“But you saw through that ruse and led the assassin back to the op center so you could interrogate him.”
Carl chuckled. “Correct.” The interrogation had been successful, though painful.
Palmer quipped, “I probably would have handled the interrogation differently.”
“Just so you know, I only let him kick my ass to make him overconfident, you know, so I could get intel out of him.”
Palmer chuckled, then said, “Rainman plays large, so if he’s involved in Chicago, there’s something strategic happening there that is much more than just police brutality. We need to know what it is. The police chief seemed to make a great effort to ensure violence would occur. He could have de-escalated his response to the protest at any point, but he instead made sure his police force escalated the conflict. Except I can’t imagine how a local civilian protest, even in a city the size of Chicago, fits into Rainman’s agenda.”
“Well, there’s no doubt Rainman is involved, even though I can’t show proof.” Carl was silent for a moment, then added, “Both Tavares and the assassin said something about technology capable of controlling police behavior, and the assassin said it was some kind of prototype test. If we investigate this further, though, we tip our hands that we know Rainman is involved. He’ll know we’re onto him and go into hiding again.”
“Yes.” She was silent for a moment, and Carl got the feeling she was considering the same plan he was. “So we pretend we don’t suspect his involvement?”
“Indeed, and I’m thinking the CIA analyst is a plant. His request to join us is too convenient, the timing too coincidental.”
“We vetted him. For him to withstand the level of scrutiny we employed in his background check, his alias has to be very deeply placed. We literally know everything about the man going back to his parents’ elementary schools. If we now suspect him of being an infiltrator, standard procedure is to put him in isolation and interrogate him.”
“Yes, but that’s exactly what I don’t want to do,” Carl said. “Let’s pretend we don’t know either Rainman or the CIA asset is involved. Let’s pretend we think our new CIA analyst is a worthwhile asset. Debrief him, then let him go about his business. Let him be seen in public, so if he’s being monitored, they’ll know he’s not a prisoner. Let him stay in his job and feed us intel.”
“Okay.”
Carl notched his eyebrows under the ice mask even though she couldn’t see him over the voice channel. “Nancy, there are so many assumptions in this plan, I expected you to be more skeptical.”
She said nothing.
“Unless you know something I don’t know.”
“The drone picked up some interesting data. I just now got the analysis.”
He waited, then said, “Well, don’t make me beg, Nancy.”
“There was an encrypted phone call originating from the top floor office. We couldn’t decrypt it, but we traced it.”
Carl folded his hands across his lap and smiled to himself. “You know where he is, don’t you?”
“Rainman is in New York. In Manhattan. I have his address.”
Finally, after eight months I have a lead to the whereabouts of my nemesis. Carl said, “I know the correct tactical action would be to deploy human intel surveillance and satellite assets—”
“But if we deploy assets against him, he’ll see us coming,” Palmer added. “He’s probably at high alert right now since whatever he was doing in Chicago failed. He no doubt has an escape plan in place.”
“Agreed,” Carl said. “Let’s let Rainman reduce his readiness, then in a few days, we’ll go visit him, just you and me.”
“We might lose him.”
Carl nodded to himself. “If we go after him now, we’ll definitely lose him. But the president has given us a free hand in pursuing Rainman, hasn’t she?”
“She has.” Palmer was silent for a few moments. “And pretending is something that is definitely not in the government playbook. It might just work.”
The FBI and TER had never been able to profile Carl Johnson because he’d always taken random, unexpected actions in his ops against the government and against Rainman. If his nemesis now thought he had profiled Johnson, then that was all the better for Carl and his team. If Rainman thought he could predict Carl’s actions, then they could bait the man and his counteractions could be predicted. That gave Carl the tactical advantage.
Twenty-four hours later, as Carl sat on the oceanfront veranda of his opulent mansion on the west coast of southern Mexico, Agent Palmer sent a video to his cell phone showing the aftermath of the protest. After Carl had left, a small band of protesters went over to the disarmed police and offered first aid to the wounded while waiting for paramedics. The rest of the protesters disbanded, but the next day at noon, many more protesters again converged on the coffee shop.
Thousands of marchers filled the streets. There were hundreds more police also, along with snipers on many roofs. Carl saw a dozen more APCs. Even the National Guard had been called out. Clearly, the police were ready for any type of escalation. They were ready for Carl Johnson even though he was thousands of miles away. There were a dozen camera crews lining the sidewalks. Then the black-clad police made their approach, same as the day before. Thirty feet shy of the protesters, though, a surprising event occurred.
A cop hollered a command, and all the police stopped. Then that solitary cop walked over to the front line of the protesters, fully armed and in uniform, removed his helmet and dark shades, and dropped them to the street. He turned around and faced the rest of the police, held out his elbows, and stepped back into a newly formed gap in the civilian front line and linked arms with two of the protesters. For several long minutes, nothing happened, then a reporter and her cameraman raced over to get the interview.
Carl muttered, “Huh… Well, ain’t that something?” One white face among the sea of brown faces. One hero making a difference.
When the camera zoomed in on the officer, Carl saw it was the police officer who had assumed command of the defeated riot squad yesterday—the officer Carl had lectured, then almost killed in his own personal rage.
The reporter stuck a microphone in the man’s face and asked him why he was there. She asked him if the American Terrorist had made him rethink his duty and responsibility to the citizens.
“I’m first and foremost a police officer,” the man said. “If I see the terrorist Carl Johnson again, I’m going to shoot him dead, and there won’t be a trial.” He looked left and right. “But I’m also a citizen of this city just like all these people. Sometimes we forget whom we serve. People have a legal right to protest peacefully, even if the politicians or the powers-that-be don’t like it. If protesters get violent or start looting, I’ll be the first one to make some arrests. But our job is to preserve the peace and protect our citizens. We don’t have to escalate. In fact, our job is to not escalate whenever possible.”
The officer looked around. “I may get fired for this, but I’m protesting something too. I’m protesting the series of orders yesterday that led to the murder of six SWAT officers, two of my team, and the crews of that chopper and APC. Those decisions also resulted in over a dozen officers being seriously wounded. I’m protesting the illegal actions of a handful of bad cops that cost the rest of us good cops the trust of the citizens. The city lost a valued citizen, along with two witnesses to that crime. These people have something to say about it. They want to be heard, so let’s hear them.”
The police force kept its distance, and after some time, the protesters began to disband. Thanks to the officer, their voices had been heard. Some patted the officer on the back or shook his hand. Others got interviews with any of the news crews who would give them airtime.
Carl felt a wave of emotion as he watched a single man defuse a crisis that could have spiraled out of control into a full-blown race riot. He felt hope for his country and for humanity, but he also felt fear.
“Nancy, we didn’t do anything
good here. We just made it worse by getting involved. There’re ten times as many cops as yesterday.”
“You stopped the violence.”
“I didn’t. That officer did.”
“Because of what you did yesterday.”
“I can’t help but wonder if every protest from now on will be faced with even more police. Maybe they’ll use the excuse that I might be there to justify bringing out the big guns. Maybe they’ll be even more brutal than ever before.”
Agent Palmer added, “You’ve given the topic of police brutality a new conversation thread. Traditional and social media are on fire with the discussion of creating a federal entity to police the police at the local level. Not under the control of a vigilante or a terrorist, of course.” They both chuckled. “The current thinking is that it would be more of a monitoring or watchdog agency that is not a part of any law enforcement organization.”
Carl was silent, so Palmer continued. “The assassin, Chrissy, spoke of an experiment or test. Along with the encrypted phone call, there was an unencrypted data stream transmitted from the Stennhauser Building. It was a brief test report summarizing the proof-of-concept experiment Chrissy mentioned…in biotechnical behavior control.”
“I can see controlling police activities from a systemic or policy perspective by creating rules of engagement, but controlling their physical or mental behavior? I can’t even begin to understand what kind of biochemical mechanism might be in play here.”
“They’ve done it. You stopped the violence, but this data suggests the experiment was successful, though it doesn’t explicitly mention the biological technology used.” Palmer took a deep breath and said, “Carl, the report says they’ll be ready in a few months to launch in a dozen major cities with actions that will make yesterday’s protest look like a Sunday school picnic.”
She took a deep breath, and Carl figured she was about to drop the bomb on him.
“That’s Phase Three, but the report conclusion mentioned Phase Two-A, the manipulation of a compartmented protection unit.”
Carl stood up so fast, he almost dropped the phone he held. He disabled the phone’s speaker mode and put the device to his ear.
“Christ, Nancy, he’s going after the president again!” He continued to gaze out at the Pacific Ocean, but he no longer saw the tranquil beauty of the undulating surface. “They’re going to target the Secret Service to make them kill her.”
“Agreed.”
“Do you know when?”
“Yes, Carl. Rainman is going to implement his plan in twenty-seven hours. We have that much time to save the president.”
Chapter 18
Carl’s Gulfstream cruised at forty-three thousand feet en route to Virginia for his mission with Agent Palmer to retrieve the president. He sat in one of the four captain’s chairs in the front part of the cabin with his laptop open on the table that folded down from the bulkhead to his right. He had a split-screen videoconference app open, waiting for TER Agent Nancy Palmer and Director Aaron McGrath.
As Carl waited, he opened his brown lunch bag and pulled out a sandwich. For an instant, he was launched forty-five years into the past when he’d been the only kid in school that carried his school lunch in a brown paper sack instead of a superhero lunch pail. He chuckled at the memory, then remembered he’d packed his lunch on the plane so he wouldn’t have to eat one of the government MREs provisioned on the plane. The government interrogators who worked for Palmer and McGrath had used Meals Ready to Eat as psychological torture when they’d captured him eight months earlier. Sometimes they let him eat them, and sometimes they snatched that hope away in the most hideous way possible. If he never ate another MRE for the rest of his life, that would be just fine.
He thought about Lieutenant Yeong Dae Jin, still struggling with his mixed feelings about the man’s death. The Korean SWAT and Hostage Rescue Teams veteran had sculpted Carl into an aged but effective killer. Now Carl was a near-expert shooter with several handguns and assault rifles, and he could hold his own in hand-to-hand fighting with trained soldiers and assassins half his age, thanks to three months of intensive training by the lieutenant. But the man was a sadistic bastard.
At first, Carl had been excited when the lieutenant said his training would be like “SEAL Training except you won’t have to play in the water like those kids do.” He’d soaked up his trainer’s advice and techniques like a sponge, but soon learned the unfortunate reality of trying to undergo intense training at an advanced age. He felt renewed respect for any young person that completed SEAL training. It was one thing to watch it on TV, and quite another to actually experience what SEALs went through.
He learned that fifty-four-year-old muscles could take the extreme training, but the ligaments and tendons could not. In one’s fifties, those connective tissues are much more brittle than those of a person in their twenties or thirties. Carl’s training exacerbated existing tendon micro strains, stretches, and tears he didn’t realize he had. He was in constant pain for the whole three-month training program, but his trainer gave him no respite and no quarter. End-of-day ice packs on knees, elbows, and shoulders were part of his daily regimen.
Until that final sparring match…
“Carl?” Agent Palmer’s voiced snatched him back to the present. “Are you okay? I know that look.”
He grunted and looked out the window at the blue sky. “I was thinking about Lieutenant Yeong.” He tried to calm the feelings of hatred that he knew Palmer saw on his face.
“His death was…unfortunate.” She gazed at him from the laptop monitor, then said, “We never talked about that, but we have a few minutes while we wait for Aaron. I mean, if you want.”
Palmer’s serious face took up the left side of the screen, and the right side was a gray box where McGrath’s image would soon be.
“Everything was fine until I bested him in a sparring match in the second month. I got lucky, but he took it as a sign that I needed harsher training. He became even more sadistic. He was cruel, evil. I needed tough training, but in the last month, I snapped. To me, he became a bully. So, I killed him.”
Fifteen years Carl’s junior, the lieutenant was an extremely capable soldier. He was a world-class marksman in multiple firearms, an expert in blade work—knives and swords—and a high-level black belt in several martial arts. Carl had learned a lot in all those disciplines from the man, and he was grateful to him for the extreme training.
“When I fought that Delta Force assassin eight months ago, I was lucky.” Carl had been the last man standing between the killer and President Mallory, and he could not retreat. “But when I picked up a knife and went after Yeong in that final encounter, he still thought it was just a sparring match, another training exercise. We went at it for five minutes.”
Carl took a deep breath and looked out the window again. “And then I cut him. Twice.” He looked at the laptop screen again and matched Palmer’s piercing gaze with his own. “Right then and there, he knew he was going to die. I saw it in his eyes, and his fear empowered me. Ten seconds later, I cut him again, a life-ending arterial slice in his upper thigh, and then I took him to the mat.
“I could have reveled in my victory, could have stood over him and watched him bleed out, but I didn’t. I knelt down and cut his throat.” He closed his eyes and said, “It couldn’t have ended any other way. I know that now.”
Palmer said, “I’m worried about you, Carl. I’m worried that you’re going too far to the dark side.”
“I know. I can feel it too. I’m losing control of what little humanity I have left.” They looked at each other for long seconds, then he said, “I want to see you again, Nancy. I mean, not on a mission or anything. Just, you know, maybe coffee or dinner or something.”
She smiled in that girly way that crinkled her nose. “That would be nice, Carl.” She returned his gaze with a distant look in her eyes, then said, “I think about…”
That kiss.
“I think about it t
oo.”
She was about to say more, but Director McGrath’s face replaced the gray box on the laptop screen.
“Status,” he demanded.
Carl raised an eyebrow at the aggressive tone of the TER director’s voice. He looked at Palmer’s image, but her face showed no reaction. Something new had happened. He said, “You already know we suspect the president’s life is in danger—”
“Yes.” McGrath looked down like he was consulting notes. “Another assassination attempt, this time using Secret Service personnel compromised by an unknown biotechnology.” He leaned forward with his elbows on his desk and clasped his fingers, and Carl got the feeling the director was ready to drop a bomb.
“Don’t keep me guessing, Aaron. Let’s have it.”
McGrath nodded. “I want to run this op out of our office here in Virginia.”
Carl shrugged. “You don’t work for me, Aaron, nor do I work for you. You can do whatever the fuck you want to do as long as you don’t interfere—”
“Your body count is rising too high and too fast. Eighteen deaths this month alone in Mexico, six in Albuquerque, and now sixteen police officers in Chicago, not counting the initial four officers at the coffeeshop.”
“If you mean the cops that killed civilians, and those that were getting ready to kill protestors? Well, the bad guys are dead.”
McGrath leaned toward his screen. “But apparently not the bad guys that these bad guys were working for! The operators that went for Cummings are gunning for you, not us.”
“Their mistake.”
“Johnson, do I have to remind you that we have—”
Carl leaned closer to the laptop, matching the director’s posture. “Don’t go thinking you have some kind of leverage on me and my people, Aaron. I’m happy to conduct my ops my way without your—”
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