I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2

by Mike Bogin

  Memory and contemplation were the challenges. He was built for the opposite of inaction. Filling time, endless time, was much worse than humping sixty pounds plus across a mountain ridge with his fist gripped around thirty-one pounds of steel Barrett. He imagined the feel of his fingers on the strings of his guitar. He tried playing air guitar to squeeze the sounds from each note. He failed.

  He tried to picture Captain Sam sitting on the thick grass under the shade of their tree, the hundred-year-old oak with its foot-thick branches spreading fifty feet around the gnarled trunk. But he had no control of the images that popped into his mind. Too often, he pictured the kid in the red Manchester United shirt.

  He sometimes pictured his dad, Jack, too. He had been keeping Jack afloat for fifteen years, depositing half his army pay into Jack’s checking account and his dad went through his daily routine never noticing. What was Jack doing now? Stop working for free, Jack! Invoice a customer, why don’t you! There he was, in the white overalls, chaining the white panel van, coming up the steps into the little white bungalow, walking into the white living room with two slices of Wonder bread and a glass of milk and sitting down on the couch until he falls asleep in front of the TV.

  Remembering is hard. Memories need to be taken out in the fresh air. They need to breathe. Spencer tried to remember junior high and high school. The whole six years from his mother’s death through leaving that house was close to bland, a random array of black and white fragments without adjectives or verbs, colorless and stuck.

  Inside the gray walls, it became a struggle to bring color to anything. He already knew the gray walls well enough to spot faces, a dog, even rocket ships in the lines where the concrete had cured. He searched his palms, trying to remember which wrinkle was his lifeline and hoping it wasn’t long.

  *****

  He need to initiate routines, hours-long workouts that incorporated the micro-exercises he trained himself to do while he was hiding, waiting sometimes for two days before his target appeared or he broke off. Exercise had always sustained him.

  Working out from his toes to his neck and everything in between, including his entombed legs, Spencer pushed himself despite the mind-numbing pain. He was able to roll onto his stomach now, wincing but not crying out. His left thumbnail had worked inside the laminated ply on the underside of the sleeping pallet until the end of his thumb was entirely a giant blister. It was worth it to him; he could feel it beginning to yield, feel the sharp corner point as the layers peeled back.

  His interrogator was under stresses of his own. Spencer could sense that in Texas’ tone. He considered the implications, weighing the potential of victory against the unknowns that would come if he defeated his immediate captor. The next man would be worse.

  He gave up Eagle Arms, the place where he sourced his weapons at the gun shows. He explained Sands Point in detail, right down to the oyster beds and the birthday cake. They already knew about the kidney, about his PEB, about the $32,000.

  But he would never give them Captain Sam.

  American-style mess hall food. Clean shoes. Clean uniforms. Clean water inside the toilet bowl. Consistent, reliable electricity. U.S. facility. Except when they used it tactically, the temperature was a constant, probably close to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Spencer dismissed anything in East Asia, where consistency was always suspect and U.S. facilities commitments were few and far between. East Asia meant humidity, but the cell was bone dry. That dryness reduced the likelihood of Colombia, too. Removing Asia and Latin America left Africa (Oman, Morocco), and Eastern Europe (Poland, Romania, the Baltics). Mexico was too unstable. Too much focus on narcotics trafficking to be prime as a black ops site. Low profile, high security—a small facility. Where? Everyone he had seen or heard was U.S.; wouldn’t they use locals in Eastern Europe? Oman would not expect or demand local employment. Dry climate, established U.S. support facilities, stable government, and no questions asked. Oman?

  Every single one of the probable locations added language variables on top of the thousand other unknowns. Was the prison inside a city? Was he miles away from every other building? Did they truck in supplies or fly them? He had sat the controls of helicopters twice, small planes a half-dozen times. Zero takeoffs, zero landings. Flying optimized rapid distance, but apart from the obvious operating challenges, he also would stand out singularly on radar and satellite tracking. A remote location meant climate, terrain, water and food obstacles. Escaping into a crowded city might make it easier to blend or put a hundred thousand eyeballs right onto him.

  All questions. No answers.

  *****

  Owen stared at the grocery store deli-counter Styrofoam container on the granite breakfast bar in Tremaine’s kitchen. Chow mein and sweet and sour pork, along with a soggy eggroll and a six-pack of Bud Light tall boys.

  “Not your gourmet cuisine, Tee,” he said out loud, his eyes fixed across the kitchen on the stainless steel six-burner range.

  Allen, the new Intel Commander, had notified Owen by email and voicemail that he was asking One Police Plaza to open up an official, permanent position at Intel Division. Owen took out his cell phone and replayed the message.

  “Lieutenant, I have been documenting every effort to contact you at least twice every week. I don’t know if you’re dead or alive, and at this point I honestly don’t care. One Police Plaza has been notified. Your union has been notified. This is the last time I pick up the phone to talk to a wall. You either get approval to return to work or you are done with this division and, let me tell you, after all this bullshit it’s going to be an uphill battle for you to get a placement anywhere in the department.”

  He had occupied most of the middle of the day staking out his own house, sweating inside the hot car across the street until he finally gave up without a glimpse of Callie or the boys. There was a red eviction notice taped across the front door. One of the boys’ rubber balls was inside the hydrangea bushes across the driveway alongside Mike and Shelley’s old house. Both places were sitting empty. Mike and Shelley had moved to a house they bought at Lake Success. He grimaced thinking about it.

  Owen got out of the car, ran across and retrieved the half-deflated ball. He stood in the middle of the driveway and tried to get it to bounce, but the ball stopped dead on the concrete, making a hollow splat.

  He went and picked it back up anyway, massaging it in his hands as he was drawn to the decrepit shed. He pulled at the door until he could squeeze through. The old workbench was still there. Eamonn’s oil can was on the shelf above the mason jars that hung from where the lids were nailed on the underside of a shelf up high, at the Big Man’s eye level. Owen spun his father’s vise open as wide as it would go and then put the ball between the steel sides and reversed direction, turning and tightening until the remaining air compressed and the ball burst, rupturing with one booming belch. Tears were still running down his cheeks when he stopped at the deli counter before driving back to Tremaine’s townhouse.

  He pulled one of the beers off the plastic ring, opened it, set it down and then unfolded the squeaky container. The chow mein and pork looked like grayish worms swimming in bright red mucus with yellow pineapple bits.

  Callie’s message from the day before said they needed to “look at legal separation.” If he wasn’t going to act like a man, she had to make decisions for herself.

  Owen looked at the open can, lifted it toward his mouth. “Smooth Refreshing Light Beer,” he read out loud. Then he stood up with it in his hand, grabbed the remaining five, and poured them, one by one, down the kitchen sink.

  *****

  Jeffers and the APA kept sending Bishop more instructions and demands. They had to be watching the interrogation feed, probably leering into their computers like they were watching television. Suriving Torture…tonight on History! He hadn’t produced any deliverables in six days.

  “Well, sorry to disap
point,” Bishop muttered to himself. He’d spent his entire adult life working for the United States of America, not this old boys club, the APA, with its bullshitty patriotic name and its “iceberg” of hidden agendas.

  What was it that really mattered to them, Bishop wondered, proving that Spencer was a hired gun or just seeing him suffer? He tried not to think about it, reminded himself that he was a realist and he needed the paycheck, but the whole setup bothered him more than he wanted to admit, the secret prisons, private organizations being handed work that only government agencies had always done. It paid well, and bringing in money freed him from having to think about money all the time.

  You work your butt off to get to be an expert in your field and along comes Stephen Nussbaum and a thousand techies just like him and then the work you spent your life doing gets replaced by zeros and ones behind some piece of software.

  On the screen in front of him, Spencer’s biofeedback numbers appeared numerically and graphically in a sub-window while Bishop played back interrogation segments. The metrics didn’t lie; the steep spike day one was now moving toward a level line. No rising anxiety ahead of interrogation; blood pressure steadily ranging from 115/70 to 124/80. Bishop tracked numbers after moving up to four-bucket sessions. Spencer could have been lying on a beach.

  Left to his own devices instead of functioning inside their damned Panopticon, Bishop knew he could get the job done. Going back to 1952, the FBI measured an 8 percent attachment syndrome rate. Across his career, he was successful up to 56 percent. Seven times the standard. But if they hobbled him with interrogation limitations and then completely shot down reward-based therapies, it wouldn’t happen. Jesus. What do you expect? Why the hell would you hire the best man for the job and then dictate to me how I am supposed to do it? You know everything better than your own experts?

  Target acquisition methods?

  Funding?

  Intelligence resources? Domestic? International? Foreign government?

  Ordnance?

  Food, clothing, transportation, medical? Who helped?

  Goals? Financial? Ideological?

  Networks? Affiliations? Active military? Ex-military?

  Each one of these bullets ought to lead into twenty more. But where the charts should have offered guidance, should have dictated when to hammer one point and when to pitch fastballs until the prisoner’s head was bursting, every biometric measure was skewed. Spencer wasn’t breaking, he was getting stronger.

  The stress had to be increased. He should have initiated hours in forced positions, half-squats that burned and tore through every ligament in the knees. But how? The prisoner was in full-leg casts.

  They had already instructed him to ratchet up using air horns, random disturbances to induce measureable fatigue-induced psychosis.

  Bishop looked into the mirror above the hotel room dresser. “Are they torturing him or me?” he asked.

  He surveyed his hotel room: king bed, chaise, 50-inch flat screen television, the desk where he wrote up the daily reports, the red leather armchair, room service leftovers on the round dining table. He wasn’t sleeping, his appetite was gone (two-thirds of a dried-up cheeseburger with curling lettuce and crusting mayonnaise was left the room service tray), his right eye was going into random spasms, his hands were beginning to shake.

  This was supposed to be his day off. He hadn’t even left the room. Zero deliverables on accomplices, support network, handlers, anything at all that could offer up a gauge against the probability of further attacks, Bishop recounted. Only he’s one man, acting on his own. Period.

  Thousands of well-trained reliable snipers were out in the workforce doing every trade imaginable. Any of them could be ready to fire the next bullet, but they didn’t. Why didn’t Jeffers trust his own success? Americans are in the screaming and apathy business. We breed nutcases, not political violence.

  “If twenty more Jonathan Spencers started shooting down billionaires, this country would see guns outlawed the next day.” If that happened, APA and this Supreme Court would do a one-eighty and send private gun ownership straight down the tubes.

  He was a lifelong NRA member, too, not that it mattered.

  “Just reality,” Bishop muttered. “You don’t screw with the deep pockets.”

  Jeffers supplied Bishop with Spencer’s military jacket before having Spencer erased from digital memory. The Department of Defense no longer held any record of Master Sergeant Jonathan Spencer. No training records. No history of engagements.

  Bishop’s copy indicated zero rebellion against authority. No disposition toward any ideology. So why did he kill nine billionaires? Who or what made him do it? What is it that separates the sniper soldier from the serial killer? Once you take away the money motivation, is it possible for anyone to shoot down strangers and not to be psychotic?

  Bishop closed his eyes and pressed his fingertips to his head, massaging his temples until the surging pain passed. “You’re making money hand over fist,” he told the drooping face in the mirror. The cup was supposed to be half-full, not half-empty. But he could not escape the pounding reality. Deliver or die, the universal fact of life in consulting.

  He unbuttoned the two top buttons from his collar then popped two Benadryl out of their foil wrappers, gulping them back with a swig of bottled water. On top of the bedspread, he undid his belt and opened his zipper then reached for the remote control and scrolled the hotel selections, pausing unenthusiastically at the adult offerings.

  Not worth $8.99, he thought.

  *****

  Spencer pressed himself up and held a one-arm pushup then stretched his free hand to reach the toilet handle and flush. The water swirled clockwise. Clockwise. North of the Equator. Suddenly, he couldn’t remember if that was bullshit or real?

  If the toilet really does flush opposite then that ruled out Tasmania and Guam, he thought. Nope. Not Guam. Could still be Guam. But it was so dry. Guam would be sopping with humidity.

  Working assumption—U.S. black ops site. Could still have been Afghanistan, or Gitmo, Pakistan, Thailand, Bulgaria, Moldova. But he felt confident taking Afghanistan and Pakistan off his short list. He knew voices of soldiers in those places, the newbies filled with jittery excitement, always anxious to prove that they have what it takes, and the deadly, bitter, threatening cadences from guys who had mastered their shit and kept it together. And then there was the lifeless mumbling of men stuck floating between fucked-up homesick sadness and mortal terror.

  No, this isn’t in country, he decided. Not inside the war zone. Afghanistan is out. Gitmo… Cuba? Stocky would have sweat rings under his arms the minute he went outside. Nothing there. Gitmo was out, too.

  There was no tapping through the walls, no night screams, no sign of other prisoners through the thick walls. Intermittently, without any regular intervals, he felt that dull vibration humming through the wall beside the sleeping platform, but the single constant sound came from the tinnitus inside his own skull.

  From oatmeal to spaghetti and meatballs, scrambled eggs and hashed-brown potatoes to chicken fingers, the Twins were there, four meals, two days per week. Stocky and Slim five days, Twins two, including the one day in seven when he wasn’t hooded and shifted to interrogation.

  No stripes, names, no unit insignia on their khaki fatigues. The keychain stayed on Stocky’s belt. It made a distinctive, metallic zipping noise when it extended and retracted. Stocky held the cuff key and all door keys; Spencer figured that Stocky held rank, probably E5 or maybe a staff sergeant Slim was most likely SPC1 or corporal. But five-day workweeks? That wasn’t Army.

  Stocky always moved in first while Slim opened the door. His entire thick frame burst in like he was threatening to punch Spencer’s face, always bullying to make the prisoner flinch. Spencer evaluated his response options, whether or not to strategically present himself co
wering before the brute force, but determined instantly that he was never giving in. Each act of resisting charged his psyche. He made Stocky work up a sweat to get his head up and yank down the black hood and he paid for that, too, when Stocky’s knuckles raked down his face and he felt Stocky cinch the lanyard into his windpipe. After the hood was on, he could feel Slim’s thin hands reaching a wide waistband around him and snapping it closed along the small of his back. Stocky dragged a second strap under his crotch then ran handcuffs through heavy hoops attached by grommets set into the waistband.

  Stocky liked to go the extra yard, leaning into the cuffs to get through more clicks. Spencer knew Stocky could tell that the force painfully dug the cuffs into both his wrists.

  They trussed him out like a hog, then Stocky came from behind him, always lifting from the armpits, while Slim clutched his hands beneath the casts at the ankles. Piercing pain shot outward from both thighs and from the underside of his knees when they flopped him onto the wheels and moved him through the steel-cased doorway, but he held his breath and gave nothing back to Stocky.

  From behind his head, Spencer felt Slim shove at the gurney to get it moving. Slim didn’t smell of Axe today, but his clothing carried its usual sickly sweet scent from tobacco. Spencer noticed a raspy tone in his breathing as he pushed the gurney forward. Even through the hood, Spencer heard a motor sound followed by a soft thud and then a sound that he couldn’t place, although it was strangely familiar.

  The gurney was moved forward several feet then bumped into something and stopped. Again, Spencer heard a version of the familiar mechanical sound, then, when he felt a sudden lurch, he knew! They had him on an elevator. There was an elevator shaft abutting his cell! He heard two quick pings as they passed floors before the elevator bumped to a stop and the doors opened. The balls of Slim’s feet scratched on the concrete floor with each long step the guard took. Stocky lumbered alongside, his weight shifting with short, shuffling steps. Metallic jangling. Keys. He seemed to be holding back, slowing the gurney to keep up. Elevator, he thought. Where would a black ops site be elevator-equipped?