Web of Lies

by Michael Cross

  The man shakes his head. “Never seen anything like that before.”

  The waitress drops off our drinks, and we all sit in silence for a moment as we take a sip, giving ourselves a moment to decompress. I can see the questions in their eyes—they’re wondering why I pulled them out of there. It’s a question I don’t have an answer to myself, to be honest. I know I shouldn’t be sitting here with them. I know I shouldn’t get involved with this. But just when I think I can get up and walk away, I see the face of that little girl in my mind all over again.

  “What happened to your little girl?” I ask before I can stop myself.

  The woman’s face falls, and her eyes well with tears. She looks down at the table, her lower lip quivering. The man puts his hand on her shoulder comfortingly. He purses his lips then looks up at me.

  “My name’s Eric Woods. This here’s Danette Williams,” he says. “Sherise was my niece. I’m also the family attorney.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” I say.

  He nods. “Thank you.”

  Eric looks at me, his eyes narrow, appraising me. I take a long swallow of beer and wait him out for a moment. He drains half his scotch and sets his glass down, his eyes never leaving mine.

  “What’s your interest in this, Mr.—”

  Danette still has her head down, tears rolling down her cheeks. She’s too stricken to say anything. Which is understandable.

  “Echo. Just call me Echo,” I tell him. “And my interest is in seeing justice done.”

  “So this isn’t about the fifty-k, huh?” he asks skeptically.

  I shake my head. “Don’t want your money.”

  “So what, you’re just doing this out of the goodness of your heart?” he presses. “The world doesn’t work that way.”

  “Maybe it should,” I reply. “No mother should ever have to bury her child.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical.”

  I shrug. “Nothing to forgive. I get it,” I tell him. “But I just want to know what happened.”

  He looks at me for a long moment, his eyes boring into mine as he tries to divine any ulterior motives I might be hiding. When he doesn’t see any, he sighs, and his shoulders slump. He folds in on himself and seems to age ten years right before my eyes. And when he speaks, his voice is hollow. Weak. As if his strength has finally been leeched out of him.

  “We don’t live in the greatest neighborhood,” he says, almost ashamed. “Sherise was playing out front and a couple gang-bangers rolled up. They started shooting up a couple houses over. Sherise tried to run, but…”

  He loses his grip, just for a moment. He clenches the table tightly with his hands, his knuckles turning white.

  I nod. He doesn’t need to say it out loud.

  Danette lets out a choked sob and buries her face in her hands, her body shaking as she tries to keep from making a scene in the bar. It’s as if all of the control she had at the rally has crumbled all at once. She’s paralyzed with grief right now and unable to speak. Unable to do anything but cry. I shake my head. It’s a tragic story. No mother should ever have to lose her child like that.

  “Do you know who the shooters were?” I ask, not expecting that they will.

  Eric shakes his head as I expected he would. But it was worth a shot. You never know what might turn up.

  “You said they were gangs,” I say. “Any idea which ones were involved?”

  “Sixtieth Street Rollers and the Coronas,” he nods without hesitation.

  “You’re sure about that?” I ask.

  Eric nods. “Rollers have been running that area for time out of mind. The Coronas have been trying to cut into the territory for the last six months or so,” he says. “More shootings than I can count lately. It’s like a goddamn warzone anymore.”

  “And you told the police all this, I assume?” I ask.

  Eric scoffs. “For whatever good that does,” he spits. “Oh, they say they’re tryin’ to find Sherise’s killer, but they don’t even patrol down in our area anymore. They don’t care about black and brown kids gettin’ shot.”

  Silence descends over the table as I take a long swallow of beer, taking in all of the information—and trying to decide what to do with it. My mind is split down the middle right now. Part of me wants to help this grief-stricken family. The other part of me knows what a tightrope I’ll be walking with Delta, and know I’m risking all of the answers I’m trying to get about my own life.

  I look at Danette and see the pain written across her face. Eric too. Their grief is all too real, and it sends a dagger of guilt straight through my heart. How can I even think about walking away and leaving them to fend for themselves? How can I stand by and do nothing when confronted with a situation like this?

  I know they aren’t going to get any answers, let alone justice, for that little girl. They’re unfortunately right—nobody cares when it’s a black or brown kid getting killed. It’s simply written off as gang on gang violence and buried.

  The work I’m doing for the Tower is supposedly an effort to protect this country. But is the country really worth protecting if we don’t look out for each other? If we don’t try to extend that protection to our most vulnerable people? If we don’t stand up for those who need it most? If I’m going to protect this country, I want it to be a country worth protecting. Worth sacrificing for.

  “I’m going to look into this for you,” I tell them.

  Danette raises her head and looks me in the eye. “Please, Mr. Echo, don’t go makin’ promises—”

  I raise my hand to stop her. “I’m not making any promises except for one—I will look into this,” I tell them. “Other than that, I won’t get your hopes up. I don’t know what I’m going to find when I start looking. It could be nothing more than dead ends. But I promise you I will keep looking until I’ve exhausted all possible leads.”

  They both look at me for a long moment, then exchange a look with each other, some silent bit of communication passing between them. Finally, they turn back to me, and I see the faint spark of hope dancing in their eyes.

  “Who are you?” Danette asks. “Are you a cop?”

  I shake my head. “No. I’m just a concerned citizen. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Eric chuckles. “Concerned citizen,” he says. “Who are you really?”

  “I’m just a guy,” I insist. “That’s all.”

  “Can I ask why you’re doing this?” Danette presses.

  “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  Chapter Eleven

  After some careful consideration, I decided to scrap the cheap motel and hole up in my safe house for the duration of this op. It was probably foolish—or just wishful thinking—to believe the Tower doesn’t know about this place when they know everything else about me. Besides, they might take it as a sign that my memories are returning, which they can only think is a good thing. And if they truly are on the up and up with me here, I shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

  And given all of that, I’d rather sleep in a comfortable bed and not have to worry about catching some nasty flesh-eating bacteria or dealing with the disgusting smell anymore, thank you very much. Besides, having to pack up and haul all of my shit with me every time I left the room was getting really old.

  After a hot shower, I sit at the table in the dining room unafraid to be barefoot with my unsanctioned laptop open and going. I take a swallow of beer as I scroll through the articles on the shooting of Sherise Williams. All of them mention the Rollers and the Coronas, of course, but it seems more of a detailed history of the gangs and a rehashing of past violence, rather than any substantive investigation into the shooting itself. And the boilerplate statements from the cops make their interest level seem—low. To say the least. No leads, no information, no—nothing.

  I know I’m not going to get anything out of the news, so I search smaller sites, blogs, anything I can find that has a crime beat. It takes me about thirty minutes and two
beers, but I don’t find much of anything useful. About the only thing I glean that might be of some use are the territorial boundaries of both the Rollers and the Coronas. I make a few notes and look at the gang borders again, an idea starting to form in my head. Not a great idea, but I can iron out the details later.

  For now, I want to get an idea of what Eleanor Vogel did to run afoul of the Tower. Because nothing I’ve seen in the dossier warrants the total destruction of her name and everything she’s built. Delta would shit her pants to hear me say it, but I kind of admire Vogel for what she’s done. She used her own intelligence, drive, and relentlessness to build something bigger than even her own considerable family name. How can that be a bad thing?

  “How is that leading to the destruction of the country?”

  I do a quick Google search on Vogel and find plenty of articles about her company, more than a few profiles of her personally, and even more than that about various deals her company has made for advanced weapons technology. While plenty of them are puff pieces heaped with admiration for Vogel, not all of them are friendly.

  The more I dig, the more pieces I find that aren’t dripping with praise for Vogel or her work. In fact, I find more than a few that accuse her of being a war profiteer. Some actually blame her directly for many countless thousands of deaths, calling her the most evil part of the country’s war machine. I scan one such piece and chuckle to myself.

  “I think calling her worse than Hitler is a bit over the top.”

  The way I see it, Vogel is a capitalist. Plain and simple. She used her smarts to build a better bomb. The quality of her products surpasses other competing products, and so she reaps the benefits. Sure, the specific nature of her business is the market of death. But humans have been commodifying death for a millennia. Why her? Why now? And what makes her so much worse than any of the other defense contractors out there all doing the same thing?

  I sit back and think about it for a minute and then pull up the Clarion Call to see if Publius has anything to say about her. The information I found on the Call during the Blankenship op was enlightening as hell. And accurate, as it turns out. If there’s dirt out there that the media isn’t covering—or perhaps just doesn’t know—I’m betting Publius will have dug it up.

  When the Call’s homepage comes up, I sift through the articles on the front page. Most of them are pieces on the death of Judge Blankenship, all of them refuting the official line that it was a heart attack that killed the judge. Publius has plenty of bits and pieces of the actual story, but not enough to weave it all into one coherent narrative.

  But there’s more. He—or she—goes into fine detail about Blankenship’s ties to the Hellfire Club, even positing that it’s the reason why the judge was murdered. They even posit a theory about an assassin who had been seen in town and was tied to an ongoing missing persons case. Unfortunately—or perhaps, fortunately, in my case—the writer is short on hard facts. To most anybody, this will all sound like wild conspiracy theories. Lucky for me, all the fake news flying around out there is going to work in my favor. This time, anyway.

  But the fact that they made the connection at all sends a chill down my spine and underscores the concerns Delta expressed earlier. I almost want to apologize for tearing her head off when she got on me for what I’d done. Almost.

  I’m still not going to apologize for doing the right thing. I just need to be more careful about it. And it also makes me wonder once again about how Publius is getting their information. They’re obviously really well connected to pull the information they’re putting out there. I mean, unless they’re a psychic, somebody has got to be tipping them off to what’s really going on.

  It once again makes me think about walking away from the murder of the little girl. The last thing I want is to draw any more attention to myself. I’m pretty sure it would make my standing with the Tower even more tenuous than it already is.

  But even as the thought of walking away crosses my mind, I see the smiling face of that little girl again and know that I can’t. What happened to her is wrong, and somebody needs to pay for it.

  I drain the last of my bottle and immediately open a new one, taking a long swallow of it. I try to clear my mind of everything and focus on my task at hand. The best way to keep in the Tower’s good graces is to do the job and make them happy. If they’re focused on celebrating a win for their side, they likely won’t notice any of my side activities. Hopefully. I apparently just need to be discreet enough to not draw the attention of Publius.

  I go to the search box on the Call’s website and key in Eleanor Vogel’s name. Almost immediately, a slew of articles comes up. My eyes widen in surprise at what I see. I scroll through the first couple of stories I come across, feeling my anger rising in equal proportion to my disgust.

  “Son of a bitch,” I mutter.

  If the allegations Publius is making are true, it changes everything for me. Far from the industrious story of American ingenuity, her story is one of craven political scheming, shady backroom deals, nepotism, and greed. Of course, it’s a story as old as time itself, and one not all that uncommon among the country’s elite. It’s stupid of course, but I’d let myself think better of Eleanor Vogel.

  I don’t know why, but I had stupidly let myself believe she was above that garbage and had gotten there all on her own merits.

  According to Publius, Vogel has been conducting a secret affair with very married Micah Hardwick—the Hellfire Club’s alleged would-be-Manchurian-Candidate for the Senate. Hardwick is a graduate of West Point and a former Marine with an impeccable service record. He is a literal war hero. But he is also a member of the Hellfire Club.

  Given his background, it’s expected that Hardwick will be in a position of influence within the Senate, specifically within the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees. In positions such as those, he can certainly pave the way for Vogel to secure more of those lucrative government contracts.

  It’s typical pay to play politics as far as I can tell and nothing that’s even remotely overtly remarkable. Disappointing maybe, but not remarkable.

  But it’s the next article I read that makes me take notice. Along with the article profiling Hardwick, Publius included photos of him with other members of the Hellfire Club—Judge Miller Blankenship among them. The photos are candid and appear to have been taken by a hidden camera. The pictures are surprisingly sharp—whoever took these has some quality equipment—and were taken at what looks like some fancy garden soiree fundraiser for Hardwick’s campaign.

  I look closer and see that one of the photos was taken by somebody carrying a tray of champagne flutes. The catering staff. Of course. I briefly wonder if the photos were taken and passed on to Publius by a source—or whether Publius was actually there. After a moment’s thought, I am dead-ass certain it’s Publius, and that whoever they are, they work for one of these well-vetted catering companies the DC elite typically use over and over again.

  See, the thing is, people at parties typically don’t notice the wait staff any more than they notice the furniture around them. They often talk about things they shouldn’t be discussing in the open. There is no telling what else Publius might have seen or overheard at these parties. There’s no telling what other information they might be sitting on, just waiting for the right moment to publish.

  Which, of course, leads me to another question—what is Publius’ agenda? I’ve read some articles that would make them seem more in line with the Tower, and others that seem markedly less so. The only constant seems to be their staunch opposition to the Hellfire Club and their shady objectives. So what is their long game here? Which side are they on?

  It’s all interesting and good mental fodder for later, but it’s not what’s important right now. I give my head a small shake and focus on the task in front of me—specifically, on what caught my eye in the photographs. Or maybe more specifically, who caught my eye—Eleanor Vogel.

  In the photos, she’s cozy as hell
with Blankenship and Hardwick—though they are careful to appear professional still. You’d get no indication they were having an affair if you didn’t already know. And while her friendliness with Hardwick and his wife might not be noteworthy in and of itself, since she’s bankrolling the candidate, it’s what I see on the left lapel of her suit jacket that catches my eye.

  She’s wearing one of those distinctive Hellfire Club pins—like the one I’d found in Blankenship’s house. There’s no denying it now—she is definitely part of the cabal.

  There’s other information contained in some of Publius’ works that I want to verify, but for the moment, it somewhat eases the burden of guilt about taking Vogel down, and in my mind, puts her firmly in the bad guy column.

  With all that I’ve seen in the weeks since I’ve woken up, I haven’t been surprised often. But I admit, this is a surprise. And even as I admit it, it’s something I should have expected.

  “Damn,” I mutter.

  Delta was right. Of course she was.

  Chapter Twelve

  The following day, I’m sitting across the plaza from Vogel Tower, trying to solve the unsolvable puzzle. I’d taken a run through the building a little earlier to scout it, finding that the floors civilians are not allowed on are equipped with not just keycard identification, but optic and biometric scanners as well.

  So, short of stealing somebody’s keycard, then cutting off their hand and gouging out their eye, I’m not getting in there. Not even delivery personnel are allowed beyond a certain point. And I don’t have the tech-savvy to pose as any kind of tech repairman. Of course, they probably have their own geek squad in house. And if they do farm out work, I would imagine with the level of security I see, they have specialized firms whose employees are all vetted six ways to Sunday.

  “It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?”

  I look up and avoid trying to give a start as Justice drops down into the chair across from me. She reaches out and pulls my plate over to her with a mischievous grin. She reaches into the deep dish and pulls out a piece of pizza, happily taking a big bite of it. I cut a glance around and see that nobody seems to be paying us any mind.