by Marcus Wynne
“Nice job,” Hunter said.
Ole shrugged. “Not good enough for him.” He stared at the bag clad body of Agent Shield loaded on a gurney and wheeled to the Coroner’s vehicle. “Not good enough by a long shot.”
Hunter stood there and watched the assault team leader’s face. Ole was careful not to look at Hunter; the play of painful emotion there was a thing that wasn’t acceptable in front of people who weren’t on the team. Alpha warriors don’t show their feelings outside of the clan, they keep them private and alone, for those times in the middle of the night, or over a drink with a trusted and proven friend. It’s unmanly to speak of it, to sully something that can never, really, be talked about, only defined by the talking around of it.
Hunter knew what that was like.
“You have any kids?” Hunter said.
Ole looked at him, surprised. “Yeah. A daughter. She’s three.”
“That’s a good age.”
“Yeah. It is. They’re a lot of fun. You?”
Hunter shook his head no. “Not able. Not any more.”
Ole’s eyes narrowed as he thought, then nodded. “Sorry to hear that. I didn’t know.”
Hunter shrugged. “I always thought it was the most precious gift in the world, to bring a new life into the world, bring them up, protect them.”
“It is.”
“That’s what that young man was doing. Protecting life. He went down doing his job. And you came and did yours. You got payback for him. He wasn’t wasted. Remember that.”
“I don’t know how much family he had. Wife, girlfriend, what ever.”
Hunter nodded, and said, “Let people who are good at that deal with it. Give it time before you reach out to them. Sometimes, it’s easy to do more harm than good if your timing isn’t right.”
“You been there?”
“Yeah. I been there.”
Ole poured out the rest of his coffee. “Terrible shit. I don’t know how they get away with selling this. Leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”
“There’s a lot that does. Talk to you later, Ole.”
Ole adjusted his battle harness, touched the butt of his pistol and swung his MP-5 more comfortably. “Later, Hunter.” He stalked away to where his troops stood by, waiting for their next call to action.
Hunter commandeered a G-ride and a junior agent driver to take him back to the first house. In the full light of the day, curious drivers slowed down to look at the house with its shattered front door and full panoply of police cars, vans, and taped off entrance way. A steady stream of forensics people and drafted agents came in and out of the house, loading up box after box of junk into the waiting rented Ryder trucks. Hunter walked on the dying grass beside the cracked concrete walkway and went into the house. Just as before, he was struck by the layers upon layers of junk and detritus of someone else’s life – but not the life of the man who had died before his eyes. Hunter dropped his head and called on his visualization skills, built a small movie screen right in front of his eyes and ran the movie of his memory right there…
…the man’s face, drawn in determination, pumping with adrenaline, that’s to be expected, but control on it too, he was no stranger to stress, this was not the first time he’d been there, what drove that determination, what brought him in there, what was underneath…sadness. There was a profound sense of sadness in that man, in the stoop of his shoulders, in the way if you exaggerated the body language, it was as though he were trying to protect his heart. If that was so, what had injured him? Was it bringing his life to a close? There wasn’t the frenzy Hunter had seen on the face of fanatics before…there was a resignation, a sense of release and closure…he was glad to go, that man, he was glad to die, not gleeful, not in a frenzy, he was glad to die to…what? Hunter recalled the man’s last words: “Callie, I’m coming home…” Who was Callie? And where was home?…
Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything.
That’s what Musashi would say. But then, Musashi didn’t have to deal with Muslim extremists, did he?
Hunter walked slowly through the house, careful to stay out of the way of the technicians, who ignored him. He looked in the bedroom, where the fingerprint technicians worked carefully and cautiously, going meticulously over every inch of bearing surface in the room, doorknobs, handles, headboard, any place that would hold a print.
“How’s it going?” Hunter said.
A fingerprint tech looked up. “We’ve got some good prints. We’ll be running them over the wireless in just a bit; if he’s in the system we’ll get him right away. We’re first priority in the system.”
“Let me know if you don’t see me right away, all right?” Hunter said.
“Will do, Agent James.”
“Call me Hunter.”
The tech, a young earnest man who looked like he should be detasseling corn in Iowa, grinned. “Okay. I’ll let you know.”
Hunter continued through, lingered on the back steps and looked out at the ratty back yard. Neighbors on the other side of the rickety fence stared curiously at him. Hunter went back inside. In the front room, a young female tech looked at the shelves and shelves of dusty paperback books, magazines, and odd knick knacks.
“Fuck,” she said, with feeling, and began to photograph the shelves.
Hunter stood off her shoulder and tilted his head to one side to better read the titles. Shelf after shelf of Harlequin Romances, historical novels, several rows of science fiction, including a ten inch section of thin Bantam paperbacks of the Doc Savage series.
“Damn,” he said softly. “Those are old.”
There was a book protruding out from the uniform line of pocket books, a trade paperback. Hunter bent to look at it and paused in surprise. It was a paper back copy of Thirty-Six Stratagems, the Wang Xuanming edition, his own personal favorite. This one was in better shape than his copy, and looked newer, and strangely out of place on the shelf.
“Hey!” Hunter called to the tech. “Can I touch this shelf, this book?”
The tech looked over. “Gloves, be careful handling it in case you smudge prints. Why, what did you find?”
“Just a book I like.”
“You don’t get to keep it.”
“Yeah,” Hunter said. “I get that.”
He pulled a set of gloves out of the tech’s open work box, then took a pen from his pocket and carefully levered the book out of the shelf. There wasn’t as much dust on this shelf as the others.
Why?
There was a bookmark in place, protruding up a few inches. The logo and header on the bookmark was of a local used book store. That made sense, as this edition wasn’t available new, hadn’t been for awhile. He eased the book open with the tip of the pen to the bookmarked page.
Stratagem Seven: Create something out of nothing.
That took him a long way back…
…they were resting, sitting on flat boulders inserted into the grassy expanse of ground that gently sloped down to the water’s edge. The purl and whisper of the river seemed clear and sharp in the early morning clearness, the air crisp and cool as they let their sweat cool, knives resting in their laps, and they listened to the man Jim called The Raven as he read from the battered book he held in his hand:
“…what does it mean to create something out of nothing? In the way of deception? It means to design a counterfeit front to put the enemy off guard. When the trick works, the front is changed into something real so that the enemy will be thrown into a state of double confusion. In short, deceptive appearances may always conceal some forthcoming dangers…from false to real, from nothing to something. The false can only delude the enemy. It takes the real to overcome the enemy…”
The Raven was, in appearance anyway, as white bread as white bread could be. Fit, hellishly so, but not in a way you could read through his clothes or in his usual carriage, which while relaxed, didn’t have any of the usual physicality that normally exuded from a fighter; medium length gray hair
and thinning on top, like a lot of middle aged men, uniform features, no distinguishing characteristics, nothing to make him stick out in the crowd, nothing to draw attention to himself…
Till he moved with a knife in his hand. Then it was as though someone had whisked away a curtain and shown this dynamic figure quivering with massive electricity, energy that struck you like a club, speed that left you devastated, wondering what happened, unbelievable technique and flow…
Till he spoke, with a melodic, hypnotic voice, certain and sure as he made his points, discussed his principles, and even in repose, he quivered with intensity and energy, fearsome…
“Who the hell is that guy?” Hunter asked one of the other Riddlers.
“He’s the man, dude. That’s the Raven, and he’s killed more people with his knives than a lot of third world countries, man. He’s the real deal.”
What the hell was this doing here? Hunter wondered. He studied the shelf again carefully. “Hey?”
The tech looked up. “What is it?”
“Check this out.”
The tech wandered over.
“Look at this shelf, dust this book…this doesn’t look right.”
“What’s wrong with it?” the tech bent over the shelf.
“Look at the difference in the dust…this was cleaned, the other shelves weren’t. This book doesn’t go with these other ones. All the other books are sorted by type…this is just stuck in here at random.”
The tech got close in and compared the shelves. “Yeah…” she breathed. She took her equipment out, took a few digital pictures. “Let me see that book.” She dusted the book, and got an excellent array of prints off the glossy cover of the Thirty-Six Stratagems. “Nice.”
“Can you run those now?”
“Yeah, but I was waiting till I had the full series for the house…”
“Run them now.”
“Okay.”
The tech took out her laptop and fired up the wireless modem, attached a device that looked like a miniaturized scanner, then utilized a small pen that scanned the image of the print right off the book cover. Like magic, the images appeared on the computer monitor, where she used the track pad to move the pointer and place the images on the electronic image of a standard fingerprint card. When she had the full array in place, she clicked save, and then hit transmit. The hard drive hummed and a status bar showed the progress of the transmission.
“It’ll be a little bit before we get anything back,” the tech said. She crouched down in front of the laptop.
Hunter weighed the book in his hand. Synchronicity. It was a strange and powerful force in the world. He pored over the other books on the shelf he’d taken this one from. More science fiction, grouped alphabetically by author. On one side of the gap where he’d plucked this book from, H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. On the other side, Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness. Both good books; he’d read the Wells while in high school, the Zelazny book while on an Air Marshal mission a long time ago, chasing the summer solstice east from New York to Stockholm. The Thirty Six Stratagems. What were the odds?
The computer pinged.
“That was fast,” the tech said. She clicked on the track pad. “Yep, we got a hit, all right.”
Hunter stood over her while she worked the keyboard.
“Right out of the stock database, with cross references to DOD,” she said. “Must be a vet.”
Like magic, an image bloomed across the upper quarter of the screen, with accompanying text to the right of the picture and continuing below. It was him, all right, the man from the airport, the terrorist and murderer and suicide.
First Sergeant Alvin Torkay, US Army retired. Last unit of record 2d Battalion, 325th Infantry, 82d Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Decorations include Combat Infantryman’s Badge with two stars, Silver Star, Bronze Star with Oak Leave Cluster, Purple Heart….
And it went on.
A decorated army paratrooper, a senior NCO from the 82d Airborne Division, a war hero with service in Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm.
What the hell was this?
“Jesus,” the tech said. “This guy is no terrorist. He’s a Catholic!”
Hunter took out his cell phone and hit the speed dial to Basalisa Coronas’s line. The phone buzzed only once before he heard her crisp voice: “Coronas. Go.”
“This is James,” Hunter said. “I have something you need to see, right now. Get to your techs with a wireless modem, I’m going to have this sent over to you right now.”
“What is it?”
“We have a make and ID on the airport shooter. You’re not going to believe this.”
Silence. Then, “Send it now, and stay on the line. You’re positive?”
“Picture matches, and the prints. I saw the guy, this is him.”
“I’ll stand by.”
The tech looked up at Hunter while she tapped the keyboard. “What the hell is this about?”
“I don’t know,” Hunter said. “I don’t have any idea.”
Behind them, high on the shelf where no one had reached yet, a small cube, a miniaturized camera with a transmitter that sent the digitized stream of images to a repeater hidden in the back yard further transmitted the information to a server concealed in a rental house, where the information was digested, encrypted, and sent on through a number of cunning cut-outs to a broadband server that sent the packet of data along where it was plucked out by the computer technicians of Ahmed Samir Said, where it was relayed to the big computer monitor in the computer work room in the warehouse safe house.
Ahmed Samir Said watched, in real time, the activity inside the house, saw the look on Hunter’s face, heard the discussion between the tech and Hunter and Basalisa Coronas.
“Is that him?” someone asked.
“Yes,” said Ahmed Samir Said. “That’s him. The Air Marshal.”
PART III: DISPLAY IN THE EAST AND ATTACK IN THE WEST
“When the enemy command is in confusion, it will be unprepared for any contingencies. The situation is like flood waters rising higher and higher; likely to burst the dam at any time. When the enemy loses internal control, take the chance and destroy him.” The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Chapter One
Basalisa Coronas watched the information scroll across her laptop screen. Outwardly impassive, her stomach turned as she read the data on Sergeant Torkay.
What the hell is going on? He’s a war hero, for God’s sake.
One of her fellow CIRG agents, Ed Robbins, looked up and said, “What you got, boss?”
Basalisa smiled a controlled smile and turned her attention on the younger agent. “An enigma wrapped in a riddle, Ed. I want you to do something for me.”
She pointed at the screen.
“Everything from everywhere on this man. And I want you to cross reference with everything on the people that were in this house, and the property list, and the internet activity and the phone logs – everything. I want you to find me the connection between him and these people, and anything whatsoever to do with terrorist activity during or after his military service. Leave nothing unturned.”
Ed studied the screen; his eyebrows raised in surprise. “This guy?”
She nodded slowly, her attention back on the picture of Sergeant Torkay. “This guy.”
1
Hunter prowled through the detritus of Sergeant Torkay’s life. This whole house was wrong; there was nothing here of the man himself. He had history…why didn’t his surroundings reflect that?
Because he wasn’t living here.
He was staying here.
Which meant his real home was elsewhere.
Though there was a semblance of a life here with the books and the dog and TV equipment, everything looked thrown together, as though the house had been assembled from the pieces of someone else’s life; from a series of shopping trips to Salvation Army stores and consignment shops. There was no unity here, except in the pitiful small colle
ction of pots and pans and the neatly ordered bedroom.
Hunter took a deep breath, cleared his mind, settled his weight underside, and let his eyes relax and enhance his peripheral vision. The “soft focus” allowed his mind to absorb more visual data, and relaxed his perceptual filters and let that data sift through the subconscious mind. It was sometimes the physiological basis for intuition, and Hunter had come to rely heavily on his intuition and trained it and trusted it.
He wanted to see this room, this house, this shell of a life, with new eyes.
Hunter turned away from the bookshelves, wandered back into the bedroom, looked at the neatly made bed.
Why make the bed if he knew he was going to die?
But then again, why not?
Hunter thought about that. What would he do if he’d been Alvin Torkay, and on the day he was going to die rolled out of bed, sat there in his rumpled underwear, and let the images of the day to come roll through his mind? Would he have made the bed, shaved carefully after showering, rinsed his dishes? Or would he just have left it all a mess, seeing only to the function of his pistol and the one hand grenade?
No telling.
Hunter paused in front of the bedroom closet, opened the door, looked at the clothing hanging there, each facing in the same direction, sorted by shirt and pants.