by Ben English
“Somebody’s got access to his account, then,” Steve said. “The same address he used for our—for his last, um, burgle.”
“It’s from his father,” Jack said. “He promised a list of Raines’ targets.”
It was a brief table of names, notes, addresses. Nearly half of them had been struck through. There were even dates next to some of the names.
“We need to get to work on this,” Ian said.
Jack’s sigh surprised him, and he realized he’d been hoping to get some rest on the plane. “All right. Once we’re in the air, I want everyone up on the network. Al and I will take a good look at Cuba, set up the logistics there. Steve, go to work on the list. These are hot targets, they need to be pulled to safety as quick as we can make it happen.
“Ian, before you work up your profile of Raines, look over the list. We still need the golden why to all this un-neighborly behavior.”
“Jack.” Alonzo pressed his finger to the screen, drawing a complaint from Steve. “The next name on the list is scheduled for last night.”
“Roger Switzer. Why isn’t he crossed off?”
Ian squinted against the growing light. “He’s in San Francisco. It’s still last night on the West Coast.”
Steve and Alonzo started talking at the same time.
“We can’t get to him in time.”
“Homeland Security, turn it over—”
Ian cut them off. “We still have a man in San Francisco.”
Steve closed his mouth audibly.
“Sure. Pete.” Jack said. “He’ll be awake.”
Alonzo nodded, but Steve spread his hands and leaned back. “He gives me the creeps, Jack. There’s something just not right there.”
Jack looked straight at him. “He’s on the team.” He glanced at Ian, Alonzo. “Does anyone think we’re ready to turn this over to Homeland or the FBI?”
“Not without full disclosure,” Alonzo said. “We can’t even prove Raines’ involvement in London. According to his website, he was at an executive retreat in Barbados with his board of directors yesterday. We’re not ready. Without a report—neatly typed, in triplicate, with accompanying PowerPoint, we’re not ready to share.”
Ian agreed. “There’s a new Agent in Charge at the San Francisco office. Very touchy, very careful. Checks everything over twice since the VX gas scare a few years back. Even if I called him myself, he’d request verification from the Bureau, getting his boss out of bed. This is time we don’t have. Call Pete.”
“Call Pete,” Alonzo echoed, pushing himself slowly to his feet. “Criminy, I feel like an old man.”
Jack looked again at Steve. “Use his old contact info. He doesn’t change his habits much, the numbers should still be good. If you can’t reach him, I’ve got a last resort number you can use.”
Steve was back to desperate. “Why me?”
Jack’s phone pinged. He stole a glance at the screen, then answered. “You need to get to know Pete a little better. He could answer your questions about death and killing a grand sight better than the rest of us could. I’ll help you stow your gear. Our transportation is on its way.”
Steve wet his lips, attached a hardline cable to his phone, and plugged into his computer. It took him three tries to stab the connector into the port, and two tries to type the number in correctly.
“You mean we’re not taking one of these?” Alonzo tilted his head toward the World War II-era bombers.
Jack stood. “Something a little quicker.”
Alonzo leaned onto his heels, thumbs massaging the small of his back. “No time for a nap?”
“Three hours.”
“It’s a ten hour flight, Jack.”
“We’ll be there in three hours.” Jack looked over Alonzo’s shoulder at the airplane taxiing toward them. Even on the ground, it sliced through the air without effort.
Alonzo heard the hum and turned, and his mouth fell open.
“What in hell.” Ian stated.
The body of the plane was lifted and angled in the middle, making the cockpit look like a raised, sleek muzzle. The canards—small, raised wings near the cockpit—added to the canine semblance, giving the impression of happy, doglike ears above the sleek windshield. What surprised Jack—even though he’d been expecting the plane—was the lack of sound. The engines, slung low and wide under the backswept wings, barely rustled, though their mechanical intensity resonated through the air and earth around them. The plane stopped, the engines pulsed once, and Jack felt his bones shake.
Ian whistled. “What are we looking at, Al?”
“That’s a QSST. Quiet Something-something—Quiet Supersonic Transport. He looked at Jack. “Is it for me?”
“Won’t quite do Mach 2, but it can be flown quiet, and doesn’t need much runway.”
“Like the old Concord?” Steve asked.
“Better,” Alonzo said. He touched the smooth sloping underbelly of the craft, and marvelously, his voice could be heard over the singing of the engines. “The design breaks up the two big sonic booms into lots of little quiet ones, so you can legally fly it over land.”
“You like it?”
“Better than the pony I got when I was seven.” Was that a catch in his voice?
Jack hefted his duffels. “Raines has one just like it. According to MI5 it filed a flight plan out of Farnborough airfield, outside London, about three hours ago.”
“Well. This’ll do,” said Ian. “We needed a ride.” He hefted his luggage and made for the descending stairway.
It took them a few minutes inside to stash all their gear. While the flight crew assisted Steve with setting up the computers, Jack and Alonzo stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the main compartment. “So it’s ours, with a year’s supply of gas and pilot time.”
“This is an eighty million dollar plane, Jack. Just the plane by itself, forget the Marantz theater and the nice toilet.”
“I told them you’d promise not to break it. Actually the Queen’s idea. William and his family are glad to have their little girl back, and want to help us get Raines.”
“Probably would have given us a commando brigade of the Royal Marines, if we’d asked,” said Ian. “So Jack, can we, ah – use this for personal travel?”
Alonzo’s eyes drifted around the cabin, following the lines of teak and steel until they came to rest on the flight attendant, who stood perkily near the flight deck. “I vote yes. Shame to keep anything this gorgeous out of the sky.”
Jack stifled a reply and found a comfortable spot in one of the club chairs. Al wasn’t too wounded to hit on the staff. Take it as a good sign.
“Mr. Flynn, we’re most pleased to have you aboard. We’ve been informed of your flight requirements, and have permission to queue up for an approach to the runway.” Welsh accent, like Major Griffin. From the corner of his eye, Jack noticed Alonzo sit up even further in his chair. She smiled, and Alonzo made a faint, strangled sound. “I apologize for the lack of services before takeoff, but we understand that speed is the first order of the day. Once we are airborne, what would you gentlemen like for breakfast?”
As she began to busy herself about the cabin, she paused at Jack’s chair. “A pleasure to have you aboard, sir.” She looked earnestly at Alonzo, glanced at his clothes before clearing her throat.
“Forgive me for being so gauche, but are you an actor too?"
“Actor? No ma'am. I work for a living. I'm a stunt man for the porn industry."
Her expression didn’t change as she nodded pleasantly. “Why, of course.”
Jack waited until she moved further away, and said, “That was smooth.”
“You should see me dance.”
As the plane began moving towards the runway, Alonzo looked across the aisle to where Ian and Steve had walled themselves in behind computer screens. When Steve felt Alonzo’s gaze, he glanced up.
Alonzo asked him directly: "What do you regret the most? Sol's death or the men you had to shoot?"
Steve's
answer came quietly, without hesitation. "Solomon." He swallowed and grimaced, and his face grew red.
Broad beams of light lanced through the windows as the plane turned broadside against the rising sun.
Ian gently reached across and gripped Steve’s shoulder, almost with enough strength to pull him out of the chair. Jack clasped his hands in the light and spread his fingers wide, forming a moving fan which winnowed the sunrise and spread the light around them.
“You're on the right track," he said. "I can't tell you how long the road is, but you're on the right track."
“I hope that’s the truth.” Sadness weighted the young man’s words.
Alonzo nodded. “I know one truth that you’re about to teach Alex Raines.”
They all looked at him.
“Beware the fury of a humble man.”
He leaned back, patted his coat pockets. “I wonder if they’ll let me smoke in here. Anybody seen my cigars?” A beat, and a hand shot to his bandaged ribs. “Where are my smokes?”
“Jack?”
The High Lord of San Francisco
California
Midnight
At what point does courage border on the foolish, or valor reveal itself as goofy obstinacy? The guy just didn’t know he was outclassed, even though he was carrying a shotgun, revolver, grenade, crowbar, and a crossbow. Crossbow, for crying out loud. The engineer behind the computer kept at the game doggedly, determined to die in the most embarrassing ways available to him. Some fools just wouldn’t stay dead.
Motionless, Pete Dalton rested two hundred feet above Haight Street, under the sharp gables of a vacated Victorian. His perch on the raingutter afforded the perfect view of Roger Switzer’s apartment, a corner suite with wide, deep windows, not much in the way of curtains, less yet in the way of taste. The sixth on a short list of five dead scientists, Switzer remained blissful and busy in front of three angled computer screens, alternating his attention between a text document, a CAD rendering of several tiny, interlocking machines, and an online first-person shooter game.
Switzer wasn’t very good at the Internet version (multiplayer games involved interacting with other, flesh-and-blood humans), and Pete decided he had no concept of flank protection; every time Switzer spawned a new virtual self he was mowed down by a crossfire of shotgun blasts or rocket-propelled grenades. Avoiding death by mutilation wasn’t his forte, and as the evening progressed, the balding, rumpled man before the three virtual windows spent more and more time staring at, or perhaps through, the middle screen, scanning page after page of schematics.
Watching a middle-aged, mid-career computer jockey stumble repeatedly into his own gruesome murder was not Pete Dalton’s activity of choice on a night in the City, but Pete’s relationship with death could generally be described as unconventional.
Pete saw the man breathing, noticed when he got up to use the bathroom or refill his Diet Coke or fetch a pack of Pop-Tarts from the freezer, but merely noted these things in passing. Pete’s full attention, his real point of focus lay eight feet below him and just back inside the upper window of the vacant Victorian. Vacant, not empty.
There were two men inside, and by the smell of grease and gun oil, at least one of them had a high-powered rifle. The two men took better than average care to remain unseen and unheard in their perch opposite Switzer’s loft. From their unavoidable noises and scraps of conversation, Pete learned they’d already spent two nights using surveillance equipment to record everything Switzer did—every password, every keystroke. Blessed with the patience common to snipers and herdsmen, the two men below watched Switzer and waited. The first night they ordered food from the Indian place on the corner, the next they called ahead and picked up sandwiches from Molotov’s down the street. They had no idea Pete joined them on their third night, moving through the crowds around them, feeling his own kind of hunger, and listening.
After the first ten minutes, Pete had pictures of both, their shared address, and a rough estimation of the firepower they carried under their long jackets. They dressed in the hard-to-light layers common to San Franciscans inured to the icy fog; they’d worked in the City before. By the end of the first hour Pete was convinced that Jack had it wrong; this was simple, low-grade industrial espionage. Despite their weapons it was obvious they were intent on stealing whatever Switzer was working on. The hit team must be elsewhere.
During the second hour, after a few beers, they were noisier than usual, laughing and kidding each other about the family they had just killed. Taking up residence temporarily in San Francisco was an easy prospect; the City had the easiest hotel access of any on the west coast. The two enterprising souls beneath Pete, however, had taken it upon themselves to locate less conspicuous and traceable accommodations in the Inner Richmond, posing as professional movers assisting a newly-arrived family as they set up house. Hacking email accounts was an easy matter for the short killer, and by the time he’d sent resignations to the husband’s and wife’s respective employers, cancelled the daughter’s judo and piano lessons, and unlocked the couple’s bank accounts, his partner had everyone stripped, gagged, and tied into interesting positions in the basement.
“Did you see her face when she realized what the pliers were for?”
Pete’s stomach roiled at the macabre nostalgia, at how the two men kept teasing each other with the details of their acts upon the helpless family. Despair and rage yawned before him, a far deeper, emptier vacuum than the four story plunge to the street. He nearly blew the surveillance when he realized he was too late to help, that Martin, Amy and Melissa were already dead. A shingle cracked off under his grip, grated over the gutter, and fell at shattering speed towards the street.
Pete found himself praying then that he’d been detected, imagined himself swinging down and around the gutter into the faces of the two killers, to be done with the matter right then and there, but he held off a moment, enough to gather the sense to hold the anger back, push it down, force it to wait. His eyes fell upon the bobbing, balding head of Roger Switzer as he lost yet another version of himself on the virtual battlefield, while two flesh-and-blood killers recorded the evolving substance of his other two screens via laser-listening tools and telemetrically enhanced digital video cameras.
So Pete listened, hungered for motion, and watched the watchers.
They took a break a bit after midnight, and both headed downstairs again to Molotov’s for dinner and an intense conversation with a salt-and-pepper haired local named Ramone.
Pete studied all three.
Ramone acted as rough as anyone else in the establishment, but his occasional lapses of bravado and insouciance gave Pete the impression that by day, Ramone was a junior accountant on Sansome Street. The two killers seemed to care less what the younger man did during the day, but before the meeting was over they’d passed him a carton of money and drugs. Then it was business as usual: sneak up into the old house across from Switzer’s for another hour of clumsy, vicarious video death with a touch of industrial espionage on the side.
Near one in the morning, Pete sensed an excited shift in the activities below. They were dismantling their equipment, making careless noise. One of them laughed out loud, and Pete smelled cigarette smoke.
Switzer had been out of sight for 20 minutes, except for part of a pair of black boots that passed back and forth frequently between his bedroom and bathroom. Pete supposed the two below had a better view into the apartment, or knew from prior observation what their quarry was up to. “What a tool,” one of them said, quite loudly, and his companion agreed. “What’s next, a cape? There’s gotta be laws against that much hair gel.”
When at last Pete caught a glimpse, he was baffled. As Switzer bent over his computer, Pete clearly saw the outfit, but didn’t understand it. The balding programmer wore black leather pants, thigh-high thick-heeled boots, a flowing silk shirt that laced at the neck, and a dark blue sash that matched the twin blue bandoliers that crisscrossed his chest. His compute
r secure, Switzer pulled on a pair of black gloves and strode over to the window. He’d obviously applied something to his face, and he now appeared paler than before. Switzer stood at his window and glowered down on Haight street for several seconds.
The killers in the Victorian sniggered.
A black trenchcoat completed his Goth getup. Switzer seized his keys from the peg near the front door, and stormed out, coattails swirling. The two toughs in the room beneath Pete seemed to be taking their time packing up, in no hurry to follow. Pete moved away as quickly as he was able, leapt to the roof of an adjacent building, and barely made it onto the street before Switzer’s new Jaguar left the parking garage. If the killers weren’t following, Pete decided they knew where the costumed scientist was heading, or at least where to find him later. He turned his attention on following Switzer.
The scientist drove like he was still in a computer game, sloppy and fast. He pushed the Jaguar through Hayes Valley, then took Van Ness over the hill and down into the Marina. Wind had blown any fog off the streets, and white foam crowned a million waves out in the bay. Near the water Switzer turned west on Marina Boulevard and parked near the beach at the east end of Crissy Field, across the street from the Palace of Fine Arts.
Pete liked the Palace. When San Francisco was preparing to host the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, in celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal, nearly everything in the City was shiny and fresh—rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake and ensuing fire. Feeling the new City lacked a classic, timeless aspect, the Exposition’s organizers created what Pete considered an architectural marvel, an overgrown, classic ruin at the edge of the town proper. It reminded him of a Piranesi engraving. Arches, courts, Greek colonnades, and columns broke the San Francisco skyline. Heroic, colossal figures were everywhere. The artistry of the Gilded Age was poured into the Exposition showplace, and some of that man-made magic remained. Pete had only ever seen it at night, when the orange-and-gold illumination underneath the giant Roman rotunda lent it an air of enchantment, a witch-like beauty.
