station how fast and accurate she is,” Washington softly stated, “and our three dead dirtbags over there bear mute witness to that.”

  Green reached over and removed his white handkerchief from the top of the table; under it was a suppressed, laser-sighted Browning Buck Mark pistol. “This your gun, S’leen?” he asked and got a nod in return. Washington made sure the detective saw Ross’ blood-drenched .45 caliber Ruger on the floor amid a pile of medical waste. “Dick, I think you’ve got enough to keep you busy for some time. S’leen and I are going to take a ride north to the big city and see how Jack’s making out.”

  The alien ran back upstairs and returned moments later wearing a color-matched fanny pack. “I am ready,” she announced.

  “LT,” Washington said, “I’d like permission to accompany you and S’leen to the trauma center. Jack Ross was my friend, and as one of S’leen’s firearms instructors,” he smiled shyly at the H’kaah, “I’m proud of her, and I’d like to help.”

  Green tried to keep the amusement out of his voice as he dryly said, “Much as I admire your, um, devotion to duty, Sergeant Washington, I think you need to stay here. When I drive out the gate you’ll be the ranking officer on the scene, and from what you said you were also the first officer through that door. Crosby needs your insight and expertise more than S’leen needs you to…to protect her.” He softened the order by adding, “I may be old, son, but I’m far from dead. I’ll make sure nobody bothers her.”

  He held out his hand to the awaiting H’kaah and said, “Shall we go?”

  * * *

  Even as St. Augustine and its surrounding county moved toward its inevitable fate as a bedroom community for its huge metropolitan neighbor to the north, there were still long stretches of undeveloped rural US Highway 1 linking the old tourist-oriented town with bustling Jacksonville. In the young hours of that summertime Sunday automobile traffic on that once-major artery was almost non-existent.

  Inside the police cruiser S’leen sat uncomfortably surrounded by the tools of the modern-day law enforcement professional. There was so much equipment on the seat between Green and the H’kaah, as well as bolted to the floor and attached to the dashboard, that it seemed to the alien that both driver and front seat passenger were almost afterthoughts.

  “Is all of this…this equipment really needed?” S’leen asked. “I count four different radios, a portable computer, three boxes of paper forms and numerous electronic devices I have no idea of their purpose.” She looked almost overwhelmed. “Why do you need all this…this—?”

  “All this ‘stuff’, S’leen?” Green said around a wry smile. When he noticed her slow nod he said, “My type of police work is more like that of a high-level manager. I have to be able to monitor and contact any law enforcement agency, as well as keep track of all my officers and what they’re doing at all times. Everything here has a purpose; nothing rides in my car unless I have a use for it.”

  S’leen looked directly at Green, and when he realized she was staring at him she suddenly asked, “What use do you have for me, Lieutenant Green? How does taking me to the place where Jack Ross may already be dead serve your law enforcement needs?” The way she phrased her questions startled the man, and he didn’t immediately answer her. When he finally responded, what he said first shocked, then dismayed the alien. Lieutenant Nolan Green knew even more about Jack Ross than S’leen did, and virtually none of it was good.

  “Black Jack” Ross, the alien learned, had been a marked man for decades.

  Chapter 7

  *High Crimes & Worse*

  “What do you know—really know—about Jack’s background?” Nolan Green asked his alien passenger, and she replied with an overview of Ross’ horrifying lunchtime revelations. “And that’s all?” Green asked, incredulous. He got a confused, silent nod in return. “Oy,” he said, putting more grim inflection in that one word than S’leen would have believed possible.

  After a tense moment S’leen said, “I don’t understand, Lieutenant Green—”

  “For God’s sake, S’leen, call me Nolan,” he said with exasperation. “Whether or not you realize it, right now I’m the best friend you’ve got.” When she looked even more confused he sighed, then said, “Up to now you’ve been at a ‘need to know’ security level in this, but I think matters have reached a point where your ‘need to know’ covers just about everything relating to this whole operation. Sugar-coating situations like this can get you killed, and as you’ve recently discovered, people involved in this kind of thing play rough, and they play for keeps.”

  Because it was still dark Green wasn’t driving much over the speed limit, and he wasn’t running the patrol car’s blue lights or siren. Since they were still some distance from the hospital Green decided to make good use of the private time with the H’kaah. “I’m going to tell you of a dark period before you were born, S’leen, of an Earth torn by small wars, ‘police actions’ and terrible deeds done by monsters disguised as ordinary humans. Jack told you that he killed people while working in what we humans call government-sponsored ‘black operations’; what he didn’t tell you was how many people he killed, and—dear God—what led to some of those deaths.

  “Tonight you discovered that when your prey has no face the killing is easy,” he brusquely stated, but then added dramatically, “Occasionally, though, there comes a time that you have to look your victim in the eye, and that’s when the killing becomes personal.”

  “I don’t understand, Nolan. I could plainly see their eyes, and—”

  Green frowned, saying, “No, that’s not what I meant. You shot three masked intruders while fighting for your life, and you killed them from a distance while looking over the sights of a gun. If you literally ‘look your victim in the eye’, you’re probably in direct physical contact with them, and you’re probably the predator with the victim as your prey. It’s not cold, it’s not impersonal, and I can tell you from experience it’s not easy.”

  He was silent for a handful of moments, the patrol car’s amber dash lights giving his strong-featured face a hellish, otherworldly cast. “I wish to God—anybody’s god—what I’m about to tell you was a fairy tale,” he said, “but fairy tales normally don’t give adults nightmares, and I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in over twenty years.”

  * * *

  When I first caught up with him, “Black Jack” Ross was already a major player in the shadowy, “black” world of military/governmental special operations, the kinds of things no country publicly admits sponsoring, although most engage in them. At that time Jack was working solo in the Middle East, trying to stir up enough civilian outrage in a small Arab sheikdom to incite its population to overthrow their leader, a cold, brutal man who happened to be extremely hostile to both America and my native Israel, a land that, like that particular Arab sheikdom, no longer exists.

  Teddy Shapiro (yes, he’s the one everybody mistakenly thinks runs Patrons) and I were operatives in Mossad, Israel’s elite combination secret police, government intelligence and covert operations unit. We had heard of Jack’s exploits, but few in the agency really believed one goy (sorry, that’s a Jew’s term for a non-Jew) could actually be respons
ible for so much mayhem in so many different places around the world. By this point in his career Jack was credited with personally assassinating two third-world kings, three military dictators and a Communist premier, along with killing seventeen mid—and high-level governmental officials. He had also engineered the destruction of twelve governmental and industrial buildings, which killed over two hundred bureaucrats, technicians and laborers. While he always avoided capture, he was often able to shift blame for the deeds to the very groups and individuals he was working to destroy.

  Arabs and Jews, S’leen, are of a race of humans called Semites. It’s tragic that while Arabs and Jews are “blood brothers”, so to speak, we so desperately hated each other we…we obliterated our homelands and millions of our own people in a senseless nuclear war. But that came much later.

  Teddy and I were ordered to merge our operation with Jack’s effort, and our instructions were to meet him in the market place of the small town he was using as a base of operations. Being Jews born and raised in Israel, Teddy and I were, with our extensive Mossad training, able to blend in and pass for native Arabs, and we thought it would be easy to spot a Caucasian—Jack—as he tried to pass himself off as an Arab merchant.

  We were wrong.

  After hours of fruitless searching during which we managed to annoy dozens of lifelong town citizens whom we thought looked suspiciously like Caucasians in disguise, we took shelter for the night in a “safe house”, a nondescript home owned and maintained by one of our people. Shortly after we had gone to sleep we were awakened by a shadowy figure in our rude, tiny room—and the figure had us covered with a nasty-looking Uzi machine pistol.

  I’m not proud of it, but when I saw that figure standing there like the shadow of death I wet myself.

  Jack had slipped into the house and into our bedroom without triggering some rather sophisticated security measures we had installed, and he would have killed us right there and then vanished into the night had we not been able to prove our identities. It turned out that he had been watching us all the time we were trying to locate him—and even with our specialized training we had absolutely no idea we were the prey being stalked by such a deadly predator. Teddy and I realized right then that all the stories we’d heard about him must be true.

  Over the next two years the three of us worked as a team, running covert operations in virtually every part of the world. While we three became close friends Teddy and I noticed that Jack was becoming more and more disenchanted with the terrible things our work required us to do. Still, that didn’t stop him from maintaining his reputation; “Black Jack” Ross was, plain and simple, a government-backed terrorist-assassin, and the world we live in today would be a far different place had he not been so terribly effective. Sadly, that effectiveness is the very reason why he was attacked tonight.

  Jack, you see, was too good at his job, and both his government and mine used his talents far too often for his own good. Because of that, and despite his chameleon-like ability to blend into almost any culture and situation, enough information on how he operated was eventually accumulated to compromise his ability to function in the black operations world. Eventually he got out of it, both for reasons of security and from a growing case of conscience, but…but not before he did something so horrible, so incredibly outrageous that Teddy and I—well, we still have nightmares.

  The three of us were in another part of the world; where we were and what we were doing doesn’t matter that much anymore. We were trudging on foot through one of a seemingly endless string of nameless villages that infest poor countries like fleas on a dog. Poverty in such places is often so thick and overwhelming that it’s like walking through a quagmire of undernourished, swollen-bellied babies and gaunt, vacant-eyed adults. And the smell— When there’s no money, no food and no hope, hygiene becomes an impossible luxury. Such poverty has a stench that infects your sinuses and burns itself into your memory. Teddy and I never forgot it, and I’m still overly sensitive to people who don’t bathe regularly.

  In that part of the world the three of us were not the “right color”; we could disguise the shade of our skin but not our basic body structure and facial features, so we didn’t even bother trying to pass as natives of the area. Still, we spoke enough of the local language to get by, and wherever we went the locals thought we came from a country not too distant; an often-brutal country they respected but mostly feared.

  As we walked in silence past a small collection of primitive hovels, each of us lost in our private worries about the job we had to do in that sad nation’s capital, we desperately tried not to take notice of the horrors all around us. Nothing green and in any way edible survived; even the ever-present scrawny cattle and half-wild dogs were absent, apparently having been sold or eaten. Everyone had a half-dead, listlessness attitude, as if even breathing was almost too much effort. At that time none of us were married; you don’t accept such risky duty when there are dependents expecting a spouse or father to return home. Still, no sane human could be exposed to such deplorable conditions without being affected, and we thanked God in our own private ways that our personal lots in life were better that that.

  And then, without warning, Jack stopped in his tracks. He had spotted a starvation-bloated, fly-covered infant, probably no more than six months old, and she was lying in a pile of filth and garbage not far from the entrance of one of the disgusting, dung-walled huts.

  The baby appeared to have been thrown away like so much trash, and I guess that with the overwhelming deprivation everywhere around us such a thing really wasn’t so unusual. Life was cheap in many third-world countries, and in that part of the world children often died before their first birthday. In fact, this was the first sign of children we’d seen in the little village, so maybe that’s what made Jack suddenly pause and look so intently at this one pitiful example of discarded humanity. A moment later, as the three of us stood there lost in our dark thoughts, we saw something that changed everything.

  The baby moved.

  In an instant Jack dropped his backpack, stooping down to sweep the pathetic little mite into his arms, and after giving her a cursory examination his wordless look of anguish told us that while she was alive, death would soon claim her. Then his eyes changed. S’leen, as God is my witness those pale blue eyes were like nothing you ever want to see. In all my years, in all the terrible things I’ve seen in all the countries of the world, I’ve never seen a look of such raw, naked outrage the equal of what I saw in Jack Ross’ eyes. No writer can describe it, no movie actor can portray it. As a child I’d heard it said a man can literally blaze with anger, and in that one timeless instant, as Teddy and I stood looking at our chaver and team partner, I knew the truth of those words.

  Jack swept the area with his terrible gaze and it finally descended on a nearby old woman squatting next to a pile of filthy blankets. Moving like an ill wind he swooped down upon her and in low, urgent tones demanded to know whose child it was that he held in his arms.

  Teddy and I could only watch helpless from the sidelines, our mission of death and mayhem momentarily forgotten. We all knew the price of drawing too much attention to ourselves, but Teddy and I—well, we had both trusted our lives to Jack’s judgment on countless occasions, and we figured he wouldn’t endanger the mission. Looking back, I guess we were right, but for a horribly wrong reason.

  Jack wouldn’t accept the woman’s listless replies; he kept badgering her, rephrasing and relentlessly repeating his question until he got a response that satisfied him. But I guess “satisfied” was not really an accurate term; “galvanized” is probably closer to the effect her words had on him. He stood, the flaccid infant still tenderly cradled in his lean, powerful arms, then he strode purposefully toward the nameless village’s commons area.

  There a lanky young woman was squatting next to a stinking dung fire over which a small, black pot of vile-looking liquid bubbled; a rude dinner for the village’s chief, no doubt. Jack’s approach to
the woman attracted little attention from the rest of the village’s hollow-cheeked inhabitants, but his harsh words, barked in the guttural, colorless language spoken in the region, caused a number of nearby heads to swivel, buzzard-like, towards the noise.

  Under his questioning the young woman admitted that the infant was, in fact, hers, and that, yes, the child had been abandoned to die. Life was harsh, she told him defensively, and there were too many mouths to feed as it were. God, she stated in an ugly, nasal tone, would provide more food when he wanted the children to survive; until that time, she added brusquely, there was no need to feed unwanted babies. There would always be more babies.

  Who, Jack carefully asked, spoke to her of God’s divine wisdom? She irritably declared that the village’s holy man (priest, shaman, witch doctor, the term is of little consequence and means virtually the same in all languages) was the voice of God in all things, and that he’d wisely told the village’s inhabitants that children were an unnecessary expense. The villagers had, the woman angrily stated, been all too happy to rid themselves of the burdensome children they could ill afford to raise. Before Jack could say or do anything else the infant convulsed and gave out a thin cry, then became deathly still in his arms. Still squatting by the fire, the woman’s skeleton-like, harsh face reflected undisguised hostility at this light-skinned man’s intrusion into her affairs. Jack paused for a time to gaze at the pitiful, lifeless lump he was holding next to his heart, and while Teddy and I were both saddened at the death of the child and disgusted with the village’s inhabitants, we thought the baby’s death would be the end of the matter.

  In fact, it was just the beginning.

  Wordlessly Jack knelt and carefully placed the dead child at her mother’s feet, then he stood, his face a stone mask. In a smooth, efficient motion that I’ve replayed in my mind a thousand times, Jack reached under his vest and withdrew a large black combat knife, and striking like one of the deadly vipers native to that miserable land he slashed open the woman’s throat from ear to ear.