Total Mayhem

by John Gilstrap

  “There,” Venice said, pointing. “He’s talking to . . .” She referred to her notes. “Grant Duncan. That’s the parking lot attendant. Now, look at this.”

  The picture changed to the same angle, but showing devastation. The attendant booth was shredded and scattered over a wide swath of parking lot. “This is that same spot just a few minutes later.”

  “Duncan was killed?” Gail asked.

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Venice said with a knowing smile.

  The picture went back to the suspect and Grant Duncan.

  “I’ve jumped back to the timeline,” Venice explained. “Mr. Duncan lived to speak to the police about this,” Venice explained. “That’s how we know that this man—the one he’s talking with in the picture—told him that it was unsafe to stand where he was while standing in the booth. He told him to seek safety somewhere.”

  “He warned the guy?” Jonathan asked.

  “Yes,” Venice confirmed. “How does that make sense?”

  “Maybe they knew each other,” Gail suggested. “Maybe they were coconspirators.”

  “The FBI is wondering that, too,” Venice said. “But so far, as of the date of these files, they haven’t been able to find a link. There’s more.”

  The picture on the screen switched to show parallel rows of neat little houses lining a residential street. Again, the magnification on the images made them fuzzy.

  “Keep watching the right side,” Venice said as she clicked through the images. “There,” she said, pointing. “That guy on the sidewalk is the same one who parked the truck and talked with Mr. Duncan.”

  “Where’s he going?” Boxers asked.

  “Wait for it,” Venice replied. The man turned right—his left—and walked to the front door of one of the cookie-cutter houses.

  “Oh, my God,” Gail breathed. “He’s a local?”

  “Renter,” Venice said. “Rented the place for three months, starting two weeks ago.”

  “Please tell me he paid by credit card,” Jonathan said.

  “No such luck. Keep watching.” On the right, in the top half of the screen, another figure was visible approaching the house. “Look familiar?”

  “That’s the parking lot guy,” Gail said. “Danby.”

  “Duncan,” Venice corrected. “He told the FBI that when our bomber—Remember, he didn’t know yet that it was going to be a bomb—”

  “Pretty good bet, given what he was told,” Jonathan said.

  “Fair enough,” Venice conceded, “but he maintains he didn’t know yet. What he figured was, if the area itself was unsafe, by following the guy who told him, he’d end up in a place that was. Sort of by definition.”

  “Does he go inside?” Boxers asked.

  “Keep watching.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ven, this isn’t a goddamn movie. You’re allowed to give away the ending.”

  Venice didn’t flinch. It was as if Big Guy had never spoken.

  “A few minutes pass here in the timeline,” Venice explains. “Duncan just stands there. Except there. Looks like he thought about getting closer, maybe to look into a window, but then he changes his mind.”

  Between two of the stills, the garage door on the target house switched from closed to open, but Duncan remained on the sidewalk. “Here you’ll see a car backing out of the driveway,” Venice said, and that’s exactly what happened.

  “According to his testimony to police, Duncan didn’t know what to do when he made eye contact with the bomber because the bomber specifically told him not to follow. Now watch.”

  The sedan cleared the apron of the driveway and started driving toward the camera.

  “Grant got left behind,” Boxers said.

  “More than that,” Venice said. “Keep watching.”

  Four frames later, the house from which the sedan had just pulled away erupted in a ball of fire that obscured their view of Grant Duncan.

  “Holy shit,” Boxers said.

  Venice kept advancing the slides. The sedan had exited the bottom of the frame, and as the fireball lifted, Grant Duncan was revealed on his hands and knees.

  “Doesn’t look like he was hurt,” Gail observed.

  Venice said nothing as she continued to advance the slides. Four or five images later, the distant background lit up. After that, they watched an eruption of debris. “That was the main bomb,” Venice said.

  “So, who’s our guy?”

  “I passed this on to Derek,” Venice said. “He ran the images through really advanced state-of-the-art facial recognition software.”

  “Dammit, Ven,” Jonathan said, “I wish you wouldn’t do that without talking to me first.”

  “Because you’re the technology expert?”

  “Because I’m president of the company.” Jonathan cringed at his own words.

  “I didn’t realize we were quite so structured,” Gail said.

  Jonathan pointed to the screen. “Keep going, please.”

  “Thank you. And for what it’s worth, I think you’ll be interested in the results. In fact, Derek just sent me this.”

  The screen switched to the discernable face and shoulders of a white man in his thirties with dark hair and a goatee. Thick of neck and shoulders, he had that same operator look that they had seen with the others.

  “Is that our man?” Jonathan asked.

  “According to Derek, it is. Thanks to facial recognition technology that only certain people in certain jobs can obtain.”

  “That’s Ven being subtle,” Boxers said with a grin. “In case you didn’t get that.”

  She shot Big Guy a look that was not entirely disapproving and continued. “Given that there are seven billion people on the planet and the enhancement process sometimes emphasizes clarity over accuracy—”

  “Goddammit!” Boxers boomed.

  “I’m reading what Derek just sent me!” Venice boomed back. “You can sit in silence while I break it down, digest it, and reprocess the information like I usually do, or you can sit in silence and listen to me read. Which do you want?”

  Jonathan had rarely seen her so spun up, and it kind of scared him. Boxers was on his own in this fight.

  Big Guy grew uncomfortable, and he cleared his throat. “I was out of line,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Jesus, hell’s frozen over and pigs are flying, Jonathan thought. Boxers just apologized.

  “Then quit being such an asshole,” Venice said.

  Jonathan shot a look to Gail, who seemed as startled as he. Mother Hen never cussed.

  She went back to reading her screen. “Duh, duh, duh, ‘sometimes emphasizes clarity over accuracy, a total of twelve people in the NSA database meet the ninetieth percentile probability that this picture is them. But given circumstances and known information, the most likely identity of the man in the picture is former SF operator Fred Kellner, originally of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.’”

  When Venice fell silent this time, no one said a word. If only for his own safety, Jonathan was willing to wait for as long as it would take for her to resume. During the silence, he watched her retreat into what he’d come to call Veniceland, where all that mattered to her was the research thread she was chasing.

  After ten minutes of typing and scowling, she once again offered her keyboard a triumphant poke with her finger, and the screen filled with a picture of a younger version of the man in the enhanced photograph. This man was a little skinnier, but still heavily muscled, and he was dressed in a Class A Army uniform with a green beret cocked oh-so-precisely on his head. His lapel insignia showed him to be a staff sergeant, and his beret flash showed him to be a part of a Special Forces Group.

  “Meet Frederick Kellner,” Venice said. “In the interest of time, I’ll skip over the early life details and the ins and outs of his military service. Cutting to the chase, he and Uncle Sam parted ways in other-than-honorable ways, and now he has a credit score in the low-five hundreds.” She looked up. “Sounds like a matc
h to me.”

  Jonathan liked it. Not a sure thing by any means, but in his line of work few things ever were. “Okay,” he said. “Frederick Kellner it is. How do we find him?”

  Venice beamed. “As of a few minutes ago, every security camera at every ATM, library, gas station, light pole, and every other place whose feed is run or monitored through cyberspace is actively looking for the man who meets that description.”

  Jonathan’s jaw dropped. “We can do that?”

  “No,” Venice said. “We can’t do anything like that. But we know people who can.”

  “But the NSA can’t surveil people in the United States,” Gail said.

  “Obviously, they can,” Jonathan replied.

  Venice explained, “What they can’t do is use the results of that surveillance to prosecute the surveilled.”

  “This is all fruit from the poisonous tree,” Gail said. “None of the evidence that follows finding Kellner through these methods can be used against him in court.”

  “I’ll tell Wolfie about this and let her decide what to do about it,” Jonathan said. “But she made it pretty clear to me that there’s literally zero expectation that this prosecution will ever make it to the courthouse steps.”

  Boxers rumbled out a laugh. “God, I love this job.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Arthur Evers watched out the window of his U Street apartment in Northwest Washington as he rubbed moisturizer into the stump of his leg, and he mulled just how much his life would soon change. And how he’d gotten to this terrible, wonderful spot.

  He’d never owned much of what most Americans considered to be important in their lives. He grew up in Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, the son of a union welder who was blinded by an explosion at work when little Artie was only seven. The injury rendered the old man pretty much useless to the rest of the family, so Mom picked up the slack working two jobs at a time. Dad’s drinking didn’t help. Looking back, it was hard for Evers to remember a day when his father didn’t wake up drunk and go to bed drunker.

  The Army was supposed to be Evers’s big break—his chance for a reset, and for a while the world felt right. In fact, it felt right for nearly eighteen years.

  Evers was all-in. There wasn’t a shithole in the world that he hadn’t visited and spilled blood in—both his own and that of his enemies—and he made it his quest to be as close to the point of the spear as he could be. As he closed in on sergeant major’s stripes, his soldiers liked him, his senior officers respected him, and his junior officers feared him, just as they should.

  And then he shot himself.

  It was a stupid mistake holstering his Beretta M9 pistol without decocking it. He wasn’t even done with the weapon yet. He just needed to free his hands to look at a map, and the trigger snagged on the waist adjustment cord for the hoodie he was wearing, and in that microsecond, everything got derailed.

  Normally, a leg wound from a nine-millimeter pistol wasn’t a big deal. They hurt like hell, and you could bleed out if a major blood vessel were hit, but in the grand scheme of war wounds, they were usually minor league. Not so for Evers’s wound. The bullet he fired entered at the back of his thigh and tumbled through the length of his right leg to exit three millimeters above his ankle. On the way, it shredded his posterior tibial artery, the distal end of his sciatic nerve, and pretty much the entirety of his tibial nerve. It was a one-in-a-million shot.

  His team called a medevac, and he was on an operating table within ninety minutes of being wounded, but there wasn’t enough useful structure to save. Thus, the stump and the damnable prosthetic peg leg.

  Looking back, he supposed he could have stayed in the Army, but what would be the point? If there was one immutable commandment never to be broken in the U.S. Armed Forces, it was “Thou shalt never shoot thyself nor thy fellow troops.” A close corollary applied to senior noncommissioned officers: “Thou shalt never make an idiotic, high-profile mistake in front of thy troops.” Even as he fell to the sandy ground, he knew that he’d ended his career. And rightfully so.

  Hard to believe that five years had passed since then. After he separated from the service, he was able to milk his injury to qualify for 8A status for some deskbound security contracting work, but that never floated his balloon.

  His consuming passion in that time evolved into navigating the nightmare that was the Veterans Affairs benefits office. Weeks would pass between requests and responses, and all too often the eventual answer would be no. No, he couldn’t have more pain meds. No, he couldn’t qualify for an upgraded prosthesis. No, they didn’t give a shit about how much of his life he’d devoted to the cause of promoting America’s freedom.

  Evers saw a lot of his old man in himself as he drank progressively more, and the irony was not lost on him. They say it’s a bad idea to drink and type, but Evers was never much of a rule follower. He spent hours every night—tens of hours every week—posting on various internet sites that promoted vets’ venting of grievances about the shoddy way that Uncle Sam treated his soldiers after they were no longer useful trigger-pullers.

  Some of the posts were wildly off-the-wall, and Evers understood that many of his own posts walked too close to the line that separated truth from lie, but those communities grew to be his family. Those were his new troops—his new cadre of guys who got it.

  Explorations of the Dark Web were the natural next steps in his explorations of anger, and soon he found himself in places where he knew he didn’t belong. Jihadist sites, but in English. His distaste for American bureaucracy had never approached hatred for the country itself. He thought himself immune to such beliefs, and it was his confidence in the American Way that emboldened him to read what the Jihadis had to say. Hell, he’d killed enough of them over the years. Maybe the least he owed them was a ready ear (ready eye?) for their point of view.

  What he found were people in pain, people who’d lost family members to drones and air strikes that they’d never seen coming. Many of the angry posters were Americans here on U.S. soil whose extended families remained in the Sandbox, unable to escape in time to save their own lives.

  Intellectually, Evers understood that much of what appeared on the screen was entirely fabricated, specifically designed to foment anger, but at a more intimate level, he saw where they were coming from. He saw that he, as a soldier in the United States Army, was the cause for their suffering, or at least a part of it.

  When a child lost a parent or a parent lost a child, the geopolitical justifications were all bullshit. The loss was personal, and the desire for revenge—no, the need for revenge—trumped every other element of the equation. While he was in the shit, Evers had never allowed himself to think of the humanity associated with the missions he accomplished for his commanders. They were merely orders to be obeyed.

  Then there were the friends we tossed aside in theater. The moment a source had been exploited to its maximum capacity, we turned our backs and walked away, all too often leaving them and their families to the rabid wolves that were ISIS and the Taliban. It was a despicable thing to do. No wonder their world hated our world so much.

  Another irony not lost on Evers was the fact that he himself had been so readily abandoned by his beloved military. They might not have liked how he received his injury, but as far as he was concerned, there was no denying that it was sustained in service to God and country. But his chain of command saw only the embarrassment of it all.

  What, exactly, was a combat arms noncom supposed to do with his life after being tossed aside without prep work for his résumé? How was he supposed to make a living? Yeah, there were consulting gigs, but let’s not kid each other. The revenue from those jobs just kept the lights on, they didn’t provide a lifestyle. Even combined with his disability pay—much of which went to private doctors because he couldn’t stand the wait to be seen by VA docs—he barely stayed afloat.

  Evers was willing to admit that he wasn’t solely a victim in his current state. Beyond the self-inflic
ted nature of his injury, there were a couple of bad business decisions—the least wise of which was a calamitous gambling trip to Atlantic City—but desperate people did desperate things, right? And he was on painkillers when he lost it all.

  He understood this stuff about anger. And abandonment. And betrayal.

  So, he came clean. In one long stream-of-consciousness rant on a Jihadi message board, he let the frustration flow. He mentioned no names, but he wrote about some of the missions he’d run and some of the people he’d killed. He made it clear that he respected the commitment of the warriors he’d killed and that he understood the anger that propelled the discourse on the site.

  The response surprised him. He expected to be cursed and trolled out of the community—and there were some attempts at that—but by and large the community embraced him for his honesty and expressed admiration for his own commitment to duty. To be sure, some of those posters were FBI agents posing as Jihadis, so much of the praise needed to be taken in context.

  He needed to disappear off the grid for a while after that, just in case. He didn’t know of any law he might have broken, but these days, with that useless Tony Darmond sitting in the White House, anyone could snoop on everyone. Evers wondered sometimes if this was how things started in 1938 Berlin. Don’t like the opposing party? Send the IRS after them. Don’t like a news report? Name the reporter as a coconspirator in a felony.

  About six months ago, he learned that no one is ever truly off the grid.

  He was at a friend’s fishing cabin on the edge of Shenandoah National Park when he saw a guy in a blue parka approaching him through the woods. This guy wasn’t a wanderer. He walked with purpose, as if he were a magnet and Evers were a hunk of iron.

  As he thought back on it, Evers remembered how his warning radar had pinged in his head. The man who had targeted him was wearing too much coat for the temperature of the day, and Evers had ventured all the way out to the edge of the water without a weapon. He supposed a few fishhooks and a fileting knife could save his life in the pinch, but only if the new guy didn’t know what he was doing.