Light It Up

by Nick Petrie

  On the truck list, the shipment boxes were numbered and described. Peter correlated them with the manifest. “We already did that,” said Sykes. “Twice. Boxes were opened and inventoried. Nothing was taken from the shipment.”

  Peter kept reading. A list of the weapons thrown onto the back seat. Henry’s big green Thermos. Deacon’s coat. Jumper cables, a toolbox, a Pelican case with Henry’s mountain survival gear. Nothing Peter couldn’t identify after three days’ driving around in Henry’s truck.

  There had to be something, he thought. Something special, to make it worth killing four men.

  What would it look like? he wondered. How big would it be?

  How in hell had anyone known it was there?

  On Henry’s phone, Peter touched the text icon. It was how the Heavy Metal crew leaders had kept in touch with the clients and with the office during the day. There was a long string of recent texts from yesterday’s stops. On my way. There in 20 minutes. Leaving now. Stuck in traffic.

  Peter found Zig McSweeney in the phone’s contacts, then hit the text button to find the history. He scrolled down. And there it was.

  From McSweeney: I have a favor to ask. Something personal I want you to carry to the cabin tomorrow. Not product, not on the manifest.

  Henry had replied: Happy to help. If you’re not there, leave it with Tonio.

  Peter showed the text to Sykes and Steinburger. “We were carrying something that wasn’t on the manifest. You do any digging into Zig McSweeney?”

  “The dope grower,” Steinburger said. “Yeah, he says he’s having money troubles. We got a letter from his lawyer to that effect. He wants his money out of the evidence locker.”

  “You think he might have arranged the hijacking to salvage some cash out of this?”

  Steinburger shook his head. “The hijacking caused his money troubles, according to him. Our financial crimes guys are looking into that. But honestly, I don’t see him for armed robbery.” He looked at Lewis. “That takes somebody who’s either crazy, stupid, or a true outlaw.”

  Peter said, “You dig into McSweeney’s investor?”

  “What, that holding company? They’re not returning phone calls. Our financial guys are working on it.”

  “No, the original investor,” Peter said. “The one who loaned him the money to start with.”

  “Yeah,” Sykes said, and flipped through his binder. “Jon Jordan. Boulder money guy, a Wall Street refugee looking for that Rocky Mountain high. I talked to him the day after the first shipment went missing. Seemed nice enough on the phone, told me he’d sold his loan to that holding company a month ago.”

  “You know he’s dead?”

  “What?”

  “He was riding his bike. Got run off the road three days ago. Dead on arrival.”

  Sykes and Steinburger looked at each other.

  But something else was nagging at Peter.

  The manifest hadn’t shown McSweeney’s personal delivery. The bad guys might have hacked Heavy Metal’s system, but they wouldn’t have learned about it that way.

  McSweeney had made the request via text.

  Which meant either McSweeney was calling the shots, or the bad guys had an inside man, or someone had access to Henry’s texts.

  Peter didn’t like the last possibility.

  He felt it deep in the pit of his stomach.

  “Lewis,” he said. “Can someone read your texts without having your phone?”

  “Sure,” Lewis said. “I do it all the time. When you send me a text, it comes to my phone, but also to my laptop. You can set it up that way on your main account preferences.”

  “Could someone do that without your knowledge?”

  Lewis gave Peter a tilted grin. “Not my knowledge,” he said. “But if you had the account log-in and password, you could change a lot of shit. Is that a company phone?”

  “Elle says it is. She keeps telling me she wants it back.”

  “So somebody with Heavy Metal has access to that account information. Could be the owner, could be someone else in the company.” Lewis looked at Steinburger and Sykes. “Like Leonard Wallis. The operations manager.”

  But Peter didn’t care about any of that anymore.

  The pit in his stomach got deeper.

  “Listen,” he said. “How hard would it be to find out someone’s identity from their phone number?”

  “Not hard,” Sykes said. “Not hard at all.”

  Peter took out Henry’s phone and pulled up the texts again.

  Scrolled down through June’s messages. Found the one with her flight number and arrival time.

  She’d landed about an hour ago.

  Then he saw a text he’d missed, probably while he was on the phone with Elle. A selfie of June, a wide smile on her face, standing before a new blue Mustang convertible with the top down. See you soon, sucka!

  The pit in his stomach felt bottomless.

  Like he was in free fall.

  This was all his fault.

  He found her number and pressed call.

  The phone rang and rang.

  29

  The offer had come out of nowhere, less than a month after Dixon’s dishonorable discharge.

  He was woken in his crappy second-floor studio apartment by a ringing phone. He didn’t recognize the ring. It wasn’t his phone. But it wouldn’t stop ringing.

  It took Dixon several painful minutes to locate the damned thing inside a padded FedEx envelope he’d found in his mailbox the night before. He hadn’t opened it because the return address was a law firm in New York. Dixon wasn’t eager to view any mail from lawyers, even his own.

  It took him another shameful minute to slice through the layers of tape with his pocketknife. His hands were shaking.

  The phone was the only thing in the package. It was still ringing.

  Dixon hit the green button. “Who is this?”

  “Good morning, Mr. Dixon,” said the voice on the other end of the connection. A male voice, mid-Atlantic accent, pink and hearty and sure of itself. “I have a business opportunity I’d like to discuss with you.”

  Dixon looked at the cheap futon couch that folded out into a bed, at the unwashed glass standing by the sink, at the empty fifth of tequila atop the fridge. Evidence of his sins. It was early. His head throbbed. He swallowed the rising bile.

  “Sure,” he said. “Fire away.”

  “How’d you like to start your own consulting business? An attorney will help you set up the entity. You’ll be reimbursed, of course.”

  The voice named a dollar amount, Dixon’s monthly stipend. Half again more than he’d been making as a lieutenant colonel. “Plus expenses and bonuses. You’ll be paid by multiple business entities. Your instructions will come through me.”

  “And you are?”

  “An attorney,” said the voice. “I’ll introduce myself in person once you’ve actually retained me. At that time, our conversations will be protected by attorney-client privilege.”

  “What’s the work?”

  “The kind you’ll be familiar with. A series of discreet interventions.”

  “Interventions?” Dixon asked. “Intel or hands-on?”

  “Discreet,” said the man. “Operations will vary. This is sensitive work, vitally important but completely off-book. Deniability is crucial.”

  Deniability for whom? Dixon wondered. But he didn’t say it.

  The attorney said, “After you’re set up as a corporate entity, you’ll form a team. Freelancers, combat veterans, experience is a must. A particular psychological type. I’ll arrange for testing. Start by looking for people who miss the war. They’ll be having trouble adapting back. Few social ties. The pay will be good. They’ll be grateful.”

  Dixon recognized the strategy.

  It was what the lawyer was doing with him, after all.

  Dixon didn’t like it, but he didn’t have to.

  Between his personal obligations and the money the lawyer was offering, he would
do whatever was necessary.

  There was honor in that, he told himself.

  —

  Dixon found freelancer candidates online and flew the best out to a rented hunting camp for assessment. Expense money was wired directly into his business account. Dixon tried to be frugal. The lawyer never complained about costs.

  The freelancers were a strange bunch. The testing had winnowed the candidates down to a small cadre of true mercenaries. Which, Dixon supposed, now described himself, too.

  He’d told them the work was critical to national security. Work they could feel good about.

  They didn’t believe it, either. Nor did they care.

  Dixon hired four men. The mission was to destroy a large office building in Jakarta. The lawyer told Dixon that the building was owned by a front company for Jemaah Islamiyah, an Indonesian terrorist group. Three months to plan and execute. A truck bomb detonated at midnight local time, minimal casualties. Bonus on completion.

  They got their bonus.

  Dixon added four more men. The second mission was very different.

  According to the lawyer, the goal was to take down the finance arm of a multinational African insurgent network. Targeted assassinations, in the end more than a dozen, spread out over as many months. Some were explicit murders, others had to appear random or accidental. Long-range sniper shots. A sharp knife in a public market. A restaurant robbery gone bad. A nightclub bombing. An armed attack on a fortified compound by what appeared to be members of a local militia.

  The work was difficult, the environment brutal. Half the time they were operating in the middle of a civil war. Every time Dixon thought it couldn’t get worse, it did.

  Of the eight men on the team, only three survived. Dixon prayed for their souls.

  He had plenty of time to figure out who he was really working for.

  He didn’t want to know, not exactly, but the degraded remains of his professional self required it. He needed to make sure he wasn’t working for the Russians, or worse.

  In the end, it wasn’t difficult.

  All he had to do was follow the money.

  —

  The owner of the building in Jakarta was not a terrorist front, but an overleveraged and underinsured family-owned company. The bombing forced the company to liquidate several of its other properties to survive, including a large undeveloped oceanfront parcel on the island of Bali. That parcel was sold to a local holding company, then resold to a flamboyant American investor who sold it yet again to a British hotel chain for more than three hundred million dollars, three times what he’d paid.

  The targets of the African assassinations were all members of the continent’s economic elite. Dixon discovered that each of the dead had professional or family connections to a large mining operation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and each death changed the ownership structure of the mine. A week after the death of the youngest adult son of the man with sole remaining controlling interest, the mines were sold to a French national acting as a confidential representative for the same American investor, who turned around and sold it to a Chinese consortium for twice what he had paid, almost a billion dollars.

  Dixon’s so-called consulting business, his discreet interventions, were part of a billionaire’s negotiation strategy.

  Dixon kept the knowledge to himself. He found he didn’t mind as long as the money kept coming in and he had a bottle of tequila to help him sleep.

  After all, his daughters still needed college tuition. Their weddings would come soon after. His wife’s expensive medical care would be necessary for the rest of her life.

  Dixon was already going to burn in hell for who he was, for the things he’d done.

  What did it matter that he was a few steps closer to the devil?

  —

  After Africa, the lawyer scheduled a meeting at a charter flight service located just outside the Richmond airport, two hours south of D.C. The charter company had two big hangars, an office, a terminal building, and a service center for fuel and provisioning trucks, all flanking a broad asphalt apron with various Cessnas and Citations and Lears parked along the perimeter.

  Dixon’s texted instructions were to drive to the far side of the apron, closest to the taxiway, where a big white jet loomed over the smaller aircraft like a hawk among sparrows.

  Marked only with its tail numbers, it was a shortened, corporate version of the Airbus A320, with the same up-curved wingtips and sleek profile. A set of stairs had been rolled to the cabin door. The air smelled of spilled fuel and hot exhaust and the burned-tar stink of recently coated tarmac.

  As Dixon got out of his car, the jet’s door opened. A woman’s head peeked out, and a pale, slender arm beckoned him inside.

  She wore a long fitted skirt and a snug white blouse with a string of pearls against the fabric. Even Dixon could admire her lush figure and the soft beauty of her face, framed by thick dark hair held up off her neck with a heavy silver clasp.

  “I’m so sorry, he’s on the phone right now.” She carried herself like a beauty queen, projecting a warm Southern charm that concealed a glint of something beneath, something wicked and slightly desperate. She gestured at the elegant little galley kitchen. “May I pour you coffee or a cold drink while you wait?”

  Dixon accepted a glass of cucumber water and stood waiting in the main cabin.

  Instead of tight rows of narrow seats like a commercial airplane, the jet had the fine furnishings of a luxury yacht, with dark, gleaming wood and buttery leather seats. A powerful voice boomed through the closed partition door. It rose and fell like a fine musical instrument, alternately cajoling and berating the unheard person on the other end of the conversation.

  Dixon was pretty sure that he wasn’t meeting the lawyer.

  Then the partition door banged open and Russell Palmer strode out, wearing his trademark red double-breasted blazer over a white silk shirt and designer blue jeans. It was his favorite color scheme, well advertised by the investor’s many appearances in public and on the business pages.

  Now Dixon knew why he’d been summoned. Palmer wanted to see what his money was buying. He wanted to meet the new head of his personal special ops team, his private team of killers. Palmer would want specifics. He’d want to hear stories. He’d want firsthand confirmation of his own wealth and power, the fact that he could order the deaths of other human beings without consequence.

  Palmer looked Dixon up and down with that plump pink smile spread across his jowls. “I just had to meet you in person,” he said. “You know why you’re here, right?”

  Then Palmer frowned. “Did Sandra wand you? Goddamn it, girl, what are you thinking? I’m doing sensitive business here.”

  Sandra hurried to produce a black box smaller than a deck of cards with two stubby antennae on the top. With careful grace, she passed it over Dixon’s arms, legs, chest, groin, back, and shoes. When she nodded at Palmer, his plump smile returned.

  “No unauthorized listening devices, that’s the only way to do business. Listen, you’ve done such good work, I had to meet you. My lawyer said no, I should keep things separate, but screw him, right?” He gave a dismissive wave of the back of his hand. “Lawyers.”

  Dixon opened his mouth to respond, but Palmer just kept talking. It wasn’t a conversation, it was a monologue, delivered as if Palmer already knew the answers to any question Dixon might ask.

  “Hey, I understand your wife isn’t well. You know there’s a doctor in Switzerland who specializes in her particular illness. You don’t? He runs a private clinic, he’s developed some promising experimental therapies, had some real successes. It’s expensive as hell, you can only imagine.” Palmer raised his eyebrows. “You’d need to earn a lot more than I’m paying you now.”

  Dixon felt a numbness spreading through him.

  Of course Palmer would know about his wife. Palmer would know everything. Dixon felt the weight of his shame, his lifetime of sin, along with the pull of Palmer’s weal
th and access. As Palmer surely intended him to.

  “Anyway, as a special favor to me, this doctor has agreed to review your wife’s medical records. Maybe there’s something he can do. Meanwhile, I have another project, a bigger one. But I’ll need more out of you. If you want to step up, there’s a pile of money to be made. You ever work in Venezuela?”

  Just like that, Palmer pulled Dixon further in.

  No, Dixon thought. Palmer didn’t have to pull. Dixon went willingly.

  That’s how the devil worked.

  You had to actively choose to sell the next piece of your soul.

  To step down into the next circle of hell.

  —

  With each new operation, Dixon saw more of Palmer’s organization. Now this latest oddball project in Colorado.

  Dixon didn’t like the idea of working anywhere domestically, had in fact advised Palmer against it, even if the project seemed small enough. But it required a specific kind of hire. A personal connection. Dixon had consulted with the Army major to find a recently discharged sergeant.

  The sergeant’s psychological testing results were somewhat disturbing. In person, however, he was an excellent operator. Talented, experienced, physically fit, charismatic enough to lead the field team, a true predator.

  More importantly, the sergeant had a direct inside line to the next target.

  His price was to have his military jacket wiped clean, which Dixon could get done through the Army major.

  In the planning stages, the Colorado thing had seemed like a cakewalk.

  The first phase went like clockwork.

  The second phase was a disaster.

  Now Dixon was summoned to Palmer’s jet again, this time at Jeffco Airport between Denver and Boulder. As always, Sandra met him at the cabin door with the bug detector. As she wanded him, she gave him the same complicated smile. Palmer had told Dixon that she’d been Miss Georgia twenty-three years ago. Palmer had a fondness for former beauty queens.

  Dixon and Sandra hadn’t become friends, exactly, but each recognized in the other a fellow degenerate. A fellow servant and plaything.

  He accepted another glass of cucumber water and sat at the elegant conference table, listening to Palmer in his office shouting into the telephone. Dixon would have preferred to have this conversation on the phone, but Palmer liked to do this delicate business in person.