The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “We need every Volunteer we can get,” decided Hill. “As Freud said, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar. I’ll run this chick’s history through the wringer and see if I can get anything that feels wrong. If not, we’ll give her a buzz, but with a little more than the usual caution. You know the rule: no one joins the NVA, the NVA joins you. This serendipitous introduction sounds just a little off-key to me, but you’re right, weird shit happens in the fog of war. I don’t want her to meet or be able to ID any more Volunteers than she needs to at first. You’re too high up, Jim. She doesn’t see you again. As far as she is concerned, Comrade Smith no longer exists. You know we always try to preserve first contacts, so we’ll start her out as an A Company wannabe. Jimmy, I’ll let you handle her. Your misogyny may come in handy. You first, and if she still rings true then we’ll get Ma Wingfield down from Dundee to have a chat with her. That sharp old lady can spot a lying female a mile away. One thing, Jimmy, I want you to be extra specially vigilant for any sign that she is still using drugs, despite her denial. The feds are great ones for using junkies as CIs in exchange for keeping their habits stoked. Secondly, let me know if she tries to put the moves on you right off.”

  “A detailed report,” said McCann with a grin.

  “Piss off, sir,” said Wingo.

  VIII

  Running The Game

  Whither should I fly? I have done no harm.

  But I remember now I am in this earthly world

  Where to do harm is often laudable,

  To do good sometimes accounted dangerous folly.

  Why then, alas, do I put up that womanly defence

  To say that I have done no harm?

  Macbeth—Act IV, Scene 2

  The next morning found Detective Sergeants Lainie Martinez and Jamal Jarvis sitting in the plush, carpeted office of Portland Police Bureau Chief Linda Hirsch. Jarvis had sense enough to keep his mouth shut and let Lainie make the pitch, which she did with cool efficiency.

  The police chief was a coveted affirmative action three-fer, being simultaneously female, Jewish, and lesbian. Linda Hirsch was a huge, square middle-aged woman, massive without appearing obese, who seemed to squat in her chair behind her expansive mahogany desk like some stone idol. She had been brought into the job by a high-powered cabal of liberals, leftists, feminists, gays, and other assorted “community activists,” a procedure which was by now the norm in the City of Roses; no one could remember the last time Portland had a white male heterosexual as chief of police. Her previous post had been as police chief in Sacramento, California, where she had clawed her way up to the top of the department through an awe-inspiring mastery of the weaponry of interoffice politics, blackmail, coercion, schmoozing and bribery. When Hirsch left Sacramento, the California Attorney General was investigating her office for providing generously paid no-show jobs to assorted “community activists” including a number of illegal aliens who were listed as Spanish and Tagalog interpreters but who spoke no English, and a black transvestite prostitute who was drawing $75,000 per year as “police liaison to the transgender community.”

  Linda Hirsch had a deep and nuanced knowledge of both ends of the litigious aspect of sexual discrimination and sexual harassment; she herself had filed half a dozen such lawsuits against her superiors in the Sacramento force on her way up, and she had accumulated three lawsuits against her in Sacramento and one so far here in Portland from female police officers from whom she allegedly demanded sex in exchange for promotion, choice assignments, and other departmental favors. Her predatory habits in this regard were so well known that her administrative assistants would come in some mornings and find on their desk a gift-wrapped box containing a set of novelty foam rubber kneepads inscribed “Property of Monica Lewinsky.” The chief had assigned a detective to the task of ferreting out the politically incorrect humorist in the Bureau. Sergeant Elena Martinez herself had occasion to fend off the police chief’s unsubtle hints, which had been hard sometimes because Hirsch took a special interest in the Hatecrime and Civil Disobedience Squad’s activities. She liked to question suspected racists personally, often showing up at an interrogation room with her black doctor’s bag full of Dershowitz Protocol-approved needles and other equipment.

  Linda Hirsch always wore her uniform, complete with a row of mostly bogus decorations, at work and even off duty. Her jet-black hair was curly to the point of being kinky, and her broad face was that of a dyspeptic camel, with dangling dewlaps and fleshy nose and small piggy eyes. Right now it was the face of a skeptical and hostile camel, but that meant nothing, since Linda Hirsch’s face had been skeptical and hostile since she was a toddler.

  Lainie went over the entire official version of the Kicky McGee incident, with the major deletion of Jarvis and Roscoe from the Lenny Gillis homicide, replacing them with Kicky herself as Lenny’s killer. She understood that the chief was no fool, and that Hirsch had probably already picked up from the interoffice grapevine what had actually occurred in the alley behind Jupiter’s Den, but neither of them made reference to it. White trash pimps didn’t matter any more than white trash hookers. Lainie played the surveillance recording from the previous night, and she could tell that her boss was impressed. “Ma’am, I’m sure I don’t have to point out the significance of this,” she concluded. “Call it serendipitous. We have been handed a key that can unlock the whole NVA for us in Portland.”

  “Or maybe beyond that,” grunted Hirsch. “First question. You let two dangerous racist terrorists walk away with a package of stolen electronic components that will certainly be used to kill a lot of people, women and racial and sexual minorities, government personnel, law enforcement officers, possibly some of our brother officers. Possibly even you two yourselves one day if you turn the ignition to your car or walk in the wrong door where these animals have been there before you. Why did you do that, Sergeant Martinez?”

  Lainie was ready for the question. “Because in the larger scheme of things, ma’am, putting an end to this whole racist insurrection against the United States of America is more important than taking out two individual terrorists and recovering that one consignment of microchips. The math is simple. We don’t need to prevent specific acts of terrorist murder; we need to put a stop terrorist murder, period. As cynical as this will sound, the old saying that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs is true and applicable in these circumstances. If you want to discipline me or charge me with dereliction, that’s your prerogative, but as hokey as this sounds, if freedom and justice and the American way are going to prevail, somebody has to look at the big picture, and last night I chose to do so. It was my call, and I should point out that I made that call over the protests of Detective Sergeant Jarvis and Detective McCafferty both.”

  “Very noble of you to offer to carry the can, Sergeant. I hope you’re willing to carry it all the way if it comes to that. All right,” said Hirsch. “I’ll overlook your action for the time being, so long as you understand that if that call ever comes back to bite this department in any way, you take the bite right in that fine brown tuchas of yours, not me.”

  “Understood, ma’am,” said Lainie, calmly absorbing an insult that would have brought a white male police officer, however senior, up on racism and hatespeech charges so fast it would have made his head spin.

  “Where’s the shiksa whore now?” asked the chief.

  “Downstairs. Will you give us the task force to pursue this operation, ma’am? With all due respect, I need a decision quickly, because if it’s a go she needs to report to her day job with the taxicab company at four o’clock this afternoon as if nothing had happened. We could intervene and square it with her employer if she’s late or absent, of course, but that widens the circle of knowledge that something unusual is going on with her, and we need to keep that circle of knowledge as restricted as possible, for obvious reasons. That is why I have taken the liberty of coming to you with this directly and bypassing Captain Rawlinson.”

  “
Rawlinson stays out of it. Leave him to me, I’ll square that,” said Hirsch with a dismissive wave. “What’s your immediate plan, Sergeant Martinez? I see where you’re going in the long term, of course, but how about the next few days and weeks?”

  “We need to keep her in her old orbit, so to speak, and wait for the racists to make contact with her,” replied Lainie. “We’ll be monitoring her cell phone and keeping her on GPI at all times, of course. I am sure that the NVA has ways of checking her out, and we have to make sure that they don’t pick up on anything unusual or out of character. They’re pathological killers, but they’re not stupid, and their intelligence has always been highly accurate. You know they’ve detected undercover insertion attempts from other agencies before, and we’ve found the results lying dead out on logging roads in the woods. This girl needs to show them nothing suspicious, no sudden sign of having money to spend, nothing like that. She goes back into her trailer, which we will wire, of course. We keep the child and the mother, set them up in a secure location where we can arrange supervised visits, the carrot as opposed to the stick of her legal problems. The official story will be that the child and the grandmother are staying with relatives out of town. In the meantime, Ms. McGee needs to keep on driving her cab.”

  “And keep on whoring?” asked Hirsch.

  “That would cause a lot of problems with surveillance, and also put her needlessly at risk, not just from the NVA but from some of her more kinky and dangerous customers,” said Lainie. “Not to mention straining her already tenuous emotional and mental equilibrium, knowing she was turning tricks while being recorded electronically. There might even be a civil rights issue there, since technically speaking, sex trade workers are recognized as a politically protected sexual minority.”

  “How is she holding up?” asked Hirsch.

  “Not well,” admitted Lainie. “The girl is angry and paranoid and frightened to death of what might happen to her, as well she should be. She is going to require careful handling if she’s going to be useful long term, and I don’t think asking or forcing her back into prostitution would be helpful. The NVA might have reasons of their own to do so, of course.”

  “Mmmm, you think she might be able to build a sort of special in-house clientele among the goots, so to speak?” mused Hirsch.

  “The thought did occur to me, yes,” admitted Lainie. “That in turn could open up all kinds of avenues of information and possibly help us flip some more of these bastards, especially if some of them are cheating on their wives, that kind of thing. The possibilities here are endless, Chief. Once we get her on the inside, I just want to let her sort of go with the flow, with us following everywhere she leads, hearing everything she hears, seeing as much as we can manage to get on digital of what she sees. She will be kind of like one of those robot probes archaeologists send down into Egyptian pyramids, flashing lights into all the dark corners and passageways. That way we can at long last start to build up a picture of who these people are, where they are, how they operate, how they recruit and indoctrinate new members . . .”

  “Yes, Sergeant, I get it,” said the chief, waving a hand again irritably. “All building up to the big takedown. An intriguing and exciting prospect, I admit.”

  “But first we’ve got to get her inside,” continued Lainie. “That’s why there can’t be any obvious breaks in her lifestyle, why she needs to show up to do her shift with the cab company tonight, and every night, until they contact her again.”

  “What if they smell something hinky and don’t contact her?” asked Hirsch.

  “They will,” said Lainie, with a confidence she somehow genuinely felt.

  “What kind of manpower and resources are you looking for?” asked Hirsch.

  Lainie ticked her shopping list off on her fingers. “First, I want to select my own team, with full command of the operation from start to finish. I’ll want Sergeant Jarvis and myself, and three two-officer backup and surveillance teams with unmarked vehicles, all experienced undercovers. I want Detective McCafferty full time, with one backup ESD tech, both of whom will have unlimited call on all the resources and equipment they need, and your help in obtaining anything the PB doesn’t have by way of technology from other departments, including the FBI and DHS if necessary.”

  “That will take some finessing, but it can be done,” said Hirsch. “They’re going to get curious if we ask for the loan of their special surveillance toys, and I do not want any federal knowledge of this operation. A snitch inside the NVA is the gold standard of American law enforcement, detectives. Nobody else has one, and if the feds find out we do, then they’re going to take her away from us and keep her for themselves. I don’t want our people doing all the work and taking all the risk just so some fucking FBI assholes can get a gold star and a corner office and a GS-grade bump or two. Is that understood?”

  “Abso-fukkin-lutely!” growled Jarvis in assent.

  “I second my partner on that, ma’am,” said Lainie. “We will also need a suite of rooms to use as an operations center and command post, in the most secure area of the Justice Center you can arrange for us. Mark it ‘janitorial supplies’ or something and lock it down tight as a drum. Task force members only will have the necessary de-lock codes on their swipe cards. And yourself, of course. Our own separate, completely secure computer system, no interface with any other system, so it can’t be hacked.”

  “You’ve got it,” said Hirsch decisively. “Okay, Sergeant Martinez, it’s your show. Pull it off and give Portland that one big bust that will make this city racist and terrorist-free, then the sky’s the limit. Fuck it up and you burn. But there is one proviso,” she added.

  “And that is?” asked Lainie in some concern. Provisos were not good.

  “If and when you get a chance to nail that murdering son of a bitch sniper Lockhart, the so-called Jack of Diamonds, I don’t care what else you do, you take him down!” Hirsch snarled. “That motherfucker killed a friend of mine yesterday. I don’t care if you blow the whole operation in the process. I want all nine of that Cat’s lives. Now be back here this time tomorrow morning with your task force picks and all the details, and we’ll get this show on the road.”

  * * *

  It took a while for the NVA to check Kicky out with the resources they had at their disposal and contact her, which was a good thing, because it gave her a chance to pull herself together. If they’d come to her in the first couple of days after their initial encounter at Lenny Gillis’ apartment, she probably would have gotten flustered and blown her cover. As it was, the knowledge that she was under constant surveillance forced her to get her act together, stay off the crack, and fall into a normal blue-collar work routine driving for the hack line. At four o’clock every afternoon she went in to the garage and checked out a cab, took whatever fares the surly and still horny dispatcher Singh felt like giving her plus any street hails or airport runs that offered, dealt with the usual run of obnoxious passengers and drunks, closed out her shift, and took the bus home to the trailer park where she found she could definitely get used to having a good night’s sleep. The stress died down to manageable levels, but it still exhausted her.

  She was allowed to spend two hours every other day with her mother and her daughter, who were staying in a suite of rooms in an upscale Oregon City motel that had been seized as a criminal asset from a Brazilian drug trafficker, and was now used solely as a safe house for what had been code-named Operation Searchlight. A team of heavily armed, plainclothes private security contractors from the infamous Blackwater group, four men and two women brought in especially for this assignment from North Carolina, guarded both May and Ellie around the clock, although they were not part of the task force proper and did not know precisely who Kicky was or what she was doing. “We know the Portland Police Bureau has been infiltrated by the NVA,” Lainie Martinez admitted to Kicky candidly. “These Blackwater people report directly to me or to Sergeant Jarvis, and no one besides us two and the chief of police k
now they exist. They are paid, very handsomely I might add, out of several slush funds so that the money would be impossible for a spy in the department to trace, and if they did spot any of the cash flow they wouldn’t know what they were looking at. The contractors will do exactly as they are told by either Jamal or me. All it takes is one phone call, and within the hour Mary Ellen will be transferred by private jet to a child protective facility in another state far from here, pending her adoption into a new family, the records of which adoption will be destroyed so that there will never be any paper trail to follow. Even Jamal and I will never know where she ended up. You screw up just once, or if there is any interruption in your electronics, and in the twinkling of an eye, your little girl is gone forever.”

  Ellie of course understood nothing, except that now she had good things to eat and could watch endless cartoons and Sesame Street on DVD. She had her own playroom in another part of the hotel filled with dolls and stuffed animals and every kind of plastic wheeled toy for toddlers, where she spent a large part of her day. She missed her mother, but Grandma May was with her often, or else one of the female contractors, and her guards were kind enough to see that she didn’t get bored, at least. May herself understood in a general way what was going on, and she was sufficiently terrified for her daughter to stay reasonably sober most days. In any case, her beer ration was kept strictly to a twelve-pack per day. May had been told by the head of the security team that if she tried any funny business, such as trying to remove Ellie or going off to bars and getting drunk and talkative on her own or anything of the kind, the consequences would be negative for all three of them. She and Kicky were never left alone during the supervised visits, nor was she allowed any phone calls, so they had no opportunity to speak privately. All May could do was ask her daughter in a strained voice to take care of herself and be very cautious. Every time Kicky had to leave the motel for the long ride back into the city in an unmarked police car driven by one of the task force detectives, so she could get to work at the cab company on time, her heart sank in despair. She desperately tried to find some way out, some way she could get together with May and Ellie and flee, but she could think of nothing.