by Neil Mcmahon
Baskett and other agents had given Monks a thorough raking over the coals. They had finally conceded officially that he wasn’t to blame, but it was clear that they blamed him anyway. A lot of attention had focused on Glenn-how deeply he might have been involved in hacking computer information that was instrumental in the selection of the murder victims and facilitating the killings. The fact that Glenn, by all indications, was dead, did not figure in. He was still a criminal in their eyes, and the heavy weight of guilt by association had landed on Monks.
With Freeboot now linked to the Calamity Jane killings, the media furor had been explosive. After the FBI had tossed Monks away like a drained husk, satisfied that he had nothing more to give them, packs of journalists fell upon him. When he finally got to his home, bone weary and heartsick, a crowd of them was waiting.
He might have been able to endure even that, but he had come to realize that the media’s main interest in him didn’t lie in what had happened-it was in fashioning some tawdry story about a dysfunctional family with a renegade son.
He had shoved his way through them into his house, then walked back out with his shotgun, emptying the five-round magazine over their heads amid a shower of leaves and branches from the overhanging trees. After the last of their vehicles spun out of his drive, he had politely carried all of their dropped equipment down to the county road and left it there in a pile. The incident had brought him a warning phone call from the local sheriff’s office, along with several threatened lawsuits from the offended news folk. Other calls were still jamming his line-requests for newspaper and magazine interviews, invitations to appear on national television, feelers from talent agents and film producers for books and made-for-TV movies. But no one had dared come onto his property again.
There was one upside to it all: this time the authorities had hidden Mandrake genuinely and well. The odds of Freeboot’s finding him now were practically nil.
Pietowski’s headlights appeared, coming up the driveway. He parked and got out of the car, a newish generic sedan that was probably from an agency pool. He was wearing a light jacket and slacks, looking more like a realtor on his way to a Kiwanis Club dinner than a man who made a living tracking killers.
“Nice place,” he said. “I see what you mean about liking your privacy. Ever think about putting in a security system?”
“I keep meaning to.”
“You’re not worried about Freeboot paying you a visit?”
“He’s not going to kill me, not any time soon,” Monks said. “He wants me alive, thinking about Glenn.”
Pietowski gave a curt nod. His meaty ears seemed to flop slightly.
“I hate to say it, but you’re probably right,” he said.
Inside the house, Pietowski glanced around with the bland expression that Monks had seen on other FBI agents, absorbing all the information that the room offered. He stepped through the junk on the floor and picked up the open bottle of Finlandia vodka, raising an eyebrow appreciatively.
“Good stuff,” he said. “How long you been going at it?”
“Couple days.”
“Mind if I have one?”
“Help yourself,” Monks said. He waved a hand toward the kitchen. “There’s clean glasses in there someplace. Ice. All that.”
Pietowski moved to the kitchen with his deliberate, almost lumbering walk, and started opening cubboards. His jacket parted as he reached for a glass, giving Monks a glimpse of the leather sling of his shoulder holster.
“So, you’re a Chicago boy,” Pietowski said. He chunked ice cubes into the glass and filled it with the Finlandia. “Me, too. Where’d you go to high school?”
“Saint Leo. Down on the South Side.”
“Sure, I know it. I’m from Saints Cyril and Methodius, myself, up north. Wall-to-wall Polacks.”
Monks got a piece of split oak from the woodbox and knelt in front of the stove. He stirred up the embers with the log, shoved it all the way in, and closed the iron door. He turned back, still on his haunches, then sat on the floor, hard, like a toddler.
Pietowski watched him, with a twist to his mouth that might have indicated sympathy.
“I know you took a hell of a beating,” he said. “You did what you had to. So did we. That’s how you’ve got to look at it.”
Monks exhaled, then nodded. Pietowski extended a hand. Monks took it, and used it to pull himself laboriously back to his feet.
“There’s just been another killing that looks like a Calamity Jane,” Pietowski said.
Monks nodded again. He was too numb to be shocked.
“Happened a couple hours ago, it’s just now crossing the wires,” Pietowski said. “ A Sutton Place penthouse, right in the poshest part of fucking Manhattan. Security like Fort Knox. They got up on the roof somehow and rappeled down an outside wall. But this time we got the shooters.”
A flare of grim excitement cut into Monks’s sluggishness. Finally, something to go on.
“Have you identified them?” he asked.
“We don’t have a clue, which is why I’m here. When they knew they were trapped, one of them dove out a window. Hit the pavement face first, from twelve stories. The second one was right behind him, but a police sniper creased his head and knocked him back inside.”
Pietowski took a six-by-nine-inch manila envelope from his jacket pocket and tossed it on the coffee table.
“This is the one that’s still got a face. I thought maybe you’d recognize him, from the camp.”
Monks remembered the maquis well, even the ones he’d only seen by firelight. He opened the envelope and pulled out several high-resolution black-and-white photos of a man’s face taken from slightly different angles. He was about thirty, clean-shaven, with short, neatly styled hair. It was the same businessman’s look sported by Freeboot’s other maquis, except for the bloody jellied mass of blood and brain where the sniper’s bullet had clipped the right parietal bone, above and behind the ear.
But Monks had to shake his head. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure I never saw him,” he said, tossing the photos back on the table.
“That’s too bad.”
“Sorry I can’t help.”
“I don’t mean you. I mean, that tells us that the ones you saw aren’t the only ones. There’s more of them out there than we thought.”
While Monks ingested this unsettling information, Pietowski started pacing with slow, heavy steps that were like the systematic plodding of a draft horse.
“I’m guessing they were under orders not to be taken alive, so they wouldn’t break down under questioning,” he said. “Maybe even to destroy their faces, to make them harder to identify. Their fingertips were scarred, too, like the ones you saw. Now, what the hell kind of people are willing to sacrifice themselves like that?” He seemed to be asking himself, rather than Monks. “Religious fanatics, suicide bombers, okay. Or somebody in a jealous rage that pulls a murder-suicide. But highly trained operatives do not commit extremely risky crimes, give away what they steal, and then off themselves when they’re cornered. That’s not how they think. Those guys are survivors.”
“Freeboot talked about the assassins,” Monks said. “Their absolute loyalty. The night of that scalp hunt, he told a story about how the Old Man of the Mountain could point at a man and snap his fingers and that man would jump off a cliff to his death.”
Pietowski grunted. “Telling a story’s one thing. Getting people to actually do it-” He shoved his hands into his pockets, then stopped walking and turned back to Monks.
“I’ve got something else to ask you. There’s a buzz, about Bodega Bay. You know the place?”
“I’ve driven through it a fair amount,” Monks said. Bodega Bay was a small, pretty town on the coast about twenty-five miles north of his home-an old fishing harbor that had adapted more and more to recreation, and recently to condos.
“That’s where they filmed that Hitchcock movie The Birds,” Pietowski said. “Remember that, mid-sixties?”
The Birds was the town’s claim to fame as a tourist attraction, although mention of it tended to make residents roll their eyes. Monks recalled, oddly, that early advertisements for it had read: THE BIRDS IS COMING.
“Sure,” he said. “What do you mean, a buzz?”
“The undercover people we’ve got working the streets-they’ve heard a rumble that there’s something coming down there, April 1. We don’t know what. But that ‘Revolution Number 9’ riff is in the air, like it’s some kind of a theme.”
Monks recalled what Marguerite had told him about Freeboot’s cultivating contacts with elements more sinister than the homeless-gangs and big-time drug dealers, via wild parties that centered around the medical marijuana trade.
“So you think Freeboot might be involved?” he said.
“That’s a long shot. And the whole thing might be complete bullshit. It’s April Fool’s Day, for openers. But we can’t ignore it. What I’d like you to do is be there. We’ll have undercover agents, too, but you’re the only reliable witness we’ve got who’s actually seen those people. You go in disguise and hang around. You spot anybody, you alert us.”
“I don’t know that I could do you any good,” Monks said. “They’re going to be in disguise, too. Freeboot told me I looked right at him.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t thinking about him then. If you’re looking, you might see things you recognize. Even the way somebody moves.”
Monks nodded hesitantly. “I’ll try.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll figure out the details.”
Pietowski turned toward the door, then picked up the bottle of vodka and hefted it. The room had gotten warm from the added firewood, and his big doughy forehead was gleaming with sweat.
“For what it’s worth, I’ve crawled into one of these plenty,” Pietowski said. “Last time it happened in a big way was after Waco. I got called in there, after the ATF fucked it up. There were plenty of ways they could have walked up to Koresh and slapped cuffs on him. Instead, all those people burned. Kids.”
He set the bottle back down. “I’d love to jump in right now, believe me, but I can’t afford it. Neither can you.”
After he left, Monks saw that he had barely touched his drink, if at all. Monks had the sudden sense that Pietowski had come to him as a sort of priest, offering absolution, giving him a chance to set aside the past days and move on to action that might be of actual benefit. Ashamed, Monks dumped out his own glass in the sink.
He went to the kitchen calendar and pieced together that today was March 30. Tomorrow was going to be ugly and penitential, filled with sweat and pain-splitting wood, lifting weights, and working the heavy bag to a base line of pain throbbing in his head like the rap music blasting from a passing car.
Then, the wait to find out if this rumor was an April Fool’s Day joke or the next outrage that Freeboot planned to throw in the world’s face.
36
Monks was in a hotel room in Bodega Bay just coming out of a restless half-sleep when the phone rang. It was 5:33 A.M., the morning of April 1. He located the phone’s red LED in the darkened room and picked up.
“Monks,” he said.
“This is Pietowski. Turn on the TV, any news channel. Call me back.” He sounded enraged. Monks finished waking up instantly, fearing that he’d done something wrong.
He found the TV’s remote and started flicking through channels. His finger stopped at the fourth one he hit. An attractive blond anchorwoman was at her desk in the foreground, with the CNN logo on the backdrop.
“…was e-mailed to millions of computers around the nation, from an unknown source, early this morning,” she said. “A list of five hundred names and addresses, titled-apparently, with vicious sarcasm-‘The Fortune 500,’ includes prominent members of the business community, legislators, and government officials-among them, all the victims of the Calamity Jane killers.
“Initial response from law-enforcement agencies is that the list is an April Fool’s Day prank. But the people whose names are on the list are alarmed that it’s a warning-that they’re intended targets, too.
“We’ll have more on this explosive new development after this short break. Stay with us.”
Monks punched the number of Pietowski’s cell phone. They had talked enough times during the past two days that he had memorized it by now.
“I only got part of the story,” Monks said.
“Freeboot just stomped on the panic button, is the story. Sent out a mass e-mail that looks like a piece of spam, except it could only have been compiled by some highly sophisticated hacking.”
“The news announcer said the police were treating it as a joke.”
“Joke, my aching ass. They got the addresses of people that are harder to find than Osama bin Laden. Cracked fire-walled corporate and government databases, identified people who operate way, way behind the scenes.”
Monks swallowed a dry lump at the back of his throat. That pointed to Glenn, and the FBI agents knew it. Yet it fanned the flicker of hope that he was still alive.
“We’re already spread thin, and now we’ve got five hundred of the world’s most influential people screaming at us about what we’re going to do to protect them,” Pietowski said sourly. “Anything happening there?”
Monks walked to a window and opened the curtain. The view looked west over the town along Highway 1, and down the long spur of Doran Beach farther out, a favorite spot of windsurfers and body boarders. It was just dawn, and the vast expanse of ocean and sky was a pale gray-blue that would soon turn to azure. The highway was empty. The sea was calm, the surf hardly more than ripples. Toward the harbor’s north end, the fishing fleet and recreational boats floated in the marina like beasts of burden grazing in a peaceful pasture, waiting to be put to use.
Informants had confirmed a rumor on the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities all the way to L.A. and Seattle, that some sort of mass party was supposed to take place in Bodega Bay today, and that “Revolution No. 9” seemed to be the motif. But the odds of finding Freeboot here seemed tiny, and Pietowski even feared that it might be a diversion from something serious, like another Calamity Jane killing.
“Right now, the place looks quiet as a tomb,” Monks told him.
“I guess that’s good, except it means we’re going to waste a lot of manpower. Call me again when you’re ready to hit the bricks. We’ll run a test on your microphone.”
Monks got a cold bottle of orange juice out of the room’s mini-refrigerator, then started making coffee, using half the specified amount of water. He shaved in the shower, mirrorless, a habit he’d carried over from his navy days.
When he came back out, he poured a cup of the thick black brew and stepped to the window again, still grappling with his hope that the “Fortune 500 List” might mean that Glenn was still alive-and his fear that if so, it deepened his involvement in the killings even further.
Outside, the sky was lighter, but things remained as tranquil as before. Local police and sheriffs had been alerted, but everyone agreed that it would be best to stay quiet, rather than alarm residents over what might amount to nothing.
A single car came into sight, driving into town on Highway 1 from the south. Monks kept watching it. It was a big old sedan, an Olds or a Buick, 1970s or even sixties vintage, dented and crusted with dirt that looked as permanent as paint-not the kind of vehicle that was common around upscale Bodega Bay. He could hear its rumble all the way up to his room. It moved slowly, giving the sense that it wasn’t in a hurry to get to anyplace in particular-it was just cruising.
As it drove past his window, an arm flopped carelessly out of the rear passenger-side window and flicked a cigarette butt that skipped a few times on the pavement, throwing off sparks.
The car kept going north on the highway, then turned left on Westshore Road, which led down toward the marina and campgrounds.
37
By noon, Bodega Bay ’s marina was thronged with people-clo
se to five thousand, Monks judged, with more still pouring in. Parking areas were jammed with vehicles, a lot of them junkers, along with a fair number of chopped Harleys. The newer arrivals were parking some distance away and walking in, since vehicle traffic was almost impossible. The strip of Highway 1 through town, with its shops and restaurants, was clogged.
It was looking like The Birds, all right-only this time it was thick with human beings.
Monks wandered around the fringes, wearing the disguise that Pietowski’s makeup specialists had provided-ragged jeans, worn-out boots, a threadbare army field jacket. His wiry black hair was dyed gray, then worked with pomade to straighten it and give it a greasy, matted look. One of his incisors was blacked out to appear missing. A thick beard and mustache, along with a weathered baseball cap pulled low over sunglasses, hid most of his face. A tiny receiver was planted in his left ear and a body bug microphone was sewn inside his collar, giving him two-way contact with an FBI listening post set up in a phony delivery truck parked nearby.
The day was pristine, clear, warm with sunshine but cooled by a light ocean breeze. The scene was outwardly festive, something like the mass concerts or happenings of the late sixties-but Monks percieved an undercurrent that was disturbingly different. These weren’t kids who had come to party, to soak up the music, grooviness, peace, and love. These were fully formed adults, most of them well past their teens and many pushing middle age and bearing the hard look of years on the streets or in jails. Even the younger faces tended toward an uncaring cynicism, a sense that nothing they saw was of value or even interest.
He eavesdropped on conversations as he cruised, trying to get a sense of what this gathering was all about, but nothing became clear. There didn’t seem to be any kind of central event planned. All that he could glean was that some mysterious groundswell had named today as the day, and Bodega Bay as the place, for a party. There was a lot of beer and screw-cap wine. Marijuana smoke drifted through the air, and he was sure that there was plenty of hard dope around, too.
