Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  “Dammit, Father!”

  “Dammit, Venice!”

  The exchange hung in the air.

  “Please talk to me,” Dom said. “I’ve already got Wolverine involved. She’s finding a reason to send police to the cathedral to look around.”

  Venice looked stunned that she hadn’t thought of that herself. “That’s good,” she said.

  “Wolverine is going to want to know details,” Dom went on. “You’re going to have to share them.”

  Venice had always been intimidated by Irene Rivers. Dom knew how little she liked to speak to her.

  Venice steadied herself with a breath, then spun in her chair to face Dom. “She called me from an office inside the cathedral. I think she said it was on the twelfth floor. She was there to meet with Jackie Mitchell, and somehow or other, she ended up coming under fire. She called me to see if I could pull up drawings to get them out of there.” Her lip startled trembling again. “I just didn’t have time. They found her when I was still looking. That’s when I heard them kill her.”

  “I still don’t know what that means,” Dom said. “I don’t know what you mean when you say you heard them kill her. You mean you heard them shoot at her?”

  Venice nodded. “There was a lot of shooting. Shooting and yelling. And then it just stopped. A man picked up her phone and said that he’d just killed her.”

  “So, you don’t know that she’s dead. There’s no certainty.”

  Venice looked confused. Maybe a little angry at being questioned.

  Dom explained, “Suppose she just dropped her phone in the fight? Suppose she was on the run and it just dropped out of her pocket? Just because some guy—a bad guy, no less—says that she’s dead, that doesn’t necessarily mean that she is.”

  Venice thought about it and seemed to allow herself a tiny glimmer of hope. She turned back to her screen and powered it up again

  Dom’s cell phone rang. Wolverine. He snapped it open. “Please tell me you have good news.” He pressed the speaker button. “Venice’s on the line, too.”

  “The news is neither good nor bad,” Irene said. “The chief of police down there is an acquaintance of mine. He sent a unit to the Crystal Palace. They spoke with the security team on the main floor, and they said they knew nothing of a shooting.”

  “Did they check the place out?” Dom asked.

  “They didn’t feel it was necessary,” Irene said. “Under the circumstances, with the extremely limited information we have to offer, I can’t say as I blame them.”

  “Are they at least going to keep the police cars on the property for a while?” Venice asked.

  “I can’t imagine that they would,” Irene replied. “Venice, I need you to catch me up with the details.”

  It only took a couple of minutes.

  When the explanation was finished, Irene said, “I don’t suppose you recorded this conversation, did you?”

  Venice’s face turned into a giant O. “Oh, my God,” she said. She pushed her chair across the mat to her credenza, where the push of a button produced a postage stamp–size memory card. “I did record it.” She placed the card in her computer and clicked a few buttons. The whole horrible scene played out all over again, from the initial contact through the shooting and finally the ominous voice at the end.

  Halfway through, Dom felt himself turning pale and he leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. When it was over, he understood Venice’s feeling of helplessness.

  Silence hung in the air until Irene broke it with, “I’m sorry, guys, but that really doesn’t sound good for Gail.”

  “There’s always hope,” Dom said. He looked to Venice, but didn’t get the support he was hoping for.

  “If you say so, Father,” Irene said. “Matters of faith are much more your bailiwick than mine. I want to know whose voice that is at the end. Venice, can you send me a digital copy of that? I’ll try to get it voice printed and see what we can find.”

  Dom shared a smile with Venice as she clicked send on the file she had already been copying. She was already a step ahead. “On its way,” she said.

  “I want to pull out that shouting on the recording, too,” Irene said. “Maybe we can isolate something in the noise that will be helpful to us.”

  “I really appreciate this, Wolverine,” Dom said. “I know you’ve got a lot going on. It means a lot—”

  “You people mean a lot to me too, Father,” she interrupted. “I’ll be back to you if I get anything useful out of any of this.”

  With that, the line went dead.

  “I can’t put my finger on why,” Venice said as she turned her attention back to her computer. “But I really don’t like that woman.”

  “She’s pulled Dig’s backside out of a lot of fires,” Dom said.

  “She’s set a few of them first,” Venice replied.

  Jonathan and Irene had a history that even Dom didn’t fully understand, but he knew that there was at least as much angst between them as there was trust.

  Dom scowled as he watched Venice become lost in whatever she was typing into her machine. “What are you doing?” he asked. “You look like you’ve discovered something important.”

  Venice shook her head, but she didn’t move her eyes from the screen. “I should’ve thought about the shouting,” she said. “Pisses me off that Irene got to that one first. I even have the same software they do.”

  Dom smiled. “I’m guessing that if you were Catholic, I’d have heard a confession after you got your hands on it?”

  “That’s why it’s good to be Baptist, Father. Everything we do is a sin. We don’t draw hard lines on things like borrowing without permission.”

  Dom laughed at the euphemism. He imagined that Saint Peter would have his hands full when the Security Solutions team finally passed on and had to be sorted out. Was stealing still a sin when the stolen materials were put to good use—even if it meant breaking the law? He imagined that God was growing weary of them all.

  His attention was drawn to a series of horizontal lines that had appeared on Venice’s computer screen. The lines fattened and thinned on the screen, not unlike the lines painted by oscilloscopes and electrocardiograms.

  “Noise is the accumulation of many sounds,” Venice explained. “Even in the noisiest party, you can pick out the words of the person you want to hear, right? You might have to concentrate and watch their mouth for visual cues, but you’ll still be able to get the gist of what they’re saying. To do that, though, you make yourself oblivious to the rest of the noise in the room.”

  She paused in her explanation, clearly seeking an indication of understanding. “I’m with you,” Dom said.

  “Good. If you were to listen to a recording of that same party, it would be difficult if not impossible to consistently pick out any one voice because the recorder is a piece of electronic equipment that gives equal value to every sound—from the individual voices to the hum of the air-conditioning. That all becomes noise.”

  Venice liked to show off a little when she was about to slam-dunk a computer. Dom settled in for the rest.

  “For years, governments and individuals have been trying to figure out a way to eavesdrop that would allow the listener to weight the importance of different sources of sound. The FBI took the lead for domestic listening, and the National Security Agency got the nod for international eavesdropping. Obviously, the NSA program is more sophisticated, if only because they’ve got more PhDs per square inch than anywhere else on the planet.”

  “And you got your hands on the NSA version,” Dom said, connecting the dots.

  Venice gave a demure smile. “Well, it’s not the very latest,” she said. “But it’s better than what the FBI can use.”

  “Pesky warrants and such?” Dom asked.

  “Exactly. The Constitution really gets in the way of prying into people’s business.”

  Dom got the irony.

  “Okay, here,” Venice said, pointing. “The program has anal
yzed the digital recording—it has to be digital for it to work—and separated out what it believes are separate sources of sound. Once separated, it breaks it into separate channels and then scrubs it. The scrubbing process takes a lot of the character out of the voices, but the words should be understandable.”

  She tapped the lines on the screen. “This one is obviously the sound of the gunshots,” she said. “You can tell from the peaks in the noise.”

  Dom nodded because he knew it was the best thing. In reality, they all looked the same to him.

  “I think this one is Gail,” she said. She typed something on her keyboard, clicked her mouse twice, and the lines on the screen turned into sounds from her speakers.

  Tristan hated guns. It wasn’t a political thing, although when he turned eighteen and got to cast a vote that counted, he was going to do his best to outlaw the damn things throughout the world. They were ugly and heavy, and they stank. Literally, they smelled bad, an odd combination of oil and must.

  The Big Guy—honestly, speaking of stupid names, that one reset the bar—seemed less than happy to be giving Tristan his firearms class. He’d handed Tristan one of the weird-looking Mexican rifles, along with one of the box things that hung from the underside to hold the bullets, but without any actual bullets. Fifteen or twenty feet away, Scorpion seemed thoroughly engaged in a telephone conversation.

  “Okay, kid, listen up,” Big Guy said. Then he caught himself. “Sorry. I meant to say Tristan. T-R-I-S-T-A-N.” He smiled, Tristan’s first indication that the man had a non-abusive side to his sense of humor. They’d stopped in the middle of the jungle and pulled the Pathfinder into a thicket of foliage that camouflaged it, though not to the point of invisibility. They’d already refilled the gas tank, and now, as far as he could tell, they were killing time.

  Big Guy continued, “The first and most important lesson about firearms is this—the little round hole in the front points only at the enemy. Never at your own face, never at your feet, never at your friend, and, by God, never at me. Any questions so far?”

  Big Guy held one of the bigger guns—an M16, Tristan thought, but that was only because he’d seen the movie Platoon—and in his hands, the rifle looked more like a big pistol, and apparently weighed nothing. Tristan’s gun, on the other hand, weighed more than he’d anticipated. He had no questions yet because he hadn’t really learned anything yet.

  Big Guy held up the bullet holder thing. “This is the magazine,” he said. “If we get into a shootout, your survival may well depend on how quickly you’re able to switch these things out.”

  “Whoa,” Tristan interrupted. “I’m not shooting at anybody.”

  The Big Guy’s eyes flashed anger, and then they flashed patronizing tolerance. “Just humor me, okay?” he said. “My boss wants me to teach you this shit.”

  When he actually waited for a response, Tristan gave a shrug that meant, Okay.

  For the next twenty minutes, Big Guy showed him how to aim the rifle by pressing it into his shoulder, and then how to change the magazines without looking. While shooting, you just raised your trigger finger to stroke the little button, and the magazine fell away. Then, apparently, you could just grab another magazine and slap it into the old one’s place without looking. Big Guy made it look like the easiest thing in the world, but Tristan had a hard time getting the hang of it.

  “Why do I need to learn this?” Tristan asked. “I’m not a killer. I couldn’t shoot another human being.”

  “I hear that a lot from people who haven’t been shot yet,” Big Guy said. “Again, just humor me.”

  From there, Big Guy showed him how to shove as many bullets as possible into the magazine. For his gun, three of the magazines took thirty bullets, but two of them took only fifteen. On full-auto, all of those magazines combined would give him eight seconds of total firepower.

  “Fire one shot at a time,” Big Guy said. “One bullet per trigger pull. Even though these are machine guns, and they’re capable of putting hundreds of rounds downrange, I want you to think of your rifle as a single-shot weapon. Questions?”

  “Yeah,” Tristan said. “Who will we be shooting at?”

  “I have no idea,” Big Guy said. “But I can tell you this—if you’re shooting at them, it will be because they shot at you first. Once you cross that line, a lot of the rest won’t matter. The priority will be to conserve ammunition. Between the various weapons, I figure we have between twenty-five hundred and three thousand rounds. That sounds like a lot, but you’d be surprised at how fast that gets used up.”

  “Are you going to actually teach me how to shoot this gun?” Tristan asked.

  The Big Guy looked confused. “I already told you about the safety,” he said. “You take that off, and then you point the little round hole toward the bad guy and you pull the trigger. For you, though, the lesson is to keep the friggin’ safety on.”

  Venice had guessed right, but Dom found the changes in the voice to be unsettling. It was as if the machine had taken Gail’s voice apart and stripped away the humanity. The other sounds in the room—everything from the gunshots to the other voices—were completely unintelligible. They reminded Dom of someone moaning into a galvanized tube. The overall effect was beyond unnerving.

  They listened to Gail’s conversation with Venice, and they heard the long, soothing shh that she’d uttered to Harriett. Then the real bedlam started. Above the muffled cacophony, Gail’s altered voice yelled, “The guard named Volpe from downstairs! Another white male, six feet, mid-thirties, slender! Black male—”

  And that was it. Her voice was cut off, even as the rest of the noise continued to pound in the background.

  “She described her attackers,” Venice said. Her expression showed that she was somewhere between impressed and amazed.

  “More than that,” Dom said. “She named one of them. Somebody named Volpe. A Crystal Palace security guard. Are the other descriptions enough to be useful? A young slender white male and a black male? Between the two, she described half the world and three quarters of Scottsdale.” Even as he spoke the words, he had trouble wrapping his head around such a non-emotional discussion of harm against Gail.

  Tears returned to Venice’s eyes and she started typing again, perhaps just to mask the emotion. “No coincidences,” she said. “That means that Volpe and some guy named Hainsley both have something in common with somebody named Abrams.”

  As Dom watched her do her best to be brave and professional, his already-massive admiration for her grew even larger. She’d known Digger from the day she was born, grown up in the same house as the daughter of his family’s housekeeper. She’d endured his Army years, been there for his marriage and divorce, and had been a friend through the ordeal of his ex-wife’s violent death. Now she was working hard to save Digger’s life, even as she knew that the second love of his life had likely been killed.

  “I don’t think you should tell Dig about Gail,” Dom said.

  She looked up.

  “You know, when he calls in.”

  “I can’t lie to him,” she said. “I won’t lie to him. I owe him that much.”

  Dom sighed. “Truth isn’t a fine line,” he said. “It’s a sleeve. It’s entirely possible to vary from the line while staying within the sleeve.”

  Venice scowled as she looked at him, then cocked her head. “Are you sure you’re a priest?”

  “I need another way out of here, Mother Hen,” Jonathan said into the satellite phone. “We’ve been made here. We’ve gone to ground to hold out for the remaining part of the day, but the going is way too slow. If we’re going to have any chance at all, we need to compress the time in country. Can you find me an airplane?”

  A pause. “Your original exfil aircraft is out of play, right?”

  “That’s affirmative,” Jonathan said. “These guys know too much about our plans. We have to assume that they knew about Gutierrez’s plane.”

  Another pause. Longer, this time. “I’ll see
what I can do.”

  “Hey,” Jonathan said. “You sound strange. Is everything all right?”

  She snapped, “Do you want me to find you an airplane, or do you want to chat?”

  “Here’s the deal,” Scorpion said, interrupting the shooting lesson. “We’re veering from our plan.”

  “Thank God,” Boxers said.

  “You don’t know what the new plan is yet,” Jonathan said.

  “I don’t have to. It has to be better than the one we’ve got.”

  Jonathan beckoned them closer to him and offered them a patch of mulchy jungle floor. He pulled his GPS out of its pouch and turned it on. “I had Mother Hen do some additional research for me.” He handed the device to Boxers. “Look here. This satellite shot is about an hour old.” He brought up an aerial map of a lot of jungle, and then zoomed in until the picture looked like it had been taken from maybe a hundred feet up. “What does that look like to you?”

  Boxers smiled broadly. “About the ugliest damn airplane I ever saw.” The make and model weren’t discernable from this angle, but it looked like a Cessna Skylane, a high-wing single engine plane that was typical of hacienda owners who needed to get from place to place while avoiding the miserable roads.

  “Now you’re talkin’, Boss,” Big Guy said. “All this ground-hugging has been getting on my nerves.” He moved his head closer to the screen and squinted to see the detail. “That runway looks short, but I guess if he got it in there, I can get it out.” He raised his head and looked to the sky, clearly running numbers in his head, “Gas could be an issue,” he said. “Even with a full tank and if nothing goes wrong, it’ll be tight.”

  “What does tight mean?” Tristan asked.

  Boxers gave him one of the patented annoyed looks. “It means running out of gas and falling out of the sky.”

  The look of shock on the kid’s face made both Boxers and Jonathan laugh.

  “Don’t worry, Tristan,” Jonathan assured. “Neither one of us is suicidal.” To Boxers: “How tight?”