by Jon Land
“I’d really like to go back, stay to the end. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important to me. You boys mind reconsidering?”
“Move,” said the one who hadn’t spoken yet, gun out of its holster now but still held beneath his suit jacket.
Tyrell obliged, taking one step and then another. He was halfway into the third step when he brought the shovel around, high and hard. It smashed into the skull of the man whose gun was drawn, pitching him sideways. The second man had just gotten his gun out when Tyrell thrust the shovel’s blade into his throat, pinning him back against the tree and twisting so the steel would shred flesh. The young man’s eyes gaped as he drew his fingers to the jagged wound. He staggered, his knees starting to buckle, while the first man crawled through the grass. His hands groped before him, feeling blindly for his gun. Tyrell drew the shovel overhead and finished him with two more blows. The other one was dead by then too, and he dumped both their bodies in the freshly dug grave near the oak tree.
Tyrell brushed his hands clean and started back up the hill. He got to the top just as the coffin was being lowered into the ground. A line of mourners had cast dirt upon it one at a time before the second pair of men noticed him and approached, looking about for the two who had accompanied them.
“They’re down there,” Jack said, waiting until the minister’s final blessing had been given before he turned and followed the men down the hill, shovel in hand.
Jack Tyrell had been walking for hours, ever since he had gotten off the New Jersey Transit train that had brought him into Manhattan. He hadn’t meant to stay this long in the open, where someone could recognize him at any time; for a man used to living his life in the shadows, the sunlit stares of others were something to be avoided at all costs. A casual glance, a smile or friendly gesture cast his way—these were the things that could give him away.
It wouldn’t take a particularly smart person to recognize him, either. Just someone who knew a little bit about history, who read magazines, or who had seen his face on an FBI’s Most Wanted poster, where it had been for seven years running a long time ago.
After the funeral, he took to the streets of New York City, figuring he’d do a block or two, get the lay of the land and the feel of what he should do now that he was back in the world, with four bodies left behind him. He had lots on his mind. It was time to work it out. He needed to get used to being part of the world again.
Horns made him stiffen. Don’t Walk signs that kept him from moving in the direction he wished left his flesh crawling. He contemplated ducking back into the subway, where things were dark and people were afraid to look at anyone twice. But the next block passed more easily, and the one after that was easier still. By the sixth block, he had actually fallen into a rhythm. Letting his eyes roam. Taking things in, as he weighed his options.
He started meeting the faces of those he passed. Some of them looked familiar, stoking memories of friends, many of whom were gone forever. Friends he had gone to war with against a nation. Plans hatched in dingy basements and dark attics, life lived between the whispers, everyone full of ambition. The odds were impossible, but it never mattered to Jack Tyrell, although it probably should have.
He needed something to change the odds. He had dreams twenty-five years ago, and they kept him from seeing that. But he saw it now, because the dreams weren’t in the way anymore.
Some people he passed carried giant radios they called boom boxes. Others passed him wearing headphones, walking to their own music with no idea what the beat of a different drummer sounded like. Deep thick drags off joints rolled thick as cigars. Cushiony dreams born of acid hits that made the sounds of the blasts clearer and the smell of blood sweeter. Wondrous things, these, but where had they gotten him? All the rubble he had left in his wake amounted to nothing when piled together.
This time it would be different.
He had gotten his start with the Weatherman movement, lasting until the rest of the leadership refused to back up in practice what they supported in philosophy. A bomb blast here and a kidnapping there, the group’s biggest claim to fame having been to make a lot of smoke at New York City police headquarters in 1970. The movement went underground not long after that, but Jack Tyrell had unfinished business. Saw their withdrawal from the scene as a blessing, because it freed him to follow his own path by forming Midnight Run. He culled the best from the ranks of the Weatherman and Black Panther movements, lured them up from the underground with a promise that it was time to back up their words with deeds.
Jack found himself at Fifty-sixth and Lexington, his feet blessed with a mind of their own. He got chills as he came upon the corner across from the old Alexander’s department store. A relic now, like him.
Standing there, gazing up the street, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Last time he’d been here, there had been a parking lot where the Mercantile Bank building once stood. But now a sprawling, fifty-story office building rose toward the sky, swallowing even the alley he had made his escape through twenty-five years ago when things had gone bad in a hurry. Jack figured folks these days thought a little urban renewal was all it took to wipe out an age, an era.
He remembered guns going off when the Mercantile Bank building had been there; his people, the soldiers of Midnight Run, going down everywhere around him. The bearded countenance of one of his own men shouting instructions to the black-garbed gunmen, ordering them about. The goddamn son of a bitch was a plant, a spy! They’d been sold out!
“FBI!” the bearded man had yelled. “Freeze!”
Jack Tyrell had dived to the floor instead beneath a maelstrom of gunfire, crawling to his detonator. The charges hadn’t all been set yet; some of his people were still in the process of planting them. But the wiring had been laid, ready to send the signal when Tyrell hit the button.
The Mercantile Bank building had erupted around him in a shower of stone and steel. How he loved that sound, loved the feel of the air getting sucked up around him and the hot wave that replaced it. He had let it swallow him that day, welcoming the end at long last. But instead of dying, he had awakened in an emergency triage unit set up on the street to treat those with wounds he had inflicted.
Jack had wiped the blood from his eyes and seen the police scouring the area, checking the wounded for a face that matched the description they’d been given. A description of a man who for two years had blazed a trail of terror across the country. For the past eighteen months, number one on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. A man whom J. Edgar Hoover had sworn publicly to strap into the electric chair himself.
Jack turned away from the pigs coming toward him and watched a boy covered in a blood-soaked sheet die. He felt, not regret or guilt, but power. He had done this, he had made this. And in that instant he saw his escape.
He moved to the boy and collapsed over him, sobbing uncontrollably in a fit of hysteria. A father holding his dead boy’s hand. The stuff of tragedy. Jack kept his face low, felt an arm on his shoulder.
The arm belonged to a man with an FBI ID badge pinned to his jacket, William something, it said. Jack wanted to ask him if he knew an agent with a beard, the rat-fuck bastard who had sold out Midnight Run. But instead he kept up his sobbing, and the FBI agent steered him toward a priest.
The priest drew him aside to offer comfort. Wrapped an arm around his shoulder, his narrow collar dripping with blood Jack had spilled. They walked together into a nearby alley. There Jack had killed the priest and used his clothes to make his escape. It took the FBI the rest of the day to realize that Jack was still at large.
He looked at that spanking-new building now and saw how easy it had been for them to wipe out his work, bury his impact beneath fresh layers of steel and glass. What he wanted so intensely was to make the kind of impact that wouldn’t be forgotten quickly. Not just a building. Not just a single bomb people might miss learning about on the news if they channel-surfed. He wanted to destroy something there wasn’t enough steel and glass in the world to fix.
<
br /> Jack got a rush that felt like an acid hit, only smoother. He closed his eyes and saw it in his mind, the shape of things to come. He had to keep himself from laughing, feeling almost giddy. He imagined someone recognizing him now, Jack Tyrell looking like he had just told himself a joke.
Of course, he hadn’t been called that in a long time now. On the posters displaying his face, and to the hordes of federal agents and police who had once made it their life’s work to catch him, he had another name:
Jackie Terror.
The old warehouse looked abandoned from the outside, right down to the iron grate across its front entrance, secured by a rusted padlock. Jack Tyrell would have left if he weren’t sure this was the correct address. He reached out to jiggle the padlock, and it came free in his hand. He slid the grate back enough to slide through and squeeze up against an old sliding door. The door opened with a ratchety clang and Tyrell stepped into a master’s den.
The clutter of the place didn’t surprise him so much as the source of it: shelf after shelf of electronics equipment in various states of disrepair. He could hear the sound from a dozen different televisions battling for attention, the dull glow emanating from their screens accounting for most of the huge room’s light.
He continued through the junked stereos, hi-fis, and husks of major appliances until he came to a central worktable covered by what appeared to be an endless supply of cable TV boxes. A single bright bulb dangled from a ceiling wire. Beneath it a lone figure sat on a stool at the table, wearing a jerry-rigged light around the crown of his balding dome. Looked like a jockstrap with a bulb instead of a cock.
The figure appeared too enmeshed in his work to turn around. “Since you don’t have an appointment,” his raspy voice called out, “you got exactly three seconds to tell me who sent you here.”
“You gonna shoot me if I take four, Marbles?”
The man on the stool stiffened, swung round in slow motion.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” he said, squinting his eyes behind a pair of glasses with lenses as thick as old-fashioned Coke bottles.
Jack Tyrell started forward again, letting Marbles see the briefcase in his hand. “What are you, a goddamn TV repairman?”
Marbles kept squinting at Jack as though he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’ve come here because they finally wired your building for cable.”
Jack reached the table, looked over the cluttered piles of descramblers.
“They’re called black boxes,” Marbles explained. “Plug them into the outlet and you get every premium channel for zip.”
“Premium channels?”
“HBO, Showtime, Spice, pay-TV events—you know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Christ, where you been for the last twenty-five years, Jackie?”
The lamp attached to Marbles’ skull followed Jack around the table like a spotlight.
“Here and there,” Tyrell said. “How ’bout you?”
“You might say I’ve gone into the entertainment business.”
Jack gave one of the boxes a closer look. “That the best you can do with your talents?”
“People on the up-and-up aren’t racing to hire fugitives with a generation of paper following them. Anyway it lets me stay on the move and keeps me in cash. Enough to eat, work on my projects.”
Jack liked the way Marbles said that, a man who still kept his real life hidden where no one could find it.
“I got lots of accounts,” Marbles continued, “don’t care where I work out of or what hours I keep, ’long as I make good on their orders. I got a new box I’m working on, lets you steal off the Internet.”
“I read about that,” said Jack.
“Pays well.”
“That’s what all this is about?”
“Times change,” Marbles said unapologetically. “You want your tech-ware updated, Jackie, you come to the right place. Otherwise …”
Jack laid his briefcase down just to Marbles’ right, unsnapped it, and lifted the top. The hundred-dollar bills stacked and wrapped neatly inside were caught in the spill of his beam.
Tyrell could see Marbles’ eyes bulge behind his thick glasses. “What the hell …”
“I’ve been busy the past twenty-five years.”
“Okay, you got my attention,” said Marbles.
“I need a wire man. Very elaborate setup. One-day gig.”
Marbles looked up, his light suddenly angled on Jack again, stinging his eyes. “Twenty-five years go by and all of a sudden you flipped your switch back on?”
“It got flipped back on for me. I bought into something, but that’s done and over now. There’s nothing holding me to them anymore, and four of them got dead for being disrespectful.”
That made Marbles straighten a little.
“You understand what I’m saying here, Marbles? I feel like the last twenty-five years never happened, like I’m picking up just where I left off, only this time I’m gonna make this country hurt in a big way. Where it counts. Make them stand up and take notice. Give them something they’ll never forget.”
“You expect me to just drop everything and come along?”
“Yup.”
Marbles picked up one of the black boxes and let it crash to the floor. “Just tell me what it is we’re going for. Tell me where we’re gonna lay this hurt.”
“A city,” Jackie Terror told him.
“A city?”
“We’re going to take a whole fucking city hostage.”
SIX
Blaine lay on the porch of Buck Torrey’s stilt house, the crickets and night birds singing around him. He had come outside so the breeze could cool his body, which was drenched in sweat even now, the air like a sauna from dawn to dusk and, after dark, a steam room inside Buck’s stilt house. If his former sergeant major’s plan was to make him forget about his shoulder and hip by making him hurt everywhere else, it was working. They’d been at it for three weeks now.
Three weeks …
But it felt like much longer. Blaine couldn’t recall a time when he’d ever been this sore. His early years of training were certainly worse in terms of duress, but he’d been decades younger, which made the pain easier to swallow. No reprieves from training due to injury or hurt at that level, and with good reason.
You’re in the jungle wounded, shot probably. Or maybe you got winged by a frag, or couldn’t dance clear after hearing the click of the mine you triggered. Alone with your pain for company and the enemy on your tail, closing fast. Stop and you die. Nobody surrendered in the jungles where Blaine had spent his formative years. The Special Forces training he’d endured was meant to build tolerance, as well as character. If you couldn’t take the pain in camp, you wouldn’t be able to take it with a bullet in your leg, or an artery doing its damnedest to bleed out while you humped across twenty miles of jungle.
The door creaked open and Buck Torrey joined Blaine on the porch, settling his bulky frame on a patch of dry wood, a pair of beer bottles in hand.
“Woulda brought you one, son, but I know you and booze ain’t exactly in bed together.”
Blaine propped himself up gingerly on his elbows. “We were once.”
“All of us were lots of things back then that fortunately got a way of changing, moving on. Life’s not much more than that, from where I’m sitting. Going from one place to another. Packing up. You know how you can tell when an old dog like me’s had enough?”
“No.”
“He stops unpacking. Just leaves the pieces of his life in boxes, so they’ll be easier to move the next time.” Buck Torrey took a hefty swig from his bottle. “Trouble is, you can’t fit everything in boxes. Knew another guy never took nothing with him. Just bought everything new when he got where he was going, give himself a fresh start.”
“You’re talking about family, Buck.”
Torrey’s eyes turned to hot spheres of fire, hiding the wryness behind them.
“Sir,” Blaine correc
ted, as he rose to a sitting position. No longer did he need to hold on to the porch railing to manage the effort. He casually stretched his bad arm toward the rail now and put some weight on it. The shoulder took all he gave it, complaining with a little stab of pain but holding fast.
Blaine watched as Buck drained a hefty portion of the bottle in a single breath, his stilt house like a moist wood shroud behind him. There were three small rooms, with a gasoline generator out back for electricity and propane tanks to make hot water. A cramped bathroom featuring a toilet that took a half day to fill and a galley kitchen with a stove Buck almost never used. He cooked virtually every meal out here on an old, rusted gas grill. Many of those meals consisted of fresh fish dropped off every few days by local fishermen. Shrimp was a staple, along with snapper and small, spiny lobster-like creatures called crayfish. Blaine didn’t always like the taste of what came off Buck’s grill, but he was so hungry by the end of the day it didn’t seem to matter.
On a clear day Buck could glimpse a few of his neighbors’ comparable dwellings, stretching up to a half mile away. At night and on foggy days, he might have been the only person living on Condor Key, a few flickering lights the only hint of others in this waterbound neighborhood.
The residents were all like Buck in one way or another. People who had come here because there was no place else they especially liked, but who took care of each other nonetheless. There wasn’t a day went by that a neighbor didn’t come up in his or her skiff just to check on things. And Torrey had taken Blaine out on several similar sojourns three or four times. Folks around here looked after each other but didn’t get in anyone’s way. And the few times a stray boater had wandered into their stretch of water, it was a race to see which resident could motor out the fastest to turn him around. There would probably never be a time when everyone got together, yet they were a community all the same.
“I’m talking about family, all right,” Buck was saying, the second bottle of beer cradled between his squat legs. “The one thing you were smart enough not to get yourself.”