by David Freed
“You want some water or something?”
She shook her head no, dabbing her tears with the napkin.
“Then what do you want, Savannah? Why drive all the way up here from LA? Because I know it wasn’t just to tell me Arlo’s gone.”
“I’d like you to tell the police what Arlo did for a living.”
“He worked in marketing.”
“His real job.”
“That was his real job.”
We both knew I was lying.
“Logan, the police are never going to find who killed him if they don’t know who he really was, what he really did. I need your help. Please.”
Something shifted in my gut, a moist sickness. Some nerve, asking for my help after cutting off my balls. I swallowed down the taste of bile and leaned back in my chair, my hands clasped nonchalantly behind my head.
“What are the police telling you?”
“That they’re not getting anywhere.”
Detectives assigned to the case, she said, had concluded that Echevarria’s demise was the result of more than some random act of violence in a metropolis whose middle name is random violence. But given what meager evidence they had to go on, investigators had been unable to gain much traction, according to Savannah. No arrests had been made. No viable suspects had even been identified.
“People die in LA all the time,” I said with a shrug. “Sometimes, for no reason at all.”
“Arlo died for a reason,” Savannah said. “I think it had to do with what he did, his work—his real work. Somebody out for revenge. If you could just talk to the detectives . . .”
She searched my eyes, waiting. I gazed at her evenly and gave back nothing.
“I told them that Arlo worked for the government,” Savannah said. “They said they couldn’t find any records other than when he was with the Army.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“You know that’s not true, Logan. You worked with him. You worked for him.”
“That I did. In marketing.”
Her jaw muscles tightened. She was getting nowhere, but she wasn’t about to give up. “I want to show you something,” she said, digging through her purse.
Outside, a regional jet began its takeoff roll down Runway Twenty-Six, its twin turbines rattling the walls of the hangar. I hiked the sleeves of my polo shirt a little and folded my arms across my chest, pushing my biceps up with the backs of my hands to give her a glimpse of what she’d given up for the likes of scrawny Arlo Echevarria, but she was too busy rummaging through her designer handbag to notice my mas macho gun show. She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and tucked it behind her ear as she searched her purse. Why did she have to still be so goddamn gorgeous?
“I haven’t been over to his house yet,” Savannah said. “I can’t. It’s just too . . .” She cleared her throat, still going through her purse. “My father hired a company. They come in after somebody dies and pack up all their clothes, personal effects, clean up the mess. Can you imagine a job like that? Anyway, I was going through a box of Arlo’s things the other night, and I found this.”
She pulled out a wallet-size photograph from her purse and slid it toward me across the desk. I exhaled like I was doing her a big favor picking it up:
The photo was of Echevarria and me, taken in the Nubo-Sindian Desert. Our cheeks were streaked with camouflage face paint and eight days of Iranian dust. We were outfitted in battle dress devoid of rank or unit insignia. Sprawled at our boots was a bearded Arab, arms splayed above his head, his eyes half-hooded in death, the front of his white dishdasha man-dress splotched red from multiple gunshot wounds. In Echevarria’s right hand was a Kalashnikov assault rifle with a collapsible stock and extended banana clip. His left hand was clamped affectionately on my shoulder. He was beaming at the camera like a safari hunter posing with a trophy lion, while I stared grimly into the lens, thoroughly exhausted.
I’d forgotten how slight Echevarria was. His combat uniform hung from his bony frame like a protestor on a hunger strike, yet there was no denying his raw physical appeal. The pale green eyes so inconsistent with the bronze Mayan skin. The high cheekbones. The aquiline nose. The lips curved perpetually in an impish little boy’s smile.
“I showed that picture to the police,” Savannah said. “They said they didn’t know what to make of it.”
I flipped it back across the desk. “Picture’s a fake,” I said.
“Fake? What’re you talking about?”
“Going-away party. The guy on the ground worked in accounts receivable. Got a bookkeeping job with Halliburton in Baghdad. We squirted catsup on him, told him to lay there and look like roadkill so he could get an idea of what he had to look forward to. It was all a big joke.”
“That’s the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard. That man is dead, Logan. Arlo killed him. Or you did.”
I put my feet back up on my desk, clasped my hands behind my head once more and stared at her blankly.
“Logan, Arlo’s dead. He’s dead, OK? There’s no reason to keep covering up everything. Why can’t you just talk to me? That’s all I’m asking. Be honest with me. For once in your life. I’m begging you. Please.”
I’ll admit it. I got off watching her grovel. Probably too much. But unless you’ve been there, sitting within tactile proximity of a woman who once carved your heart out and stomped on it like Carlo Rossi come grape harvest, you’d probably never understand.
“Was it the CIA? At least tell me that much.”
I forced a chuckle. “That’s one thing I always did like about you, Savannah. You always did have a healthy imagination.”
She looked away, nostrils flaring, like a bull about to charge. “Do you really think I didn’t notice? All the late night phone calls, the last minute ‘business trips’? All the lies? It was no different with you than it was with him, Logan. How stupid do you really think I am?”
As dispassionately as I could, I said, “Arlo Echevarria ran a marketing company. I worked for him. I respected him. Until he stole my wife.”
Savannah slung her bag angrily over her shoulder and stood, then slowly, deliberately, leaned toward me over my desk, her palms flat on the worn gray metal.
“I’m not going to tell you how much I despise you,” she said, her mahogany eyes burning holes in my soul. “You can figure that out yourself.”
For the second time that morning, I watched a beautiful woman walk out of my life. The only difference was, this one I cared about.
Only after she’d gone did I notice that she’d left behind the photograph of Echevarria and me.
THREE
I can’t say whether there was a second gunman in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated, though anyone familiar with the elegant efficiency of your basic L-shaped ambush could take one look at the sixth floor sniper’s nest and the stockade fence behind the grassy knoll on Dealey Plaza and draw their own conclusions. I can’t say whether it was a flying saucer outside Roswell in 1957, or whether Elvis is alive and well and eating chili dogs with Marilyn Monroe on some obscure island in the Mediterranean. What I can say with certainty is that, until very recently, in the name of national security, the government of the United States relied on a select handful of men to do its dirty work in places and ways that never once made the network news.
The agency to which these men reported was classified Tier One Ultra and code-named Alpha, a purposeful tip of the hat to Alfa, Russia’s most elite counterterrorism unit. Known only within highly compartmentalized circles, Alpha showed up on no Defense Department orders of battle. There was never a mention of it in any Congressional budget reports, nor on any blogs. No Tweets. Culled from the various branches of America’s military and intelligence apparatus for their individual skills, elite operators assigned to Alpha surrendered all formal rank and title. They were referred to synonymously as “go-to guys.”They were hunter-killers, these men, honed in the arts of asymmetric warfare and oblivious to the so
vereignty of treaties or international borders. They proved an invaluable weapon in the fight against global terrorism. But they were not invulnerable to the vagaries of shifting political winds. The current administration, fearing scandal if word of Alpha’s actions ever were fully known, quietly ordered the group disbanded within a month of Inauguration Day. White House officials past and present will deny there were ever any “go-to guys.” But I know there were because I was one of them. And so, too, was Arlo Echevarria.
I’d be on the next Con Air flight to Super Max were I to divulge all that we did. That’s how nondisclosure agreements work. Sign one, tell a few tales out of school, and the next thing you know, you’re bunking with Robert Hanssen and stamping out license plates the rest of your life. So you’ll excuse me if I’m a bit vague on operational details—target ID’s, mission locations, and the like. What I can tell you, though, is how Echevarria and I worked together, how I initially revered him, and how, ultimately, I wished him dead.
For me, it began in college.
We were playing New Mexico at Albuquerque my senior year. With time about to expire before halftime, I snagged a pass cutting across the middle and turned to run upfield when the Lobos’ 240-pound middle linebacker, a first-round NFL prospect with “I Shall Fear No Man But God” tattooed across his throat, separated me from my cleats. The football went one way; the major structural ligaments of my right knee the other. And so ended my collegiate gridiron career. Fortunately for me, playing football was not the only reason the Air Force put me through college.
Flash forward ten years. I’m flying A-10 Warthogs. The ’Hog sometimes gets a bad rap from other fighter pilots who drive ships with pointier noses, but there’s no better platform when it comes to blowing up stuff. I blew up stuff real good all over the world— and got paid well to do it, too. Tanks. Republican Guardsmen. Miscellaneous terrorists. A total blast. Literally. Then, during an otherwise routine six-month physical, my friendly flight surgeon asked if I had any squawks. I made the mistake of telling him half-jokingly that I was considering applying for work at the Weather Channel because I could always tell when a low pressure system was moving in based on how lousy my surgically reconstructed knee felt. The doctor bent and prodded my lower leg this way and that, then concluded that the joint had atrophied beyond acceptable Air Force standards. I was ruled unfit to fly. At that moment, no longer a fighter pilot, I could’ve just as easily been ruled unfit to continue living.
I spent a month searching for the true meaning of life at the bottom of bourbon bottles, debating whether to resign my commission. The airlines were hiring like crazy back then. Most were so desperate for pilots they didn’t care about something as trivial as a reconstructed anterior cruciate ligament. As long as you had a pulse and could more or less keep the dirty side of the airplane down, you were assured of a paycheck. For me, though, the notion of hauling software salesmen and colicky infants around in the back of a 737 held all the appeal of driving a Greyhound bus. I enjoyed being in the Air Force. I just needed a different career path. My superiors, as it turned out, were only too happy to accommodate me.
Soldiers and Marines are quick to point out that the Air Force is the most non-military of the military services. They call it the Air Farce. The Chair Farce. Civilians in Uniform. A country club with airplanes. Deservedly so. Most Air Force weenies can’t tell the difference between a handgun and a howitzer. I was somewhat unusual in that regard. When you bounce from ranch to ranch as a foster kid on the arid plains east of Denver, you quickly learn that: 1) much of Colorado bears little resemblance to a Coors commercial and 2) shooting firearms is about all there is to do recreationally in such places unless you count goat roping and getting loaded and/or laid. Goats give me the creeps; booze, I discovered early on, brings out the bad in me; and street narcotics always seemed to me a stupid thing to do to one’s physiology. But guns, ah, now those were another story altogether.
I loved the precision they demanded, their perfect utility. For my twelfth birthday, my foster parents du jour gave me an old single-shot, bolt-action .22 with a red cocking indicator and a battered walnut stock. It was the most animate inanimate object I’d ever seen, let alone owned. I worked every job I could get—digging irrigation ditches, shoveling snow, pulling weeds—to buy ammunition, and target practiced endlessly. Cans, bottles, rocks, birds on the wing, varmints on the run. After awhile, I could hit anything with consistency and at ranges that sounded more like bragging than marksmanship. Which helps explain why, after being admitted to the Air Force Academy, I consistently registered among the highest scores in school history with both pistol and M-16.
My performance on the firing range was not lost on my superiors when they sought to find me a suitable new job after clipping my wings. Such ability, they concluded, lent itself to the wonderful world of military informational gathering and assessment. What one’s shooting skills had to do with flying a desk as an intelligence analyst was beyond me, but I didn’t ask many questions. Most things in the military make no sense. And thus, with some initial reluctance, I accepted a series of ground-based assignments, first to the Air Intelligence Agency at Wright-Patterson, then to the National Air Intelligence Center at Lackland Air Force Base, until, finally, I ended up where I did, in the darkest shadows, on the blackest operations, a token zoomie in the land of snake eaters—among them a warrior of Mayan ancestry who one day would steal from me the only woman I’d ever truly loved.
I was lounging on a rope hammock in my landlady’s backyard, hoping the sun would bake away all thoughts of Savannah and her unannounced visit that morning. The plan wasn’t working. I thought about going inside, maybe catching up on my reading, but when it’s ninety-four degrees and your home is a converted two-car garage with a flat roof and no insulation or air conditioning, going inside isn’t something you do voluntarily until well after sundown. So I just lay there. Even my feline idiot of a roommate, Kiddiot, the world’s most worthless cat, was showing the effects of the heat. He was dozing in the oak tree above me with his tongue lolling lethargically out one corner of his mouth. His lanky orange and white limbs straddled the tree like some Bulgarian gymnast passed out on a balance beam. A mockingbird perched on the same branch not two feet away from him, singing every song in its vast repertoire, untroubled by the cat’s proximity. Kiddiot’s slothful reputation obviously had preceded him.
I slipped the photo of Echevarria and me out of my pocket and studied it for the umpteenth time. I’d lied to Savannah. The blood in the picture was as real as the dead Al-Qaeda operative who’d spilled it. He was a pharmacist from Damascus, mastermind of at least four jihadist bombings in Madrid and Islamabad. More than eighty innocents had met their end, courtesy of his handiwork. Any one of the attacks might’ve easily landed him atop Alpha’s tasking board. But the Syrian pharmacist was definitely three strikes and you’re out material: it just so happened that he was related by marriage to a prominent Arab-American politico with personal ties to the White House. The President’s handlers were not keen on seeing that story above the fold in the Times. So telephone calls were placed on encrypted lines and options discussed—obliquely, to be sure, and always off-the-record. Make the evil pharmacist disappear.
Great patience and skill were needed to bag him—that and a $250,000 reward. In the end, his own daughter gave him up. He was not merely a crazy mad-dog bomber. As it turned out, he was also a member of the Disneyana Fan Club, an avid collector of all things Mickey. That alone was reason enough, the daughter would later insist, to drop a dime on Daddy. We helicoptered in on a moonless night and tracked him for almost a week before cornering him and two of his lieutenants in a wadi southeast of nowhere. When they tried to run, we shot all three with Kalashnikovs to make it look like the handiwork of local warlords. We photographed and fingerprinted the bodies to confirm their identities, then left them to rot in the sun.
The screen door swung open with a crash, disrupting my stroll down memory lane, as my landlady, Mrs. Schm
ulowitz, emerged from her modest 1920’s bungalow, shuffling backward, all eightyeight pounds of her, while struggling to balance an orange plastic tray with two glasses and what looked to be a pitcher of iced tea.
“Global warming, schmoble warming. This is nothing. Try August in Bensonhurst.”
“Here, let me get that for you, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
I pocketed the photo as I bounded out of the hammock and steadied her by a bony elbow, commandeering the tray of drinks a half-second before she took a tumble.
“Always helpful Cordell, who never gives me trouble and pays his rent on time—and good-looking to boot,” the old lady said, beaming at me. “You are one handsome man, you know that? The most handsome man I ever saw.”
“You told me your first husband was the most handsome man you ever saw, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
“Don’t get me started. My first husband, such a shmendrick, that man. A man more in love with a mirror you never saw in your life, may he rest in peace.”
Mrs. Schmulowitz was pushing ninety and crooked like a question mark. Her sun-baked skin was the color and approximate texture of an apricot fruit roll. A retired elementary school gym teacher, she was the only octogenarian I ever saw whose preference in warm weather attire was Lycra bicycle shorts and a fire-engine red sports bra. Her hair was Einstein frizzy and thinning at the crown, but the years, so far as I could ever tell, had done nothing to dim her mind. Rhodes Scholars and stand-up comics only wished they were half as sharp as Mrs. Schmulowitz.
I carried the tray of drinks and set it down on a rusting wrought-iron patio table that could’ve stood a new coat of paint.
“Even money Tampa Bay chokes on Sunday,” she said, pouring me a glass of iced tea. “Their passing game stinks, they can’t stop the run, and that coach of theirs. They shouldn’t fire him. They should indict him.”
“Be honest, Mrs. Schmulowitz. New York could start Rudolf Hess at fullback and you’d still pull for the Giants.”
