“He looks at me and says, ‘Alhamdulillah.’ That’s hajji for ‘praise be to Allah.’ I’m thinking, what the hell? Do I look like I give a damn about Allah? But I notice he has his hand out toward me. He’s holding something, offering it to me. Without even thinking, I just grabbed it. Reflex, you know?”
Swaringen nodded. Human nature.
“It was a little computer drive. With a keychain attached to it, only there’s no key. Just the chain, looped through the little hole on the end of the thumb drive.”
“Strange,” Swaringen said.
Barter nodded. “Right. I was already getting pretty high up in the pecking order here, so I figured it was one of those intelligence-gathering ploys by some rinky-dink third-world outfit.”
He took another mouthful of whisky and another lungful of smoke.
“Next day,” Barter went on, “I took the thumb drive to the security people, down on the first floor. Told them what had happened. They asked all the usual bullshit questions, like did you know the man who gave this to you, do you still pleasure goats, all the normal stupidity.
“Anyway, they told me to wait outside while they ran a scan on the disk.”
He brought the cigarette to his lips. His hands shook.
“It drags on,” he continued. “I’m standing there in the hallway with my dick in my hands for maybe half an hour. I have work to do, so I’m getting antsy. I called them on their desk phones, but nobody answered.”
Another drink, another drag.
“I’m about to leave when my boss walks in. ‘Heya,’ he says, or some shit. The DDO, the guy who was my boss’s boss at the time, was right there with him. The DDO told me to keep waiting, and said it would only be a couple of minutes. They both walked into the security office.”
Barter swallowed.
Swaringen realized his insides were tensed up, and his hand hurt from gripping the arm of the couch. He forced himself to relax.
“Finally the DDO came out,” Barter said. “His face was ghost white. He looked like he was about to puke. ‘I called the chaplain,’ he told me.”
More scotch, more smoke. “The goddamned chaplain. That’s when I knew.”
Swaringen felt dread and vicarious anguish in his chest. They pressed down on him like a weight.
Barter threw back the rest of his whisky, poured another, gulped half. “It wasn’t a virus or a goddamned spyware thing on this thumb drive,” he said.
His eyes misted and unfocused. His voice tightened.
“It was my son,” he said. “A video. Those fucking animals strapped his head down to a board. Then they sliced his forehead and peeled the skin off his face. It took thirty minutes. Then they pulled off his pants and sliced his balls off.”
Swaringen sat in stunned silence.
Barter took another drink. “He screamed and wailed and fought and suffered for a goddamned hour before they finally sawed his head off.”
Swaringen felt a tightness in his chest. He couldn’t speak. His throat constricted.
Barter looked out the window. “All I could think about was the way he looked as a little boy, crawling around with a big smile on his face, bringing me toys to play with.”
Swaringen fought back tears. And he felt something else, too. White hot anger.
“I had this sense,” Barter went on. “I knew for sure that watching him die like that, seeing the way he suffered, I had just died with my boy. I mean, it totally hollowed me out.”
Swaringen shook his head, but said nothing. He couldn’t fathom what it must have felt like to watch your own flesh and blood suffer such an unimaginable death.
Barter gathered himself. “Anyway, when they’d finally put him out of his misery, this goddamned coward in a mask held my son’s head up in one hand and the Koran in the other,” he said.
Swaringen felt sick, deflated.
Barter raised his glass in a bitter toast. “Alhamdulillah. Praise be to fucking Allah.”
Barter topped off their whiskeys. It was a blistering pace of alcoholic consumption, and it likely accounted for the permanent red patina on the old man’s nose. “My wife blamed me, my job here at NSA. She figured they would have let Brad go if I wasn’t such a high-profile infidel.”
He snorted. “But they would never have let him go. They were always going to take his life to make a statement.”
Swaringen swallowed. The knot was still in his throat.
Barter smiled. “Seven years already, and I still can’t talk about it very well.”
“That’s more than understandable,” Swaringen said. “I can’t even imagine.”
Barter eyed him for a long moment. “I didn’t tell you that so you’d feel sorry for me, or so you’d think I was less of an asshole than I really am.”
Swaringen nodded, tried to smile.
“I told you all of that because I wanted you to know who it is we’re dealing with here. These are not people who respond to peaceful overtures. They are barbarians, and they don’t give a shit about human life. They are up to their eyebrows in bullshit religious dogma, and they fulfill their deeper purpose by killing us and making videos of it. It’s that simple.”
Barter stood. He had an air of finality about him. He motioned toward the door. The meeting was evidently over, and Swaringen was being dismissed.
Swaringen rose and extended his hand. “Mr. Barter,” he said. “I’m completely at a loss. I’m so sorry.”
Barter’s giant paw crushed Swaringen’s hand. “I’m not a healthy man, and I don’t have much time left on this earth,” he said. “But I’m going to spend my remaining days doing my damnedest to make sure no other parent has to go through what my wife and I went through.”
Swaringen nodded. He couldn’t argue with the sentiment.
“That’s what Operation Penumbra is all about,” Barter said, showing Swaringen to the door. “Saving lives. But sometimes you have to pull the trigger to do it.”
He clapped Swaringen on the shoulder. “So next time, son,” Barter said, “don’t hesitate to pull the goddamned trigger.”
Part II
23
Nero Jefferson Chiligiris drove north on I-25. He was almost to Denver. The city had grown so quickly that it now almost connected to the town of Monument, halfway to Colorado Springs. The highway could be beset by a traffic jam at any given time on any given day along the front range. It was a sign of the times. There were nearly seven billion humans, and Nero figured that at least half of them had moved to Denver from California.
At least traffic was moving. It helped his frazzled nerves. Being alone on the road gave a man’s mind plenty of time to conjure up all sorts of dire scenarios. Nero’s waking nightmares involved recapture and reentry into whatever kind of messed-up system could lock him up and throw away the key without so much as a court hearing.
Nero had a safe deposit box in Denver full of cash. He wasn’t stock market savvy — no matter how many fancy equations you used, playing stocks was ultimately little more than soothsaying, Nero thought, and he loved his money too much to watch it go up in smoke — but he wasn’t a spendthrift. He saved his money, and even invested some of it in a little rental property. And he kept a big pile of it stored away for a rainy day.
But the safe deposit box required a key. The United States Department of Homeland Security currently possessed that key, along with the key to his grunge-era Pontiac Grand Am, which, Nero presumed, Homeland also possessed at the moment.
No problem. Nero would just present his identification to the clerk, and ask for a new key.
Except that his identification was also in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security. Nero didn’t have so much as a library card on him.
He had no money. Other than the clothes on his back and the motorcycle he had liberated from the farm-cum-crack house outside of Pueblo, just a leisurely morning’s stroll from the site of the fortuitous prison van crash that had freed him, Nero had nothing to his name.
Less than not
hing, actually. Because he was a wanted man. In the Great Ledger of Life, Nero Chiligiris’s name most definitely had something written next to it: detain on sight.
He couldn’t exactly lay low at home for a while. He was beyond certain that the feds would have his house and family under surveillance. If they had spent the resources to send three helicopters full of storm troopers to collect him from a dusty road seventeen miles from nowhere, he was sure they could afford to pay at least one flatfoot to keep an eye on his front door.
In fact, Nero reflected, there was probably a flatfoot watching the home of every person Nero had ever met. The department’s name said it all: homeland security. It was a narrow mandate with astronomically large latitude for interpretation. An infinite number of threats existed, real and imagined, which brought an equally large number of pork-roll projects and programs. Money was therefore no object. Nero surmised there was no shortage of resources to keep tabs on him, and anyone he’d ever known.
Which brought him to that asshole Money. If Uncle Sam thought that Nero was a terrorist of some sort, it was undoubtedly due to the cranky Arab. Any effort to figure out why the feds wanted Nero for terrorism had to start and end with Money. There was no way around it. Nero was squeaky clean otherwise. His only indulgence was cable television. He didn’t even surf internet porn, because it made Penny feel insecure.
So Money was going to get a visit, Nero decided.
Unless Money had already gotten a visit, Nero suddenly thought. From guys with badges.
It brought up an interesting question, one that Nero hadn’t fully considered. What if Money was already in custody?
What if Money had been on the receiving end of a coercive conversation, and some Special Agent America guy had squeezed him for names? Nero would be easy to implicate, if even one of the hundreds of duffel bags Nero had exchanged over the past few years had contained anything remotely shady.
Maybe that was it. Maybe Money had blown the whistle. Maybe the arrogant little prick was already in custody, had already struck a deal, and was singing like a bird to get his sentence reduced.
It made no difference that Nero had taken such great pains to keep himself oblivious of the true nature of Money’s transactions. Nero realized now, with the benefit of painful hindsight, that proving his ignorance would be a very difficult thing. As he’d realized earlier, proving a negative was impossible. And trying to prove his ignorance in front of a jury — provided the feds even bothered with any due process at all — would sound a lot like quibbling.
It was, in fact, pretty damn unbelievable. Nero could imagine the prosecutor’s question: “You mean you worked for this guy for years, and you never bothered to ask what was in the bags you were delivering?” Nero would not have had a convincing answer, he was sure.
He would only have had the truth, which was that he truly was ignorant of Money’s dealings. Because Nero was a man with a record, and he wanted no part of anything that could land him back in prison.
All of which might have suggested a little more due diligence on Nero’s part, he thought with a grimace.
But it wasn’t like he went into the whole thing completely blind. Sure, he didn’t know the specifics, but he had been around enough criminals in his life to recognize one when he saw one. Money fit the description. But Money also paid pretty damn well, and Nero had fiscal needs, just like the next guy. Mouths to feed, and a life to rebuild.
And as a man with a ten-year prison sentence on his record, he wasn’t exactly a hot hiring prospect for the six-figure jobs out there in the world. Money’s money was good money, and Nero had used it to build a good life for his family. That was all the motivation Nero had needed to stay as ignorant as his conscience permitted.
Which accounted for why Nero was, at the moment, completely screwed.
Nero moved over to let a car pass him on the highway. Traffic was heavy but fast, a good thing. He scanned above the horizon, paranoid about another helicopter incident. He had no idea what the feds had on him, why they had used so much force to apprehend him, but if they had done it once, there was nothing to stop them from doing it again. Nero needed to get out of the open.
He needed money, clothes, transportation, and shelter.
And he also needed to find Penny, to talk to her somehow, to tell her he hadn’t done anything, to tell her he was innocent, to tell her that he loved her and the kids, and that he wanted nothing more than to come home and continue their life together.
Nero was sure they were all things that Penny would doubt in the aftermath of his sudden and total disappearance. He wanted desperately to talk to her, to tell her what had really happened, to set her mind at ease about him.
Nero felt this need, the need to reconnect with his family, even more acutely than he felt the need to stay out of the grip of the feds. Nero loved the life they had built together. It wasn’t mansions and yachts, but their house was full of laughs and contentment. He felt a physical ache when he thought of them, at home without him, wondering what had happened to him, wondering whether he had abandoned them.
But Nero was no fool. He knew that most criminals were caught trying to contact friends and family members. There was no smart way to approach Penny or the kids without giving himself away, Nero feared.
Which left him completely, crushingly alone.
He shook his head. There was nothing he could do about it at the moment. Other matters were more pressing. Nero was starving. He couldn’t remember the last meal he had eaten. He was also parched. The long, dusty drive north from Pueblo had taken its toll.
Nero had no real idea where to begin putting his life back together. He believed he now understood what it might be like to be an immigrant, alone and afraid in a foreign country, particularly an unwelcoming country.
Like America.
He thought about all the immigration debates in the news over the years. The white man wanted his floors mopped and his tomatoes picked, and he wanted it done cheaply, but he didn’t want to budge an inch on border controls. Messed up, Nero thought. But then again, Nero’s skin was brown. Politics smelled a lot more like exploitation on the brown end of the spectrum, he mused.
Nero shook his head, focusing his thoughts. There had to be someplace newly-arrived immigrants went to get on their feet. Like a shelter or soup kitchen or something. Those were generally no-questions-asked kinds of places, at least from what Nero had heard. He’d never visited a shelter himself, and he didn’t know whether the camera-happy surveillance apparatus had extended its reach to homeless shelters and hostels. He decided that given the kind of taxpayer money in play, it probably did.
He discarded the shelter idea.
Where could he turn?
He had a dozen close friends, and maybe three dozen in his inner circle. But Nero was certain all of them would be under electronic surveillance, and most of them would be subject to physical surveillance as well.
At least, that’s what he imagined would be the case. Nero was not prone to delusions of grandeur, and he would never have figured himself to be worth a second thought, from a national security perspective. But three assault helicopters and a bevy of close-cropped Homeland agents had changed his mind about the situation. In light of those factors, Nero had to assume that he was under constant surveillance, and that the resources deployed to recapture him were indeed unlimited.
Which left him back at square one.
Nearly square one, he corrected himself.
There was something he could do.
He just hadn’t given the idea any serious air time before. Because it was a terrifically stupid idea. Foolhardy. Desperate.
Suicidal, maybe.
But so was every other crazy notion he’d come up with so far.
So he decided it had to be done.
24
Sam and Brock arrived exhausted in DC. They deplaned and stopped at a coffee shop in the airport concourse. Sam ordered a latte, and Brock got the house decaf. They wanted nothing more tha
n to get home and get cleaned up, but there was a more pressing matter.
They sat at a table with a view of passersby. They watched. They had taken great pains to leave Europe unnoticed, but there was no guarantee they had been successful. They needed to know whether they were still being followed.
They had traveled under aliases, but Homeland’s computer system had been compromised on numerous occasions, and there was no guarantee the opposition didn’t have exquisite knowledge of their travel plans.
International flights being what they were, neither Sam nor Brock slept much on the trip across the pond from London. They sat bleary-eyed across from each other at a small table, but their eyes scoured the concourse, looking for people with that operational look.
Brock pointed out several candidates, people who he thought were paying undue attention. Sam checked them all out, and while she hadn’t ruled any of them out completely, she didn’t get a strong suspicion. After half an hour, they collected their belongings and made their way to the parking lot.
From there, the first stop was the hospital. Sam wanted to have a conversation with an English-speaking doctor about the hole in her side.
Sam remembered the hospital vividly. It was the scene of a vicious attack by a Venezuelan criminal known as El Jerga. El Jerga shot up the wing where Sam had convalesced. In fact, El Jerga had put her in the hospital in the first place. He had actually killed her, albeit briefly. Sam had ultimately returned the favor. So the world had one fewer hideous bastard in its ranks.
One or two of the nurses recognized Sam. “You should consider a new occupation,” one of them told her.
“Maybe she’ll listen to you,” Brock said with a pointed look at Sam. “I keep telling her the same thing, but so far without effect.”
“Maybe I’ll go to nursing school,” Sam said.
“I like that idea,” Brock said. “You have to promise to wear the skimpy outfit.”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 70