Dead or Alive

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Dead or Alive Page 11

by Grant Blackwood


  “Crossed?”

  “When you’re stacked up outside a room, you know, just before you go in, and then you split up inside, one group moving to the heavy side, the other to the light side-”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “In the Laundromat you sidestepped and tracked your gun outside your zone. Your barrel crossed me-right across the back of the head, in fact. A real no-no.”

  “Okay, so lesson number one: Don’t point your gun at your friends.”

  Brian laughed. “That’s a way of putting it, yeah. Like I was saying… you’re rough around the edges, but you’ve got great instincts. What, you been holding out on us? Do some training with the Secret Service when you were a kid? Maybe a few vacations with Clark and Chavez?”

  Jack shook his head. “No, none of that. I mean, yeah, I shot some guns but nothing like this. I don’t know… It just seemed to play out in my head before it was happening…” Jack shrugged, then smiled. “Maybe got a little of Dad’s Marine DNA. Hell, who knows, maybe I’ve just watched Die Hard too many times.”

  “Somehow I don’t think so,” Brian replied. “Well, whatever it is, I wouldn’t mind having you on my six.”

  “I’ll second that.”

  They raised their cans of Diet Coke and clunked them together.

  “About that, guys…” Jack said tentatively. “You remember that thing last year… in Italy?”

  Brian and Dominic exchanged glances. “We remember,” Dom said. “Hell of a deal, that.”

  “Yeah, well, I was thinking I wouldn’t mind doing some more of it-not that exactly, maybe, but something like it.”

  Brian said, “Jesus, cuz, are you talking about unplugging from your keyboard and living in the real world? I can see the devil lacing up his ice skates as we speak.”

  “Very funny. No, I like what I do, I know it makes a difference, but that stuff is so intangible. What you guys do-what we did in Italy-that’s the real deal. Hands on, you know? You can see the results with your own eyes.”

  “Now that you’ve brought it up,” Dominic said, “I’ve always meant to ask you: Did any of that bother you afterward-not that it should have, necessarily, but let’s face it: You were kind of dumped ass-backward into a shitty situation-if you’ll pardon the pun.”

  Jack considered this. “What do you want me to say? That it bothered me? Well, it didn’t. Not really. Sure, I was nervous, and there was a quarter-second just before it happened where I thought, What the hell am I doing? But then it was gone, and it was just me and him, and I just did it. To answer the question I think you’re trying to ask-no, I haven’t lost a wink of sleep over it. You think I should have?”

  “Shit, no.” Brian looked around to make sure they were alone, then leaned in close, forearms on the table. “There’s no should about it, Jack. You either do or you don’t. You don’t, and that’s okay. The asshole deserved it. First time I popped a guy, Jack, he had me dead to rights. It was kill or be killed. I put him down, and I knew it was the right thing. Still had a few night-mares, though. Right or wrong, whether he deserves it or not, killing a man ain’t a pleasant thing. Anybody who thinks it is is a little touched in the head. All that gung-ho stuff ain’t really about killing; it’s about doing the job you’ve trained your ass off to be good at, taking care of the guys to your left and right, and coming out the other side with all your fingers and toes.”

  “Besides, Jack,” Dominic added, “that guy in Italy, he wouldn’t have just up and quit one day. He would’ve cost a lot of people their lives before somebody sent him on his way. For me, that’s the deal-breaker. A bad guy deserving what he gets is all well and good, but what we’re doing-what this whole thing is about-isn’t revenge, at least not for its own sake. Playing it that way is sort of like shutting the barn door after horses get out. Me, I’d much rather stop the guy who’s planning on opening the barn door in the first place.”

  Brian stared hard at his twin brother for a couple of beats and then shook his head and grinned. “I’ll be damned. Mom always said you were the philosopher of the family. I just never believed her till now.”

  “Yeah, yeah…” Dominic muttered. “Not so much philosophy as math. Kill one, save hundreds or thousands. If we were talking about decent, law-abiding folks, that’d be a harder equation, but they’re not.”

  “I agree with him, Jack,” said Brian. “We’ve got a chance to do some real good here. But if you’re thinking about doing this kind of stuff because you think revenge is the answer, or that it’s all James Bond shit-”

  “That’s not what-”

  “Good, because it ain’t, not even close. It’s ugly shit, period. And revenge is a piss-poor motivator. It makes you sloppy, and sloppy is dead.”

  “I know.”

  “So what’re you going to do about it?”

  “Talk to Gerry, I guess, and see what he says.”

  “You better have one hell of a pitch,” Dominic said. “Hell, as it stands Gerry took a risk hiring you in the first place. Your dad would have a fit-”

  “Let me worry about my dad, Dom.”

  “Fine, but if you think Gerry’s just going to hand you a gun and say, ‘Go forth and make the world safe for democracy,’ you got another think coming. If you were to buy the farm, he’d be the one making the call.”

  “I know.”

  “Good.”

  “So,” Jack said, “if I talk to him, you guys’ll back me up?”

  “For what it’s worth, sure,” Brian replied. “But this isn’t a democracy, Jack. Assuming he doesn’t shoot down the idea on the spot, he’ll probably run it by Sam.” Sam Granger was The Campus’s Chief of Operations. “I doubt he’s going to ask us.”

  Jack nodded. “Probably right. Well, like you said, I’d better make my pitch a damn good one, then.”

  14

  AUTUMN WAS HERE. You could tell from the wind and the ice pack, which had begun pulling away from the coast to reveal the black water of the Arctic Ocean. It could not be colder without turning to ice, and there was plenty of that still in sight, just to remind one that summer up here was fleeting at best. Mother Nature remained as grim and heartless as ever, even under a sky of crystal blue and a few cotton-ball white clouds.

  This place was not unlike his first Navy posting to Polyyarniy twelve years before, just as the Soviet Navy was starting to shut down. Oh, sure, they had a few ships left, most of them tied at the working ports of the Kola Fjord, manned by men who stayed in the Navy because they either had to or had nothing to go home to. There were a few ships with crews composed almost entirely of officers who actually got paid a few times a year. Vitaliy had been among the last men drafted into the former Soviet Navy and, to his astonishment, found himself liking the work.

  After the mindless basic training he’d been made a junior starshina, or petty officer, and a bosun’s mate. It had been hard, backbreaking work but satisfying, and it had ended up giving him a useful trade. He’d profited personally from the demise of the Soviet Navy by buying at a discount an old but well-maintained T-4 amphibious landing craft that he’d nominally converted into a passenger craft. Mostly he took scientific parties, exploring the region for obscure reasons beyond his interest, while some were hunters looking to convert a polar bear into an expensive rug.

  His charter for the week was waiting for him down the coast at a small fishing village. Two days ago he’d preloaded their equipment-a GAZ truck with all-wheel drive, new tires, and a fresh paint job, equipped with a heavy-duty A-frame, taking delivery from an anonymous driver who, like him, had probably been paid in euros. As any good captain did, Vitaliy had inspected the cargo and had been surprised to find the truck stripped of all identification codes, right down to the one on the engine block. While such a task wasn’t particularly complicated, and neither did it require a mechanic, something told Vitaliy that his charters hadn’t done the work themselves. So they’d come here, bought a GAZ in good condition, paid someone handsomely to strip it, then hired a pri
vate charter. Plenty of money to spread around and overly concerned with anonymity. What did that mean?

  But there was no point in being too curious. Smart cats knew the danger of curiosity, and he liked to think he was smart enough. The euros would also take care of his memory, something in which his party seemed supremely confident; the leader of the group, clearly of Mediterranean descent, had told Vitaliy to call him Fred. It wasn’t so much an artifice as it was a moniker of convenience, almost a private joke between them, and Fred’s smirk during their initial meeting had confirmed it.

  He watched his charter party come aboard and wave at him, and with that done, he signaled to Vanya, his engineer/deckhand, who cast off the lines. Vitaliy started the diesel engines and pulled away from the dock.

  Soon enough he was in the fairway and headed out to sea. The black water didn’t exactly beckon, but it was where he and the boat belonged, and it felt good to be heading back out. All he needed to make the morning perfect was a tranquilizer, and that Vitaliy handled with an American Marlboro Lights 100 cigarette. And then the morning was perfect. The local fishing fleet had already cleared the harbor-such dreadful hours they worked-and the water was clear for easy navigation, with only a slight chopping breaking on the marker buoys.

  As he passed the breakwater, he turned to starboard and headed east.

  Per his instructions, Adnan had kept his team small, himself and three others that he trusted implicitly, just enough bodies to do the heavy lifting but not enough to present a problem when the inevitable conclusion to their mission arrived. He didn’t mind that part of it, actually. He would, after all, suffer the same general fate as his compatriots. A sad necessity, he thought. No, his biggest worry was that they might fail. Failure here would undoubtedly have a resonant effect on the larger operation, whatever that might be, and Adnan would do everything in his power to make sure that didn’t happen.

  His life. Adnan smiled at the notion. Nonbelievers saw all this-trees and water and material possessions-as life. Nor was life defined by what you ate and drank and defiled with your bodily lusts. The time you spend on this earth is but preparation for what comes after, and if you are devout and obedient to the one true God, your reward will be glorious beyond imagining. What was less certain, Adnan realized, was his fate should he succeed here. Would he be given greater missions, or would his silence be more valuable to the jihad? He would prefer the former, if only to continue serving Allah, but if the latter was to be his destiny, then so be it. He would meet either outcome with the same equanimity, confident he’d lived his earthly life as best he could.

  Whatever was to come, he thought, was in the future, and he would let that worry about itself. In the here and now he had a job to do. An important one, though he wasn’t sure how exactly it fit into the larger picture. That was for wiser minds.

  They’d arrived at the fishing village the day before, after parting company with the driver who was to deliver their truck to the docks and into the hands of the charter captain they had hired. The village was largely abandoned, most of its occupants having moved on after the waters had gone barren from years of overfishing. What few villagers remained kept to themselves, scraping by as best they could as autumn moved toward winter. Adnan and his men, bundled in parkas and their faces covered in scarves against the cold, had drawn little attention, and the hostel manager, who was only too surprised and happy to have paying customers, asked them no questions-neither about where they had come from nor about their future travel plans. Even had the manager asked, Adnan couldn’t have answered if he’d wanted to. The future belonged to Allah, whether the rest of the world knew it or not.

  It was dark in Paris, and there was a chill in the air that affected the two Arabs more than the Parisians. But that was an excuse for more wine, which was welcome. And the sidewalk tables had thinned out enough that they could talk more openly. If anyone was observing them, then he was being very careful about it. And you couldn’t be afraid of everything all the time, even in this business.

  “You’re waiting for another communication?” Fa’ad asked.

  Ibrahim nodded. “It’s supposed to be en route. A good courier. Very reliable.”

  “What do you expect?”

  “I’ve learned not to speculate,” Ibrahim said. “I take my directions as they come. The Emir knows what to do, doesn’t he?”

  “So far he has been effective, but sometimes I think he’s an old woman,” Fa’ad groused. “If you plan your operation intelligently, then it will work. We are the Emir’s hands and eyes in the field. He picked us. He should trust us more.”

  “Yes, but he sees things which we do not see. Never forget that,” Ibrahim reminded his guest. “That is why he decides on all the operations.”

  “Yes, he is very wise,” Fa’ad conceded, not entirely meaning it but having to talk that way even so. He had sworn his allegiance to the Emir, and that, really, was that, even though he’d done it five years before, still in his enthusiastic teens. People believed much at that age, and swore loyalty easily. And it took years for that sort of oath to wear off. If ever.

  But that didn’t entirely stop doubts. He’d met the Emir only once, while Ibrahim could claim to know the man. Such was the nature of their work. Neither Ibrahim nor Fa’ad knew where their leader was living. They were familiar with just one end of a lengthy electronic trail. That was a sensible security precaution: American police were probably as efficient as the European sort, and European police were men to be feared. Even so, there was much old woman in the Emir. He didn’t even trust those who had sworn to die in his place. Whom, then, did he trust? Why them and not… him? Fa’ad asked himself. Fundamentally, Fa’ad was too bright to accept things “because I said so,” as every mother in the world said to every five-year-old son. Even more frustratingly, he could not even ask certain questions, because they would imply disloyalty to certain others. And disloyalty in the organization was tantamount to a request for self-immolation. But Fa’ad knew that this actually made sense, both from the Emir’s point of view and for the organization as a whole.

  It wasn’t easy doing Allah’s work, but Fa’ad had known that going in. Or so he told himself. Well, at least in Paris you could look at the passing women, dressed as whores, most of them, showing their bodies off as though advertising their business. It was good, Fa’ad thought, that Ibrahim had chosen to live in this area. At least the scenery was pretty.

  “That’s a pretty one,” Ibrahim said in agreement to the unspoken observation. “She’s a doctor’s wife, and sadly she does not commit adultery, in my experience.”

  “Mind reading.” Fa’ad laughed. “French women are open to advances?”

  “Some are. The hard part is reading their minds. Few men have that ability, even here.” And he had a good laugh. “In that sense, French women are no different from our own. Some things are universal.”

  Fa’ad took a sip of coffee and leaned closer. “Will it work?” he asked, meaning their planned operation.

  “I see no reason why it would not, and the effects will be noteworthy. The one drawback is that it will give us new enemies, but how will we notice the difference? We have no friends among the infidels. For us, now, it’s just a matter of getting the tools in place for our strike.”

  “Inshallah,” Fa’ad replied.

  And both clicked their glasses, just like Frenchmen after an agreement is reached.

  There was nothing like home court advantage, former President Ryan thought. He’d gotten his doctorate in history at Georgetown University, so he knew the campus almost as well as he did his own home. All in all, he’d found the lecture circuit surprisingly agreeable. It was easy duty, being paid an embarrassing amount of money to talk about a subject he knew well: his time in the White House. So far there’d been only a smattering of audience loonies, eighty percent of them conspiracy nuts who’d been quickly shouted down by the other attendees. The other twenty percent were lefties who held the opinion that Edward Kealty had
pulled the country back from an abyss Ryan had created. It was nonsense, of course, but there was no doubting their sincerity, a reminder Ryan took to heart: There was reality, and then there was perception, and rarely the two shall meet. It was a lesson Arnie van Damm had tried-mostly in vain-to pound into Ryan’s head during his presidency, and a lesson Ryan’s stubborn pride did not allow him to swallow easily. Some things were just true. Perception be damned. The fact that a majority of the American electorate seemed to have forgotten this fact by electing Kealty still boggled Ryan’s mind, but then again, he was no objective observer. Should have been Robby in the Oval Office. The trick was to not let this disappointment taint his speech. As much as he might like to, criticizing a sitting President-even a jackass-was bad form.

  The door to the greenroom-in this case a small lounge adjoining McNeir Auditorium-opened, and Andrea Price-O’Day, his principal Secret Service agent, stepped past the agents at the door.

  “Five minutes, sir.”

  “How’s the crowd?” Ryan said.

  “Full house. No torches and pitchforks.”

  Ryan laughed at this. “Always a good sign. How’s my tie?”

  He’d learned early on that Andrea was far handier with a Windsor knot than he was-almost as good as Cathy, but the good doctor had left early for the hospital that morning, so he’d tied the knot himself. A mistake.

  Andrea cocked her head and appraised it. “Not bad, sir.” She made a slight adjustment and gave a curt nod of approval. “I feel my job security slipping away.”

  “Not gonna happen, Andrea.” Price-O’Day had been with the Ryan family a long time, so long, in fact, that most of them rarely remembered she was armed and ready to kill and die for their safety.

  There came a knock on the door, and one of the agents poked his head through the gap. “SHORTSTOP,” he announced, then opened the door to admit Jack Junior.

  “Jack!” the elder Ryan said, walking over.

 

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