Brothers In Arms

by Marcus Wynne

  “Yes, we have to be careful,” Marie said. “I’m sorry to be the one who must say it, but we need the work. There’s nothing else on right now.”

  “Then perhaps we need to find something new.”

  “If there’s work, there’s work,” Marie said. “If there isn’t, there isn’t. That’s all there is to that.”

  “Yes,” Isabelle said. She wrapped her arms around herself as though suddenly cold, even though she sat in full sunlight. “Let’s put this aside, shall we? We’ll discuss it more later. We’re neglecting Ilse.”

  “Is that right, Ilse?” Marie said, stroking the child’s face. Ilse laughed and smiled, her lips gleaming with peach gelato. “She hardly looks neglected.”

  Isabelle stood, took a napkin, and wiped Ilse’s face. She plucked the soggy remnants of the cone from her daughter’s fingers and wiped the sticky fingers with a Handiwipe she took from her purse.

  “Let’s go,” Isabelle said. She took Ilse by the hand and began to walk away, leaving Marie on the bench.

  “Isabelle? Isabelle?” Marie called. “Don’t be like this.”

  “Come along, Marie,” Isabelle said over her shoulder. “We are wasting a beautiful day.”

  Marie got to her feet and slowly followed her lover and her daughter.

  DOUBLE O FARM, DECATUR, ILLINOIS

  Charley and Dale sat inside the screened-in porch of the big farmhouse and watched the sun drop low in the west, casting long shadows across the packed dirt of the gun range.

  “You know you can hear corn grow?” Dale said. “It cracks at night when it’s growing.”

  “You grew up around here, didn’t you?” Charley said.

  “Right here in Decatur,” Dale said. “Until I went into the army.”

  “Just a regular country boy, huh?”

  Dale laughed. “Thank god for that.”

  “I’m a city boy myself.”

  “Where?”

  “San Francisco mostly, then San Jose.”

  “Nice out there.”

  “Yeah, the city is sweet. I miss it sometimes, but I get back there to visit my family pretty often. Too damn expensive to live there anymore.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  Charley nodded, then sipped at the small glass of whiskey, well iced, he held in his hand. “So what does Callan say about the Twins?”

  “We’re getting our hunting license,” Dale said.

  “Really?” Charley said. “Hunt as in find or hunt as in kill?”

  “Don’t know yet. What do you think?”

  “They’re pros, Dale. They knew the risks going in, but they’ve got powerful friends, lots of low people in high places. I think just warning them off is enough, now that they’ve blown their last shot at getting Uday. They didn’t know who was protecting Uday, and they don’t know that they’re messing with the best. A good warning should be enough.”

  “What kind of message does that send? That you can take a whack at us and walk away from it?”

  “You’re certainly bloodthirsty,” Charley said. “They obviously didn’t know who they were going up against or they would have come heavier. They thought they had a superior grade of rent-a-cop. They’ve backed off and I don’t think we’ll see them again.”

  “The fact that they were operating on our soil is a factor to me.”

  “We’re not operating for the G,” Charley said. “We’re protecting the client with his own funds, albeit through Callan.”

  “We’re working for the G and you know it,” Dale said. “We have been all along. Callan’s a black company exec and always has been.”

  “Well,” Charley said, sitting back in his chair and rolling his eyes in mock astonishment. “You think so?”

  “There’s something to Uday,” Dale said. “This smallpox thing . . . Callan didn’t say anything about passing that on to the right people . . . not that he would anyway to us.”

  “You’re sticking your nose where you shouldn’t, Dale,” Charley said. “We get our checks from Callan and that’s all we need to know. Need to know, remember that? As for teaching the Twins a lesson, I’m all for a visit to the fleshpots of Amsterdam. But they won’t be easy to whack on their home turf and I don’t like killing women anyway. Put my vote down for a stern warning.”

  Dale shifted in his seat. “Just warn them off?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Anything else and we get into more trouble. That’s direct action. That’s not what we’re getting paid for.”

  Dale stood and stretched his back, raising his arms above his head and stretching his palms toward the roof.

  “I talk to Callan tonight,” he said. “But I think we’ll be taking a trip to Amsterdam. Just you and me, I think. That’s enough for a warning.”

  “Wow,” Charley said. “Does that mean you’re going to listen to me?”

  “Yeah,” Dale said. “That’s exactly what it means.”

  “You’re finally learning,” Charley said. “Old age and wisdom will beat out youthful enthusiasm every time.”

  “Fuck you,” Dale said. He grinned and slapped Charley on the shoulder. “Get your old tired ass up and let’s check on the troops.”

  Charley took a stick of gum out of his shirt pocket and unwrapped it carefully, saving the foil in his pocket. He popped the gum in his mouth after he hastily swallowed the last of his whiskey.

  “Alcohol abuse,” he said. “Let’s go, fearless leader.”

  After a walking patrol of the perimeter and checking on the operators manning the camera monitors in the operations center, Dale and Charley went back out onto the porch. John Onofrey opened the front door and said, “We’ll be eating pretty soon.”

  “Sounds good, Rhino,” Dale said.

  “All this and he cooks, too?” Charley said. “You bet,” the big man said. “Got a big pot of venison stew going and some fresh dinner rolls. We’ll have us a feast. You want some more whiskey?”

  “Maybe later,” Dale said.

  “Yeah, later,” Charley said reluctantly.

  Rhino laughed. “You don’t sound so sure, Charley.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Charley said. “After dinner would be good.”

  Rhino went back into the house, letting the screen door slam behind him.

  “That’s a good man,” Charley said.

  “The best,” Dale said.

  “Do you ever miss the life?” Charley said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The life,” Charley said, waving his hand and taking everything in around him with the gesture. “This. Running and gunning.”

  Dale shrugged, then looked out at the lingering twilight. In the clear air, far from the lights of the city, a few stars could be seen.

  “I mean, you’ve been out of the game for a while. Just like me. Are you glad to be back in it?” Charley said.

  Dale pushed his chair back and kicked his feet up onto the railing beneath the screened portion of the porch. “I’ve got a woman back in Minneapolis. She’s a detective with the PD, a real operator. She said something to me, when this gig came up, she said I needed engagement.”

  Charley laughed. “Maybe she was talking about the marrying kind.”

  “No. She said I needed a mission to give me something that I wasn’t getting from training the cops. Something with teeth in it.”

  “So do you?”

  “Yeah,” Dale said. “I guess I’ve missed that part. I was so fed up with the way things were done, I just didn’t want to have anything to do with the Outfit anymore. And that colored everything for me. I didn’t even carry a gun for a while.”

  “That’s serious.”

  “What about you? The life of a photographer give you everything you want? I guess not, since you’re here.”

  Charley pursed his lips. Long lines, deep wrinkles, cut from his mouth to his cheeks. “We’re a lot alike, bro. I got fed up with the Outfit, too, threw my hat in and moved on. But I had photography to fill that gap. There’s alway
s something missing when you leave something the way we left. There’s a void that you have to fill up, or else the empty space calls for you to fill it up with the same damn thing. Photography does that for me. What do you fill yours with?”

  Dale didn’t hesitate in his answer. “Nina. My woman. She filled that void for me.”

  “Dangerous business, having women in that space. You have to have something of your own, and you never own a woman, at least not one worth keeping.”

  “You have someone?”

  Charley laughed out loud and stomped his feet, once, on the floor. “Oh, women are one thing I have no shortage of, bro. I’ve got more than I need. But don’t you think you need something besides your woman to give you purpose? It’s putting a lot on her, that weight, whether she knows it or not.”

  “I never thought about it that way.”

  “Listen to the old gray dog here, Dale. I’ve been where you are before. I’m not saying that you have to get back in harness with the G. But men like us, we need to have something to do, and if training SWAT cops isn’t giving you the juice, then you need to look around and find something that will. Something of your own.”

  “Something like this?”

  “I don’t know. It’s what you want that’s important. If you could do anything you wanted to do, and you didn’t have to worry about money, what would you do? Where would you go?”

  Dale raised his eyebrows in surprise and rocked back in his chair. “That’s a good question.”

  “That’s what determines the quality of our lives, man. The quality of the questions we ask ourselves.”

  “You surprise me.”

  “Didn’t know I was such a philosopher, huh? Thought I was just another cock hound shooter?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So what would you do?”

  Dale drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair and thought for a moment. “I think I’d be some kind of outdoor instructor, a counselor or something like that. Teach kids about camping and backpacking, spend a lot of time outdoors.”

  “Now see, I’d have never thought that for you. I thought maybe you’d be a cop, or maybe in the FBI, something like that.”

  “No,” Dale said. “I don’t think I’d be a good cop. I’d just want to shoot the bad guys.”

  Both men laughed, a clear sound in the night that surrounded them.

  DOMINANCE RAIN HEADQUARTERS, FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA

  Mike Callan lolled in the overstuffed armchair Ray Dalton kept for his visitors. A mug of expensive Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee steamed in his fist, and he cupped both hands around the mug to feel the warmth against his palms. Ray, in his orthopedic leather executive chair, rocked back and forth slightly behind his expansive desk.

  “How far do you want them to go with this?” Callan said. “Are you giving them full license?”

  “What does Dale say?”

  Callan sipped his coffee, then said, “He’s saying to warn them off. He says the Twins didn’t know who they were going up against. They thought they just had private security hired by the family. He thinks telling them that the G’s involved with Uday will back them off. The Twins are pros, they won’t want to have a hassle with us.”

  “Damn right.”

  Callan narrowed his eyes and studied the other man intently. “Why do you want them dead?”

  Ray stopped rocking in his chair. “They took out a source we were running in Venezuela. Joint project with the DEA, it was a money-laundering operation the narcos were running. Someone made our source and fingered him for the Twins. They took him out on a walk-up, their favorite modus operandi: one distracted him with a little skin, the other blew his brains out on the sidewalk in front of his house. His wife and kids were just inside the house, saw the whole thing, but the Twins let them be.”

  “The Twins don’t hit families. They think it’s unprofessional.”

  “Not much comfort to his wife and kids.”

  “Did they know he was a US asset?”

  “Not as far as we know.”

  “Then clear your head, Ray. You’re making it personal, not business. The Twins worked for us before. They stay away from our assets. They must have thought he was Venezuelan intelligence or narcotics, DISP or something.”

  “That’s what it was.”

  “Let your field operator make the call, Ray. Dale knows what to do and Payne is top-shelf; you’d be hard-pressed to put together that good a crew. You always preach about keeping the personal out of operations. Who was this guy to you?”

  “I met him . . . he was just a good young kid taking a lot of risks for not much payoff . . . You don’t think we’re better off having them both dead?”

  “No, I don’t. The Twins serve a purpose. We might need them again in the future. Put your feelings aside and let Dale and Charley warn off the Twins. Dale thinks he can persuade the Twins to let him know who they’re working for, use the fact that the Twins were being run against the US without being told. He thinks they’ll be pissed and willing, for a price, to finger who took out the contract on Uday. That would give us some insight into the mystery with this guy, and we need that.”

  “We do have some nasty pieces, don’t we?”

  “Smallpox is as nasty as it comes. You put together the pieces that Uday brought and it’s starting to add up to a smallpox attack. You can bring in your medicos to Decatur and work on Uday, his rights and long-term treatment, well, you tell me how important they are in the face of that kind of threat. We’ve got great protection in place with good information security, we can launch Dale and Charley off to see what they can get out of the Twins. Give them a big checkbook and some favors from the favor bank and I believe Dale when he says he can bring something back.”

  “I hate letting those bitches go,” Ray said.

  “Save it for another time, that’s my counsel,” Callan said. “There’s plenty of that to go around.”

  “Then let’s make it so,” Ray said. He cracked his knuckles absently. “It’s killing time.”

  AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

  The upper level of the converted river barge the Twins called home was split into two rooms: one great room that served as a bedroom/study for Marie and Isabelle, the other a smaller room that served as Ilse’s bedroom, overflowing with stuffed toys, books, and games on neat rows of white shelves.

  Isabelle stalked around her bedroom, tightening the already immaculate bed, brushing nonexistent lint from the covers, and then went into Ilse’s room and straightened the already straight rows of books and toys. Downstairs, she heard Ilse laughing and Marie, between laughs, trying to read her a book in Dutch. They spoke both Dutch and English in the house and Ilse could go back and forth with ease, but lately they had been working on more Dutch to prepare her for preschool.

  Isabelle went back to the study and the laptop set up on the desk there. She sat down and looked again at the e-mail she’d just received from the cutout on the Minnesota contract. He’d asked for another meeting. Isabelle decided to leave Marie with Ilse and take this meeting herself. She wanted to see the face of the cutout and get her own sense of him. She had a bad feeling about this whole affair. There were layers of deception here. She felt, faint and far off, the machinations of some puppet master running a larger operation that they were just a small part of. This was no clean hit of a group of Iraqi dissidents; this was something else. There was an intensity to the hunt that seemed out of scale for the target, which meant that they didn’t have everything they needed to make a target assessment.

  She was going to see to that herself.

  She took care in dressing: black hose, a short black skirt and a white blouse, a loose leather jacket, heavy sensible shoes that could disable a man with one kick. She drew her hair back into her habitual working ponytail and decided to leave her features clean of makeup. From a small flat case taken from a locked cabinet in the study, she took out a folding fighting knife, the American Emerson CQC-7, and clipped it inside
her thigh atop her stocking where it gathered into her garter belt. She took a few steps to make sure the knife didn’t rub, then went downstairs where Marie and Ilse bustled in the kitchen, working together to make lunch.

  “Will you want to eat?” Marie said.

  “Save me something,” Isabelle said. “I don’t think I’ll be gone long.”

  In a café across the street from the youth hostel her target was staying at, Isabelle lingered over coffee. After a short while, she saw the young Arab come out, his courier satchel slung across his shoulders, and watched him as he glanced around. Then he set off at a stroll toward the rendezvous point, a marijuana coffee shop a few blocks away. Isabelle followed him from across the street, taking her time and watching for any surveillance. There were no cars with extra mirrors and multiple antennas, no couples lingering overlong in storefronts, no solos suddenly changing direction to follow the young Arab. Satisfied that she alone was following the young man, she crossed the street and fell in behind him, studying his tradecraft. He stopped a few times to look in windows and watch for anyone following him; he looked across the street for anyone moving in tandem with him, and he hurried across the street when the light changed to see if anyone hurried to catch him. He stopped in one shop and bought a bottle of water, then came out and stood in front and slowly drank the water, giving any watchers time to show themselves. She’d continued past him without another glance. He gave her the appreciative look that men normally gave her, but she ignored him and went on ahead. She knew where he was going, and that was her advantage.

  Isabelle stopped in a shop and looked at some boots till she saw the Arab pass by. Then she came out and fell in behind him again. The weight of the knife bothered her, and she brushed her hands over her skirt to make sure that the knife wasn’t sagging against the fabric. She studied the nape of bin Hassan’s neck, and thought about taking the heavy bladed knife and sinking it into his spine. Her anger over the contract and the inadequacy of the client’s intelligence effort might find some short-lived release in that.