by Jeramy Gates
“Thanks.” He hung up and stared into the fog drifting over the evergreens. Like a million people before him, Castillo thought, It can’t be like this all the time, can it?
Chapter 9
John Carver checked the stopwatch on his phone. “Ten seconds!” he bellowed. The only response he got was the steady percussion of gunfire. Carver’s noise-cancelling earmuffs reduced the volume to a tolerable level, and it became almost secondary to the repetitious pinging of the steel targets. The gunfire was rapid, almost machinelike in its cadence and speed. Any faster, and it would’ve sounded like full auto.
The desert wind gusted around him. It tousled the wave of dirty blond bangs that fell over the patch on his left eye, and threw tiny specks of dust into his right. He turned, drawing his gaze over the scene, blinking away the tear that came to his good eye. He shot a glance at the storm clouds gathering over the mountains to the west. It was a spring thunderhead, moving fast and casting a dense black shadow across the barren Nevada landscape. A similar one had passed through the day before and left hail the size of golf balls on the ground.
The phone buzzed in his hand.
“Time!” Carver shouted. A sudden silence fell over the range.
Carver took off his earmuffs. He stood uphill, gazing down at the three men who emerged from the maze with their guns now holstered, still breathing heavy. The shortest and heaviest of the three, Deputy Norton, shot him a beaming grin.
“I’d like to see somebody beat that,” the rotund man said.
Carver noticed the man’s sweat-stained polo shirt and bright red complexion. “You know, you could cut your time down if you moved a little faster. A few less jelly donuts maybe wouldn’t hurt.”
Norton’s reply came in the form of a recommendation that was not only profane, but physically impossible. Carver just shook his head and smiled. He made a note on his checklist. “That’s your final course for this session. I’ll have your scores ready tomorrow, and we can go over the replay.”
“Sounds good,” Norton said. “I’ll bring the beer.” He headed down the path toward the parking area with his partners.
Carver hesitated. He was about to go into the maze to collect the targets, but he felt a strange sensation on the back of his neck. He turned, drawing his gaze up the slope, and caught his breath as he saw a tall dark figure looming over him. The sun stood behind her, forming a halo around her figure that made it impossible to recognize her features. If her silhouette wasn’t enough to give her away, the cane upon which she leaned certainly was.
“Valkyrie,” he said, climbing the hill. “You’re the only person in the world who can sneak up on me.”
She smiled as he joined her on the crest of the hill. They shared a brief hug and then he stood back, looking her up and down. “How are you? I’ve been worried about you.”
“Well enough, I suppose. All things considered.”
“Did you finally come back to finish your training?”
“I’ve already finished your course twice,” she said. “I can’t tell if it’s me your after, or just my money.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You have money?”
Valkyrie laughed.
“You look great,” Carver said. “If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t believe you’re the same person who came here in that wheelchair. How long has it been now? Five years?”
“Since we first met? About that.”
“What have you been up to?”
There was a brief silence. He stared at her, waiting, wondering. She seemed to be trying to say something, but not sure how to go about it. Finally, she said, “Carver… can we talk?”
“Sure, come on up to the trailer. I’ll make a pot of coffee. Or a cold beer. I think I have a few in the fridge.”
“Coffee is fine.”
Carver’s trailer stood a hundred yards back from the rise, in a cluster of juniper trees and sage brush. It wasn’t exactly an oasis, but the trees helped keep the temperature down on a hot day, and helped keep the hail and snow off the trailer’s roof the rest of the time. The door was latched open, letting the fresh air in. He’d have to go around closing things up pretty soon. The shed out back, too. That was where he kept the extra targets and construction materials to repair the course.
Val settled into the dinette, which was located in a slide-out section of the trailer. Carver fussed with the coffee maker. “Five years,” he said as he filled the coffee pot. “Where have you been all this time?”
“Traveling, mostly.”
He shot a meaningful glance over his shoulder. “You stuck with it, then? That crazy idea you had about tracking down your husband’s killer?”
Val stared at him, silent. The expression on her face said everything. He slid the glass coffee pot into its cradle and joined her at the table. “That’s why you’re here,” he said, dropping into a chair. “It’s about him?”
She leaned back, straightening her shoulders a little. Carver could see that she was trying to ease the cramps in her lower back. “You need an aspirin or something?”
“I need your help.”
“Help? I don’t see you or hear from you for years, and then you show up out of nowhere…”
“I’m close, John. I’ve almost had him at least twice. Just days ago, I spoke to him.”
His eyebrows squeezed together, twisting the patch over his left eye. “You spoke to a serial killer?”
Val gave a little nod of her head. Through her jet-black bangs, Valkyrie’s dark eyes gazed back at him. Carver felt a yearning he hadn’t felt since the day she’d walked out of his life. Valkyrie had been too busy for a relationship then, too broken, too obsessed with the man who had destroyed her world. Carver had hoped time on her own would sate that need, but he could see now that it had only intensified. He drummed his fingers on the Formica tabletop.
“If you got close enough to talk to him, why didn’t you kill him?”
She sighed. “It’s a long story.”
Carver leaned away from her and the chair groaned under his weight. He was a heavy man: not fat, but dense. Broad shouldered with bones like iron, his body trim, muscular, and hard as a rock. He was the sort of man who didn’t like to swim because it was easier to walk across the bottom of a pool than to float in it.
“Sure, I’ll help. I told you years ago that I’d be happy to kill that son of a-”
“That’s not what I want.”
“Oh? And what do you want?”
The coffee pot made a gurgling noise. Val fell silent. Carver rose to fill their cups. He thought things over while he moved around the kitchen. He had many questions -so many he could hardly keep them straight. The way she put him off guard didn’t help. Why’d she have to be so beautiful? What was it about her? She wasn’t like any other woman he’d ever met. She was broken, he thought. That’s it. Broken, like me.
He returned to the table, placed the cups before her, and settled back into his chair. “Let’s start over. Go back to the beginning and explain to me what you’ve been doing all this time.”
“All right. I suppose it all starts with Matt.”
“Matt?” he reflected a moment. “Oh, right, the kid. He was a friend of your son’s.”
“Right, but he’s not a kid anymore. Matt is twenty-three now, and on his way to a master’s degree. He’s a computer whiz; a real genius. Of course, he always was…” She paused to take a sip of her coffee and sort out her thoughts. Carver stared at her, waiting, yearning. She continued:
“When Kyle died, Matt was devastated. He had become preoccupied with the killer. He created programs to search the internet, looking for stories that might be related to the Collector.”
“And he showed this to you?”
She nodded. “I was still going through therapy. I was angry with him at first. I told him he was crazy, that he should just leave it alone. But he convinced me that we could use the information to help the FBI. That made sense.”
“So what happened?”
/> “Just what you’d expect, I suppose. We went to them with the information Matt had put together, and they brushed us off. To them, I was just another traumatized victim obsessing over a home invasion.”
“That’s what they called it? A home invasion? Even with the… the torture, and everything?”
“I don’t know whether they really believed that or not. They may have been saying it just to get me out of their hair. And to add insult to injury, they kept stringing me along, promising me that they were following up on the case, but never having anything to show for it. Eventually, Matt and I began to think we might have a better shot at solving it than the cops.
“That’s when you came here, and started training?”
Another slight nod. “I needed to be strong again. Not emotionally. Physically. Inside, I had already changed. I realized that before all this happened, I had been so naïve. I had taken for granted that I was safe, that the world was full of people like me who just wanted the best for everyone. I projected my innocence, my emotions onto everyone around me. I used to think I could save the world with my little organic farm…” Her gaze went distant, and a quiet exhalation escaped her lips, like a sigh. “I couldn’t even save my own family. What the Collector did to me… It opened my eyes.”
Carver ached with empathy. It was tragic, what Valkyrie had survived. No one should have to go through that, much less a woman. But it was also amazing; a demonstration of inner strength that went beyond words. The kind of strength few had, male or female. In his eyes, it only served to make her that much more beautiful.
“We all deserve to feel safe,” Carver reasoned. “That’s why we have cops, soldiers, government. They’re there to make us feel like things are in control.”
“I know. But that’s not reality, is it? When that system breaks down, when it fails… Then what?”
They fell silent, drinking their coffee, having similar thoughts that neither could find a way to voice. Carver didn’t like what Val was doing to herself, but then again, it hadn’t been him at the bottom of that well. He had been in other situations, perhaps equally devastating. He’d walked through ruins of once beautiful cities, seen the hatred burning behind the eyes of those who had been wronged, or worse yet, the look of utter abandonment and hopelessness.
“Civilization at its very best,” he said, “is a house of cards balanced on the edge of a knife. It’s rare and beautiful and doomed. Always doomed. Nothing good ever lasts.”
Valkyrie gazed at the steam rolling out of her cup, her mind distant. “I don’t look at people the same way anymore. I see strangers on the street chatting on their cell phones, eating ice cream with their kids. They literally have no idea what’s going on around them. They have no idea that something -someone- could come along and take it all away in a second.” She snapped her fingers to emphasize the point. “I used to be like that. I don’t know how I could ever have been so… complacent. It doesn’t seem like me anymore. It all seems so distant. Almost like a dream.”
“Good,” Carver said. “God’s act of pity on us is that memories fade.”
“Maybe. But I haven’t forgotten yet.”
“Me either,” he sighed. “So this killer… You tracked him down, and then just had a quiet conversation?”
She smiled as she took a sip of coffee. “Something like that.”
“Tell me, what happens when you run into the cops? Do you tell them who you are?”
“Not exactly. I have some badges-”
He snorted. “Of course you do.”
“I let them believe what they need to believe, in order to let me do what I need to do.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “That’s a convoluted bit of thinking. You come up with that on your own?”
She ignored him. “It allows me into their investigations. I get to look at the crime scenes, study the details, try to figure out what exactly I’m dealing with.”
“And have you?”
“In a way. I know what I’m doing. I’ve done my research. I have actually helped catch a couple of serial killers.”
Carver almost dropped his cup. “You did what?”
“Well, when the cops need help it’s hard to say ‘no.’ It wouldn’t make much sense if an FBI agent showed up, took a few notes, and then left.”
He snorted. “I don’t believe it.”
“Believe what? That I could help catch real bad guys?”
“No, I don’t believe you haven’t gotten yourself killed.”
She smiled. “I’m hard to kill, Carver. I learned from the best.”
“You were hard to kill before we ever met.” They stared at each other for a while. “All right,” he said at last. “You didn’t show up here for the scenery, and I know you didn’t come back just to share a pot of java with me. What exactly do you want?”
Val bit her lower lip.
“Well?” he prodded. “Let’s have it.”
“I need your help.”
His eyes narrowed. “What kind of help?”
“First, I need a gun.”
He looked surprised, and she laughed. “The Packard’s impounded,” Val explained. “I think it’s safe to say my entire collection is gone.”
“All right. We can rustle up something. What else?”
She took a deep breath. “I need you to help me break into Blackstar Fusion.”
Chapter 10
Carver hadn’t aged a day in the years since Val had seen him. The man was weatherworn and battled-scarred, but still tough as nails. Despite the eye patch, he was attractive in a raw, dangerous sort of way. Maybe even a little more attractive for it. There was something different about him that she’d never seen in another man. Something dangerous and yet vulnerable. Something broken…
“Blackstar Fusion,” Val repeated, leaning closer. “Have you heard of them?”
“Sure. I used to work for them, but I have a feeling you already know that.”
“How long ago?”
“Eight years. What does this have to with your husband’s killer?”
Val gave him an abbreviated version of the investigation that had led to the military contractor. “It was tough, piecing the clues together,” she said. “The trail was muddied on purpose.”
“In what way?”
“Some of these victims… their employment records have been tampered with. Some of them had fake identities. We still don’t know all their real names.”
“Why would someone do that?”
“I don’t understand it myself, but I’m certain it all leads to Blackstar. In some cases, I can make a direct connection: an employer, a contract, something like that. In other cases, the trail has been obliterated, like the person never existed until six or seven years ago.”
“And your husband?”
“The same. The company he worked for appears to have been under Blackstar’s umbrella.”
“He was an engineer, wasn’t he?”
“I thought so.”
“Okay,” Carver said. “Say it’s all true. Say these victims are all connected to Blackstar Fusion. Does that prove anything? That company has thousands of employees. Tens of thousands, if you count contractors, satellite companies, and so on.”
“I’m aware. Believe me, I’m aware. But it can’t be a coincidence.”
He gave her a skeptical look. “Can you prove any of this?”
“Yes… sort of. Matt has connected Tom and some of the other victims to Blackstar Fusion through a series of leases.”
Carver chuckled, a deep-chested laugh that seemed to echo in the tiny trailer space. “Oh, boy. Leases?”
“Matt knows his stuff. It may not sound like much, but a link between this company and so many victims is too much to be a coincidence. I just need more evidence. So far, we just can’t find a way in. Matt says Blackstar’s IT security is tighter than NASA. And I believe him, because he’s hacked NASA.”
Carver leaned back, folding his arms over his chest. “All right. What is it you want from
me?”
“I want you to get me inside.”
“Inside Blackstar? Physically? Forget it. It’s not possible.”
“Why?”
“Because of everything you just said. You’re talking about a military contractor. They have security -real, on the ground security- that you wouldn’t believe. When I worked for them, I had to go through a fingerprint scanner, a security point with a metal detector, a pat down, and I had to carry a tracking badge just to get in the door. The security system tracked me everywhere I went. If I wandered a few yards away from the designated areas, security would show up in seconds. And that was years ago. I can’t even imagine what they might have now. Nanobots, tracking sensors in the floors, artificial intelligence… could be anything.”
Val chewed on that for a minute. “I was afraid it would be like that. Matthew said it would be.”
“I’m sorry, Val. I wish I could be more help.”
“Maybe you can.” She reached into her blazer and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. She opened it and laid it on the table before him. On it was a computer rendering of the likeness of a tall, thin man in his sixties with gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Carver looked it over.
“What’s this?”
“That’s a man I call the Informant. His real name is Levin Alexander. He had been helping me, until recently.”
“Helping you?”
“He would call now and then, clue me in about where the Collector might be headed next.”
Carver licked his lips. “You’re sure it was this guy?”
“Of course. I met him face to face. I’d never forget. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I know this man. He works for Blackstar.”
Val started to speak, and faltered. Whatever she had expected to learn from John Carver, this was not it. She took a moment to formulate her thoughts. “You know him?”
“Not personally. I met him once.”
“When?”
“It was an interview. My team subcontracted with Blackstar. We had a two-year contract: security, search and rescue, stuff like that. When our contract was up, I came home. At the debriefing, they offered me two more years. Alexander was part of that briefing.”
