Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

Chip stepped back, but he went all in. “Hell, no,” he said. “Take everything, including that bag of greenbacks. You’re the best one to get it back to the civilized world. I was thinking overland to Turkey, but you’d know better than me. Set up a small business, open some accounts, and start paying yourself with that cash, run that shit through the laundry, baby. I rotate home in twelve weeks. I already have a buyer for the Eurobonds. We are going to make a pile of money and have a blast doing it.”

  The asset didn’t say anything.

  Chip watched him decide.

  But he was confident in how it would play out. He knew the man. He’d given his asset the information he needed to make the right choice. They were a good team before, they’d be a good team again.

  The asset, whose name was Shepard, lowered the rifle, shouldered the duffel, picked up the briefcase, and walked off without another word.

  A week later, Chip got a nasty shock when the station head called Chip into his office and started asking questions. They’d been tracking the colonel and his escort with a Predator drone, had stumbled onto Chip’s operation, and caught the firefight on video. The Predator had tracked Chip back to his waiting driver/fixer and the FOB. The station head had sent a team to the scene to see who else was involved.

  Shepard’s keffiyeh had concealed most of his face, and they’d lost him anyway, of course. Shepard was half ghost when you were standing right next to him. From five thousand feet wearing the Arabic equivalent of a baseball hat? He basically evaporated. With all that money.

  As it turned out, Shepard holding Chip at gunpoint was what kept Chip out of Leavenworth. An unexpected benefit of his plan.

  Chip was a talented actor. He was contrite, he’d been caught, the story spilled out of him, and some of it was almost true. He pled love of country, frustration with the bureaucracy, and hatred of corruption. He was used by an unknown local player who’d fed him information about the colonel through third parties, only to step in and take all the intel, proof of corruption, everything.

  He was embarrassed and ashamed and lucky to be alive.

  He fooled four interrogators and six polygraphs and submitted his resignation.

  Unbelievably, the agency actually asked him to stay on.

  He told them he wanted out while he still had some scrap of his soul.

  And laughed all the way to the bank.

  25

  PETER

  Peter headed toward the freeway, June’s laptop open and running on the passenger seat. He assumed the hunters had taken it over completely, so he had the Web browser open to a map of British Columbia and a half-dozen Vancouver hotel websites, and took advantage of stoplights to click from one site to the next.

  Waiting at the on-ramp, he used his anonymous phone to find a number and made a call.

  “Semper Fidelis Roofing, can I help you?”

  “Hey, Estelle, it’s Peter Ash. How are you?”

  “Peter who? I know this can’t be Ashes because he got eaten up by Bigfoot. Why else wouldn’t he have called like he promised?”

  “I got sidetracked, Estelle. And I never promised you anything. Don’t bust my balls, okay?”

  “Oh, I’m not,” she said. “’Cause if I were, you’d for damn sure know it.”

  Estelle Martinez was thirty-five years old and managed the office for her brother Manny’s roofing business. She’d been an Army drill instructor for ten years and now ran ultramarathons on the weekends. Her last boyfriend had been hospitalized for exhaustion. All the roofers were combat veterans, and they were scared of her. Peter was scared of her, too.

  “Estelle, can we do this another time? I need to see Manny.”

  “Manny’s busy.”

  “Estelle. Cut the shit. This is serious. Put him on.”

  She sighed. “He’s not here. Don’t you got his cell?”

  “I lost my old phone. I need to see him in person, I’m heading up to your office now. Where is he?”

  “Out doing estimates.” He could hear the clack of a keyboard. “He’s in Mountlake Terrace right now. I’ll text you the address of his next appointment and let him know you’re coming.”

  Peter found Manny standing in the driveway of a McMansion, holding a tablet computer in both meaty hands, staring into the air above the house. The tablet showed a moving view of the house from above. A high penetrating whine came from somewhere over the roof. The soft rain had stopped.

  “Ashes, mi hermano. Gimme a sec, let me finish this run.”

  “What, this is work?”

  Manny smiled without looking away from the speck in the air. “I’m a high-tech motherfucker, mano. This thing does a programmed run over the house, the software takes all the measurements. Square footage, hips and valleys, all the flashing. The clients fucking love it. I send them the video with my proposal, they think, shit, that’s how you do estimates? Imagine how you’d do my roof.”

  Manny Martinez wasn’t tall, but he had broad sloping shoulders and legs like tree trunks. He’d been one of Peter’s platoon sergeants in Iraq. Once during a firefight, Peter had seen Manny throw another sergeant, Big Jimmy Johnson, shot in the leg and bleeding out, over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carry him to the MRAP a half-mile away. Big Jimmy had outweighed Manny by sixty pounds at least.

  Jimmy was dead now, but it wasn’t because of Manny.

  A lot of them were dead.

  But Manny was clearly alive and well. He wore clean Carhartts and a crisp white button-down shirt with a fresh shave and a high fade sharp enough to cut. He had a dozen employees and drove a nearly new pickup. He had a wife and two little kids.

  The tablet beeped and the video stopped moving. Manny touched the screen and the little quadcopter drone homed in like the world’s largest mosquito. When it touched down on the driveway, his grin made him look like he was eight years old.

  His friend had made a life here. He was thriving. Peter couldn’t get him involved.

  Manny picked up the drone and headed back toward his truck. “So what’s up? Stella said you had something serious.”

  Peter said, “It’s not like that. I’m back in Seattle for a few days, and I wanted to say hey. Maybe we can grab dinner before I head out?”

  Manny looked at him. It was the same solid, steady stare that could see through walls and around corners, that could find ambushes before they happened. The eight-year-old boy was gone.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Ashes. What are you into?”

  Peter shook his head. “Forget it, Manny. You’re doing great. You’ve got a family, people depending on you. I have no business asking you for anything.”

  The muscles flexed in Manny’s jaw. “Listen, Ashes? What would really piss me off? You end up dead and I’m not there to stop it. Because if it weren’t for you, I’d have been dead years ago. Same goes for half the guys working for me. You did what had to be done, what nobody else had the balls to do. You called down the fire and you took the heat for it. So you name the time and place, we’ll be there. That’s how this works.”

  Peter sighed. “This shows every sign of getting ugly,” he said. “You set up for that?”

  Manny snorted. “You forget who the fuck you’re talking to?”

  “No,” said Peter. “I didn’t forget. It’s why I’m here.”

  “Goddamn right,” said Manny. “When and where?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call you in a day or two.”

  Manny told him the number.

  “By the way,” he said. “Stella’s single again. If I was you, I’d watch your ass.”

  “I was never here,” said Peter. “We never talked.”

  26

  Four hours later, Peter rolled back down June’s driveway and parked the minivan beside a big black BMW 7 series with a dented rear fender and a long scrape along the driver’s side.

  He’d con
tinued north on I-5, waiting for the laptop to run out of power. As the battery got very low, the computer kept shutting itself down, and he had to keep turning it back on until the battery was fully exhausted and it would no longer restart. He was past Edmonds before he finally shut the lid and used the next exit to head south again.

  With the navigational help of his phone, he made a quick stop at Dunn Lumber in Wallingford, then limped through REI’s enormous flagship store. It turned out you could carry a lot in a minivan.

  His last stop on the way back to June’s apartment was a big QFC grocery store. He forced himself to walk slowly down the aisles, breathing through the rising static as he filled the cart. Gradual desensitization. It wasn’t easy.

  The reward was getting to cook a real meal in a real kitchen.

  For June, who was the most vivid woman he’d ever met.

  He was planning to ask about her dad after dinner. He’d have to tell her he’d asked Lewis to look into her mother. He wasn’t looking forward to it.

  But when he opened her door, juggling four full bags of groceries, he saw her sitting on the couch beside a round-shouldered young man hunched over a laptop computer.

  “Knock knock,” said Peter.

  June looked up. Her fat lip was still purple but the swelling was down even more. She’d clearly showered and changed her clothes. He wondered how she would smell now.

  “Peter, what took you so long? This is Leo Boyle, my landlord. Leo, this is Peter Ash.”

  Boyle kept his eyes on the screen, but he put up a lazy hand. “Yo, bro.” He looked to be in his mid-twenties, but his hairline was already retreating up the broad expanse of his forehead. He wore factory-distressed jeans and a wrinkled dress shirt that he’d left untucked, trying to hide his soft belly. They were fashionable clothes, Peter supposed, and probably expensive, but a long way from dress blues.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Peter. He shut the door with his medical boot, hefted the bags to the kitchen counter, and began to put away groceries. “Can you stay for dinner? Nothing fancy, just fish tacos, Spanish rice, and salad. Plenty of food.”

  June shot Peter a smile, her eyes bright.

  Boyle glanced at June, then at Peter. His face was soft and undefined, the skin pale and puffy with lack of sleep or too much alcohol or both. “Sure, I guess.”

  “Great,” said Peter. “Can I get anyone a drink? There’s beer and wine and mineral water and orange juice.”

  “You bet,” said June as she leaped off the couch and perched on a stool to ogle the supplies. “Oh, man. I’m hungry. And thirsty. Is that Lagunitas Copper Ale? I’ll take one of those.”

  Boyle clambered after her. “There’s Grey Goose in the freezer,” he said, staking some kind of claim with his knowledge of the liquor supply. “I’ll take a martini, dirty. No vermouth. Two olives. To the brim.”

  “Coming up.” Peter found an opener and set the bottle in front of June. “Glass?”

  She shook her head and raised the bottle to the corner of her mouth without the stitches. A small amber trickle made its way down her chin. She wiped it off with her wrist.

  Peter found a lonely martini glass in a cupboard of recycled jelly jars, washed out the dust, then took the vodka from the freezer and poured. He fished two ancient green olives from the crusty jar, splashed a little of the brine into the glass, then topped with vodka until the meniscus was crowned at the rim. Clearly the volume of alcohol was important to Boyle.

  He pushed the glass carefully across the counter. Boyle lifted the glass without spilling a drop, and took an experimental sip. “Not bad,” he said. As if making this particular drink was a challenge.

  Peter opened a beer for himself, then turned on the oven to heat and laid a thick slab of halibut on a pan to come up to room temperature. He brushed it with a little olive oil, then added salt and pepper. “You mind if I use your shower?” he said to June.

  June gave him an innocent smile with something else behind it. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  • • •

  “DID YOU MAKE IT to the library?”

  Showered, scrubbed, and shaved, Peter had the rice simmering, the lettuce washed, and the vegetables chopped. Peeling and dicing mangoes, he didn’t want to ask about her research in front of Leo Boyle. He definitely wasn’t going to bring up Tyg3r, or whatever he was supposed to call the skeleton key algorithm.

  “For a few hours,” she said. “Public Investigations has a subscription to TransUnion, where I found more history on our guys.” She held up a hand. “Before you ask, I logged on with one of my coworker’s passwords. But I got location histories, legal histories, past and present vehicle registrations. Then cross-referencing on all of that. We definitely have some new leads there. But nothing new about the companies we talked about.”

  Peter noticed that June was being cautious with the details, too. Maybe it was Boyle, or maybe just habit. Then she waggled her eyelashes at him, Groucho-style. “I did buy a new computer. Leo was just geeking out on the specs.”

  Her landlord had downed his martini with no evident effect, and was sucking on a lollipop. “What are you working on?” He talked to June as if Peter wasn’t in the room.

  “Just background,” she said, catching Peter’s eye. “It probably won’t turn into anything.” He was glad June didn’t seem to want to get Leo involved. The less anyone else knew, the safer they would be.

  “Gotcha,” said Boyle. “Woodward and Bernstein stuff.” He watched June out of the corner of his eye, trying not to stare, and failing. June didn’t seem to notice.

  Or maybe she was used to it. Peter understood why Boyle would come over to see June. Anyone in their right mind would. But what did June see in Boyle? The man had the personality of a banana slug.

  The timer went off for the rice. Peter put the fish in the oven, turned the timer on again, then stirred the diced red pepper and smoked jalapeño into the rice along with some paprika and garlic powder, poured in a little of his beer, then put the rice back on the heat. He put the mango pieces into a bowl with chopped tomatoes and basil and squeezed a few limes into the mix for a simple salsa. His shoulders were tight from the static, but cooking helped calm him down.

  As he assembled the salad, he thought maybe he could distract Boyle from staring at June. “So, Leo. What do you do for a living?”

  “Oh, you know. A little of this, a little of that.”

  Peter knew that dodge. He’d used it himself.

  Boyle took the lollipop out of his mouth and examined it. “You want a sucker?”

  “With beer? No, thanks.” Peter had another Lagunitas open on the counter. “I like the apartment. Did you do the work yourself?”

  “Most of it. The cabinets came out of the house. I’m working on that kitchen now, or I’m supposed to be.” He shrugged. “I kind of lost interest. I’m building an app right now.”

  Peter imagined Seattle to be a place where half the population over the age of twelve was building an app. Either that or brewing craft beer or roasting artisanal coffee. Or renovating these old houses. He’d seen a lot of Dumpsters and scaffolding in the neighborhood. Seattle was probably a good place to be a carpenter. He’d have to retrieve his truck and tools if he wanted to work.

  The timer went off and Peter checked the fish. “About five more minutes,” he said.

  Boyle pushed himself to his feet. “I’m gonna grab a smoke,” he said, and strolled to the front door.

  When the door closed behind him, June turned to Peter. “It was nice of you to invite him for dinner,” she said. “He can be a little annoying sometimes.”

  “Any friend of yours,” Peter said, raising his beer to her.

  She gave him a rueful smile. “I’m not sure Leo has any real friends,” she said. “I’ve kind of adopted him, like a big sister.”

  Peter had seen the way Boyle looked at June
. Not how any brother should look at his sister.

  “He’s pretty young to own a house like that. What does he do?”

  June rolled her eyes. “Trustafarian.”

  Peter didn’t know the term, and it must have showed on his face. June clarified. “He told me he inherited some money and doesn’t have to work. Those are marijuana lollipops he’s always sucking on. But he’s a computer nut, talks about all these groups he works with online.”

  “What kind of groups?” Peter was thinking about the people who’d hacked June’s laptop.

  “I can’t keep them straight,” she said. “He’s always starting some new project. He’s smart but lazy. He never seems to finish anything.”

  “He finished this apartment,” Peter pointed out.

  “Are you kidding?” said June. “When I moved in, the kitchen and bathroom were done, but the walls were all unpainted. The floor was bare concrete. No baseboard, no trim at the windows or doors. I put in that slate tile. I installed that trim.”

  “That was you?” Peter raised his eyebrows. “Got some skills, girl.”

  “If you ask me nice, I’ll show you my nail gun.”

  “Now you’re just teasing me.”

  Boyle came back inside, and it was time for dinner.

  27

  Stuffing down his fourth taco, Boyle said to June, “Was there some kind of problem with your old laptop? I could give it a tune-up. Might be nice to have a backup machine.”

  “It keeps turning on the cell modem,” she said. “I think someone’s got remote access.”

  “You got hacked again?” Boyle was trying for casual and failing. “I’ll take a look at it if you want. I built a Faraday cage in my basement. At least I can debug without your modem dialing out.”

  “You have a Faraday cage?” asked Peter.

  Boyle looked at Peter, his face a mix of arrogant skepticism and a kind of shy geek pride. “You know what that is?”

  A Faraday cage was an enclosure made of fine wire mesh or metal foil. It could be the size of a cigar box, a factory, or anything in between, and was designed to protect sensitive equipment from static electrical charges. They were used in tech research and manufacturing, but they also kept out all electromagnetic radiation, like radio waves and cell signals, which prevented electronic eavesdropping or damage from an electromagnetic pulse. Which is why they were popular with the military, along with other paranoid institutions and individuals.