Or someone else, maybe? FBI? Metro PD? The TV news gawkers?
Sam had no idea. But she didn’t like the development. Lots of ways for the situation to turn plaid.
She shifted her focus from his chest to his face. What she saw there surprised her.
Uncertainty.
Fear.
Then she understood.
Barter didn’t know whose choppers were hovering over his house, either.
But he knew whose helicopters they weren’t.
They weren’t his.
She watched his eyes. Turmoil, weight, and sadness registered, but only for a moment. Then clarity and focus returned.
And peace.
“May you have the will to do what needs doing, Ms. Jameson,” he said.
Which were his last words.
He raised the old revolver to his temple and squeezed the trigger.
Epilogue
In the end, Nero Jefferson Chiligiris remained a guest of the Department of Homeland Security for seventeen weeks.
It wasn’t the dead drops that got him captured.
It was the drones. The little ones, bird-sized, powered by a little hobby motor. Made by the thousands in a factory in Ohio. Deployed everywhere the Stars and Stripes waved, and many places it didn’t.
He wasn’t allowed a telephone call until the middle of the third month. By then, Penny wasn’t interested in accepting telephone calls from Nero. Nero wasn’t even sure whether Penny still lived at their address. He’d had no contact with her since that fateful day near the Kansas border.
His next telephone call had been to a lawyer. Not one he knew, because Nero wasn’t the kind of guy who knew any lawyers. He picked one out of the phone book.
Nero didn’t exactly have orthodox legal needs. There wasn’t much precedent for fighting terrorism charges in New America, where you’re guilty because someone thought you might be, and case closed, so Nero’s guy was grossly under-qualified. But together, Nero and his overmatched lawyer put up a good fight. They filed motions, petitioned courts, wrote letters, contacted news agencies.
Nero wasn’t squeaky clean, with jail time in his background and a long list of questionable associates, and that made it much more difficult to garner sympathy. But he and his lawyer hammered away at the civil rights issues, which were many and egregious. The lawyer gave an earful to anyone and everyone who would listen, and many who wouldn’t. A US citizen was detained at gunpoint, he would howl in a nasal voice. Charged with no crimes, presented with no evidence against him, afforded no opportunity to defend himself, given no chance to secure legal counsel, and thrown in jail without recourse for a permanently damaging length of time.
It was the kind of thing that happened in third-world dictatorships, in old Iron Curtain countries, in Vladimir Putin’s New Soviet Union, the lawyer said. It wasn’t the kind of thing that was supposed to happen in America. You weren’t supposed to have your life ruined by the feds without a damn good reason.
The Department of Homeland Security, of course, believed they had a damn good reason. They believed Nero’s association with the man known on the street as Money was evidence enough that Nero was a terrorist.
It didn’t come out until later that Money was not, in fact, a terrorist. Money was a thief. He stole cell phones. Rather, he worked in the upper-middle layer of an organization full of petty thieves who stole cell phones. Money was the wholesaler. The guy near the top, moving volume.
As such, Money had particular needs, such as a need for firearms without serial numbers or paper trails, storage for large quantities of cash, and a plausible, legal fence to launder that cash.
That, evidently, was where Nero had come in. Nero’s courier duties had facilitated the logistical operations necessary for Money’s enterprise.
So how had Money ended up on the terror watch list? It was an answer that Nero never obtained. But it wasn’t too difficult to imagine what kind of needs a terror cell might have. Clandestine communication was chief among them. The feds had grown wise to the use of internet chat rooms, and there wasn’t a telecommunications company on earth that wasn’t in bed with the US security apparatus, either by choice or by force, so it was difficult for Ahmed the Asshole to make calls on his personal cell phone to his asshole friends to iron out the details of a terror attack.
So maybe one of Money’s clients had harbored Islamist sympathies. Maybe Money had inadvertently sold stolen cell phones to a terrorist. Maybe more than once. Occupational hazard. Doing business on the shady side of the line attracted shady people. Not all of them were mere petty criminals. Odds were good that at least a few of them were ideologues. Zealots. Religious criminals.
None of it mattered in the end, other than as an idle curiosity. Because Nero’s life, such as it was, had been thoroughly devastated.
It wasn’t Nero’s lawyer who had ultimately secured his freedom. It was a high-profile scandal that had done the trick. One federal agency had evidently started a shootout with another federal agency. The left hand had gone to war with the right hand. One police-state juggernaut started duking it out with a rival bureaucracy. It made headlines the world over.
Heads were evidently rolling. The President of the United States claimed ignorance, then claimed a national security prerogative. Flip-flopper, the press wailed.
The American Civil Liberties Union crawled so far up the federal government’s backside that the security agencies had no choice but to demonstrate some degree of reform.
Not because it was the right thing to do. Merely because it was what had to be done for those in power to remain in power. Because the big companies with deep pockets who owned the politicians could not afford to support liberty-trashing fascist warmongers, which was one of the catchier euphemisms to find its way into print. Corporations threatened to pull their campaign donations. And without corporate cash, the Washington illuminati had nothing. They couldn’t buy votes by themselves. Too damn expensive.
The whole thing went down remarkably quickly, particularly by Washington standards. Senators began losing donations, which meant that telephones lit up like Christmas trees at Homeland, NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, and any other federal agency that even remotely smelled like a surveillance apparatus.
The heads of all of those agencies served at the pleasure of the President of the United States. And the President had become increasingly displeased. A flurry of mea culpas and resignations ensued.
The press caught on to stories like Nero’s, of lives shattered without the benefit of due process. Even more egregious episodes eventually came to light. American paramilitary teams had assaulted, shot, and killed dozens of American citizens. Judge, jury, and executioner. Not the kind of thing the public was willing to tolerate from the nation’s powerful, secretive intelligence giants.
One man had come to symbolize the degree to which America had become a rogue state. That man’s name was Clark Barter.
He had been an enthusiastic participant, a zealous ringleader, some said. He was guilty as hell, they claimed. And he was also dead, which made him a perfect scapegoat. Duplicitous politicians joined the Barter-bashing, desperate to distance themselves from the crisis. His suicide was evidence of his guilt, they said, though deep down they thanked Barter for making the ultimate sacrifice for his nation. It allowed them to preserve the lie just a little longer. Agitators and watchdogs gradually shifted their howls from “rogue nation” to “rogue agency” to “rogue actor.”
And life went on.
But not completely as before. Operation Penumbra ceased to exist.
The blatant self-interest at play in the aftermath of the scandal worked in Nero’s favor. Cell doors sprung wide open in federal detention facilities all across the globe. Nero’s cell door was one of them.
But when Nero finally stepped back into daylight, it was to face a painfully uncertain future.
He arranged transportation to the home he and Penny had shared for years with their kids.
There were no
cars parked in the drive. Nobody answered the door. There was no furniture in the house.
Only silence greeted him.
The helicopters over Clark Barter’s house had indeed belonged to Homeland. They were the cavalry, and they arrived just in time to save the day, thanks once again to Dan Gable’s brains and balls. They rounded up the sparse NSA reinforcements on Barter’s front lawn.
When she emerged from Barter’s house, shaken and bloody, Sam gave Dan the grateful hug he richly deserved.
Homeland also rounded up the rest of Barter’s men, who were nabbed as they waited outside Mark Severn’s house. Severn wasn’t home. He was with Dan. But the NSA goons didn’t know that, because Sam’s ruse had worked. And it had saved her life.
The dust eventually settled, but not in a completely satisfying way. In keeping with the grand American tradition of punishing the lowest-ranking asshole available, Clark Barter’s foot soldiers, all military members detailed for special duty, were placed on trial. Many were convicted. Several became destined to die in prison.
Carl Ivan Edgar Frankel, semi-retired CIA assassin, remained a free man. No evidence.
Sam faced mountains of paperwork, tedious after-action interviews, and stressful administrative reviews at the hands of hindsight heroes who had long ago gone soft in the middle. But she endured it all with uncharacteristic good humor, because it felt good to be alive, and it felt good to be home with Brock. She cleared everything off her plate at work, and showed up only when required. She and Brock spent the extra time joined at the pelvis.
They also booked vacation time and airline tickets. To the Caribbean. Europe could wait, maybe until a few of the nightmares about men with Slavic cheekbones lost their intensity.
The real, ugly, nearly-unbearable truth about Operation Penumbra came out over time. Sam was appalled at the details, as was the rest of the human population.
She watched in cynical amusement as the administration’s movers and shakers shimmied and shuffled away from the radioactive calamity NSA had wrought.
There was even talk of abolishing the NSA altogether. Sam wasn’t sure it was such a bad idea, all things considered.
But she knew NSA was the scapegoat. Sure, they were bald-faced tyrants, but they weren’t operating in a vacuum. Odds were better than even that the President of the United States had authorized the whole operation. The big man himself had ordered the assassination of at least one American citizen without trial or tribunal. What would stop him from scaling up? And Sam knew from Janice Everman’s calendar at Justice that the president’s chief of staff knew all about Penumbra. It was a smoking gun, but it would never see the light of day.
And all indications were that the president stood a solid chance of reelection.
Which was disheartening. Because her calling was to rid the world of the bastards, to make things a little bit less unbearable for the weak and powerless. But what kind of dent could she really make, when the biggest bastards ran the whole damn world?
The futility got to her. She considered leaving Homeland. She discussed it with Brock, and together they debated, vacillated, calculated, raged, furied, fumed, wavered. They decided, undecided, then re-decided. They talked late into the night, many nights in a row.
And ultimately, she stayed.
Because the one battle you should never fight is the battle against yourself.
Descent
Part I
1
He awoke with a splitting headache. His world swum. His mouth felt dry and pasty, like he’d chewed on a handful of cotton swabs. Vodka, of course, but there was something else, too. Whiskey? Tequila? Jägermeister, that abomination of a German obsession? All of the above? He couldn’t recall, but it was combining for a powerful bout of vertigo, and his stomach threatened jihad.
He inhaled deeply, trying to clear some of the cobwebs from his mind. He smelled sex. Boy sex and girl sex. The blood instantly rushed south, and he felt arousal despite his vicious hangover. His body made ready for more, but he felt soreness, evidence of a successful hunt for bacchanalian liaisons.
Recollections of the previous evening came back to him in waves. It had been Roman in its decadence, the kind of thing that Peter Kittredge, a man who had been surprised to discover relatively late in life that he was a hard-wired sexual omnivore, would surely recall fondly for years to come.
Kittredge opened his eyes. He was lying on his side, a long shock of brunette hair near his nostrils, smelling of perfume, shampoo, and cigarette smoke.
Kittredge felt a hand on his hip, gripping him from behind. He turned his head. Damn, that boy is pretty, he thought. He had thought so when they met the previous evening, but he had gotten a long way through a bottle of vodka before ever leaving his flat, and his vision had been nearly as dull as his judgment. He was pleasantly surprised to find that he’d landed a looker despite his debilitating inebriation. Two lookers, it looked like, his right hand caressing the smooth arc of the girl’s hip while he admired the boy’s jaw line.
Kittredge recalled joining the couple in the dark, smoky club, gyrating and throbbing together to the insistent beat of European house music, remembering clearly the zing of adrenaline and excitement he felt when he first got the vibe that the couple might be receptive to his vibe.
Receptive was the right word for it, he thought, now fully tumescent.
His left hand ventured south on a hunch, where he discovered aroused maleness. He pulled the girl to him, his exuberance waking her, and he felt the young man’s grasp tighten on his hips.
Afterwards, they dozed for a while. It was Friday, a workday, but none of them appeared to be in any shape for work. That wasn’t unusual for Kittredge, who hadn’t been in any shape for gainful employment for a number of months. He had the guilt of a rich but estranged father to thank for his sudden entry into the leisure class, the kind of guilt that found its way into an old man’s last will and testament. Cancer wasn’t without its redeeming qualities, Kittredge had thought at the time, hating himself as he thought it.
Nora was the girl’s name. She snored softly in a disarmingly gorgeous way. In addition to being dangerously beautiful and capable of improbable sexual deviances, Nora seemed to have a wicked wit and a razor intellect. Kittredge liked her. It scared the shit out of him, for reasons that were still too close, too real. It hadn’t been nearly long enough since the last time a girl had nearly done him in.
Sergio was the boy. Kittredge thought of him as a boy, but really he was a man of twenty-something years, making him fifteen-odd years younger than Kittredge, who was forty-something. As a rule, gay men didn’t count beyond forty, or thirty if they were militant rainbow-flaggers.
Sergio seemed a little fey, and he clearly spent time on both masculine and effeminate sides of the sexual spectrum, to the great pleasure of everyone else in Kittredge’s bed at the moment. Sergio was too damn young to be a serious threat of turning into Kittredge’s next big mistake. He had a built-in half-life, which would expire when Sergio’s youth clashed with Kittredge’s middle-aged weariness. It could be perfect, Kittredge thought: plenty of quasi-meaningless but thoroughly enjoyable carnal engagement with no pressure for anything else.
What would Charley think of all of this? Kittredge hated himself for still thinking thoughts like that. It had ended poorly with Charley, to say the least. He bore scars, psychological and physical, and barely an hour passed during which he didn’t think of the various ways Charley Fucking Arlinghaus had ruined his life. Charley was Kittredge’s former live-in lover, with whom Kittredge would certainly have described himself as being in a committed relationship, but whose commitment was, with the benefit of hindsight, clearly not of the fully reciprocal kind. In his more honest moments, Kittredge accepted the right amount of responsibility for the tailspin his life had become, but Charley’s treachery had sure given things a huge shove in the wrong direction.
“I’m hungry,” Nora announced in the husky, smoky voice that had driven Kittredge wild th
e previous evening. And morning.
Kittredge was thankful for the interruption. His thoughts had been headed in a dark direction. “Me, too,” he said quietly so as not to wake Sergio. “I know a place where they serve the only respectable Bloody Mary in Cologne.”
He offered his shower to her, but she declined. “I like the smell of you boys on me,” she said with a naughty smile. In spite of himself, Kittredge envisioned Nora occupying a growing share of his calendar. He hoped the feeling was mutual.
They dressed, he in clean clothes, she in yesterday’s skirt and a borrowed button-down shirt, and they slipped quietly out the front door of his absurdly expensive Appelhofplatz flat in downtown Köln. Or Cologne, to those less Teutonic and more Anglo. The building’s entrance was a block away from a subway station in either direction, but their destination was even closer than that. The Königsmarkt Bäckerei, or king’s market bakery, which doubled as an avant-garde eatery, was just a few steps away.
“Hell,” Nora said. “I forgot my purse.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kittredge said. “Breakfast is on me.”
“Thanks. That’s kind of you,” she said. “But I’m expecting a call from work, and I need my phone. Can I borrow your key? ”
Kittredge fished his apartment key from his pocket, and waited in front of the Bäckerei while Nora trotted back to his apartment for her purse. She returned just a couple of minutes later with an apology on her lips. Kittredge waved it off. “Not a problem at all. I needed the fresh air anyway.”
They’d barely taken their seats when the waiter showed up, seemingly out of the blue, with a dangerously tall Bloody Mary, which he handed to Kittredge without preamble. “And for the lady?” he asked.
“I’ll have the same,” Nora said, smiling at Kittredge. “Not your first time here, I take it,” she said when the waiter left.
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