“Was he much of a brake, then?”
Zach felt the old shame, the old embarrassments. “He was what was known in somewhat polite society as a horndog. Balled anything in skirts, from lobbyists to state reps. In what little spare time he had, I guess he did his job.”
“After your mom passed away, says here he was placed in a nursing home in Carroll County.”
“Been there for ten years. Alzheimer’s.”
Tanya returned to her papers. “I take it you know a man named Duncan Crowley.”
“Went to school with a Duncan Crowley. Turner Regional High School. He was star pitcher two years in a row for the varsity team. Big man on a small campus. So I knew him a bit, but not well. What’s going on with Duncan?”
Tanya passed over a color photograph of Duncan, standing in front of an Irving gas station. Even with the twenty years that had gone by, Zach recognized the prominent nose, the cocky grin, the bulked up shoulders. In the photo he had on a simple EMS blue outdoor jacket and it looked like he was talking to some biker guy with long hair, beard, and leather jacket. He recognized the other guy as Duncan’s brother Cameron.
“Your buddy Duncan—”
“Not my buddy,” he interrupted. “Just knew him a bit.”
“All right, your classmate Duncan has built himself up a nice little criminal empire up in Washington County.”
Zach couldn’t help it, that this slight woman and her beefy driver—still hovering around the rear of Zach’s truck—had come all the way here to talk about Duncan Crowley. He burst out laughing. “The shit you say, really? What does he do up there? Sell illegal moose pelts?”
“No,” she said sharply, her voice stronger than one would think from someone so small, and, let’s face it, cute. “He’s involved in marijuana cultivation and sales, the smuggling of cigarettes and liquor, loan-sharking, and a variety of other unlawful activities. About everything and anything illegal that goes on up in Washington County, either he’s active in it or gets a cut of the proceeds.”
“If you know all these naughty things about him, then why isn’t he in jail?”
“You look fairly smart, Chief Morrow,” she said. “It’s one thing to know if some skell is doing something outside of the law. It’s another thing to prove it in court. You know the budget situation in Concord and in D.C. Unless it’s a slam dunk, resources aren’t going to be used in something that’s too hard, too difficult to prove. He’s also an expert at being discreet. It’s not like he’s shooting up banks or beheading his competitors.”
Zach folded his hands on the truck’s hood. “All right. So he’s managed to skate on being a bad boy, but now he’s gotten the interest of Homeland Security. What’s he smuggling that has your attention? It can’t be booze or cigarettes. So what is it? Illegals?”
“Not a bad guess,” Tanya said. “Most everyone—including Congress, the editorial board of the New York Times, and about ninety percent of the American public—forget we have a northern border. Sure, all the bad news and coverage and interest is on our failing friends to the south. Which means the northern border is practically wide open for criminal minds, terrorist minds, and everything else in between.”
“Duncan? Terrorism? What the hell do you mean by that?”
She pulled out another photo. “This is what we mean by that. Check this out.”
He looked down, recognized it instantly. A rectangular cargo container, like hundreds of thousands afloat at any time during the day on the Atlantic and Pacific, either coming in or going out. Containers holding everything from car parts to rubber duckies to jet engines. Structures like this were off-loaded from ships, stacked up in ports, then dropped onto tractor-trailer truck frames and driven around the world. This particular container was half-sized, bright yellow, and marked with a shipping company logo in blue and red: mextel lines.
“For some reason, your friend Duncan—I mean, acquaintance
—has a business interest in this particular container,” she said. “It arrived last week at a terminal on the St. Lawrence Seaway. We believe this container is under the control of people either working for Duncan or cooperating with him, and that it’s headed to the New Hampshire border with Quebec. But now it’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared as in kidnapped by aliens, or disappeared as in the surveillance was screwed up?”
“Disappeared as in the Vice President last month said something stupid about our Canadian friends, and to retaliate, they’ve been dragging their snowshoes on helping us out in certain investigative matters,” Tanya said. “Like this container, which we believe is going to be smuggled into northern New Hampshire sometime over the next several days, into the waiting arms of Duncan Crowley.”
“What’s in the container?”
“Which is where you come in, Zach,” she said, ignoring his question. “You have certain skills, you’re from the area, and you even know him. We’d like to have you go back up to your hometown, quietly and gingerly poke around, find out what you can, and pass it on to us.”
“What’s in the container?” he repeated.
“A matter of national interest,” she said.
“That’s not enough.”
“I’m afraid it’s enough for you,” she said.
“My security classification access was pretty high up when I was on active duty, and—”
“That access was taken away upon your dishonorable discharge,” she said.
He said, “Something bad is in that container, isn’t it. A dirty bomb. VX gas. Vials of anthrax. Not immigrant Inuits, looking for day labor.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny, Chief Morrow.”
“But it’s important, then.”
“Vitally.”
“So why is Homeland Security coming to me?”
She shuffled some papers about, kept her head down. “There was something in your paperwork that stuck in my mind, that hadn’t been redacted. That even faced with disciplinary action, you said you were going to do what was right. No matter what. So here you are. And here I am.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I’m also going to do what’s right, no matter what.”
Zach pondered that. “Seems like you’re going off the reservation, there, Miss Gibbs.”
“So far off that I’m not sure I can get back in,” she said, looking up. “But it’s extremely important that this container get intercepted. Officially, unofficially—I don’t care.”
“So why isn’t the full force and fury of the US government coming down to bear on this rogue trailer? Why is Homeland Security pinning its hopes and dreams on me?”
She took a deep breath. “Because with the trailer missing, my higher-ups have decided it’d be easier to say there was nothing there to begin with. The official story is that the original concern of what was in the trailer was wrong. A glitch, an oversight, a mistake by the Canadians when they were high on huffing maple syrup. Nothing to worry about. But I’ve managed to see some of the original intelligence. I don’t think it was a mistake. I think it’s still very much something to worry about.”
“My, you certainly are off the reservation,” Zach said. “I bet if we stay here long enough, we’ll hear the hoofbeats of the cavalry coming after you.”
“Perhaps.”
Zach said, “What’s driving you, then?”
“My professionalism.”
Zach laughed. “No, seriously. What’s driving you? And tell me the real deal, or I walk back into my home there, and you can find somebody else to go up there and play around in Turner.”
She seemed to sigh. “You ever hear of Colby Consulting?”
“No, can’t say that I have.”
She said, “Colby Consulting was a business firm in New York City. My college roommate, Emily Harrison, my best friend in the whole world, worked there. Went to Simmons togethe
r in Boston. We shared secrets, troubles, the state or non-state of our love lives. We could go a month or two without talking, and then one of us would pick up the phone and we’d start up the conversation like only a day had passed. She entered business because of her father, who ran a hedge fund in Manhattan. I took up law enforcement because of my dad, who was a small-town police chief in New Jersey. We used to laugh that our fathers had planned our lives right from conception. You ever have lifelong friends like that, Chief?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Colby Consulting was in the ninety-fourth floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She was at her desk, bright and early, on one September Tuesday morning. Need I say more?”
“More than a decade has gone by,” Zach said. “Bin Laden is dead. We’re pulling out of Afghanistan. Most people have forgotten.”
“Not all of us,” she said, her voice suddenly sharp. “Some of us think the threat is still out there, no matter what other people say or wish for.”
He waited. Looked at the photo of the container. Looked at her. The hulking driver was now near the right rear fender of his pickup truck. “What are you offering?”
Tanya smiled, still looking like a sixteen-year-old pretending to be a grown-up. “Your dishonorable discharge is reversed, to honorable. All back pay and benefits are restored. You’ll also get a generous stipend over the next several days, until the moment we intercept that container through your investigative efforts. Say, one thousand dollars a day.”
“Pretty generous,” he said. “Being as you practically said this little adventure isn’t authorized, how can you make it right for me when the time comes?”
She said, “Let’s just say I have someone on my side.”
“Who is it?”
“Can’t say.”
“Legally, how do you do this? Am I a contractor? Freelance?”
She said, “After the World Trade Center went down and my best friend was murdered, a lot of laws got passed. There’s one that allows those who’ve been dishonorably discharged to be placed in the inactive reserve list, whereupon they can be reactivated in the national interest. Consider yourself reactivated.”
Zach looked at the steady gaze of the attractive woman standing across from him, again having the deep feeling that he always knew something like this was going to happen. Even after his dishonorable discharge, he knew his days of working in the shadows were going to continue, one way or the other.
Like now.
“Just to be clear, then,” he said. “You want me to go back up to Turner, quietly snoop around, meet old friends and acquaintances, and find out when and what Duncan Crowley is doing with this shipping container. In return, I get the stipend of one thousand dollars a day, and if the container is intercepted by you or your associates, I get my back pay, pension, and discharge status changed.”
“Correct,” she said.
“What if I don’t find the shipping container?”
She shrugged. “Keep your stipend as payment from a grateful Homeland Security administrator. Alas, everything else—your dishonorable discharge and all the rest—remains the same if we don’t grab that container.”
Zach again felt that sense of anticipation tingling inside of him. It had been a very long time since he had been excited about doing something.
“Lady, you got yourself a deal,” he said.
In the next few minutes, Tanya went back to her car and returned, passing over a brown business-sized envelope. Zach opened it up and saw the placid face of Benjamin Franklin looking up at him. He flipped through the bills, counted out ten.
“Your first day’s stipend,” she said. “The following daily stipends will be deposited into your checking account.”
Zach folded the envelope, stuck it in the back pocket of his Levi’s.
“I take it you already have my checking account number,” he said.
“Of course,” she said. “Here, take this.”
She passed over a cellphone. It was silver and simple-looking, with the standard numeric keypad and a few other switches. “Encrypted and untraceable,” she explained. “Any calls coming to you will be from me or someone working for me. You press the speakerphone button there, it doesn’t bring up the speakerphone. Instead, the phone dials directly to me or to my voice mail. Either I’ll access the voice mail or someone who works for me will. I’ll want a daily report. If I don’t get one, the deal is off.”
He took the cellphone. “All right,” he said. “Anything else?”
“You know everything else,” she said. “The container, Duncan Crowley, and you have under a week. Oh, and not to tell you how to do your job”—and with that, she offered another shy smile—“go in quiet and subtle. Duncan didn’t get to where he is without being very, very cautious.”
“I’m sure,” he said, putting the exotic cellphone into his coat pocket.
She started putting her papers and photographs back into the manila folder. “Then here’s something to make you more sure. Among the other information we’ve received about Duncan Crowley is this delightful tidbit: Last year, in two separate incidents, emissaries visited Duncan from what passes as organized crime outfits in Boston and Providence. Seems like they were interested in getting a piece of Duncan’s businesses. They went up to the northern woods armed with weapons and bravado, and they never came back. Disappeared. Vanished. So your friend plays for keeps.”
“Not my friend.”
“Whatever,” she said. Manila folder back in her slim hands, she said, “Ask you a question?”
“Go ahead,” Zach said. “Won’t guarantee an answer.”
She said, “So what did you do to get a dishonorable discharge, Chief?”
Flash of memory, of standing shin-deep in a warm and muddy river up the ways in Sierra Leone, a dark-skinned man and his wife and children patiently looking at him from the riverbank, waiting and waiting, while behind them, a village burned and gunfire roared and screams were going on and on and on …
“Instead of following orders, I decided to stand up for the honor of the United States,” he said.
Tanya said, “Bet you learned your lesson, doing a silly thing like that.”
“Learned something, that’s for sure.”
He watched her walk back to her car, seeing a fine butt wiggle underneath her long coat. When the Crown Victoria had maneuvered its way out of his gravel driveway and disappeared, he let his breath out, rubbed his cold hands. Lots of things raced through his mind but as he had learned so long ago in Cape May, New Jersey, during Coast Guard basic training, it was time to focus on the mission.
But first, just a little check of the situation.
He went to the rear of his truck, where Gibbs’s driver had been hanging around. Zach got to his hands and knees, peered up at the underside of the truck. Right there. Little black box stuck next to the gas tank, little trailing antenna sticking out. No doubt the cellphone had a tracking device, but Homeland Security—at least this particular part of it—was being more efficient than he thought possible. Whaddya know. Not a particularly trustworthy group, but that was to be expected.
Zach got up, brushed the dirt off his knees, and went back up into the double-wide. Looked around. This place was a shelter, but definitely wasn’t a home. Some years ago he had bought these fifty acres sight unseen with the romantic notion that he would build a cozy retirement home when his service was completed. But his service was completed ahead of schedule, against his wishes, and instead of
a home, he had this dump. Inside he spent a few minutes packing a change of clothes in one black duffel bag, and some personal items and books in another duffel bag. He didn’t waste much time checking anything else out inside the creaky building. The kitchen was tiny and looked grimy, no matter how much he cleaned it, and the furniture was old and smelly, picked up at the local Goodwill and Sal
vation Army stores. The bathroom had collections of mold that looked like they had been developed at a secret Soviet Union germ warfare outfit before the Gorbachev era. Having spent the past twenty years in the service of his nation, he didn’t have much in the way of possessions. With the two black duffel bags, everything he cared about could be carried out in his hands.
Three more things to do before it was time to shove off.
At the rear of the double-wide was a crumbling wooden deck where he kept a barbecue grill. He opened the squeaking sliding glass door and dragged it in, sliding the door closed afterwards. In the narrow living room, he undid the hose to the propane tank and turned the valve wide open. Propane gas started hissing out.
He went outside, closed the door behind him. Carrying his two duffel bags, he went into the front seat of his Ford pickup truck. Unzipping the nearest duffel bag, he took out a disposable cellphone—not trusting the super-duper cellphone for his own calls—and dialed a memorized number from down Boston way. So it had happened after all, he thought. Now it was time to get to work on something else.
The phone rang and rang, and was picked up, an older man answering. “Yes?” the man asked.
“It’s me, Zach,” he said, saying the practiced words with ease. “Can’t you help me out?”
“I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Please,” Zach said. “You know what happened to me wasn’t fair.”
The older man said, “Please don’t call me again,” and then hung up on him.
Zach sighed. The answer was totally expected but the call had to be made. He waited. Looked at the double-wide, and then called his landline number.
The phone rang until a spark was generated from the phone and the near windows of the double-wide blew out in a blossom of red and orange flame. In a matter of seconds, the place was burning merrily along. Even though he was anticipating the explosion, it still made him sit back hard against his truck seat.
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