Shockwave, page 22
“Come on!” He wasn’t shouting, just the opposite. But his voice was vibrating with tension.
“Your guy doesn’t work alone. He’s the boss of a three-man team. I take him out, you let the other two in on the deal. You understand what I’m saying? They—your people, I’m talking about—they only know about Gomes. And they only lucked into that. Maybe Gomes didn’t plan on the kid dying, just wanted the tape for his collection. But he’s like all of those sickos—he couldn’t bring himself to dump the tapes, not even that one.
“You get it? Get it now? Gomes disappears, you not only slip out from under that rockslide that’s coming your way, you get to stay in business, too. You expose Gomes to the other two guys he works with because you’re on their side, understand what I’m saying? So, after that, it’d only be natural for you to warn them when you could … and for them to tip you when they could. Brother race warriors, they’d do that.
“Now, you’re not interested in stuff that gets counted in kilos, and the kiddie-porn stuff is really for Interpol. But when you passed that one on, you cooked Gomes, too. No way you could have known that—Gomes had to be a moron to inform on the same ring that ended up with a copy of that snuff film he made.
“So what are you really losing? You wouldn’t want to blow your cover—to your Aryan brothers, I mean—by asking about stuff like that, anyway. But that ‘domestic terrorism’ bullshit they keep planning, that’s your ticket to the top—why should you care who’s driving the bus?”
He blinked once. So hard I could hear his eyeballs click. Then he just said: “How much?”
“I don’t have time to play used-car salesman. Seven figures. The lowest seven figure.”
“You think I—?”
“Yeah, I do. Or, anyway, that you can get it.”
“I don’t …”
“This is Tuesday. They’re set to grab Gomes this coming Monday night—they already know where he’s supposed to be. They do that, Gomes, he’ll have a decision to make. You know what that’s going to be—you knew he was a piece of filth all along. Maybe telling you about that kiddie-porn ring made you wonder even more about him.
“You got any doubt what he’s gonna do? You can’t believe he’s going to take a Double-Forever in some super-max rather than give you up. And that’s not even the worst he’s looking at—that tape he made could put him in line for the needle.”
“There’s no federal death penalty for—”
“The kid he killed? It was on a rez. Not far from a casino. How much more do you want?”
He went silent again.
“You know what I think? I think they’re going to milk him dry. And after they get your name, they’re probably just going to make him disappear. Why embarrass the agency? Of course, the rest of that job is to make sure you never get near a witness stand. You’ll probably get a hero’s funeral. Killed in a gunfight with a terrorist—now, that’s something they could get mileage out of, right?”
He was done arguing. About anything. “How can I—?”
“You?” I half sneered. “You can’t. I’ll tap you—Thursday, midnight. You say ‘yes,’ it means you’re going to get all three of them in one place—a place where I can do what I have to—anytime this weekend. You say ‘no’—and not answering your phone is ‘no’—you’re on your own.”
“You want me to get a million in cash by this weekend? There’s no way I could ever—”
“Ten percent down, three more in ninety days, three the next ninety, the final payment ninety days from that one. One year, and you’re paid in full.”
“How do you know I wouldn’t just …?”
I didn’t say anything, letting my silence answer his question.
“Easy,” I cautioned Mack. “We’re pressed for time, sure. But if a cop stops us and looks in the trunk, we’re both going to be doing time.”
Mack didn’t answer, but he slowed the Taurus down to ten-over. “How about if I draft?”
“Okay.”
He accelerated until we were behind a yellow Camaro, one of those new ones with windows that look like the slits in an armored car. The Camaro was flying, but he’d be the one breaking the radar gun’s beam, not us.
I wished it was raining—the cops don’t ever seem to be out in force on the speedways unless it’s nice and dry.
“One more time,” I said.
“Damn, you really go over a plan, don’t you?”
“The way I was trained.”
“You were trained to do what you’re saying we’re gonna do next?”
“Yes.”
“Were you—? Ah, never mind,” he interrupted himself.
It was full-on daylight by the time the Taurus pulled around behind our cottage.
“Go home and get some sleep,” I told Mack. “We can only work nights, and we haven’t got many of those left.”
Dolly and Rascal were both at the door. Dolly took one look at me and said, “Now!” I kept moving until I got to our bedroom.
“Because I can’t teach you to be quiet enough in the time we’ve got,” I answered Mack’s question the next night. “When—uh, if, I guess—I find him, I’ll tap your number. These throw-aways don’t even have a vibrate setting, so you keep a decent distance away to keep him from hearing it ring.”
“I follow him to his house, then I call you and you meet me there?”
“If it’s a house, yeah. If it’s one of those little condo things, make sure you get the exact unit. Wherever it is, it’s close by. And it’s got to have room enough for all the equipment he’ll have.”
“And then we go in?”
“There’s no ‘we’ in this. You go in, right behind him. Then you just keep him there until I show up.… Won’t be long.”
“He’ll see our faces.”
“Yeah, he will. What’s he going to do, call the cops? All you have to do is make sure he understands you’re waiting for your boss—that’s me—to show up.
“Make sure he hears you when you tell him that he already knows me. That we’ve worked together in the past. He won’t know my face, but he’ll recognize my voice. And he thinks I already know where he lives.”
“I’m no good with guns. You already know that.”
“You’re not going to shoot the damn thing. But it’s what a guy like him would expect you to have. A prop, like. I’ve got a shoulder holster for you, too.”
“You have a suit?” Dolly asked him.
“For court, yeah.”
“Good enough,” I said. Quickly, before Dolly could start questioning him about his whole wardrobe. “You know the script. We’re not there to terrorize him; we’re there to sign him up for a mission.”
“You really think a guy who … does what he does, you think he’s gonna buy all this?”
“Remember, I’ve known about him for a long time … but nothing ever happened. He may not know what I am, but he knows I can be trusted. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have gone back to his video stalking.
“He’s low-hanging fruit,” I said to Mack. “And he’s been waiting a long time for the right people to recognize how ripe he is.”
The tiny red light blinked on.
He was at work, his usual spot. Easy enough to take him right there, but that wouldn’t get us inside his house.
A big sedan threw up gravel as it spun into the Lovers’ Lane spot. One whoop! from its siren set all the other cars in motion, moving even more frantically as a huge man rolled out from the passenger seat and charged up the hillside, a bright spotlight in one hand. He was heading away from the exiting cars, straight toward where the video ninja had been lurking. You could hear branches snap under his boots, just behind the spotlight’s beam, like if Bigfoot was wearing a miner’s hat.
The little red light went off. I could hear the video ninja’s panicked breathing as he packed up to run. He knew lugging the weight of his equipment would slow him down, but he wasn’t about to leave it. “Tu n’abandonnes jamais ni tes morts, ni tes blessés, ni tes armes!” ran through my mind as he passed within ten yards of me.
This one would never have comrades, so “never abandon your dead or your wounded” wouldn’t be on his screen. But abandoning his weapons, that was unthinkable. For this creature, that would be pulling out the IV feed that was keeping him alive.
I popped open my cell, tapped “3 3 3,” and thumbed it off.
Following the video ninja wasn’t hard—I just stayed behind him until I was sure that the “north-north-north” message I’d sent would stay accurate. Then I turned and went back the way I came, all the way down to the now deserted make-out spot.
Deserted except for Dolly and Franklin.
“Where’d you get the car?” I asked the giant.
“It’s Mr. Spyros’s. He’s got this Town Car that he uses for limo jobs. Not himself, I mean, he has this service that he runs. Anyway, I asked him could I borrow it just for the night, and leave my truck with him, just like you said, Mr. Dell.”
“You did perfect!” I told him, clapping him hard on his chest. I don’t think he felt the thump, but I knew that he’d felt the approval. And that Dolly would reinforce it all the way back to wherever he’d met her.
Mack’s voice on my cell: “In place.”
He gave me an address. I heard him tell the video ninja, “ETA fifteen minutes, max,” as I cut the connection.
Turned out to be a house. Small one, with a detached garage, door closed. The Taurus was in the driveway—Mack had probably taken the video stalker as he exited the garage.
I rapped on the door: three times, one time, three times. Nobody answered. I hadn’t expected anyone to. What I did expect was to find the door unlocked, and Mack seated across from a man in a black jumpsuit. The jumpsuit’s hood was down, the man’s face blanched and twitching.
“This is Conrad, boss,” Mack said to me. “Photo-verified.”
Meaning Mack had taken a cell-phone snap of the video ninja’s driver’s license, or some other form of ID.
“I know,” I answered. “We’ve worked together before.”
A little color came back into the video ninja’s face. He’d never seen the black Tanto, just felt it, so I didn’t bother showing it to him again. I just took a seat next to him. His smell was as familiar to me as my voice had been to him. It’s not only dogs who can smell fear, if it’s heavy enough.
“Conrad, the agency has a special assignment, one that requires your skills.”
“My—”
“Skills, Conrad. For some freelance work. We’re authorized up to five thousand, depending on one area we don’t have confirmed yet.”
“I don’t under—”
“Audio. We need video, still photography, and audio. I know you’re a master of the first two, but—”
“I’ve got everything,” he burst out, interrupting me in his eagerness. “Shotgun and directional, both. Under the right conditions, I can narrow in on a single conversation at fifty yards.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” I said to Mack. “Conrad’s the man for the job.”
Mack nodded soberly.
“You mind?” I said, reaching inside my jacket for a pack of cigarettes, lighting one up without waiting for a response. Two reasons: I—Adelbert Jackson, me—I don’t smoke. And the gesture helped give off that sense of no-way-out I needed the video creature to feel. If he thought he had a choice—a choice about anything—he might make the wrong one.
“Okay, this is a rough breakdown,” I told him. “We don’t have all the details, not yet. We’re”—nodding at Mack—“meeting with four men. Four members of a terrorist cell. They don’t know they’ve been identified—under surveillance even as we speak—and we have to keep them from learning otherwise. People like them have a need to believe they’re in charge, and we have to cater to that need if we want them to reveal as much as possible.
“What we need is one final audio and video. Of that meeting I just told you about. We already know it’s going to be an outdoor meeting. At night, which is why we need a man with your specific skill-set.”
I looked around for an ashtray and didn’t see one, so I tapped the gray ash of my glowing cigarette into a small rubber pouch I pulled from my jacket.
“They’re going to set the time and place, but we’ll be there before they are … and you’ll be with us. Your job will be to find a good spot, and record as much as possible.”
I let some gravity into my voice. “This could not be more important, Conrad. There’s no danger to you—they’ll never know you were even there—but, believe me, your country will never forget your contribution to our counterterrorism work.”
He didn’t want to look at me, so he just nodded.
“Give it to him,” I said.
Mack handed our nameless agency’s new night-video expert one of the unused burner cells I’d rejacketed; its new casing was branded with an indecipherable symbol in small gold printing on its underside.
“This is special-issue,” I told him. “You never use it, not for anything. It’s just a way for us to signal you. As soon as you hear it ring, that’s your green light. Start putting together all the equipment you’ll need—we’ll have to travel some distance from here. Within a few minutes of that green-light signal, we’ll come by to pick you up, and then we’re off. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, still frightened, but already feeling a calmness he’d never before experienced in his entire life. Not the confidence that comes from being part of a team, but that sense of self when you suddenly realize you’re not the permanent outsider you’d always believed yourself to be. Doomed to be.
I would never acknowledge it, but I instantly recognized what the video ninja was feeling inside himself—La Légion had put that same calmness inside of me long ago.
The café dwellers could rant on about the possibility of existentialism, but all us légionnaires knew the truth of fatalism—no matter how well trained or well equipped you were, once the shooting started, the bullet either found you or did not.
Still, I would choose them again. To be an outsider all your life was worth … what?
“Yes or no?” was all I said.
“Saturday night,” the FBI man answered. “The Rainbow Coalition Tavern. That’s just off I-5, about three miles northwest of Vancouver. We’ll all be in the booth farthest to your left as you walk in. I’ll give you forty-five minutes on each side of oh one hundred.”
“When you see me, that’ll be your signal to walk out,” I told him. “We can’t do this inside.”
“We could in that place, trust me.”
“Why would I do that? Trust you? What’s out back, a parking lot?”
“No, parking’s only out front. Behind is just empty space. There’s no lighting, and no paving, either. Nothing but a few old girders still in place from the demolition, but new construction won’t start for at least a few months. They’re putting up a whole—”
“Okay. Now, listen: I walk in, you see me. I turn around, walk back out the same door I came in … like I’d made a mistake. Then I slide around to the back. You give me a minute, then get out there yourself—you and the other three.”
“There’s a back door.”
“That’s up to you. But you use the back door, you better make sure nobody else does. Not until all our business is finished.”
“Done.” He signed off. I hadn’t missed his “I’m still in charge” tone, but I guessed that wasn’t for me; it was for himself.
We picked him up where he wanted—a pool of darkness just behind the high school.
Dusk hadn’t even settled in yet, but if we hadn’t been watching, we wouldn’t have seen him. Must have been a place he’d used before. No sign of a vehicle, but he had to have gotten there somehow. The one thing I was sure of was that a friend hadn’t dropped him off.
I got out of the backseat and said, “Put it all in here,” pointing to the trunk Mack had popped open from the driver’s seat. I could see Conrad didn’t want to let go of his lifelines, but he relaxed a little when he noticed we had padded the whole compartment with those foamy acoustical tiles they use in recording studios.
I pointed at the front seat. He climbed in. When Mack pushed the button, it wasn’t the sound of all the doors locking that froze Conrad in place—I was sitting behind Mack, so every time our video man turned to his left, he’d see me.
Probably all unnecessary. The video ninja wasn’t going to run, not with all his equipment in our possession. And not with us knowing where to find him. But my training was that there’s no such thing as taking too many precautions.
The meeting was for 1:00 a.m. I wasn’t lying when I assured our video expert that we had plenty of time—we’d be in place well before midnight.
No rain. Around the coast, that’d be counted as a lucky break, but where we were going, none was expected. Weather wouldn’t have changed anything, but at least I could keep my window down—my character smoked, and I wanted to keep reinforcing that in the video man’s mind.
He’d seen my face only when he was terrified, before. Now he was more relaxed—not much more, but enough to do the work we needed doing. He never spoke, just looked straight ahead or out his window. Probably couldn’t have picked me out of a lineup. Even if he wanted to.
And there was no “probably” about this: he’d never want to.
Something was nagging at me, but I couldn’t isolate it.
I closed my eyes, blocked out even the sensation of the car moving.
Why did I see the man seated next to Mack as “Conrad”? His name, I mean, the spelling. Why “Conrad,” not “Konrad”? How had I known this before I’d ever seen the ID Mack had copied?
Was that because the only “Konrad” I’d ever known was in the same unit I was—I should say, had the same paymaster? He was older than me, but way too young to have fought in World War II. Yet there had been something about him that triggered an embedded memory—Luc’s memory, now mine.
We were in the midst of a firefight. At the first crack of a rifle shot, our unit immediately split—taking cover as separated as possible, every man for himself. For reasons I’d never examined, that triggered memory had caused a trigger pull.
