Clean

by Tom Lytes

  “Have I heard your music?” Bobby asked Roger. “Are you a rapper?”

  Roger shook his head.

  “What then?”

  Hansel spoke for him and said, “He plays the electric violin. He’s the founding member of a pretty successful group. It’s called PPP. Their thing is classical crossover country music. They’re popular in Australia and Turkey.”

  “What’s PPP stand for? Anything in particular?” Bobby asked.

  “Puss Pissing Prettyboys,” Hansel said.

  Bobby nodded and took a bottle of scotch from a cabinet. He poured two glasses. One was for him and the other was for Hansel. Bobby downed his in one go. Hansel didn’t touch his.

  “Thank you, Mr. Touro for the offer. I don’t drink alcohol. I eat a macrobiotic, vegan diet. Please don’t take offense.”

  Bobby looked at his driver, “Did you hear that?”

  “Yes, boss,” the driver said.

  Roger reached around Hansel and sipped the scotch as he listened to Bobby and Hansel talk.

  “Much better than Jimmy, eh?” Bobby said as he alternated between pounding the desk and motioning towards Hansel.

  The driver nodded.

  Bobby said, “So the first thing I need you to do is a little out of town job. You up for it?”

  “Yes sir,” Hansel said. “Where are we headed? What do we have to do?”

  “I need you to go down to South Carolina and get a couple of people into a building. Then you gotta babysit them until they get access to a computer down there,” Bobby said.

  “Sounds easy,” Hansel said.

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. He pulled out blueprints for the building that housed Clemson’s supercomputer and spread them out on the table in front of him. “Easy as pie. Let me walk you through this. The first thing is to gain access to the structure, so a computer guy can make sure a program is being worked on there.”

  “Then what?” asked Hansel.

  Bobby looked up from the blueprints.

  “We’ll go over the details of what I want you to do, then you blow the whole fucking thing up.”

  31

  Peggy, Officer Pincus, other policemen from Sullivan’s Island, and several officers from the Isle of Palms Police Department were coordinating the beach area rescue effort. The police assisted the medical teams wherever they were needed and tried to handle the crowd, while managing the numerous emergency vehicles coming and going from the scene. It was chaotic work, lit by the glow of the huge ship that wouldn’t stop burning.

  After helping load a sailor with minor burns, Peggy shut the back door of an ambulance and slapped it twice to signal the driver that he should go. As it pulled away, Peggy saw that she was within twenty feet of Leonard, who was in the center of the roped off pedestrian area. Leonard was on the phone.

  Peggy hesitated, but decided to approach him. His house wouldn’t be a safer place to ask him questions, later. Certainly not safer than out in the open on the beach, surrounded by pedestrians and emergency personnel.

  “Leonard,” she said loudly, “Hey, Leonard.”

  He didn’t even turn, which seemed strange because she thought she could hear his voice. Why couldn’t he hear her? She was yelling his name.

  “Leonard,” she yelled, trying again to get his attention.

  She was irritated and couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard her. She moved towards him but stopped when she thought he was speaking a foreign language. It took a few seconds to click, but Peggy realized that Leonard was speaking German. She listened to him speak and wished for the first time that she took the German elective offered in high school. While she understood nothing, she watched Leonard’s body language, and it was different. He seemed more confident, in control, and assertive than when she’d seen him, albeit briefly, before. His shoulders were back and there was something about the way that he carried himself, too. If she wasn’t mistaken, he was giving orders or instructions. It was hard to tell, but she could see that Leonard was holding a very one-sided conversation, with him doing most of the talking.

  Her thoughts were pulled back to the emergency scene when a young police officer ran up to her. “Can you help us over here?”

  “What do you need?” Peggy asked as she stole another quick glance towards Leonard, who was still engrossed with his phone conversation.

  “Can you hold this flare?” the young officer asked as he pulled the pin and it flamed. “The helicopter is triangulating off this point, among others.”

  Peggy took it and the young man took off running again, with a GPS device in one hand and a box of flares in the other.

  Peggy held her arm high as the flare lit up the night around her. She marveled at the coordination between the ground, air and water crews. Some of the injured were being treated on the beach at the makeshift triage station and transported to the nearby Roper Hospital in Mount Pleasant. The badly burned were being transported via helicopter somewhere else, and other people were being brought out of the water at a location off the harbor, and then moved directly to the MUSC Hospital downtown.

  The rescue crews handled their watercraft expertly, and the fire departments from both islands seemed to have several boats and jet skis at their disposal. It made sense given the rip tides and the location of the islands, but Peggy found herself gawking at the rescues which were occurring one after another. It seemed that the crew from the burning cargo ship began jumping into the ocean before the flames reached them. When one of the helicopters spotted somebody jumping and then bobbing, one of the fire boats would blast over and scoop the person up. The Coast Guard was doing a lot too, but Peggy tuned into the local police and fire crews who were including her in their work.

  After several minutes, a larger fire boat arrived from somewhere south, and started spraying water onto the ship. The brightness of the light from the fire diminished, but that was pretty much the only change. The stubborn fire burned ferociously.

  Peggy didn’t notice Officer Pincus at her side until he spoke to her.

  “Peggy, there’s no question in my mind that you are in great danger.”

  Peggy looked at him and thought he looked strange, maybe from adrenalin and the work they were doing, but maybe something else too.

  “Everything okay with you?”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “Quite a situation here with that ship on fire. We’ve had ships lose power out there. That can cause some serious problems, but this is a first.”

  “I’ve never been part of a rescue with so many water elements,” Peggy said. “We have some issues on the lake, and in the rivers, but this is so much bigger.”

  “You do snow and mountain rescues up there in New York?”

  Peggy nodded and said, “Sometimes people get lost when weather moves in, especially in the Adirondack mountains, and our local police and fire assist search teams all the time.”

  “Well, the cold is something I could do without,” he said. “I’ll take water any day.”

  Officer Pincus pointed to a dark area of the beach where some shoulder height bushes grew atop a dune. The ocean left cut marks in the sand below the bushes during a storm at some point, and it was easy to see how the beach on Sullivan’s Island was dynamic. It grew or shrank, depending on how any given storm hit the beach.

  Officer Pincus said, “Step over to this dune where we can have some privacy and we can talk for a minute.”

  Peggy looked over at the isolated, dark area of the dunes and then at Officer Pincus. It didn’t feel right to go over there. She looked back at Leonard, and saw he was still on the phone, waiting with a small but dedicated group of pedestrians who were taking in the scene, behind yellow tape and under the watchful eye of a deputy from the Isle of Palms.

  Officer Pincus was already halfway to the dune, and Peggy started to follow. She made sure not to catch up with Officer Pincus, leav
ing a good ten feet between them. She couldn’t help but think he wasn’t acting like himself. When he stopped, and turned around, she stopped abruptly. Officer Pincus was still looking at her in a way that made her uncomfortable, more now because he seemed to be looking over her shoulder at the crowd and then back to her. Peggy started to back away and looked to see how far away the other officers were. Officer Pincus saw her looking and abruptly changed his posture. He smiled broadly and put his hands out to the side in an expansive, non-threatening gesture.

  “Peggy, we have to figure out what to do with you.”

  The old Officer Pincus she thought she knew was back again, it seemed.

  “What do you mean?” Peggy asked, keeping her distance.

  “There are people who want you dead,” he said. “And there’s the FBI and DA that will eventually want me to hold you for questioning, and there’s a ship that flamed up like nobody’s business.”

  Peggy nodded. She was at the center of a lot of stuff, but she didn’t think she could be blamed for the ship. She looked deep into his eyes in the diminished light. She didn’t sense immediate danger anymore. Peggy wanted to trust her survival skills but didn’t know if she should. There was something troubling about how Officer Pincus was looking at her earlier.

  “I can’t have you out in the open,” Officer Pincus said, interrupting her thoughts. “Somebody wants me to kill you pretty badly, and law enforcement, in general, is going to be all over this island investigating this ship fire. I can’t really pretend I don’t know where you are anymore.”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  “There’ll be busy days coming up,” Officer Pincus pointed at the ship. “And there’s going to be a lot of multi-agency cooperation. We’ll be hosting all kinds of people that are going to want to speak with you.”

  “It’s true,” Peggy said. “Every agency in the country will have people looking at this fire.”

  “As odd and unlikely as it sounds,” Officer Pincus said. “I’d like to be able to tell people you’re missing and might have died during the rescue, or during the chaos from the ship fire, somehow. That’s the only way you’re going to be able to stay out of custody and be free to work on defeating the program.”

  Peggy said, “Wait a minute, you want me to fake my own death?”

  “Yes,” Officer Pincus said with confidence. “It’s for your own safety, really.”

  32

  Leonard extracted a phone from his pocket and returned a call for Vortmit that demanded his immediate attention. He looked around casually like a captivated sightseer. The rescue effort around the burning cargo ship was an ongoing distraction on the water and up and down the beach in both directions. The best place to make the call was in plain sight. With everyone swirling around on the beach, he wouldn’t be noticeable speaking on his cellphone.

  When the call connected, Vortmit heard a steady, hardened voice speak clearly and succinctly, “Vortmit, I am taking a risk calling you.”

  “I imagine you are, Rhodes,” Vortmit said, returning the tone, “and I am taking a risk to speak with you. I am busy doing the job you are paying me to do.”

  “Yes, I am paying you for a specific result. Leave Peggy Whitfield out of this.”

  Vortmit didn’t expect this from Rhodes. It was understood that he would do whatever needed to be done to achieve the desired result. If there were casualties, it was to be expected.

  “We discussed how this works.”

  “Don’t involve Peggy,” Rhodes said.

  Vortmit replied, “When you approached me, you spoke of righting wrongs, with both Carson Miller and Bobby Touro. That was the only arrangement we made.”

  Rhodes said, “Carson was the prosecutor responsible for putting me in jail. Bobby set me up. Both must pay.”

  “Right,” Vortmit said. “You never mentioned Peggy.”

  “Do I have to mention every individual I don’t want mixed up in this?” Rhodes asked like a man whose anger wouldn’t be contained. “I am telling you now. Leave Peggy out of this.”

  Vortmit felt Rhodes’s rage pulse through the phone.

  “I understand. Nothing will happen to her. Peggy will not be involved.”

  Rhodes’s breaths came through the phone hard and raspy. Vortmit knew the lie he told was essential. Rhodes came to power in a brutal prison, using brutal tactics. His reach would be long enough to find Vortmit on the island, and without warning. Whether he could keep Peggy safe remained to be seen, but it wouldn’t matter anyway. Despite his assurances to Rhodes, he was too deep into the project to make such a shift. Peggy was crucial to what he was doing, and Rhodes would deal with the fallout alone.

  Vortmit would only take the nightmares with him when he disappeared thoroughly. Neither Rhodes or anyone else would unearth him; his associates in Germany would see to the details. Vortmit would be done being Leonard; the holiday from his own life and his conscience would be over until Vortmit’s next project.

  Peggy checked back in visually, but wasn’t ready to seek out Leonard again, yet. He was still on the phone anyway. He looked absorbed in his own world a million miles away, despite the dramatic events occurring right in front of him.

  She found her way back to the beach. It seemed the fire boats focused less on putting out the fire now, and more on searching the water for survivors. When they found somebody, they took them out of the harbor on the Charleston side, or by helicopter. The sense of readiness on the beach hadn’t gone away yet, but the adrenalin pop that surged through the rescue operation when bodies were coming to shore had run its course for now.

  Peggy called Bobby Touro, and when the line connected she said, “Hey, Bobby, are you keeping up with the news?”

  “What? You think I haven’t been working, and have all the time in the world to sit down and watch television?” Bobby asked without saying hello.

  “Ha, Bobby,” Peggy said. “Nothing like that. It’s just that a huge ship lit on fire off the island where Leonard lives. There’s been a crazy rescue operation. The ship is as big as a New York City skyscraper, just lying down in the water.”

  “Oh,” Bobby said. “I don’t know anything about that. I’ve been lining up a small crew to assist with that Clemsum computer.”

  “Yeah, Clemson,” Peggy said. “That’s why I’m calling, to find out what’s going on. Can you get us in?”

  “Yeah, right. So, I’ve got guys that are going to get you in there. It won’t be tonight, because the travel time alone makes it impossible. I’m arranging for them to have what they’ll need. A guy will meet them at the airport with supplies and a car. I’ll be flying them down in the morning.”

  “That sounds okay,” Peggy said. “The ship fire took out a chunk of time, and I’m not sure Finley would be able to do everything he has to do tonight, anyway. He still needs to lure the program to that computer. I don’t know if he has the details worked out.”

  “Did you connect with Leonard?” Bobby asked. “He’s a genius at the computer stuff. Besides Peg, he knows you’re down there. It might take all of you collaborating to stop this fucking program.”

  “I tried talking with him earlier tonight, and I’ll try again later.”

  “All right, Peg, my guys will be down there tomorrow to help you get in to that computer building.”

  “Yeah,” Peggy said, “And Bobby?”

  “What?”

  “You got a second? I need some advice on something.”

  “I never thought you’d ask Peggy, darling.”

  “Don’t get the wrong idea, Bobby,” Peggy said. “I just need an outside perspective on what’s been going on. It’s been a busy few days, but something might be going on that isn’t right. Either that, or a lot’s been going on and I’m feeling, I don’t know, worn down.”

  “Okay, Peg,” Bobby said. “What’s going on?”

/>   “Okay, thanks. There’s a policeman down here,” Peggy said. “He’s the guy who didn’t take me into custody when the FBI asked him to apprehend me.”

  “Right, I remember him.”

  “His name is Officer Pincus,” Peggy said. “He’s been very cool with me, and kind of protected me, like I said.”

  “Why the fuck would he do that?” Bobby asked, knowing that his influence with the police union had everything to do with it. “He’s a cop.”

  “We told him about the program,” Peggy said.

  “And he believed you?” Bobby asked. “He didn’t think you were a total nut job?”

  “He believed us. It probably helped when he was sent an email, directing him to kill me. It was blackmail, but misguided. They were threatening something he didn’t care about.”

  “You think you might be dead if he cared more?” Bobby asked.

  “Here’s the thing,” Peggy said. “Before, I would have said he would never kill me. Officer Pincus isn’t that kind of guy.”

  Bobby pulled the phone away from his head and told his driver to fetch the car.

  Then he asked, “You changed your mind?”

  “Just now I had a weird conversation with Officer Pincus.”

  “Weird in what way?” Bobby asked.

  “He asked me to come over to a dark area of the dunes,” Peggy said. “I don’t know why, but every bone in my body was telling me to watch out.”

  “Did you go?” he asked

  “Yes,” Peggy said. “I went over to the dune but stopped short of getting too close to him. I calculated a safe distance and stayed at the ready, as far as I needed to be to make a run to safety. He saw it, and he knew what I was doing. I know he did.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He asked me to fake my own death,” Peggy said. “He thought it might be a good way to get the Feds off his back and let me fight the program.”

  “Huh,” Bobby said.

  “What do you think?”

  “I say trust your instincts,” Bobby said. “Whatever was warning you about this guy was working hard to keep you safe. That’s a fucking animal instinct and should not be ignored.”