by James Grady
“Whatever you say,” said Lang. “You’ve got the guns.”
“No,” I said, lifting the Colt .45 out of Zane’s belt before he could say anything, turning and holding it out to Lang butt-first. “We’ve all got ’em.”
The intense blue eyes of the old spy blinked. He stared at the offered pistol. Made absolutely no motion.
“Go on,” I said. “Take it.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a subtle change come over Russell as he stood in the bedroom door, knew he’d filled his hand.
“Take it,” I told Lang again.
So he did. Let it swing down to his side, barrel pointed to the floor.
“But if you use it,” I said, “have the balls not to shoot me in the back.”
Walking to the kitchen sink gave him my spine. Let me get a drink of water with a glass from the drainboard. Hid my shaking hands.
Behind me, Cari said: “Sir, you and I… They’re not our opposition.”
“Really,” he said. “All evidence to the contrary.”
“Not all evidence,” I said, staring out his kitchen window to the night. “What have you got in your hand?”
“A great bluff? A madman’s move? You tell me.”
“What would you believe?”
“That’s always the problem. I believe I’m standing in my living room with five self-professed, violence prone, fugitive maniacs who outgun me and one supposedly outstanding agent who… well, who’s also here. What do you want me to believe?”
Russell said: “Give it up. This is going nowhere.”
Outside the kitchen window, the night moved. But I saw nothing.
I said: “Ask.”
Genuine curiosity rang in Lang’s answer: “Ask what?”
“Whatever,” I said, turning from the sink to face him and the faces of my fellow fugitives, of Cari. “What do you want to know?”
We saw wheels spinning in his eyes.
Lang finally said: “Why did you come here?”
Right to the heart of where he was and where this might go.
“You’ve got enough chairs,” I said. “Sit on the couch and we’ll tell you.”
Oh what an opera we performed! A saga of sound and fury and whacko, scenes like jump cuts of a Marx Brothers movie: INTERIOR. NIGHT. CABIN. Yellow glow, audience of one trapped on the couch. We played our parts and we were great, because besides being a manipulator, every spy is an actor.
Russell sang ‘Lying On The Floor (just like Doctor Friedman did)’ but got cut off as Zane raced behind Hailey to demonstrate how Nurse Death nailed her whack job only to have Hailey scream: “Watch out for my blood!” I said: “I know, Mr. Lang, since we busted the crime scene, forensics won’t back us up, but at the time, it was a good idea to take him with us, though, I’m kind of sorry for taping him to the fence.” Russell said: “And I’m sorry for freezing up and not dropping Nurse Death alive.” Zane waved that off: “Forget about that, it was bathrooms.” I interjected: “Bathrooms and love,” then Zane continued: “If we’re going to start getting sorry, I’ve got the burned up police car.”
Lang said: “The burned up—”
“Mirror,” blurted Eric. “Broke mirror. Bad luck. Sorry.”
“Wasn’t your fault,” said Hailey. She told Lang: “Eric’s triggered by any comprehensive order. Won’t stop, can’t stop obeying no matter what, like—Eric: explain the thing you made at the memorial shiva.”
Eric rocketed to his feet: “Leonardo Da Vinci created the—”
“Sit down and stop, Eric,” I said and he did. “If Hailey hadn’t been careful with what she told him to do, I couldn’t have ordered him to stop even if this cabin was burning down around us. It would have been like that shrink woman he grabbed onto.”
The CIA Deputy Director (covert) frowned: “A shrunken woman?”
“She doesn’t matter,” said Russell, “but your blonde there—”
“Who?” said Lang.
“Me,” said Cari. “I dyed my hair as a disguise.”
“The point is,” said Russell, “I was going to get laid, but she fucking stopped it.”
Lang said: “The two of you—”
Simultaneously, Russell shouted: “No way!” and Cari yelled: “Not him!”
“But we got a great car out of it!” I interrupted to quash Russell’s anger. “Even if that guy was dead, it got us all the way to the hit this noon on the SAD building.”
“Why was a building sad?” asked Lang.
“No sir,” said Cari. “Our SAD. Up by the Takoma Park metro.”
“What ‘hit’? You killed—”
“Nobody,” I quickly said.
“Well,” said Zane. “Nurse Death bought it, but that was a combat mishap.”
“And then,” I said, “the empty office told us to run.”
We ran out of breath.
My watch took a sweep of ticks before out of Lang escaped: “Wow.”
And he said: “So this is all of you being all together?”
We all gave him a shrug.
“OK,” he said. “Now you’re here. Now—”
“You got anything to drink?” said Russell.
“No booze!” I yelled.
“Don’t worry,” said Lang. “I don’t want any of you drunk. In the fridge, there might be some Cokes.”
Russell flowed into the kitchen, jerked open the door, said: “Wild! Beer.”
“No,” I said.
He gave a bottle to Zane, took one for himself, opened one for me.
Rudeness is the last thing we need, I thought as I took sip of cold golden brew. I raised the bottle in salute to our host. “Thanks.”
Cari said: “Director Lang, they’ve got something. Stumbled onto something.”
“But,” he said, “aren’t they still… crazy?”
Zane said: “Yes. And oh look: we’re still sitting right here in the room.”
“No offense,” said Lang. “I was just trying to get an analysis of intelligence.”
Zane took a swig of his cold beer.
Lang put his eyes on Cari. “And you’re sure you… have bullets in your gun?”
“Here.” I handed him the tranquilizer gun. Took off the weapons vest with its ammo pouches, stun gun, three looped-on flash/bang grenades, and dropped it on Lang’s lap. “Add all that to your .45 and you’ve got more bang than any one of us.”
“But don’t forget,” said Russell, the beer held in his left hand, his right hand empty and calm. “Quality tops quantity.”
“My philosophy, too,” said Lang. “So… You showed up here to surrender?”
“Not hardly,” said Russell.
“Not ever,” said Zane.
“We came here so some of us could get safe,” said Hailey.
“We came here to help you help us help you,” I said.
“We came here to nail that whacker Kyle Russo,” said Russell.
Lang blinked: “Who?”
All six of us started to answer, but Lang took command: “Stop!”
He pointed his index finger at me like he didn’t care that if it had been a gun, Russell would have given him a third eye.
“Victor, you and you alone talk. Debrief. No dramatics. No adventures—I’m still lost up around Asbury Park. Give me this ‘something’ you’ve convinced Agent Rudd is real. And what or who is Kyle Russo?”
Twenty minutes later, after I’d gone from the assassin’s technique to the check that paid for the dead-drop that led us to the SAD building, I was done. Cari told me: “Good job, Victor. Good briefing.”
But Lang said: “You’ve got not much of who knows what.”
“Well,” said Zane, “it’s something.”
“Everything depends on how you add it up,” said the spymaster. “And all this no
t much is what you want me to bring in with you to the Agency?”
“Actually,” said Russell, “until we know what’s-what, no way are we going in.”
Lang exploded. “So what are you going to do? What do you want me to do? You must have a plan! Did you think you’d come here and I’d take over your… crusade or investigation or mad dog run or whatever, and then you’d all end up all right?”
“Well…” said Hailey.
“What do you want me to do? Run Kyle Russo and the addresses of empty offices and public mailbox stores through my computer over there?”
“You could do that?” I said.
Zane said: “Don’t forget about that cashier’s check from the small town bank.”
“Tomorrow,” said Lang, “I can send a team there. It’s about a three hour drive, near the Atlantic shore. When the bank opens, they can get the records. Cashiers’ checks may seem anonymous, but the issuing banks keep records of where the money came from for the checks, who bought it. No way of avoiding it.”
“If you scramble a team,” I said, “then… there’ll be people we don’t know.”
“More people,” said Russell, “less control for us.”
“But first…” I nodded to his computer. “You’re wired into the Agency?”
“For practical purposes,” said Lang, “with my access codes, I am the Agency.”
Zane said: “Eric?”
“Customized computer. Probably NSA.”
“A cast off,” said Lang. “Five generations old for them.”
“Got a special modem. Power pack. Satellite connection. Probably anti-hacking protocols way past commercial firewalls. Could tele-conference, camera unplugged.”
“If they can see you,” said Lang, “they can see you. I prefer privacy. As for the rest, all I know is that it works.”
“So give it a shot,” said Russell. “With Eric eyeballing, what do we got to lose?”
Lang sat at the computer. Following Zane’s command to ‘Watch what he does there so he can’t alert help,’ Eric scooted next to Lang’s chair, Hailey’s hand on his shoulder. Eric entered commands into the computer until a “window” appeared in the lower left hand corner of the monitor. To me, it looked like flashing cyberspeak. To Eric it decoded the operations of the computer whose keyboard he relinquished to Lang. Zane stood behind the CIA master spy, while Russell leaned against a wall where he could see the crowd at the computer and the locked front door.
I stood next to Cari. Feeling the beer relax me, I whispered to her: “Thanks.”
“For what?” she whispered back.
Lang said: “Can I start?”
Zane said: “Go.”
Colored light flashed from the computer monitor as one screen of security warnings gave way to the next. Required code words got typed in by Lang.
I whispered to Cari: “I could never have gotten him to believe us without your help. You were terrific.”
“All I did was be a spy. Report.”
Lang said: “OK, I’m at the full indices search. This is top access. Not just Agency systems, everywhere from NSA to the Pentagon to the White House.”
“My ass is on the line, too,” Cari told me.
“I couldn’t ask for better company.”
In the search mode, Lang typed in Kyle Russo, Nurse Death’s real name, the SAD building and other ‘hard data’ we’d logged on our index card matricies. Hit ENTER.
Cari turned and found me softly smiling at her. She shook her head. Closed her eyes. Opened them, said: “Victor, I don’t, it’s not, you’re not—”
“What the hell is going on?” said Zane.
All of us stared at the computer screen except Russell, who from the far wall flowed to combat ready.
ACCESS DENIED filled the computer screen. Colors and images flashed behind those blazing white letters. Lines of code streamed through Eric’s peek-a-boo window.
“Crazy!” yelled Lang. “It can’t deny me access! I’m on the fucking National Security Council! An Agency double-D! And fully black cleared!”
Eric blurted: “The system’s backtracking! Machine trying to turn camera on!”
BAM! BAM! BAM!
The computer hard drive box on the floor slammed into the desk with crackling sparks. The high security modem whirled off the desk to the floor. The monitor screen cracked and shattered and glass splinters rained down on the keyboard and the hastily jerked-back hands of D.D. (covert) John Lang.
Russell whirled from blasting the computer to scan the cabin door and windows.
Left Zane to press the bore of his own pistol against Lang’s head as that man rose and backed away from the crackling corpse of his machine.
“Did you do this?” yelled Zane, his free hand again taking the .45 from Lang.
“Do fucking what? You watched me the whole time! So did Eric! It was that maniac in black who shot—”
“It’ll be me who shoots you if,” said Zane. “Eric?”
Our engineer shook his head: “He did standard stuff. Hit a trapdoor.”
“So it wasn’t him?” said Zane.
“His queries hit snatch-to-blast program. Anybody who logged in some component of data we searched would have been locked out. Backtracked.”
Zane lifted his gun bore off Lang’s silver-haired skull.
“Whatever’s going on in your guys’ heads,” said that spymaster, “take a few more seconds to think before you react.”
“You’re still alive,” said Zane.
“What you watch, watches you.” Russell kept his eyes on the door. “Even if the camera was unplugged, who knows what got turned on—to us.”
“Eric,” I said, “how much time?”
“Human factor. Soon as he hit the trap door, even if his box’s signature wasn’t known, trace-trap the link. He says his known response team hit in two minutes. Figure, co-opting them or triggering bad boys is more difficult… Three minutes minimum. Max… Who knows?”
Lang stared at us: “What did you people do?”
“Not us, man.” Russell pointed to the computer corpse. “You hit the tripwire.”
“’Xactly.”
“Now you’re one of us,” I said. “And we’ve got less than three minutes.”
Lang said: “But I’m… An Agency executive. Hell, a White House star!”
“So was Dr. Friedman,” said Cari. “Or he would have been, if.”
Those words from a probably sane colleague made Lang blink.
“We gotta go,” I said. “Hard. Fast. Now.”
Eric added: “No gear of his. No electronics. No cell phones.”
“Can I grab a coat?” said Lang, getting it.
And he did, pulling a worn Navy Pea coat out of his closet, letting Eric and Zane pat it down. The two of them burdened Lang like a pack mule with the coat, the weapons vest, the tranquilizer gun. We took his dented Land Rover because the 30 seconds we used to grab his keys, race out to the street and cram ourselves into it bought us at least 15 minutes we didn’t need to spend crashing through the woods to get back to our Caddy. We dumped his trackable Land Rover in the shadows of the pool shed, he dumped his burdens of coat and weapons vest and guns in the trunk of the Caddy. I keyed the white beast to life as Eric jumped in beside me, Hailey taking shotgun next to him. Our backseat was door-to-door meat: Zane, Cari, Lang, Russell.
We roared off into the night, blasted through the neighborhood’s gate and onto the main road, turned left because that way looked the darkest.
Russell hummed: “Bum bum-pa-bum, bum ba bum-bum-bum…”
“We’re not ‘The Magnificent Seven’!” said Lang, recognizing that movie theme. “We’re seven spies on the run from some phantom taped to the roof of this stolen car.”
Russell said: “Yeah, we need our own theme song.”
&nb
sp; “No,” said Lang, “we need a plan. What have you got left that you haven’t—”
“The bank!” I yelled. “They’ll have the records of the cashier’s check to set up Nurse Death’s Op! It’s only three hours away! You could badge them and—”
“Great idea. Except Eric didn’t let me grab my I.D.”
Eric said: “Could have been micro-wired.”
“What about his clothes and body?” said Zane.
Cari said: “You guys! No!”
“Now, let’s all be professional,” said Russell. “Double-D… strip.”
“Right here? Crammed in like a sardine with all of you? Buck naked in traffic in a white vintage Cadillac? Don’t you think that might draw attention?”
“Only need shoes,” said Eric. “Probably.”
“Check them, don’t chuck them,” said Cari, who’d complained about first dead Harry Martin’s sneakers being too big, then the spare pair from Hailey being too small.
Crammed into the back seat, Lang couldn’t reach his feet. Zane took off the D.D. (covert)’s lounge-around-the-house black Chinese gung fu shoes, passed them up to Eric.
“Doubt it,” said Eric, passing the shoes back to be put on Lang.
“I’m Seventh Floor shadow exec,” said Lang, “not a street dog on an Op where tracking me might be worth the budgetary expense and effort.”
The rear view mirror showed me arms and bodies turning and shifting to get comfortable with a chorus of groans, apologies and anger.
“This won’t work,” said Lang. “We can barely breathe back here, and you want us to drive three hours to some town on the Eastern Shore, wait until the bank opens at what, 9 a.m.? Packed in here like this, we’re a magnet for policemen’s eyes, a bright white classic violation of no seat belts and over-crowding. We’re a traffic stop waiting to happen, and when that does… Did you say you already got away with burning up one police car?”
The turn signal blinked as my answer.
“Where are you going?” asked Lang.
“Car shopping,” I answered.
“To go where?” said Hailey.
“The bank. The more we get, the better to nail Kyle Russo and skate clean.”
“Director Lang doesn’t have his credentials,” said Cari. “Mine and those of my guys are probably hot. If we flash them and the bank officer checks…”
