Another unbelievably loud roar filled the tiny space. Sam flattened herself against the hardwood. She felt the floor and walls vibrate as the pellets buried themselves in the ancient plaster. She heard a few of them bounce off the floor in front of her.
She felt a sting in her right calf.
She heard the shotgun crunch-crunch again. The man ejected the spent shell and chambered the next round.
Sam didn’t wait. She sprang up, sprinted around the corner, spotting Dan several paces ahead in the gloomy hallway. There were doors on either side. None of them were marked. She was looking for an exit sign, but there was none. Only dark, dirty doors in a dark, dirty hall.
She sprinted down the hallway, a strange sensation with each step, as if her calf wasn’t quite working properly. As if there was a shotgun pellet lodged in her muscle. It was undoubtedly going to hurt like hell, once the adrenaline wore off.
One of the hallway doors flew open. A tall man. Buzz cut. Anger on his face. Bear-like jowls. Arms like tree trunks.
Decision time.
Sam accelerated. She angled closer to the wall. She readied her elbow. She swung it from her hip. Up, out, and around. Throat-height.
The man turned. Perfect timing. His eyes registered alarm, a bit of anger, and a lot of surprise.
Sam’s elbow landed with a crunch, crushing his windpipe, as hard a blow as she’d ever delivered. It was all over but the dying. He fell to the floor and thrashed around, hands clutched around his throat, suffocating, the beginning of a truly horrific death, which Sam didn’t hang around to watch.
She looked up, forward down the hall. She saw Dan’s stocky, muscular frame. He was airborne, flying across the hallway, shoulder lowered, arm curled by his side. His shoulder crashed into a doorway. It exploded inward. Shards of wood flew everywhere. Daylight burst into the gloom.
“This way!” Dan shouted.
Sam charged headlong down the hallway to the shattered door. She heard the sound of breaking glass. She used the doorjamb to help her round the corner into the room.
A child’s room.
With a child in it.
A boy of about nine, staring open-mouthed. Sam held a finger to her lips, urging silence. The child said nothing, did nothing. Just observed, with a kind of reserved anger and resignation. Not the first time he’d been in the crossfire. Wouldn’t be the last, either, Sam guessed.
Dan snatched a pillow from the boy’s bed and used it to clear out the remaining shards of glass from the windowsill. He helped Sam through the broken window, then followed.
They emerged into an alleyway, full of garbage. Tall brick buildings rose on either side of them. It reminded her of Budapest, of the alleyways she’d snuck through, both chasing and evading. She felt small, exposed, frightened. Budapest wasn’t a good experience.
Boston hadn’t been a barrel of laughs, either.
“Where’s the car?” Sam asked.
“This way,” Dan said, taking off at a run. They sprinted out of the alleyway, emerging back onto the sidewalk, instantly out of place, bloody and breathless and brandishing a gun in the middle of civilized society.
They drew stares from passersby. Someone screamed. Dan raised his Homeland badge aloft over his head. “Federal agents! Back away, please!”
The crowd parted like the Red Sea. Dan holstered his weapon, charged forward, then turned west at the corner. Sam followed at a run. She spotted the rental car.
There was somebody in it.
“Going to have to ride in back,” Dan said. “Somebody else already called shotgun.”
“Friend of yours?”
“Nobody’s friend anymore,” Dan said.
Sam looked into the window. A gentleman of Slavic descent. In fact a very familiar gentleman.
32A.
Extremely dead, torso covered in blood from a gaping hole in his neck.
“He tried to carjack me,” Dan said.
“Looks like he did it wrong,” Sam said with a chuckle, climbing into the backseat.
“That’s the other reason I was late to your party. They were right on us, instantly. I don’t even think you were inside the floral shop before this guy jumped in the car.”
“Like they knew we were coming,” Sam said.
Dan nodded gravely. “Exactly.”
The Boston police cordoned off the area around the building full of Russian gangsters. The local FBI office responded as well, taking command of the scene.
There was jurisdictional angst regarding who ought to be in charge. Local cops never liked it when the feds showed up. The Bureau stiffs never liked it when Homeland ran an operation under their noses without telling them. Sam conceded the point. In light of the way things turned out, more help from the local FBI office wouldn’t have killed anyone. Except she didn’t have six months to plan and six more months to tap-dance her way through the Bureau’s infinite layers of middle management. But she kept that to herself, and offered a genuine apology to the local agent-in-charge.
“Are we good here?” the agent asked. “I mean, you aren’t taking over this scene, are you?”
“Not on your life,” Sam said. “I’ll leave the forensics and the tidying up in your capable hands. But I do need my gun and my phone.”
The FBI boss motioned to an underling, spoke a few words, and sent him off.
The agent-in-charge said nothing until the lackey returned with Sam’s Kimber .45 and her cell phone. He handed them to her. “What you did was extremely stupid,” he said.
“Maybe a little stupid,” Sam said with a smile.
He didn’t return the smile. “There’s been an uneasy truce between these gangs and the authorities. You’ve upset that.”
“Truce?” Sam asked with a derisive laugh. “You don’t mean a truce. You mean a payoff. These assholes bribed the local precinct assholes. Birds of a VCVC feather.”
“I would never make such an accusation,” the agent said.
“You just did.”
The agent said nothing.
“Names, fingerprints, background checks on everyone in this building, please,” Sam said.
She watched the FBI man’s jaw tighten.
“An issue of national security,” she said before he could protest. “Non-negotiable. I don’t care if the mayor of Boston is on the take. I don’t give a rat’s ass if the President of the United States is on this gang’s payroll. This place gets a good old-fashioned shakedown.”
The FBI man shook his head. “You have no idea the trouble you’re causing,” he said.
Sam laughed. “That’s not true at all,” she said. “I have an extremely good idea of the trouble I’m causing. But I don’t give a shit.”
32
David Swaringen’s palms were sweating. He felt the acute discomfort associated with excess amygdala activity in the brain, the kind of anxiety that had no productive outlet.
His physical unease was progeny of a vague sense of dread. He paced back and forth outside Clark Barter’s office door.
It was something in the old man’s eyes, something dark, bottomless, unfathomable. It was a look that Swaringen had never seen on Barter’s face before.
It had come when Swaringen asked to talk with Barter in private. Swaringen didn’t know how, but he had the sense that Barter already knew exactly what was on his mind.
Perhaps it was just in his imagination, but Swaringen felt as though Barter had been peering over his shoulder while he was gathering clues about the suspect list and its origin, as if Barter knew exactly what Swaringen knew.
Maybe it was in the way the old man’s look was surlier than usual, more direct, more openly truculent. Not an inner-circle kind of look, the kind Swaringen would have expected after having heard the gut-wrenching details of how Barter’s son had been murdered. That had clearly been a bonding moment between the two men, superior and subordinate, but the bond had evidently been short-lived. There was nothing but frosty distance in Barter’s eyes recently.
The doo
r opened. Barter’s secretary emerged. “Mr. Barter will see you now.”
Swaringen nodded, stomach knotting anew. Time to man up.
He walked into Barter’s office. There was a glass of scotch on Barter’s desk, but Barter didn’t offer one to Swaringen. Instead, the old man sat back in his chair, crossed his hands over his ample lap, and waited, an expectant look on his face.
Swaringen sat, unbidden.
“Make yourself at home,” Barter said, eyes hard, clearly calling Swaringen’s presumption, putting the younger man in his place.
Swaringen swallowed.
Barter shrugged, raised his eyebrows, shook his head. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he finally asked.
Swaringen took a deep breath. “Mr. Barter,” he began. “This job is a huge opportunity, and I’ve learned a great deal.”
Barter snorted. “But?”
“No ‘but.’ I’ve learned a great deal, and I’m enjoying the challenge,” Swaringen said.
The old man eyed him for a long moment. “I’m glad you’re feeling challenged and fulfilled, David.”
Swaringen paused, unsure of himself, unsure of Barter’s reception.
“Say it,” Barter said.
Swaringen took a breath. “I’ve had a concern,” he continued. He studied Barter’s face carefully. It registered no surprise whatsoever. The old man had been expecting this conversation, Swaringen surmised.
“You want to know more than you already know,” Barter said. It was a statement, not a question.
Swaringen nodded. “I have the sense that I could do a much better job for you if I had a little more understanding of where the list came from, what factors we use to determine which people to put on it. You know, a more complete picture of the operation. I feel like I could be more effective as your deputy, and especially as your stand-in when you’re not available, if I had a little more insight into how things fit together.”
“You’ve been asking around.” It sounded like an accusation.
“Like I said,” Swaringen said, “I want to get better at my job, and to do that I need to understand how the operation works.”
“Asking questions is poor form, in a security environment like this one,” Barter said.
Swaringen bristled. “Bad form? What about throwing your deputy to the wolves with almost no information?”
Barter looked amused. “You think I threw you to the wolves?”
“No doubt about it. Which is why I started asking questions. Lives are at stake, and I didn’t want to screw it up.”
Barter pursed his lips, sipped his scotch, nodded his head. “Understandable,” he finally said. “But trust me a little bit here. I’m not new to this game. Some things are highly classified because they reveal sensitive technical capabilities. Other things are highly classified because the information is politically sensitive. Toxic, even, in the wrong hands. In the wrong context. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you, David.”
The two men eyed each other. Barter’s expression was arrogant, patrician, mildly bemused. Menacing.
It pissed Swaringen off.
“These operations are occurring on US soil. Aren’t they.”
Barter’s mouth hardened into a line. “That information is above your clearance.”
“We’ve got thousands of drones flying circles over US cities, watching US citizens.”
“Pure speculation on your part,” Barter said, a bit of menace in his mien. “And way above your clearance.”
“But it didn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to figure it out,” Swaringen said.
“What makes you think that’s the case?” Barter asked, switching tactics, eyebrows raised.
Swaringen played along. “A few things. First was the secrecy. We’re blowing shit up in a dozen countries. Most of it’s on the evening news. Not a secret at all. Which got me to wondering, what the hell might we be doing that could possibly warrant that level of sensitivity?”
Barter took a long pull of scotch from his glass. He eyed Swaringen, a cold, inscrutable expression on his face. No human warmth whatsoever.
“What else?” Barter asked.
“The roads,” Swaringen said.
“Excuse me?”
“Well, the roads, and also the time zones. It’s always daylight on the video when it’s daylight here. It’s always nighttime on the monitors when it’s nighttime here. I thought at first maybe it was all tape-delayed, and being viewed and examined in retrospect. After the fact. But it’s not. We’re exercising real-time command and control of field operations. The key being real-time. So the raids were happening someplace in the Western Hemisphere. From there, it wasn’t tough to figure out. Surely I can’t have been the first guy to notice the world’s best interstate highway system on camera. Better than the autobahn. Sure as hell better than any of the roads in Mexico, Central America, or South America.”
Barter said nothing.
Swaringen eyed the old man. “So that narrowed things down pretty fast,” he said. “Not the kind of thing you can keep secret for long.”
Barter lit a cigarette and poured more scotch. A new expression settled over his face. Tiredness.
Then resolve.
“Clever boy,” he said.
“So it’s true, then.”
Barter shook his head. “Above your clearance level,” he repeated. “Have you spoken to anyone else about this?”
Swaringen shook his head.
“Don’t lie to me, David,” Barter said. “I have spies everywhere in this building. You’ve been asking around about the program.”
Swaringen’s face flushed with anger. “Absolutely I’ve been asking around. Just like I told you. I want to understand the process. I want to be better at my job. I’ve asked relevant, responsible questions. And I’ve kept my suspicions and my speculations to myself. Until right now.”
Barter pondered a moment. Then he pursed his lips and nodded his head quickly, as if he’d reached a decision. “Fair enough.”
He took a drag of his cigarette. “I’ll put you in for extra clearances. The paperwork may take a few days. But you’re absolutely right. If you’re going to act on my behalf when I’m gone, you’ll need to understand exactly what’s going on, and why. You need to have full confidence in what you’re doing, and in what we are doing here.”
The old man sat back in his chair. Still no warmth, Swaringen noticed. Something was still off.
But he decided to take the old man at his word. He felt relieved. He had doubted himself, doubted his sanity and his desire to understand things, wondered why he couldn’t just trust the process and trust the system like everyone else seemed to do. But Barter’s conciliation was validation of his instincts. He had been right to pursue answers to his questions, and he had been even more right to come forward to Barter and air his misgivings.
He breathed deeply, relaxing for the first time in days. “Thank you, Mr. Barter.”
“Think nothing of it,” Barter said. “Now, beat it. I have a lot of bullshit to catch up on. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Swaringen rose and left.
Before the door shut in Swaringen’s wake, Barter picked up the phone and dialed. It was a number he hadn’t used in quite some time. It was a call he never relished making.
But it had to be done.
And above all, Clark Barter was the kind of man who did what had to be done.
33
Nero Jefferson Chiligiris was a new man, in spirit if not in body. He had just shy of ten grand in cash in his possession. It was enough to see to his basic needs. And it was enough to rent a storage facility. He slept there. He couldn’t risk renting a hotel room, or an apartment. Couldn’t take any chances on a background check. As it was, renting the storage unit had been beyond nerve-wracking. The clerk had given him a hairy eyeball when he told her he wanted to pay in cash. But money talks, and everything seemed to work out.
He sat in the gloomy storage unit. Thin bed clothes purchased from a chain sto
re did a poor job of insulating his backside from the cold concrete floor. He recalled the foray to his uncle’s house, the bowel-shaking terror he felt when the police searchlight hovered over him for what seemed like an eternity. His feet still hurt from scaling the fences without his shoes.
But those hardships made him smile now. They represented a milestone achieved. Progress. A challenge overcome.
The first of many on the way to clearing his name.
Nero wasn’t dirty, but the feds thought he was. That had to be on account of Money. Which was a problem. If the feds hadn’t already nabbed Money, they surely had him under surveillance. He wanted to see Money, to confront him, to figure out which cookie jars his former boss had stuck his paws in, to figure out how to disentangle himself from the crazy Arab.
But that would have been an even dumber move than going home to see Penny and the kids. It would be leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
And there was no safe way to find any of Money’s underlings, either. Nero had made it a point not to become entangled with any of them. There were a few faces that he would undoubtedly recognize, if he saw them again, but he would never know where to begin looking for them. Nero had no names, no addresses, no phone numbers. He dealt with and through Money, exclusively.
He shook his head. It had seemed like a smart play, like he was mitigating risk by limiting his exposure to potentially shady characters. But it was obvious in retrospect that he had been a fool. De facto, he had placed all of his faith in Money. And it had evidently come back to bite him in the ass.
Dire circumstances notwithstanding, the successful midnight foray to his uncle’s backyard had suffused Nero with a degree of optimism. He was determined to figure out what Money was involved in. Otherwise, he would simply have to forfeit his life. Sure, he could run somewhere, maybe hide out in a faraway place, but he’d always be looking over his shoulder, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Without Penny, and without the kids.
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