Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Clarice watching her.
“Be strong, Ms. P.”
Amanda tore open the envelope and pulled out the single sheet. No notary stamp. One illegible witness signature. Typical Phillip. It would be almost impossible to enforce. The date at the top was less than a month ago. Two lines. Shortest thing she’d ever seen.
“All to my beloved sister.” She closed her eyes against the tears. Damn the old bear, reaching out from the grave like that.
She wiped her eyes clear to read the second line.
“Except, all my files to Jeffrey Davis.”
CHAPTER 35
“Hup! Hup! Hup!” Shelley’s shout shattered the silence so abruptly Jeff actually jumped.
The trainees jerked out of their bunks and in under three seconds there were a half-dozen guns aimed at him. Well, not exactly at him, more at Shelley Thomas. But she was only an arm’s length away. Jeff edged slightly farther to the side toward Grim Reaper who was, oddly enough, a comfort. The only one who didn’t react was the guard Shelley had commanded to silence with a raised finger.
“This man,” she nodded toward Jeff, “has no name, is not to be addressed directly except in crisis safety situations. Mr. Reaper, you’ve met before.” By their foul looks, it had not been a pleasant meeting.
Jeff had a moment to inspect the trainees.
They ranged from a hugely muscular man who had almost as many stripes as Shelley, to a cute slip of a blond woman with a three-stripe patch on her arm. Two other women, medium build, brunette, not the prettiest women on the planet, but not bad either. Three other scary men though none as big as the main guy.
“Today’s first lesson, your guard may be a traitor,” she nodded to the woman to stand down. “In high-pressure situations, you must be completely sure of every member of your team, or post a double guard. For future reference, if you are forced to use the latter precaution, you’ve already lost.”
“Now,” she led them over to a hatch by the elevator and keyed it open. “Let’s see if you actually know your weapons.”
Jeff had been told that he could tag along if he wanted. Well, he’d had enough cells to last him a lifetime. The guest suite had been luxurious enough with a full bath, king-size bed, a small Nautilus exercise machine, and an amazing collection of movies on DVD, though no Internet. He’d hit the bed fully clothed and slept the clock around, thirty-six hours interrupted only to use the bathroom. The closet held unranked green fatigues and boots in a variety of sizes, none of which quite fit. Too big in the body, too short for his long arms and legs, but he’d managed. A quick shower, some take-out coffee gone half cold and overly-sweet donuts Grim had brought along, and he was almost feeling human.
The other option, of spending the day restricted to the guest room level of an underground missile silo, didn’t fit his criteria for comfort. He’d slept four stories, eighty feet below ground, nearing the lowest level of the New York subway. And there were six stories more below his bedroom. Nope, he’d get out and about.
Now he was actually in deeper. Subterranean level five of the next silo over was apparently to be the real highlight of getting out and about and seeing the town. When he’d pointed that out, Shelley had informed him, in her typically succinct manner, that his life expectancy outside this complex was to be measured in hours or days, not years or decades. He’d stopped protesting.
He followed at the back of the line as the trainees trooped down a double flight of stairs. His ears popped with the change. He strained again to clear his ears and couldn’t, as if the air had gone dead and flat. He was about to turn back to see if he could clear his ears when he noticed the others working their jaws and rubbing their ears as well.
“Anechoic chamber,” Shelley announced in a flat, sotto voice that had none of the ringing tone she’d used to roust the troops thirty seconds ago. “The walls and ceiling here are coated with sound deadening materials as we will be firing live rounds. The padding will suppress the natural echo and ring of gunfire typical of an enclosed space. It can be deceptive. If you start to lose your balance, remember to cease fire and safety your weapons immediately, then worry about hitting the floor.”
Jeff inspected one of the walls. A dark gray foam coated the surface. It was formed into bottom-of-egg carton lumps. He snapped his fingers, no echo. No ring at all. Just the flat snap.
“Test. Test. ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves,” his voice sounded as if it were someone else’s. “Did gyre and gimble in wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths . . .”
The silence behind him was loud enough to make him turn from the wall. Only Grim was smiling. The rest looked at him as if he were nuts. He shut his mouth. Shelley might be fighting a smile, though it was hard to imagine one creasing her face. She was all gung-ho military. He inspected the rest of the room to avoid their stares.
Racks of guns lined one side of the room. Hand pistols, rifles, machine guns, and nasty looking assault weapons that were probably illegal even in the permissive United States. A few massive guns that even Rambo couldn’t lift. You could conquer a country with the arsenal in this room.
“Most of these weapons have had their barrels plugged and are non-functional.”
“There’s a relief.”
Shelley glared at him and he shut up. Jeff could even feel the heat rising to his cheeks. Definitely not his normal world where a fast quip was welcome, expected, even required at some level. Survival in his world included proving you possessed a quick and snappy repartee to fit into New York cooking society. It didn’t require obedience. It didn’t require drugging your victims. And it definitely didn’t require endless racks of machine guns.
He did a quick area count, twenty guns in the first rack, six racks to a row, six rows, hell of a lot of weaponry here. Maybe he’d just fallen into The Matrix. He counted to five, but the rows didn’t come rushing at him. He looked down, he wasn’t wearing a black, leather duster. He wasn’t Keanu Reeves. Bummer.
“However,” Shelley turned her attention back to the trainees as if he were no longer in the room, “they are real weapons and you will be stripping down and reassembling a number of them.”
There were a few muttered curses.
“A large number of them.”
They kept silent this time though they looked no happier. A part of him was tempted to chime in with, “Why not all of them?” But perhaps that was what she’d make them do if he spoke, and that could take days. Then the big guy with all the stripes might sit on his head.
The room had a shooting station of some sort in the middle. A long maintenance corridor extended through one of the silo walls and into the distance, where a series of targets were revealed by dim light.
“First, rack your training weapons in the orange shelving. You are done with them. You must rack all weapons and cartridges. I don’t want anything getting mixed up here. Do not exit the orange zone until I check to make sure you’re clean.”
A wide area of bright orange surrounded the bottom of the stairs. Much of the room’s floor was covered with foam as well. Rubberized paths led to the weapon racks, the middle of the room, and a large safe, like the kind banks had in old Westerns, with “Ammo” written across the front.
They racked their weapons, each had a wide orange stripe across the handle and muzzle. They emptied cartridge belts, dug ammunition out of various pockets along their legs. The supply appeared to be endless. These people lived armed to the teeth.
Shelley scanned them each and every one with one of those airport wands. A few stray rounds were revealed.
Grim started to empty his pockets. Switchblade, make that switchblades, big Bowie hunting knife, one of those everything Swiss Army folders, a couple of pointed throwing stars . . . By the seventh weapon, Shelley just shook her head and waved him through.
“You never use firearms anyway.�
��
He grinned as he returned the weapons to various parts of his clothing.
“Guns don’t like me and I don’t like them. It’s mutual. They’re too noisy and only useful if you want to draw attention to yourself.”
“Or if the other guy has a gun,” the big guy almost spat at him.
Close friendship blooming there, Jeff could tell.
Grim made a gesture of grabbing a knife and cocking his arm back to throw and the big guy flinched away. Shelley watched with folded arms.
The big guy appeared to get the message. And, by his expression, it apparently tasted worse than Jeff’s curdled, vinegar Alfredo.
“An unarmed assailant from under twenty-one feet away has, if not the advantage, then the ability to make a good attack.” Grim spoke with all the patience and knowledge of a college professor, but the tall man’s face reddened more and more. “A well-thrown knife is good to twice that distance. And up close, a throat cut creates no sound beyond a deep sigh.”
Jeff reassessed Grim. He’d thought the man was a street punk, but here he was lecturing military types with an authority Jeff doubted he could muster. Then it was his turn to go through the inspection. He wasn’t sure that he liked it when he passed as clean, without emptying any pockets.
The tall guy with all the stripes sure didn’t think much of him either.
CHAPTER 36
“A-Team good to go.”
“B good.”
“Mother?” First Lieutenant Bobby Stenman queried on a second frequency. This was much more his style than sitting in a damned television studio watching Chef Julio and some poor tourist bite the dust. They weren’t supposed to be operating on US soil, but the chain of command was clean and the decision must have happened way above his pay grade.
There was a pause and then the surveillance operator on the high-flying radar plane called down. “Field is clear. Authorized.”
“A. B. Go. Repeat. Go.” Stenman turned on his night goggles and tapped his flak vest right over his heart for good luck. They slid out from behind the boulder that had hidden his jed-team of three for the last thirty minutes. SAW gunner and Sergeant Intelligence were in A with him. Sniper, Spotter-Medic, and Explosives in B on the far side of the objective.
They rolled through the shadows of the alley. This late at night all the neighbors were sleeping. And if everything went well, they’d still be blissfully unaware when both teams departed just as quietly seven minutes from now. He pulled up below the edge of the porch.
“No IR print.” His headset radio was reading five-by-five. No crackle that would let him pretend he’d misheard. There should be an infrared signature of at least five people inside the building. Had been during last night’s recon by C team.
“Re-scan.”
“Did. Twice.”
Were they shielded? Asleep in some central room so that no windows showed their natural body heat radiating against the glass.
Or was it a trap?
“Explosives. Move ahead with caution.” Tech Sergeant Bander would check the building for traps. It added thirty seconds, maybe forty-five to the overall scenario. Their evacuation team at the rendezvous knew to be patient. But wouldn’t be too patient.
Stenman counted heartbeats while they waited. At sixty Bander called back, a minute and fifteen seconds since the “Go,” his voice barely a whisper because he was so close in on the objective.
“No trap found.”
“Proceed with prejudice in fifteen.” A long time to leave Bander spread-eagled across the front porch, but it was proven that everyone else would be better prepared and move more quietly if given a few extra seconds.
As he checked his AR-15, he knew the others in his team were doing the same with their M249 SAW and M24 sniper. The suppressors on the barrels unbalanced the weapons badly, but the neighboring houses here were tightly clustered, they needed to keep the weapons quiet. They were going in and they were going in hot.
The numbers had been ticking by automatically in his head. At fourteen he pushed to his feet. By fifteen seconds from his mark he was out from behind the boulder and sprinting across the back porch.
He went through the door without even slowing to see if it was locked. The old wood splintered as easily as he’d expected. Bander was in through the front at the same instant.
No flash and bang. Booby-trap, if there was one, hadn’t tripped yet.
It was empty.
Every instinct told him in that instant, they were gone. Bander’s nod indicated the same read as the others rolled into the room.
Under thirty seconds to scour every room, closet, cubby hole, and the attic. They gathered in the kitchen.
The refrigerator door was propped open with an old dish towel, but no light shown. It was turned off. He stuck a hand through the crack, careful to not touch any surfaces. Little to no latent chill. Gone over six hours, ten more likely.
“Mother?” He called to the plane. “Dry hole. I repeat. Dry hole.”
“Clear out. Meet extraction team in seventeen.”
“Hold it!”
Someone else was on the circuit. Shouldn’t be.
“This is Agent Mark Anders. Are you sure?“
“I don’t care who you are. Get off this circuit. A and B out.” He was answered by silence, exactly the right response. He’d have to thank the eye-in-the-sky operator if they ever met, silence certainly wasn’t the idiot agent’s first choice. And broadcasting his name, even on an encrypted circuit. Truly dumb.
Both jed teams ran out the back door, down the steps to the beach. Two hundred yards along the beach the six of them gathered the Zodiac inflatable runabout, turned ninety degrees, and sprinted into the waves. They rolled aboard as they hit the water. Banger had the electric motor running and they were a hundred feet out into Penobscot Bay before they were all seated, squatted low to minimize radar profile. Without looking, he knew they were two and a half minutes ahead of schedule. Four miles down the coast, seventeen, now sixteen minutes at top speed, their ride would be waiting at an abandoned marina.
Not one of them had noticed the small, ten-dollar webcam mounted in the corner of the ceiling.
CHAPTER 37
“Yes! Whoo-hoo! One for the home team!” Clarice was doing a little victory dance in her chair, waving her arms over her head like a cheerleader. Her blonde hair swirling about her head like a sixties go-go dancer.
Amanda was feeling less enthusiastic. They’d been harassed before. EMS had never been popular with the multinational corporations or the government. But this time was different. They’d come armed to the teeth and ready to fire. Six. Special Ops by the look of them and armed like US Special Operations Forces. On domestic soil which was patently illegal. This was not an encouraging sign at all.
She stared at the two files again.
C3 versus C4 modes of photosynthesis. Desertification due to global warming.
Were these worth killing for?
“All my files to Jeffrey Davis.”
Phillip had told her about contacting Jeffrey only one day before they’d dropped in on Jeff’s apartment.
But his will had been signed and witnessed a month before. He’d planned it for at least four weeks. He’d left her his ultimate note from the grave in his revised will.
After thirty years! Why contact Jeffrey now?
Could there be two Jeffrey Davises? No. Did a part of her wish there was so she didn’t have to face this one again? Maybe.
She shoved out of the chair and slammed out through the back door into the cool night. Within moments she was through the moonlight and in the woods. Oak and maple filled the air. Crickets chirped and a bird queried the night from its nest as she passed beneath.
The heavy leaves, thick with the summer sun, would be turning soon. The first hints of gold had shadowed the mountains just below timberli
ne. The multitudes of tourists were already arriving to tour the autumn leaves, which had further helped mask EMS’s return to the old farm.
She knew these woods like a child remembers their first stuffed animal. They were her security blanket.
A low wall of fallen field stone marked the back of the yard and the start of the forest proper. She’d been six years old before she was allowed to cross this mighty barrier by herself. A hundred times, a thousand, Phillip had given in to his little sister’s importuning to lead her over the wall and beneath the trees.
From six to ten she’d had to stay in sight of the wall. At ten, the boundary extended to the trail head, “and only to the trail head,” the best way up to the Appalachian trail from their family property. That didn’t stop her from scrambling high up the mountain’s face through trees and scrub, always careful to avoid the trail so that she could honestly say she hadn’t been near the trail head or the trail.
The ultimate freedom to be a young teenager roaming the high woods of the White Mountains on her own. Now, she simply stepped over the low spot in the wall, a mighty mountain pass to a little girl, and entered the woods. In Maine, forests were uniform pine, second and third growth timber barely bigger around than her leg. In Poulsbo, Washington, their headquarters before that, the woods were underlaid by an inaccessible mass of blackberry and salal undergrowth with towering Douglas fir above.
Here they were soft, long Scotch Pine needle trails winding between crinkly layers of oak leaves gathered year upon year. Boulders were scattered by glacier giants playing marbles and were now covered with lichen and moss to show how long ago the gamesters had departed for other realms.
A game.
CHAPTER 38
It felt like a game.
The pieces?
She and Jeffrey.
Phillip taken, removed from the board.
Soon Amanda would need a sweater for nighttime walks, fall was a rising chill on the air.
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