by Brian Wiprud
“So it can arrange terminations.”
“Some say the NSA subsystem can even use OnStar systems to cause fatal car crashes, make it look like people fell asleep at the wheel.”
“Linked into every license plate reader, every face-recognition app, every credit card swipe, every phone call, every flight reservation, every Web purchase?”
“Like Google or Amazon, it profiles people on the grid, looks for patterns, then flags people of interest for deeper scrutiny in the subsystem. You’re more or less off the grid here, but not enough that the subsystem couldn’t track you using facial recognition cameras at the airport to link you to your new name and airline reservations. It probably knows where I am and that you’d come to me. So it eased Vugovic’s way here. They have profiles on him, too, and played the odds. It knew the Kurac are relentless.”
I removed the shirt and looked at the chest wound. The deepest part was about a quarter-inch deep. I’d need some stitches, butterfly bandages at the very least. The salt water had puckered the wound and made it stop bleeding, for the most part.
“Tim, does this mean the NSA subsystem will continue to hunt me down?”
She bit her lip and examined the horizon. “You’ll have to keep an eye out. And so will we.”
I studied the blue water, out where the sharks had taken the remainder of their meal, out to deeper water. You could see the flash and flicker of baitfish following the sharks, snapping up shreds of Vugovic.
“Question is: am I now a liability to you guys?”
“You’ve done good work, this time and before. You got Spikic. We’re the good guys, Gill. Would I have saved you from Vugovic if you were a liability? Would we be flying you to San Diego and setting you up there?”
“That’s hard to say.” I reached into my pocket and came up with the bullet that killed Trudy. Tim looked at it in my outstretched palm. “You know where this came from, don’t you?”
Her eyes examined the flat-nosed slug, then met mine. “And?”
“This didn’t come from an M70, the kind of guns Serbs smuggle in through diplomatic pouches. Likewise, this is not the kind of ammo the Kurac throw. It’s special-ops ammo, the kind for shooting through cars and windshields. While I suppose it could be .40 S&W or 10mm Auto, this seems more like a SIG .357, possibly fired from a P229, the kind of pistol a lot of ops use. To have hit Trudy at that distance the shooter had training, the kind only professionals get. Now, I can’t see any reason why the NSA would kill her, or the FBI or even the Secret Service. But I can see why you would. Two reasons.
“First reason was to make sure Spikic was taken out. You knew if it looked like the Kurac killed Trudy I wouldn’t stop until I got them. But you guys also live and die by redundancy. So I’ve also got to believe that once you guys set your sights on Spikic you wouldn’t want to risk all your eggs in one basket by having just me chasing him down. You’d have had someone on the inside with the Kurac. Someone who just might have been on a detail with Vugovic’s gang.
“Second reason was that next to operational redundancy you guys love economy, you love two birds to drop with one stone. Killing Trudy not only kept me motivated, but it also got her out of the picture. You people didn’t like us hooking up to begin with, much less the way the heist of the Iraqi antiquities went down.”
“You’ve been thinking about this the whole time you’ve been here?”
“The whole time since Trudy was murdered.”
Tim sighed and squinted into the distance. “Gill, it wasn’t up to me.”
I unwrapped a piece of gum and put it in my mouth. “Then who was it up to?”
Tim shook her head at her feet. “You know The Clause, Gill. Trudy witnessed some things in Iraq she shouldn’t have. They felt we had to close the door on that.”
I held out the pack. “Gum?”
Fifty-two
There was one Western I saw at Portsmouth that had a bed-ridden old man who pays Lee Van Cleef to coerce information from a crook and then kill him. Van Cleef confronts the crook, and the crook hands him his life’s savings to kill the old man instead of killing the crook. Lee gets the information, takes the crook’s life savings, kills the crook anyway, and returns with the information to his client. The old man is very pleased to pay the balance of his fee for the information and murder. However, just as he told the crook, Van Cleef tells the old man—and for some reason I remember this word for word: “But you know, the pity is, that when I’m paid, I always follow the job through. You know that.”
Lee picks up a pillow and uses it as a silencer to shoot the old man in the head.
Ten minutes after Tim took and chewed the end piece of gum, I dragged her body into the shallows and tossed my bloody shirt next to her. The sharks came back. Eagerly.
I went the long way around into the lodge and slipped into my room without anybody seeing my chest wound. I bandaged myself up and went to the airport, where I made my flight out. The little plane banked out over the ocean, the sun blinding me through the window.
Tim was right. It was time to redeploy, but not for anybody except myself. Aside from the fact that she had planted someone with the Kurac to kill Trudy, putting her down was the only way for me to close the door and get out. I had little doubt that despite what Tim said I was a liability to her, and thus my time was winding down. Who knows what was really waiting for me in San Diego? My next assignment might be as a decoy that gets caught in the crossfire. It happened before when I was set up in the Gulf. The point was that Tim and the agency had become a liability to me.
The Clause works both ways.
My ulterior motive to complete the mission was so that Tim would let me come in for a re-deploy. I needed to confirm why Trudy fell victim to The Clause, and to keep from being expendable myself.
Nobody would ever find Tim’s body, nobody would know exactly what happened to her, but the organization would connect the dots. True, the NSA subsystem might still come after me, but maybe—just maybe—it would see that I had tidied up after myself and therefore wasn’t worth coming after, so long as I went out and stayed out. After all—wasn’t it Tim and the agency that created my situation? Weren’t they the ones letting X50 ops rise too close to the surface? I had to believe that The Clause was part of the subsystem’s logic algorithms.
Well, it didn’t matter. You have to take it one adversary at a time. I really had little choice but to put Tim down. Just as with the Chinese friends, the Kurac, and the FBI, it was a matter of eliminating one enemy after the other, playing them at cross-purposes, taking advantage of their weaknesses, until there were none left. There’s probably a Western like that. I haven’t seen it. I guess I lived it.
I shielded my eyes with my hands. From the plane’s window, I could see Turtle Bight a thousand feet below, and make out the sinister silhouettes of a few hopeful sharks gliding the flats.
NOBODY BENEFITS FROM PROLONGED WARFARE. ONLY THOSE THOROUGHLY ACQUAINTED WITH THE EVILS OF WAR CAN THOROUGHLY UNDERSTAND THE PROFITABLE WAY OF WINNING.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Originally from Washington D.C., Brian Wiprud is a New York City author of eight previous crime novels. Brian won the 2002 Lefty Award, has been nominated for Barry and Shamus Awards, and in 2011 was nominated for the RT Book Reviews Choice Award for Best Contemporary Mystery. Starred reviews have been bestowed on his novels by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews. Brian is also an expert angler widely published in fly-fishing magazines.
His website is www.wiprud.com.
Photo by Joanne Murdock.
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