by S L Shelton
“Nothing,” I replied as I sank the pointed end of the pliers handle into the soft explosive. “Applying blasting cap.”
“Make sure you’re grounded,” he said.
“Good advice anytime,” I muttered as I reached up and touched the bare metal of the truck before sliding the small metallic cylinder into the hole. Once it was secure, I gently unwound the short length of wire that extended from the end and began crawling backward.
“It’s in,” I said as I emerged from under the truck.
“Okay. Go ahead and connect the wire,” he replied, taking several steps backward.
I did so, first checking that I had sight of both ends of the wire and that neither end had a detonator attached—wouldn’t want someone stepping on it and setting it off while I was still hooking up. The instructor squatted his long, lanky frame down and pulled his hat off, revealing a shiny bald top to his pointed head. As he peered under the truck, he grunted his satisfaction.
“Okay,” I said after twisting the wire into a Western Union pigtail. “It’s secure. I’ve got it anchored, and the detonator is in my pocket.”
“Great,” the instructor said as he helped me to my feet. “Let’s get clear of the blast radius.”
“It’s gonna be a smaller radius than you allotted,” I said as I unrolled the wire.
He looked at me with a curious expression, prompting me to open my satchel and reveal the remaining explosives I had not placed.
“Why didn’t you set the rest of them?” he asked as we walked casually to the concrete barrier a few dozen yards away.
“You wanted me to break the axle,” I said with a smug grin. “How would I know if you’re teaching me well if I used three blocks of explosives to do a simple metal cut?”
He looked at me for a moment and then shook his head. “It’s a pass or fail course,” he said finally. “If the axle doesn’t break, you are a No Go.”
I smiled. “I’ve still got two and a half blocks. If I fail, I’ll pack the hub with plastic and use a fuse.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “This is why I hate working with civilians,” he said with an amused expression. “With soldiers, you tell them to do something and they do it. You guys are always thinking ‘out of the box’.”
“True—and thank God for you guys,” I said as I pressed the spring-loaded buttons down on the detonator and tucked a wire into each of them. “Otherwise, when I’m in the field and give you an order, it might be second guessed.”
He squinted at me and scoffed but then laughed at my audacity. “Yes, sir,” he replied finally with a pat on my shoulder. “Blow it.”
I squatted down next to him and yelled, “Fire in the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole!” before pressing the clacker on the detonator.
A loud, deep pop sounded from under the truck, followed by the sound of the truck moving and grating against rock and dirt. We poked our heads up and saw the truck was now canted to one side.
After disconnecting the detonator and tucking it into my pocket, we walked back to the vehicle carcass.
“So tell me,” the Sergeant said as we approached the truck. “I’m assuming this class isn’t for the postal service. What branch are you part of?”
“National Park Service,” I lied with a straight face.
He looked at me for a second before shaking his head in disgust. Upon squatting down and looking at the results of the explosion, he grunted his satisfaction at the cut in the axle and then got back to his feet. “Pass,” he said simply before walking away from me.
Back at the concrete bunker, he picked up the hand mic on a radio and called to the range cadre. “Range is clear,” he said simply. Then he turned and looked at me. “The bears in our national parks won’t know what hit ’em.”
I grinned. “That’s the idea.”
After securing the remaining explosives in the back of the Humvee, I climbed in the passenger side and he drove us off the range. Once we were back on the asphalt, I pulled out my phone and hit redial on the secure call app. It rang once before someone answered.
“This is Ruth,” came the reply.
“Hi, Ruth. It’s Scott… You called?” I said as we rolled down the winding roads of Fort Leonard Wood.
“Hi,” she said with a chipper flirt that brought a smile to my face. “I’ve got another handful of mug shots for you look at. They should be on the TravTech secure server.”
“Hold on a sec,” I said before placing her on hold and flipping to my secure FTP program. In a directory called “mommaSearch,” I found the shots. I pulled them up and began flipping through them. When I got to the end, I took Ruth off hold.
“Nope,” I replied. “He’s not in this bunch.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” she said. “Those were the last of what we had with the last name of Grumman, Grummon, Grummond, Greenman, Grenmon and any other possible combination.”
“All ex-military?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I thought for a moment. “And the image captures from the scope couldn’t be cleaned up enough to match on facial recognition?”
“No. You got a partial profile shot but nothing clear from the front,” she replied, sounding somewhat defeated.
“And John hasn’t had any luck remembering where he’d seen the guy before?” I asked though the answer was obvious.
“None. But he hasn’t given up yet.”
“Shit,” I muttered and then thought of something else. “What about the big guy?”
“We got a hit on him, but no data,” she replied with a little agitation.
“I don’t understand,” I replied. “If you got a hit, why can’t you get his information?”
There was a long pause at the other end of the line.
“Ruth?”
“I can’t say,” she replied quietly.
“Can’t say” not “I don’t know” I thought. There’s something classified about his identity.
“Is John there?” I asked.
There was another pause for a couple of seconds and then John came on.
“Hey, Scott.”
“Hi, John. What’s up with the giant?” I noticed the sergeant I was riding with glance over at me. I ignored him.
“The nose camera on the gunship got good footage of him. We fed it into the facial recognition program and got a locked file,” he said.
“Let me guess,” I said.
“DIA.”
“Shit,” I mumbled. “What is it with those guys? First my dad and now the giant.”
“The director has a formal request going through channels, but I don’t expect it to turn up anything,” he said. “When agencies block access to other agencies, the information has a tendency to just disappear if they’re pressed—we do it ourselves.”
“Treason,” I jabbed through a chuckle.
“Yeah, yeah,” he replied with a bored tone. “Did you need anything else?”
I paused a beat, then decided to clear the other question that had distracted me while I set the explosives.
“How’s Mark doing?” I asked, hoping I’d get at least an update on his physical condition—I still felt bad that my “out-of-body, kung fu-possession freak out” had done so much damage to him.
“Did you need anything else?” he asked again, making it clear I wasn’t in the official loop to know things like that.
“Nope,” I replied. “I’m golden. Got the best instructors money can buy and having a blast.”
He chuckled at my pun. “Good. Get back to me on that other thing when you hear something,” he said, referring to the Cayman bank search Storc was doing.
“Will do,” I replied. “Bye.”
I tucked my phone back into my pocket, sat back, and closed my eyes, trying to recall the face of the man I had killed in the Syrian Desert. The tone in my ear got louder as the detail became clearer. Shit, I thought. What is going on with my head?
“Giants, huh?” the sergeant said, snapping me out o
f my reflective moment. “No wonder the Park Service is training you in combat explosives.”
I grinned. “It’s not the giants we’re worried about,” I replied without looking at him. “It’s those damned elves.”
He smiled and shook his head. “You CIA guys are spooky,” he mumbled. “I’m not sure I feel safe having you out there.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I said straight-faced. “I’m with the National Park Service.”
“With all due respect sir—fuck you,” he said with an ironic grin.
I laughed as we pulled up in front of the headquarters building for the detachment I was training with.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to wait around for the graduation ceremony,” he said as he got out of the Humvee.
“Nope,” I replied. “I’m heading out tonight.”
“Good,” he said, still milking his jokingly belligerent tone. “I don’t want you infecting the rest of the battalion with your crazy, spooky, mind rays. It’s hard enough to teach here without it.”
“Don’t worry,” I replied as we walked into the office. “Park Service mind rays only work on bears.”
He laughed and shook his head.
**
After eating chow in the mess hall and packing my bag, I caught the shuttle to the airport in St. Louis. My flight wouldn’t leave for a little more than an hour, so I tapped the airport Wi-Fi and connected to the TravTech app server to download some software.
As it downloaded, I tried again to recall the face of the assassin who I had killed in Syria. The ringing in my ears started almost immediately.
What the hell is going on? I asked my inner voice silently as the pain ramped up behind my eyes.
The damage from the Taser to your skull is being repaired, it replied. Be patient.
Why would that have anything to do with remembering someone’s face?
Not all your gifts are natural, it replied.
A cold wave passed through my gut as the implication of that statement hit home.
Are you saying my memory isn’t my own? I asked.
The memory is yours. The method by which you organize it, is not it said, barely audible through the persistent tone in my ear.
I shook my head. The longer I lived with this voice in my head, the more troubled I was about it. Not only did I seem to have a conscious entity living in my brain that wasn’t quite me, but it had the ability to control my body at times and now? Now it seemed that the personal pride I always had in my abilities was misplaced. They belonged to the voice, not to me.
Not true, the voice said. The abilities are yours. They are a part of you, even if unnatural.
Unnatural is a good word for it, I thought though I couldn’t shake the sadness at discovering my talents weren’t all mine. Well, since I’m stuck with you in my head, can you do anything about that goddamned noise every time I try to remember something in any depth?
Patience, the voice said again as the shrill whistle began to subside.
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered, garnering a sideways glance from a woman in the next row of seats in the gate lounge. I turned my head away from her in a manner that allowed her to see my Bluetooth headset, prompting her to return to minding her own damned business.
Actually, it is excruciatingly difficult to speak, the other voice whispered past the ringing.
“Then you should save your energy and call only when you have something important to tell me,” I snarked, happy for a rare moment of philosophic ammunition over the nagging voice that had haunted me since Amsterdam last May.
I got no reply. “Hallelujah,” I muttered as I noticed the woman looking at me again. “Chat later,” I said and then pretended to disconnect my call.
I immediately pulled up the new app I had downloaded, a forensic sketch artist’s tool, and began piecing together parts of “Grumman’s” face from memory. I tried to relax my mind, ignoring the tone and the pain as each piece of the assassin’s face flashed before my eyes. Pushing past the agony, I attempted to replicate his features on the program.
I worked hastily, anxious to draw my instant migraine to a conclusion. When I was done, I breathed the image away out of my head and gave a satisfied grunt as the pain dissipated. The picture I was looking at was a nearly perfect representation of the man I had killed in the desert. I exported the image before attaching it to a secure e-mail to John only moments before boarding started for my flight.
Walking down the ramp to the airplane I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingers to alleviate the lingering discomfort when my phone rang.
“Wolfe,” I answered as I got to the door and showed my boarding pass to the flight attendant.
“That’s him!” John exclaimed.
“I know,” I replied. “See if Ruth can get a facial map hit on that.”
“Good work,” John said. “I just wish I could remember where I saw him before. I’d give anything to have the recall you do.”
I chuckled in my head. Not at the moment you wouldn’t, I thought.
“Let me know what you come up with,” I said as I stowed my bag in the overhead compartment and sat down on the next-to-empty flight.
“You got it,” John said. “Thanks, Scott.”
“No problem,” I replied before ending the call.
I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes trying to clear my mind to make the ringing go away. After a moment, the tone and headache subsided to something close to tolerable. I let myself fall asleep until we landed in Richmond, Virginia.
**
10:25 a.m. on Friday, October 22nd (three days later)—The Farm, Camp Peary, Virginia
My phone vibrated in my pocket as Marcus—one of the instructors involved in my waterboarding—was lecturing us in a class on asset development. I got up, noticing the sideways glances from several of the other students, before walking out of the door at the back of the classroom. I turned the corner and headed to the back of the building as I answered the phone.
“Wolfe,” I said quietly.
“Scott. This is Mathew Burgess,” came the reply, startling me.
Holy crap! What did I do now? I wondered as I squatted down between the twin heat pumps in the rear.
“Yes, sir. How can I help you?” I replied, hearing my voice echo back to me—he had me on speaker.
“I’m sorry to have to interrupt your training, but I have John and Carrie Cantor from the DOJ here in my office,” he said. “I have to ask you a question, and I need you to think about it carefully before you answer.”
My chest tightened in anticipation. Is this about me hacking Baynebridge’s network? “Okay. I’ll do my best, sir.”
“We are struggling to get enough clear evidence to move on the investigation Mark Gaines was working on before his family was murdered,” he said, giving me time to wrap my head around the subject of the call. “We don’t think it was a coincidence that you came across the same mercenary twice, once in Burbank when you and John captured Gaines and then again in Syria.”
Whew! Not about hacking Baynebridge.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence either,” I inserted quietly.
“My question is, how confident are you in the accuracy of the sketch you provided us?”
“One hundred percent,” I said quickly before I realized it may have sounded too certain. Honest people don’t like to hear “one hundred percent certainty” about anything because it reeks of ego, not accuracy. “That’s to say, when I created the sketch and generated the image, that is precisely how I remembered the man’s face in both instances. The sketch itself is about ninety-five percent accurate, but only because of the limitations of the software I used. But I was a hundred percent certain it was the same guy as soon as I laid eyes on him, and I verified it with a closer look after I killed him in the desert. It was the same guy.”
“Scott. This is Carrie Cantor. Can you tell me how you can be so certain it was the same person?” she asked.
“I’m not doubting your word, Mr. Wolfe, but can you provide any other examples of this ability that could put me at ease going to the attorney general with a request?”
“Certainly,” I replied quietly as I tried to calm myself, bracing for the scream in my ears that would follow an attempt to access deep memory. I did the best I could to avoid relying on the visual display of information as I started thinking back to the first time I met Carrie Cantor. The ringing in my ears began immediately.
“During the debrief in July, a question was brought up about how I obtained the satellite feeds. Do you have access to the transcripts on that?” I asked.
“I do. Just a moment,” she replied, and I listened as her fingers clicked on a keyboard—her laptop, I assumed. After a moment, she spoke again. “Okay. It’s up. Go ahead.”
“You asked, ‘How did you obtain those feeds?’ Director Burgess nodded to indicate I should answer.” I began my recall on the event, doing my best to ignore the rising squeal in my ears. “Before I could answer, my phone alert sounded, letting me know I had an e-mail message.”
“Yes,” she said as the pain in my skull began to throb. I did my best to disguise the delay as concentration.
“Ned Richards asked, ‘Do you need to get that?’ I replied, ‘No,’ and proceeded to answer the question, saying, ‘I was handed a pocket drive containing the first three sets. There was a fourth set, but I didn’t need it.’ Followed by you asking, ‘Under what conditions did you receive this data?’ I replied, ‘In all three cases, they were handed to me by Agent Temple.’ I could tell you weren’t fully satisfied by my response so I added—”
“That’s very good, Mr. Wolfe, but does your recall extend to visual information as well? That is what is pertinent for our issue today,” she said, clipping my response.
“On that day, you had a portfolio-styled briefcase,” I continued. “On the side with the flap, on the bottom right-hand corner, there is a deep scratch in the leather, approximately a quarter of an inch from the bottom and running diagonally at about a thirty-degree angle to the outside edge. The case is black and made for a man. The initials on the etched identity plate are RTC. The R has a scratch near the top in the shape of a sideways S and the rivet on the left is slightly offse—”
