Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  It wasn’t possible to make people understand the horrors he’d endured. And rather than try, Ethan said nothing. He thought at the time that he was doing everybody a favor, but looking back, he realized how fundamentally he had changed as a boy. As a human being. Happiness became a charade for him, the thing you fake when people are looking, but never quite exists. And the thing is, you never know that you’re not happy. You just think that everyone else in the world is clueless.

  You’d never be able to convince Ethan that people didn’t know about what he’d allowed to be done to him. Somehow, people knew, and they judged him for it. He could see it in the eyes of the other kids in school, the way they stopped talking when he passed. He heard it in the guidance counselors’ voices as they sat him down and urged him to explain what was going on inside his head. Why were his grades falling? Why was he fighting with other boys so much?

  He’d come close to saying it. So close to saying it, just to punish those earnest assholes for asking questions they really didn’t want to hear the answers to. Then he realized that with all the shit that was piled on his life in layers without any icing separating them, he really didn’t need the burden of having sent his parents to prison. For murder.

  So, yeah. Ethan caused his parents’ divorce. From the overheard conversations—the screaming matches that even the deaf could hear—he figured out that each of them blamed the other for the incident. That was the euphemism they’d settled on, sort of unofficially. The incident left out all the unpleasantness of reality. If the other had kept better watch on Ethan, if they hadn’t have been so tough on him, if they’d done the right thing and called the police, if sun spots didn’t happen and if pigs flew, then their son would still be the happy little boy who he used to be. Ethan didn’t bother telling them that he’d never been all that happy to begin with, but that would have felt like piling on.

  He remembered vividly the night when the truth clarified for him. He lay in bed, listening to the row between his folks, and he realized that it was simply easier for them to hate each other than it was to embrace what had happened to him. Shame does that to people.

  When he was done, Wendy wouldn’t make eye contact with him. She just concentrated on her notes. He was a breath away from chastising her for being no better than the others when he saw her wipe away a tear.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The paper worth killing for—and dying for—contained an address. A Mr. Peter Appleton who lived on Illinois Street in Arlington, Virginia. Venice’s Internet scour for the address turned up nothing of note. Mr. Peter Appleton of that address was an employee of the US Department of State, who listed him as a senior data analyst. It was the kind of meaningless job title that drove Jonathan crazy. A GS-14, he earned a solid low six-figure income, and that was the kind of money that could fund an upper middle-class lifestyle even in the close-in suburb of Arlington.

  Alice Appleton, Peter’s wife, was the executive director of the Organization of Waste and Recycling Businesses, an unpronounceable acronym (and therefore not an acronym at all) that lobbied for laxer rules on the disposal of waste and the handling of recyclable materials. No stranger to that industry—Jonathan’s father had once run a scrap yard as a cover for his mob connections—the irony was not lost on him.

  Brookville, in Braddock County, was less than an hour from Arlington, so Jonathan decided to go directly there to see what the connection might be. During the drive, Venice tore the Interwebs to shreds trying to find some connection between the Appletons and . . . well, anything, but all she found was vapor.

  “They’re visible enough to be legitimate,” she proclaimed at the end of her search, “but not visible enough to be a problem. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Well, we have to follow it to ground,” Jonathan said. And that’s what they were doing now.

  Jonathan had a theory that the streets in Arlington, Virginia, had been laid out with an eye toward some Cold War plot to keep enemies from navigating the roads. Addresses such as South Persing Avenue West were at an entirely different geographic grid than South Persing Road North. In the days before reliable GPS navigation aids, Arlington had been known to swallow tourists whole, only to spit them out ten years later, exhausted and craving sanity.

  Illinois Street was relatively easy to find, provided you started at Interstate 66 and realized that the only way to get to it was to follow the signs for Washington Boulevard. Then, you just had to have enough street smarts to get off of Washington Boulevard onto a street that even GPS didn’t know about. Then it was immediately on your left, noticeable only after you’d passed it. Jonathan hated this part of Northern Virginia. Nowhere near as much as he hated the District of Columbia, but it was close.

  The Appletons’ house was quintessential Arlington. Built in the late 1940s, it was small, but had a lot of the character that was attendant to that era of high-quality construction. As Boxers pulled the Batmobile to a stop across the street, he looked across the console to Jonathan. “What do you think we’re getting into? What do you think this address is all about?”

  “I can only assume that it’s the next target for kidnappers,” Jonathan replied.

  “Why would somebody want to kidnap an analyst for the State Department?”

  “I have no idea,” Jonathan confessed. “But we’ve rescued our share of people who had no immediate need to be kidnapped.”

  Boxers chuckled at the absurdity. “Fair enough,” he said. “How do you want to play it?”

  “Given how little we know, I suppose we just go to the front door and knock. See what happens.”

  “Are we going together?” Boxers asked.

  Jonathan said, “Yeah, normally I’d have you cover the back, but it looks like they have a fence all the way around their property. I don’t want you climbing stuff and attracting attention. Let’s knock and see what we find.”

  “Firepower?”

  “Just side arms,” Jonathan said. “Concealed.”

  “I’m ready, then.”

  As they climbed out of the vehicle, Jonathan scanned the horizon for threats. Whoever he’d knocked out at the park had had no usable identification, which was no surprise, and the fingerprints Jonathan took had come back negative. The owner of the fingerprints had valued this address enough to threaten him with death, though, so that meant something important resided here. Jonathan needed to know what that was.

  Typical of a neighborhood that was nearly seventy years old, the sidewalks were crumbly, and the steep, narrow brick steps that led from the street level to the elevated lawn should have been replaced ages ago. The yard was easily six feet higher in elevation than the sidewalk, prompting Jonathan to again scan the horizon for threats. The additional elevation introduced an entirely new target package for anyone inclined to be looking for a target.

  Jonathan and Boxers had done this drill enough over the years that Big Guy knew to hang back in the yard while Jonathan knocked on the door. Given Boxers’ height and girth, Jonathan considered it a bad idea to have him in the same visual frame when someone answered the door to a stranger.

  With Big Guy in position, Jonathan walked to the door and rapped with his knuckle. When no one answered after thirty seconds or so, he scanned the area around the jamb and found the doorbell button. He pressed it. If he used his imagination, he could convince himself that he heard a ding and a dong from the space beyond the door. A few seconds later, footsteps approached. Jonathan caught movement behind the curtains that lined the jamb, and he knew that he’d been eyeballed by someone. That was a ritual that he’d never really understood. If the visitor were a bad guy—someone intent on doing harm—then he’d shoot at the movement and be done with it. On the other hand, if the visual check revealed someone known, but whom one didn’t want to see, how would the homeowner explain the fact that he peeked, yet didn’t open the door? As a third alternative, if one peeked out and saw a stranger, yet opened the door anyway, what was the purpose of checking in the firs
t place? When Jonathan was elected king, things would make a lot more sense than they did today.

  A lock slid and the door opened to reveal a scrawny young black man, perhaps twenty years old, who looked like he needed a nap. “Good afternoon,” he said. The words rang as strangely formal to Jonathan’s ears.

  “Hello,” Jonathan said. “Mr. Appleton, I presume?”

  The young man scowled. “Who are you?”

  “Mr. Appleton?” Sometimes, the best way to avoid answering a question was to ask one of your own.

  “No,” the young man said. “Good day.” He moved to close the door.

  Jonathan kicked out his foot to block it, the old salesman’s trick. “Please don’t,” he said. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

  “You need to answer one first,” the kid said. There was a toughness to him that surprised Jonathan.

  “Who am I?”

  “That’s the one.” The kid stood with half his body bracing the door, as if expecting Jonathan to attempt to crash through. That spoke of training.

  “Well, okay,” Jonathan said. He reached into his back pocket and produced his FBI badge. “My name is Special Agent Horgan. Richard Horgan.” If the kid had checked the details of the credentials, he’d have seen a matching name. But people rarely saw past the badge.

  The kid looked at the creds, and nodded, but he didn’t move to let Jonathan pass. Definitely, he’d been trained. “Okay, Agent Horgan, how can I help you?”

  “You can tell me where I can find Mr. or Mrs. Appleton,” Jonathan said.

  “Last I heard, they were in Peru,” the kid said.

  Jonathan narrowed his gaze. “And who are you?”

  “My name is Prince Albert, and before you give me a bunch of crap about it, yes, that’s my real name. I’ve hated my mother and father for it my whole life.”

  Jonathan stifled a chuckle. What would possess parents to do such a thing to their child? “Okay, Mr. Albert—”

  “Call me Prince.”

  “Sure,” Jonathan said. “Why not? Okay, Prince, I’d appreciate it if you could tell me who you are, why you’re here, and what happened to the Appletons.”

  “Not a problem,” he said. “You already have my name. The Appletons were transferred to Peru, and my boss is renting their house for the next couple of years. I am the au pair for my clients’ two daughters.”

  “May I ask who your client is?” Jonathan asked.

  “May I ask why you’re asking?”

  This was a way chattier interview than Jonathan normally encountered, especially after he’d badged someone. Usually people saw the gold shield and just babbled out words. This guy—this Prince—seemed not the least bit cowed by the presence of the power of the federal government.

  “I can’t go into the details,” Jonathan said, “but we have good reason to believe that the occupants of this house—that you—may be the target of people who are trying to do you harm.”

  “Who?” Prince asked. “Who would want to do harm to this family?”

  Recognizing that this was going to be a harder sell than he had anticipated, Jonathan decided to swing for the fences. He reached into his pocket and produced the crumpled piece of paper with the Illinois Street address on it. “A man tried to kill me today to prevent me from getting my hands on this piece of paper.” He let Prince hold it in his fingers, and then motioned for it back.

  “That’s this address,” Prince said.

  “I know that,” Jonathan said. He held out his arms in a silent ta-da! “So here we are.”

  “But the Appletons don’t live here anymore,” Prince said.

  “I believed we’ve established that,” Jonathan said. He felt his patience ebbing. “What we keep dancing around is, who does live here. Other than Prince Albert, of course.”

  Prince offered a smile that looked more like a wince. “Yeah, well, my boss is Ariana Baker,” he said. “Senator Ariana Baker, of California.”

  Jonathan’s heart skipped. What were the chances of randomly interacting with the families of two members of Congress over the course of the same week? This wasn’t good. “Where is Senator Baker now?” he asked.

  “At the Capitol, I presume.” His face became a mask of concern. “What is going on?”

  Jonathan’s mind ran through about ten thousand options in the span of a couple of seconds. Senator Ariana Baker lived in a house that Venice’s data said belonged to the Appleton family. He supposed it was possible that Battle Beard was after the Appletons but got the Bakers instead. However, on the heels of the incident with the Johnson girl, he didn’t believe that for a second. Somehow, Battle Beard had better intel than Venice did, and that was at its face unsettling.

  “You said you were the au pair,” Jonathan said. “That means there are children in the house?”

  Prince’s scowl deepened. “I think it’s time for you to tell me what this is all about,” he said.

  “May we come in?” Jonathan asked.

  For the first time, Prince realized that there was a second man, Boxers, who continued to stand in the yard. “No, you may not,” he said.

  As standoffs went, this one was feeling pretty solid. Time for a different approach. “I feel as if we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” Jonathan said.

  “Would that be the one you stuck in my door?” Prince asked.

  Jonathan smiled in spite of himself. He had a role to play here, but it was hard not to be amused by Prince’s adherence to whatever protocol he’d been taught. “Actually, that’s my right foot,” he said with a smile. It was a statement of fact.

  A shadow of a smile appeared on Prince’s face. “Please just tell me what you want.”

  “The bottom line,” Jonathan said, “is that I believe the residents of this house to be in danger, but before I can explain the specifics, I need to know who I am speaking to. Other than merely your name and job description.”

  Prince eyed Jonathan for a full ten seconds, then said, “I am the manny. That’s male nanny. I’m a student at American University, and this is the gig that pays my bills and gives me a place to sleep.”

  Jonathan checked his watch. Two-thirty. “Are the children in school now?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Age and sex?”

  “Twin girls,” Prince said. “Nine years old.”

  “And what school do they go to?”

  “Our Lady of Sorrows,” Prince said. “It’s just a couple of miles from here.” He checked his watch, as well. “They’ll be getting out in a few minutes, at two forty-five.”

  The entire scenario crystalized for Jonathan in a flash. This was another kidnapping attempt in its infancy. “Please listen to me very carefully,” he said. “Is Our Lady of Sorrows one of those private schools that lots of wealthy kids go to?”

  Again, Prince recoiled. It was the kind of cheap question one would expect from a Washington Post reporter.

  Jonathan picked up the pace. “What I’m really asking is if the school has a higher level of security than your average public school.”

  “It is a private school,” Prince confirmed. “The teachers are priests and nuns, but the curriculum is more secular than you would think.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Jonathan said. “Listen to the question. Do they have a high level of physical security there?”

  Prince looked confused. “There aren’t armed guards, if that’s what you’re talking about.”

  That was exactly what Jonathan was talking about. Perhaps he should have asked the question that way. His mind raced to formulate some kind of plan. It wasn’t as if an attack were imminent, or that the children were even in immediate jeopardy, but the evidence was mounting, so he was willing to take the leap of faith. Besides, if the whole thing turned out to be bullshit, no one had any idea who he truly was.

  “Okay, Prince, I need you to listen to me carefully,” Jonathan said. “The girls are in danger. So are you and the senator.”

  “What’s going on
?” For the first time, Prince’s face showed real fear.

  “Just listen to me,” Jonathan said. “I need you to call the school and tell them to hold the girls past dismissal. Tell them whatever you’d like—up to and including that they are in danger, but try not to trigger a lockdown of the entire campus.”

  “Who’s causing the danger?” As he asked the question, Prince craned his neck, as if to spot a gunman in the street.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Jonathan said. That sounded so much better than, I have no idea. “I can tell you, though, that another member of Congress’s daughter was recently kidnapped—”

  “I didn’t hear anything about that,” Prince said. “I’m sure the senator would have told me.”

  “The sheer weight of what senators don’t know should shift the orbit of the planet,” Jonathan said before he could stop the words. In the hierarchy of flora and fauna, Jonathan harbored more respect for honeybees than he did for members of Congress. At least honeybees worked for what they got. “This kidnapping attempt no doubt happened outside her sphere of knowledge.”

  “How do you know about it, then?”

  “Really?” Jonathan snapped. “I just told you that the girls are in jeopardy, and you want to knock dicks over our relative intel resources?”

  That seemed to take Prince off balance. “I’m going to have to tell the school something,” he said.

  “Like I said, figure that out. And after you talk to the school, you probably should call the senator and tell her what you’re doing. None of this needs to be public knowledge unless you want to make it so.”

  “And are you going to the school to protect the twins?” Prince asked.

  Jonathan knew that the smart move here was a lie, but nontactical lies did not come easily to him. “No,” he said. “I’ll leave that part of the security to you and the senator.”

  “But I don’t have any experience with that sort of thing,” Prince objected.