Point and Shoot

by Duane Swierczynski

  “Things have changed a lot since you worked for the cops.”

  “The FBI, too?”

  His double made a grim, laughlike sound. “The Feds, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Boy Scouts, whoever. The Cabal claims to be this country’s greatest protector, and in exchange, they enjoy limitless immunity. But the information we brought down could end it all.”

  Hardie thought about Deke Clark and wondered where he was at this moment. Hopefully somewhere hiding out with Ellie and the girls. Not caught up in all of this stuff. Yeah, he felt bad about shocking the poor guy in that garage, but there was no time to rationally discuss things. And now Hardie was especially glad he hadn’t bothered. That route, the calm, rational, white-hat cowboy route, would have landed them in graves immediately.

  Meanwhile his double continued to speechify.

  “Here’s the real insidious part,” he said. “The public has the idea that there’s something seriously wrong, but they can’t quite put their finger on it. They blame the usual suspects: the banks, the politicians, even the media. But they’re missing the real culprit. They can’t see the control room; they’re too focused on the stage.”

  “You sound like you just walked off the set of The X-Files.”

  “The X-Files? Is that the best pop culture reference you can dig up?”

  “Blow me. I’ve been in prison, I’ve been in space. Before that, I just watched old movies. Buy me a copy of Entertainment Weekly and I’ll catch up. Anyway, you said we’re all focused on the stage. What are these assholes doing behind the stage? What do they want, besides more power?”

  “Are you asking me about their endgame? Here’s my take on it: The Cabal knows the end of the world is coming. I don’t mean rapture, or a giant asteroid, or a new ice age, or any of that Roland Emmerich shit. I’m talking about the fall of civilization. The explosives were planted during World War II, and everything’s about to go up. The Cabal exists for one purpose only: to be the winners. That means having every available resource at their disposal, no matter what. They don’t care if the public doesn’t like it, or revolts, or camps out on their front lawn singing kum-ba-fucking-yah. It doesn’t matter. They are ants scrambling up to the boot of a soldier.”

  Hardie saw the fringes of Salt Lake City on the horizon.

  “You must be great fun at parties.”

  You like Hardie. In spite of everything, all of the studying and surgeries and the bad blood between the two of you, there was still something admirable about the broken-down old fucker. A tough, flickering spirit that only burned hotter and brighter when the wind picked up.

  You’ll almost be sad to see it snuffed out.

  20

  Don’t eat the car! Not the car! Oh, what am I yelling at you for? You’re a dog!

  —Tom Hanks, Turner & Hooch

  THEY MADE IT as far as halfway through Nebraska before Charlie Hardie was shot and killed.

  After his doppelgänger’s big apocalyptic speech on the outskirts of SLC, they settled into a serious driving groove. Nobody said a word. The sun went down, the terrain went from flats to mountains. Hardie tried to nod off but couldn’t. Every so often an ambitious trooper would show an interest in their vehicle traveling at insane speeds, initiate pursuit, then drop off once the license plate was called in. What once was kind of a sick thrill became routine, especially when the troopers apparently called ahead with the word to let this black sedan pass. By the time they entered Wyoming, the pursuits had stopped entirely.

  At some point Hardie did fall semi-unconscious, but it wasn’t true sleep. Instead his brain had downshifted a gear or two, leaving one hemisphere in the real world and the other in a phantom zone of his own mistakes. He was at once aware of the hum of the engine and the sound of the tires on asphalt, but he also heard gunshot and cries and screams. His fingers curled his hands into loose fists.

  Feels good, doesn’t it, Charlie? Choke that bitch out. Go on. Break her little scrawny neck.

  If his clone was looking over at him he would have seen Hardie’s fingers twitch.

  We want an actress who was cut down in her prime. Choked to death by a man who lusted after her. Murdered by you.

  Would have seen his torso jolt.

  And before you do open your mouth, I’d keep Kendra and Charlie Jr. in mind.

  All at once he was looking down at Kendra and Seej. Both were lying on the cold concrete floor of a basement, eyes open. The strange thing was that this wasn’t one of the surveillance-style shots Hardie had watched over the past nine months. He didn’t recognize the basement or anything in it. And even though what he saw was a high corner of this mysterious basement, it didn’t feel like he was watching the image on a screen. It felt like he was in the room with them, floating above them. And Kendra’s eyes were blazing with the same kind of familiar hate. Staring right at him, as if she could see him. Could she? Was she wishing him dead right this minute?

  Hardie couldn’t look away. He was frozen in place, too, looking down at his family in torment for what seemed like a couple of forevers when he heard his own voice pleading with him—

  wakeup

  wake up

  “Hardie, I think you’d better wake up.”

  Hardie sat up with a jolt. “What? What is it?” The car had stopped moving. Hardie squinted through the bandages, looking first out the windshield and then the back window.

  The sun was hours away from coming up, but even in the pre-dawn gloom Hardie would have seen them. An unmarked sedan in front; the other sedan in back. Cherries flashing in both, cutting through the dark night. A classic two-car trap.

  “I thought this car was supposed to be unpulloverable?” Hardie asked. “Remember. … limitless immunity? Or was that something you just made up on the spot?”

  “Yeah, I thought so, too. Guess somebody didn’t get the memo.”

  “I saw guns in that bag of yours,” Hardie said.

  “Yeah. But are you comfortable killing cops, if that’s who these guys turn out to be?”

  “Who else would they be?”

  “If they’re stopping us, there’s a good chance they’re not cops.”

  “Cabal?” Hardie asked. “Could they have made us, even inside one of their cars?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  The two Charlie Hardies quickly discussed their battle plan, which was simple: point and shoot. Spray bullets at anything that moved. Make sure that the chunks of meat on the asphalt stopped twitching. Then haul ass out of the area and hope the Cabal didn’t send any other mobile death squads after them.

  Among the handguns the fake Charlie Hardie had shoved into the black canvas bag back at the way station in northern Nevada: Glock .23 semiautos, .40 S&W cartridge, plenty of loaded magazines. Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum and .38 Special revolvers, double action only.

  The real Charlie Hardie took a .38 Special, stuffed it in a pocket of his spacesuit, then grabbed a .44. Outside, car doors snicked open. The noise echoed across the quiet Nebraska pre-dawn.

  “This is it,” the fake Charlie Hardie said, snatching up two Glocks for himself.

  “I’ll take the front, you take the back,” the real Charlie Hardie said.

  “Works for me.”

  A proper team-up.

  Which of course was shattered when a familiar voice cried out, “Charlie Hardie! It’s me, Deke!”

  Deke Clark had called in four favors. These favors would soon become blood debts, held by four of the toughest gunmen on the planet.

  The kind of people Deke Clark—in his former life as a federal agent—used to investigate, arrest, and remove from the general population.

  But these rules had long broken down for Deke. He was tired of living with a gun to his family’s heads.

  So instead of cultivating a list of snitches, Deke had spent the past year cultivating a short list of hired muscle who could be called upon in a pinch to deal with a crisis. Of course, the crisis Deke had in mind was protecting his family against an onslaug
ht of Accident People, or whatever the hell they were called.

  This favor was different. This was about cornering a man speeding down a highway and taking him into private custody without anyone getting killed.

  Only Charlie Hardie could answer certain questions about the people who had threatened Deke’s family. And so God help him, if Hardie decided to do the stoic thing or try to escape …

  Well, then, that’s where his four favors came in.

  By the time Deke’s team was assembled—which didn’t take long at all, since these men were prepared to travel at a moment’s notice—Hardie and his mysterious black sedan were crossing the Colorado state line. Deke calculated the time and agreed to rendezvous in Grand Island, Nebraska, and set up a two-car trap along Route 80. Nothing fancy. Just stop him. Pull him out of that car. Have one of the other men take control of the car (who knew what secrets it might yield) and go to somewhere neutral for some answers.

  Deke kept tabs on the sedan thanks to favors called in to the Colorado, and then Nebraska, Departments of Transportation. Hardie was still headed east on 80, predictable as hell. The one strange thing that Deke didn’t understand was the speeding. Hardie should have been pulled over a couple dozen times in Colorado alone. And Nebraska? Hell, the entire state was one big 104,111-square-mile speed trap.

  Again, the steely voice called out on the lonely highway: “Charlie, man, it’s me. Deke! Come on out of there!”

  Inside the coma car, Hardie’s bandaged jaw dropped. “No. Way.”

  “Is that—” His double lapsed into a brief dumbstruck silence. “Is that Deacon Clark? How did he find us?”

  “No idea. But you know, Deke was always the best at the whole cop game.”

  “There’s no fucking way he could have found us. We’re invisible.”

  “Well, he’s out there asking for me right now. I guess I should go talk to him.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like any of this. But listen to me—whatever you do, do not shoot him. He’s taken care of Kendra and the boy all this time, and—”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I know all about Deke.”

  “So none of that shit about pointing and shooting and spraying, okay?”

  The Other Hardie nodded quickly. “But wait … you can’t step outside. Remember, your face?”

  Wrapped in bandages. Right. Deke wasn’t X, the man with X-ray vision. He could be forgiven for thinking that a mummy had kidnapped his old pal Charlie, and would shoot first, check under the wrapping later.

  “Let me go,” his double said.

  “No. What if he spots you for a fake right away?”

  “I fooled all of those machines in the satellite. They thought I was a dead ringer for you.”

  Outside the car:

  “Final warning, Charlie! Don’t make me do this!”

  “Deke’s not a machine,” Hardie said. “I have to go. Cover me in case it gets weird, okay?”

  Hardie expected another fight, but instead his double just nodded again.

  “Deke,” the man in the bandages cried out, lifting his hands above his head. Deke could tell he had guns in the pockets of his uniform. Now that he saw it up close, it did look like some kind of spacesuit. “It’s me! Don’t shoot!”

  “Show me your hands! Is Charlie Hardie in that vehicle with you?”

  Hardie complied, lifting his bandaged hands up in the cool night air. “Deke, it’s me. It’s Charlie.”

  “Step away from the car. Come all the way around.”

  “Deke, seriously, man. Listen to my voice.”

  “No. I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re not Hardie. Tell Hardie to step out of the car now or there will be serious trouble.”

  “The last time we met, you told me other people would finish this. That I didn’t have to do this anymore. All I needed was to stop and come home. Well, Deke, you were partly right. All this time, I needed to come home. But I can’t depend on anybody else. I put my family in this mess, and I’m the only one who can get them out of it. I hope you’ll understand that.”

  Deke squinted, as if he could see past the bandages. Goddamn. Was this him? That was a conversation they had a year ago, alone, in a garage. That lawyer Doyle was there, but he was unconscious. The only other occupants of the garage were dead. Had to be him.

  “Charlie?” he asked.

  And then shots blasted out into the airspace behind Deke’s head.

  Abrams knew that Deacon “Deke” Clark would be useful one of these days. His weathered mug was the only face that Charlie Hardie trusted. Which was why Abrams didn’t bother having an Accident team dispatched immediately to erase Clark and his family.

  Instead, Abrams had his home—his supposedly “protected” home—bugged, right down to the wood under the carpet tacking. She steered Cabal-friendly gunmen and mercenaries in his direction, making Clark feel like he’d recruited them.

  Abrams considered this a smart, relatively inexpensive insurance policy. Doyle would have gone all high-tech with it; sometimes, the old tricks work the best. And now it had paid off.

  The gunmen had simple orders—grievously wound Charlie Hardie and bring him back to L.A. They needed him alive. He didn’t have to be conscious. Just with a pulse. It was important if she was going to make her point heard and end these bitter little internecine squabbles with Doyle. Prove her way worked. Keep costs down, use forward thinking, not expensive gadgets and elaborate schemes.

  If Doyle were in charge he would have probably sent heavily armed mobile death troops in dozens of bulletproof cars to hunt down and destroy Hardie. Which would have cost hundreds of millions and most likely exposed them in a number of small ways. Given the enemy something to exploit.

  No, better to do this quiet and clean and cheap and easy.

  Now it was nearly 6:00 a.m. East Coast time. Abrams leaned back in her first-class seat, picked up her orange juice, and eagerly awaited the status update.

  The shoot-out was brief, as they tend to be. The gunmen behind Deke Clark opened fire. They were expert marksmen, ex-mercs who’d impressed the Cabal enough to be given retainers. They knew how to make shots designed to incapacitate. Kill shots were easy; the surgical ones required on-the-scene finesse.

  There was no time for Charlie Hardie to speak or scream or protest or reach for the revolvers in his pockets. His body was thrown back against the vehicle, then slid down to the asphalt.

  Deke Clark, still laboring under the delusion that these were his trusted men, spun around to face them, a stunned expression on his face. The gunmen knew the ruse was blown; they were under orders to execute Deke right after Hardie was taken out. His usefulness to the Cabal had come to an end.

  Deke decoded the expression on their faces in a fraction of a second. He’d always been good at reading people, thinking fast on his feet. He opened fire; the gunmen adjusted their aim and returned fire at close to point-blank range.

  Meanwhile another man emerged from the driver’s seat and used a Glock .23 to open fire on the gunmen on the opposite end.

  Those gunmen were momentarily gobsmacked; they had been trained to kill Charlie Hardie; had studied various photographs until his image was burned into their minds. The moment that Deacon Clark confirmed the man in the bandages as Charlie Hardie—“Charlie?”—that man was taken out. So who was this man, who looked exactly like him?

  This gave the double a small window of opportunity.

  Headshot, torso shots. The double wasn’t screwing around. He pulled a second Glock and started firing in the opposite direction, toward Deke and his gunmen—already engaged in a brief, blood-splattered, close-range battle. Metal panged, glass sprayed, asphalt was ripped up by shots gone wild. The noise was as if the very air around them were full of firecrackers and all of them were popping off at the same time. Smoke obscured some shots. Agonized cries cut through the din and the fog and blood.

  All told, the gunfight on that Nebraska road took maybe nine, ten secon
ds.

  To all involved, it felt like forever.

  Deke hadn’t called an ending like this. Not for him, not for Charlie Hardie. He kind of saw the two of them as old men in a backyard, swilling beers they shouldn’t be swilling, talking war stories while their grandkids milled about. While Deke and Charlie were never friend friends, he’d always hoped they’d mellow into some kind of grudging mutual respect as they grew old. And that would somehow transmogrify into real friendship.

  None of this was right. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Charlie Hardie, slumped against a black Lincoln Town Car, shot in every possible way a man could be shot.

  Deke, breathing blood, feeling numb all over, knowing this was it.

  As he died he mumbled words to his wife, Ellie, a confused tangle of apologies and sweetness. He sent his love to his daughters. He thanked his wife for the eggs.

  The bullets didn’t kill Charlie Hardie.

  The sight of Deke Clark, shot up and dying on a cold Nebraska road … now that killed him, in the deepest way possible. This was a point-blank shot to his soul.

  This was Nate Parrish all over again, but somehow worse, because when a man swears something will never happen again, when a man voluntarily exiles himself from his life and all that he loves so that it has no chance of happening again …

  … and it happens again …

  It was almost too much to bear.

  Hardie got a good man killed. He always seemed to let good people die on his watch. Nate Parrish. Lane Madden. Now Deacon Clark. And somehow he went on living.

  How? Project Viking? Was that bullshit even true? Was that his curse? To survive, even as good men were cut down all around him?

  So be it.

  He deserved the pain he had coming.

  On the dizzy edge of consciousness—Hardie had to have lost a ton of blood in the past few minutes, because his clothes were soaked as if he’d gone swimming—he prayed that the Project Viking stuff was true. That somehow he was death-proof, maybe even immortal. That he could stand up now and the bullets would drop out of his wounds and go tinklingon the asphalt. And then he’d go save his family …