by Sean Black
‘Need a pool digging out. Too narrow to get a digger in. Thirty bucks for the day. Do a good job and I’ll use you the rest of the week.’
‘Done,’ I said, getting in.
The guy didn’t introduce himself and I didn’t ask. We took a right at the bottom of the off-ramp. The guy glanced in the mirror before the turn. ‘That your old lady back there?’
‘No,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know who she is.’
‘You speak good English,’ said the guy, as he pulled an illegal U-turn on the Strip and headed south, away from the city.
My mixed heritage had left me with brown skin but decidedly Caucasian features. It confused people. Some pegged me as a light-skinned black guy, others as Middle Eastern or from Mediterranean Europe (a dark Italian), but a lot of the time people I encountered assumed I must be Hispanic. My appearance made for an interesting time back home but gave me great adaptability overseas where straight-up white guys were bad covert operators.
‘I’m from the east coast,’ I said.
‘Huh,’ said the guy, before lapsing into silence.
Getting in I had noticed the gun tucked under the driver’s seat. A Glock 9mm with a ten-round clip. Concealed-carry wasn’t that unusual out here, and if the guy was in the habit of picking up cheap labor, a gun wasn’t the worst idea.
My new employer took the 215 beltway that looped south-east toward Henderson, taking the exit onto Windmill Lane, then picking up the Maryland parkway. He turned off into a residential street of ranch homes. He pulled the pick-up into a driveway and parked just short of a twenty-yard Dumpster that was already filled with about a foot of soil. He got out and I followed him into the back yard.
He had been as good as his word. The ground had been cleared at the surface and a rectangle marked out. The houses were no more than four feet apart. Any mechanical digger you could get through the gap would be only marginally more use than someone reverting to the pick and shovel that were lying in a nearby wheelbarrow.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the guy said.
‘How deep you want me to go?’
He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s like two now. Just keep going until I tell you to stop.’
With that, he headed back to the truck. I heard the engine start up, and the guy take off. Near the kitchen window there was a small patio set. A plan for the pool was laid out on the table, the corners weighed down by a couple of heavy-duty glass ashtrays. I took a look, running a finger over the dimensions. I looked back at the area that had been staked out. The outline was off. Whoever had drawn up the plan hadn’t allowed for edging. The pool would be smaller than they wanted.
Rooting around in the backyard, I found a tape measure, moved the stakes and set to work. I gave myself a system and found my rhythm. I loosened the soil with the pick, shoveled it into the wheelbarrow and moved it into the Dumpster. Every half-hour or so, I would take a two-minute break to rehydrate as a sharp Nevada sun pounded my back.
About two hours in, as I stood in the middle of the hole I’d dug, my mind started to drift back to Sasha’s grave. This time, though, she didn’t come as a vision but as a memory. A more distant memory. It left a question. If the girl and the camp were in my past, what had happened to bring me here? I hadn’t walked from Afghanistan to Vegas, so where had I come from?
I set back to work, scooping the soil out until there was a sizeable mound, then clambering out, filling the wheelbarrow, doing a dozen or so runs to the Dumpster and jumping back into the hole. Nothing came to mind about how I’d got there, but to feel fully in the present with no flashbacks felt like a kind of progress.
I was in the hole, digging, when I heard the pick-up pull back into the driveway. The driver’s door slammed. I walked to the edge of the hole and climbed out. It was close to dark.
The guy who’d hired me stood, hands on hips. ‘I ain’t paying anybody else but you. Thought I made that clear.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, there’s no goddamn way that one man dug that,’ he said.
I followed the man’s gaze. The hole was six feet deep and covered an area twenty feet long by twelve feet wide.
‘What’s the deal?’ he asked. ‘I drop you off and you call some buddies to come help out? Thirty bucks is what we agreed.’
I didn’t argue. ‘That’s good with me. Now, you have somewhere inside that I can get washed up?’
The guy eyed me. ‘No funny business, okay? You take a shower, I’ll find you something else to wear and then I’ll drop you back. Don’t fuck with me, you hear?’
The guy’s skull burned yellow and red; a mixture of fear and anger. I saw that he was staring at a tattoo on my arm. ‘That thing real?’ the guy said.
I looked down at the ink. ‘Yes, sir.’
The guy glanced back at the pool-sized hole in the yard. ‘Goddamn, you guys must be like some kind of a machine.’
With some money, a pair of jeans, a fresh plaid shirt and my old clothes in a duffel bag, I climbed out of the truck. I should have worked slower. It had been a three-day job and I had done it in just under a day. Looking at the Dumpster full of soil as we drove away, I could see why the guy had freaked. It was a superhuman amount of work for one man to have done. My arms and back ached a little. Otherwise I felt fine.
My mind was clearing. On the drive back from the laboring job, I had begun to stitch together more recent events. I had been in New York with Julia when I’d received a call from the office in DC. They’d asked me to travel to Nevada. Somehow whatever had happened to me there had led to some kind of a temporary psychotic episode that had taken me back to Afghanistan where I had conducted a number of covert missions, including the one in which the child had died.
I had spoken to a man called Muir, back then and more recently. I had taken pills. I could picture them in the bathroom cabinet at home. But there had been something else too. A surgical procedure. An implant of some kind. I reached a hand up to the side of my neck. Had the implant been there? Had I or someone else cut it out and by doing so hastened another collapse? Every turn in the road, every piece that slotted back into the jigsaw puzzle of my past seemed only to throw up more questions.
I could call Julia. It would be the easiest way to figure out what the hell was going on. Yet something within me cautioned against it. A voice was telling me that I had to figure it out for myself first. That it would be dangerous to drag her into whatever this was.
Lost in the maze of my own thoughts, the first I knew of the Las Vegas Metro patrol car that had been slowly following me for half a block was when I noticed the red light spill over my feet. A siren wailed briefly. It was followed by a voice from the roof-mounted Tannoy system.
‘Stop right there, buddy.’
THIRTY-THREE
Fingers interlaced behind my head, I got to my knees. One patrol officer approached me from behind, while the other, gun drawn, covered his partner from behind the driver’s door of the Crown Vic. At this moment, I was very firmly in the present, everything hyper-real. The wash of red from the patrol car’s rollers spilled over the grey sidewalk.
I heard the clink of the cop behind me taking his cuffs from his utility belt. Judging by the guy’s breathing, he was at least fifty pounds overweight and out of shape.
‘Keep those hands right there,’ the cop said.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, a model of compliance.
The scuff of shoe leather on sidewalk told me that the cop was adjusting his position, getting ready to snap on the cuffs. The tips of my fingers began to vibrate as I felt the nickel-plated steel of the cuffs draw closer. The vibrations in my fingertips accelerated. I used them to gauge the position of the cop’s hands, waiting until the very last fraction of a second to make my move.
The last thing the cop said was ‘What you do to your neck?’
My fingers separated. My hands moved out to my sides in the shape of the cross. Tucking in my right arm, I launched my elbow back and up at a forty-five-degree ang
le. I made contact with the cop’s face, splintering the cartilage in his nose.
Adjusting the angle of my feet, I sprang up on my heels, and used the forward momentum of the elbow strike to carry me round so I was facing the cop. The handcuffs dropped with a clatter onto the sidewalk. The cop fell back, arms windmilling as he tried to maintain his balance.
I needed his body mass to stay between me and his partner. I shot my left hand out and grabbed the utility belt. I centered myself, steadying the cop with my left hand as I used the right to pluck his duty gun, a Springfield 1911, from its holster. With my left hand, I spun him round so that he was facing his partner who was already lost in the moment. Rather than taking cover behind the door and radioing for an assist, the guy was too busy spluttering orders at me. I bent down to retrieve the cuffs, grabbed the cop’s wrists and snapped them on so that his hands were held tightly in place behind his back.
Racking the slide, I jammed the gun under his jaw but kept my finger wrapped around the outside of the trigger guard. What happened in the next sixty seconds was what counted.
Both officers were terrified: a golden yellow color spilled out over their skulls, their bodies awash in adrenalin. The last thing I wanted was to have to hurt one. Equally, I wasn’t going to risk whatever would come from sitting handcuffed in the back of a patrol car. Not until I had figured out what the hell was going on.
‘Lower your duty weapon, put on the safety, and toss it into that drain. Once you’ve done those three things, I’ll release your colleague to you, and you can get him medical attention. You have five seconds to comply, beginning now.’ As I said it, I kept my tone even, and moved my finger to the trigger of the Springfield.
In five seconds, if his partner hadn’t begun to do what I had requested, I would pull the trigger. Threats were only credible if you had every intention of carrying them through. I had made a reasonable request. If I had to kill the cop it would be because his partner had stalled or tried to play the hero. I would kill him, and then I would kill the partner if he drew down on me. After that I would leave. Right now, as I watched the cop hugging cover behind the door lower his duty weapon, I felt absolutely no discernible emotion whatsoever.
I heard the click of the safety and watched as the cop tossed his weapon at the slit between sidewalk and road that I had picked out for him. I listened as the weapon clattered against the edge of the drain and dropped down into the void.
Further down the Strip, I could see more red lights. Reinforcements. I took my hand away from where I was holding the cop’s cuffed hands, turned and ran. Across the Strip to my right was the edge of McCarran airport with a couple of small private jets parked up; one bore Wynn Casino livery. A razor-wire-topped chain-link fence separated the airfield from the road. To my immediate left were a row of billboards and a slope that ran up to a palm-tree-dotted golf course. Up to the north was a Vegas landmark in the shape of the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign.
I headed for the open ground of the golf course. Vaulting the basic chain-link fence that served as a perimeter, I took off again, skirting back north, figuring that at some point they would have a chopper up and that an urban environment with lots of bodies would make for better cover.
The course was dark. I hugged the line of palm trees. I could hear more sirens wailing down the Strip. Among them, I picked up the crooning of an Elvis impersonator scraping the last few dollars of the day from the tourists having their picture taken next to the Las Vegas sign.
“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” I couldn’t help but smile.
The smile evaporated an instant later as the ground directly ahead of me exploded, the force of the blast stripping a palm tree six feet away out to its roots, the trunk slicing into long strips, green fronds floating into the neon sky as the King kept crooning in the distance, and sirens pulsed out a staccato beat. Earth and spars of metal fence detonated all around me, a clod of earth hitting me between the eyes, the dirt blinding me. I swiped it away, my head pounding with a migraine blast of pain that sent me to my knees. I clutched my head, the black metal of the Springfield 1911 cold against my cheek. To pull the trigger, to free myself from this torment? The idea flashed through my mind.
I opened my eyes and glanced through the torn fencing. I was almost parallel to the Las Vegas sign. Elvis had stopped singing, his audience distracted. The tourists’ cameras and cell phones, red lights blinking, shot video of the cops swarming the scene.
Sasha sat atop the Vegas sign, her face lit by yellow and red light, her legs dangling over the O in WELCOME. She waved at me as blood poured from her body.
I blinked, willing her away, denying her presence, and felt guilty. Julia. I said her name to myself, repeating it like a mantra, the pain in my head falling away with every incantation.
Before me, the ground that had been torn away was restored. The palm tree that had blown to pieces in front of me was whole, its fronds rippling gently in the slipstream of cars pushing their way down Las Vegas Boulevard. Up ahead, the golf-course fence squared off into a dead end. Two figures were climbing over from the other side. One was a broad, squat man sporting a ball cap. With him was a tall woman in cut-off jeans, with long blonde hair.
I raised the Springfield, a reflex action more than a sign of lethal intent. The two figures kept coming until they were close enough for it to click where I had seen them before. They were the two pan-handlers from the off-ramp.
I lowered the gun and took a step toward them. My foot caught a root, or whatever I was suffering from kicked back in, because I stumbled, falling onto one knee. They moved either side of me as a helicopter spotlight arced across the open ground of the fairway. They pulled me up and began to drag me to the fence they had just climbed over.
The woman’s blonde hair tumbled across my shoulder. She stank of sweat and perfume. I tilted my head, catching sight of her throat and the prominent bulge of an Adam’s apple.
‘This way,’ the man with the beard said to me, as we clambered over the fence, the spotlight zigzagging rapidly toward us.
On the other side, the ground fell away sharply to a concave concrete basin with a hole, some kind of access tunnel. A ladder led down into a storm drain. The blonde went first, shining a flashlight, picking out the corroded brown rungs of the ladder. I followed. The man with the beard came next. I felt myself begin to lose consciousness as darkness closed around us. Arms caught me. Then I blacked out.
THIRTY-FOUR
New York City
Graves
The black sedan with tinted windows was parked across from the apartment building. Harry Graves sat in back, a frosted-glass partition separating him from the driver. He watched Julia Tibor as she walked past on her way to her apartment. She was attractive: long auburn hair, piercing blue eyes, a nice figure. Byron had done well for himself. And not just in terms of his wife’s looks. She was bright, too, and plugged in, at least in broad terms, to their world. She was an east-coast liberal to the core and that had troubled Graves when he had learned of the relationship.
Relationships of any kind were a delicate area when it came to selecting participants in the program. The rule had been that the men selected had to be SSD – single, separated or divorced. Siblings were fine, as were parents, although the closeness of those relationships was carefully assessed – and Byron had scored top marks on that front because not only was he an only child but his parents were dead. Casual relationships between men like Byron and women they met were fine, as long as they remained that way.
Byron’s relationship with the woman whom Harry was now watching fumble with her keys, as she juggled two bags of groceries, her handbag and a stack of folders, had been different. There was no question of it being vetoed but a careful risk assessment had been carried out. Muir and Graves had sat down with him separately to talk to him about what he could and could not reveal.
It was hardly virgin territory. Anyone who worked with a certain level of security clearance, either as a civilian or in t
he military, knew that they had to construct a fairly robust firewall between their personal and working lives. That said, Byron wasn’t just aware of certain classified information: he was classified information. He was a walking, talking, sentient top-secret project — with a mouth. At least, unlike Lewis, Byron actually got it. His stability had marked him out.
In the end it had been agreed that perhaps a long-term relationship, and marriage, could be of benefit. For one it gave him deeper cover. And it gave them leverage over him.
The only problem that remained was just how much the future Mrs Byron Tibor would know about her husband’s past. In the end it had been fairly straightforward.
‘Tell her the truth,’ Harry had told him. ‘Just finesse the transition part. That way if she starts to dig she’s only going to find what’s been there all along.’
So that was how it had gone. Graves knew that because Byron and Julia had been under pretty heavy covert surveillance during the early part of their relationship. It had been discontinued three months after they’d got hitched. The marriage hadn’t seemed to impact on Byron any more than it would have on any other high-level operative. He couldn’t talk about aspects of his work. He sometimes had to leave home at short notice and be away for an undetermined and occasionally extended period.
Graves knew that Julia had been aware of this because he had listened to recordings of the two of them discussing it. She had seemed to tease him about the clandestine nature of his work, assuming he was working for the CIA, but she knew enough not to ask too many questions.
In some ways, Muir had told Graves, Byron’s marriage and ability to sustain such a close relationship without his spouse suspecting the truth had left the project way ahead of where it had been. They had proved that someone like Byron could be fully integrated. If he could live with a partner, he was ready for pretty much any operation. In some ways it had informed the planning of the operation to extract Masori — three or four possible scenarios had been placed in front of the folks in Washington. The upside was that, even if the mission failed, the worst-case scenario was that they lost one man rather than potentially dozens. It had appealed to the military advisors because it was a defiantly old-school special-forces operation that harked back to the days when special forces was more about using local populations and less about abseiling out of helicopters while armed to the teeth.