Soft Targets

by John Gilstrap

  “I’m ahead of you,” Irene said. “Clearly, he’s headed south, and something is drawing him there. I don’t think he had time to plan anything elaborate, but he had to plan something, which to me means that he has some connection to that part of the country. Paul is doing some research for me on the QT to see what if any connection Tony might have to the Carolinas or any of the Southern states. Even Texas and Mexico. There has to be something. There has to be a reason for him to be in North Carolina.”

  Jonathan thought on that for just a few seconds. “I agree,” he said. “Let’s head south.”

  A little more than an hour later, they were walking across the tarmac of a little regional airport outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia, on their way toward a Gulfstream corporate jet. Between the three of them, they carried enough weapons and ammunition to conquer Spain.

  “Okay,” Irene said, “I know you won’t give me a straight answer, but I have to ask. Where does all of this stuff come from? Where does all the money come from? Surely Uncle Sam doesn’t foot the bill.”

  Jonathan coughed out a laugh. “God, I wish. No, this is all on me.”

  Irene stopped. “What do you mean?”

  Jonathan stopped, too, and he smiled. God, what a smile. “You’ve seen the house. Look up ‘rich’ in the dictionary. My picture is there.”

  Irene wasn’t buying. There had to be something bigger than that. “No,” she said. “Really.”

  Jonathan shrugged and nodded. “No, really,” he said.

  “So, if you’re that rich, why would you risk your life in battle if you had enough money not to?”

  Jonathan stopped short and turned on her. “You disappoint me, Wolverine,” he said. “If you have to ask that question, then I could never in a million years explain my answer.”

  He turned and started walking again.

  Irene felt stung. And embarrassed. She knew from her own experience that the truest heroes did what they did from a most solid place in their hearts. In the case of the elite military units in particular, theirs was a calling of service, and she had been wrong to malign that in any way. She hoped that Jonathan would figure out on his own that her comment had been born of the sheer magnitude of the dollars involved, not out of any doubt toward his conviction. In fact, she sensed that he did understand. Either way, there was no way to undo whatever impression she had made without sounding whiny.

  They’d just reached the base of the Gulfstream’s stairway when Irene’s pager beeped again. It was Paul Boersky. “I need a phone,” she said, and she turned toward the little building that served as a terminal.

  “Wait,” Jonathan said. “I have one here.” From the pocket of his rucksack, he produced a portable phone, barely larger than a checkbook. “It’s a cellular phone,” he said.

  She’d heard of them, of course, and the Bureau had installed them in all of the official vehicles, but this was her first experience with a truly portable version of the technology.

  “One, area code, and number,” Jonathan explained. “Just like any other telephone.”

  The pace of technology was amazing, Irene thought. She dialed the number, and Boersky answered on the second ring. “What’s up?” she asked.

  “I think I have something,” Boersky said. “There’s a suspected kid-toucher in Asheville, North Carolina, named Leo Ramus. There’s not enough on him to make an arrest, but the Asheville PD have reached out to us for help. Mayo was the help we provided.” He paused as Irene thought it through. “It might not be a strong link, but it’s a link. I’ve got an address for you.”

  Irene told him to wait a moment while she fished a pad and a pen out of her pockets. “Okay, shoot.”

  Paul gave her the address and a general description of the man. Five-eight, balding, and about thirty pounds underweight, Leo Ramus seemed to be liked by no one but loathed by many. Could there possibly be a more clichéd version of a pedophile? In Irene’s experience, most child molesters fit a certain physical profile, and Ramus’s fell smack into the eightieth percentile.

  When she clicked off from Paul, she relayed the information to Jonathan and Boxers.

  “Finally,” Boxers said, “something more than a compass point. There’s actually an airport in Asheville. We can be there in forty-five minutes.”

  Irene had always thought that a plane like this required two pilots, but apparently, one would do. Boxers sat alone in the cockpit, while she and Jonathan sat in the opulence of the passenger area. They didn’t speak much—in fact, Jonathan appeared to sleep, though she wondered how that was possible—and as they flew, Irene wondered what these guys were really about. She’d heard, of course, about elite Special Forces units like Delta Force and SEAL Team Six—in fact her own FBI Hostage Rescue Team was constructed from their model—but she’d never spent any time with the members of such teams. The level of confidence and the level of cross-training amazed her, as did the individual men’s interest in partaking in additional risks during their leave time.

  Fifteen minutes into the flight, she had to ask. “Excuse me,” she said. “Sorry to wake you.”

  “I never sleep,” Scorpion said, not bothering to open his eyes. “I don’t think I’ve actually slept slept in fifteen years.”

  “Why do you do this?” she asked. “You take all of these risks on your own time—and on your own dime. What’s in it for you?”

  Jonathan took his time answering, beginning his response with a long, noisy sigh, but he still didn’t open his eyes. “Why do you think?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Suppose I told you we did this because it was the right thing to do?”

  Irene started to answer, but hesitated. “I’m sorry, but that’s too easy.”

  Finally, Jonathan’s eyes opened and he leaned forward in his captain’s chair. “Sometimes, the truth is easy. You’re thinking too hard. Two weeks ago—actually, almost three weeks ago—the Unit, Uncle Sam’s finest fighting force, was dispatched to a place I’m not allowed to tell you about because the United States is officially not in that part of the world, to save the life of a congressman’s daughter who was on an ill-considered save-the-world gig. We had intel that bad guys were planning to kidnap the girl for ransom so the president dispatched us to dispatch the bad guys with the most extreme prejudice imaginable.”

  “You killed them,” Irene translated.

  “Yes. On direct orders from the very top. And as far as I know, the girl—her name is Tessy—never knew she was in danger.”

  Irene scowled deeper. “I don’t think I’m following.”

  “It was the efficiency of it all,” Jonathan explained. “We knew who the bad guys were, we knew that they were murderers, and we took them out in order to save the good guys. There were no warrants, no lawyers, no asking for permission. The order was given and the order was executed.” His eyes twinkled as a smirk grew on his face. “Tell me you wouldn’t enjoy that kind of efficiency. I sense that you want the world to be grayer than it is. Sometimes, black is just black and white is just white. Overseas, we recognize bad guys as bad guys and we take them out. Here, under rules from the same government, we make it too complicated.”

  Irene opened her mouth to argue—she knew it was her responsibility to argue—but the words wouldn’t come. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d told people that if a hundred guilty people went free to preserve the civil rights of a single innocent, then the system was working. Now that her own children were in danger, the words resonated as utter bullshit, ignorant words spewed from the podium of a lecture hall and absorbed by academics who’d never known real fear, and had never experienced violence that was not prepackaged for them in a movie theater. The real world—the practical world—was far more nuanced and, yes, gray than any lawmaker could ever or would ever acknowledge.

  In many regards, she realized, doing what was right and doing what was legal could be entirely different concepts.

  “I get it,” she said to Jonathan. “If it isn’t ab
out the money and it isn’t about the thrill seeking, then all that’s really left is doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”

  Jonathan’s smile broadened. “I told you you were going to hate yourself when you got back to your FBI office.”

  Irene had been to Asheville, North Carolina, twice that she could remember. The community there was an eclectic collection of starving artists and billionaire businessmen, somehow finding common ground in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The median political view made Haight-Ashbury look like Wall Street, and the consensus on everything from sex to drugs to religion ran the spectrum “fine by me” to “cool, we gotta try that.”

  In this part of the world, addresses meant little because few of the roads were actually named and because so many of the homes came with wheels attached. Leo Ramus’s house, such as it was, was the worst of both. The house wasn’t actually a trailer, though it might have been—certainly it looked as if it had been patterned after one. Squat and rectangular, it sat by itself in a clearing about halfway up the steep hillside. In the dark, the woods appeared unbroken as the headlights of their borrowed Explorer swept them. On the long drive up from the main road, Irene caught sight of a half dozen mailboxes along the roadside, but each was separated by a half mile or more.

  As dawn approached, the ticking clock felt like a physical weight upon her shoulders, as if each passing moment slid Ashley and Kelly deeper into jeopardy. As Boxers brought the vehicle to a halt, Irene felt compelled to dial things back a little with the guys.

  “Gentlemen,” she said. “After last time, we need to take a gentler approach. We knew for certain that Jennings was a murderer, even though he turned out not to be the man who snatched my children. With Ramus, all we have is a strong suspicion—third-hand suspicion at that. I want to be a little less ... brutal in our interrogation.”

  “Don’t we know that he traffics in children?” Boxers asked.

  “We strongly suspect, but we don’t know. If we knew, he’d be in jail.”

  Boxers chuckled and shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he said.

  Irene ignored him. She understood his frustration, just as she was beginning to understand the addiction to justice served Batman-style, but she couldn’t allow herself to wander too far astray of her moral compass. “I see no need for rifles,” she said. “No sense spinning him up too far too fast.”

  Big Guy clearly didn’t agree.

  “She’s the boss,” Jonathan said, earning him a smile from Irene.

  She took that as a compliment.

  “So, how do you want to handle it, Boss?” Boxers asked. His tone was far less tolerant.

  “For starters,” Irene said, “Let’s actually cover the back door this time.”

  “That’s for Big Guy,” Jonathan said. “He’s always been a back-door guy.”

  Irene would have missed the sexual double entendre if Boxers hadn’t flipped him off as he walked around the back. There was a part of men’s brains, she decided, that simply stopped developing after sixth grade.

  “We’ll knock in two minutes,” Jonathan said, checking his watch. Then he winked at Irene. “Sorry. That probably sounded like I was trying to take control.”

  Irene waved the comment away. “You two seem to think each other’s thoughts. I wouldn’t dream of getting in the way of that. Is he as scary as he seems?”

  Jonathan coughed out a laugh. “Oh, God, yes. He’s the smartest, most lethal human being I have ever met. And I know a lot of very smart, very lethal guys. We’ve been through a lot together.”

  The way Jonathan said that last part, Irene knew that there would be no elaboration.

  Just as one would imagine, the two minutes crawled by in slow motion. At one minute and sixty seconds, Jonathan nodded to Irene. “Ready when you are.” He drew his .45 and stepped to the side of the door, his back to the wall.

  Her heart hammering, Irene took a deep breath, rapped hard on the hollow core door with the knuckle of her middle finger, and then moved down off the stoop into the yard and stepped a few feet to the side. As every law enforcement officer was aware, the area directly in front of a closed door was known as the cone of death. To stand there eliminated a bad guy’s need to aim before he blasted through the door.

  After fifteen seconds or so, Irene nodded to Jonathan, who reached out and pounded again, never moving his back from the front wall. Of course, given the quality of construction, the wall provided him with little more protection than the hollow core door.

  “Who is it?” a voice asked. It sounded both sleepy and frightened.

  “Leo Ramus, it’s the police,” Irene said. In the silence of the morning, it sounded like she was shouting, but that wasn’t her intent. “We need to talk to you.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Mr. Ramus, please just open the door and let us in. You are not in trouble.” That one earned her a surprised look from Jonathan.

  “Do you know what time it is?” Ramus shouted. “If I’m not in trouble, what are you doing here at this hour of the morning?”

  “Open the door and we’ll talk.”

  “Do you have a warrant?”

  Irene sighed. “Mr. Ramus, please don’t—”

  “Hey!” Ramus shouted. “Who the hell are you?” There was a sound of a struggle. “Hey! Ow! You can’t do that.”

  Up on the porch, Jonathan was laughing.

  Five seconds later, the door opened to reveal Boxers standing in the opening, a nearly naked Ramus dangling from his forearm. “He says you can come in,” Big Guy said. To Irene’s disapproving look, he said, “The back door was unlocked, okay?”

  No, it wasn’t okay, but it was done.

  The neatness of Ramus’s house surprised Irene. In her mind’s eye, predators lived in hives rather than homes. She expected to find food wrappers strewn among years-old newspapers and magazines, and the stench of decaying trash. She’d expected Jennings’s place. What she found instead was a neat, well-cared-for little bungalow furnished with pieces that had been recently purchased, though no doubt from a discount chain store. His color palette ran to the browns and blacks that were typical of a bachelor pad, though he preferred rugged fabrics to leather, and a Danish modern styling that had to be rare in this part of the country.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ramus sputtered after rebounding off the back of the sofa Boxers had shoved him onto. “You have no right to do this. You need a warrant. You need something. It’s five-thirty in the morning!”

  “I always did want a talking watch,” Boxers said.

  Irene nudged Big Guy out of the way. “I’ve got it from here,” she said.

  Boxers took a giant step back out of the way, and then he and Jonathan busied themselves with other things as she pulled a chair closer and settled in to talk with Ramus.

  “Hey, that’s my stuff!” Ramus protested as the men started rifling through his belongings. “You can’t go through that.”

  Irene smacked him across the face, just hard enough to get his attention. “Focus, Leo.”

  His eyes focused on her, hard and hot.

  “Don’t pay any attention to them,” she said. “Focus on me. I am where your nightmare resides.”

  Now that Ramus was fully awake, anger began to take the place of his fear and confusion. “I want to talk to my lawyer,” he declared.

  Irene smiled. “Yeah, well, we all dream of things we can’t have.”

  “You said you’re a cop. I asked for my lawyer. I don’t have to say another word to you.”

  Irene nodded as she pretended to consider his words. “I understand your confusion,” she said, “but there are a couple of other conditions in play. First of all, while I am a cop, I’m not the type of cop you’re used to, and I’m damn sure not following the same cop procedures that you’re used to.”

  She waited for the confusion to register. “For you,” she continued, “that’s both good news and bad news. The good news is that we’re not really a
fter you, despite the fact that we know you’re a child molester and a kidnapper.”

  Ramus turned red. “I am no such—”

  “Shut up,” Irene snapped. “I want exactly one piece of information from you. Since I won’t be able to use any of what you give me in court, there’s no downside to any confession you give. You’ll have whole hours to pull your stuff together and get out before we collect any real evidence to put you away. Think of this as your opportunity for pre-arrest parole.”

  Ramus’s color deepened. “I already told you that—”

  “Shut up, Leo.” Irene’s words were much louder this time. “When I’m done talking, you can say anything you like. For now, I want to know where Tony Mayo is. And if you pretend not to know his name, I’ll ask my big friend here to cut your lower lip off.” She had no idea where that image came from, but it clearly had the desired effect. Ramus’s face went from red to white.

  Irene drove her point home. “Which brings us to your bad news. This is not official business. There’s no record of me being here. That means we can pretty much do whatever we want to you, all without consequence.” She paused for effect. “So think your answers through carefully before offering them up. I suggest you frame them in a way that is best guaranteed to bring us face to face with Tony Mayo. Like I said before, he’s the one we want. Now it’s your turn.”

  For a full fifteen seconds, Ramus just stared. His eyes didn’t move and he didn’t blink as his brain churned through his options. “Okay,” he said, finally. “Okay, I know Tony, but only as a desperate, screwed-up FBI guy. He’s talked to me a few times about stuff. But it’s not like we’re friends or anything. I have no idea where he might be. Why are you so anxious to find him?”

  So this was how it was going to go. Irene leaned back in her chair, a posture designed to project patience that she didn’t have. “Leo, I’m going to throw you a bone here. If you cooperate—”

  Irene sensed Jonathan’s approach from behind, so she was not startled when his hand touched her shoulder. “We found these,” he said. His voice sounded sad and she noted the fear in Ramus’s eyes as they grew huge. A piece of paper approached from around her shoulder. It looked like something from a copy machine—a memo, maybe—but there was an image on one side, a cheap, black and white copy of a photograph made by a Polaroid.