A Viable Threat (A Martin Billings Story Book 4)

by Ed Teja

  I stood, hearing the magical hidden electronics doing their work. The door swung open, and Pedro stepped through, handing me the clothes. A fresh jump suit and slippers rested neatly on a perfectly folded white towel.

  “Let's go,” he said as I took them. I tucked them under my arm, obediently stepping out in the hallway and heading for the shower. He waited while I scrubbed myself clean and dressed, then we went to the galley.

  As always, I seemed to be the only diner in the windowless dining room and the meal was exactly the same as every other meal I'd eaten since I arrived: a basic Marconi and noodles, bread, crappy salad with mayo and coffee. Again, I was certain the intent was to deprive me of any metric for measuring the passage of time. When breakfast, lunch, and dinner were interchangeable, the body had no cues.

  “How does this place stay in business?” I asked. “You would do well to move closer to the freeway because location matters and this location must suck, cause there's never any business. Or do you plan my meals so I'm only here when things are slow?”

  He grinned again and then caught himself. “Glad you see the humor in it all.”

  That pissed me off. “I don't see a damn bit of humor in it,” I admitted. “That's why I feel the need to inject a little. It doesn't do a lot toward preventing escapes to deprive the inmate of smiles. I get a few shots in, but I have to say it's like shoving party balloons into a black hole.”

  “Nice image for a dystopian television show,” he said.

  “It's almost as if you guys think I can wrestle conversation from you and use it to escape.”

  “Words are mightier than the sword.”

  “I thought that was the pen.”

  “We can't let you have a pen,” he said with a wink.

  I chuckled. “I'm complaining, but I feel bad for you.”

  “Why?”

  “In this game I get to be the prisoner. I live here now. While your hours seem to be as shitty as mine and I'm sure you don't live here, this is your job.”

  “I get overtime.”

  “You know, you are the only person I've seen since I finished my show and tell. I'm beginning to think they sent everyone else home. Were you a bad boy? Is guarding me your punishment?”

  “Not after tomorrow.”

  “What happens then?”

  “I go home. We work two weeks on, then three weeks off. Why, if you extend your reservation with the front desk, you'll get to meet and annoy an entirely new person.”

  “Hodges?” I laughed.

  “A new guard.”

  “I don't even know why I'm still here. For all I know Hodges has already signed me up with a lifetime membership.” I grinned. “I hope there's a gym.”

  The guard made a face. That one he didn't find funny.

  I didn't care what he thought. It wasn’t for him. The joking helped me, and it did seem to get him to treat me like a human for moments at a time. That helped more.

  I needed those moments. I had no clue how long I'd be here, and I wasn't having a great time.

  Ever since I'd spilled my guts to Hodges, told her everything I'd seen, knew, thought I knew, and guessed about Hank, Amy, my good friend and cargo Brad, Hank's minions, the island, and the way Amy died—in all its completely unforgettable blood-splattered glory—I'd been alone in my cell, or in the shower, or in the galley. Just me and my shadow. I didn't count the invisible people who pushed the buttons that ran all the doors. I still had a suspicion that a computer did all that, anyway.

  Hello HAL.

  Several times I had thought about asking the guard how long I'd been there, but I knew he wouldn't tell me. That would be against the rules. Most things were against the rules, especially saying anything that gave a prisoner a clue about where or why or how he was incarcerated. I knew it was standard practice, although I wasn't sure about the point. In some way it comforted the folks in charge to know I didn't know a damn thing.

  Not that it mattered. It didn't make a damn bit of difference if I'd been locked up a day or a week. Being naturally curious had certain drawbacks in a situation like this.

  Things were what they were. My future was now not some parole down the road. This wasn't the judicial system. For all I knew, Martin Billings no longer existed. A few button pushes, some clerk hitting a few delete keys, and all records of me would be gone.

  All that would remain would be the consequences of the things I'd done. Of course, the government would have to deal with some consequences of its own. Eventually, Ugly Bill would figure out they had me, and he would begin the deliberate process of disassembling everything, including taking this building apart brick by brick. There was some satisfaction in knowing that, even if I didn't get to see it.

  After I ate, I ambled back toward my cell with my loyal sidekick trailing behind in what I pretended was a companionable silence.

  “Hold it,” the Pedro said.

  I stopped in the middle of the sickly green corridor and listened to him talking to himself. Actually, he was talking to his invisible bosses, much like the way medieval monks talked to God, with the only difference being that the guard's superiors gave clear instructions and expected answers when they asked questions. But when it came to retribution and wrath, the relationship seemed much the same sort of thing.

  “Hold out your hands,” he said. When I did, he put cuffs on.

  “Wow, getting me dressed up... Are we attending a formal affair?”

  “Go this way,” he said, pointing down a sickly green corridor with his baton. I didn't think I'd been down that one before, but they all looked alike.

  “The scenic route? How nice.”

  He ignored me and I restarted my amble. Eventually, three electronically activated, automatically opening then closing and clicking locked behind us doors later, we came to an office. It was decorated like the office of a prison warden. You might be curious how I know what one looks like, but I'm hoping that information was erased with the rest of my file.

  The office was messy. I liked that. I have no idea whose office it was, as again it was devoid of personal effects of any kind, but Hodges sat behind the desk staring at me. I found her stern gaze oddly reassuring.

  33

  After a time, Hodges’ intense focus in me started to wear me down, irritate me. Of course, it was supposed to unsettle me, and there wasn’t much I could about it. I resigned myself to waiting patiently for her to tell me what had her bugged. It couldn’t be me. She’d had me locked in my cell, so it seemed unlikely I’d done anything to upset her—at least recently.

  “Sit,” she said.

  I sat in a standard-issue office chair.

  “Cuffs,” she told the guard.

  Pedro scowled his disapproval of the idea. It had to be against protocol, but he had been well trained to obey his liege. When they were off and I was rubbing my wrists, she waved a hand at the guard. “Out.”

  He straightened. “Protocol—”

  “Out!” If possible, her voice sounded even more stern than the first time.

  “Don't forget to smile,” I said, earning myself a silent rebuke from her eyes.

  A woman of few words, our Hodges.

  “I wish I'd known how to talk to the help around here,” I said. “Single words, no elaboration—that's efficient. I could have said, 'cuffs' and 'door,' and be halfway home by now.”

  “You'd be halfway dead and wishing you'd made the entire trip,” she said.

  I saluted. “I stand corrected.”

  “I've checked it all out.”

  “It all?”

  “The information you gave me, and we've done some research.”

  “Especially the stuff on Amy's drives?”

  “Especially those. You've been straight with me. Jeffries was indeed in it up to his neck. And your speculation of his hostile takeover seems right.”

  “I promised I would be straight. I swore to be a good scout and show and tell all.”
/>   “I see you've regained your sense of humor.”

  “I never lost it. It got a tad shrunken and withered on the way here, but humor retention is a fundamental survival skill you learn in the SEALs.” I held up a hand. “Basic stuff: You have to master the five ways to kill with a necktie, three with a knife, and twenty-seven with bad jokes effective at various ranges.”

  “Well, you'll need it.”

  “For a firing squad? It isn't that robust yet. Can I have a little more time to prepare?”

  She reached to a stack of papers and handed me a newspaper. The banner told me it was Bahama Press. The headline was about an American woman—a tourist who'd been killed on Exuma.

  According to the paper, the police came across an attempted rape that went bad. Some drunk American sailor had tried to rape the woman at gunpoint in a parking lot in Georgetown. The details were unknown, but in the course of things, he shot her. A passing policeman took stock of the situation and came to her aid. The sailor pointed his gun at this noble cop, who fired his own revolver. A picture of the dead bodies showed the officer had hit him squarely in the face. The authorities and the US State Department issued a joint memo pointing out that such crimes were extremely rare, and no one should cancel vacations there. The ambassador said that the US would present the brave officer a medal with the grateful thanks of the American people.

  My stomach knotted up, and it wasn't the sight of Chandler's body that did it. Someone had driven the car back to the parking lot and staged things nicely. It was the right thing to do, but that didn't make it any more palatable. I'd just managed to stop thinking constantly about Amy and wondering what I might have done differently.

  “Nice work,” I said. “Wraps up a couple of loose ends.”

  “Because you passed the message to the co-pilot, we got that done before the police arrived.”

  “And the bit about police heroics?”

  “That was to smooth troubled waters on an intergovernmental level and locally—it ensures they don't investigate further.”

  “Good, I suppose. I guess you've sorted it all out.”

  She shook her head. “A lot still doesn't fit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her dark look grew even darker. “I believe you have told me what you know. I need you to help me speculate a bit now.”

  “About what?”

  “Start with how Hank Jeffries knew where you'd go to pick up the car? If Chandler was there ahead of you, waiting, it wasn't that they'd tracked you somehow.”

  I let out a breath. “Fuck! I never thought about that.”

  “You had other things on your mind, like surviving the night.”

  “If we'd gone to the place where we launched the mission from, then I'd say they followed us. But they weren't that good.” Hodges was right. “There's no way Hank would know where we were headed. And Chandler was in the trees right beside the damn car, waiting for us. I didn't think about that at all. You're right, even if they had a tracker on us, they wouldn't have known which car we were going to use.”

  She almost smiled. “It seems that when Amy called in the change of plan, it sent off an alert of some kind. We are tracing that now, but Homeland Security was given all the details.”

  “Amy said that might happen. She thought it was safe because she was sure Hank didn't have any hooks into them. And why would they care about that mission?”

  “The official word is they know nothing about it. In fact, there is no record that they got any such notification.” She took a breath. “But someone did. We tracked an encrypted message that someone in Washington, DC sent to Hank's office within minutes after that message was received. That means someone was watching for it, and I assume it gave Hank the information about the car—what it was and where it would be. And it wasn't the driver, by the way. She had no idea why she was putting the car there.”

  “So, someone up the food chain fed Hank the information?”

  “Definitely. Now, while I kept you on ice, guaranteeing no one else in the world knew why I was checking, I collected Hank's communications. I can only find one person he contacted frequently enough to suggest any kind of operational coordination. The messages were more frequent as the mission approached. They are all encrypted, which means nothing. Everyone encrypts text messages these days.”

  “They do?” I asked.

  “Everyone but you and Ugly Bill and a guy in Montana who lives in a cave.”

  “Who was he communicating with?”

  She held up a hand. “First, another fact. When you and Amy headed for the airport, no one but you knew what had happened. We grabbed Chandler's body and Amy's before the cops. That means no one, no one but the crew flying you here and the person I sent to do the cleanup, knew whether he'd killed all three of you, counting Brad, or if all of you escaped. Not only do I trust the person on the ground, but I can account for his whereabouts when things went to shit.”

  “So, none of them.”

  “Curiously, just about the time the plane got airborne, well before anyone had a clue of the deaths, Homeland Security red-flagged two passports: yours and Amy's. Obviously, they didn't know she was dead.”

  “Flagged as a terrorist alert?”

  She nodded. “Whoever is behind this wanted you taken straight into Homeland's custody. Given that you and the crew all knew that Amy was dead, I can eliminate even the outside possibility that any of you three were involved.”

  “Not to mention that red-flagging my own passport wouldn't be a great survival strategy.”

  “But a clever way to cover your own involvement.”

  “Damn, I can be diabolically clever.”

  “Someone with clout within or connected to Homeland moved fast. Even with leverage, that takes time to implement, so I imagine it was a fallback in case Chandler wasn't successful. Then, if you two were dead, then no problem. If you were alive, they'd grab you when you arrived.”

  “Just another pro-active public servant doing a thankless job.”

  “That sense of humor can be annoying.”

  “Black humor often is, and I have a ton of that right now. We already knew Hank was planning to kill us to cover up why he wanted Brad dead. This scenario says that it was part of something bigger. Some big deal person, a really big fish, set us up, then tried to draw the net tight around us.”

  “Exactly. At the time, you just didn't think to look up higher than the people immediately involved.”

  I pulled myself together, trying to figure out how long a person could survive in a surreal universe like the one I'd fallen into. Hodges seemed to do okay, but I was dizzy from it. Still, I'd told Amy I'd finish this and apparently Hodges wanted more help. I intended to do my best. “I hope you'll understand if I say this is all very weird.”

  “Oh, I agree entirely. Weird and disconcerting.”

  “I guess I should've listened to Bill.”

  “Ugly Bill?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About what?”

  “He told me that if I expected to cope with the world, I should reread all of Kafka once a year because sooner or later I was bound to wake up and find I was a cockroach.”

  A thin smile crossed her lips. “Is Bill looking for a job, by any chance?”

  “No way. He's already got one, and I've entangled him in this mess more than enough already.”

  She nodded. “He's clear. I officially untangled him. He connected with your fisherman friend, Jackson, and they unceremoniously scuttled our very expensive boat and the remainder of the tactical gear. Then they returned to St. Anne. As far as anyone can tell, seeing as Hank never cleared you two out, he just returned from a fishing trip with a friend.”

  “Go Bill.”

  She nodded. “Help me wrap this up and I'll see that you join him.”

  Tension seemed to leak out of me. I realized how hard I'd worked to force myself not to wonder about what had happened to Bill and was g
oing to happen to me. Now, maybe, if Hodges could be trusted, there might be an end in sight.

  “You are watching Ugly Bill?”

  “We were, but we lost track of him when a woman named Sally grabbed a large bottle of rum and dragged him off somewhere.”

  “She shook your spies?”

  “Momentarily. I called the dogs off when they reported in that they had a pretty good idea what he was doing, but not where.” She grinned. “If we need to talk to him—I doubt he'll go far for some time.”

  “No, he probably won't.” I sighed my relief. “Thanks.”

  “So why would Hank risk his career if he wasn't at least taking over Vermeer's role?”

  “I'm sure that was the intention. Hank would take it over and run things. But they can position that a couple of ways. He could retire and get hired by an outfit in Europe that now owns Vermeer's operation, or perhaps they fake his death. He gets remembered as a hero while sitting happily on the island with a new identity. Of course, they didn't count on us... relocating him before they acted.”

  I let myself take a few breaths, digesting it all, putting it back into context, revisiting the discussions Amy and I had, but flavoring it with the new information.

  “If this is true...”

  “Based on the information you, and Amy, provided, I'm damn sure it is close.”

  “The new management will have a nasty surprise after the takeover.”

  She leaned forward. “Tell me.”

  “Once we knew Hank wasn't telling the truth, we assumed the worst. Amy wasn't sure we'd get out with the data on the operations. When she copied it, one reason she made two thumb drives was that once she finished copying, she reformatted Vermeer's hard drives. She wanted a backup.”

  Hodges allowed herself a thin smile. “That was totally against protocol.”

  “That makes it pretty damn cool in my book.”

  “Mine too,” she said. “It won't totally stop them, but it will be a major setback.”