by Lewis Perdue
The street threw off heat like a griddle. The wind had shifted since his run and howled in now from the east, a Santa Ana, wind special-delivering desert heat and Central Valley pollution. A Santa Ana often sparked forest fires and tempers.
Dan felt the dark spots grow around his armpits and soak through the lower back of his knit shirt. He stopped for the light at Osos. At the foot of a shade tree, a battered old man with undisciplined hair and a matted beard coaxed a ragged tune from his guitar. Gabriel hesitated for a moment, then recognized a man in far worse shape than he was. The light changed. Dan pulled a five from his wallet, dropped it in the man's open guitar case, and stepped off the curb to cross the street.
Half a block down, Gabriel pushed open the glass door of the Chinese buffet and made his way to the host's podium. High-backed, leatherette booths, dark walls, dim lighting, and a massive steam table dominated the center of the roam. Gabriel needed this dim anonymity to conduct a meeting that didn't happen. He looked at his watch. Noon straight-up.
The host seated a couple of elderly ladies with flowered dresses, refilled the iced tea glass of a lone student with a thick textbook, and finally made his way toward Gabriel. Suddenly a waving hand emerged from the shadows across the room, then the dim outline of a familiar face.
Dan waved back, nodded his greetings to the host, then made his way to shake Jack Kilgore's outstretched hand.
"You're looking trim these days, General." Kilgore's voice carried a deep, booming authority that inspired fear or confidence depending on whose side you were on.
"Thanks," Gabriel said as he slid into the booth facing Kilgore. "General."
"Yeah, hell, they'll probably take the freaking star if I tell the padded asses at the Pentagon to stuff it one more time, now that I don't have you and Braxton as my point men."
Gabriel's laugh was genuine.
Jack Kilgore had been a member of Task Force 86M for nearly fifteen years and its commander for five. He had been Gabriel's first and only choice for the top slot. Kilgore had a reputation for cutting through BS to get a job done. Right. The first time. But his disdain for paperwork and bureaucracy had earned him enemies among the paper-pushers. His bold operational plans made others nervous and branded him a cowboy.
"It only looks risky when you don't understand the situation," Kilgore explained time and again. "And the upholstered assholes in Washington don't have enough combat experience to understand which end of their freaking M16 gets pointed which way." Kilgore had an enormous capacity to hold every single one of the important elements of a situation in his head all at the same time and to look at things as a whole rather than just piece by piece.
Few officers had this gift, and that was one of the two reasons Dan had called on Kilgore. The other was obviously firepower and intel.
"You're right," Gabriel said when the lightness of his laughter gave way to the real reason for the meeting. "But that's not why I called."
"Didn't think so."
"Like I said before, this is a conversation we never had."
"Most of my conversations these days are like that," Kilgore said. "Problem is sometimes I can't remember whether I forgot a conversation because I was supposed to or because I'm getting old." He smiled, but Gabriel didn't pick up on it.
"We have a problem which may need some extracurricular activity."
"Uh-huh. Another training mission?" Kilgore used his fingers to put quotes around training.
"Maybe. It's about a secret operation called Project Enduring Valor." Dan waited for a look of recognition, but got only a frown. "It's a high-priority effort. Braxton says it's got some bad history."
"How bad?"
"Enough to blow his presidential bid out of the water."
Kilgore made a low whistle. Then: "You hungry?"
"A little."
"It sounds like you're going to need some time to fill me in." Dan nodded.
"You paying?"
Gabriel nodded.
"Then I'm hungry too."
Kilgore slid out of his seat and headed for the buffet. Gabriel followed him.
For the next forty-five minutes over food made banal enough for the average middle-American palate, Dan laid out the situation. Kilgore ate quietly, rarely interrupted, as he absorbed the connection between the illegal experiments, My Lai, Frank Harper, and Braxton's head wound.
Kilgore stopped eating entirely when Dan related the details of the soon-to-bedeployed Xantaeus patches.
When Dan ran out of words, Kilgore looked at him in silence for several moments.
"You're sitting right on top of a drum of fuggy old nitroglycerin, aren't you?"
Gabriel nodded. "And I have to make a decision in the next seventy-two hours. There's a huge series of meetings at the General's—"
"He still calling it Castello Da Vinci?"
Gabriel nodded.
Kilgore frowned. "That's awfully pretentious."
"But it looks awfully good on a wine label."
"Whoopee-do. Everybody and their yard boy up there has their own wine label."
"Not on a bottle selling for five hundred dollars and up—if you're lucky enough to find one for sale."
"Still—"
"Yeah, I'm with you on all that wine porn crap." Gabriel paused to drain the last sips of his iced tea. When it was gone, he rattled the ice around in the glass before continuing.
"General Braxton's hosting a series of top-level meetings over the next three days. Some relate to the campaign, some are social and fundraising events. There's one that Braxton has been tight-lipped about, and I'm sure it's about Project Enduring Valor."
Kilgore nodded as he turned his concentration on chasing a chow mein noodle around his plate with his chopsticks. Finally, he gave up and raised his face to met Gabriel's eyes. "Lord, lord." Kilgore shook his head and rubbed at his chin. "My experience has been that the General is rarely wrong about military matters." "Therein lies the problem."
"On the other hand, I may have heard about this Stone fellow," Kilgore said. "You and I live in a pretty small world. We're talking ancient history, but it's easy enough to check out."
"Soon?"
"This afternoon." Kilgore took a bite of moo shoo pork and washed it down with iced tea. "You've never been this spooked before, old son. You've got to put on your operational hat or you're going to get hurt."
Gabriel nodded.
"Well, besides Stone, the ultimate hard choice we have to make on the usual incomplete information concerns the Xantaeus issue and Braxton's connection." Kilgore paused to study the ceiling. "Genies don't go back into their bottles." He shook his head. "Nukes came out and stayed. CBW. The chemical warrior ain't crawling back inside either. Braxton's right about making sure we win the wars."
Gabriel opened his mouth, but Kilgore held up his hand.
"On the other hand, if the effects are not completely reversible—even if a tenth of one percent never come out of it—we have a national disaster, a whole new class of highly capable killers who can't turn it off. Maybe a lot of them who look normal and act normal, but in the end what we could end up with are bunch of domestic My Lais."
Gabriel nodded.
"But you might be wrong. You could be contravening a decision when you don't have as much data as Braxton has. It's a command thing."
"Braxton's not in the military anymore and neither am I."
"Technically you're correct. But in reality, were in a war for the soul and security of this country. It's never been in greater danger. And brave, good people like this Stone fellow do get killed in a war, sometimes they have to be sacrificed. It's not right, but sometimes it's the only alternative.
"Now, mind you, I'm not yet convinced the General's right. However, if we play the odds, we both know his judgment has been vindicated so many times I can't think of the last time he was wrong."
"Bothers me too," Gabriel said.
"Good! Absolute certainty's killed more people than informed ambiguity, which means we ha
ve to take the ball the General has handed off and run with it until and unless we find we're headed toward the wrong goalposts."
"What if we don't realize it until it's too late?"
Kilgore gave him a broad smile. "You've been pushing a desk way too long, old buddy."
CHAPTER 61
Fog still shrouded the landscape like a gesso wash, robbing the world of depth and color and making close things seem far away. Jasmine and I drove through a few rare spots where the sun had burned completely through, but most everywhere else we looked, a bright, lethal glare left us frowning and squinting.
"Okay, if I remember correctly, we should find a little track leading through that line of trees up there." Jasmine chewed on a corner of her lower lip as she stared intently ahead, steering the pale silver SUV south along a serpentine gravel track paved with ruts and washboard corrugations.
A thin selvage of trees and tangled vines along the Tallahatchie River hurtled past on the left. Cotton in full bloom rushed by on the right.
For the best part of an hour, Jasmine had navigated the SUV along a backwoods odyssey of roads—paved, gravel, unpaved—and more than a few dirt and mud tracks that required the SUV's four-wheel drive. She kept us off the main roads and on a mostly northerly course.
Occasionally in the distance, we saw police-car light bars strobing in the haze. It didn't take much imagination to interpret those as roadblocks, although the radio made no mention of a manhunt or the shooting of a sheriff's deputy by a mysterious blond woman.
With nothing better to do, I tinkered periodically with the SUV's Global Positioning System navigation unit. According to the GPS, we were nowhere near anything. And that offered yet another metaphor for the Delta.
Abruptly, I pitched forward as Jasmine stabbed at the brakes.
"There." She pointed. I followed her finger and, right off the tip, saw a break in the trees materialize out of the glare. Slowing to a crawl, she turned the SUV cautiously left and stopped in front of the rusted superstructure of a condemned bridge barricaded with dire warnings. She stopped the SUV nose to nose with a red-and-white- striped barrier.
"Wait here."
She put the SUV in park and got out. To its credit, the GPS display showed us on the Tallahatchie's west bank, south of Ruby. Jasmine strode confidently around the barriers and out onto the bridge.
Then she faded to a shadowy cipher on the far side, and a shadow of loss fell across my heart. I turned from the image and tinkered with the GPS for distraction, looking for Tyrone Freedman's house, which, according to the latest technology, existed nowhere except in a native Deltan's head.
While I worried about dragging Tyrone further into this mess and second-guessed my own memories of how well we had connected back at the hospital, I'd called his cell not long after Jasmine had steered us away from John's pickup in the killer's SUV.
"You're lucky I'm in the imaging lab," he'd told me. "Whole hospital's crawling with Feds and some really creepy guys with dead eyes."
He volunteered shelter faster than I could ask. I talked him out of doing more.
Jasmine made her way out of the fog now and, with an easy, swift familiarity, moved the barriers blocking access to the bridge.
"I would have thought those barricades would be a lot more permanent," I said when she got back in.
"They were once, but the locals made some changes, otherwise they have to go down to Money or up to Minter City to cross."
She put the SUV in gear, eased past the barrier then stopped. Without being asked, I got out and dragged the barrier back in place behind us. As Jasmine drove, I tried not to look at the decrepit, weathered boards covering the bridge's roadway or the storm-roiled brown water below. I also tried to ignore how the bridge swayed and yawed and struggled to ignore the great pancake-sized scabs of rust flaking off the bridge's elderly, anemic girders.
* * * * * In the swirling silver mist, a lean, lit, muscular man stood at the edge of the trees and brush and followed the pale silver SUV's taillights disappearing across the old Tallahatchie bridge. He pulled the baseball cap off his head and ran his other hand across the top of his head and nodded to himself.
"Good try," he said quietly as he replaced the baseball cap on his head and adjusted the pitch, rotation, and yaw a degree here and there until he got it precisely where he liked it. "But not good enough to lose me."
It was a process of elimination, and from the data he'd gathered and from what he knew about the two, there would be only one place they'd go. He smiled as he walked back to his truck.
CHAPTER 62
The muddy, leaf-matted clearing in front of Jasmine Thompson's sharecropper's shack looked like an all-night doughnut stand at 3:00 A.M. Four sheriff's cruisers were jammed fender to fender with a highway patrol car, two boxy ambulances, the coroners personal car, a crime scene van, and a hearse.
John Myers stood at the center of the circus, playing ringmaster and repeatedly telling paramedics he wouldn't leave until he was damn well ready. From the moment they'd arrived, they'd poked and prodded at him, attached an EKG, pumped the blood pressure cuff on his good arm time and again, and seemed awfully disappointed to find his blood pressure normal, his EKG solid and healthy, and his heartbeat right at seventy (ten beats faster than normal, but he wasn't about to tell them that).
He allowed them to give him an antibiotic but refused the pain medicine. He needed a clear head, for a while at least.
"Yo! Don't walk over there! Evidence." Myers's voice was as deep, loud, and commanding as ever, and no one at the scene was inclined to mess with his authority.
Before the first vehicles had arrived, Myers had used the camera function on his new cell phone to document the scene. He took close-ups and long shots. He took a picture from the sniper's position, then he walked over and took a picture toward the dead sniper from the spot he had been hit, easy enough to spot by the blood on the ground.
He had taken a lot of shots of the dead blond woman, including close-ups of her face, tattoo, and the curious pharmaceutical patch.
Then he had e-mailed all of the photos to himself and his usual cc: list, including a secret Yahoo! mail account he had used since his wife's death to surf Internet chat rooms as a younger, hipper version of himself.
Myers had also taken good shots of the rifle and the scope and, with a great deal of pain, had written down the serial numbers of both. These he had laboriously entered with one hand into an e-mail along with the data off the dog tag and sent to himself and the same recipients as the photos.
Now, Myers watched with satisfaction as the forensics team shot the same images from the same angles with professional, high-resolution cameras, close-up lenses, and tripods. A videographer walked the scene.
With every photo, note, and foot of tape shot by his own people, Myers relaxed. But as the sustaining tide of adrenaline ebbed, the throbbing in his shoulder surged like a red-hot rod. He tried to keep the pain from his face, but instants later an overachieving paramedic appeared at Myers's side.
"You okay, Sarge?"
"Just fine." Myers tried to wave him off, but the sandy-haired young man with pink skin and freckles didn't walk away as earlier.
"Sarge, even if you feel okay right now, the chemicals thrown off from the injury can come hack to bite you in the ass. Shock might not be out of the question."
"I'm gonna shock you, son, if you don't leave me alone." But Myers noted his own lack of conviction. Then right when John had decided to sit down, a new sound popped his adrenaline level up a notch. The distent thwack of a helicopter drifted in among the work sounds. As it grew louder, Myers focused on the sound: too deep for the little old bubblecockpit Sikorskys used for crop dusting. Wrong pitch for the Sheriff Department's Bell JetRanger.
When Myers realized the helicopter sound was growing loud way too fast for any civilian chopper in his memory, the dread settled in on top of his heart. He'd known this would happen even as he'd prayed it would not. An instant later he looked up
as an Army Blackhawk helicopter thundered over the clearing.
Faces turned upward as one. Mouths open to the sky. Myers looked around and thought of hatchlings in a nest expecting to be fed.
The Blackhawk returned and hovered over the clearing. Armed men hung out the side door. One of them held what looked like a video camera. Myers palmed his phone and held it unobtrusively at his side, taking photos as fast as his phone would allow.
Everything else happened in a blur. As soon as Myers looked around, he saw a Humvee come around the curve and into the clearing, the growl of its motor covered by the Blackhawk's powerful engine. The Humvee was the genuine military-issue article, not one of those fake Hot Wheels Hummers favored by wannabes with too much money. Myers took more photos, hit his speed dial, and took more.
Another Humvee followed, and behind them two dark green Suburbans with tinted windows and the all-too-familiar white-and-blue license plates that screamed, "Feds!"
Four combat-ready soldiers complete with body armor and kraut helmets piled out of each Humvee. Simultaneously, the Suburbans disgorged six or seven SWAT-ready Feds each. Myers lost interest in counting.
The soldiers and the Feds fanned out. The Feds pushed their way through Myers's men and shoved them aside. One of them snatched the videographer's camera away. Myers snapped that photo then e-mailed it and all the others. Then he shoved the phone in his pocket and strode to the Fed with the video camera—his damned video camera.
"What the hell you think you're doing?" Myers yelled, and reached over with his good hand.
The hand never got close.
A crushing blow whacked the breath out of his lungs and dropped Myers to the ground. He landed on his wounded shoulder and managed to hear his own scream of pain over the drone of the Blackhawk's rotors. He rolled off the wounded shoulder and saw the Feds, with soldiers covering their backs, as they relieved all of the law enforcement officers present of their firearms, batons, Mace, and pepper spray.
