Patriot Acts

by Greg Rucka

  Bowles, who had turned to watch, brought his attention back to me, explaining, “Perimeter.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  He slid the laptop aside and set an elbow on the table, leaning forward and resting his chin in his hand, grinning. He’d removed his overcoat and suit jacket, but the knot on his necktie was as tight and perfectly centered as ever. He was roughly my age, perhaps a year or two older, with straight black hair combed neatly back, and a pale face that was so smooth as to appear almost prepubescent. His eyes were so dark I could barely discern his pupils against the irises.

  “Nothing to say for yourself?”

  My hands were in my lap, and I brought them up slowly, felt pain stabbing through my fingers. They’d been bound with black Flexi-Cuffs, and whoever had done the binding had pulled them tighter than they needed to be; I could see the plastic biting into my skin, slowly killing my circulation. When my hands were at eye level, I showed them to him.

  “You’re kidding, right?” he asked.

  I set my hands on the table, sighed, then said, “How about something to drink?” When I spoke, I could feel the dried blood at my mouth and lips crack.

  He considered. “Water.”

  “That would be fine,” I said.

  Bowles half turned in his seat to the two on the couch, and the one who wasn’t Sean got to his feet with a grunt. I watched him go, disappearing into the kitchen out of sight. There was murmured conversation, the words lost to the distance, but I was making out at least three voices.

  So seven of them, then, including Bowles and his buddy Sean and the two on patrol. Maybe a couple more lurking someplace, but I doubted it; the cabin didn’t look like it could hold many more people.

  Still, seven, and if I was correct in assuming that Bowles had limited combat experience, that still left six of them who knew what they were about, and probably knew it quite well. If these were contractors—and Sean’s presence all but confirmed that they were—they’d come with a pedigree, with years in the Army or Marines backing them up, maybe even some time with Special Forces. An awful lot for Alena to handle alone and in the cold and with a leg that, despite everything, still wasn’t what it should be.

  “So, where you been hiding?” Bowles asked me.

  “Oh, you know,” I said, turning my attention back to him. “Here and there.”

  “I’m guessing Eastern Europe. Maybe some time in Africa.”

  I shrugged.

  He checked the laptop screen, clicking one of the keys a few times. “You have gotten around, though. Jakarta, São Paulo, Tokyo. Quito…huh. What were you doing in Ecuador, Atticus?”

  “Someone’s got to pick all those coffee beans.”

  Bowles smirked, nodded, tapped, and I wondered if he knew that, in fact, I’d never been to any of the four cities he’d just listed. If he did, this was gamesmanship, but to what end, I didn’t know. If he didn’t, I had no desire to correct him.

  The one who wasn’t Sean returned from the kitchen, setting a paper cup of water on the table by my hands. I took the cup in both hands, sipped at the water. It was so cold it hurt my teeth.

  “Patriot,” Bowles said for the third time, and I felt a flicker of annoyance. “You never answered my question. Are you a patriot, Atticus?”

  “Probably not the way you or Sean, there, would define it.”

  On the couch, Sean’s eyefuck dialed up to eleven.

  “Don’t you love your country?” Bowles asked.

  I met his eyes with a look that, hopefully, told him just what I thought of people who asked that kind of question. It was a stupid question, it was a rhetorical question, it was the kind of question asked by people trying to establish their moral superiority. It was a question used to identify enemies, not to make friends. It was an all-or-nothing question, and there was never a right answer. It was a question that had nothing to do with place or history or current affairs or society. It was a question that asked only one thing: Are you with us or against us?—and us were always the people posing the question in the first place.

  It was a question that, from the first time it had ever been uttered outside the Garden of Eden, was a justification to violence. Cain, I was sure, had asked Abel if he loved his country.

  Bowles held the look, and his smile grew, and then he made a soft laugh and said, “Patriot,” once more. Then he turned the laptop so I could see what he’d been looking at on its screen.

  It was the Interpol file on Alena, except in it she was called Drama. The header dated the file from the winter of the last year, only four months earlier, identified the document as a law enforcement briefing-slash-update. According to the same header, it contained the latest intelligence for distribution on The Ten. It put “The Ten” in quotations.

  With a gentle nudge, Bowles moved the laptop closer, so I could have access to the trackpad and keyboard. I scrolled down. There was a small file photograph, grainy and ill-focused. I’d seen the photo many times before, and it was now well out-of-date, almost five years old, taken when she’d been spotted in New York, trying to kill a man that I’d been trying to protect. I was only vaguely surprised that, since then, no one had managed to acquire a better one.

  There were lines for her vitals: gender, height, weight, hair color, eye color. Country of origin. Aliases. Distinguishing marks. Characteristics. Methodology. Where the information was known, it had been filled in, which meant more lines about her had been left blank than had been completed, and much of what was there was incorrect. They’d gotten her gender right, that was about all.

  I scanned the document, careful to limit the curiosity on my face to that alone and nothing else. There was a section on group affiliations, another on contacts, another for her known associates. Scant and theoretical biographical information followed, mostly surmising that she had been trained by the Soviets, specifically the GRU, prior to the end of the Cold War. Several pages were devoted to cataloguing her list of crimes, either those that had been definitively attributed to her, or those she was suspected of committing. The section ended with an analysis of the quality of this intelligence, and what could be reasonably concluded from it.

  The list of aliases attributed to her numbered seventeen, and of them, I recognized only two. One of them was “Natasha.” Nowhere was the name “Alena.”

  Under contacts was listed Danilov “Dan” Korckeva.

  The list of murders was presented by date, from earliest attributed to most recent. It stretched back a little over ten years, and racked up thirty-three bodies. Seven of them had been killed in the last three years, which pretty much threw that section of the file into question. I’d been with her night and day for the last three years, and if she’d murdered anybody during that time, I’d like to think I would have noticed. Of the murders she was accused of committing prior to our association, only two of the crimes matched what she herself had told me, and, in the main, I was more inclined to believe her than anything Matthew Bowles put in front of me.

  The analysis, at the end, concluded that Drama was still considered to be active, and had taken on a partner. There was a hyperlink embedded in the document, to a new entry on “Patriot.”

  “Oh, c’mon,” Bowles said. “You know you want to.”

  The link jumped the file to a new page, with a new heading and a new photo. The photo was of me, excellent quality, though a little small, and, as with Alena’s, nearly four years out-of-date. My entry followed the same format as hers, though this time many of the lines had been filled in, most of the time correctly. My distinguishing characteristics included the thin scar along my left cheek, and the fact that I required the use of corrective lenses.

  According to the file, I’d done a lot of traveling in the last three years. I’d visited São Paulo and Jakarta and Tokyo and Glasgow. I’d been in Vienna and Stockholm and Brussels and Cairo. I’d apparently stopped briefly in Quito. According to the file, I’d never stayed long in any of the locations.

  Just long en
ough each time to commit a murder, before moving on.

  “They call you Patriot because you’re one of the only members of The Ten they’ve actually pulled a full bio on,” Bowles told me. “Date of birth and education and, of course, your military service. The honorable discharge, that was the thing that did it. That’s why they call you Patriot.”

  “I don’t know that anyone is calling me anything,” I said.

  “Sure you do. You’re on the list, Atticus. You’re one of The Ten. Congratulations.”

  I stared at him, trying to find the angle. There was no reason to believe that the document was legitimate. It could have easily been manufactured by Bowles, or more likely, by someone working for Bowles. Just a tool to put me off balance, prepared solely to be used in this interrogation, to provide him with a psychological edge.

  It was also just barely possible that the document was legitimate. That, through one machination or another, Atticus Kodiak had been presented to Interpol as an assassin-for-hire. I had no doubt that the crimes listed had actually occurred, and in that case, it would have been a small matter to manufacture the evidence that linked me to these murders. We were talking about The Ten, after all; we were talking about people like Alena and Oxford. When they did their work, they left little behind in the way of evidence. For them, supposition and rumor were often all that existed to tie their presence to the crime.

  Bowles arched his left eyebrow in amusement. “You think I made this up?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “I think you’re too busy being someone else’s errand boy,” I said. “You probably had a lackey do it back at the White House.”

  “I’m in the private sector now, Atticus.”

  “You weren’t when you recruited Illya.”

  “Having trouble recalling that name, actually.”

  “So who are you working for?” I asked. “Who is it who’s pulling your strings, giving you your orders? Someone in the administration? Someone connected to it?”

  He rocked back in his chair in mock surprise. “You’ve got questions?”

  “Bushels of them. I want to know who, and I want to know where, and I might even go after the why, if I feel like it.”

  “Why?”

  “Cold Spring.” I looked past Bowles, to Sean, still seated on the couch. If he’d moved at all, I couldn’t tell. “Why this guy and his gun-buddies Grant and Mark tried to kill me. Why the second team went after the safe house. Questions like that. After the thing with Oxford, it was supposed to be finished, Matt. You’d pulled the plug. You said that was that.”

  At the mention of the gunfight, Sean’s right hand moved slightly, started up towards his shoulder. He arrested it, dropped it back into his lap. The eyefuck that had been at an eleven stayed steady and straight, and it struck me that it was his act, his part in these proceedings. Whether or not he actually hated my guts for shooting him, I couldn’t tell, but I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did.

  “Does it ache?” I asked him. “Because of the cold?”

  “There was a lot of blood on the ground,” Sean remarked. “Some of it was yours.”

  “Some of it was. But none of it was because of you.”

  Bowles moved his right hand, waving it slightly back in Sean’s direction, keeping him from retorting. He needn’t have bothered. Sean didn’t seem at all inclined to take the bait.

  “You’ve got so many questions,” Bowles told me. “I have only one: Where is she?”

  I creased my brow. “Drama?”

  “Yes. Where is she, Patriot?”

  “Fuck if I know,” I said. “Haven’t seen her since that clusterfuck of yours three years ago.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and it sounded honest because it was honest.

  “We need to talk to her,” Bowles said. “You bring her in, we can do a deal for the two of you.”

  “A deal?”

  Bowles nodded.

  “I’m trying to guess what that would be,” I said. “All I can come up with is two head shots for the price of one.”

  “What happened in Cold Spring was a mistake. Let’s move past that. It was fallout from Oxford, that’s all it was. An overzealous mistake. Orders got confused, wires got crossed. It was a mistake.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “It was.”

  He missed my meaning entirely, continuing. “We’re trying to correct that. We’ve been trying to correct that for the last few years, here. But you and Drama, the two of you up and vanished. How were we going to make it right when we couldn’t even find you guys to do it?”

  “So you make it right by beating me, cuffing me, and then dragging me into the middle of the woods to ask some questions?”

  “If I’d just come knocking on your door back in Whitefish all alone, you’d have been happy to talk? With you blaming me for what happened in Cold Spring, like you just said?”

  “I put in the passport application for a reason.”

  “You wanted us to find you, I get that. What you don’t seem to get is that you’re one of The Ten, Atticus. You’re one of the motherfucking Ten, you’re one of the most lethal, most dangerous, most skilled professional assassins working in the world today. You’re Oxford, Atticus. You’re Drama. You’ve become the person that—back when your head was on straight and you protected people for a living instead of whacking them—scared you so bad you would pee yourself.”

  “Flatterer,” I said.

  “So you can understand why I might be suspicious of your motives, how I might think going to meet you by myself would be a good way to end up quickly dead.”

  “I put the application in for a reason,” I repeated.

  “Because you have questions.”

  I moved my cuffed hands up and touched my nose with an index finger.

  “Back where we started,” Bowles said. “Where is Drama?”

  “I told you, I don’t know. Who wants us dead? Who was it who put Sean here and his Soldier of Fortune buddies on us?”

  Bowles shook his head, growing aggravated. “Not going to work like that.”

  “If it’s someone in the current administration, it’s someone pretty high up but not high-profile. Someone with enough influence to shut down any media attention about what happened that morning in Cold Spring, at the least. How many dead? Two at the Citgo and another six or so at the safe house? That really should have made the news, don’t you think? Someone had to dance pretty damn quick to hush it all up.”

  Bowles shook his head again. “Where is she, Atticus?”

  “You want something for nothing,” I said. “You’ve got me cuffed and beaten here, you think I’m going to just give up the only bargaining chip I have?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think you will.”

  Sean and his buddy on the couch got to their feet.

  “You’re not going to beat it out of me,” I told Bowles.

  “You are an arrogant son of a bitch,” he snapped, suddenly furious. “You’re standing on nothing, you realize that? You’re standing on fucking thin air, you’re the goddamn coyote in those cartoons the second before he realizes he’s off the cliff, you’re just too damn stupid or stubborn to realize that gravity’s got you by the balls. You cannot beat this thing, don’t you get it? You’re one of The Ten, now, you’ve got no friends, you’ve got nothing. I make one call, every cop in five hundred miles comes hunting for you. I make a second one, the FBI joins the chase.”

  The one who wasn’t Sean moved to the hall, called out a “hey.” Almost instantly, the two he’d been speaking with when he went to fetch the water emerged from the kitchen. Like the others, they were Caucasians, mid-to-late thirties, wearing more denim and flannel. The one who wasn’t Sean motioned them to join us.

  Bowles got out of his chair, closing the lid of his laptop. “You’re going to give her up. You can s
ave yourself a lot of discomfort if you do it now.”

  “Who gave the order?” I asked. “Who sent you here?”

  “Take him outside,” Bowles told Sean.

  “A name,” I told him. “Just give me the name, I’ll give you what you want.”

  Bowles shot a glance at me, ripe with disgust.

  “Even if I gave it to you, Atticus, you wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing with it,” Matthew Bowles said.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  When he said, “Take him outside,” what Bowles actually meant was take him outside, strip him down, and then beat the living shit out of him, preferably by knocking him down in the snow over and over again. It meant don’t speak to him, and it meant don’t do anything that will keep him from talking when he eventually decides to, and it meant take your time, because the cold is frankly more effective than your feet or your fists will be, but all three in concert, that should do the trick quite nicely.

  It meant that bringing a bucket of water from the bathroom and throwing it on him might also be a good idea, just to help things along.

  When they moved to grab me, I went for Bowles’s laptop and broke the nose of the guy who’d brought me water with it. Then I tried to kill one of the others by ramming the corner of the computer into his trachea. He moved, and I missed, and hit him high on the sternum instead, and since I was having to deal with the three others at the same time, I don’t fault myself for failing. I got a kick into the side of someone’s knee, and had the gratification of hearing him cry out before Sean tackled me, and then I lost the laptop.

  There followed a dog-pile, and it took all four of them to lift me up and get me out into the night and the cold and the snow, and they dropped me twice because, unlike back in Whitefish, I felt no need to be nice about it. I got a glimpse of thick trees and a clear, star-filled sky when they finally hauled me outside, and there wasn’t a hint of light pollution, and wherever we were, I knew I could make a lot of noise and no one who cared would hear it.