Shockwave, page 19
“Il n’y a pas eu d’épouse pire que moi depuis Ève.”
“C’est la première fois que tu me mens.”
“I’m not lying, Dell. I am the worst wife since Eve. I didn’t even … think. Listen to me, now. I’m sorry if this makes me sound cold. Or even crazy. But I want you to stop. Stop right now. If Homer ends up in some hospital, I’ll be sad about it, but—”
“But you want me to be careful, I know.”
“Now you’re finishing my sentences for me?” my ready-for-battle wife challenged.
“I just thought—”
“You can do all the thinking you want, but unless you can read my mind, maybe you could just shut up for a minute!”
I made a gesture, a sorry imitation of how the French can say “Mais oui!” with their hands. It didn’t make her giggle, like I’d hoped, but at least she didn’t look so angry anymore.
“What I was going to say was this, Dell: Yes, I have confidence that you could do … whatever you felt was necessary, and no one would ever know. But there’s always some risk. And even the tiniest risk to you isn’t worth what getting Homer out would mean to me. Understand?”
“Yes.”
She stepped back a pace or two. Looked me over like I was a used car she was considering buying. Then she nodded. “I get it. I get it now. You were going to go on and on, weren’t you?”
“I don’t—”
“You understand just fine, Dell. If I hadn’t just realized what I did when I … set you loose, if I hadn’t stopped you from saying more, you were going to ask me if I was willing to risk something happening to Mack. Tell me I’m wrong,” she challenged.
“Well, he’s not trained, and what he does is really important, and—”
“Shut up!” Dolly snapped, punching me in the chest. I’ve been hit softer by men trying to hurt me. But I’d take another few of the same if only my precious girl wouldn’t start crying again.
Dolly turned her back on me. “You really hurt my feelings, Dell. I … I can be stupid, I know. But for you to think that I’d be more worried about … about anyone more than you, that’s just …”
I put my hands on her shoulders, trying to think of what words might work. All I could think of was “I never thought such a thing, sweetheart. I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be you, to think that. All I thought was that you might believe that maybe I’m … better at some things than I probably am. To disappoint you would be more than I could bear.”
It seemed like forever until she turned around and let me hold her.
“How bad do you want Homer out?”
“You’re not looking for adjectives,” Mack said.
I just nodded. I guess that wasn’t enough for him.
“Spell it out,” he said.
“Some people will do anything if they believe their cause is just. But there’s a difference between writing an essay and having a quarter-second to make a decision. You might be against capital punishment, but you wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a man climbing in your bedroom window at night.”
“You’re asking, would I kill someone to spring Homer? Like, do a copycat murder, so the cops would think the real culprit’s still out there?”
“The real culprit is out there.”
“Sure. But that doesn’t mean—”
“The guy the ocean washed up, he must have trusted whoever killed him to have let them get so close—and behind him, too. Or at least get close enough to show him a gun, walk him up there. If they did it like that, they’d want him to die quiet.”
“What if—?”
“There’s no ‘if’ in this. No way they killed him someplace else—they’d have to haul a dead body all the way to the top of those rocks. That’s not just a lot of work; it’d take a lot of time, maybe leave an evidence trail, too. The longer you take to do anything, the better the chance somebody will see you doing it.
“Okay, look. None of that’s really important. But this is: the killers weren’t hired hands—they had to be some kind of Nazis themselves.”
“So you’re asking, would I kill one of them, then?”
“One or more.”
“On my own, or with you?”
“What difference?”
“Morally? None, I guess. But I know you’ve … I know I’d have a better chance of not being caught if you were in on it with me.”
“You’d have a much better chance of getting them killed, too.”
His silence was my answer.
|
Only one way for me to respond:
|>Squad. So why only one target?<|
The answer came so quick that the round must have been chambered in anticipation.
|
So the Nazis had made “Welter” for a rat. But instead of some general KOS nonsense, they’d put a specialized squad to work. This Welter Jordan must have known a lot more than a few hand signs and a leadership chart.
And he had been running. That made him valueless as an informant, so he couldn’t look for any help from whatever agency had gotten his sentence shortened. Which told me he didn’t have a sleeve ace—hadn’t held back anything. Certainly nothing that would get him any more than some paper ID. That wouldn’t be near enough—he’d need plastic surgery for a new face, and even more for a complete tattoo-removal.
I almost laughed out loud when I thought it through—the fool had made a deal to betray his White Power comrades, but all it got him was some time cut off his sentence. And before whatever agency he’d made the deal with turned him loose, they’d already bled him white.
Death math, again. Agencies don’t share info. Even when they say they’re on the same side, with the same objectives, they’re adversaries when it comes to funding. So this “Welter” guy had been turned pretty recently—probably reached out himself, while he was still in prison.
But the steady-flow informant had been in place for a good long while. That explained the difference between “agency” and “agent” in the cyber-ghost’s last transmission. Whoever was running the still-working informant must have had access to more than just his own files. So he outranked whoever had turned “Welter.” Or he’d accessed files he shouldn’t have.
I felt safe ruling out that last one. The shadow who went everywhere without leaving a trail was as high-skill as it gets, so he even tracked changes within internal-control systems. Years ago, he’d warned me that any unauthorized intra-agency access would be picked up instantly, and followed in real time. That’s why the cops in L.A. finally lost out on the money they used to make by scouring their data banks for info on movie stars: unlisted telephone numbers, traffic violations, stuff like that.
So the agent was a boss, then. Not a field man.
“You think this Detective Lancer would talk to me?”
“No,” Dolly said, emphatically. “Didn’t I tell you to—?”
“I’m not going to take any risks, honey. Any at all. I was just trying to figure out, if I walked him through the killing—showed him how it must have happened—whether that would be enough for him to look past Homer. But …”
“But something else might?”
“I don’t know yet. But I keep thinking about a newspaper reporter.”
“Around here?”
“Maybe not physically. One of those—what did you call them—those Internet people? Didn’t you say that they were the only real journalists out here?”
“I … guess,” she said, dubiously.
If nothing else, planting that idea was good enough to buy me some time.
I don’t have any of that “tradecraft” stuff you see in movies.
I’d never been trained to be anything but a soldier. Not even an elevated one. A fighter in the field, not some high-rank boss sitting in a command post.
I sat in my cellar and thought about that. Until I realized I was doing this all wrong.
Feeling sorry for myself, that I already knew was wrong. But it wasn’t even close to the edge of how I’d been feeling. When I got close enough to see that edge looming, I realized I was being disrespectful to Luc. And that was unforgivable.
So I burned the self-pity out of my mind the only way I could—by going over the tradecraft I did know. The survival skills Luc had taught me. When I first entered La Légion, I’d lied when they asked if I could speak French. The same lie I’d told Dolly when I woke up in that field hospital: Un peu.
That was Luc’s training, and it encouraged some of the légionnaires to say stupid things right in front of me, the way some people make disgusting hand signals in front of a blind man, or twirl their forefingers next to their heads when a retarded person is speaking.
That wasn’t all. Luc had taught me to read body language. To watch a man’s hands—“Dans cette ville, tout le monde parle avec ses mains. Ce qui est typique des Français. C’est leur façon d’insister sur ce qu’ils disent. Si les mains d’un homme ne collent pas à ses paroles, on ne doit pas lui faire confiance.” Watch their hands. Not for weapons, but because most people talk with their hands, no matter what the language.
And to know a liar’s eyes.
From the moment my military training began, the word I heard most often was “survie.” Survival. The only god in the jungle. Not a god you prayed to, a god you obeyed.
But I already knew more about survival than soldiers three times my age. Even in a city famous for cheese, a gutter rat will starve unless it can forage. And even the most successful foraging will not feed you if you can’t defend what you stole.
“Tu ne dois avoir confiance en personne.”
“I trusted you,” I said to Luc, in the language I knew much better than French. I didn’t know why that was—whatever years had been stolen from my mind before I’d fled that “clinic” in Belgium must have been in America, or with Americans. “Doesn’t that mean I had knowledge? Some knowledge?”
“You had nothing,” Luc told me, very calmly. “Including choice. I was an old man. You had been told about old men by other little boys who live in the alleys. It was them you did not trust. And you were confident that you could defend yourself, if I turned out to be one of those old men they had warned you about, yes?”
I nodded.
“So! You had no real knowledge. Why? Because you had no choices, so anything you might have known was of no value. Even your belief that you could defend yourself against an old man was wrong, was it not?”
By then, I had seen what amazing things that old man could fabricate from scraps others tossed into those same alleys I once foraged in. He knew a hundred ways to kill me. Or cripple me, if that had been his pleasure. So all I could do was nod again.
“You were fortunate, mon fils. Nothing more. Lucky. You may never be so again in your life. You know what a man who trusts in luck is called?”
“A gambler?”
“Yes. And all gamblers lose. Know that. You would think, the more a man does something, the better he becomes at doing it. That is true. But ‘better’ is not ‘perfect.’ Life is not equally rouge ou noir, as gamblers believe. That may be true of all lives, but you are concerned with only one—your own. And no ‘law of averages’ will ever help an individual. You must never trust in luck. If you spin that wheel too many times, it will betray you. That is the only certainty. And you will never know which spin will be your last.
“So, then, what can you trust?” By now, I knew such questions were not for me. They were just introductions to his answers. And this was no different. “Your skills,” Luc said. “What you learn so well that your action comes even before thought. When you have choice—not the gambler’s illusion of choice; not which color of the wheel to wager on—then you must know which choice to make. That knowledge must live within you, and spring forth as naturally as a child’s instinct to retreat from cold and move toward warmth.”
“How do I learn this?”
“Every mistake you survive must become a mistake you never repeat. Never in your life. You trusted me. As I said, you were not ‘right,’ you were fortunate. Lucky. So—listen now: never trust another person as you did me, not ever again.
“You can never learn how to trust—to trust another person—unless you first face the world with total distrust. Tu comprends? Distrust first. Then you wait. Use that time of waiting to watch carefully, listen closely, and then decide. But know this, my son: no matter how careful you are, all trust is some form of gambling. The best you can do is push the odds more in your favor.”
Even back then, I knew the old man was speaking the truth.
But there was one truth I’d known long before Luc took me to be his son. A truth known to all orphans, and only to us: despite the blather of the café sages, you can miss what you never had.
When I decided to go with Luc, that had been more than blind luck. It had been the one true blessing in my life, that I trusted him. Some form of compensation that I deserved, though I would never know how it had been granted.
Until Dolly.
|>Locate?<|
The response was so quick that I was still watching my message disappear when it flashed:
|
I closed my eyes, keeping that message on a screen in my mind as I wrote it down on the pad of flash paper I keep next to the transmitter. Then I began the decoding, writing on that same paper. I had to make sure I got it right before the crack of a wooden match would make all of it disappear.
The informant was Lewis Gomes. Conclusion: he was one of the three men on that hunter-killer squad. He had to be—it was the only way it made sense for him to have access to the kind of info he’d been passing along. Whoever was sending that team out knew they were all killers-for-the-cause. And those killings would make them the last ones ever to be suspected of informing.
And they’d also be the last ones suspected by the government—not with an FBI boss running interference for them.
All FBI men are “special agents,” but “Alan Brigham, SAC” meant “Special Agent in Charge Alan Brigham.” So Brigham had been running the same “007” informant for a long time, and the “3 majors” that he’d been tipped to had propelled him to that higher position.
The repeated “13” and “R” symbols would baffle decoders, because even a random-number generator required a match at some point. When only a single recipient knew the key, it wasn’t a code at all—it was a shared language.
So I knew that numbers always meant letters, but that letters themselves took their meaning only from connected numbers, and changed again if before, after, or in the middle of numbers. If letters were not touching numbers in some way, the meaning of the letters themselves depended on whether they were capitalized.
“13” was always “M.”
“B” in the upper case signals that it is the first letter of a word that logically follows the word connected with all its preceding numbers, but only if placed at the end of a string.
“R” following only lower-case letters means “ring,” but an “R” following numbers means “race.”
I put it together, working slowly and carefully, moving from easiest to decode to most complicated. What I knew was that this “SAC” had received information from Gomes about three operations. No indication whether the operations were planned, in progress, or completed, but one had certainly been “aborted.”
If the group Gomes had infiltrated—no, belonged to—was neo-Nazi in some way, the “1388R” could refer only to the “Master Race” scenario that ran like a buried power line through all those groups, no matter if they had three members or three thousand. RAHOWA. Racial Holy War. Ice People exterminating Mud People. Restoring the planet to its natural state, the one that god—in some versions, Christ; in others, Odin—intended.
And the “cpR” was also straightforward enough, especially if fitted into an ongoing operation leaked to a government agency. A child-pornography ring wouldn’t require the participation of the Nazi group to have its existence known to some of the group’s members. And I vaguely recalled that several different “leaders” of such organizations had been convicted of crimes that would fit. Best theory, then: Gomes was the source of information that some individual was hooked into a child-pornography ring, and the government took it from there.
“13” was “M.” So a word that began with an “M” followed by a word beginning with a “B.” Morphine base? When I was still the property of La Légion, it was common knowledge that the opium poppy was easiest to grow in hot, dry places. The paste the growers extracted from the poppies had to be turned into morphine base before it was moved as major weight. Morphine base was like moldable clay … and it didn’t give off an odor. So it first went to Marseilles for the transformation, that route handled by Corsicans.
What I call “common knowledge” was nothing more than information considered to be of such low value that it was passed along like any other cliché. Everyone said the Sicilians must have some kind of working arrangements to move heroin from France to America—they were already established there, and the Unione Corse preferred the safety of its own territory. Compared with the Corsicans, the clannish Sicilians were warmly accepting of strangers.
At first, the product was sold only to blacks in America, but it spread like any other virus. As the market widened, the blacks were able to wrest control of their own neighborhoods. The Italians were better organized, but they didn’t have the endless supply of young men willing to die for a chance to change their fate.
I heard that many died in those wars. I didn’t know this for a fact—barroom gossip is just what it sounds like it is—but I knew this for certain: Those who died would have been soldiers, not bosses. Or soldiers who wanted to be bosses and let their plans be known too soon.
Just before I quit, the mercenary job board had begun to list work in countries like Colombia and Peru. Those aren’t dry climates—better for cocaine, really. But heroin was making a strong comeback. Without the old ten-to-one rule—ten tons of opium makes one ton of heroin—a much purer form could be produced. Naturally, that final product would cost the end buyer a lot more, so the profit margins were probably still worth the risk.
