The Interloper

by Dave Zeltserman

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah,” Willis said. “You made a mistake with her.”

  “We don’t make mistakes, Willis.”

  There was no misunderstanding the threat in Barry’s voice. He was giving Willis one last chance to back down and take care of the matter, or there would be severe consequences.

  “I’ve been watching the target almost two weeks,” Willis said. “I’m convinced she is what she appears to be. A young woman who puts in ten hours a day at her job, and lives for her son. She’s not part of any conspiracy or terrorist organization. You need to double-check her status.”

  There was dead silence from Barry. Then, “Where is she employed?”

  Willis gave him the name and address of the dental office where Melanie Hartman worked. Barry told him that he’d check it out himself.

  “Don’t do anything until you hear back from me,” Barry warned before ending the call.

  One day later, Barry called back to tell him that a mistake had been made.

  “How the hell did that happen?” Willis demanded.

  “It’s interesting that you would ask that,” Barry said. “We’re fighting a war, and as you know, collateral damage happens. If you had answered your psychological profile answers honestly, then this wouldn’t matter to you. You fudged on your answers, didn’t you, Willis?”

  “No. But I take pride in my work, and if I’m spending time and putting myself at risk to take out a target, I want it to be a real target.”

  “Hmm,” Barry mused in a way that made Willis think of a pudgy cat purring as it lay on a satin pillow. “Interesting. To answer your question, Willis, the insurgency has been feeding us misinformation. Most of it we’ve been able to weed out. This little bit of misdirection slipped through. It’s good that you caught it because it would’ve exposed one of our inside agents if you hadn’t. Still, all of us need to accept that collateral damage is inevitable. Any future assignments, just do them and don’t waste time investigating the target. We don’t have time for that. The war we’re fighting is too important. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Check the bulletin board. Your next assignment has been added. Get it done quickly, earn your bonus, then take your three weeks off and relax. You’re going to be busy when you get back. From the reports I’m getting, this war we’re fighting is getting uglier by the day.”

  Chapter 11

  After getting off the phone with Barry, Willis logged onto The Factory’s bulletin board so he could get the details for his next assignment. He wasn’t planning on doing anything about it yet—he had other things in mind, but he knew The Factory would be monitoring when he checked in.

  Willis’s next target was his age and looked quite a bit like him. A grim smile compressed his lips as he read through the particulars. He knew the age and physical similarities weren’t purely a coincidence—that The Factory picked out the target special for him to send him a not-so-subtle message. That unless Willis got on the ball, he could just as easily be a target himself for another field agent. The target was named Steve Taggert and he was marked for murder. The dossier mentioned a nearby vacant house that was available to use for surveillance purposes. The vacant house was a colonial, and Willis would be able to watch from the second floor and pick off Taggert with a rifle shot when he left his house, just as a field agent would be able to watch for Willis from the woods surrounding his rental house and pick him off when he left one day.

  Willis had earlier bought a bag of pig ears, and Bowser was laying on the floor a few feet from Willis busily chewing up one of them. “Boy, what do you think?” Willis asked him. The dog interrupted his chewing for a moment to look at Willis. He let out a satisfied grunt, and then was back to working on that ear.

  “Yeah, I agree,” Willis said. “They’re not out there yet. Might not be a bad idea for us to find a new place, huh?” The dog was too busy tearing apart his pig ear to grunt back an answer.

  Willis found a cabin two towns away that he could rent by the week. He paid cash for one week in advance and brought only Bowser, a small suitcase packed with a week’s worth of clothing, a 9mm automatic with three extra clips, and a pair of binoculars. He left his Factory badge back in his house.

  The next morning, Willis withdrew an amount in cash that wouldn’t draw suspicion from anyone expecting him to be going on a three-week vacation. After watching Melanie Hartman for the past two weeks, he was able to bump into her at the small diner several blocks from where she worked and where she had lunch most days—usually a garden salad, although sometimes she’d have a scoop of tuna salad added to it. Hartman recognized him immediately and offered a bright smile while Willis feigned surprise and wrinkled his forehead as he slowly pretended to place where he knew her from. Then snapping his fingers he mentioned that she was the one who helped him out finding a dentist. Flashing an easygoing smile, he asked if he could join her at her table. She hesitated briefly, then told him she’d be happy to have the company.

  “So you were able to find someone?” she asked.

  “With your help, yeah.”

  “No cavities?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Even better!”

  Willis noted how beautiful her smile was and how it showed just as brightly in her eyes. Completely genuine. He knew there was some interest on her part, and if his situation were different the interest would be mutual. An uneasiness twisted in his stomach as he realized how close he had come to wiping out that smile for all time, but he made sure to keep that hidden and only show a relaxed expression.

  “Lunch will be on me, okay?” Willis said. “It’s the least I can do for helping me out the way you did. That was very nice of you, by the way.”

  He could tell she was going to protest, but then probably realized it wouldn’t do any good and instead went along with it in a good-natured way. “Who am I to tell a good-looking guy he can’t buy me lunch,” she said blushing slightly. Willis grinned then. Not a fake one, but the first real one since joining The Factory. He liked the way she looked when she blushed, maybe even more than the way she did when she smiled. Her blush deepened. A waitress came over and Willis ordered a burger and coffee while Melanie Hartman ordered an iced tea and a garden salad, probably skipping the tuna salad to keep the cost down for Willis. After the waitress left, she asked whether he worked nearby.

  “Nope. I came here on a business assignment.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Sort of a corporate troubleshooting position.” He waved it away. “Not all that interesting, but it was all I could find after my sales job was eliminated. Those eleven months I spent looking for work were brutal.”

  “I know. I was only out of work for four months, but those four months were miserable. I was so worried that I wouldn’t find a job, especially with all the stories out there about people being out of work for years. If it wasn’t for my son, Jack, I don’t think I would’ve made it. Jack was what kept me fighting to find something.” Her smile weakened and a moistness showed in her eyes. “I broke down and cried when Dr. Shulman offered me that job.”

  Willis nodded grimly. “What did you use to do?” he asked. He already had a good idea since he had seen the textbooks when he searched her apartment, but he showed the proper amount of surprise and interest when she told him she used to do something very different.

  “My degree is in biotechnology,” she said, her smile weakening even more and turning into something bleak. “Four years for my bachelor’s degree, another two years for my master’s. I was working for a lab in Cambridge doing some advanced research, but they, like a lot of the labs that used to be here, decided it would be cheaper to do their research and development in India or Russia. I’m not complaining, though. You play the cards you’re dealt. All I want now is to be able to take care of my son.”

  The waitress came back with their beverages. Willis watched as the waitress walked away. Anger showed in his eyes as he shoo
k his head.

  “I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you did complain,” Willis said. “People have a right to be angry. Jobs being wiped out left and right and a national unemployment rate of thirteen percent, all while the top one tenth of one percent in this country get wealthier and wealthier. When I was out of work, I had a group contact me. Real revolutionary stuff. Burning down the country so we could start over, stuff like that. I had my moments where I seriously considered joining up.” Willis looked away as he took a sip of his coffee, then gazed back to her. He asked whether anything like that had happened to her.

  “No, thank God,” she said. “Not that I blame you for briefly considering it. I can understand the anger out there, but it doesn’t do any good. We need to be constructive and work together and not tear this country apart.” Her smile turned apologetic. “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be preachy. But at least things seem to be turning in the right direction. I read this morning that the unemployment rate has dropped to twelve point six percent, so at least we’re seeing some progress.”

  Willis had wanted to talk with her to find out whether the insurgency had tried contacting her. He wanted to know whether the insurgency had fed The Factory’s inside agent Hartman’s name as Barry claimed, or whether the assignment had been a major league screw-up on The Factory’s part. When Hartman mentioned how the unemployment rate had fallen four tenths of a percent, something clicked in his mind. Something that had been vague suddenly became clear. He understood then why the unemployment rate had fallen and what his role had been. He understood why Hartman had originally been his target, and why she was later removed.

  Early on, Willis didn’t consciously pay much attention to the targets he was being assigned. They were all loners; either single men or divorced, mostly all of them living in either shabby apartments or rundown houses. It made sense to Willis that these were men whose anger could lead them to joining the insurgency. Later, he started realizing that many of his targets were unemployed, and he assumed that was because that was who the insurgency were actively recruiting. Men who would be angry and depressed and would have little to lose in seeing the country go down in flames. At some point, Willis started to have his doubts and was searching for proof of the insurgency and his target’s connection to it. With his last few assignments, all of the detail was at a conscious level, but it must have also been there at a subconscious level for a while now. Maybe even from the beginning.

  Willis changed the conversation to a lighter topic, and while he hoped he maintained a pleasant exterior, in his mind’s eye he was actively clicking through all twenty-five targets that he had taken out, trying to remember everything he could about their dossiers and his surveillance of them. They all could’ve been unemployed. He couldn’t say for sure since he wasn’t paying attention to that early on, and some of his assignments were completed quickly with little surveillance. As he sat talking with Melanie Hartman, his mind flipped through his assignments as if it were a rolodex and he became convinced that not only were they all unemployed, but that they had to have been that way for a while. That was why they all seemed so shabby, except maybe Foley. And that was why they were made his targets.

  Their food was brought over. Willis barely tasted his hamburger as he ate it and continued his conversation with Hartman, all the while his mind racing on other issues. When their lunch reached its normal conclusion, Hartman remarked how she needed to head back to work. Willis nodded, exchanged some final pleasantries with her, and acted dense when she hinted about how she wouldn’t mind having company on the two-block walk back to her office. Under different circumstances, Willis would’ve taken her up on it, but with the way things were he was going to need to keep far away from her and her son. It was a shame. He liked her and found himself attracted to her.

  After she left, he had a refill on his coffee and drank it while he considered his options. As far as he could see he had three choices. Keep doing his job and collecting a paycheck, go on the run, or do what he could to stop The Factory. He finished his coffee and accepted that he had only been kidding himself. He had no choice about what he was going to do next.

  Chapter 12

  Willis drove back to the shack he was renting so he could pick up Bowser, then drove back to his house. He stopped about a quarter mile away so he could let the dog out. The dog took off, running straight back to the house as if it was a game while Willis crept along behind him. If there was anyone hiding out there with a rifle, the dog would’ve smelled him out and gone after him. Still, Willis was careful to keep low as he made his way to his side door so he could let himself and Bowser back in.

  Once he was inside, he packed up what he was going to need since he wasn’t going to be returning. Then he left a message for Barry. Twenty minutes later, Barry called back and Willis told him they needed to talk.

  “I believe we’re talking now,” Barry said coldly.

  “Face to face,” Willis said. “You’re going to have to meet with me in person and explain to me how Melanie Hartman ended up being labeled an insurgent. I’m going to need to see the files and other documentation that led you to that decision.”

  Barry’s tone turned icier as he said, “I already explained to you what happened.”

  “Yeah, well, the problem is I don’t believe you.”

  “I see. And what do you think happened?”

  “Something very different.”

  Barry went silent for a long moment, then told Willis that what he was asking for was impossible.

  “It better not be. In an hour, I’m going to call you from Boston. Someplace crowded where we can both be safe. When I call you I’ll give you the location and you’ll have fifteen minutes to show up. If you don’t, I’ll be going to the press and I’ll be giving them everything, including copies I made of the dossiers and assignments from The Factory’s bulletin board—”

  “You were forbidden from making copies of that. You took an oath!”

  “Yeah, well, too bad. I’ll also be giving them a recording of all of our phone conversations, including this one.”

  Willis heard Barry exhaling his breath as if he were trying to calm himself down. Then in that same icy tone from earlier, Barry said, “You’re not going to get anywhere with what you’re doing.”

  “Possibly.”

  “It’s doubtful that the media will do anything with whatever you give them. Not with our reach and not with the current political environment.”

  “You could be right.”

  “The problem, Willis, is that you shouldn’t have lied during your psychological profile examination. If you had answered the questions truthfully, we wouldn’t be having this issue now.”

  Willis disconnected the call. It wasn’t worth arguing the matter.

  What he was going to do next was tricky. He was going to have to bring his Factory badge with him, and they’d be able to track his location with it. It was possible that they’d try to intercept him on his way to Boston. But even with that problem, Willis couldn’t help smiling over the way Barry screwed up. Willis had no idea where Barry was located. For all he knew, Barry could’ve been operating out of Nebraska. Or Texas. Or somewhere in Southeast Asia. Willis was hoping that Barry was located near the field agents he was supervising, and he had further guessed from the hours that Barry kept that he was on the east coast, but it had been only a guess. From the way Barry responded to Willis’s demand, he all but confirmed that he was within an hour’s drive of the city. Otherwise, he would have tried bargaining that he needed more time for them to meet, whether or not he had any intention of them meeting.

  Willis would have liked to have dropped Bowser off at the shack that he was renting, but he couldn’t do that since they’d be able to track him driving there. He considered abandoning the dog, but he couldn’t do that either. So he let Bowser in the backseat and gave him a thick rawhide bone to work on.

  Willis kept to the back roads and avoided any toll highways. Given the little time The Facto
ry had, it was more likely that they would track him to wherever he was going and deal with him there, but if they tracked him to a toll road, they could shut down the toll booths and trap him. With the route he took, he’d keep them off balance as to where he was heading, which was an area in South Boston where he knew it would be easy to park, and more importantly, an area where people tended to look the other way when things went down.

  As he expected, there was plenty of available street parking, but he parked illegally down an alley where his car wouldn’t be easily visible from the main street. Bowser looked up from his chewed-up bone and offered Willis a quizzical look. Willis got out and pointed a finger at the dog and ordered, “Stay here and be quiet.” Bowser grunted out his dissatisfaction over that, and then proceeded to demonstrate his unhappiness by tearing more vigorously at what was left of the bone. If Willis was able to come back later, he expected to see the backseat torn up also. That was okay. He wasn’t going to be keeping the car much longer.

  Willis cut through the alley, then down a side street and another alley so he could enter the coffee shop from a back entrance. He dropped his Factory badge in a corner of the shop and then kept moving until he was out a side door, keeping himself low and his face hidden. He kept walking until he was positioned in a doorway of a vacant storefront where he’d be able to watch the coffee shop, but still be mostly concealed unless someone flashed a light into the doorway.

  It didn’t take long for his man to show up. No more than three minutes. The man was about his age, a few inches shorter, stockier, and with the hardness of a killer showing around his mouth and eyes. He wasn’t Barry, Willis was certain of that, but then again he still hadn’t made his call to Barry, and even if he had, he’d never expect Barry to show.

  The man who did show up moved cautiously as he consulted a device that must have been a GPS tracker. He kept close to the buildings so he wouldn’t be seen easily from the coffee shop, and he ended up passing within two feet of Willis without realizing it. As the man moved on, he kept consulting his GPS tracker. He stopped three doors away from the coffee shop and flattened himself in another building’s doorway. Willis texted Barry providing the coffee shop’s name and address, and telling Barry he had fifteen minutes to get there. Barry must’ve immediately texted the same information to his other man because Willis could hear the buzz of a phone that had been put on vibrate. He watched as the man took a cell phone from his jacket pocket and studied it as if he were reading a text message. The man put the cell phone away, then stepped out from the doorway and continued on. Before he entered the coffee shop, he slipped his hand inside his jacket. Willis knew the man was keeping his fingers inches from a gun that he had holstered. He didn’t want to take it out yet, but he wanted quick access to it.