by Marcus Wynne
Ray’s voice was soothing. “That’s why we need to have lunch and a talk. I’ve got some tape to show you. Then we can discuss what we’re going to do and I think you’ll find it to be okay.”
“What are you going to ask me to ask him?”
“I’m going to offer him a job.”
LINDEN HILLS NEIGHBORHOOD,
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
In the chaos of the crime scene in Linden Hills, Dale Miller and Charley Payne surrendered their personal weapons to a female forensics technician in a blue jacket emblazoned with POLICE across the back.
“I’ll take care of these for you guys,” she said. “We’ll see about getting them back to you as quick as we can.”
“Thanks, Francine,” Charley said. “I hate feeling naked in such a violent world.”
“That your only shooter?” Dale said.
The two men studied each other. Payne was tall and thin, but hard muscled beneath his baggy work shirt. His face was long and lined with grooves that started at his hairline and ran to his chin.
“Yeah,” Charley said. “You?”
“There’s always a spare if you’re a firearms instructor.”
“Lucky you. Want to lend me one?”
Dale looked Charley up first, then down. “I’d have to know you better. Maybe you should buy me a cup of coffee.”
“That would be an interesting conversation.”
One of the detectives standing nearby looked up from his notebook. “I’d’ve thought you two secret squirrels would have run into each other by now.”
“Is that right, Rocco?” Dale said. “We’re secret squirrels?”
“You were,” Rocco said. “Charley too, I hear.”
Charley pursed his lips before he answered. “Something like that. We’ll catch that coffee sometime, Miller. I’ve got to go.”
“All right,” Dale said. He pointed at the Sebastian Joe’s outdoor patio. “I’m over here every morning, just like clockwork. And you’re over there at the Linden Hills Diner, just like clockwork. Cross the street sometime, take a walk on the wild side. I’ll buy you coffee and a roll.”
“I’m that obvious, huh?”
“Not too many top-flight shooters working this block, big boy.”
“I’ll do that,” Charley said. “Maybe tomorrow. I’ve got to go.”
Dale watched Charley walk down the street and through the doorway that led to the apartments above the Linden Hills Diner.
“You know that guy, Rocco?” Dale said.
Rocco nodded. “In a way. He works for the department, forensics photographer. That’s how he knows everybody. He was friends with Bobby Martaine, that cop that got whacked in that Cannibal Killer case a year back.”
“What’s his history? You know?”
“Some kind of contract guy for CIA supposedly. Quit them and came out here to work as a photographer. Don’t know much else. He’s a pretty good guy, gets along, and the guys in the bag like him. Good sense of humor and he takes good pictures. Did a wedding for one of the guys not long ago.”
“What do you have on the guy that got whacked?”
“Which one? You may have noticed we have a few.”
“The one they were protecting.”
Rocco brushed back the long black hair that fell across his forehead and flipped through his notebook. “He had a Honduran passport on him, name of Rhaman Uday. His team was from United Security, expensive local outfit. The team leader, we knew him, he was an ex-cop from Minneapolis, sergeant on the ERU named Heritage. One of the other dead bodyguards was a cop, too.”
“Anything on the shooters?” Dale said.
“The women? They were stone pros. Disappeared without a trace. We’re canvassing the neighborhood and putting out the word on the TV that we want to talk to anybody that saw them or the moped. Nothing yet, and I’m not too hopeful. If we haven’t heard anything yet, I don’t think we’re going to.”
Dale rubbed his hands together, then stuck them in the rear pockets of his Levis and looked over the street, blocked with police cars and yellow tape. “I’m going home and get another gun. This neighborhood is getting too damn dangerous for me.”
Charley Payne returned to his small apartment above the Linden Hills Diner. He stood and looked out at the street from his window, and absently touched his elbow to the empty holster at his side that should have held his Glock .45. Unarmed and shooters on the loose. He didn’t care for that. The police cars and other emergency vehicles still blocked the street below, and their lights, even in the bright of day, flickered up and through his window and across the photographs he covered his otherwise plain walls with. The other shooter, Dale Miller, was still talking with the detective. Charley felt strange watching Miller talk; he was sure they were still talking about him. Even after all this time he clung to the remnants of a way of life that demanded secrecy in all things.
He didn’t like people who actually knew something about him to talk.
And Miller might be one of the very few who would know something about Charley Payne and the elite shooters of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Staff, would know his history and what it meant in the small community of special operators. Charley had run and gunned with the SAS all over the world, conducting the “special activities” that ran the gamut from assassinations to complex bugging operations to striking down terrorists in their own backyards. They were legends in the community, and Charley had been one of the best.
Charley dragged his small armchair close to the window and sat down, kicked his feet up on the windowsill and made himself relax. He was still working off the adrenaline rush of the shooting. The big muscles of his legs and shoulders trembled. He rolled his head slowly to ease the kinks out and thought about having a drink, but decided to wait.
He’d done okay today. Not bad for being out of practice. The time on the range he spent keeping tuned up had paid off. He’d often questioned his need for carrying a gun and keeping in practice; he was a photographer now and that was what put bread on the table. But he’d spent a lifetime carrying a gun, and he felt incomplete without one. Lucky for him today he’d had one.
Miller was damn good. Some kind of spec ops shooter before, the detective had said. Charley wondered. It would be good to talk to somebody with the same history. Maybe he should take Miller up on that cup of coffee. The younger man’s cockiness and self-assuredness put him off a little bit. Maybe he was feeling his age, and the younger man prickled his vanity, which he had to admit was considerable.
Charley laughed and ran his fingers through his thinning hair, flecked with gray. Hell, he should buy Dale Miller a cup of coffee or a beer—after all, the young shooter had covered this old gray dog’s ass today, and done it well.
And maybe he’d loan him a pistol.
MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE,
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
Patrice Nordby had been a medical examiner in Minneapolis for ten years. In the hundreds of autopsies she’d performed, she’d seen the entire range of abuse that human beings could mete out on one another. But this was her first mass killing. She looked over the long row of bodies, stiff and cold on their gurneys, waiting for her attention in the City Morgue. She snapped the cuffs of her surgical gloves and got ready to work.
“I’ll start with the boss,” she told her assistant. “Bring him on in.”
The small chubby man, his face distorted from bullet wounds, his dental work shattered, was wheeled in and transferred to the autopsy table. Patrice reached up and adjusted the microphone above the table and began her initial examination. She measured the man and found him to be five feet, eight inches tall. He weighed one hundred ninety pounds. Something nagged at her when she had the height and weight.
She called to her assistant. “Jerry? This one had the passport on him?”
“Yeah.”
“Did we get a copy of it?”
“Right here.”
Her assistant handed her a Xerox cop
y of the inside front page of the passport. The man in the picture looked like the man on the table, as battered as his face was. But the passport said the man was six feet, one inch tall, and weighed two hundred ten pounds. Something was wrong here.
“Jerry? Get me the lead detective, will you?”
Patrice went over her autopsy notes with the lead detective, Rocco Rococelli.
“This isn’t the guy in the passport,” she said. “The passport says six feet one inch, this guy is five feet eight. The passport says two hundred ten pounds, this guy is one hundred ninety. He might have lost the weight, but you don’t lose five inches in height. The face looks the same, mangled as it is, but this is the kicker—he’s had plastic surgery.”
“Plastic surgery?” Rocco said.
“Yep,” Patrice said. “On his face. Expensive, too. Altered his looks and I’m betting it’s to make him look like the guy in the passport. If there is a Rhaman Uday, which is a funny name for a Honduran, it’s not this guy.”
Rocco sighed. “Bad enough I got a mass shooting, I got to have a John Doe mystery, too. You sure on all this, Patrice?”
“You know me. I’d go to court with what I’ve got.”
“All right. Thanks.”
Rocco slapped the covers of his notebook together and stuffed it back into the inside pocket of his wrinkled sport coat.
“Damn it,” he said. “So just who do I have here?”
TORTURE REHABILITATION CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF
MINNESOTA CAMPUS, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
Dr. Rowan Green looked out the window at the rolling green lawn, and the trees that hid a direct view of the river. She felt a tug to be outside in the summer warmth, but turned her attention back to her patient. Rhaman Uday sat across from her, his tall frame bent into an overstuffed chair beside a long couch. He plucked over and over again at a loose thread on the zipper of his exercise-suit top.
“How are we feeling today, Mr. Uday?” she said.
He kept his attention on the loose thread. “Lost. Always lost.”
“Can you remember what it was like to be found?”
The man’s face darkened. “To be found is to be hurt. To be lost is to be safe.”
“You’re safe here. Are you lost here?”
He nodded. “Yes. Safe. Lost.”
Dr. Green jotted a note to herself on the progress worksheet. At least now she could engage him in some dialogue. When he’d first come to her, weeks ago, she’d been unable to get anything out of him. He’d been pushed to the top of the Center’s waiting list after his initial examination and, fortunately for him, an opening came quickly.
“How long have you been lost?” she said.
Uday pulled at his lip and stared over her shoulder at the wall and her diplomas there. “Not as long as I was found.”
“How long were you found?”
He dropped both hands into his lap. The fingers knotted together, writhing like snakes.
“Many weeks,” he said. “Many, many weeks.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. Do you know who I am?”
“You’re not the One. My wife told me.”
“The One?”
“No more screaming. No more . . . with the wires. No more. You’re not the One. I know the One. For me was the screaming, many times when he brought us to work, he brought screaming for us.”
“Who brought screaming for you?”
“Saddam brought it for us. We were lost and then we were found. Then we were the screaming while others watched.” He fell silent and studied his hands in his lap.
Dr. Green measured him with eyes used to calculating the human toll of disclosure. Saddam. She’d dealt with the handiwork of the Saddam regime before. She quietly flipped through the notes section of Uday’s folder. According to his wife, who’d brought him to the center, he’d been a government bureaucrat high in the favor of Saddam Hussein. He’d been close to Saddam’s son-in-law. After the son-in-law defected and then returned, there was a purging of all those close to him. Uday had been one of those tortured to madness. He’d languished in a prison cell till his wife had been able to bribe his jailers and buy him out. They’d escaped to the west, to America, to the Center where his mind and body could be repaired.
So he was safe here, as safe as he could be.
“Saddam,” the broken man said. He closed his eyes and began to hum tonelessly as he rocked back and forth in his seat. “Saddam.”
DOMINANCE RAIN HEADQUARTERS, FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA
Michael Callan, a senior consultant with Kroner-O’Hanrahan, one of the country’s most prestigious international security firms, sat on Ray Dalton’s office sofa and forked Caesar salad out of a Styrofoam to-go box. Ray sat across the low coffee table from him in an armchair and munched on a roast beef and Swiss sandwich. Their favorite place for lunch was too crowded for a quiet talk, so they’d opted for a takeout meal in the privacy of Ray’s office.
Callan wiped his mouth on a napkin and said, “Who were the hitters?”
“The Twins,” Ray said. He set his sandwich down on the table and picked up the remote control for the VCR and television unit mounted in his wall. He rewound the tape of the hit in Minneapolis to a close-up of the two beautiful women on the moped.
“Top-shelf,” Callan said. “They still in Amsterdam?”
“That’s where they are. Marie Garvais and Isabelle Andouille, the only all-woman crew working in the business of taking out heavily protected targets, with a stellar record of success for a wide variety of clients. Everybody from the narco cartels to a sampling of European government agencies. Even, once or twice, for us.”
“That’s very much off the record, I suppose.”
“You probably have it somewhere in those expensive computers you maintain in Tyson’s Corner.”
Callan grinned, a smear of salad dressing on his upper lip. “You got that right. We get the same take from the same people.”
“Which goes back to my original statement. We’re all working on the same side of the street.”
“You want me to approach Dale and see if he’d take a contract? Doing what?”
“This Uday that got killed . . . he’s one of a small group of Iraqi exiles we’ve been watching. They’re related, either by blood or by the time they spend together in Saddam’s prisons. For some reason, why we don’t know, what’s left of Saddam’s apparat is looking for these people. They got close enough to put the Twins to work on taking them out. One down, and there’s only a woman and one other man left. The woman is married to one of them, she’s not a player. But the man may be.”
“Where’s the other man and the woman?”
“Still in Minneapolis. The woman is in a private-sector safe house with a crew around her; the man is a psychiatric patient at a specialty clinic at the University of Minnesota. The Torture Rehabilitation Center. They’re used to getting patients on somebody’s hit list, so they maintain low profiles for their patients and practice decent security. Problem is, they’re not prepared to deal with the Twins. So that’s where we come in. We want to take over protection of this man and move the woman to a secure location. We want Dale Miller to be a team leader of the protection team on the man.”
Callan pushed his Styrofoam plate to the middle of the coffee table, then cracked his knuckles one by one. “Not to blow my own horn, but I’ve got top-shelf executive protection teams I can rent you, Ray. Ex-Delta, SEALs, Secret Service . . . I’ve got shooters as well as technical support. Why run a contract with a loner when you can get a top flight team?”
Ray bobbed his head in quick agreement. “Dale was one of us. As far as I’m concerned, he’s still one of us. We want to keep things compartmented, but you’re right, you’ve got the resources. We want Dale and a contract crew for deniability, with you as a fallback.”
“Little conflict of interest here, Ray. If I succeed with your favor, I’m doing myself and the company out of a tasty bit of business.”
“There’s a substa
ntial consultation fee to soften the blow. And favors in the favor bank.”
“There’s that,” Callan conceded. “Me and Dale go back to Delta. So if I can help him, I will. What are you not telling me?”
“Full disclosure,” Ray said. “I’d like to bring Dale in myself, but there’s that ugly bit of history between us.”
Callan stood up, wiping his hands with a napkin, then balled it up and dropped it into his plate. He went to Ray’s big window and looked out. “Jonny Maxwell drove a wedge into everybody. He needed to die sooner than he did.” He paused for a moment, then said, “I’m sick of this traffic. It takes forever to get anyplace. You know it took me forty minutes to get here?”
Ray leaned back in his chair, stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankles. “Will you do this for me, Mike?”
“Minneapolis is a pretty city. I’d like to see Dale again, and it’d be nice to get out of here for a day.”
Ray got up and went to the window and stood beside Callan. “Thanks, Mike.”
“I’m doing your dirty work again, Ray. Big favors in the favor bank.”
“Done.”
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
Youssef bin Hassan stood outside the Central Train Station in Amsterdam, part of the milling crowd composed mainly of young people on holiday from all over the world. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered young man with a perpetually narrowed look on his face, dressed casually in baggy denim pants, light boots, and a white collared shirt open at the neck. He had a courier bag slung over his shoulder, weighty with his laptop computer, the latest I-Book from Apple.
It was a beautiful day in Amsterdam, clear and warm, and the sunlight glittered from the windows of the hotels that looked over the canals. He stood by the arched stone bridge that crossed over to Dam Street, and watched the canal water buses go by. When he judged he’d killed enough time, he looked at his wristwatch, an inexpensive Casio, then went to a public phone outside the tourist information center beside the bridge. He swiped a locally purchased phone card in the slot, waited for the tone, and punched in the local telephone number he’d been given. The phone was answered on the third ring.