Clawback

by Mike Cooper

  His actions were effectively insane, but the fuck had style.

  “I’m a tax-planning consultant,” I said.

  “You mentioned that.”

  “But I’ve taken on a few other assignments. Over time. In certain specialized areas of expertise.”

  “I gathered.” Deadpan.

  Sometimes you have to trust people. I spend too much time with sociopaths as it is—most high-ranking Wall Streeters are awash in psychopathology, unsurprisingly. You can’t lie all the time and make any kind of normal human connections. A relationship that has any value requires honesty, which may be why I don’t have many.

  I didn’t want Clara to slip away.

  “You could think of me as a forensic accountant,” I said. “Except written for TV—more guns, fewer spreadsheets.”

  “I got some interview tape from those doormen who saw you take on the assassin. They made it sound like Jason Bourne, watch out.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t anything.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “You saved my life, too—and three against one.”

  Pause.

  “I thought you were unconscious during that.”

  “I figured it out.”

  “Well, I—” Wait a second. No lying. “No. You’re right.”

  “Yes?”

  I thought about the attack on her, in the park. “The thing is, they could have killed me then, easy. Once he pulled out the pistol, standing over you, I was dead—except he didn’t feel like it, I guess.”

  “He had a gun?” She sounded surprised.

  “Yeah. Probably the same one he was waving at me on the helicopter.”

  “What? It was the same man?”

  Oh, right. I forgot—nobody but me knew that. I sighed. “Let me tell it again,” I said. “I’ll try not to leave out anything this time.”

  And I did. Clara listened, and the few questions she asked were keen and to the point.

  When I was done, she picked up the takeout container and the chopsticks and carried them to the bathroom’s wastebasket. I was still sitting in bed, against the headboard, blanket pulled up. The river’s chill was slow to dissipate.

  Clara came back and sat on the edge of the bed. She’d brought my fleece jacket, the one I’d tossed her before taking off after the mad sniper. I put it on. The room was small, with no additional chairs.

  “You’re a hero,” she said.

  “Ah, fuck.”

  “No. Even the detective interviewing me thought that, though he didn’t say it. I could tell.”

  This was too depressing to think about. The TV vans were probably all outside my door now.

  That’s the problem with being a hero—you lose the rest of your life.

  “I’ll never be able to work again,” I said. “Assuming I don’t go to jail.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “No. Once the cops start digging around, they’re going to find out far too much about me. Then some department blabbermouth will call the Post, and I’ll have to hire on with some merc company and ship out to Yemen.”

  She put both hands on the mattress and leaned forward, facing me. “I didn’t tell them your name,” she said.

  My turn to stare.

  “Or where you lived. Or anything.”

  “But, I thought you said—”

  “I told the detective I’d run into you on another story, just a face in the crowd. I didn’t even remember you when you came up to me outside Faust’s building—but I try not to alienate potential sources, so I was polite. It was just chitchat, mostly with Darryl. Then the shooting started, and you ran off, and that’s all I could tell him.”

  “That wasn’t smart. You lied to a cop.”

  She lifted her hands to shrug, and sat back. “I told him I needed to go through my notes, see what I could find that might help with details about you. I have to call him back later.”

  “Uh.” The situation did give her total blackmail control over me, but we could worry about that later. “Why? Why would you do that?”

  “Because you saved my life,” she said. “Don’t you listen?”

  “Not enough, I guess.” I wiped my hands and face and chest, and blanket and pillow, too—somehow the ramen had dribbled everywhere—and tossed the wadded napkins vaguely toward the bathroom. “Not enough.”

  “Work on that.”

  Conversation faltered.

  I noticed smudges of dirt on Clara’s cheekbone. Her hair was no longer neat, strands falling across her forehead and over one ear. Her collar had folded under.

  The kiss was sudden and hard, both of us going in simultaneously. Her arms around my back, pulling me forward, while I caught one hand behind her and the other swept aside the blanket. A groan, mine—a moan, hers. Our faces switched sides, then again. Pain from my bruised chest was distant and unimportant. We started to fall onto the mattress, conveniently placed beneath us.

  Clara pushed back.

  “Not now,” she said.

  We were both breathing hard.

  “Not now?”

  “It’s not the right time.”

  “Yes it is!”

  “No it’s not.”

  “But—” Wit seemed to have deserted me.

  “I don’t…I’ve rushed into a few too many things. You know?”

  I was thirty-five years old, single, formerly in the military and now nine years resident in Manhattan. Of course I knew what she was talking about.

  “No,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.” She stood up from the bed, sort of pulling herself back together.

  “Don’t know what?”

  “How big a mistake you are,” she said.

  And five seconds later she was gone, the door closing gently behind her.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The night proceeded through degrees of ache and discomfort. Painkillers seemed like a bad idea—even the informal kind, the sort that comes in a flat glass bottle—since I was worried about being found. I needed to be sharp if the police showed up. Or the press. Or Ganderson.

  Or my death-from-the-sky mad sniper.

  My chest sure was sore, and movement was stiff and slow, but I had to get out. Hardly any bruising on my face, fortunately, so no second glances. I rode the subway uptown, the Sunday-morning passengers mostly quiet, all of us keeping to ourselves. Some kids on the platform were horsing around, a hundred feet away. A middle-aged couple shared a Times, dumping unwanted sections onto the train’s floor as it rattled from one local stop to the next. Everyone else sat deep in their cellphone shells.

  The garage booth was empty, but when I hammered on the utility closet’s door—metal and solidly locked—Goldfinger opened up. He was dressed and awake, holding a radio in one hand. Sports talk, the usual posturing and jabbering.

  “Hey, funny you showing up,” he said. “I was gonna call.”

  “Good.” I pushed in, pulled the door shut. The room smelled of food going bad and open liquor, though I couldn’t see any. “What’s up?”

  “I got a match.”

  “A match?”

  “Yeah. I’m the CSI king, motherfucker. Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

  My ribcage hurt. My head hurt. I took the radio and dialed it down to inaudible. “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing escapes the giant eyeball.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Fuck you. Want the name or not?”

  “What name?”

  “Your friend with the baton, and I don’t mean the fucking drum major, you know?”

  “Baton—hey, that was fast.”

  “No shit.” Goldfinger coughed. “Truth is, it wasn’t that hard. Clean print, and the guy was in the service, so his records are in good order. IAFIS kicked it out straightaway.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You picked a hardcase to fuck with, I’ll tell you that. His 201 was mostly redacted, and you know what that means—black fucking ops.”

&nbs
p; “Name?”

  “And he spent ten years in. Hey, what’s MOS stand for again?”

  “Military Occupational Specialty. His job in the army. Come on, Gol—I mean, Ernie. Tell me what you know.”

  “What’s an 18B?”

  I paused. There are hundreds of MOS codes, but I happened to know that one: Special Forces Weapons Sergeant.

  The guy who’s so good with every kind of firearm, he teaches and maintains them for his teammates.

  “I’m dying here, Ernie. Give me the name, already.”

  “Joe Saxon. Ring any bells?”

  None, but I hadn’t recognized him in person, so no surprise.

  “I’ll email you the sheets,” Ernie said. “No printer here. The last current address is Kentucky.”

  “Is it an APO box?”

  “Yeah, at Fort Campbell. Does that mean anything?”

  “No, not much.” I gave him one of my disposable email addresses, and he sent it while I watched.

  “Thanks, Ernie. That was nice work.”

  “Give me a challenge next time.”

  I didn’t hang around long. “I came over to get my car,” I said on the way out. “Anybody been by asking about it? Or me?”

  “No.” He looked at me, sharp. “Why? Should I be expecting something?”

  I didn’t figure the police to have backtracked me this far. My arrangement with Goldfinger was unofficial and cash-based. The car itself was registered to a corporation that had no existence outside a PO box in White Plains.

  “If authority shows up,” I said, “you don’t have to cover for me. Tell them what they want to know.”

  Which he’d do anyway, of course. Goldfinger was no dummy. But this way he’d feel better about it.

  “What are you involved in?”

  “Righting wrongs. Making the world a better place. What I’m always doing.”

  He laughed with that deep rasp you get from a lifetime of abusing your metabolism. “You and me,” he said. “You and me both.”

  I drove back downtown—it was downright pleasant on the avenues, light traffic, no delays. Too bad it can’t be Sunday morning all week. Even parking wasn’t too bad. It only took about five minutes to find an on-street spot a few blocks from the hotel, and I could leave it there until Wednesday, the next street-cleaning day.

  Back in the room with takeout coffee and muffins, I crawled back into bed, like a wounded animal going to ground. I really had taken a beating the day before, and time was the only cure. Staring at the wall, I thought about what Goldfinger had dug up.

  Fort Campbell was, among other things, the headquarters for the 160th SOAR—the Night Stalkers. The Army’s special forces aviation unit.

  No wonder Saxon could steal a helicopter like he was hot-wiring a Chevy.

  Which suggested another point. If Saxon had a decade of SOF experience, he’d be drawing six figures easy on the private market. Even more if he was hiring out for gray-area assignments, like terrorizing young women bloggers.

  I was starting to see big money in the mist. Johnny’s theory seemed to be gaining ground—anarchists and guerrilla-theater impresarios generally don’t have bankrolls like that. Ganderson’s nemesis might be just one more capitalist enterprise.

  The room’s single window had only a torn shade, but the glass was dirty enough to serve. The dim airshaft, eight stories deep, meant a permanent, murky twilight.

  One of the phones I was carrying around had more than basic functionality—not quite a smartphone, but I could do basic web surfing. The proprietary browser was awful, and the rates extortionate, but that didn’t matter. I logged on and picked up Ernie’s email. It was buried amid twenty Viagra pitches. How do the spammers do that?—the address had been active for only a week, and I’d never used it for anything.

  Good thing building botnets pays more than, say, designing microprocessors, or those Russian hackers would eat America’s high-tech lunch.

  Anyway, Ernie was right, Saxon’s 201 was as heavily redacted as every other Bush-era intelligence document. One solid block of black overprint. But the basics were there: dates of service, unit information for Saxon’s first few years and a discharge summary. It looked like a typical climb up the spec-ops ranks: infantryman, airborne certification, a tour with the Rangers, specialized aviation training—and then nothing. Blankness, all the way to the end, followed by the separation date and a list of badges and combat decorations.

  Three separate Purple Hearts. Expert Marksmanship Badge, with six component bars. Two Silver Stars. Blah, blah.

  And a Distinguished Service Cross.

  The motherfucker was a hero.

  I could have gone after him on the internet. As Clara proved by demolishing my own careful walls, it’s really hard not to scatter electronic bread crumbs—not if you live a halfway normal life. But she was the researcher par excellence, not me. I didn’t have the patience for all that time online, especially on a three-inch screen

  Instead, I started calling around.

  Even though the SOF numbers have skyrocketed in the last decade—even Gates loved us—we’re still a small community. Especially the guys who’ve actually been outside the wire. Small-unit activity in hostile territory creates bonds stronger than anything on earth. We don’t exactly have conventions, but we keep up.

  Among other reasons, you never know when you might need a favor.

  “Joe Saxon? That prick? If you find him, first thing—before anything else—shoot his balls off.”

  That was call number six, when I started to close in.

  “Had a problem with the guy, did you?”

  “Only when he breathed, moved or opened his mouth.” This was serious criticism, coming from a sergeant who’d spent months with Saxon in Afghanistan. “Political as all hell, and useless with the hajis. He’d have done ISAF twice as much good working directly for the Taliban.” The man paused. “Good shooter, though.”

  “Sniper?”

  “Some. He didn’t really have the patience for that. But in close-quarter combat…Saxon’s a total raving asshole, but there’s no one I’d rather go through a breached wall with.”

  “Because he—”

  “Completely cool under fire. In the worst firefights—you know, three-sixty incoming, nothing visible, just mud and rubble and your guys dying around you—Saxon never lost it. He’d just keep on doing his job, putting every round where it counted.”

  “So why didn’t you love him?”

  “He cheated, lied, stole, gobbled go pills, backstabbed us with headquarters and sucked the major’s dick.”

  “Literally?”

  The sergeant laughed. “All but that last one, and he might as well have. The major wrote him up for about fifteen citations.”

  “I saw the medal count.”

  “Yeah.” He hesitated. “I’ll say this, though—Saxon deserved at least half of them. Absolutely.”

  More than one call went like that. Saxon seemed to have had a genius for alienating his comrades. Which bolstered his reputation for exceptional competence—you have to be twice as good to survive if even your friends hate you.

  No one had kept up with Saxon after he left the service. Unsurprising, but not helpful to my search—until the very last call, going on evening, when I talked with a lifer who happened to have been injured, and on desk duty, the day Saxon filed his discharge papers.

  “Yeah, I remember,” the man said. I’d reached him in Hawaii, at Fort Shafter, where it was still the middle of the day. “Saxon couldn’t wait to leave.”

  “Where was he going?”

  “Private security, of course. No one else would be crazy enough to hire him.”

  “DynCorp, Blackwater, like that?”

  “No. Stateside. Joe boasted how he was making a perfect soft landing—no more shooting it out with the hajis for him.”

  “Kind of ironic, if that’s all he was good at.”

  “You’re telling me. I was just glad he was gone.”

&nbs
p; “So what was the company, do you remember?”

  “Sure,” the man said. “A-Team Tactical Dynamics.”

  I had to laugh. “They weren’t bidding for DOD contracts, were they?” Only civilians would take a name like that with a straight face.

  “State Department, maybe.”

  After I hung up, I checked online. A-Team’s website was defunct, but enough PR Wire puff clips, press releases and brief news stories in the trade press were out there to assemble a picture. A-Team had lasted five years, then faded away. Saxon’s name wasn’t mentioned anywhere, which wasn’t a surprise—he wouldn’t want the publicity, and A-Team would minimize the sort of information that could make things easier for the lawyers they’d inevitably attract.

  Before I shut down, I remembered how easily Clara had found me. A quick search for “Joe Saxon” turned up ten thousand hits—the name was too generic.

  But “Joe Saxon A-Team” immediately struck pay dirt: “…three years with A-Team Tactical Dynamics, where he specialized in executive protection and counterterrorist operational consulting. Joe Saxon served ten years in the U.S. Army Special Forces, earning commendations including a Distinguished Service Cross for actions in combat zones around the world. As Blacktail Capital’s new Director of Security, Saxon will be responsible…”

  Aha.

  And what was Blacktail Capital? Their website was pleasantly designed but minimal, the interesting content probably all behind the client login. “We achieve consistently market-positive returns,” read the mission statement, “through advanced technological implementation of complex and proprietary mathematical structures.”

  A hedge fund, that is, almost certainly focused on high-frequency, high-velocity trading—the kind where powerful computers, programmed by the best MIT and Stanford PhDs available, might buy and sell thousands of instruments every second. Sure, Blacktail and similar operations had almost crashed the market multiple times. “Complex mathematical structures” also meant uncontrolled volatility and liquidity flight beyond the capacity of human brains to comprehend, still less to keep up with. But so what? They practically minted money—for themselves.