Punching Tickets: Book Five in The Mad Mick Series

by Franklin Horton

  If those nations had the money and the manpower, that was who they’d partner with. Damn the Constitution, damn freedom, damn personal liberty, and damn the United States of America as a sovereign nation. What did any of that matter? All this group cared about was the consolidation of power and wealth, and that they be among those standing at the top of the pile when the dust settled.

  Of course, they had to know that they wouldn't really be on top of the pile, right? All puppets had puppet masters. There was always another hand moving those lips and controlling those jerky movements. Conor held no illusion that taking out these targets would end the move toward one world government. Even the people who hired him knew that. Still, it would be a setback. Important people with critical relationships would be lost. Replacing them would take time.

  After the lunch meeting, the guests adjourned to naps, afternoon drinks, tanning, or smaller meetings. Later they reconvened for dinner, which often turned into drinks on the deck. Further notes included maps and drawings of private staterooms and public meeting spaces. As Conor read the notes, he circled items of interest and made his own notes in the margins. After several hours of analyzing the material, he decided to take a hot shower and change into clean clothes. When he finally came out of the bathroom, Barb was sitting up on her bed.

  "Sore muscles woke me," she mumbled.

  Conor dug into gear and found "Vitamin I", 800mg ibuprofens, for both of them. With nothing else to do during the daylight hours, Conor sorted gear while Barb took a shower, stretched, and worked out. They rehydrated and rested. By the time the sun began to lower on the horizon, they'd cleaned their weapons and were ready to explore the ship. It was still too early, though, and they were expecting a visitor.

  Even with the knowledge that she'd be coming to their room, the tap on the door startled them into alertness. Hands lashed out for rifles and brought them to bear on the door. Conor stalked toward it, then peered out the peephole. He hadn't seen the asset before but had to assume this was her. He whipped open the door, his rifle leveled at her chest.

  "Inside," Conor hissed, holding the door wide for her to enter.

  Both he and Barb kept their weapons on the woman as she stepped into the room. Conor quietly guided the door shut behind her.

  "You're the guest we're expecting?" Conor asked.

  "Yes, my name is Dana."

  "What's in the box?"

  She held out the small cardboard box for their examination. "Dinner from the ship's dining room, if you're interested. I thought you might like some real food."

  Conor gestured with his weapon. "Set it on the bed. Check it, Barb."

  While Barb checked the takeout boxes, Conor tentatively frisked the woman.

  "Looks like prime rib, baked potatoes, asparagus, and hot rolls," Barb said.

  "Jesus," Conor mumbled.

  Barb gestured at Dana. "You might want to step back before he tramples you."

  Conor set his rifle down on the dresser. "Well, you have to eat it warm, right?"

  Barb handed him a container and a roll of silverware, which Conor took to the small table against the wall. Barb gestured for Dana to take a seat on the bed.

  "I still haven't been able to get up with my contact on shore," Dana said. "It's not like we were friends or anything, but I need to know something. Did you have to kill him?"

  Conor was focused on his prime rib, greedily sawing at it with a steak knife. He couldn't even respond to the question until he'd shoved the first bite into his mouth. He closed his eyes and chewed, savoring the flavor and feeling his soul tingle with delight. After the moment passed, he gave Dana a serious look. "He's dead, but we didn't kill him."

  Dana's hesitation told Conor all he needed to know. She didn't believe him.

  "I'm telling you the truth. He was a friend, Dana. The man he'd been assigned to work with turned on him. We don't know who he was working for or if he might have compromised the operation. We didn't know if we'd be walking into a trap on the ship or not. We assume the double-agent was communicating with someone but we don't know who."

  "Did you kill this double-agent?" Dana asked.

  "Oh, hell yeah," Conor said, his mouth crammed with baked potato. "Dead as a mackerel."

  Dana gave a satisfied nod. "Good. I didn't know the man I sent those messages to but I felt a connection. He was a lifeline to a saner world."

  "So how did you end up here?" Barb asked.

  "I was a congressional page for Congresswoman Greta Shoe while I was in college. After graduation, I was able to become a staffer and that role has grown over the years. I've been with her now for fifteen years and I do everything for her. Hair appointments, Christmas shopping, scheduling, letters, doctor appointments, airline tickets—you name it."

  Barb took a bite of an asparagus spear. "Sounds like a good gig, if you like that kind of thing."

  Dana sighed. "It's been eye-opening. Congresswoman Shoe was a schoolteacher when she was elected. She lived in a small house and drove a minivan. She now has a Montana ranch, beach houses on both coasts, a brownstone in Washington, D.C., and a net worth of nearly fifty million dollars. All that on a congressional salary."

  Conor let out a low whistle. "Nothing fishy about that."

  "Sadly, there's not," Dana admitted. "It's business as usual. Stock tips, speaking fees, public appearances, and honorariums all add up. As the cash accumulates, the values that got them into office are compromised. Fifteen years ago Greta worked for the people of her district. Now the biggest donors to her political action committee are the Saudis and the Chinese."

  "And that bothers you?" Conor asked.

  Dana flung her arms in frustration. "It should bother everyone. People should be demanding answers."

  Conor looked Dana in the eyes as he spoke. "We're here for more than answers. We're here for blood. You know that, right? You understand what's going to happen?"

  Dana nodded seriously.

  "Because there's a serious gap between demanding answers and assassination," Conor continued. "The time for answers is past and we're here to set an example."

  "I wouldn't have been on board with this a year ago," Dana admitted. "But this isn't only about the people on this ship taking advantage of a crisis. I'm not saying they set up the attacks on America, but they definitely knew they were coming. They allowed it to happen and said nothing. I know because I was running the congresswoman's errands in the days before the attacks. She was preparing. She was packing bags and having her family pack bags. She fucking knew."

  "How did they end up on this ship?" asked Barb.

  "When the attacks came, all of the people on this ship were in D.C. Most were ferried to bunkers for their own safety, but some went home to be with their families. Congresswoman Shoe made a big deal about needing to go home to suffer through the disaster with her constituents. That wasn't where she went though. She and her alliance met a yacht at a private dock on the Potomac and were ferried offshore to this ship. As the weather got colder, they gradually moved south to warmer temperatures."

  Conor rolled his eyes. "Certainly wouldn't want the alliance of traitors to get chilly would we?"

  Dana didn't smile at the comment. She twisted on the bed and looked from Conor to Barb with an almost desperate need for them to understand her. "This is about more than ideology for me. My parents lived outside of Nashville and their house was washed away when the terrorists blew the Wolf Creek Dam. I have to assume that my parents and my younger sister are dead. I was angry when I found out what happened to them. I was able to make contact with an intelligence official I knew. I told him that I thought Congresswoman Shoe had advance warning of the attack. Soon, he enlisted me as an asset and had me start relaying information to them. That's how I came to be involved in this. And that's why I don't give a shit if she bleeds to death on the deck of this ship."

  Conor and Barb looked at each other, understanding passing between them. They knew something of revenge and blood vendettas. It was an act of
revenge, of blowing up his wife's killer, which set Conor on the path that led him to this exact point in his life. He liked to know the motivations of the people around him because that told him whether he should trust them or not. A woman like Dana, motivated by the death of her family, was someone he could work with.

  "Your notes were excellent," Conor said. "I read all of them. I'd like to lay eyes on some of these locations. It will help me strategize."

  "I have some thoughts on that, if you're interested," Dana offered. "The ship is fully-crewed but they're operating with fewer hospitality staff because there are fewer passengers. While it's a Chinese ship, the crew is international. I was just thinking that a woman like Barb could easily blend in. With the right uniform, she could move around the ship as long as she didn't engage with anyone. If they started asking questions about where she worked, I'm not sure she could pull that off."

  "I like that idea." Barb nodded. "Can you get me a uniform?"

  "I think so."

  Barb rattled off her sizes and Dana committed them to memory.

  "Anything else we should know?" Conor asked.

  Dana thought for a moment before answering. "I learned this afternoon that we're headed for the Mediterranean so we can pass through the Suez Canal and travel to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. I didn't know this until today, but the families of all the alliance members are staying at a resort there, compliments of the Saudis. They say it will take us seven or eight days to get there. The plan is to pick the families up and cruise to Dubai for an important meeting. If this information is correct, you need to take action while we're crossing the Atlantic. Once we get to Saudi Arabia, the ship will get a lot more crowded and they'll have access to more security."

  20

  Conor's Compound

  Jewell Ridge, Virginia

  After he watched the two figures with headlamps go into one of the buildings, Wombat headed back to his place. As curious as he was about the fenced camp on the mountain, he had no interest in spending the night out in the cold. Better to walk on home and come back the next day.

  It took him over an hour to walk home, but it wasn't a bad walk. He was going downhill and stayed to the paved road, both of which made the journey quicker. Several times dogs barked at him from the darkness though none came close enough to worry him. If they had, he'd have clicked on his headlamp and taken his ax handle to them. He'd had to kill several dogs over the past few months and wouldn’t lose sleep over killing a few more.

  In this remote mountain community, most homes had wood or coal stoves to supplement their heat. The smell of those fires sometimes reached Wombat's nose as he walked. It told him who was home and who wasn't. When he passed the dim outline of a home sitting off the road, he noted the ones that didn't have lights on inside and didn't have the smell of wood smoke. He had to assume those homes were empty and fair game for him to plunder.

  Wombat knew survival was all about supplies. The people who had the most loot had the best chance of surviving and he was amassing a pretty decent hoard from his plundering trips. Originally, he only had the things he'd brought from his granny's house and the things he'd found in the old homeplace, which wasn't very much at all. He was gradually starting to erase that deficit.

  Now he also had the stuff he'd stolen, often picked up in plain sight of occupied homes. The way Wombat looked at it, if they didn't take care of their stuff, if they were dumb enough to leave it out unattended, it was their bad luck it got stolen. That didn't make Wombat a bad person, he was simply resourceful. It was the law of the jungle. Survival of the fittest. It was the way things had been since the beginning of time and Wombat was just doing what came naturally. He was a human, doing what humans did before lawyers showed up and ruined the world.

  The moon was rising on the cold, clear night by the time Wombat neared his cabin. The silhouette of the trees and mountains against the night sky was familiar to him and guided him to the road onto his property. It wasn't exactly a driveway, too crude and neglected to live up to that title. To make sure people understood that someone lived there, Wombat had erected a number of hand-painted signs that warned of the consequences of trespassing. Sometimes if people strayed too close, if he heard voices in the trees or along the road, he'd fire off a few shots simply to establish his territory, like a dog peeing on a rock.

  He followed the rough road through the high weeds, into the forest, and around the rolling shoulders of a wooded ridge. The house itself was hidden from the road, set back perhaps a mile into second-growth trees that fought to stay upright on the steep land. Wombat's people had tried to farm this place but the soil was poor and the terrain unforgiving. They were never able to have more than a personal garden and a few low-grade tobacco plants.

  Cattle had done a little better though the family had never had enough money to own more than a few. They'd done better with hogs, goats, and chickens, all cheaper to procure and better-suited for foraging the mountainside. The place was the epitome of a hardscrabble mountain farm, the type of home that was commonplace around the turn of the twentieth century, but significantly less common by its end.

  By that time, people had discovered there was an easier life to be had in town. They gave up subsistence, independence, and self-sufficiency for comfort and convenience. They took jobs in the mines or the timber industry where they'd get a regular check, their families would have food on the table, and everyone could have shoes in the winter. Even after taking regular jobs outside of the home, those mountain farmers remained on their homesteads for some time, but they didn't see much of their families anymore. The long shifts and the long walk to work consumed most of the waking hours. Several generations grew up with only the ghost of their fathers, men who came and went in silence during the night.

  The desire to have a more normal life eventually brought those men out of the mountains and into the lumber camps, the coal camps, and eventually the fringes of town. They surrendered their cabins and shacks for identical homes that they rented from their employer. They paid for them in scrip, the currency in which they received their wages and only valid at businesses owned by their employer.

  Wombat's granny had grown up in the shack in which he was now living. Her family had been the last full-time residents, moving off their own land and into the Jewell Ridge coal camp when her father took a job with that company. He'd held off as long as he could, but the taste of poverty had soured in his mouth. Especially when there was an easier life to be had a couple of miles up the road.

  When Wombat's great-grandmother died in the late 1970s, the house and property fell to his granny and her brother. Her brother tried to keep the grass mowed and the cabin intact until he became too old to fool with it. When he passed away twenty years ago, the only visitors the place ever saw were Wombat and his granny, or perhaps the occasional snooping teenagers wanting to see what lay at the end of an overgrown road.

  The house had been broken into a couple of times over the years. A few things had been stolen, things only his granny noticed. It was never anything valuable because they'd never had anything of any worth. Aside from those few missing items and a broken window, the house hadn't changed much over the years. It was still old, sagging, and musty.

  When he reached the cabin, Wombat climbed the steps with practiced caution. Built of untreated sawmill lumber, they sagged in the middle and he was afraid of breaking through if he put his weight in the wrong place. He paused on the porch and scanned the dark woods around him, listening for anything out of place. There was only the sound of wind in the trees and a dog barking in the distance.

  Wombat clicked on his headlamp and fished his keys out of his pants pocket, unlocking the padlock that held the old pine door shut. The door was made of wood panels on the bottom with three horizontal panes of glass in the top. The wooden sections of the door held so many crazed layers of old crackled paint that it resembled ancient pottery more than wood.

  Inside, the room was cold, Wombat's breath visible in the b
eam of his headlamp. Although the rusty surface of the stove was warm with the remnants of his morning fire, it wasn't enough to drive the cold from the house. He rested his gloved hands on the cast iron body of the Warm Morning stove for a moment, relishing the heat and the restoration of circulation to his cold fingers. When the flexibility had returned to them, he pulled off his gloves and lit a stub of candle standing in a chipped ceramic bowl. He turned off his headlamp to preserve the battery and rebuilt his fire by candlelight.

  As the coals ignited fresh kindling and the fire grew, Wombat left the door open on the front of the stove, filling the living room with a comforting orange glow. His ancestors may not have owned much but they had a good stove. He could imagine a family in this very room eighty or a hundred years ago, huddled around this fire, doing the things a family did by the light of an oil lamp. Wombat had found one of those glass lamps in an outbuilding but didn't have any lamp oil for it.

  With the fire dealt with, Wombat grabbed a cooking pot from one of the back rooms. On colder days that cold room served as his refrigerator. He set the pot on the stove and gave it a stir with a wooden spoon. It was a simple soup made of a handful of rice, rabbit meat, and canned lima beans. A year ago he'd have fought to the death to avoid a lima bean but he wasn't so picky now. He had a few cans of them and figured camouflaging them in a stew was the best way to eat them. Still, he couldn't help but frown every time he bit into one.

  Wombat settled onto the couch, one of his granny's quilts thrown across it to hide the stuffing that escaped from the mouse-chewn holes. The old, decrepit house had been spacious when he'd first moved in, but the things he'd brought from his granny's house had nearly filled one of the small back rooms. His daily outings, his missions to plunder and gather, had nearly filled the larger front rooms too.

  He tried to bring something useful home nearly every day. He was a man used to long days filled with hard work and he needed something to occupy him. With nothing else to do, he'd spent months plundering vacant houses, going through every drawer, every closet, the attics, and the outbuildings. He filled his pack with the things he liked and set others aside as possibilities for future retrieval.