Calvin Pope came into focus. David saw him clearly in his mind. A heavyset man, but more thick than fat. He wore a dark, rumpled suit, tie pulled loose. Pope needed a haircut, brown hair down over his neck. Glasses. He shook a cigarette loose from a crumpled pack.
David texted:
You smoke unfiltered Camels.
The return text:
Quit two years ago.
David:
Air Force Hangar in Germany. Bringing back the runaway Al Qaeda prisoner. You were still smoking then.
Pope:
Okay. What else you got?
David closed his eyes, picturing the scene again and zoomed in on Pope. The tie pulled loose. It was U.S. Naval Academy tie.
You went to the Naval Academy.
Pope replied:
Not true. You lose.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. David worked the keypad frantically.
I only said that because of your tie. In Germany, you were wearing an Academy tie.
Nothing.
Come on, come on.
David stared at the phone, willed Pope to text him back. The man was in hiding, likely paranoid as hell. He’d see traps around every corner. What would David do in his position?
I wouldn’t believe some stranger sending me texts out of the blue, either. That’s for damn sure.
But if the man’s desperate …
The phone rang and startled him.
“Hello,” he answered.
“Remember this address.” The voice was barely above a whisper and told David an address and an apartment number. “Thirty minutes.”
He hung up.
David cranked the Dodge and was already calling Charlie as he pulled into traffic and headed for his next stop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
David parked across from the old building on the edge of Chinatown, the neighborhood gray and shabby and quiet. Nobody on the street this time of night. He watched the walk-up for signs of life as he called Charlie back.
“It’s me.”
“You look up that address?” David asked.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “It’s a put-up job all right. The apartment is leased to somebody named Sean Doolittle, social security number, paystubs, everything you need. But Doolittle didn’t exist before two months ago. It’s a pretty sloppy job by certain standards, but good enough if you’re looking for a crap apartment to hide out in.”
“Okay,” David said. “I’m going in. Call you later if I don’t get killed.”
David left the Dodge behind and crossed the street to the walk-up. He wore his new shirt untucked to cover the Browning stuck in the front of his pants and the Glock in the back. He hoped this wasn’t a shooting trip. He needed Pope to talk.
He needed answers.
David climbed the stairs to the second level and went down the hall to number three, paused and listened. Somebody upstairs played a television too loudly, so he had to press his ear flat against the door. When he didn’t hear anything coming from within the apartment, he knocked on the door.
No answer. He knocked again. Waited.
David put his hand on the knob and turned it slowly. The door wasn’t locked. He eased the door open two inches and peeked inside. Not a fancy place to live, bare floor and walls. A scratched, wooden table with a single chair. An open throughway led off somewhere David couldn’t see. Maybe a kitchen.
David cleared his throat. “Pope?”
Pope wasn’t a behind-the-lines solo operative like David, but he was plenty dangerous in his own way. If he didn’t respect the man’s abilities, the results could be lethal. David raised his voice and tried again. “Pope.”
He pushed the door open. It creaked on old hinges.
David entered, shut the door behind him.
He drew the Browning and slowly moved into the apartment. There was an issue of Sports Illustrated and a half-full ashtray on the table.
Quit, huh?
The whole place had a musty closed-in smell, like the windows hadn’t been open in a year.
He moved into the kitchen. Scratched linoleum and appliances from the Carter administration. A Chinese takeout menu stuck to the front of the refrigerator with a NY Mets magnet. David opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Takeout cartons, a jar of pickles, and half a six-pack of Heineken.
He passed back through the living room, took a quick look in the bathroom. A faded green towel hanging on the rack. No shower curtain.
The bedroom was the last room. A single bed with rumpled covers. Nothing in the closet. No suitcase. Not a stitch of clothing.
“Shit.”
Calvin Pope had reconsidered. Whatever part of him had wanted to talk to David Sparrow, a stronger part of him had overruled the idea. Maybe the part that was afraid. Whatever light Pope could have shed on this mess was gone now. David didn’t really even know Pope’s background. CIA? Military intelligence? He was a smart and devious man and could be anywhere by now.
David left the apartment and returned to the Dodge.
Back to square one. He couldn’t spend time tracking down a man that didn’t want to be found. He sat there behind the wheel wondering where to go next.
Sudden motion in the rearview mirror made him flinch and reach for his pistol.
“Don’t do it.” And the sound of a gun cocking.
David put his hands on the steering wheel. “I won’t.”
“I don’t want to shoot you,” the man said from the backseat. “But I’ll just keep this gun pointed at the back of your head anyway. Just as a matter of routine, you understand.”
“I understand.”
David’s eyes shifted back to the rearview mirror.
Calvin Pope looked grayer than the last time David had seen him, his skin hung slack and sallow, red eyes sunken back in his head. Dark circles, hair greasy and matted. He was a wreck. A man at the end of his rope.
“University of Maryland.”
David blinked. “What?”
“I didn’t go to Annapolis,” Pope said. “I went to Maryland. I spilled coffee down my front that morning in Frankfurt. I had a spare shirt but not another tie. An Envoy pal of mine was a Navy man. He lent me the tie.”
“That explains it,” David said.
Pope plucked a cigarette from the pack with his lips, then lit it with a cheap disposable. He puffed it. “I like your car.”
“At least it’s paid for.”
Pope grinned, puffed his cigarette.
“I thought you’d quit,” David said.
“Yeah, I quit the unfiltered ones.” Pope took a long drag on the cigarette, let a plume of gray smoke out slowly. “Those fuckers will kill you.”
“Mr. Pope,” David said. “The flash drive shows all the men you’ve relocated and where.”
“Yes.”
“And the bribes you took.”
Pope took another long drag on the cigarette. “Yes.”
“Maybe you’d like to tell me what’s going on,” David suggested.
Pope smoked some more, thinking it over. David figured he was gathering it all in, putting it in some kind of order so he could make a story out of it and looking for a place to start.
“The thing is … I wanted the money,” Pope said. “I have no wife or family. I had twenty-two years with Uncle Sam. What was that? What did it mean? So Dante Payne offered me money, and I took it. I didn’t stop to think what would happen next. You know, I still have no idea. What happens next, I mean. Payne gave me a lot of money, but my life was still my life.”
“You had a job to do like the rest of us.” David wasn’t sure what he’d meant to accomplish by that comment. Maybe the idea that Pope felt sorry for himself hit too close to home.
“You know what I think about that job?” Pope said. “Let me ask you a question. They’d drop you behind enemy lines and tell you to find somebody and bring them out, right?”
“Sometimes.”
“You locate your target,” Pope said, “but if you can’t bring him out. W
hat do you do?”
“Usually the order is to terminate,” David said. “To keep certain information from being compromised.”
“So my question is,” Pope said. “Why not skip right to the termination? These people are the worst scum of the Earth, and we feel we owe them something because they sold out their pals or provided information on some shit bags who are also scum of the Earth. But we owe them, so we relocate them to our soil.”
David said nothing. Whatever Pope wanted to say, he didn’t need prompting.
“Because we’re America,” Pope said. “We’re supposed to be the good guys, so we remember who helps us. Even if they’re evil or murderers or rapists. We’re the good guys. What a bunch of shit. So here we are drowning in our own good intentions. We’re bringing these people over here and then what? Like we don’t have enough of our own criminals.”
“So your taking bribes from Payne squares that how?” David asked.
Pope chuckled, but it sounded hollow. “I didn’t mean to imply that I was trying to help, just that I was disillusioned.”
“The flash drive,” David said. “Why?”
“Insurance,” Pope said. “Against Payne. If I went down or if something happened to me then it happened to him, too. Turns out I was too clever for my own good.”
“Who was it that came to my house?” David asked.
“What?”
“That first night,” David said. “The man who broke into my house. He wanted the flash drive, and he wasn’t one of Payne’s run-of-the-mill hoods.”
Pope rolled down the back window three inches and flicked his cigarette butt out of it. He immediately lit another one and puffed it.
“I’m sorry about that,” Pope said at last. “I thought I was doing something good when I slipped the flash drive in with the rest of the evidence. Helping maybe. It didn’t occur to me it would make your wife a target. It should have. I should have thought more clearly about it.”
David cleared his throat. “Who?”
“NSA,” Pope said. “Or FBI.”
“Jesus.”
“Probably NSA,” Pope said. “They want to cover it up.”
“Slow down,” David said. “Walk me through it.”
“If this mess gets into the newspapers, it will embarrass the administration, and that’s with midterm elections on the horizon,” Pope said. “So they set the NSA on me. Oh, I can’t prove who it is, but the NSA have their fingerprints all over the place. Anyway, the executive branch always sends the NSA. They have a proud history of sweeping troublemakers under the rug. Fucking lapdogs.”
That would explain it, David thought. The man who broke into the house was good. He almost had me. An NSA spook would make sense.
David watched Pope in the rearview mirror. The man had gone quiet, puffed his cigarette thoughtfully. He was looking out the window, and for the moment he wasn’t in the backseat of the Dodge. He was a thousand miles away, or maybe a decade away, maybe replaying the choices in his life that had brought him to this point.
Or maybe he was just tired and smoking a cigarette.
“The FBI,” David prompted.
Pope’s eyes met David’s in the mirror. “What?”
“You said the FBI was after you, too.”
“Oh, yeah,” Pope said. “That’s a little different. They want to bring me in alive and make me talk. Seems there’s a prominent senator on the Intelligence Committee looking to make a run at the White House. She’d just love to put on a show to make the current administration look bad, and dragging me in front of the committee to testify would fit the bill nicely. Lots of pointed questions about foreign murderers moving in next door to your friends and neighbors.”
“I can see how that might grab a few headlines,” David admitted.
“They’d make a real circus out of it,” Pope said.
“Seems turning yourself into the FBI is the obvious choice,” David suggested.
“Is it?” There was nothing amused in Pope’s weak smile. “Tell me, Major Sparrow, when they drop you behind enemy lines, who do you turn yourself into?”
“That’s not the same.”
“Feels the same to me,” Pope said. “Every place I go I’m behind enemy lines, okay? Why don’t you turn yourself in? Go to the police and tell your story and let them work it out for you.”
David didn’t reply.
“That’s right,” Pope said. “You turn yourself in and then you can’t undo it, can you? You’re caught, trapped. And that goes against every instinct men like us have. You especially, I bet.”
David found himself nodding without meaning to.
“And once they have you, they can do whatever they want. It’s out of your control. And control is everything.”
Control is everything.
And even as David found himself agreeing, it occurred to him that men like Dante Payne probably lived by the same creed.
“Why did you want my wife to have the flash drive?” David asked. “Was it just to incriminate Payne?”
“I thought I might work a deal,” Pope said. “I don’t trust the Feds, but your wife … I thought the DA could protect me in trade for testimony or something. Stupid. That was back at the grasping-at-straws stage. I’ve moved on to acceptance.”
He paused to flick the second cigarette butt out the window. He stuck another one in the corner of his mouth but didn’t light it. His head was down, shoulders slumped, some weight squashing him down a little at a time.
“Something else, another reason,” Pope continued. “I guess … maybe I wanted to make amends or something.”
They sat for a few seconds.
“What do I do about Payne?” David asked.
“You mean to kill him?”
“Yes.”
“Then you already know what to do,” Pope said.
“Anything you could tell me would help.”
“He has buttons. You can push them,” Pope said. “He’s proud. Arrogant. He’s smart, but if he thinks he’s been insulted, he might act rashly. It’s not much. I’m sorry.”
No. It wasn’t much.
David sensed Pope was winding down but wanted to keep him talking. “The flash drive. You said you were trying to help.”
Pope lit the cigarette in his mouth. “Tell you what. I’m going to smoke one last cigarette, and then I’m going.”
“You said you wanted to help,” David pressed. “What did you mean?”
Pope sighed out a gray cloud. “Whatever Payne is … I helped make him. There was this time…”
Pope trailed off, and for a moment David thought he’d lost him.
“There was this time,” Pope began again, “when Payne was first starting out. In order to set himself up, he had to clear away the competition. He was going up against the Russians. It had gotten bloody and Payne and the leader of the Russians reached some kind of truce, but it was bullshit. It was just Payne’s way of lulling the Russian into letting his guard down.”
David thought he heard Pope’s voice catch.
Pope cleared his throat, rubbed his red eyes with a knuckle. “So one night Payne and his men burned that Russian’s house right down to the fucking ground. With the Russian inside. And the Russian’s three kids and his wife and his eighty-one-year-old mother-in-law. But he couldn’t have done it without me. I provided his foot soldiers. I opened the gates and let the barbarians inside.”
Pope blew out a stream of gray smoke. “I don’t know your wife, but she seemed honest. Didn’t seem like she’d take a bribe or be intimidated. She’d keep going until she nailed Payne to the wall. But that turned out to be a mistake, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean putting Payne in prison wouldn’t solve anything,” Pope said. “He’d hired a hundred lawyers to work around the clock to get him out. Or if he didn’t get out, he’d still send messages to his people, and they’d come after your wife and you and your family. You’ve got to kill him. But you already know that. It doesn’t
end unless Dante Payne dies.”
David considered Pope’s story about the Russian and his wife and kids.
“My wife was upstairs when the break-in happened,” David said. “My kids. Sleeping in bed. I don’t care about senators or the administration or who slipped up at the State Department. I just care about my family.”
“Yeah.”
And with that single word, David now clearly heard the strain in the man’s voice. How long had he been on the run, living on the edge?
“Well.” Pope flicked the half-finished cigarette out the window. “My last smoke. I said I’d have one more then go. So … I guess … I guess I’ll go now.”
In the rearview mirror, David saw Pope stick his pistol in his mouth. David opened his mouth to shout—
The gunshot rocked the car. Brains exploded out the back of Pope’s head and splattered across the rear window.
David flung the car door open and staggered from the vehicle, ears ringing. He braced himself against the hood and bent over, the urge to gag rising. For a second, he thought he’d vomit, but the feeling subsided. He spit, trying to get the bitter taste out of his mouth.
He went back to the rear car window and looked in at the body.
Calvin Pope lay all crumpled on top of himself, one arm bent at an odd angle beneath his body, the other hand still gripping the pistol. His eyes were wide and glassy. Blood leaked from the back of his head and spread across the seat.
David took what he needed out of the Dodge. He couldn’t drive it around in this condition and didn’t have time to clean it up. He had his guns and Gina’s logbook and the cell phone he’d taken off Payne’s man.
He took a last look at Calvin Pope. Charlie had told David that the information on Pope’s flash drive had read like a confession.
He’d been right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Larry Meadows was having one of those nights.
He’d had to straight-up lie to the police. David Sparrow? Who? What? Huh? If Larry hadn’t known for a fact that David was rock solid, he’d be feeling pretty anxious right about now. The police had surrounded David’s Escalade with yellow tape and had shut down the parking garage for over an hour.
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