HUNTER: A Thriller (A Dylan Hunter Thriller)

by Robert Bidinotto

  Outside, the wind hissed through the leaves of the forest. Somewhere in the distance, a crow cawed.

  A faint medicinal smell reminded him that he still gripped the remnants of the bandages he’d just cut from his face. He lifted the white tangle and noticed brown streaks of dried blood on it. Instinctively, he opened his hand to drop it, but the surgical tape stuck to his fingers. He waved his hand, but it still clung tightly. He shook his hand wildly, two, three times, grunting like an animal. The stained white wad finally spun off into the middle of the room, landing beneath the knotty-pine coffee table.

  He was sweating now, and shivering. His tongue felt like a thick rag. He knew he was losing it. As he’d been trained, he closed his eyes, imagined himself on a puffy cloud, counted slowly as he struggled to control his breathing.

  He wanted to step into the living room. But he couldn’t move. He knew he had to look again. Had to force himself to come to terms with what he had become.

  He turned slowly. At first, he didn’t dare look into the mirror. He bent over the sink, propping himself on shaky arms. He remained that way for a moment, eyes down, staring at the rough floorboards beneath his boots. Until the knots and swirls in the wood grain arranged themselves into an Edvard Munch image of a distorted, howling face.

  He clenched his teeth. Raised his gaze to the mirror.

  The haunted stranger with the bruised jaw and swollen cheeks still stared back at him.

  “Who am I?” the stranger whispered at him.

  *

  For several days after he arrived, he could barely muster the will to unpack necessities, which he left scattered around the cabin. He didn’t eat much or go out. Didn’t read or listen to the radio. Didn’t bother to clean up or shave, either. He didn’t want to look again into the bathroom mirror.

  Each morning, he put on a pot of coffee. Wrapped in a gray flannel bathrobe, he sat on the porch in the old, creaking rocker. Sipped coffee in the morning, wine in the afternoon and evening.

  Sipping. Rocking. Staring off into the Allegheny National Forest. Watching the oak leaves flail helplessly in the grip of the rising wind, as a cool low front moved in. Watching gray squirrels scramble and dig in last fall’s brown, rotting drifts. Watching flocks of black birds wheel under the gunmetal sky and scudding clouds.

  Watching. Rocking. Trying to reconcile himself to the face in the mirror.

  At dusk, sluggish from the wine, he limped up the stairs to the loft and stretched out under the scratchy olive Army blanket on the bed under the eaves. He slept without sheets, right on the bare mattress pad. He slept at least ten hours every night, his dreams haunted by images of violence.

  *

  Rocking on the porch and sipping Malbec during the afternoon of the fourth day, he thought about his first time here.

  He was twelve years old when Dad—the tall, beefy man everyone else called “Big Mike”—brought him here for a week during deer-hunting season. They’d driven a couple of hours north of their sprawling home near Pittsburgh, taking the big Chevy pickup. Along the way, Dad revealed that the cabin was his private retreat; not even Mom knew about it. He went up here each November, he said, to get away from his high-pressure construction business and “recharge the batteries.”

  The first day, Dad showed him how to clean and shoot his Remington “thirty-ought-six.” It was his first experience with guns. Dad patiently demonstrated how to safely carry, load, aim, fire, and clear the rifle. Then he set some empty soup cans out on the grass, with the slope of a steep hill as the backstop.

  The first time he shot his father’s rifle from a standing position, the kick nearly knocked him down and left his ears ringing, despite the ear plugs he wore. But the blast sent a can tumbling.

  Dad laughed and clapped. “Nice shooting, Mr. Boone! Now, try again. But this time, lean a bit more, like I showed you. And pull the stock tighter to your shoulder.”

  The second day, Dad led him into the forest to show him how to stalk deer. He explained the difference between “up-wind” and “down-wind.” How to find a good spot and keep still. How to wait and let the animals come to you.

  That night, a snowstorm blew in. When it cleared the next morning, Dad took him out to do some tracking. They crunched through the powdery drifts about a half mile from the cabin, picked up the tracks of three deer and followed them to a half-frozen pond. But the animals had already gone.

  Dad pointed to a nearby grove of trees surrounded by tall bushes. “There’s a good place to set up. The wind is right, and we’ll watch the pond right through those bushes.”

  The plastic-covered Pennsylvania hunting license pinned to Dad’s camo jacket flapped in an icy gust, and he shivered as a cold finger of the wind poked down the neck of his own jacket. His father seemed to notice.

  “Problem, Matt?” he asked.

  “Uh—no.”

  Dad looked at him, his pale blue eyes twinkling.

  “Too cold?”

  “I’m fine.”

  His father smiled that slight, crooked smile of his and nodded.

  They took up a spot behind the bushes about thirty yards away, sitting on a fallen tree trunk after brushing off the snow.

  And waited.

  The wind swirled through the white-crusted bushes and drove tiny stinging crystals into his face. His eyes watered, his nose ran, and his breath raised a frosty fog. Even through thick woolen gloves and heavy boots, his toes and fingertips were going numb. Within fifteen minutes, his teeth were chattering. Ashamed, he clenched his jaw to try to make them stop.

  After half an hour, he thought he was going to freeze to death.

  But Dad didn’t seem to notice either him or the cold. He remained still and watchful, straddling the log with the left side of his body angled toward the pond; his Remington lay across his knees with its muzzle pointed in that direction. His big, bare hands were tucked into a fur hand-warmer on his lap. His eyes, squinting against the wind under the brim of his hunting cap, were the only things that moved, constantly scanning the area in front of him.

  After forty-five minutes, he finally couldn’t take it anymore and turned to say something—but stopped when Dad suddenly raised his hand, demanding silence. Then he pointed.

  Out of a line of pines on the opposite side of the pond a large buck emerged, moving one halting step at a time. It turned its head in brief jerks, its large rack of antlers tilting with each move, its nostrils testing the air.

  He felt his heart begin to race. All awareness of the cold vanished.

  Dad again motioned him to remain still. Moving with infinite patience and precision, he smoothly drew his bare left hand out of the fur, then, very deliberately, raised the rifle to his right shoulder. Suddenly it became apparent why he’d sat with his left side toward the pond: All he had to do now was lift and aim the weapon without turning or shifting his body, perhaps alerting the nervous animal.

  Dad didn’t have a scope on his old Remington. He simply looked down the fixed sights on the barrel, slowly drew in a breath, then let out a little white cloud through his nostrils and held the rest.

  He remembered turning to watch the deer when the unexpected blast in his ear caused him to flinch and slide right off the log into the snow. He saw the buck spasm, partly rear up, then fall. Its legs twitched twice and then it was still.

  “Clean shot.” Dad said it to himself, quietly, simply.

  “Wow!” Bounding to his feet, he caught the amusement in Dad’s eyes, and he charged over the powdery surface to where the deer lay. A crimson stain was spreading in the snow beneath its tawny shoulder. His father came up beside him, leaned over the antlers and moved his forefinger, counting.

  “Twelve points. This old guy’s been around a while.” Dad straightened, towering over his son. “Now, we earn the privilege of taking his life.”

  They muscled the carcass back to the cabin—or rather, his father did most of the muscling. Still, it was a long trek, and when they arrived, he was sweating despite the
cold, his aching lungs gasping for breath. He watched in squeamish fascination as Dad strung up the buck from a tree branch and demonstrated how to gut and clean it.

  “I could truck it up the highway and have somebody else do this first part,” he explained, wiping his long, sharp knife on a rag. “But I want you to see what’s involved. Meat doesn’t just come out of a grocery store in plastic wrap. Somebody has to kill an animal before we can eat it.... When we’re done here, we’ll drive it down to Tionesta. A guy there will finish the job, and in a day or two we’ll pick up our venison.”

  Dad paused and looked at him.

  “Still cold?”

  “Huh?” He had completely forgotten about the frigid temperature.

  Big Mike grinned. “I know you were freezing your ass off out there. But you didn’t moan and groan about it, and you kept still. And you see? Patience was rewarded.” Dad punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I’m proud of you, son.”

  His father went back to work, but continued to speak.

  “Proud because you’re not a whiner. That’s important.... First thing I watch for when I hire a guy is: Does he make things happen, or does he make excuses?”

  He reached into the buck’s abdominal cavity, pulled out a bloody, lumpy mess and dropped it onto the plastic sheet he’d spread under the deer.

  “See, Matt, there’s two kinds of people,” he went on. “And the difference is in how they see themselves. One guy says to himself, ‘I’m the boss of circumstances.’ The other guy says, ‘I’m the victim of circumstances.’”

  He paused and straightened. Looked into his eyes. “And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “They’re both right.”

  *

  He sat in the rocker, eyes unfocused, twirling the wine in the glass. After a few more minutes, he drained what was left. Got up and limped inside.

  He went to the kitchen, poured himself another glass. Grabbed a wooden chair and dragged it up the creaking stairs to the loft. Planted it in front of the dusty mirror on the vanity and sat down.

  Raised his eyes to meet the stranger’s.

  The guy in the mirror looked as if he’d been waiting.

  So, he began to talk to him.

  He spoke quietly, for a long time. Spoke about things he had never told anyone. Things he’d seen.

  Things he’d done.

  Told him why he was doing this crazy thing now.

  His voice was growing hoarse and the white square of the skylight had gone gray when he stopped. He suddenly realized that it was no longer a stranger’s face in the mirror. Nor was it a stranger’s voice uttering his words.

  He leaned forward in the dim light. Closer than he’d yet dared.

  Beneath the beard stubble, the swelling on the guy’s face was down, now, and the bruising almost gone. He was surprised that he could barely notice any surgical scars.

  Not such a bad face. Maybe even better than the one I had.

  The guy smiled at that.

  It’ll be okay. I can build a new life with that face. And it’s a good one to match the name on the Social Security card.

  He stood, raising his almost-empty glass to his new friend.

  “Hello, Brad Flynn.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Friday, December 19, 1:29 p.m.

  “So, nobody knows what he looks like, then,” Annie said.

  “We certainly don’t,” Kessler replied.

  “Didn’t you try to find him?”

  The men looked at each other and chuckled.

  “First, you don’t find Matthew Malone unless he wants to be found,” Kessler said. “Second, it seems that Matthew had been preparing to leave the Agency for some time.”

  Garrett broke in. “As you know, several years before then, we began to suspect there was a mole here in Langley. Missions around the Middle East were blown, for no apparent reason. Then a couple of our case officers turned up dead in Pakistan, and another disappeared in Afghanistan. In fact, back in May 2005, Malone himself survived an earlier attempt on his life.”

  “So they were on to him even then.”

  “Uh huh. And what was more troubling was that Malone wasn’t an obvious case officer, attached to an embassy under some transparent diplomatic cover. He was a NOC, working as a stringer for the Associated Press. His reporting was credible and there was no reason for anybody to suspect him. And being a NOC, sometimes working with black ops teams from the Special Activities Division, we of course didn’t even keep any files on him here. But the attempted hit reeked of Moscow. So how the hell was he blown, except by somebody here at Langley, with unusual access?”

  “He kept in touch with me during visits stateside,” Kessler interjected. “He was worried about more than the mole. He hated the office politics at Langley. The Company”—she had noticed that he preferred the more dated term—“was always playing it safe. Many senior people, starting on this floor, but extending all the way to the station chiefs, were afraid to put case officers in the field. Too many opportunities for blowback if operations went sour, they always said. So they put handcuffs on Grant and his people. That’s why the number of officers in the field gathering intelligence has been minuscule compared with the number of people here analyzing it.”

  “And Malone wasn’t one to put up with bureaucratic crap,” Garrett said. “I can’t tell you how many times he went off the reservation, breaking rules, pissing off station chiefs. Even a few ambassadors. I had to pull his ass out of the fire more than once. But it was getting harder to do as time went on. He could see the handwriting on the wall. So I think after that first attempted hit, he began planning his exit strategy.”

  “Strategy?”

  “Annie, it was really incredible, what he did. We found out only later that he’d been quietly liquidating his family’s holdings, piecemeal. He sold all his shares of their company. He sold the estate outside Pittsburgh, and all the contents. Cars, boats, vacation properties—the works. He must have set up accounts abroad while he traveled, because we’re sure a lot of it wound up offshore.”

  “How could he move and hide half a billion dollars without leaving tracks?”

  “Dummy companies. And aliases.”

  “Come on, Grant. You can’t tell me he set up dummy companies and accounts with a few fake IDs from Central Cover.”

  “Not fake. Not from Central Cover. And not a few, either. I don’t know how many. Maybe dozens.”

  “How could he get so many authentic IDs?”

  “He scammed the Social Security Administration. He used a spoof phone to call their headquarters in Baltimore; the Caller ID number tracked right back here. He identified himself and said he was coming over with a written request. When he got there, he showed a supervisor his ID, then handed him a signed letter on the director’s letterhead asking for access to their computers, on a matter of national security.”

  Kessler laughed. “That is so very like Matthew.”

  “He told the supervisor that we were trying to penetrate some domestic terrorist cells, and we needed to establish deep-cover aliases for a team of operatives. He talked the guy into issuing him about a hundred random Social Security numbers. Then, ballsy as you please, Malone sat at the guy’s keyboard for about an hour and typed in fake names and birth dates for all the SSNs. Finally, he actually got the guy to delete those SSNs from the queue of numbers to be issued in the future. That supervisor was so eager to do his patriotic duty that he even brought in a computer specialist to help tangle up the records, so that nobody could ever know which numbers were issued.”

  “You’re telling me that he walked out of there with scores of authentic but untraceable Social Security numbers?”

  “All connected to equally untraceable and unknown names. And of course, then he could use them to get other IDs. Drivers licenses. Credit cards. Library cards, pocket litter. You name it. From there, he could set up bank accounts, corporations, whatever
he wanted.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Believe it. He’s that good. He even conned me into giving him some alias IDs.”

  “He conned you?”

  Kessler laughed harder.

  “Yeah, me,” Garrett growled, stabbing his latest butt into an ashtray. “He used several schemes. After the attempt on his life, he convinced me to delete all Agency records on them. And to contact other federal agencies, and have them delete all their records on Matt Malone, too.”

  “You did that?”

  “I know it sounds stupid in retrospect. But the Russians were on to him, they wanted him dead very badly, and we knew they would try again. So his only chance was to completely erase his tracks and set up a new identity.”

  “But you haven’t said why the Russians wanted to kill him.”

  He looked at his friend. “Don, this is ‘need to know.’ You want to give us five minutes?”

  “Sure. I’ll take a walk down the hall.” The older man grinned. “Clear my lungs.”

  After he left, Garrett leaned forward. “What I’m going to tell you is classified way above Top Secret—SCI, in fact—so you never heard it, okay? When Malone was on a mission in Afghanistan, he heard a rumor that Moscow was funding and supplying the Taliban with weapons to use against our troops and NATO allies.”

  “What?”

  “Yep. He risked his neck a dozen ways to run the story down. The trail led to a Russkie in Islamabad, one of the money guys. Being Malone, he didn’t play nice with Ivan. He snatched the guy from his digs, dragged him off somewhere, and tortured the bastard. He got Ivan to sing like Josh Groban. Malone got names, dates, details of the shipments, contents, and transactions. The guy told him that the Kremlin wanted to bleed us dry by arming and financing the Taliban. That Putin himself considered it to be payback for when Reagan backed the jihadists against the Red Army, back in the Eighties.”

  “Malone got actual proof of this?”

  Garrett nodded. “Taped confession and some damning paperwork. He managed to deliver it to our station chief before he went back into the field.”