Predator

by James A. Moore

  “Well, yeah… sure. But it’s just…”

  “I know,” Scott said quietly. “It’s breaking up the team.”

  Marcus slumped forward, as though the words themselves were like a blow to the stomach. “We’re brothers, man.”

  “And we always will be. Always. Why don’t you put in for a transfer yourself? You’re a great soldier, Marcus. You’d be an asset to any team. And I’d speak up for you. They’d be crazy not to take you.”

  Marcus smiled wryly. “If they wanted me, they’d have asked me. Just like they asked you.”

  Was there a hint of bitterness there? Scott couldn’t believe it, not of Marcus. Or maybe he just didn’t want to believe it.

  As though reading his thoughts – which he seemed to do so often – Marcus immediately held up his hands, palms out, and said, “But hey, don’t think I’m jealous, man. Because I’m not. Really. You’re exceptional, buddy. I don’t think you realize quite how exceptional you are. And frankly, that’s what’s so fucking great about you. I always knew you were destined for amazing things.”

  “Yeah, well, so are you,” Scott said, a little overcome.

  Marcus shrugged and took a gulp of coffee. He’d always been an open guy, a guy who didn’t mind showing his vulnerable side or admitting when he was scared, but this level of emotional honesty was a little raw, even for him.

  “Yeah, well…” he muttered. “Maybe…”

  “There’s no maybe about it. Your time will come. I know it.”

  “But right now, this is your time.”

  “So, you think I should say yes?”

  “Haven’t you already decided? I thought that was the whole point of this conversation.”

  Scott grimaced. “My instinct is to say yes. But there’s a bunch of stuff to consider. That’s why I wanted to—”

  Marcus interrupted him. Forcefully. “Of course you should say yes! Hell, man, this is a great opportunity! And yes, I hate that we’ll no longer be on the same team, and I’ll miss the fuck out of you, but I always knew something like this would happen one day. Things can’t go on the same forever. And maybe a couple years down the line…” He shrugged again. “Well, who knows?”

  Who knows indeed? thought Scott. The fact was, you walked a tightrope every day in this job. Nothing was certain. And although it wasn’t life and death, this time last week it had never occurred to Scott that he would be in this situation.

  It had been right after drill last Friday that he had been summoned, once again, to Captain Parker’s office. This time Sarge, who had been at drill and had said nothing to Scott about this unexpected invitation, had not been present.

  Scott had knocked on the Captain’s office door, half expecting to find him sitting at his desk flanked by a couple of grim-faced MIBs. But when Scott had answered his superior officer’s call to enter, Parker had looked relaxed, had even been smiling a little.

  Even so, Scott had marched up to the Captain’s desk, stood to attention and saluted, thinking of iron fists in velvet gloves. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

  “I did, Devlin,” Parker said. “At ease.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  For the first fifteen seconds Scott fully expected the ax that had been hanging over his head for the past few months to fall; fully expected to be in a situation where he would be forced to defend himself against charges he felt sure would have little or no foundation, but that the government suits would doubtless have concocted in such a way that they would stick to him like glue. So convinced was he of this that it took him a while to realize he had been called here for an entirely different reason. He heard the Captain say, “It appears, Devlin, that you have come to the attention…” and then his mind began to race. Somewhere along the way he heard the words “counter-terrorism” and “overseas missions,” but it was only when Captain Parker said, “And of course, it would mean a promotion,” that he blurted:

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  Now Parker looked a little exasperated. “Have you not been listening to a word I’ve said, Devlin?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. It’s just… it’s a little hard to take in. Sorry, sir, but would you mind going through it all again?”

  The Captain had sighed, but had said, “I guess it is all rather sudden from your point of view. But apparently you’ve been on Captain Starkey’s radar for some time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Scott said brightly, whilst secretly thinking: Who the hell is Captain Starkey?

  Starkey, it turned out, was head of a black ops team, which conducted counterterrorism missions overseas. It was all extremely high profile, whilst at the same time remaining strictly under the radar. Now it appeared that not only did Starkey want Scott on his team, but that he wanted to promote him to sergeant.

  “I don’t mind admitting I shall be sorry to lose you, Devlin,” Parker said. “You’re an extremely valuable member of this team. But this is a gilt-edged opportunity for you, and frankly you would be foolish not to accept it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Scott had said, his mind reeling.

  Despite his words, Parker had given Scott a week to consider the offer. Now it was four days later, and Scott had finally let Marcus in on his secret.

  For pretty much his entire life, Scott had been not exactly insular but self-sufficient, wary of getting close to anyone but his mom, who had then taught him the folly of intimacy by upping and dying on him. These last five years, for all his lone wolf instincts, he had slowly but surely found himself becoming part of something he never thought he’d be again: a family. Marcus, Flynn and Lau – and to a lesser extent the other guys in his team – he genuinely regarded as brothers. And now he was going to have to leave them. And it would be a wrench. But at the same time he felt excited about the next phase of his journey.

  “Thanks, man,” he said to Marcus. He wanted to say more, but had never been good at translating his feelings into words.

  “I’m only telling it how it is,” Marcus said. His eyes flickered across the rec room, to where Flynn and Lau were playing cards with a bunch of the other guys – Flynn being the loudest member of the party, as usual.

  Although there was no chance of being overheard, Marcus instinctively dropped his voice. “I’m guessing you haven’t told them yet?”

  Scott raised an eyebrow. “You think I’d tell them before I told you? More to the point, you think if I’d told Flynn he’d have managed to keep it a secret?”

  Marcus laughed, and Scott said he’d tell the other guys when the moment seemed right – probably once his transfer had been finalized.

  “At least getting away from here will get those government creeps off your back,” Marcus said.

  “Maybe,” Scott replied, “though I can’t help thinking their reach extends beyond H12.”

  Marcus frowned. “You don’t seriously think they’re still out to get you, though?”

  “If I said anything but no it would make me sound paranoid, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well… a little.”

  “Then no.”

  Scott wasn’t being entirely truthful, however. Although he had given the MIBs a wide berth since his confrontation with them at the turn of the millennium, he couldn’t help thinking he was still on their radar. H12 was a big place, with a lot of communal areas, and on a few occasions he’d seen the suits looking his way – or, more commonly, deliberately turning away just as he clapped eyes on them. He’d started to wonder whether he was being paranoid and just imagining it all, when one day Spider Johnson had sidled up to him.

  “Hey, Scotty,” he said, “you piss off the MIBs or what?” Scott had stared at him a little too long. The only person he’d told about his New Year’s encounter with the MIBs was Marcus, and there was no way the news would have leaked from his lips. “Don’t think so. Why?”

  “’Cos a couple of them were giving you the evil eye in the mess earlier. You don’t want to mess with those fuckers, man.”

  “I have no intention of messing with
anybody unless I get direct orders to do so,” Scott said evenly.

  Marcus’s words were still in his head when he returned to his quarters later that day. Would his posting get the MIBs off his back? Were they even still on his back? Maybe the couple of guys he’d personally humiliated regarded him with less than nostalgic affection whenever they spotted him across a busy room, but aside from that, why, apart from pettiness, would the rest of the suits even bother concerning themselves with him?

  Unless they thought he’d seen something he shouldn’t have that night? Unless he had seen something he shouldn’t have that night? But even then, why leave it so long and run the risk that he would tell somebody? He was still pondering these questions when he punched his key code into the panel outside his room. The door unlocked with a click and he pushed it open.

  He knew immediately that something was wrong.

  It was nothing obvious. More just a sixth sense that someone had been there. He stood inside the doorway and looked around, as if wary of traps. Scott was a meticulous person, and he knew, as surely as if the room had been trashed, that too many of his things were a millimeter out of place. His knapsack beside his desk, for instance. The water bottle on his bedside table. The way the spine of one of the books on his bookshelf jutted out just a fraction too far, as if the book had been removed and then, too carelessly for Scott’s liking, been pushed back in again.

  It was this last detail that made his heart thump faster and the sweat prickle on his scalp. Pushing the door shut with a click, he crossed to the bookcase in three strides, and placing both of his hands, palms down, on the tops of the books, tilted them backwards en masse, as if they were on a hinge.

  A rolling sense of prickly nausea passed through him as his worst fears were confirmed. His little red book, the one in which he had recorded all his questions and theories and observations over the past five years, was gone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  2002

  The instant he walked into the church and saw Marcus, and most especially who was sitting next to him, Scott felt a pang of regret. He’d pretty much expected it, and he’d told himself it didn’t matter, even that it was his own damn fault – but it still hurt, nonetheless.

  “I’m guessing you’re one of Marcus’s buddies?”

  The speaker was one of the ushers, a studious-looking black man, who wore spectacles with thick blue rims and a cream-colored three-piece. His smile was so wide and welcoming that Scott couldn’t help thinking of Bingo from the Banana Splits.

  “You guess right,” Scott said, and forced a smile of his own. “The uniform kind of gives it away, I guess?”

  “Kind of,” said Bingo with another grin.

  He directed Scott to the pews reserved for Marcus’s friends, and turned to greet the next set of arrivals. Scott walked down the aisle, feeling as he always did at social occasions where he knew next to nobody – awkward, self-conscious, out of place. In some ways he’d much rather be rooting out terrorists in a war-torn hellhole than making small talk with folk he’d never met before, and with whom he had nothing in common, over canapés and champagne. At least in the field he was focused, decisive, and knew exactly what he was doing – or at least what he was supposed to be doing.

  “Hey, Devlin!”

  Scott looked up, and from the middle of the crowd crammed into the church pews he saw a massive, tattooed hand raised in greeting. Beneath it a rock of a head rested on a tree-trunk neck etched with a black tarantula design.

  Spider Johnson was grinning at him, and a second or two later, as heads turned to regard him, so were over a dozen other faces from his old unit. Scott grinned back, trying not to work out who wasn’t at the wedding, and moreover why they might not be.

  The fact that the Brotherhood seemed so pleased to see him relaxed him a little, and he gratefully accepted the invitation to sit among them. Spider urged the guys to shuffle up and make room as Scott squeezed his way through to them. When he came within touching distance, Spider stood up, grabbed him by the arms, and shook him – his version of a hug.

  “The prodigal returns! Good to see you, my man!”

  “You too,” said Scott, and spent the next couple of minutes fielding banter and giving it back, much of which centered around Lau’s new, wispy facial hair (“Poor guy couldn’t grow it on his chin, so he had it transplanted from his balls”) and the sergeant stripes on Scott’s dress uniform (“You gonna put us on a charge we get too out of line, Sergeant Devlin?”).

  Scott had to admit it was good to see the guys again, though he felt a little overwhelmed at being the center of attention. He saw Marcus’s head turn briefly to see what all the noise was about, but although Scott raised a hand in greeting, his old buddy turned back to face front without acknowledging him. Scott told himself it was because Marcus was understandably nervous, focused inward, and probably wasn’t seeing much of anything right now, but he couldn’t deny that it gave him another pang of guilt and remorse. He had spent the past twelve months on one lengthy, deep cover mission after another, as he and his colleagues had pursued a series of links in a chain following the 9/11 attacks the previous year. His contact with home had been both limited and restricted, as a result of which it had been over a year now since he had spoken to Marcus, or communicated with him in any way.

  The invitation to the wedding of the man Scott still regarded as his best friend had come out of the blue two months ago – a white card with embossed silver writing, containing a scrawled note from Marcus that simply read, “Hope you can make it.”

  Scott had been delighted for his buddy, but a little dismayed by the note. He couldn’t blame Marcus for his curtness, though, if that was what Marcus was being.

  Despite Scott’s instant reaction, which was that he wouldn’t miss his best friend’s wedding for anything, it had seemed for a time as if he would miss it. His team’s long-term mission was at a crucial stage, and there was every possibility he might have to jet out to Afghanistan or Pakistan, or somewhere equally remote, at a moment’s notice. For once, though, Scott had been uncharacteristically insistent and bullish, citing his exemplary record, and using the argument that he had gone above and beyond the call of duty, not just once but frequently over the past couple of years, as leverage to secure some much-deserved downtime. In the end, Captain Starkey had seen how much this meant to Scott and had granted him four days’ leave. All the way over, Scott had been wondering whom Marcus had asked to be his best man, and now he knew.

  The banter died down as the wedding march began, whereupon, with a collective scraping and shuffling, everyone rose to their feet. Moments later Marcus’s childhood sweetheart, Devon, clinging to the arm of her gray-haired, dewy-eyed, beamingly proud father, walked slowly up the aisle, smiling nervously at friends and relatives who managed to catch her eye. She was wearing a cream-colored, off-the-shoulder gown with a long veil, which looked stunning against her flawless brown skin, and she was trailed by four bridesmaids, two of whom Scott recognized as Marcus’s sisters, Lavonne and Taleisha.

  Scott was not the sort of guy who had ever been moved to tears by weddings, funerals or schmaltzy movies, but when he saw the look of wonder on Marcus’s face as he turned to regard his bride, and her tentative smile in response, his throat swelled with emotion. God, how he had missed these guys, and most especially Marcus. What with joining the counterterrorism team just a year or so before the 9/11 attacks, his life had become such a whirlwind he had barely had time to think about anything else. But being here, now, had all at once not only made him realize that ordinary life does go on, but also that his constant exposure to, and focus upon, the soul-numbing depravity of man’s inhumanity to man had created a hole inside him that needed to be filled with something good, and warm, and real.

  That was why, when Flynn stepped up as Marcus’s best man, and handed him the ring to place on Devon’s finger, Scott felt not merely a recurrence of the regret he’d felt when he’d first entered the church and seen another man occup
ying the spot that a couple of years ago would have been his, but a genuine yearning to rediscover what was important to him, and to reconnect with the life he’d allowed to slip away.

  It wasn’t until later, after the ceremony, and the wedding breakfast, and the speeches, that Scott finally got the chance to talk to Marcus. He’d exchanged a few words with him in the receiving line before the reception, of course, but with around two hundred guests to get through, Marcus had seemed distracted, even a little shell-shocked, as a conveyor belt of friends and family had passed before him. Scott had stopped off at the free bar, on his way back from the bathroom, and was waiting to order a beer, when he felt the weight of a hand on his shoulder. He looked round to see Marcus standing there, a half-smile on his face that seemed part contentment, part wonder, part tentativeness.

  “I can’t believe you made it,” he murmured.

  Scott frowned in mock disapproval. “You honestly think I’d miss the most important day of my best friend’s life?”

  Marcus regarded him as if he was some strange and mysterious creature. “Seriously? I had no idea.” Then he held up his hands in that familiar placating way of his. “What I mean is, I didn’t know if you’d be able to come. I mean, you and the Taliban—” he whistled “—that’s become some pretty intense relationship, right?”

  “Pretty intense,” Scott agreed, and pointed vaguely at the bar. “Hey, you got time for a beer and a chat?”

  “My wife…” he paused, blushing at the phrase. “She’ll probably tell me I should be circulating – in fact, she did say to me, only an hour ago, ‘No hanging out with your army buddies all day, you hear?’ But what the hell? It’s been over a year, man!”

  “Yeah, I know. Look, Marcus, I’m sorry about that…”

  “Hey, no, what I mean is, we’re entitled to this. I’m sure Devon will forgive me this one. I mean, this is special, right?”

  And just like that, everything between them was okay again. In fact, it had never not been okay, except in Scott’s mind.