by Brad Taylor
“As opposed to what?”
“The fucking truth, that’s what.”
2
Present Day
Joshua Bryant saw the seat belt light flash and knew they had just broken through ten thousand feet. Time to shut off his iPod, but more importantly, it was his turn in the window seat.
Only fifteen years old, his passion in life was airplanes and his singular goal was to become a pilot—unlike his younger sister, who only wanted the window to aggravate him. She’d complained as they had boarded, and his mother had split the difference. She got the window for takeoff, and he got it for landing.
“Mom, we’re coming into final approach and it’s my turn.”
His sister immediately responded, “No we’re not! He’s just talking like he knows what’s going on.”
Joshua started to reply when the pilot came over the intercom, telling them they had about ten more minutes before parking at their gate in Denver. Joshua smiled instead, just to annoy her. She grouched a little more but gave up her seat.
After buckling up, he pressed his face against the glass, looking toward the wing jutting out three rows up, watching the flaps getting manipulated by the pilot. The aircraft continued its approach and he saw the distinctive swastika shape of Denver International Airport.
A flight attendant came by checking seat belts at a leisurely pace, then another rushed up and whispered in her ear. They both speed-walked in the direction of the cockpit, the original flight attendant’s face pale.
Joshua didn’t give it much thought, returning his attention to the window. He placed his hands on either side of his face to block the glare and began scanning. On the ground below he saw a small private plane taxiing. With as much conscious thought as someone recognizing a vegetable, he knew it was a Cessna 182.
The Boeing 757 continued to descend and began to overtake the Cessna. Strangely, the Cessna continued taxiing. With a start, Joshua realized it had taken off, directly underneath them. He watched it rise in slow motion, closing the distance to their fragile airship.
He turned from the window and screamed, “Plane! An airplane!”
His mother said, “What?”
The Cessna collided with the left wing just outside the engine, a jarring bump as if the 757 had hit a pocket of turbulent air. Passengers began to whip their heads left and right, looking for someone to explain what had happened.
Twenty feet of wing sheared off as the Cessna chewed through the metal like a buzz saw, exploding in a spectacular spray of metal confetti, followed by a fuel-air ball of fire.
Joshua knew the wing would no longer provide lift. Knew they were all dead.
He was the first to scream.
The aircraft yawed to the left, seeming to hang in the air for the briefest of moments, then began to plummet to earth sideways. The rest of the passengers joined Joshua, screaming maniacally, as if that would have any effect on the outcome.
The fuselage picked up speed and began to spin, the centrifugal force slapping the passengers about, one minute right side up, the next upside down, filling the cabin with flying debris.
Four seconds later, the screams of all one hundred and eighty-seven souls ceased at the exact same moment.
3
Three Days Ago
“They’re here. I just heard the door open and close.”
Even though the door in question was to the adjacent hotel room, the man whispered as if they could hear him as clearly as he could them.
“Jack, for the last time, as your editor, this is crazy.”
“You didn’t say that when I began.”
“That was before you started playing G. Gordon Liddy at the Watergate!”
Jack heard voices out of the small speaker on the desk and said, “I gotta go. Stay near your phone in case I need help.”
He heard “Jack—” but ended the call without responding.
He checked to make sure the digital recorder was working, then leaned in, waiting on someone to appear on the small screen. The thin spy camera had slipped out of position just a bit, making the room look tilted.
A hefty Caucasian sat down in view, wearing jeans and a polo shirt that was a size too small. The contact.
Another man began speaking off camera, in flawless English with a slight Spanish accent, which, given what Jack was investigating, was to be expected. The words, however, were not. Nothing the man said had anything to do with the drug cartels or America. It was all about technology.
Eventually, the contact spoke. Jack leaned in, willing him to say what he wanted to hear. Wanting to believe his insane risk had been worth it.
He, also, said not a word about drugs, but blathered on about the right of the masses to digital technology and the developed-world governments’ undying interest in monopolizing information.
Jack rubbed his eyes. What the hell is this all about? Who gives a shit about information flow?
The guy sounded like an anarchist, not a connection for the expansion of the Sinaloa drug cartel into America. The contact droned on about his ability to free up information, then said something that caused Jack to perk up. He mentioned the US Air Force in Colorado Springs.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Colorado Springs was just outside Denver and was the American crossroads for the Interstate 10 drug corridor leading out of El Paso, which passed right by the hotel he was now in. Running straight up until it connected with US Interstate 25, the corridor branched left and right at Colorado Springs, into the heartland of the United States. The future battleground he was trying to prove was coming.
Jack leaned in, straining to catch every word, but most had nothing to do with drugs, or Mexico, or anything else he was investigating. He sat back, disgusted and angry that he’d paid the informant who led him to this meeting. Angry at the risk he had taken. Something bad was going on, but it wasn’t anything he cared about.
Wasted money. Wasted time.
Through the speaker, he heard the door open again, not really listening anymore, cataloging how he could reconnect with his sources and informants. Trying to figure out how he could get back on the pulse of his story.
A voice in Spanish splayed out, begging for mercy. The sound punctured his thoughts, not because of the words, but because of the terror, the cheap acoustics doing nothing to mask the dread. Jack stared at the screen, but the man remained outside the scope of the lens. He begged for his life, the fear seeping through like blood from a wound. On camera, the American contact had his hands in the air, his mouth slack, clearly unsure what was going on. Jack heard his own name and felt terror wash over him like an acid bath.
Jesus Christ. It’s the desk clerk. He’s sold me out.
He slammed the lid to the digital recorder closed and shoved it under the bed, then grabbed the speaker and yanked it out of its connection to the wireless receiver. He threw it in the bathroom, then fumbled for his phone, his hands shaking, looking for a way out that wasn’t the door. He realized there was none. Realized he’d made a catastrophic mistake.
He pulled up speed dial and hit a button. The phone went straight to voice mail. He shouted, “Andy, Andy, I’m in trouble. I’m in big trouble. Where the fuck are you?”
The door burst open and he remained standing, the phone trembling in his hand. Two men entered, both pointing pistols at him. He shouted, “No, no, no!” throwing his arms into the air. One snarled in Spanish, and he feigned ignorance. The other said in English, “Get on your knees. Now.”
He did so, the fear so great he thought he would pass out. He’d studied the Mexican drug cartels for over four years, seeing the savagery they would inflict on those who attempted to thwart them, and in no way did he want to provoke their ire any more than he had.
They handcuffed him with efficiency, no outward abuse, no punches or smacking just because they could, which d
id nothing but raise his alarm. They weren’t local thugs. They were trained and had done this many times before. He began calculating what he could do. How long he had. He knew they wouldn’t kill him here, in El Paso. The drug trade was vicious, violent beyond the average human’s comprehension, but it still wasn’t here. They’d move him, which meant some time. At least a day while they tried to get him across the border, to Ciudad Juárez, where they could torture him freely.
One day. Twenty-four hours. He looked at his watch and saw the seconds begin to disappear.
4
I opened the door and felt like I needed an oxygen mask from the smoke spilling out, the nightclub so full of fumes from cigarettes that I was having a hard time seeing five feet.
Guess this place hasn’t heard of the secondhand dangers.
I felt Jennifer recoil and pulled her inside. Sometimes you get to play baccarat at Monte Carlo in a tuxedo, sometimes you have to belly up to a smoke-infested bar in Turkmenistan. Story of my life.
The room reminded me of the bar at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones met up with his ex-girlfriend. A bunch of burly men and raunchy woman yelling and shouting at each other. All I needed to do was get Jennifer to challenge some big-ass bear of a man to a vodka-drinking contest, and the image would be complete.
Sotto voce, Jennifer said, “This place looks like the cantina in Star Wars.”
I chuckled and said, “Wrong movie. Come on. We’ve got thirty minutes before the meet. Let’s see if we can blend in that long.”
We found a table in the corner, and I checked my phone, seeing I had lost service yet again. The cellular infrastructure inside Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, was pathetic to say the least. It was making our surveillance effort very difficult, but in truth no harder than it had been for our commando forefathers who worked through the Cold War. It just meant we had to go old-school.
I keyed the radio strapped to my leg and leaned into Jennifer, as if I was talking to her. “Knuckles, you staged?”
“Yes. We got a box. You send the photo and trigger, and we’ll do the rest.”
“Roger all.”
Jennifer glanced at her watch and said, “This guy is cutting it close.”
“I know. He’s not stupid. He’s aware of the curfew, and he’s going to use it.”
Nobody was allowed to walk around after eleven at night in the capital, but really that was a crapshoot. A lot of people did, and the police then usually picked on the westerners to fleece for bribes. Or other unsavory things. There had been reports of them arresting women, taking them to jail, then extorting sexual favors. It would make a surveillance effort after the witching hour very, very hard.
“What if he doesn’t show? Are we going to push it and try again tomorrow or head to Gonur?”
“We still have forty-eight hours. One more night. If he doesn’t show then, we’re leaving for Gonur. We can’t blow off the contract. This was just a freebie anyway.”
Gonur was a four-thousand-year-old archeological site set in the middle of the Kara-Kum desert, and we, as the proud owners of a company called Grolier Recovery Services, had been hired to help a team of experts take a look at the dig. Well, at least that’s what the government of Turkmenistan thought.
In reality, we were a cover corporation using counterterrorist operators as employees, all working for an organization so removed from the traditional US defense and intelligence infrastructure it didn’t even have a real name. We simply called it the Taskforce, and it had sent us to Turkmenistan to identify a wealthy Saudi Arabian who was funding the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, our cover took precedence over the mission, so if we didn’t locate the contact, we were looking at spending a few days sweating in the desert. Something Jennifer would love. She enjoyed anything and everything dealing with old crap.
She waved her hand in front of her face, trying to clear the smoke, while she surveyed the bar, looking for our linkage target. She said, “I can’t believe Pedro would meet a rich Saudi in this dump. Why not in a mosque? Or any number of coffee shops? The intel seems off to me.”
Pedro was our nickname for a terrorist affiliated with the IMU. He was all set to be removed from the playing field in Uzbekistan when the Taskforce learned he was meeting a contact in Ashgabat. They decided to see if we could identify the contact, implant a collection device in his personal effects, and try to swim upstream to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with the end state being identification of the money man.
I said, “The mosques here are all owned by the government. In fact, the government monitors everything here, like it’s still part of the Soviet Union. He’d need someplace noisy. Someplace that self-defeats the bugs all over this damn country.”
Which was why we wouldn’t be doing anything overt against Pedro. Much easier to take him down when he returned to Uzbekistan. Our mission was pure snoop and poop. No high adventure.
I went to the bar, happy to see a smattering of Europeans, including one old couple clearly forcing themselves to enjoy the “culture.” Jennifer and I wouldn’t stand out. I got a couple of glasses of hot tea, and by the time I had returned to the table, Jennifer said, “Pedro’s at the door.”
I casually glanced that way and saw him, our linkage target. He was swarthy, with a full head of chestnut hair and a red beard that looked like a briar patch. Dressed in a striped shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the tails hanging out over a pair of black slacks made of rough cloth, he looked like every other regular. He glanced around, locked on something, then began walking toward our three o’clock. I followed his line of march and saw a single man sitting at a table smoking a cigarette. Bingo.
“Jennifer, you see where he’s headed?”
“Yeah, yeah, I got him.”
“It’ll be your camera.”
We each had a covert digital setup embedded in our clothing—me in the upper shoulder of my jacket, and Jennifer in a brooch on her chest, the battery pack, brains, and Bluetooth transmitter hidden in our clothing. We’d purposely sat at ninety degrees to each other to give us complete coverage of the room. If he had gone toward the nine o’clock, I’d have been getting the picture.
The cameras were digital marvels controlled by our smartphones. They had limited optical zoom but a very, very good digital zoom complete with digital stabilization. The hard part had been getting the things to line up naturally to what we wanted to see, as my jacket kept shifting when I sat down, and Jennifer, believe it or not, couldn’t get the thing to aim level because of the swell of her breast. After screwing around with them for a while, we’d managed to figure it out.
Jennifer brought out her phone and began working it, the image from the camera fed to it via Bluetooth. I waited to confirm the man was Pedro’s contact, then began relaying to Knuckles as a backup to the photo.
“Knuckles, Pike. Zulu One located. Prepare to copy description.”
After a few seconds, I heard, “Send it.”
“Dark top, black, possibly blue. Long-sleeve, button-front. No jacket. Sleeves rolled completely down. Youngish, twenty-five to thirty. Hawklike face, long nose. Swarthy—looks Saudi. Long hair down to his collar, but well kept. Looks long on purpose, not because he can’t afford a barber. Small mustache but clean chin. No outstanding identifying marks. Sort of looks like Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia.”
Jennifer, working the digital zoom, looked up and said, “He doesn’t look anything like Jake Gyllenhaal. What an insult.”
I keyed my radio. “Correction. Apparently Jake is much, much more attractive. Stand by for photo.”
Jennifer fiddled with her phone for a second longer, then nodded at me.
My radio crackled to life and I heard, “This guy doesn’t look a damn thing like Jake Gyllenhaal, except for the hair.”
Jennifer grinned, and I said, “Sue me. You guys collapse in?�
�
“Yeah, we’re set.”
I saw Jennifer scrunch her eyebrows, still looking at her phone. I glanced at Jake and Pedro, but they weren’t doing anything suspicious.
“What’s up?”
“My phone just picked up a signal. I have a missed call and a voice mail.”
“Who in the world is calling you in Turkmenistan?”
“Jack. My brother Jack.”
5
The desk clerk, a trembling, rail-thin man of about sixty, was brought in and slammed into the wall next to Jack. Behind him a dapper man in a business suit entered, taking a seat. The original hard-asses both remained standing. All four were of Hispanic origin.
The gunslingers stayed mute. In Spanish, the dapper man said, “Who do you work for?”
Jack feigned ignorance again, saying, “I don’t speak Spanish.”
In English, the dapper man said, “You may call me Carlos. Please, tell me why you are here.”
Holding nothing back, knowing it might help him survive, Jack said, “I’m a reporter for the Dallas Morning Star. My editor knows where I am and will be looking for me. It does you more harm than good to hurt a reporter inside America, and I swear I didn’t hear anything incriminating.”
Carlos turned to one of the gunslingers. “His phone?”
The man passed it over, and Carlos checked the call log. “What did you tell the man on the other end of this phone?”
“Nothing,” Jack said. “It went to voice mail. All I said was I was in trouble. I swear I haven’t heard anything.”
Looking at the number, Carlos said, “Then why would you feel you were in trouble?”
“Because of who you are. What you represent.”
Carlos squinted at the phone, then said, “This isn’t a Dallas area code. Who did you call?”
Confused, Jack said nothing, unsure if Carlos was trying to trick him. Carlos held out the phone, allowing Jack to read the number. His heart sank deeper into the void. Andy isn’t going to do anything.