Whirlwind

by Joseph R. Garber

  You’re dead, McKenzie. Sam answered, although he did not say it aloud. As of this moment, you are a fucking corpse. Johan Schmidt is your undertaker, and I’m the one who’s pissing on your grave.

  Charlie spun on his heel, stalking back toward his plane. One of the secret service agents called out, asking for instructions. “Let him go,” Sam spat as he pulled himself to his feet. He choked back his fury, smothering words he did not dare speak, Deadline! Friday noon! Either you deliver Kolodenkova or it’s open season, big bucks for whoever brings the cunt in, shoot to kill, hang her up by her heels and gut her and skin her like a deer in season, I’ll have her fucking head on my office wall, no more games, McKenzie, it ends, fuck you, it ends! Deadline! Read my lips! Dead! Line!

  “Deal!” he couldn’t stop himself from roaring. “We have a deal. And you damn well better honor it!”

  Charlie was in the Citation’s hatch. He glanced over his shoulder, extending the middle finger of his right hand. Within minutes his plane was airborne, turning lazily northwest and disappearing from sight.

  He was gone, long gone when the helicopter — a stylized eagle logo on its fuselage — feathered down on the runway beside Sam’s Falcon.

  And Johan Schmidt — summoned from a canyon of corpses and carnage — nodded briskly at his new orders.

  7

  Betrayals

  Wednesday, July 22.

  1930 Hours Mountain Time

  Arizona, early evening on a lonely road. Sam heard the two men’s voices long before he saw them. Hell, you probably could hear them in the next county: “This is a federal matter, Captain! Order your troopers out of that canyon!”

  The speaker was tenor, shrill with frustration; the answerer, big and basso with a beefeater’s tones: “Get that tin badge out of my face, junior! This is a state investigation!”

  With Johan Schmidt by his side, Sam picked up his pace, jogging around a blue-striped, white Chevy Blazer to confront two lawmen on the verge of a fist fight. One of them was a rangy Marlboro man wearing a beige Stetson and a crisp poplin uniform. The other was a charcoal-suited FBI lad straight from central casting — Ethan Hawke, Ben Affleck, Jude Law, take your pick because who can tell the difference?

  They stood at cliff’s edge above a valley turned wheat-gold by approaching dusk. To Sam’s eyes it looked like the cop was about to make the FBI munchkin part of the scenery. He glanced at Schmidt. “You’d better handle this.”

  Shaking his head, Schmidt faded back into the shadows. His whisper hung in the air like forgotten perfume. “I do not show my face to law enforcement officers. Never, and under no circumstances. This is your problem, Samuel. Solve it.”

  Squaring his shoulders, Sam stepped forward. “Gentlemen,” he said, donning his most diplomatic smile.

  “And just who the hell are you?” His nameplate identified him as Captain Thornton of the Highway Patrol, and Captain Thornton was not a happy man. “This is a crime site. No civilians allowed.”

  You ignorant country hick, Sam thought. “Who am I?” he replied sharply. “I am the president’s national security advisor, that’s who I am.”

  “And I, jackoff, am the merry queen of the May.” Thornton laid his hand on his pistol butt. “Now, mister Security Advisor, you’d do yourself a service by getting out of my face. Better yet, get out of my state.”

  Not trusting himself to speak, Sam flipped his wallet open, displaying an identification card in a plasticine window.

  Thornton eyed a professionally lit photograph, a presidential seal stamped in Williamsburg blue, a legend across the top proclaiming Office of the President, United States of America. He became mighty quiet mighty fast.

  Humiliation and anger, Sam reflected, are a dangerous combination. Best not to make a proud man lose face. “Captain,” he said with forced cordiality, “I empathize with your situation, I genuinely do. Under normal circumstances no federal agency would intrude in an accident investigation —”

  “SOC team down there says it’s no accident.”

  With practiced piety Sam whispered, “The matter is more grave than I anticipated.”

  “Three dead men, one woman pretty damned close. Yessir, I’d call that grave.”

  Sam felt a jolt of pleasure at the word “woman.” If Kolodenkova was at the valley’s bottom, so was Whirlwind. “All the more reason to sort out who has jurisdiction in a matter involving stakes higher than you know. Were those stakes lower, I would order Agent…Agent…what’s your name, son?”

  An awed FBI man replied, “Special Agent Küpper, sir.”

  “Captain, I assure you I would like nothing more than to order Agent Küpper and his team to defer to your Scene of the Crime team and allow local lawmen do what local lawmen do best. However, I trust my presence — the presence of someone directly under the president’s command — will persuade you that what lies at the bottom of this cliff is a matter of national security.” Sam lowered his voice, speaking intimately. “As you know, ever since nine-eleven certain matters are better left in the hands of federal experts.”

  Now seriously worried, the captain rubbed the side of his cheek. “You saying those are terrorists down there?”

  Sam played his fish. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that question. I suspect you can guess why.” He forced himself to count to five, before adding in a whisper, “Captain, I urge you to evacuate your people…” pause, look him straight in the eye, and add an exclamation point to the sentence… “quickly!”

  “Bioterrorism?” His leathery complexion pale, the lawman jerked a bull-horn to his lips. He strode to the cliff’s rim, shouting orders downhill. Troopers and pathologists looked up, and, shaking their heads, began to pack their kits.

  The nice thing about amateur negotiators, Sam thought, is that if you wait long enough, they’ll always feed you your straight lines.

  Within twenty minutes Thornton’s team had swarmed up three hundred feet of rope ladder, climbed grumbling into their vehicles, and driven into the dusk.

  Sam stood at Agent Küpper’s shoulder until the last state officer was out of sight.

  “Sir,” Küpper said, “I want to thank you very much. Having a bunch of hillbilly cops tramp around a crime scene —”

  “What’s at the bottom of that canyon is X-rated, junior — adults only. Get your fanny out of here. You and all your yuppie buddies. Hit the bricks, boy, and do it now.”

  Nightfall, or near enough. To the east, a discomforting darkness, stars so bright they did not twinkle. In the west, a dying sun splashed bloody spears among the clouds. Sam, far from city lights, shivered with an inner cold.

  He sat on a rock at cliff’s edge. No power on earth could have forced him down a hundred precipitous yards to sift through mangled bodies and wrecked vehicles. That was what you paid people like Schmidt for.

  Schmidt…Sam closed his eyes and shook his head. It was a little late to be having second thoughts about hiring the mercenary. But still…

  He remembered — when was it? a decade ago — the first time he’d used The Specialist Consulting Group’s services. The results were impressive, more than he’d asked for, “exceeding expectations,” as the jargon goes.

  Later, after the bills were paid and the bodies bagged and tagged, he’d decided he should get to know Schmidt better. The future is uncertain, and you wanted to have someone with his particular talents available, just in case.

  They’d met in a bar down in Fredericksburg, far enough south of Washington that there’d be no one around to recognize Sam. Or, for that matter, Schmidt — presuming that anyone who knew him by sight lived to tell the tale.

  Somewhere along the line — Sam was on his third Cutty Sark, Schmidt three-quarters of the way through a single Campari and soda — Sam’s curiosity got the better of him. He’d asked Schmidt how he’d gotten into his, well, unusual line of business.

  Schmidt’s lips twitched. He slowly stirred his drink with a swizzle stick. After slightly too long a silence, he replied:
“When I was seventeen, a platoon of ANC guerrillas attacked my church during Sunday services. I was altar boy that day. My father, my mother, two sisters, and a brother were in the pews. The blackies burst through the rear door carrying cheap Chinese AK-47s, and extra magazines — drum magazines, forty rounds per drum. They sprayed bullets, reloaded, and sprayed again. Ten men. Ten guns. I am told they fired more than twelve hundred rounds that day. My family died. Almost everyone died. Only I and six others survived. I chanced to be standing behind the minister at the pulpit. Three slugs to the chest, he fell on me, protected me. Rather biblical, don’t you think? What is it the good book says? ‘The God of my rock; in him will I trust: he is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my savior; thou savest me from violence.’

  “Just so. He is my shield. Never forget that, Samuel. He is my shield.

  “In any event, that Sunday, the schwartzers were not to be satisfied with mere rifle work. They set off explosions, too. Grenades. One rolled directly across the altar. The sight of it is my last memory of the day. I came out of a coma a week later. My first waking thought, the very first, was that spending the rest of my life killing coloreds would make for a tolerable career. Later, having developed a certain aptitude at the business, I realized that the pay was better if I broadened my horizons, did not discriminate, embraced the brotherhood of all mankind. And so you find me, one of this disposable world’s rarest individuals, a man who treats everyone alike — equitable and impartial in every regard. Can you say the same of yourself?”

  Sam didn’t bother to answer. He paid the bar bill and drove into the night promising himself that he’d never speak to Johan Schmidt again.

  But he did.

  And never regretted it. Not even now, nightfall and the stink of charred corpses faint in the air, he never regretted it. If you had regrets, you had a conscience. Ambition didn’t allow that luxury.

  A serpent coiling out of darkness, Schmidt silently materialized at the cliff’s rim. He neither sweated nor breathed heavily. That was no surprise. Sam would only have been surprised if he did.

  “Kolodenkova?” Sam asked hopefully.

  Dusting his hands, Schmidt looked outward toward falling night. Sam watched him in profile. That’s odd, he thought, I never noticed the thickness of his glasses before. The frames are designed to disguise the lenses’ dimensions. I always thought those shades were an affectation, dark eyeglasses for a dark soul. But they’re prescription, they have to be, those glasses are a quarter inch thick. The man must be half blind without them.

  Silence endured until Sam asked again, “Is she down there?”

  Schmidt grunted, “No. The dogs have sniffed a half mile in every direction. The only dead are my dead.”

  “I’m sorry.” It seemed the thing to say.

  “Sorrow is inappropriate. They did what they were trained to do. That’s what counts.”

  “Any idea as to what happened?”

  Schmidt nodded, a last glimmer of light sparking his prescription lenses. “Cottonmouth survived long enough to outline the story. I had to spike her heart with fifty ccs of epinephrine to wake her up, and another fifty to keep her talking.” He stared into the night, then back at Sam. He said nothing.

  “And?”

  The mercenary inhaled deeply, let the breath out slowly. “After sending two of my teams over the cliff, Kolodenkova set her own truck on fire, then pushed it off the edge. The Whirlwind material isn’t in the wreckage. Our opponent moved it to another vehicle — presumably the one she’s in now. According to Cottonmouth, it’s a vintage Winnebago, faded butter-yellow with brown stripes.”

  Sam whispered, “Shit, it’s the height of the tourist season. How many campers are on the road? Thousands? Tens of thousands? We’ll never find her.”

  “Not so. She won’t be moving fast, not in an oversized RV. She hasn’t had time to get far. We have a manageable search radius. It’s merely a matter of time.”

  “I devoutly hope so.” As an afterthought, he added, “Give my thanks to…did you say Cottonmouth was his name?”

  “Her. A woman. Cottonmouth was a woman. Now she’s just another KIA.”

  Killed in Action. “Oh,” Sam grunted.

  “An old hand, a fine soldier. With me from the early days. Not a friend, you understand. Commanders can’t afford friends. But she was someone I talked to. I’ll miss her.”

  “Sorry.”

  Schmidt jutted so close that Sam could feel his dry breath. “I believe I have already indicated that your sorrow is neither befitting nor welcome.”

  Suddenly frightened — enormously frightened — Sam stumbled back. “Certainly. Of course. My mistake.”

  “Good. I am pleased we understand one another.”

  Was that an emotion? From Schmidt? Sam was unable to answer his own question. He knew only that Schmidt, always a terrifying man, suddenly had become more so. Sam wished he was elsewhere. Anyplace would do so long as it was far, far away.

  “I need to get back to Washington, Johan.”

  “You’re with me for the duration.”

  A needle through the sinuses, Sam’s allergies were back, more painful than ever. For a moment he thought about objecting to Schmidt’s order. Then he thought some more. “Whatever you say.”

  “Precisely. Whatever I say.”

  Schmidt left his words hanging in the air. Sam shuddered.

  “I have a piece of good news, Johan.”

  “I would welcome that.”

  “Claude called while you were down there with your people. He has a lead on McKenzie’s data vault.”

  “A credible one?”

  “Sounds that way. Ever since the World Trade Center attack, we’ve been watching airport Internet links like a hawk. While Charlie was…uh…while he and I were in Albuquerque, somebody used the airport’s wireless system, used it in a big way.” Did the user send enough data for a half hour’s worth of video? Sam had asked. Why, yes, replied the director of Central Intelligence, how did you know? Whereupon Sam had cursed and hurled a borrowed cell phone into the darkness. “They traced the transmission to a fly-by-night Internet operator — the kind Charlie would use.”

  “Were they able to read his message?”

  “Of course not. Charlie’s using encryption techniques the NSA has never seen before.”

  “But they do know the ISP, the Internet company? They do know where it’s physically housed?”

  “Northern California. It’s run by a bunch of hackers — most of whom are on the watch list. They call it ‘the Underground Empire, dot.com.’”

  “Single site — all the servers and disk drives in one place?” Schmidt’s voice was, as ever, flat and neutral. With eyes masked by tinted glasses and a voice that was almost a monotone, he was impenetrable. In anyone else Sam would have found such icy remoteness infuriating. But with Schmidt…well, maybe he was better off not knowing what was on the man’s mind.

  “Can’t say. I don’t know much about computers.”

  “Nor do I. However, I do know Charles. There are but a few people who can compromise the kind of computer security he’d use.”

  “Who? Give me a for instance.”

  “That’s of no interest to you, Samuel. All that need interest you is whether or not I have access to any of them.”

  “Which you do?”

  “Of course.”

  Sam thought back to his earlier conversations with Schmidt — one over the telephone the night before, the other only hours ago at the Albuquerque airport. “Put him on the payroll.”

  “There will be an additional fee.”

  “Add it to Max Henkes’s bill.”

  “And am I to presume that if we do eliminate Charles’s data vault, I have your authorization to —”

  “Add that to the bill, too.”

  She should have been so famished that she’d eat even this sad salad of wilted lettuce, three alleged cherry tomatoes as juicy as Ping - Pong balls, spit-ball-soggy
croutons, an ancient anchovy deceased across the top.

  Caesar salad? No, Brutus was the chef.

  For the main course: a steak of her childhood, Soviet gristle served with corn too yellow to be natural — the hue of a hazardous waste warning, and as appetizing.

  Not that it mattered. Though famished, she could not bring herself to eat, although she knew she must.

  Hunger, they’d taught her, blunts the senses, and slows the reflexes. If your enemy has you on the run, his first objective is not to capture you, but rather is to exhaust you. Who said that? One of her instructors. Captain Petryshyn, a rare teacher who cared for his students. The thirsty are found near water; the starving are taken near food; the agent who stumbles with weariness stumbles into the arms of his pursuers. Stamina is survival. Eat well and live!

  A different voice, prideful and domineering: Eat well! At home and at sea, that is my law. My crew honors me less for my rank than because aboard my ship they do not dine, they feast! The loyalty of inferiors is bought with red beef, fresh greens, fat cakes full of rum and brown sugar. If you would lead men, forget their minds, for they have none. Forget their hearts. Those belong to street sluts. Remember only their stomachs! Feed them, and they are yours forever! But never cook, girl, never! That is woman’s work….

  “Hi. Mind if I join you?”

  It was Charlie. Of course it was Charlie. Who else could it be? Too exhausted to look up, she merely shrugged.

  He sat down. “Happy to see me?”

  A weary nod.

  “Surprised I’m here?”

  A resigned shake.

  “What’s good on this menu?”