by Jack Hardin
César stood and looked out the salon window to the water beyond. “We have a philosophical difference between us, Ringo. You and I do things differently. Much of this is defined by our cultures. In Mexico, the drug war is a part of our lives. Innocents die because they must. It keeps us ahead of our impotent government and keeps the people in line. Our modus operandi is fear. It is how we keep control and how we recruit.”
“I disagree.”
“Of course.”
“Let me tell you a story about something that happened to me as a child,” Ringo said. “When I was eight, almost nine, we lived in the hills north of San Francisco. A little town of Willits to be precise, not ten miles from where Seabiscuit used to train.”
“Seabiscuit?”
“Nevermind. Anyway, my mother had five children to raise. As I said, I was eight, almost nine - the oldest by a year - my mother had a boyfriend who lived with us. Fenwick Parsons. It would be too gracious to say that he was purer than the bottom of a toilet brush or nicer than badger. He would beat my mother, my siblings, and myself. My father, you see, split years earlier. He ended up dying in a motorcycle accident running from the cops in Nebraska after holding up a five-and-dime for twenty-three dollars. They said he hit the side of a police cruiser going sixty-eight, and they found him in a fallow corn field fifty yards over. In time, Fenwick Parsons was happy to take his place. Ol’ Fenwick was the most mild-mannered man you’d ever meet. I never did hear him raise his voice or lose his temper. But he controlled us through fear. Sometimes - with a serene smile on his lips - he would grab one of my sisters by the hair and wail on her in the other room. Same with my two brothers. He did it to me twice. When he was done he’d lean down and pat me on the head and softly tell me it was going to be all right. Then he’d walk away. I figured I couldn’t kill him. I wanted to, but I knew my mother needed me around. So I decided - I don’t know where I got the idea - to be nice. I asked Fenwick what his family was like, what he liked to do when he was a kid, and did he want to throw the baseball with me? I kept it up, and I would imagine that he started to see us as friends. He kept beating on my mother and siblings but never touched me again. Turns out I didn’t have to kill him. My mother did that a year later and made it look like he fell down the well at the bottom of the property.” Ringo sighed impatiently. “César, Fenwick Parsons taught me something my mother didn’t. He taught me that weak people can be bought with your love, with your respect.”
“It is a good lesson to learn, my friend. Respect is a value worth possessing. Come, let us go back outside.”
Ringo doused the nub of his cigar into the marble ashtray sitting on the coffee table and followed his host out the door to the deck lounge. He shut the door behind him, walked over to the rail, and leaned against it. Two women came near and flanked him. One offered him what was left of her piña colada. He took it and drank it down. He hated this. The flaunting of power, the prestige, the cheap women.
César had one of these women on each arm. He gave the blonde on his right a long, deep kiss then pulled back and looked out over the blue waters. “You ever going to retire, Ringo?
“Are you?”
“I might. But I asked you first.”
“Why would I? I’m just getting started.”
“You’ve been at this for a while now. One would think you would take that thick pile of money I’m sure you are sitting on and see the world.”
“Nah, I’ve seen enough of the world. I watch the Discovery Channel. Or what’s left of it after all their reality shows. I have a long way to go in this business.”
“So you have ambition? Dangerous, my friend.”
“Not ambition,” he corrected. “Ambition wants to be the king, thus must kill the king. I am not the king. I only want to be a prince. I want to help the king - the Caesar - get richer,” he lied.
César eyed him - almost suspiciously - and smiled. “Then you are wise.”
“And you? You’re not a young chump anymore either.”
César ignored the question. “I can get you as much cocaine as you like. You just tell me when. One day I will get you to help me with the other product,” he said confidently.
One day, you will be out of the picture.
César smiled, showing his perfect teeth paid for with no less than a kilo of snow. He clapped a hand on Ringo’s shoulder. “Come. Let’s get these beautiful ladies and this beautiful boat into the open water.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
ELLIE SLID the rag down the barrel and set the weapon down on the stainless steel table top. “There,” she said with a note of satisfaction. Her gun lay before her, perfectly cleaned, oiled, and reassembled. For the last half hour, she and Tyler had been sitting at the back of the gunsmithing shop in Reticle’s main building, cleaning their rifles while listening to a Spotify mix of Jack Johnson, Jimmy Buffett, and Bob Dylan. Ellie had run thirty rounds through her .338 Lapua, and Tyler had fired as many through his Barrett MRAD, chambered in a .300 Win Mag. She generally would stop to clean her gun at twenty rounds, but her groupings had been tight all morning, and so she kept on.
“Speedy Gonzales over there,” Tyler said.
“I’m not fast,” she said. “You’re just slow.”
“I’m not slow; I’m detail oriented. My mama always told me that was a good thing.”
“I think your mama just didn’t want to tell you that you were slow.”
Tyler loosened the retention screw on the barrel and broke the action open. “I think I’ll swap out the barrel for an eighteen inch,” he said. “I’ve had the twenty-four on for a few weeks. I need a new kind of a challenge.”
“Are you bringing your targets in?” Ellie asked. “You’re going to lose velocity if you shorten the barrel.”
“Haven’t decided yet.”
The telecom speaker in the corner came to life, and one of Tyler’s employees called him to the front counter. He rubbed his hands on a cloth. “Be right back. I’m important around here and need to go do important stuff.”
“I’ll be here.” Ellie grabbed her rifle case and set it on the cleaning table. She opened it and placed her gun into the molded foam. She closed the lid and snapped it shut.
As she waited for Tyler to return, she thought of the progress they had made with the investigation these last few weeks. How they had started with only a couple names taken from dusty files and finally had a lead that looked as if it could guide them to those bending the rules. She and Mark had a meeting scheduled with Garrett two days from now to review the case in detail and get quick approval for how they wished to proceed. Ellie had pushed to make the meeting happen tomorrow, but Garrett had left last night for a meeting at DEA headquarters in Springfield, Virginia, and wouldn’t return until the morning after next. Ellie was finally on the cusp of something big, and it rattled her nerves to have to wait, even for a couple extra days. In the meantime, she and Mark had plenty of work to do. She had already conceived the perfect name for her undercover persona.
Ellie noticed Tyler’s range bag sitting at the other end of the table, the zipper open. She walked over to it and peeked in. Inside, a handgun grip poked out from behind a cloth. She was curious, so she dug around and pulled out the weapon. The overall weight and its distribution told her what it was before it even came out. A Desert Eagle 50 AE, painted in two-tone military green. She turned it over, admiring the size, enjoying the feeling of it in her hand. As handguns went, her personal favorite had always been the Beretta M9. The feel of the weapon in her hand, its reliability and accuracy; she preferred it over the SIG she was issued in Afghanistan and the many others she had used over the years. Even now, with a host of more modern handguns available, Ellie had selected an M9 as the gun to keep on the nightstand in her bedroom. The Desert Eagle had been Voltaire’s favorite; he had even saved her life with it once on a backstreet in Libya. Its 300 grain bullet discharged from the triangular barrel at 1,500 feet-per-second. The weapon chambered the largest centerfire cartridge of
any magazine-fed, self-loading pistol. Voltaire had referred to it as a skull splitter; a hand cannon. He didn’t always take it on missions. The gun wasn’t the most practical, especially in situations when anonymity was in order. But when it made sense, Voltaire would bring it along.
Voltaire. It had been a long time since Ellie had allowed herself to think of him. She hadn’t seen him in nearly four years now, six months before the team had disbanded. He had been sent to Croatia on a long-term, deep-cover mission that she was not a part of and was never briefed on.
Voltaire was their team’s leader, and the only person on their team whose real name Ellie had known at the time. Brian Carter. He had told her one night in Belarus as they sat by the fire and as they both stepped over an invisible line that was strictly forbidden. The entire team knew each other on a code name basis only; all of them named after classical authors. Ellie was Pascal; the other female on the team, Faraday; there was Cicero, Dante, Virgil, Darwin. Their team’s director, Mortimer; named after the famed philosopher who edited the Great Books of the Western World. It was Mortimer, Ellie believed, who had facilitated the hits that may or may not have even been sanctioned by Ellie’s government. He wouldn’t have been at the helm, only a faithful hand that moved the pieces of his team to accomplish the ends of those to whom he reported.
Mortimer had sent Brian and Ellie to Belarus for three months to gather intel and conduct surveillance on Anatoly Semenov, a Russian oligarch who was wintering there and conducting a black market side business with his native country’s oil reserves. The CIA had put their best two operatives up in a small cabin in the woods three clicks from Semenov’s compound. To get to town or to get to the perimeter of Semenov’s compound to check their cameras, wireless routers, or sound recorders meant strapping on snow shoes and treading several miles through the thick snow. The isolation meant that two people in close, snowed-in quarters soon discovered that they loved each other. They had been working together for four years already and trusted each other with their lives. They worked flawlessly together, each anticipating the other’s moves and decisions at times when it wasn’t safe to verbalize them. So that winter, in a small hunting cabin in the mountains of Belarus, Ellie O’Conner and Brian Carter fell in love. They kept it from the Agency and, when they returned back to Brussels, continued a romance over the next year that would eventually create more stress than pleasure. They both knew they would be kicked off the team and severely reprimanded if they were caught, and, while they were the world’s foremost experts on sneaking around, they both felt the increasing costs associated with the risks they were taking.
So the night he left their headquarters in Brussels for Croatia, Voltaire had taken her onto a balcony and told her they needed to end the relationship. He was right, she knew, and she had probably been a couple months from ending it herself. He just beat her to it. He left the next morning, and she tried to suppress an aching heart. She had loved him. Truly loved him. In another life they could have made it well together. But many years ago, they had both made a commitment to the Agency. A commitment that meant the suppression of their own wishes and desires. When Ellie pulled the shot that night in Saint Petersburg, she went back to Brussels, and the team was immediately disbanded. Voltaire had not yet come back from Croatia when she went stateside. They never did get a proper goodbye.
As she sat in the back room of a gun range in southwest Florida, Ellie wondered where he was now; what he was doing. She wondered if he had tried, like her, to find his way in the civilian world, or if he had stayed in the game and been repurposed by the Agency. There was no way to know.
Tyler walked back in, adjusting his hat over his eyes. “Turns out someone couldn’t find the broom.”
Ellie let the past roll off her and came back to the present. “Important stuff, huh?”
“Hey, brooms are a big deal. To some people.” He stepped up to his Barrett, and his eyes caught what was in Ellie’s hand. “Were you digging around in my range bag? There’s manly stuff in there that could hurt you if you’re not careful.”
She looked down the barrel and through the sites. “It’s a heck of a gun,” she said. “I want to shoot this next time we’re out. I didn’t even know you had one.”
“Got it last week. It’s ridiculous, Ellie. The recoil is everything you would expect.”
“I’ve shot one before.”
“Did you like it?”
“It’s a little much for a handgun.” She eyed Tyler and grinned playfully. “One might think that a man who owns one of these is compensating for something.”
A eyebrow went up. “Hey, now…”
Ellie’s phone was sitting on the table, and it buzzed at her like an impatient toddler. “Hold on a sec.” She picked up the phone, looked at the number, and immediately recognized the Virginia area code.
She slid her thumb across the glass and raised the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
“Ellie. Hi.”
She could pluck Ryan Wilcox's voice out of a million. Her former boss’s voice was soft and had the hint of a Michigan accent. She had never expected to hear it again. Her synapses fired off while she raced through a Rolodex of reasons why he might be calling. Her tone was kind but guarded. “Ryan. Hi. Something wrong?”
“No...no,” he said. “Sorry to call you like this. Nothing’s wrong, but I did want to see if we could meet for a quick chat. I can come to you.”
Tyler caught the reservation in Ellie’s voice. “Everything okay?” he mouthed.
She put a finger up and nodded. “Sure. That would be all right.”
“You’re down in Pine Island?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a restaurant in Bokeelia, Suzie's Crabshack. I assume you know the place?”
“Of course.”
“Can you meet me there tomorrow night at nine?”
She wanted to ask him for his topic of discussion, but she knew he wouldn’t say anything over the phone - whatever it was. She would have to wait. “Yes. That’s fine.”
“Thanks, Ellie,” Ryan said, then dropped the call.
Ellie slipped her phone into the pocket of the black cargo pants she always wore to the range.
“Who was that?” Tyler asked.
She chewed her bottom lip. “My old boss.”
“What’d he want?”
“Didn’t say. I have no idea. He wants to meet in Bokeelia tomorrow night.”
“So your boss who still works for the CIA wants to have an impromptu meeting with you down here and won’t say what it’s about?”
“Correct.”
“I don’t know, Ellie, it all sounds very CIA-y to me.”
“I don’t like it either,” she said.
“You know, he might be coming down here to confirm my suspicions that the Wangs are a two-person sleeper cell waiting for the right moment to pounce. Or maybe he just joined a multi-level marketing company and is hitting up friends, family, and old co-workers. It’s a toss up between the two, but if I had my guess it’s the first one. Has to be.”
Ellie grabbed her gear bag. “I’m going to head on out. I need to clear my mind.”
Tyler came up off his stool and walked over to her, his expression more serious. “You look worried. I’ve never seen you worried.”
“I don’t know why he wants to meet. Top of the list is he wants to bring me back into the game. Well, that’s the whole list. I can’t think of anything else that would make sense. If he needed intel on something he thinks I know, it wouldn’t go down at an island restaurant. There are channels for that type of thing. Even if he needed to step outside those channels, he has to know that I don’t know anything he doesn’t.”
“He’s a good guy, right? You trust him?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
Tyler walked behind her, laid his hands on her shoulders, and started to rub. She closed her eyes. “Just relax,” he said. “No reason to worry unless you think he’s going to poison you or something.”
&n
bsp; She swung around and slapped him on the arm. “You’ve been watching too much television.”
“Look, just call me if you need anything or if you want me to go with you. I can sit a ways off but be there if you want. I’m serious.”
She turned her eyes to meet his. They really were the greenest eyes she had ever seen. “Thanks. That means a lot.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HIS HEAD POUNDED to the obnoxious tune of a thousand kettle drums sounding off across a stratified canyon. He opened his eyes - only halfway - and, try as he might, couldn't focus past the haze that clouded his vision.
“Sccccccotch,” someone whispered. “Sccccccotch.”
He groaned and opened his eyes again, waited for the blur to fade into clarity. A large picture teetered into view: a fleet of shrimp boats sailing out to sea against the orange and purple of a setting sun. He had seen that picture before. Where? His eyes shifted to the right. The tall armor of a Spanish conquistador stood in the corner. That was the moment his subconscious screamed at him, informing his intuition where he was before he could think it. Adrenaline shot through him, and he tried to sit up. A violent panic ran through his chest.
“Shhh….shhh. Lay back down. Just rest. My couch should be comfortable enough.”
Scotch winced against the pain as he tried to move. It forced his head back onto the pillow. He stared at the ceiling and tried to get his breathing under control.
“Scotch,” Ringo said slowly, carefully teasing out the sounds of each letter. His guest moaned again. “You were a hard man to find. It’s been, what, six weeks since she we shared a drink together? You don’t call, you don’t write. A simple text telling me you are all right and would be home past curfew would have been kind enough. I called all your friends’ houses and their mothers said you weren’t there. Then I called all the hospitals, and they didn’t have you on record. I thought the worst, Scotch. The worst.”