The Shadow Priest

by D. C. Alexander

  "Right this way, gentlemen."

  THREE

  How do you want to play this?" Morrison asked Arkin as Cornell led them across the compound toward a small office built into a corner of Egan's massive hangar-like garage where Glen Beckwith, head of Egan's security detail, waited. "Good cop, bad cop?"

  "Doesn't usually work on anti-government types. In fact, I'll bet you a case of beer this guy says 'fuck the federal government' in the first 60 seconds of this."

  "You're on. But what's our approach? I'm up for a bit of theater. How about the two burnouts routine?"

  "But you are a burnout."

  "So?"

  "You can't call it theater if you're just being yourself."

  "Point. But can you hang with it?"

  "What do you mean? I'm as much of a burnout as you are."

  "Right."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "You know what it means."

  "No, I don't believe I do."

  "Come on. Let's get into character."

  "Hold on, hold on," Arkin said, stopping in his tracks.

  "Are you going to argue with me about this? Look at how you're dressed." Silence. They stared at each other. Morrison nodded his head. "Right. So, can you pretend you don't still care? Or is your muse on spring break?"

  More silence. Arkin gave him an irritated stare. "It's autumn."

  "Okay then. Let's go in."

  As they entered, they found Beckwith seated at a table, dressed in what looked like surplus navy blue U.S. Customs BDUs, fiddling with his cellphone. He looked up as they came in. "Who are you?"

  "Mr. Beckwith, these are agents Arkin, Morrison, and Pratt," Cornell said. "They would like to ask you about the events of this morning."

  "Are you feds?"

  "After a fashion, yes," Arkin said.

  "Fuck the government."

  Arkin tried to suppress a grin. "Ah, which government exactly?"

  "The federal government. Fuck the federal government."

  Arkin allowed himself a tight smile as Morrison gave an exaggerated sigh.

  "Really?" Morrison said. "You just cost me a case of beer, asswater. And that's such a clichéd thing to say."

  "Fuck the government."

  "Yeah. Great. Try working for them."

  "I don't have to talk to you assholes. I know my rights."

  Arkin snorted. "Your rights? Oh, well that's good. Did they teach you to say that back at Central Casting?"

  "If you don't talk to us," Morrison said, "how are we going to break this case? And if we don't break the case, we don't get the stat."

  "The what?"

  "The stat, asswater! The stat! Our bonuses, our careers, our lives—all driven by the stats!"

  Arkin and Morrison both lost it, breaking into half-stifled laughter.

  Beckwith stared at them, confused. "Who are you guys with, FBI?"

  "Fuck no," Morrison said. "Those poor sons of bitches work 12-hour days."

  "We're from different agencies," Arkin said. "I work for one you've never heard of. A bureau within the Department of Defense tasked with tracking and prosecuting illegal distribution, possession, and use of military-grade weapons. Agent Morrison here is a jack-booted thug with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And Pratt, in the back, well he's the underutilized and poorly positioned regional representative of an outfit called the Directorate for Counter Intelligence—DCI, for short—a post-9/11 inter-agency counter-terrorism task force that has more or less become permanent. Marginally constitutional charter. Real big brother stuff. It's his outfit that has the deep, dark holes we might drop you down if it suits us. Why Pratt is stationed all the way out here in the Four Corners area, instead of a place like New York or D.C., is anybody's guess. Probably some Colorado senator's idea of a jobs program he can take credit for. Boost those employment numbers."

  "Again," Morrison said, "it's all in the stats."

  "It doesn't matter," Beckwith said. "Ain't talking to you."

  "The thing I can't figure," Arkin said, "is why someone would bother to shoot an irrelevant backwoods bumpkin like Egan?"

  "Because the truth scares people," Beckwith said.

  Arkin smiled mockingly. "The truth?"

  "Egan spoke the truth, Nate," Morrison said matter-of-factly. "How refreshing."

  "Well, there you go," Arkin said, turning to Morrison. "You know what? I've been searching for the truth my whole adult life. And here it was, all along, just down the highway in Cortez, Colorado."

  Beckwith had gone quiet.

  Arkin and Morrison stared at him for a moment, impassive. Then Arkin turned to Morrison. "He isn't supposed to clam up like this."

  "No, you're right."

  "It never went like this in the mock interviews back at the academy."

  "No, it didn't."

  "What are we doing wrong?"

  Beckwith, hearing everything, stared at them.

  "Oh, wait," Morrison said. "Remember, after we introduce ourselves, we're supposed to develop rapport."

  "Rapport?"

  "Chitchat. Find some common ground. That's supposed to prime the interviewee to talk, make him feel comfortable. And it establishes a behavioral baseline so that we know when he starts bullshitting us or whatever."

  "Oh, right. Rapport. Man, we screwed that up already, didn't we? Maybe we should start over."

  "That's a great idea. But how?" Morrison asked.

  "Let me think. Ah! How's your golf game, Mr. Beckwith?"

  "Go fuck yourself."

  "Mine too. Morrison here thinks I'm holding back, not following through in my swing. But I think the bottom line is I'm just not getting out there enough, what with chess club, work, so on and so forth. Spread too thin. Seems like there's never enough time in the day."

  "I ain't talking to you fuckers." Beckwith stared at them.

  "Really?" Arkin said, feigning exasperation. "Even now?" He leaned back in his chair and looked over at Morrison. "I don't think it's working."

  "No."

  "Maybe my paralinguistics are off."

  "Are off, or is off?"

  "Are. Maybe we should try reverse psychology."

  "You mean like say, 'Hey asswater, we don't want to hear what you have to say anyway.'"

  "Something like that."

  "I'm sitting right here," Beckwith said.

  "You don't think he'll figure out that we're trying to play him?"

  Arkin snorted. "This moron? No."

  "Okay, let's try it."

  "Okay."

  "Hey asswater, we don't want to hear what you have to say anyway."

  Beckwith crossed his arms and stared at them, silent, his bugged-out eyes jumping back and forth between them.

  Morrison sighed. "This guy just don't get it."

  "I don't get what?"

  "You aren't reading between the lines," Arkin said. Beckwith squinted. "Sorry for the colloquialism. What I mean is, you're not getting the message—"

  "That we don't give a shit," Morrison blurted.

  "In as many words."

  "We don't fucking care, buddy. Really. Why? We signed on, we drank the Kool-Aid, we waved the flags, we sacrificed for the team, and then we got shit on, time after time, over and over again. So now we're wise. Now we know there's nothing in this for us besides the paycheck. And we get paid whether you talk to us or not." Morrison leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. "But what good will that do you? It won't get you your revenge. And let's be honest—we all know you ain't gonna get revenge on your own. You wouldn't know where to start, would you? You don't even know where the bullets came from. You have a good 40 or 50 million square foot search area out in the dusty scrubland out there. And even if you manage to find the firing position before winter comes, then what? You going to follow the footprints back to Colonel Mustard and Professor Plum?"

  "Who?"

  "Exactly."

  Beckwith was beginning to look disconcerted. "I'm an Afghanistan v
eteran," he said in an almost pleading tone.

  "Yeah. Join the club, dipshit," Morrison said.

  A pained expression flashed across Beckwith's face. Arkin and Morrison both saw it. Time to shift gears. Morrison's voice softened. "We're just fucking with you, man. We fell for it too. You know what got me? It was those awesome commercials they played during halftime. Recon guys jumping out of helicopters and shit." He shook his head and stared at nothing in particular, lost in true memory.

  Reading the man's eyes, Arkin was sure he could tell Beckwith's story with considerable accuracy. As with Morrison, half of Beckwith's personal motive for joining the military probably had to do with wanting to get away from an emotionally unavailable mother and abusive alcoholic of a father, or something along those lines. A turbulent and unpredictable childhood. A wretched home life. Heartbreaking feelings of irrelevance and inadequacy. Beckwith might not be able to recall specifically thinking it, but in his subconscious he probably figured that by signing on that line and putting on that uniform he'd finally get some sort of meaningful control over things—control over his tiny corner of the universe. All that training. All those weapons. All that power. But it didn't work out that way. It never did. Like so many who took that path, he found out, all too soon, that it didn't give him control. To the contrary, all being in combat did was drive home the horrible truth, the terrible secret that there was no escape. That he was still mortal. Still hurtling toward the infinite dark emptiness, just like everybody else.

  They let the silence hang for a few moments. "Where were you based in Afghanistan?" Morrison eventually asked in a tone of comradely interest.

  Beckwith didn't answer.

  "I spent my first and last months at Bagram," Morrison said. "In between, Patrol Base Alcatraz, and some other places nobody has ever heard of. Places with really shitty food. Worse than Bagram. At least Bagram had a Pizza Hut. I must have ate Pizza Hut at least two meals a day for my last three weeks in-country. Got totally constipated. Arkin here, he was somewhere in the, what, Garmsir District somewhere?"

  "Camp Dwyer," Arkin said. "But only for a couple of weeks for gearing up. After that, places nobody has ever heard of. But certainly not Pakistan," he added in a sarcastic tone. "No, sir. That would have been illegal under international law." He winked at Morrison.

  "And the food at Camp Dwyer?"

  "You haven't lived until you've tasted their goat demi-glace."

  Morrison and Arkin exchanged a handful of brief stories about Afghanistan, covering noteworthy episodes of diarrhea, the video games they played while sitting around on base, and the difficulty of getting positive identification on plainclothes enemy combatants during firefights. They observed, in conclusion, that the country was a lost cause, and that the ISAF mission was mostly a giant clusterfuck.

  "At least it was a clusterfuck with Pizza Hut pizza," Morrison said.

  At this, Beckwith grinned weakly. So weakly it was barely noticeable. "Ghazni," he finally mumbled.

  "Huh?"

  "I was at FOB Ghazni."

  "Ghazni," Morrison echoed. "Isn't that where part of the Polish brigade was based? How was the food?"

  Beckwith shrugged.

  "I heard Ghazni had decent food. Probably because Poles know how to cook."

  "Come on," Arkin said. "The DFACs were all supplied and run by the same contractor."

  "Still," Morrison said. "Some of them had cooks who gave a shit, and some didn't."

  "Point."

  Beckwith fidgeted. The defiance had melted from his face, replaced by sadness. Sadness, with hints of regret and, perhaps, of fear. His shoulders were slumped forward.

  "Fuck," he muttered through an exhale, slowly running his fingers through his hair. "Fuck it. Alright. What do you want to know?"

  "Why was your security team here this morning?" Arkin asked.

  "To escort Sam to a meeting with the church leaders. The deacon committee."

  "What time was the meeting scheduled?"

  "10 a.m."

  "At White Road Church"?

  "Yeah."

  "Do they have that same meeting each week?"

  "Every Tuesday and Thursday."

  "Does it always start at 10 a.m., and do you always escort him from here to there?"

  "Always."

  "What's your procedure?"

  "We arrive in the SUVs around 9:30. We bring them into the compound and close the gate. Then we go into the house to share a cup of coffee with the Reverend. He asks us how we're doing. How are families are. Has us update him on our own efforts to bring new followers into the church. Once we're all done, we step out onto the porch at the top of the stairs. I lock the door while the Reverend stands among the other four guys. When the house is secure, we go down the stairs, get into the SUVs and drive to White Road."

  "Are the SUVs armored?"

  "Yes," Beckwith said, clearly surprised to be asked. "Bulletproof glass. Kevlar plates. The works."

  "What other routines do you follow through the week?"

  "None, really. Aside from taking him to White Road for Sunday sermon. Besides that, he usually stays here."

  "Doesn't go out much?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  Beckwith shrugged.

  "Who was he afraid of, Glen?"

  At that, Beckwith bristled. "Afraid?" The resistance returned to his face. He sat up straight, re-crossed his arms and frowned. "Reverend Egan wasn't afraid of anybody."

  "Right. That must be why he had 10-foot-high walls around his house, armored SUVs, and a five-man security detail in a town with two stoplights. Because he was fearless."

  FOUR

  Back in the main house, they watched as Cornell's people continued to process the scene. As they walked through the kitchen, Arkin spotted a pamphlet titled "Countering the Homosexual Threat to the American Family" lying open on the counter with certain passages underlined.

  "I have to hand it to you," Arkin said to Morrison, "reminiscing about Afghanistan to get that idiot to talk was a smart play. I have to quit assuming you're dumb just because you have a southern accent."

  "Yeah, and you almost fucked it up with your pompous reference to demi-glace. Did you see the look he gave you?"

  "I did." Arkin smiled.

  Morrison shook his head. "That guy's a cake from the same old recipe, ain't he?"

  "Nothing like a little ignorance, confusion, and fear to drive the weak-minded into the hands of a guy like Egan."

  "Preach it, brother. Still, he took it pretty well, didn't he? Usually meatheads like him are so desperate to believe that they go ape shit whenever anyone questions their prophet."

  "Amen."

  "We figured out where the other bullet went," a patrolman told Cornell as they entered the dining room.

  "Where?"

  "It hit right here at the edge of this area rug," the deputy said, pointing to a hole in the wood floor at the very edge of a brown bearskin rug, the fur of which nearly obscured it. "Renner found a hatch to the crawlspace in the closet."

  "Is he down there now?"

  "Hell no," Deputy Renner called from another room.

  "Why not?" Cornell shouted back.

  "Look down in there. It's dark and there's all kinds of spider webs and shit."

  "Are you fucking kidding me?"

  "That ain't in my job description. You're the detective."

  They walked to the closet and peered down into the dark square hole of the access hatch.

  "Oh. That is nasty," Cornell said as he peered through dense, dusty cobwebs at a packed earth floor littered with rodent droppings. "Definitely below my pay grade."

  Arkin took off his jacket, pulled a pen light from the breast pocket, held it in his teeth, and began to lower himself down into the hole.

  "You'll ruin your precious shoes, city boy," Morrison said.

  Arkin had to crawl on hands and knees to keep from hitting his head on the floor joists. But in a few moments, he found the hole in the f
loor above, figured the likely trajectory of the bullet, slipped on a pair of latex gloves, and began digging in the dirt and rocks with his hands. The earth was more compact than he expected, and the tips of his gloves soon tore open. Dirt and grit lodged under his fingernails as he went. But five minutes and three ruptured pairs of latex gloves later, Arkin felt the bullet. It was around six inches deep. After loosening the earth around it, he drew it out with his fingertips. Hello there, my little friend. There was no doubt it was .50 caliber, intact and seemingly pristine enough to bear general rifling characteristics that might be of use in eventually identifying the gun from which it was fired. Where did you come from?

  *****

  Soon they were back on the front porch looking out over the surrounding land. At the nearest hillock, a couple of Cornell's people were searching for the sniper's firing point.

  "Look, he's at it again, Pratt," Morrison said, gesturing to Arkin who was staring into the distance. "He has his all-seeing eyes turned on. Lord knows what he's really seeing."

  "I think they're going to have to search farther out," Arkin said.

  "Why do you say that?" Cornell asked. "Wouldn't the sniper have wanted to be as close in as possible for accuracy?"

  "There's very little cover where they're searching, and the land slopes toward us. One of Egan's security people probably would have spotted the guy if he were positioned right there. Perhaps even before Egan was shot, while the killer was setting up and observing. Plus, that's only, what, maybe 400 yards out?"

  "So?"

  "With the right equipment, a good sniper can work from thousands of yards farther out."

  "Thousands?"

  "In March of 2002, in Afghanistan, a corporal of the 3rd Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry fired a .50 BMG round from a McMillan Tac-50 sniper rifle, scoring a kill on a Taliban combatant from 2,657 yards away, breaking the previous world distance record held by an American Marine."

  "No shit?" Cornell said.

  "Who's Princess Patricia?" Morrison said.

  "How do you remember details like that?" Pratt asked, shaking his head.

  "He sucks down Omega-3 fish oil like you suck down fruit punch or whatever fruity, kiddy thing it is that you drink," Morrison said.