by Mason Cross
That was when the second fire broke out. This one was in the cab, where she could still see the two agents. She ran for the door, gun still in her right hand, and tugged at the handle. It was locked. Two agents caught up with her and wasted another second trying the handle again.
“It’s locked. Wardell’s on the other side. Go!” she yelled, directing one of the agents. He looked confused, but only for a second, then moved away from the burning cab. Banner could see the two men inside writhing as the flames leapt around them. She could smell burning flesh and hair. The other agent punched through the side window, bare-fisted. The flames lit up his face, showing an expression of panic. He reached in and got the door open. Burning gasoline ran out over the sill like lava. Banner and the other agent leapt back. The man in the driver’s seat toppled out as the heat contracted the muscles in his body again, shifting his position. The burning body landed faceup on the grass. There was a dark entrance wound in the center of his forehead. Banner felt something almost like relief for the dead man.
All of a sudden, other people were swarming around. Somebody had a foam fire extinguisher and sprayed the flames out.
“What the hell?”
“What happened?”
“How’d it . . . ?”
“Something from the house?”
“You okay?”
Banner felt anger, wanted to yell, What took you so fucking long? at the others, even though she knew that only a few seconds had passed since she’d first noticed the man on the roof of the command center.
The agent she’d sent after Wardell reappeared from around the side of the command unit, shaking his head.
“Anything?” Banner asked.
“Yeah,” the agent said, beckoning. “Come see this.”
Banner moved around to the other side of the command center, a few of the other men breaking off to follow her. The first agent was there, pointing up at something on the side.
“Looks like you winged him.” He was pointing at a smear of blood down the blue and gray paint of the big vehicle. Banner looked at the smear, then the ground below it. There were no obvious pools of blood on the grass, which meant Wardell might not be wounded too badly. A pity, but it was something. From here, it was a mere twenty feet to the trees.
“Go,” Banner said, but she didn’t have to. The men who’d followed her around were already running for the woods. A couple of them had flashlights.
“Medic! Need a medic over here!”
Banner turned around to tell whoever was yelling that the two men were way beyond medical help. Then she realized the shout had rung out from farther away, closer to the house. One of the agents was crouched next to a body lying less than ten yards from the burning house. She ran toward them, holding up an arm to block the intense heat from her face. She reached them and looked down at the man on the ground. It was Castle, and he was in a bad way. The shirt under his vest was so soaked with blood that it was impossible to tell how many wounds there were. Banner loosened the straps on the vest and ripped the shirt open. Looked like a gunshot, definitely. She shucked her own jacket off and bunched it up, used it to put pressure on the wound. Castle winced and his eyes flickered open.
“We’re going to get you out of here,” Banner said. “Just hang on, Castle. Hang on, you stubborn bastard.”
She thought she saw the ghost of a smile on his lips. It gave her hope. She kept talking. “Where’s Blake?”
With painful effort, Castle raised his left hand a little at the wrist and three fingers and a thumb dropped down a little. It took Banner a second to realize he was trying to point.
He was pointing in the direction in which Caleb Wardell had fled.
48
12:36 a.m.
The chilled, rain-damp night air sucked in and out of my lungs as I ran between the trees. After the burning house, it was beautiful. The rain was still falling fast and hard, but the woods afforded some shelter from the deluge. Wardell was up ahead of me. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him as he crashed through the undergrowth. Brilliant white light sliced through the tree cover and swept in front on me in a wide beam, and I realized Banner or somebody else had called in the helicopters. That was good and bad: good because it meant somebody besides me had seen Wardell escape into the woods, bad because I wasn’t betting on them being able to distinguish between the two armed men running in the same direction.
About thirty feet ahead I saw the shape of a man leap an obstruction and then seemingly vanish into the earth, suggesting the ground dropped away beyond. The undergrowth was thick and the going slow; it took me longer than I’d have liked to reach the obstruction—it was the thick trunk of a fallen tree, and sure enough, there was a forty-five-degree incline beyond it. I braced myself on the trunk and felt something tacky in the wetness. Blood. I raised my fingers to my face to try to confirm it, and that’s when I heard the click of a handgun being cocked.
“Drop it.”
The FBI agent who’d spoken was six feet from my face, the muzzle of his Glock 23 a good deal closer.
“I’m with the—” I began.
“I said drop it, asshole.”
I did as I was told, opening my fingers and letting the Beretta drop to the forest floor. I looked at the agent. I didn’t recognize him. Maybe that didn’t mean much. At night, in a dark blue FBI-branded raincoat and matching baseball cap, everyone looks pretty much identical: man or woman, black or white. But it also meant I couldn’t rule him out as being with the thin man.
“I’m with the task force,” I said.
“Hands on your head, asshole.”
I complied. “You know, my name isn’t actually ass—”
“Shut up.”
“The man you want is down there. He’s getting away.” The agent opened his mouth, no doubt to either tell me to shut up again or call me an asshole again, or possibly both, so I cut him off. “Call it in, Agent. Talk to Banner. My name’s Blake, I’m a civilian adviser. I’m on your side.”
The agent’s eyes narrowed and he tightened his grip on his Glock. Then, carefully, he took his left hand off the gun, reached for his cell phone, and hit a couple of buttons without averting his gaze one millimeter from me.
“It’s Riley. I got somebody. No, it’s not the target. Get me Agent Castle.”
That made my mind up. By the time the guy at the other end of the call went looking for Castle, discovered he was out of the action, found Banner, and she managed to convinced him I wasn’t the enemy, Wardell would be in the next state.
A lot of people think a gun will go off if the guy holding it flinches. That’s not true, not with modern firearms. The standard FBI-issue Glock 23 for example, like the one that was pointed at my head, has three separate safety mechanisms to prevent accidental discharge: an external integrated trigger safety, a firing pin safety, and a drop safety. A lot of safety, in other words.
That means it takes conscious thought to squeeze the trigger, not to mention resolve. All in all, there’s a lot less effort involved in knocking somebody’s gun aside, especially when you’re dealing with a law-enforcement practitioner who’s been trained up to the eyeballs to make sure there’s a clear threat before firing. The most important thing is not to telegraph the action. So I didn’t. I just kept eye contact with the agent, kept breathing regularly, then opened my mouth as though I were going to say something else.
Then I just reached out and punched his wrist out of the way. Before he could readjust, I grabbed the gun with both hands and twisted it down. I felt the bone in his finger snap on the trigger guard. As he opened his mouth to cry out in pain, I yanked the gun out of his hand and slammed my right elbow into his nose. The guy went down as emphatically as the Titanic, and a whole lot quicker. I tossed the gun deep into the pines, retrieved my own from the ground, then put my left hand onto the fallen tree and vaulted over and onto the incline.<
br />
I scrabbled down the slope, trying to balance speed with some regard for safety. It wasn’t easy in the dark; the pines dotting the slope blotted out the sky as effectively as a blackout blind, and I realized why they were called the Black Hills. I could barely make out the ground, never mind what was ahead of me. The incline suddenly became more pronounced, and any control over my speed of descent evaporated. All of a sudden I was running full tilt. And then the inevitable happened: My foot landed on a loose rock, which gave way and sent me tumbling face-first. I brought my arms up around my head as I hit the ground and kept falling. I grabbed around for purchase on a root, a bush, some grass . . . anything to slow my fall. My right side impacted off something large and unyielding—had to be a tree. It knocked the wind out of me but absorbed some of my momentum. The fingers of my right hand brushed against the leaves of a bush, and I closed my fist around a handful of it. The handful ripped away, but I was moving slower again. I was able to roll onto my back and use my heels and my palms to brake. I caught my breath and looked down.
About twenty feet below me, the trees stopped and the slope leveled out. There was a little more light down there, and I could make out what looked like some kind of weird rock formation in a clearing. I wiped raindrops and sweat from my eyes and took a moment to check myself for injuries. I had an impressive collection of cuts and scrapes, my shirt was ripped in several places, and my side hurt like a son of a bitch, but other than that, I was okay.
I picked my way down the remainder of the slope and emerged into the clearing. I realized that what I’d been looking at wasn’t a rock formation at all, but a graveyard. A very old graveyard, by the looks of it. I thought back to earlier, when I’d looked at the house plans, which had included a map of the surrounding area. I remembered seeing something about an old gold mining town, now long gone. At least, the town itself was long gone. Evidently, its dead remained.
I squinted my eyes and peered ahead into the dark. It looked like the clearing occupied a natural plateau on the hillside. Uneven rows of subsiding and fallen headstones marched ahead for a couple of hundred yards before the pines closed in once more. There was a dirt track on the other side that disappeared down a farther slope, probably leading to was left of the mining town. I cast a glance back at the upper slope and realized it had damned near turned into a cliff at the point I’d fallen. It would take Banner’s people a while either to find another way down or to rustle up rappelling equipment. That meant there was no point waiting for backup, even if waiting for backup had been my style.
I began my advance toward the dirt track. The rain washed down unabated, turning the earth under my feet to sludge. I thought about the hundred-year-old remains six feet beneath me. I put my hand on a moss-covered marker to steady myself, and my breath caught in my throat as a figure stepped from behind a large monument at the far side of the graveyard.
Wardell. Fifteen feet away. Close enough to speak to without raising my voice, too far to do anything about the rifle that was pointed at my head.
“Evening, partner,” he said. His voice contained both tiredness and pain, but also something that sounded like camaraderie. “Persistent, ain’t you?”
49
12:40 a.m.
It was him: the man from the cabin. Wardell had known it would be, instinctively, when he’d heard the sounds of somebody crashing down that hill. Nobody on a fixed salary would risk following him down that lethal slalom on foot. He was pleased to see that he didn’t appear to have any serious injuries. A man this interesting didn’t deserve to go out breaking his neck in a fall. Wardell kept the Remington 700 trained on him, ready to put a round through his right eyeball. So why didn’t he? Because he wanted to know who he was first. That was harmless enough, wasn’t it? He’d have to kill him soon, before the feds had a chance to catch up, but they had a little time before that.
“Nice weather for ducks, huh?” he said.
The other man just shrugged in acknowledgment. He hadn’t put his hands up, hadn’t tried to beg or bargain. “We’re going to talk about the weather?”
Wardell felt a flash of déjà vu at the sound of the man’s voice. It seemed familiar somehow. Or was it the situation that felt familiar? Doubtful: Most of his targets were never aware that he had them in his sights, so this setup was a little out of the ordinary.
“Good to meet you again,” he said. “Name’s Caleb Wardell.”
The other man smiled thinly. “I know.”
“Then you have me at kind of a disadvantage, partner.”
“And here was me thinking it was the other way around.”
“Point taken.” Wardell chuckled. “What’s your name, soldier?”
“Carter Blake.”
“You’re not one of them.”
“I’m not one of them,” Blake agreed.
“I know you, don’t I?”
“We’ve met.”
“Refresh my memory.”
Blake stared at the muzzle of Wardell’s rifle. “This situation was the other way around last time.”
Wardell’s mouth broke into a wide grin. Of course. Now he remembered. Mosul—right after he’d scragged all of those locals. Although it had led to his exit from the military, the episode bore nothing but fond memories for him. A dozen kills: a satisfying mix of distance shots and up-close action. Tying it up with the hit on Rassam had been smart—a legitimate target in the mix turned the civilians into straight collateral damage, gave him the freedom to go as far as he liked. Later, in Chicago, he had never been able to let himself so completely off the leash before they caught him.
“Get out of here! I knew I recognized that uptight face. I bet you’re wishing things had turned out different last time, huh?”
Blake said nothing.
Wardell nodded, remembering. Thinking about the nonuniformed man who’d appeared out of nowhere and interrupted his work, stopped him from going house to house looking for more victims. “You weren’t with them then either, as I recall. So what? Bounty hunter? Spook, maybe? You with Christians in Action?”
Blake shook his head. “Exterminator. They call me in when there’s a vermin problem.”
Wardell ignored that, flicked his eyes up at the hill and back. “How long do you reckon we have?”
“Not long.”
“Pity. You want to know something funny, Blake?”
Blake said nothing.
“I wish I didn’t have to shoot you. You were starting to make this interesting.”
“I can understand that,” Blake said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’d imagine it gets boring after a while, shooting unarmed twelve-year-olds and octogenarians.”
Wardell paused. Spoke more quietly. “And unarmed exterminators. Don’t forget those, partner.”
“Why do you do it?” Blake said. He was just playing for time, obviously. Why did you do it? had been the most frequently asked question of Wardell after his arrest. He’d never given anybody an answer to it before. But now? Why not? It wouldn’t take so very long.
“You ever hear the name ‘Juba’?”
Blake used his thumb and index finger to sweep water from the bridge of his nose. Seemed to consider the question. Then he simply said, “Sure.”
“And?”
“Juba was the insurgency’s very own Baron von Richthofen. Some kind of supersniper. They say he never missed. He popped up everywhere: Baghdad, Falluja, Mosul, Basra. Took out dozens of coalition troops. Came out of nowhere and vanished back into the desert like a ghost. Or a demon. One shot, one kill.”
“Not bad, Blake. Not bad at all.”
“There was only one problem with Juba.”
“Do tell.”
“It was all bullshit. There was no Juba. No unfailing, supernatural assassin. It was a PR thing—every time the bad guys managed to bag one of our people, t
hey credited it to Juba. Built the legend of this ghost killer. Probably worked reasonably well to inspire their own people, the more impressionable ones at least. They released videos of some of the shootings, the way they always do. The guy playing Juba changed more times than James Bond.”
Wardell laughed out loud. He didn’t let his rifle muzzle waver, of course. “Very good, Blake. Very good. I’m really going to miss you. I mean that.”
“So that’s what it’s about? You think you’re Juba?”
“Juba was bullshit, Blake. You’re one hundred percent right about that. But all the same, there was something about it, you know? The legend. Your experienced grunts never bought into it, of course. Some of the new guys, though . . . you could see it in their eyes even when they laughed it off. There was a little bit of fear there. Just a little bit, but it was real. Like they were trading ghost stories over the campfire.”
“Ghost stories,” Blake repeated. Still keeping him talking. Wardell didn’t mind that. He was enjoying this. It was a shame it would have to end soon.
“Yeah,” Wardell said, his mind drifting to the cold, arid darkness of a desert night. “Of course, I never could believe it, not even from the start. Not just because I wasn’t a rookie. Juba was supposedly operating in my area of professional expertise, so to speak, so I could never feel it like those younger guys did. Or like the rank-and-file insurgents must have. But right from the beginning, I kind of loved the idea.”
“The idea of a boogeyman.”
“Exactly. I started thinking, in a weird way, it would almost be nice if it were true. You know what I mean?”
A wide grin broke out on Blake’s face, and Wardell thought for a second that he got it, that here was a true kindred spirit. “Wardell, I have absolutely no goddamn clue what you mean.”
Wardell nodded, disappointed but not entirely surprised. “No. No, you really wouldn’t, would you? Anyway, I got to thinking: If it worked for the insurgents, and if it made some of the guys on our side a little scared, what would it be like to do that back home? I mean it’s so simple: You pick a city, and you kill a few people, and all of a sudden, you’re—”