The Nature of the Beast

by GM Ford

  Bobby nodded at the bullet in Jackson Craig’s hand. “Apparently that projectile in your hand passed through Special Agent Wald before finding its way to the bottom of a municipal swimming pool in Homewell, Wyoming.”

  He knew better but asked anyway. “They’re certain?”

  Rosen said, “ATF got a flag the minute the local Wyoming cops put the name Bryce Caldwell into the system.” He rolled a wrist to say ‘and so forth’. “Came up U.S.M.S. Witness Protection. ATF took it from there.”

  “And you don’t know where Gilbert and his family are,” Craig asked.

  “Regrettably, no,” Bobby drawled.

  “Assuming the worst regarding Mr. Fowles and his family… “ Rosen began.

  “What say we don’t,” Craig snapped. “Gilbert and his family are out there somewhere. We need to find them before this maniac does.”

  “I understand your concern, Special Agent Craig, but as I’ve explained, nothing is being spared in our efforts to locate Special Agent Fowles and his family,” Rosen assured him.

  Craig turned toward the window in frustration.

  “What now?” Bobby asked.

  “The question is why now?” Craig corrected. “What’s changed?” Craig pressed. “Where has this person been? What’s he been doing for the past five years?”

  “The only thing that changed,” Bobby drawled. “…is your recent request to return to the U.S. of A.”

  “How could this person possibly know that?” Craig asked.

  This time they exchanged a conspiratorial glance.

  “We made a preliminary scan of all relevant data bases,” Bobby said.

  “And?” Craig asked.

  Bobby took a deep breath. “Someone’s been electronically monitoring both your father’s medical condition and your sister’s phone calls.”

  Jackson Craig winced. The fault was his own then. When the two day lag time had proved too much to bear, he’d begun communicating with his sister over her regular phone line. A little voice had told him to stick with Agency protocol, but the company process was so convoluted and cumbersome it made timely decision making nearly impossible. He silently cursed again.

  “Have we identified a source?”

  “They source it from Florida, “ Rosen said. “They’re working on an address.”

  “We’ve got sub-rosa teams on both of them,” Rosen added.

  “Thank you,” Craig said earnestly. “My family didn’t sign up for any of this.” He looked from one man to the other. Each indicated his understanding, in a manner sufficiently tacit as to allow for subsequent denial.

  Despite the hour, cars swarmed over the streets like urban glow worms. He watched the lights. “I want to see the Wyoming crime scene,” Craig said finally.

  “You can’t be serious,” Rosen chortled.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?” Craig asked.

  Rosen was somewhat taken aback. Not used to being spoken to quite so directly, he slid his gaze to Bobby Duggan, hoping for Bobby to smooth a little Southern charm over the widening rift. Instead, Bobby went into aw shucks mode.

  “He’s got a point Dan. It’s his backside in the buckwheat.”

  “There’s no way someone intimately involved with the case could be assigned to participate in the investigation. It violates protocol in more ways than I can count.”

  Craig opened his mouth to disagree, but Bobby beat him to the punch.

  “Perhaps in an advisory mode,” Bobby suggested. “Something of a liaison between the old and the new investigations…I could see…”

  Rosen waved him off. “Absolutely not,” he said.

  Craig clamped his jaw hard, otherwise he would have laughed out loud. Now he was certain. These two were giving him the old ‘good cop-bad cop’ routine. If they hadn’t wanted him here, he wouldn’t be denting Dan Rosen’s carpet. They knew he was coming about five seconds after he got on board the company plane. They could have stopped him anywhere along the way, could have turned the plane around and headed right back to Brussels, but they hadn’t. They’d let him come to LA. The question was: Why bother with the good cop bad cop routine? It just didn’t make sense.

  Jackson Craig never got a chance to press the issue. Bobby walked over and patted him on the shoulder. His drawl was slow and thick as syrup. “It’s either late or early, depending on your perspective,” he said with a wink and a nod. “We can untangle this here thicket in the morning when we’re all fresh as new mown hay.”

  Rosen stayed in character. No…no…he wanted this settled right now…let there be no misunderstandings... Craig kept his mouth shut as Bobby ushered him back into the hall by the elbow.

  He leaned in close. “Good to see you again Jack. I wish the circumstances…”

  Bobby allowed the rest of the sentence to speak for itself.

  Craig hid his annoyance, gave the ops director a non-committal nod and headed for the elevator.

  6

  No reason to be so spooked. Calm down! Everything went just like he’d planned it, right? Right? He’d done his duty. Right? So why did he feel as if his stomach was full of ice cubes that wouldn’t melt? Why were the images in his mind’s eye running at flank speed, making it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything for more than a second or two? He couldn’t make sense of it. His head ached.

  He crossed the room and opened the refrigerator door and then opened and closed it again and again. The opening and closing of the refrigerator went on for the better part of ten minutes before he could force himself to stop. Except for the sound of water in pipes, the building was silent.

  He loved to stand out of sight and listen to what was going on around him. He’d learned by listening. At the coffee shop down on the corner. He’d listened to how they talked to one another. The words they used. The information sent and received the first time they met somebody. People, it turned out, were a set of facts, a name, a job, a neighborhood, Bobby Sue something from so and so town, went to so and so university, graduated in such and such year, worked at some company, drove a certain kind of car, preferred this, hated that, married, single, blah, blah, blah.

  So he’d figured out right away that if he was going to survive on his own, he was going to have to become somebody. Then he saw this cop show on TV about people stealing other people’s identities and he figured if it worked for them it could work for him, so he did what they said.

  He spent a week and a half wandering around the Oak Woods Cemetery. Took a lot of notes. Found graves of people who’d been born about the same time he had, which involved a bit of guesswork since he wasn’t exactly sure when he’d been born.

  Wasn’t quite as easy as they said though. Lots of places wanted proof that you had a right to the document. Others didn’t answer at all. Nearly two dozen requests yielded only Derrik Coleman, whose birth certificate arrived in the mail three weeks later. Just like they said, the rest was easy. Social Security Card. Library card. And before you knew it, he was Derrik Coleman. At least on paper, he was.

  First thing he did was to rent the apartment. He finally had a place where he belonged, which probably explained why, although he knew it was only for a few months, he was having so much trouble leaving for the farm.

  7

  Daniel Rosen paced the room. “You think he bought it?” he asked.

  Bobby made an cynical face. “Not hardly,” he said. “He was on to us about five seconds after we let the plane take off from Brussels.”

  “So what now?”

  “We play it as it lays,” Bobby said. “We send him out to Wyoming. Let him poke around a bit. We can use whatever he does or doesn’t find to plan our next move.”

  “The scene’s already been processed,” Rosen said. “It’s old news.”

  Bobby shook his head. “Jackson has a rather unique way of looking at things. If there’s something to be gleaned from the crime scene that ‘ol boy will glean the hell out of it.” He spread his hands and smiled. “This works for us either way, Da
n. Anything goes wrong--we’ve got a rogue agent on our hands. An agent working outside the chain-of-command who just wouldn’t take no for an answer. If the case reaches a satisfactory conclusion, then we’re all standin in tall cotton.”

  “I’m not sure I liked his attitude,” Rosen groused. “He’s taking this way too personally.”

  “Somebody’s tryin to kill him, Dan,” Bobby said. “In my neck of the woods, that’s just about as personal as things get.”

  “Not to mention that he’s got something personal to prove.”

  “He wants to prove he’s fit for regular duty.”

  Rosen’s brow looked like a plowed field. “A man with something to prove is working for himself. Organizational goals become secondary to his own. You don’t have to be a secret agent to figure that out.” He shook his wiry head. “I don’t like it one goddamn bit,” he said again.

  “Like I said, Dan, one way or ‘t’other, it works for us.” He looked over at his boss and grinned. “If he succeeds, we look good. If he fails, he’s on his own and our other problem goes down with him.”

  Rosen was unconvinced. “From what I read in his file he hasn’t always been in tune with the political sensibilities of the moment.”

  “You can’t send a man out to do the kinds of things we’ve asked of him and then second guess him from afar. It’s just not right. It’s all spur of the moment, split second, life and death decisions. He’s taken two lives in defense of his country. He’s received two Presidential Citations for bravery. What he does is not something anybody can pass judgment on from behind a desk. It just doesn’t work that way.”

  Rosen turned his back. This time in anger. Few things galled him more than being reminded that field work was not his bailiwick. Especially not the work of agents like Jackson Craig, men the details of whose assignments were revealed on a ‘need to know’ basis only, a designation which he would never attain.

  “You’re right,” he conceded. “You’re right.”

  “I tell ya one thing though…” Bobby drawled.

  “What’s that?”

  “I wouldn’t want that son-of-a-bitch lookin for me. I surely wouldn’t.”

  8

  Winter had cropped the cornfields to snow-flecked stubble. Half a dozen crows played hopscotch among the ice-rigid rows, flapping, squawking, bouncing here and there to the brittle clack of their own voices.

  He checked the road again and this time she was there, right on time, half a mile away, slipping the red-white-and-blue government issue Jeep through the ice along the shoulder, stopping only long enough to leave today’s collection of newsletters and seed catalogues and then moving on toward the next set of battered mailboxes. This was as far north as her route took her. From here, she turned around and worked her way back to town.

  He walked to the car, got in and drove slowly down the long gravel driveway. By the time he got to the road, she was nearly upon him. He got out of the car and walked to the edge of the pavement. The U.S. Post Office Jeep sloshed to a stop at his feet.

  He bent and peered inside.

  Harriet Lopresi batted her eyes and peered back.

  “Mornin, Mr. Townsend,” she said brightly.

  He returned both the smile and the greeting. “Could you…you know hang onto my mail for the next few days?” he asked.

  “Sure enough,” she replied.

  He took today’s mail from her hand. “I’ll put the flag up when I get back,” he said.

  “They finally get all that adoption paperwork settled?” she wanted to know.

  “I think so,” he said.

  She bobbed her head up and down. “It’s a heck of a thing you’re doing,” she said. “…a heck of a thing.”

  “No,” was all he could think to say.

  She waved the idea off. “Baloney,” she said. “Takes a special person to do what you’re doing. Lotta people’d find some reason or other why it wasn’t their responsibility. Why somebody else other than them oughta step up and do the right thing.”

  “Pshaaaaw,” he joked.

  “We had more people like you the country wouldn’t be in a mess like this.”

  He turned his face aside. More people like him and she’d be dead.

  9

  Daniel Rosen sat hunched behind a pile of paperwork. Deputy Operations Director Duggan lounged in the far corner of the office, staring out at the LA traffic, seemingly unaware of her presence. Although Audrey had occasionally seen both men on television, she’d never before been in the same room with either of them.

  “We’ve got a problem, Special Agent in Training Williams,” Rosen said, without making eye contact. The ‘P’ word hung in the air like cannon smoke.

  She was a good looking young woman. Tall and tanned. Medium length brown hair with blond highlights. Every bit the stereotypical ‘California Girl, standing at attention in her dark straight-legged jeans and U.S. Secret Service Tee shirt. She was a month from losing her ‘in training’ designation.

  “Problem, sir?”

  By way of an answer, Rosen pulled open his center drawer and came out with a remote control. He pointed the remote at the wall mounted media center. First the TV rolled to black and then to a blank screen and finally to recorded footage. Audrey recognized the scene immediately. Ardmore Avenue, LA. Night before last. The night they raided the Korean counterfeiters and confiscated thirty five million dollars in bogus hundred dollar bills.

  The video was taken from the front window of the house directly across the street. It didn’t take long. The shootout lasted less than four minutes. They watched as Audrey sprinted across a city street, getting off a shot, the Korean gunman going down in a heap. Aid cars everywhere. Lots of hustle and bustle. POV switches to commercial news footage. Camera coming around to the back of an LAFD medical unit.

  There she was again, Special Agent in Training Williams sitting on the back step of the ambulance, right where Special Agent Hansen left her before going inside the house, sipping on her water bottle, running a free hand through her hair. She looked up at the camera just as someone shoved a microphone in her face.

  “Agent...” A hand flipped Audrey’s ID tag over. “Agent Williams,” the voice said. “Can you tell us how all of this could have gone so terribly wrong.”

  “Wrong?” Audrey scoffed, “Nothing went wrong. The good guys won, the bad guys lost. What’s wrong with that?”

  The medic tried to cover the lens of the camera with his hand. “Get out of here,” he intoned in a strong New York accent.

  The camera freed itself. The unseen voice went on. “How so many lives could be affected by…”

  Audrey Williams piped up. “This is what happens when governments like North Korea act like common criminals…like thugs…” Outrage fueled, she went on. Even pronounced Pyongyang right. Twice.

  Bobby Duggan grimaced from his behind his hand.The TV fell dark and silent. Rosen dropped the remote on the desktop.

  “In case you were not aware, Agent Williams, the government of the United States of America is presently engaged in rather delicate negotiations with the government of North Korea on any number of fronts.”

  Special Agent Williams looked him in the eye. “Yes sir.”

  “Such minor matters as nuclear proliferation and the balance of power in Asia.”

  She swallowed hard but kept her mouth shut. Rosen held up a finger. “Also…” he began… “…Agent Williams…” His voice took on a harder tone. “FYI…” Long pause. “This agency does not pay you to voice your personal political opinions. Am I making myself clear, Agent Williams?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “Aaaaand,” Bobby Duggan drawled, “while we appreciate your desire to serve your country, this was not the first occasion where your verbiage has considerably outstripped your professional discretion, now was it?”

  “No sir.”

  “As I recall you told a Panamanian diplomat’s significant other to…” He made quotation marks with his fingers.
“Stop being such a drama queen and shut the fuck up.”

  “The woman was hysterical,” she explained. “She was going to get us all killed.”

  “I’m aware of the circumstances,” Bobby said. “You’ve also had several write-ups regarding what your supervisors considered an attitude bordering on insubordination.”

  Audrey felt her indignation rising. “What I’ve had, sir, are a number of occasions where I’ve objected to being used as a go-fer. Occasions where I’ve been given no surveillance relief for up to eighteen hours at a time. You’ll have to excuse me if I expect to be treated with the same respect as any other agent in training.”

  Her familiar tone and combative attitude brought the conversation to a momentary halt. After a pause, Bobby pushed the moment forward.

  “The Secret Service is a boy’s club, Special Agent Williams,” he said. “Surely you knew that coming in.”

  “I couldn’t have imagined the degree,” she said.

  “Believe it or not, there are those among us who still question the viability of female agents,” Rosen noted.

  “Dinosaurs,” Audrey said quickly. “Time for them to go extinct.”

  The air in the room was alive with tension.

  “I’ve had an Undersecretary of State chewing on my ass all morning,” Rosen groused.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “The State Department wants you reassigned,” he continued.

  “Far from the bright city lights,” Bobby said with a rueful shake of the head. “Somewhere where you won’t be granting any TV interviews.”

  “I understand sir,” she said.

  Trouble was, she didn’t. Not really. She understood that she’d committed an unfortunate breach of discretion but, wasn’t she expected to make a few mistakes? Any sort of censure was new territory for Audrey. She’d always been the girl in the front row with all the answers. She swallowed hard and wondered whether or not she was willing to be reassigned.