Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He pulled back, frowning uncertainly. “It’s a possibility,” he said, “but no more than that. Seems kinda like a long shot, to be honest.”

  “What?”

  He turned the laptop around so that I could see. The dossier on the screen was for one Congressman Dwayne Hicks, representing Colorado’s 7th Congressional District. Pictured was a younger man, his blond hair as impeccable as his gleaming smile. I disliked him on sight.

  “Congressman Hicks, here,” Raoul said, “appears on at least three lists. He apparently has a reputation for loudly condemning cronyism and corporatism, while he has controlling interests in at least two government contractors, both of which Bates believes got their most recent contracts at extremely high bids because of his influence. Bates thinks he’s dirty, the Cicero Group points out that he is close personal friends with a known member of ‘Sulla,’ Roberto Concri, and Chu’s files include several deals for drugs and underage prostitutes while in the DC area. There is also apparently an ongoing investigation into selling negotiation points to the Chinese and compromising several classified operations while in the company of foreign dignitaries. Bates informs us that the investigation is not going anywhere because of Concri.”

  I nodded. “If he’s pals with Concri, and he’s that dirty, he’d be a prime target for a ‘Marius’ hit squad.” Concri wasn’t an active politician, being a retired court judge and Senator, but by all accounts, he wielded enormous power in and around DC. He was a “godfather,” a don in the gilded underworld of current politics.

  “It would certainly be an escalation,” Raoul agreed, “but it would account for a heavy hitter like Daggett being around. Hicks’ house is in Lakewood.”

  “Even better,” I mused. “If they keep to the more affluent, crime-free parts of town, they’ve got less of a chance of local law enforcement getting in their way. The cops will be across town, trying to deal with the rioters.” I nodded again, making a decision. “Get me Hicks’ address. We need to go see if we can spot some surveillance.”

  Urban reconnaissance in an American suburban neighborhood is a bitch. No two ways about it. There’s not a lot of traffic during the day, and unless you’re set up to look like a believable repairman, you’re going to get looks if you don’t belong there. It’s as bad as a small village in Iraq, if not worse. The small village might have an insurgent cell; these rich fuckers will call the cops if they think you’re casing their house for a robbery, even if the cops are up to their assholes in, well, assholes.

  When you’re trying to case a house belonging to a sitting US Congressman, it gets even worse.

  Hicks had a detail in a pair of Level 7 armored vehicles out front at all times. It seemed a bit conspicuous to me, but he was home not too many miles from mobs of people committing arson, destruction of public property, assault, battery, and even murder en masse on a daily basis. He couldn’t be too careful, especially when the taxpayers were paying for his security.

  We had to get in and get eyes on without compromising ourselves to either Hicks’ security, the neighbors, or Daggett’s recon element, if it was there. The fact that we were looking for Daggett, not Hicks, wasn’t going to matter to Hicks’ detail one iota. Nor was it going to matter to the neighbors if they found a dude in a ghillie suit hanging out in their bushes.

  Fortunately, there was a nearby park, surrounding a small lake, with running paths that intersected with the nearby suburban streets. So, the majority of our reconnaissance took the shape of early morning, late morning, afternoon, and evening joggers. Sure, most of us might have stretched credibility a little bit, being generally big, hard-looking dudes who didn’t exactly fit in with the skinny suburban women who made up most of the local joggers during the day. But aside from a few odd looks, we never got interfered with.

  And we apparently weren’t the only ones who thought of it, either.

  “Great minds think alike,” Jack said, coming back in from his morning run. “That’s the third time I’ve seen the same jogger in the last couple of days, and he looks like one of us. Daggett’s guys are doing the runner bit, too.”

  “It makes sense,” Larry said. Larry had not joined the reconnaissance mission because Larry is not a jogger, and no one who saw the six-foot-five, bald, two-hundred-seventy-five-pound Monster would ever mistake him for one. Powerlifter? Maybe. Jogger? Not a chance. “There aren’t too many other ways to do it, unless you’re going to break into one of the neighbors’ houses and hold them hostage for however many days you’ve got the stakeout in place.”

  “Which is something I wouldn’t put past Daggett,” I said. “Fucker’d probably like to do it just for shits and giggles.”

  “It does make our job a little simpler, though,” Larry pointed out mildly. “Now we just have to have surveillance on the park, and spot them coming and going. It’ll be easier than trying to set up in the neighborhood.”

  “Good point,” I said. “One less potential point of failure.”

  That gave me a twinge. Jim had always been the one to point out how simple was better, because the more complex an operation was, the more potential points of failure were present, and the more likely failure then became. It was one of his words of wisdom that we’d all heard a thousand times, and now would never hear again.

  Damn, I was getting tired of putting friends in the ground before their time.

  “Eric!” I yelled, pushing the depressing thoughts to the back of my mind. Eric and Nick were the next two up. I knew Nick wasn’t going to complain about ditching the jogger disguise; he wasn’t as bad as Larry, but Nick despised running. As we got older, a lot of gunfighters I knew had come to dislike it, claiming it “breeds cowardice.”

  “Yeah?” Eric said, sticking his head through the door from the back room where he’d staked out his patch of floor.

  “Change of plans,” I told him. “We’re switching to vehicle-borne recon, based on the park. The opposition is using the same jogger gambit we are, so we just need to look for them.”

  “Roger,” he replied, disappearing back into his hole.

  “We’re going to have to get them pinned down quick,” Larry said. “They’re not going to dawdle and just watch Hicks forever. Now that they’ve got eyes on, they’re going to move soon.”

  “I know,” I said, but some of my misgivings must have made it into my voice.

  Larry raised an eyebrow. “Having second thoughts about it?” he asked.

  “You’ve seen Hicks’ files,” I replied. “Would it really be that bad to let Daggett do his job, then take him out afterward?”

  The big man winced a little. “Yeah, I can see the problem.” He sighed, folding his arms over his chest. His mouth quirked thoughtfully under his goatee. “I guess we’ve got to gauge whether the damage done by letting Hicks get killed outweighs the potential good of seeing him taken out of the picture.”

  “You know he’s never going to see the inside of a cell, regardless of the vile shit he had Chu acquire for him,” I pointed out. “Not with Concri backstopping him. I know, we’re trying to stop this little civil war from going any farther, but fuck.”

  Neither of us had an answer.

  We weren’t going to get a chance to think of one, either. Less than two hours after Eric and Nick had gotten on-site and gotten eyes on a possible target vehicle, all hell broke loose.

  I’d been catching a catnap; I’d done two three-mile runs in the last eight hours, and hadn’t exactly been well-rested since before those gangbangers had showed up in Powell.

  When a rolling boom like thunder sounded in the distance, though, I sat straight up, reaching for my rifle. “What the fuck just blew up?” I asked no one in particular.

  “I don’t know,” Raoul replied. He was heading for the window. “It sounded close, though.”

  “Or really big and far away,” I said, with a sudden ominous feeling in my gut. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been in some proximity to a really big I
ED going off, and it never boded well.

  “Oh, fuck,” Raoul said from the window. He was looking to the southwest. “There’s a fucking mushroom cloud over Denver, man!”

  I looked. Sure enough, there was a roiling, mushroom-topped cloud of smoke, dust, and flying debris rising above the city, some ten miles away.

  “Oh, fuck,” Raoul repeated. “This is bad.”

  “How big, do you think?” I asked. I was strangely calm and clinical as I watched the tower of destruction rising into the sky. Someone less knowledgeable and more prone to panic might equate a mushroom cloud like that with a nuke, but a nuke would have been a lot bigger, and we probably would have been fried by the initial thermal pulse, anyway.

  He shook his head, getting a handle on the shock. “Pack a box truck full of explosives, maybe,” he said. “That’s a big IED.”

  “And right smack dab in the middle of the trouble zone,” I pointed out. “Things must not be bad enough yet for somebody.”

  They were going to get that way, though, and pretty damned quickly.

  Chapter 23

  Almost inevitably, every comms line we had started going nuts.

  It took a second of filtering through the noise to pick out the phone that was showing Eric’s number. I swept it up and answered. “Talk to me.”

  “Shit is happening,” he said. “Our targets just packed up and started moving. We’re tailing them, but they’re moving fast, and appear to be pursuing Hicks’ detail. We’ve caught glimpses of those Level Sevens.”

  Well, it sounded like we were about to get into it. Whether Hicks went down or not, this was probably going to be our only shot at Daggett until and unless he popped up somewhere else. “Where are they going?” I asked, even as I reached for my chest rig.

  “Generally east, and they’re moving,” he replied. “Best guess is, they’re heading for the airport, but they’re going to have to swing around the trouble zones to get there.”

  I was already staring at the photomap of Denver in the living room, as the rest of the team, who weren’t out on surveillance duties or en route, gathered around. Everything else had gone quiet, as it became evident that we had a live one.

  If we’d just been after Hicks, then it would have been easy. There really were only two viable approaches to the airport, so we’d just have to set up a team on each of them and ambush his motorcade on the way through. But we weren’t just after Hicks, and Daggett had a lot of ground to choose from to set up an ambush between Lakewood and the airport. If he nailed Hicks before we could catch up, he might disappear before we could pin him down.

  “Everybody get saddled up,” I snapped, loudly enough to be heard throughout the house. “Game time.” Turning back to the phone, I told Eric, “We’re on the move. Keep on ‘em and keep me updated.”

  “Roger,” he replied. “We just turned south on the 95, passing the Sheridan Plaza.”

  That took a second to locate, especially since I was cramming myself into the passenger seat of a truck, my rifle covered—poorly—with a jacket, at the time. They were still quite some distance away, heading generally toward Sheridan. It looked like Hicks’ detail was trying to go around to the south of Denver and the riots. And the bombings.

  Larry was driving, and in minutes we were screaming down I-225 toward Aurora. If Hicks came our way, we might have to overshoot, turn around, and catch up, but Larry can have a hell of a lead foot when he needs to, and with Denver in utter chaos, especially given the mass casualties that were probably the result of that bombing, getting pulled over was unlikely, at best.

  Eric was keeping up a running commentary. It sounded like Hicks’ detail had figured out that they were being followed, and were trying to evade their pursuers. They had broken away from the main roads and were taking multiple, high-speed stair-steps through residential neighborhoods. From what I could hear, Nick was having a hell of a time keeping up.

  Larry suddenly stomped on the brake. I was thrown against my seatbelt and almost lost my grip on the phone, but I didn’t say anything. I could see why he’d stopped easily enough.

  One thing we hadn’t quite counted on, being in such a hurry, was that having a big-ass bomb go off in the middle of Denver was going to send a lot of people into a panic. And when people panic, they start trying to get away from whatever scared them, preferably by the line of least resistance. When you cram everybody possible onto that line of least resistance, it turns into a bottleneck.

  The 225 just south of Aurora was a fucking mess. It would have been bad enough if it had just been hordes of car-borne refugees desperately trying to get away from the mobs and the bombs. But it looked like there was also a multiple-car pileup blocking half the freeway.

  “Dammit!” Larry was looking for an escape route, but we were already blocked in by at least a dozen vehicles behind us. And meanwhile, things to the south were getting hairier, judging by Eric’s continuing running commentary over the phone.

  “These guys are getting more performance out of those Level Sevens than I’ve ever seen,” Eric commented. He was trying to keep his voice even and dry, though I could hear the engine roaring and Nick cussing in the background. “When this is over, I really should find out who built those for ‘em.”

  I thought I heard Nick yell something like, “Are you seriously talking cars right now?”

  I couldn’t hear Eric’s rejoinder because we needed to move. “Everybody out and off the freeway,” I said. “We’re carjacking.”

  It felt weird, saying that in the States. It had long been standard procedure if pinned in hostile environments, but Stateside was supposed to be permissive. We weren’t supposed to steal cars at gunpoint from Americans.

  But that mushroom cloud that was still dissipating above Denver put the lie to this being a permissive environment. We were downrange, and we had to act like it.

  Guns came out and we piled out of the vehicle, Larry and Bryan coming around to join me and Raoul on the passenger side. From there, it was a short zig-zag run through stationary traffic to the side of the freeway, over the concrete barriers, and up the shallow, grassy embankment.

  We were getting a lot of looks, and I was sure there were several calls to an utterly swamped 911 operator about the men in military gear with rifles running along the side of the freeway, but we didn’t have much in the way of options left. If we were going to catch Daggett, we had to move.

  We ran along the cyclone fence, between the aspens or whatever the trees were, toward the overpass that crossed the freeway ahead. From there, it got risky.

  Larry, being the biggest and objectively scariest of us, probably would have made the logical choice for the carjacker, but he was also the slowest. Raoul, somewhat to my surprise, beat all of us to the street, stepped out onto the asphalt, and leveled his Mk. 17.

  There wasn’t a lot of traffic out on the street, particularly not going west. But the one SUV visible screeched to a halt, the overweight woman behind the wheel staring at the gaunt Hispanic man pointing a rifle at her face with wide, terrified eyes.

  Raoul ran forward before she could have second thoughts about stopping, yelling at her to get out of the car. While Raoul was, really, an intel guy, he could be a scary motherfucker when he wanted to be, and he was in full barrio mode at the moment.

  The woman was too terrified to object, or even think of locking the door when Raoul ran up and yanked it open. I caught the tail end of her pleas for her life as she got out of the vehicle under Raoul’s gun.

  “He won’t kill you,” I told her as we caught up. Larry probably could have been nicer about it, but he was huffing a bit from the run. We hadn’t been jogging. “We just need your car. We’ll leave it somewhere the cops can find it.” I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. She was quaking with fear, staring not at Raoul, but at his rifle.

  “Vamonos!” Raoul snapped, pointing to the side of the road. She scurried away, her head down like she was expecting him to change his mind and shoot her on a whim.

>   I felt like an asshole, but I left her to her own limited devices and piled into the passenger seat while Raoul took the wheel.

  “What the hell was she doing driving into Denver right now?” Larry wondered as the doors closed and Raoul threw the vehicle into gear. “She wouldn’t stand a chance in there.”

  “I doubt she understood what the hell is going on,” Bryan said acidly, as Raoul threw the SUV around the next corner and started us flying south. “She probably had something she ‘really needed,’ and thought that everything would just stop, just for her. Trust me, there are thousands of those people around here.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, pulling out the phone again. Good; I hadn’t accidentally hung up on Eric, though he was calling out, wondering what the hell was going on. “We needed wheels, and she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Jeff?” Eric was saying, as I put the phone back to my ear.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” I told him. “Sorry. We got jammed up on the 225 and had to ‘borrow’ some new transpo.”

  “Well, we’re coming your way, fast,” he said. “Hicks’ guys apparently decided that trying to lose Daggett’s hitters in the residential areas wasn’t working, so they just hopped on the 225 North and are running for all they’re worth.”

  “Fuck!” The northbound part had been jammed up with traffic, but still moving. They had a good chance of getting past us before we could get back on the freeway. “Don’t lose ‘em,” I said. “We’ll catch up as fast as we can. Eddie’s out on the 70, trying to see if he can cut them off there.”

  “I think he’s going to be too far away,” Eric started to say, then I heard Nick yell an inarticulate string of mashed-together profanities.

  “What just happened?” I half-yelled over the roar of the SUV’s engine, as Raoul put the pedal on the floor.

  It took a moment before I got an answer. “Two vehicles just busted through the fence and onto the freeway, and they’re forcing the motorcade against the barriers on the median, right next to the reservoir,” he said. “I think this is it. Daggett’s here.”