Dead Simple

by Jon Land

“These Iraqi civilians you burned …”

  “Their village was hiding Scud missile launchers. I wasn’t leaving until I found them.”

  “And?”

  Dobbler’s expression was utterly flat. “I left, didn’t I?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Blaine was waiting outside when Sal Belamo pulled his cranky old sedan to a halt in front of Liz’s house just before eight A.M.

  “Welcome back, boss.” Sal greeted him matter-of-factly, moving around to the trunk.

  “What have you got for me, Sal?”

  “Some new toys to play with. Christmas came early this year.” He reached for the trunk but looked over at Blaine again before opening it. “Best present may be the dope I dug up on this Maxwell Rentz.” Sal frowned. “I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “He the one behind Buck Torrey’s disappearance?”

  “There’s a good chance of that, yeah.”

  Sal’s eyes narrowed. “Glad you called.”

  In many ways Sal Belamo was a twin of his car: scuffed and scarred on the surface, but sharp and tight as ever underneath. As a boxer, he’d fought Carlos Monzon twice for the middleweight championship of the world and had his nose busted each time for the effort. That nose still dominated an angular face that looked like a neat wedge carved out of weathered granite. His hair had begun to gray, but beyond that Sal Belamo seemed ageless.

  Sal had saved Blaine’s life the first time they met, over a decade before, something of a change for a man who had served the government as a contract assassin following two tours in Korea. He had more sources and contacts than any man Blaine had ever known and, just as important, a deep reserve of favors to call in when needed. Pushing sixty now, Sal had become as adept with a keyboard as he was with a gun, and Blaine made sure he got plenty of opportunity to use both.

  He started to rummage around the trunk, shifting equipment about. “I picked this stuff up at the SEAL training facility outside Washington. Guy in ordnance is ex-intel. I told him who it was for, and he laughed. Said he heard you were dead.”

  “I was.”

  “This is a funny world, boss. People judge you on how good you were yesterday, and yesterday was a long time ago for you.” Sal stood up again. “It’s like this. You got lots of enemies always wanted to take that shot at you who were scared off by what they knew and heard. Now they’re hearing different shit. You ask me, there’s plenty of young bucks out there like nothing better than to make their bones by taking you out. And plenty of important types you pissed off over the years like nothing better than to give them the okay.”

  “You worried they’ll be coming?”

  “Fuck, I know they’ll be coming. I’m worried about what you’ll do when they show up.”

  Blaine saw something unfamiliar flicker in Sal’s eyes before he looked down into the trunk again. Doubt, maybe; hesitation. Belamo’s surly cockiness was gone; he, too, didn’t see Blaine the same way anymore. Blaine wanted to tell him not to worry, that all one hundred percent of him was standing here right now thanks to the magic Buck Torrey had worked in Condor Key.

  As Sal carefully removed the first of the SEAL ordnance from the trunk, Blaine thought back to Liz’s insistence that ghosts, or monsters, or something, lurked beneath the lake. He hoped she was right, couldn’t wait to dive. Face the monster and kill it.

  Make Sal Belamo look at him the old way.

  “It’s like this,” Sal said to Blaine and Liz at the kitchen table over coffee. “Maxwell Rentz ain’t everything he’s cracked up to be. He’s lost his shirt on a bunch of bad investments and he’s facing more foreclosures than Reese’s got pieces. He’s in debt up to his eyebrows, leveraged to the absolute max. Everything he owns is mortgaged out, and from what I hear, he’s got maybe a couple months to make good on some short-term notes or he’s a memory.”

  “What about the financing to cover the resort he’s planning to build up here?” Liz wondered.

  “That’s the kicker, ’cause I couldn’t track any down. Just a paper trail leading to the farms that used to belong to your neighbors. Rentz squeezed them all into his portfolio with low-interest six-month balloon notes. Means he doesn’t plan on holding on to them long, or he’s expecting some sort of windfall. Don’t ask me from where, though.”

  “But I’ve seen the plans!” Liz insisted, befuddled. “There’s a scale model of the resort on display in the town hall.”

  “About as much of it as Rentz can afford to build, probably. This guy’s got himself so overextended you could knock him down with a sneeze.”

  “Then what’s he doing here? What’s he want my land for?”

  Blaine stood up. “I think it’s time we had a look at that lake.”

  “Wireless underwater communicators?” Liz asked incredulously, after Sal Belamo had handed her a headset forty minutes later.

  “Only the best,” McCracken told her, fitting his into place.

  “Forgetting something, though, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?”

  “I don’t see any of those high-tech halogens around, like Rentz’s divers used.”

  “Didn’t help them much, now did it? I don’t want to be lugging anything bulky around once I’m under. Besides, artificial light only works until something gets in its way. Much better to make use of whatever light is already down there.”

  “You’re talking night vision.”

  “Exactly,” Blaine said, and lifted an oversize diving mask from the supply bag, complete with shaded recessed lenses at eye level in the opaque plastic. “Won’t even need a flashlight with this baby on.”

  Blaine rose and accepted a portable air bazooka from Sal Belamo; no compressor hose to worry about dragging. His diving belt had a huge knife cloaked in a sheath that extended well below his hip. He wore a second knife strapped to an ankle.

  “What about that metal detector Rentz’s divers brought down with them?”

  “Based on your description, I’d say it was a state-of-the-art spectron magnometer,” Blaine told her, “used by salvage teams and treasure hunters to find precious metals; not by underwater surveyors.”

  Liz gazed out over the water. “The legend says the soldiers down there died protecting something.”

  “Now let’s find out what.”

  Dobbler lowered the binoculars to the ground beside him and lifted a camera to his eye in their place. It didn’t look like a camera really, more like a flat four-inch-square slab with the controls painted on. The lens was recessed until Dobbler focused on the big, bearded man strapping on his flippers. He heard a mechanical whine and felt the thing extend outward, making Dobbler think of a dick going hard.

  The camera took a digital impression, not a picture, which would be decoded by a special machine made by the same manufacturer. All Dobbler had to do was slip back to his nearby car, slide the thin plate out, and send it via the fax machine the car came equipped with.

  “Test one, two. Test one, two,” Blaine said into his headset, after wading out past his waist.

  “Got ya, boss,” Sal Belamo said, from Liz’s small outboard floating in the middle of the lake.

  “Loud and clear,” Liz followed, loud enough to make Blaine flinch.

  “My ears weren’t one of the things that got wounded,” he reminded.

  “My father would have fixed them, too, if they had been, soldier.”

  Blaine gazed toward the outboard and flashed Sal a thumbs-up sign. Belamo had also obtained from the SEALs a sophisticated range finder based on passive sonar. He had rigged the sensors to the bottom of the outboard and was monitoring the grid that encompassed the better part of the lake’s center, where the disappearances had all taken place. If anything bigger than a trout so much as breathed, Sal would know it.

  Blaine took one final deep breath, secured his mask over his face, and dropped into the water.

  Maxwell Rentz held the digitized picture at arm’s length before him, cellular phone in his other hand.


  “It’s definitely the man described to me yesterday, Mr. Dobbler. Now I’ll see if we can get him identified … .”

  “Don’t bother, sir,” Dobbler said, the words emerging through clenched teeth. “I know who he is.”

  The waters darkened almost instantly, the lake’s black bottom discouraging most light from coming down. Blaine swam slowly, falling into an easy rhythm as he kicked with his flippers, angling himself for the bottom. His high-tech mask gave the black waters an almost translucent greenish glow. The lake was known to be forty feet at its deepest point, and Blaine had covered about half that before he spoke into the microphone squeezed inside his mask.

  “I’m down twenty-five feet. Nothing so far.”

  “How’s the view, boss?” Sal asked, voice marred a little by static.

  “Crystal clear. How’s yours?”

  “Zero. Zip. Nada. Only thing moving down there on my scope is you.”

  “You should see something now,” Liz said nervously. “There should be something in view.”

  “Not—Wait a minute … !”

  “What? What is it?”

  Silence.

  “Blaine, can you hear me?”

  It seemed for an instant that Blaine wasn’t there anymore. Then his voice returned, a bit shaky.

  “You’re not going to believe this … .”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Blaine watched as a ghost world appeared before his eyes. The high-tech underwater mask not only gave the scene an eerie backlight but also eliminated the distortion normally caused by water, creating the illusion that he wasn’t diving so much as floating over land.

  The remains of a farm had appeared directly beneath him. He could see enough wood frame to recognize a barn long collapsed by the weight of the water, a pair of ancient rusted plows resting in the berths they’d occupied the day the land was flooded. Well beyond the barn’s remnants stood the remains of a split-rail fence: just a few posts set a dozen feet apart in the lake’s bottom. Lying near the posts were the skeletons of what must have been livestock, horses or cows, probably; Blaine was too far away to be sure.

  “Blaine,” Liz said, her voice sounding strong and resonant through his headset. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s down there? What do you see?”

  “Parts of somebody’s farm that got swallowed up in the flood. What was the year again?”

  “Early 1863. Winter.”

  One hundred and thirty-five years, Blaine calculated. The degree of decomposition and decay fit perfectly.

  “I’m heading down,” he reported.

  “Be careful.”

  “Don’t worry, boss,” Sal Belamo reported from the outboard. “You still got the lake to yourself.”

  Blaine reached the bottom and tested it with his gloved hand. His hand plunged through the black grainy silt, the bottom firm but false. The water table must have fluctuated in these parts, changing the lake’s depth by the year, or even the month, and shifting its secrets about.

  “Anything, Sal?” he asked.

  “All clear, boss.”

  “You there, Liz?”

  “What is it?” she returned eagerly.

  “Been a stormy spring, has it?”

  “Worst in years, decades. How’d you know?”

  “I think a lot of what’s down here has been stirred up in the relatively recent past. That would explain why no one would have charted any of this stuff before.”

  Blaine freed the air bazooka from his shoulder and switched it on, aiming its barrel at the black bottom. The silt fled from the stream of air, creating deep furrows that widened as he shifted the bazooka slowly from side to side, watching for anything that was uncovered. He grew impatient quickly and switched the bazooka’s power up a notch.

  The furrows deepened, became caverns forged out of the bottom amidst black clouds of disturbed silt. He could see a pale object sharpening into view, thought it was a rock until the bazooka coughed it up into the current.

  It was a human skull.

  Blaine snatched at it with his free hand, caught the skull on the third try and drew it to him. It grinned toothily back at him, remarkably well preserved by the silt and the frigid aquifer that must have passed beneath the property. Blaine recalled the legend of Civil War soldiers lost here in a storm. Defending their last patch of land from all interlopers—that’s how Liz said her grandfather explained the legend of this lake.

  Blaine gave the bazooka’s trigger pressure again, and more bones floated up from the bottom. He kicked his flippers to move out deeper, toward the center of the lake, aiming the barrel down and ahead as he swept it from side to side.

  “Check your air, boss,” Sal Belamo warned.

  “I’m okay for now.”

  The water grew noticeably colder and blacker as Blaine approached the center. But his slow, angular sweeps with the bazooka yielded nothing but black funnel bursts kicked up from the bottom. Based on the water table, Blaine figured there were probably pockets and chambers down here hidden by the silt and holding the true, ever shifting secrets of the lake.

  The bazooka coughed another wave of silt from the bottom, but this time a solid object was pushed out with it. Blaine groped for it with his hand, watched it flee with the currents the bazooka had kicked up. He swam after the object fast, afraid of losing it again to the darkness, closing on the lake’s center.

  He managed to snatch the object when it dropped back to the bottom, stowed it in the diving pouch secured on his belt after shaking the silt from his glove. Something else came free of the glove, floated down through the water. Blaine caught it and drew it up to his mask, eyes widening at the sight:

  It was a gold coin.

  Half expecting the lake’s legendary ghosts to pop up and snatch it from him, he dropped back to the bottom and worked his air bazooka about. Several more coins, identical to the first, fluttered upward, rousted from their resting place. Blaine tried to catch them, but the currents steered the coins away from him.

  Treasure, he thought. No wonder Rentz had equipped his dive team with a spectron magnometer …

  “Boss,” Sal Belamo said suddenly, filling his ears. “I think we got something.”

  “What?” Blaine responded, still swimming after the elusive coins.

  On the surface, Belamo watched a white mass flashing on the motion grid, picked up by the machine’s sensors. “There’s something moving, coming straight for you.”

  Blaine, swimming slowly toward the escaping coins, rotated his gaze on the black waters dead ahead. “There’s nothing there.”

  Belamo worked some knobs. “According to this, there is.”

  “Come up, Blaine!” Liz called. “Now!”

  But the coins were almost within his grasp. One last surge and he caught some of them. Blaine managed to snare five in all, stowing them in his diving pouch as well.

  “It’s right on top of you, boss!” Sal Belamo warned.

  Blaine unsnapped the sheath and drew his knife into his hand. The waters before him had all at once turned utterly black, the silt floating everywhere. His high-tech goggles could give him only a yard or so. The silt crept toward him in a dark cloud.

  “Boss, can’t you see it? Jesus Christ,” Belamo resumed, panic edging into his voice.

  “Blaine!” Liz cried desperately.

  McCracken had started back-kicking with his flippers when the thick cloud of silt enveloped him like nightfall. He had let himself think that Sal Belamo’s machine had registered nothing more dangerous than this mud-thick shroud, when a set of gleaming teeth burst out of the darkness.

  “Blaine!” Liz’s scream buckled her own eardrums. “Blaine, can you hear me?”

  When there was still no reply, she grabbed the spare air tank. She pulled her arms through the straps, then fished another high-tech mask from the dive bag Sal had brought along.

  Liz barely had time to tighten her regulator into place and bite down on the rubber mouth guard befo
re charging into the water and dropping under the surface.

  Blaine felt claws raking at him, digging ever deeper the harder he tried to pull free. Barely any of the air from his tank was reaching his lungs, indicating his hose had been nicked, even punctured. An impact a moment before had cracked his mask and it had begun to leak, his vision stolen. The resulting blackness kept him from seeing what had grabbed hold of him. Blaine felt as though he were being reeled in, imagined some great mouth open behind him. He tried to twist around but felt something dig into his shoulders, agony seering through him, while all his air bubbled away.

  Liz swam downward, the SEAL night-vision mask giving life to this underwater world. She bypassed the area where Blaine had sighted his initial finds and continued rapidly on. She felt the pressure of the deepening waters in her head, spreading from ear to ear. It had been a long time since she had dived; thirty feet felt like three hundred.

  She came up on what looked like a black empty hole at the lake’s bottom. She dropped closer toward it and felt the water suddenly begin to shift angrily about. Her foot snared on something and she yanked it free, had stretched herself forward again when a shape lunged out of the black. Liz backed off, screaming into her mask.

  The thing veered, then came to a complete halt, as if drawn back by a leash. Liz stopped and held her position, recognizing twin sets of flippers first and then a second, almost identical shape just behind the first. She hadn’t gotten a good look at the two of them that night over a week before, but she was certain these were Rentz’s divers, caught and sliced apart by what looked like a thick tangle of barbed wire. Rentz’s expensive robotic submersible lay on its side not too far away, trapped as well. It looked almost like a spider’s web, everything that ventured near caught in its traces.

  Liz pushed herself backward and twisted her mask about the churning mess, swimming on, searching for McCracken.