The Alarmists

by Don Hoesel

  “And if one is not inclined in that direction?”

  Before answering, Richards released a heavy sigh. “Then I’ll pray for the both of us.”

  December 19, 2012, 4:52 P.M.

  While Dabir thought it justified to hold American airport and border security in contempt, he was nonetheless careful crossing through to South America. In Africa, one could cross borders with impunity, and on those occasions in which poor timing or the will of Allah dictated border detainment, an exchange of money or other valuables ensured continued passage. In this hemisphere, one could often traverse borders with equal ease, but the penalties for being caught were often more unfortunate.

  Although, now that he was there, he found much about this country to like. In many ways, the rain forest rivaled the jungles with which he was more familiar, both in expansiveness and the undercurrent of ferocity pervading them. He did not, however, force a kinship between the two, as that would have lulled him into a sense of dangerous familiarity when he did not know the landscape’s deadly creatures, large or small.

  After debarking from the single-engine plane that had brought him from Miami, he had rented a motorbike to take him over the nearly impassable roads that wound through and around the forest.

  It seemed to him that Allah smiled on his mission: otherwise how to explain the ease with which he found the information he needed, as well as the timing of such. After observing Arthur Van Camp’s movements, Dabir knew when the man’s apartment would be empty, and breaking into the place, even if protected by an alarm, was a simple matter—another skill he’d learned in Saudi Arabia.

  It was in Van Camp’s study where the Eritrean found the man’s notes: scribblings really. But there was enough there for Dabir to piece some things together. What he was coming to realize was that his part in this play was a minor one, and whatever it was building toward was fast approaching. A firm hand had written a date just two days from the one Allah’s eternal provision now granted Dabir to enjoy.

  His wish was that neither man live to see whatever their sins had fashioned.

  To that end, he had followed Van Camp to the airport, where getting the man’s flight plan became another simple matter. He would punish this man first, this one he had never met. He would save for last the one with whom he had shared tej. Alan Canfield/Miles Standish was Dabir’s personal devil, and for that he would be Dabir’s final act.

  The Eritrean slipped his backpack off and, setting it down and unzipping it, withdrew the pieces of the M100. He sat on the forest floor, crossed his legs, and began to assemble the weapon, surrounded by sights and sounds so very much like his own world and yet very different.

  —

  As a child, Brent had understood that his life would include a variety of experiences. He knew it in the way some people knew they were destined to surpass the physical or ideological confines of their upbringings. His life, then, had been an effort toward solidifying the dreams of youth. With his advanced degree, occasional research work, and no attachments to speak of, he had thought he’d achieved his youthful vision.

  How different could the passage of a month render the perception of one’s personal landscape.

  “I still don’t know what I’m doing here,” he whispered to Richards.

  Here was a forest in Brazil—a wild land whose inhabitants barely grasped the existence of a world unfolding beyond their tribal fires. They’d come in from Colombia, someone in their military owing the colonel a favor, and twenty miles over the border they were in position to either prevent a global catastrophe or start a war.

  The way Brent understood it, the Brazilian government had no idea an American team was operating on their soil, which was another indication that things down here unfolded in a different way than they did up north. Brent couldn’t imagine a foreign military unit wedging its way into California without being detected in minutes.

  “You’re here because we wouldn’t be here without you,” Richards explained. “But when things get hairy you’ll stick with Rawlings. You won’t see any action.”

  Brent glanced at Rawlings, who had a look on his face that suggested irritation at being told he would have to remain with the civilian while the rest of the team risked their lives.

  Before anyone could argue about the arrangement, Snyder emerged from the forest and crossed to the colonel’s side.

  “They have a moderate presence around the perimeter,” he said. “All light armament from what I could see.”

  “Any way to breach without being spotted?” Richards asked.

  Snyder shook his head. “They have motion detectors and cameras. It would take us a long time to circumvent their systems. I think we can take them all from the tree line; there’s not a one of them that’s hunkered down.”

  “But if they were hunkered down, you wouldn’t see them now, would you?” Brent asked.

  Richards smirked and returned to surveying the scene through binoculars. He remained that way for a few minutes before lowering them. He removed the radio from his belt. “Bradford, meet Snyder and me by the rise ten degrees off the front gate. Addison, set up on the southeast corner.” He didn’t wait for a response before gathering Snyder with his eyes and rising to disappear into the forest.

  The thing Brent registered most was the unnatural quiet of the forest, as if the animals around them had paused to see what would happen.

  “Sorry you have to baby-sit,” he said to Rawlings, whose only response was a grumble the professor couldn’t translate.

  The two men passed the minutes in silence, both sets of eyes fixed on the compound below them. Their single target, along with the sounds of the forest, lulled Brent into a sense of complacency—which meant that he nearly jumped out of his skin when Rawlings spoke.

  “Are you sure about this, Doc?”

  Brent didn’t have to ask what he meant.

  “Because it’s something to kill a man,” Rawlings went on. “If you’re going to do something like that, you better believe one hundred percent that it’s the right thing to do.”

  The soldier might well have been reading Brent’s mind. The entire flight Brent had tossed the question around in his head, and each time he did, he came down on the side that said Van Camp was the one they were looking for. Too many things lined up for it not to be true. And there was also Maddy. Brent suspected his judgment was clouded by the prospect of finding her, and he could only hope he wasn’t passing judgment on a man based solely on his admiration for a woman.

  “I’m as sure as I can be” was the professor’s honest answer.

  Rawlings studied him for a moment before nodding and turning away.

  Then Brent heard the voice of Colonel Richards coming through on Rawlings’s earpiece. Brent couldn’t hear what he said, but when he finished, Rawlings handed Brent the binoculars.

  “They’re ready,” he said.

  Brent didn’t want to, but he accepted them and used them to review the compound. Magnified, the shapes he’d watched moving around below now took on faces. He raised the binoculars to try to spot Richards and the others positioned near the front gate, but the dense forest swallowed everything up. He brought the binoculars back to the trio of men guarding the gate, and the moment his hand stilled he saw a man’s head explode in a mist of blood. It happened so fast that he almost dropped the binoculars. Just seconds later the two remaining men met similar fates.

  When all movement stopped, Brent found that he couldn’t pull the binoculars from the scene. It wasn’t until Rawlings put a hand on his forearm and gave a soft tug that Brent lowered them. He turned a somber face to Rawlings, who nodded and then motioned for Brent to follow. Without a word, the soldier rose and started off down the slope.

  —

  Van Camp stood on a second-floor balcony overlooking the rain forest, which stretched as far as he could see, crossing the border into Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela in one direction and spreading into the country’s wild interior in the other. From this spot he coul
d nurture the belief that he was there alone, as he could not see the security team in evidence, nor did the existence of the city less than ten miles away intrude upon his solitude. Manacapuru was one of the larger cities in Amazonas, which meant it could supply anything Van Camp might need yet was small enough to allow the forest to block it from his consideration. While his wife still lived, they would sometimes take a motorbike the ten miles to the outskirts of the city, where they would browse among the fruit stands and small shops, sampling coffee and pastries.

  He took a deep breath, tasting the scents he hadn’t sampled in a long while. It was his first time back to this place since his wife’s death and he was disquieted by the circumstances behind it. Had everything gone according to plan, he would have watched the culmination of the project from Atlanta, sitting in his office atop the company he’d worked to build.

  However, with Alan’s disappearance, and the detonator with him, he’d come to the conclusion that remaining in the United States was imprudent. There were too many trails and he worried at least one of them would lead past his vice-president of Business Development.

  Even so, he doubted anyone would be able to put the pieces together to form a clear enough picture to implicate him. His team of lawyers would see to it that any case presented against him remained tied up for so long in the courts that he could well be dead before anyone discovered the true extent of the operation.

  Van Camp harbored little ill will toward Alan, even considering the position in which the man’s actions had put his boss. In hindsight, Van Camp saw that putting that much responsibility on the shoulders of one man was a mistake. Perhaps he thought he’d noticed something of himself in Alan, something to be developed, refined in fire. He couldn’t even fault Alan for cleaning out the expense account. Had Van Camp been in a similar position, he would have done the same.

  Van Camp sipped at the Mouton. When he’d selected it from the wine cellar, he’d meant it for the final tick of the clock. But he yielded to the urge to uncork it early, understanding the truth that the only ceremony granted a moment was that which a man gave to it.

  His only hope was that wherever Alan went, he would do the one deed now denied the one whose plan this was. He suspected he would. Shackleton had been Alan’s idea after all—a grand one. And after it was concluded, and after the stocks susceptible to such things either rose or fell according to their types, he expected that Alan would try to come for him. In the same fashion in which he sought to put the entirety of the blame on Alan, so would the man seek for him.

  Arthur Van Camp stood on the balcony for a long while as the warm wind pushed through, carrying with it the smells he remembered from years ago. He could have gone to any number of houses around the world, all of them similarly stocked and secured. He’d chosen this one because it had been his wife’s favorite, which was the reason he had not visited since her death. Before now, it had seemed wrong to be in the house without her.

  He emptied the wineglass and went back inside.

  His office, normally as orderly as the ones he kept all over the world, was cluttered with the things the impromptu flight had forced him to bring. His aide had left three boxes against the wall opposite the desk, upon which were spread several file folders and a loose stack of papers—all the items he needed to keep the business running. A member of his IT team had installed a new computer, as the passage of five years had left the system there inadequate for his needs, which included the ability to web-conference with his leadership team.

  Aside from these, the only other addition to the office was the one thing Van Camp considered most important. His wife’s painting now hung on the wall to the right of his desk.

  He retrieved the Mouton and poured himself another glass and then sank into the guest chair.

  The one thing he most had to consider was the one thing he seemed least inclined to entertain, and he imagined the reason for that rested in the sheer number of ways this whole operation might play out. And even acknowledging that bothered him. As a younger man, he would have charted every possibility and developed plans for dealing with them all. Not a detail would have escaped his notice; no contingency would have remained unaccounted for. Now, he just felt tired. Once Alan pressed the button—if he pressed it—Van Camp’s personal portfolio would increase by a factor of five; of that he had no doubt. But would he, after finally achieving the dream he’d sought for so long—which at times seemed childish and at others an all-consuming fever—be a man without a country? For despite all the resources at his disposal, there still was no way of knowing.

  Finishing the second glass of Mouton, he emptied the rest of the bottle into it.

  —

  When Rawlings, with Brent trailing, reached the bottom of the slope and joined the others, with Addison only now rounding the tree line to meet them, the colonel and Brent shared a look. The professor’s drawn lips apparently told the man what he needed to see. Richards offered a grim nod and then turned to his work.

  “There’s a sensor on the gate, Colonel,” Addison said. “If you open it from the outside, it triggers an alarm.”

  Richards nodded.

  “If you look right there,” Addison went on, directing the colonel’s attention past the gate bars, “you can see the panel Van Camp’s security team uses.”

  Richards held his response as he considered their next move. Brent knew the man was weighing the need to do this correctly against the danger posed by allowing the dead bodies to remain as testament to the presence of the Americans.

  “How does security get back in if they have to leave the compound?” Richards asked. “They can’t just hope someone’s going to be around to open the gate for them.”

  Without waiting for a response, Richards walked toward the gate, and after a slight hesitation, the others moved with him. When they reached it, Brent saw that one of the security guards had collapsed nearby—perhaps close enough.

  The professor knelt in front of the bars and reached an arm between two of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t reach the dead man from that position, so he dropped onto his stomach and, with his face pressed up against the cold metal, pushed his arm through up to the shoulder. Even straining he was barely able to insert three fingers around the man’s belt, and once he’d done so he discovered he had no leverage to drag the man forward.

  “Hang on to him,” he heard Rawlings say, and then the professor felt hands around both of his ankles. The soldiers pulled him backward as Brent held on to the dead man, who was a good deal heavier than he looked.

  Addison took over, kneeling and fishing around in the man’s pockets. He found it in the second pocket and handed it to the colonel, who gave it a once-over before holding it out and pressing its only button. In the top left corner of the gate a light that had been red turned to green. Snyder quickly pulled the gate open, then closed it again once they were all within the perimeter.

  Seen from within the walls, the house was massive. And in the middle of the forest it looked like something that had grown up independent of the hands of men. Brent was struck by the beauty of the structure, understanding the inappropriateness of that when three dead men lay on the ground behind him. He avoided looking at them. He had watched them die and felt no need to relive any part of the experience.

  The team spread out over the compound while Rawlings and Brent remained by the front gate. Brent watched as Snyder and Richards disappeared around one side of the house, with Bradford and Addison taking the other side. In less than a minute they were coming back and gesturing for Brent and Rawlings to advance.

  “The perimeter’s clear,” Richards said once the others were within earshot. He looked toward the front door. “We have no idea what’s inside, so Rawlings and the doctor will stay out here until we clear the interior.”

  Brent offered yet another apologetic look to Rawlings. The soldier gestured with his head, indicating Brent should follow him away from the door. It was as Brent moved to comply that he heard a sin
gle shot. As when Rawlings had spoken to him in the trees, the loudness of the sound caused the professor to nearly jump out of his skin. Eyes wide, he whirled to see if he could find the shooter and instead found confusion setting in when he saw Snyder with a pistol in his hand, smoke rising from the barrel. Brent followed the line of the man’s gun. It was pointed somewhere past Brent’s right shoulder, and as the professor turned he again saw the three men the team had executed from afar. Except Brent was certain that one of them was not in his previous position.

  “We didn’t put him down the first time, Colonel,” Snyder explained.

  Richards took a second to assess the situation and then began barking orders, the element of surprise now gone.

  Instantly Rawlings pulled Brent away while the rest of the team converged on the entrance, Snyder leading and Addison taking a position halfway up the steps, his weapon trained on the door.

  Bradford pushed the door open, and after an eerie moment during which no shots rang out, he slipped past the doorframe and disappeared inside. Snyder and the colonel were right on his heels.

  December 19, 2012, 7:19 P.M.

  Van Camp understood the meaning of the sound before the blast dissipated. Yet he did not end his review of the documents spread out on the desk. With a red pen he made a note in the margin, and after scanning the rest of the page he capped the pen and returned it to its place.

  No other shots rang out after the first one, but now he could hear voices in the courtyard below. He turned to the computer and checked his email. A quick perusal revealed nothing earth-shattering, nothing that couldn’t wait. However, considering his present circumstances, he thought it prudent to send a few updates to his executive leadership team. It took less than two minutes to compose his thoughts regarding the Stratford Industries takeover, and his thoughts about network programming for the coming season, and his decision to try for a share of Major League Baseball broadcast rights.