140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  “What’s that?”

  “The reasonable, rational side of me is thinking: why take any more risks? Why not just make Eddy here tell me all he knows about everything you two have been up to all these years—everything about the janitors, the heart attacks, the accidents, all those deaths . . . and everything about my dad. Get him to clear my name while he’s at it, for the record, and throw in everything he knows about you too. Get it all on video, hand it over to the DA, and be done with it. Then I can come back for you with a warrant and a SWAT team to back me up. That sounds like the sensible move, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, sounds reasonable to me,” Roos said without missing a beat. “I mean, Eddy’s a high-ranking intelligence officer. Hell, he could be running the whole Agency before long. People would believe what he says.”

  “I think they would,” Reilly said. “He’s a respectable pillar of the community. And even if there happened to be a few cuts and bruises on him, which I would hope we could avoid—he’d give us a pretty compelling testimony. There’s only one problem with that.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I’m not in a reasonable mood.”

  Roos smiled. He hadn’t expected anything less from Reilly. Not after everything the agent had gone through to find him. “No?”

  “Not really,” Reilly said. “Besides, to be frank with you, I don’t really trust the system anymore.”

  “You should,” Roos said. “You’ve fought for it all your life. It’s a sad day when an agent of justice loses his faith in it. It’s almost like you’re saying you’ve devoted your whole life to something worthless.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far, Gordo. But it’s true that lately, it’s been letting me down. And I’m not fully convinced that you and Eddy here wouldn’t manage to pull a few strings or do a dirty and use some kind of leverage to make that tape disappear and ride back into town on your high horses. With all the nasty implications for my friends and me. We could put it on the Internet, but that wouldn’t work either. You’d just spin it off as another hoax from some conspiracy nut jobs.”

  “I know what you mean,” Roos said. “It’s tough to beat the system sometimes.”

  “So you see my dilemma.”

  “I empathize. I do. But you said you had a decision to make. What’s option two?”

  “Option two is: justice can wait.”

  Roos wasn’t sure what Reilly meant. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “It means, let someone else deal with the big picture and the crimes of the past. Me, I’m a simple guy. I’ve got more focus.”

  “And that focus is?”

  “Beating the truth out of you with my bare hands.”

  Ross chortled. He’d read a lot about Reilly—surveillance reports, case files—but he’d never spoken to him until now. He was actually starting to like Reilly, though it wouldn’t have any effect on what he had in store for the agent.

  “Well, you know,” Roos said, “focus is good. And you and I—we’ve had this coming for a long time. From way back, in fact. Around the time you were ten, right?” He paused, knowing the words would have the intended effect on Reilly. “Why involve anyone else?”

  Roos heard the slight pause, the one the agent would have loved to snuff out entirely, before Reilly said, “Exactly.”

  “So what do you propose? I’d invite you up here for a chat and an Irish coffee, but something tells me you have something else in mind.”

  “No, that sounds great. A sandwich would be nice too—I haven’t had lunch yet. But you did say we shouldn’t involve anyone else.”

  “That, I did.”

  “Then I need you to send those boys away.”

  “What boys?”

  “I need to see at least six guys leave your place before I come up.”

  Roos snorted. “All six of them?”

  “Actually, make that eight.”

  “Eight? I think you overestimate my importance here. Or maybe you’re overestimating yourself.”

  “Eight guys, Gordo. I want to see eight of them leave your cabin or I’m going to work on Eddy.”

  Roos was curious. He wanted to see them leave?

  Reilly was nearby. Had to be.

  “Ah, well. Let’s say I could rustle up eight of my boys. How am I going to prove to you that they’re gone?”

  “Have them drive down to the bottom of the mountain. Tell them to get out of their cars once they get to the main road, then get back in their cars and head back where they came from.”

  Roos needed more information about where Reilly was. “And you’ll be watching?”

  “I’ll see them, don’t worry. I’ve also got a spotter some ways up on Route Twenty-nine, on the way to Charlottesville. When he calls to say your boys have passed him, I’ll come to you. Just to make sure they don’t decide to double back ’cause they forgot something.”

  “How do I know you’ll come alone?”

  “It was my idea, wasn’t it?”

  “What about Eddy?”

  “I cut him loose.”

  Roos thought about it. “OK,” he said. “I’ll need proof that you really have him.”

  “Hang on.”

  Roos heard some buffeting from the wind, then Tomblin’s voice came on. “Gordo?”

  “You OK, Eddy?”

  “I’m fine. Listen—”

  More abrupt buffeting, like a phone being snatched, then Reilly’s voice came back. “We good to go?

  “Sure. When are we doing this?”

  “No time like the present,” Reilly said. “We’ve waited long enough, right? Ten minutes enough for them to hit the road?”

  “Make it fifteen.”

  “OK. I’ll see you soon,” Reilly said.

  He clicked off before Roos could reply.

  64

  We had lift off.

  On several levels.

  The most literal, however, concerned the drone Kurt had brought with him.

  I’d never seen one of these, but apparently they were all the rage, a brilliant piece of playful technology that was as much as a game changer as the original iPhone and the Oculus Rift.

  I hadn’t been entirely facetious with Roos. Yes, I had Tomblin. Yes, he was Roos’s partner back in the day, which meant he probably knew a lot of what I wanted to know, maybe even about my dad. Yes, I could have made him talk and got the whole thing on video. But I really did think they would find a way to bury it. And I wasn’t sure we’d survive long enough to suffer that disappointment. I was holding the head of the National Clandestine Service, the CIA’s most secret department. You don’t just walk away from that. No, it really was about Roos and me. Any answers I wanted had to come from him and nobody else. What I’d do once I got them—well, I’d figure that out if I made it that far.

  I was stunned by how easy it was to get the drone airborne. Kurt had brought a DJI Phantom, the Vision 2+ model, he explained, which had a built-in full HD camera hanging underneath it. It had only taken him a couple minutes to get it prepped, which involved taking it out of the box, manually screwing in the four plastic propellers, snapping the battery in place, doing a quick compass calibration and getting a GPS lock on our position by spinning it around itself on both axes, and syncing up the drone to the remote control unit he’d use to fly it. Easy enough, although we were lucky he’d done it before and knew how to pilot it with ease—he had one back at his place, but since that was a no-go zone, he had to buy a new one. It was small, a sleek white X-shape made out of plastic, with each of its arms not even a foot long. It was also light, weighing less than three pounds. It still managed to pack enough clever technology in that compact package to justify its thirteen-hundred-dollar price tag.

  Our present location had been chosen to allow three things: we needed it to be close enough to Roos’s cabin so that it was within the flight range of the Phantom, which was about a mile; we needed it to also allow the drone to monitor the departure of his goon squad, follow them until they were well
on their way out of here, and make sure they didn’t double back; and we needed it to give us the privacy to get on with our work.

  We sent the drone up a first time before my call to Roos to get a closer, real-time picture of the situation. The weather was borderline—not so much the snow as the temperature, but the Phantom didn’t seem fazed by it. Kurt sent it up to around five hundred feet. It was so small that we stopped seeing it long before that, and its buzz was so discreet anyway that we stopped hearing it even longer before that. I was confident that Roos and his entourage wouldn’t know it was there.

  Kurt had flown it across the hill toward Roos’s property, its remote-controlled camera relaying what it was seeing to the remote control unit in Kurt’s hands, which in turn beamed the footage by Bluetooth to Gigi’s laptop. The image was surprisingly stable thanks to the three-way brushless gimbal that held the camera, and it gave me a great aerial view of what I’d be facing.

  Roos’s cabin sat at the end of a long dirt trail that snaked its way from the main road up the mountain, carving a path through his eighty acres of land. Kurt flew the drone in a big circle to see what else was around, which was basically rolling hills of forest, forest, and more forest. At one point, the camera caught the mountains at an angle that looked familiar, and I was pretty sure it was the same mountain range that was behind Orford, Padley and Siddle in that picture of them in full hunting gear, the one I’d snatched from Orford’s office.

  This was a hunting lodge, pure and simple, a secluded retreat to escape to and stalk black bear, whitetail deer and turkey, as well as predators like coyote and fox. It was also, it seemed, a lodge where far deadlier kinds of predator roamed around, no doubt plotting their own special brand of hunt.

  Kurt had brought the drone around again and put it in a fixed hover so as to give us a clear view of the front of the lodge. It was a rustic log cabin, about a thousand feet in footprint, two floors with a couple of dormers on the roof, a wraparound porch, screened deck at the side. There were three cars out front, parked haphazardly in the small clearing that faced the house, large black SUVs, standard issue for hard-asses with attitudes. I couldn’t see them cramming more than four men per car, given the gear they had to be lugging. So it was likely Roos had eleven hired guns up there. We could see two guys standing outside, by the cars. The others weren’t visible. I’d decided the most I could ask Roos was to ship off two of the three vehicles, hence my request for eight men. I’d be left with Roos and three others to deal with. Twelve-to-one didn’t sound promising. Four-to-one I could live with.

  I’d asked Kurt to give me another look at the road up to the cabin and I tried to memorize its turns by matching the visual with the satellite picture on Google Maps. Then he’d brought it back and swapped its battery for a fully charged one while I’d prepared the car for my drive up to the cabin.

  Once everything was ready, I’d called Roos just after Kurt had sent the quadcopter back up. I’d made sure Tomblin hadn’t seen the drone—we had his eyes covered with duct tape too, and we flew it away from the car so he didn’t hear it. I didn’t want him telling Roos we had a bird up. It was amazing to be able to do this with something anyone could pick up at any halfway-decent electronics store or just buy online for next-day delivery. We had live coverage of the cabin all while I spoke to Roos. There was no action to watch, though. He was obviously inside, and the men outside were just standing there, waiting for orders.

  Things changed after I hung up.

  After a couple of minutes, three men came out of the house and joined the two who were already outside. The drone was too far for us to get a look at any of their faces. They just looked like small, dark figures against a dirty-white background. Then three others came outside, followed by two others.

  They all held position for a moment, the first eight clustered close to each other, the last two closer to the house, facing them. I moved closer to the screen, sensing one of the two was Roos—the general addressing his troops. Then the eight men climbed into two of the SUVs, which drove away and took the long trail down the mountain.

  “Where do I go?” Kurt asked. “You want the cars, or you want me to stay on the cabin?”

  Ideally, I needed both. The guys at the cabin would be setting up whatever ambush they had planned, while the guys in the departing SUVs might be putting in place a trap of their own. And there were many more of them to worry about.

  “Stay on the cars,” I told Kurt. “Let’s make sure they’re really gone.”

  He nudged the two joysticks expertly to control the drone’s flight, and I took one last look at the tiny figure on the screen that I imagined to be Roos, burning his image into my memory before he headed back in and the cabin disappeared from the picture.

  We watched as the two black SUVs snaked their way down the dirt road. They hung left when they hit the main road, pulled over, and the eight men got out. Kurt had moved the drone well up to make sure they wouldn’t see or hear it. The eight tiny figures stood there aimlessly for a moment, like they were stumped, then they got back in the cars and headed north. Kurt brought down the drone and had it follow them as long as it could, to the limit of its range. Once it reached it, its return-to-home feature kicked in automatically and it just reversed direction and started flying straight back to us. Kurt stopped it after a few seconds and held it in a stationary hover to monitor the road and make sure they weren’t coming up yet. We watched the road for about ten minutes and nothing showed up. I doubted Roos believed my story about a spotter, but it was worth a shot anyway. I figured they’d pull over somewhere within reach and wait for the call that would tell them I’d arrived at the cabin, then they’d rush back. Which meant I wouldn’t have much time up there.

  Kurt brought the drone back while I got the Navigator and Tomblin ready. He swapped the battery for another fresh one and we were set. I’d have a guardian angel in the sky and a comms piece in my ear. Deutsch would have the other one. She’d be monitoring the situation and giving me some live updates, for which I was grateful. Assuming I made it up to the cabin alive.

  I glanced at my watch. Almost an hour had passed since I’d spoken with Roos.

  It was high noon on the shortest day of the year. I didn’t know whether to take that as a good sign or not.

  Either way, it was time to go.

  65

  The black Lincoln Navigator stormed up the mountain, making mincemeat of the narrow trail and swallowing up the slushy bends in its stride.

  From behind an open window inside the cabin, Roos waited, scanning the tree line for any sign of movement. The mountain was entirely still, with nothing but the distant sound of water cascading over rocks to disturb it. The snow was still falling lightly, the sky behind the carpet of hardwoods a dull grey. Then he became aware of a growl at the edge of his hearing, the throaty gurgle of a large engine. Its noise grew and grew, sending his pulse spiking up with every added decibel, and then the black SUV appeared from behind the trees as it rounded the last bend eighty-five yards downslope from the lodge.

  Roos looked through his binoculars. Straining to get a clear picture through the irregular reflections bouncing off the SUV’s windshield, he was able to make out one solitary figure inside it, behind the wheel: male, as expected, in a black baseball cap, sitting straight up. There could be others ducking low inside there, but it wouldn’t really matter anyway. If anyone else was in there with Reilly they’d also soon be just as dead as he was.

  He watched as the Navigator rushed up to the mouth of the clearing outside the cabin—and didn’t slow down. It kept going, accelerating now and heading straight at the cabin.

  Roos gave the signal, and a barrage of high-powered rounds erupted out of the trees.

  The relentless feed of bullets, coming from outside on both sides of his cabin, drilled through the SUV. Roos watched as the 7.62mm NATO rounds rained down on the charging car, obliterating its windshield, side windows, body panels, as well as its driver, whose body was visibly sh
aking around violently with each impact. It was less than forty yards from the cabin when its wheels exploded from the gunfire, which hobbled it until more rounds ate into its engine and crippled it three car lengths away from the cabin’s front steps.

  The gunfire stopped. The stillness returned to the mountain, apart from a light hiss and some irregular clinks from the crippled car.

  Roos wasn’t smiling.

  Something was wrong.

  Reilly wasn’t suicidal. He had consistently shown himself to be way too clever than to attempt a blind charge like that. Roos looked again through his binoculars, focusing on the head of the driver. Too many rounds had found their target—and even though the man was a pulped, bloodied mess, his head was still upright. With wasn’t natural. And the man wasn’t damaged enough for Roos to recoil when he saw enough to recognize the dead driver.

  It sure as hell wasn’t Reilly.

  I struggled to keep the car properly aligned as I guided it up the mountain.

  It wasn’t easy, given that I wasn’t sitting in the driver’s seat. Nor was I driving it by remote control. I was crouched in the footwell of the passenger seat, wearing a helmet and goggles and a vest, surrounded by body armor panels, with one hand on the selfie stick that I’d taped to the gas pedal and the other on the steering wheel.

  Above and to my left, Tomblin was in the driver’s seat, held in position with enough duct tape to ensure he couldn’t move an inch. I’d even made sure Tomblin’s head would stay upright by running some tape around his neck and the headrest. His mouth was also taped shut. Only his eyes were free to roam, and they were darting back and forth between the road ahead and an intense, terrorized scowl that was directed right at me.

  Kurt and Gigi had set up the visual aids for me: a smartphone taped to the big Lincoln’s front bumper, linked by video call to a 4G tablet they’d taped under the dashboard, where I could see it. It was cramped and awkward, but it was the only way I could see myself even getting close to the cabin in one piece.