Won't Back Down

by J. D. Rhoades

  “I know, kid. Hang in there. We’re going to get the guys who did this.”

  “And I can’t find our father. Bassim kept calling and calling, and he didn’t answer. I’m afraid.” She begins sobbing again.

  “It’s okay to be afraid,” Keller says, “but you guys have to keep it together. I’ll try to find your dad, as soon as I know you guys are safe.”

  She’s sniffling now. “Really?”

  “Really. I’ll be in touch in a little bit. Okay?”

  She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Okay. And, Jack?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I asked you to stop calling me kid.”

  He chuckles. “Sorry. I’ll try to do better. See you soon.” He ends the call, then dials another number.

  “I hope you’re calling the detective,” McCaskill says.

  “Yeah.”

  EIGHTY-NINE

  Fletcher is staring at the fax sheet in his hand, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “You know that’s bullshit,” Cameron says.

  “I know it’s from a US government number, with a Homeland Security letterhead.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Fletcher lowers the page and looks at his partner. “And that doesn’t mean anything to you?”

  “I’m just saying. I think we’re being played.”

  “Question is, by who? Keller or our own government? In case you forgot, Lauch, we work for the government.”

  Cameron snorts. “We work for the county. An’ I seem to remember a couple of operations we ran with the Feds where they weren’t what you’d call completely up front with us.”

  “That was that one time.” He hesitates. “Well, okay, twice. But that’s out of, what? Six, seven times?”

  “It’s enough that when some stranger claims to be a Federal agent, I ask for references and two forms of ID”

  Fletcher laughs in spite of himself. “You’ve always been a skeptic, Lauch.”

  “And you should be, too. You’re too good a detective not to be.” He shakes his head. “C’mon, Fletch. Admit it. You trust Keller more than that lady who claimed to be from Homeland. It’s why you helped get him out.” He nods at the paper still clutched in Fletcher’s hand. “And that paper there’s got that shady lady’s fingerprints all over it.”

  The argument is interrupted by the buzzing of Fletcher’s cell phone. He looks at the screen. “It’s Keller.” He puts the fax down on the desk and raises the phone to his ear. “Keller. Where are you?”

  The voice on the other end has the strange, echoey quality of a dodgy connection. “I’m at the Khoury house. I found out where they are.”

  Fletcher scowls. “I thought you were going back to your house. To check out the damage.”

  “I didn’t think it’d do any good. Place is totaled, right?”

  “Not as bad as we thought. Someone wired a grenade to the door. Tore up the entryway, but…” He pauses. “We found a body.”

  There’s silence on the other end.

  “Keller?” Fletcher says.

  The reception is clearer when he comes back. “Who?”

  “Still waiting on a positive ID. But he had a wallet in his back pocket. It looks like Brandon Ochs.”

  “That stupid little—what the fuck was he doing at my house?”

  “Why don’t you come back to the station,” Fletcher says, “and we can talk about it. Bring the Khourys.”

  “I’m going to—wait a minute. You think I wired my own house? To get to someone I had no idea was coming by?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Fletcher says, and he means it. “You need to come in. And Bring the Khoury children in, too.” The second the words are out of his mouth, he realizes he’s said the wrong thing. He looks over to see Cameron grimacing.

  “Bring them in?” Keller’s voice is tense. “You make it sound like I’m bringing back a couple of bail jumpers. Fletcher, what’s going on?”

  Fletcher forces a chuckle. “You’re just hearing it that way because of all those years bounty hunting.”

  “You’re lying to me, Fletcher. Why are you lying to me?”

  “I’m not lying, Keller.” He considers his options, then takes the plunge. “We just got a fax from Homeland Security. The Khoury family’s been placed on the terrorist watch list.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  Keller laughs. “You cannot be serious.”

  “I am serious. Look, I know it sounds crazy but—”

  Keller stops laughing. “These are children, Fletcher.”

  “Come on in. Bring them. We’ll get it sorted out.”

  “Right. Okay. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Keller? Keller?” Fletcher realizes he’s talking to a dead connection. He tosses the phone down on the desk and swears.

  “Well, that went well,” Cameron observes.

  “Shut up.”

  “Fletch, come on. You had to know what a guy like Keller—suspicious, paranoid—was going to do when you told him that. I’d almost think your heart wasn’t in this whole idea of bringing in those kids.”

  “Spare the Dr. Phil psychobabble, Lauch,” Fletcher snaps. “We need to bring these…people in.”

  “These kids,” Cameron insists. He walks over and picks up the fax. “Because someone’s put the entire Khoury family on the terrorist watch list. Including their teenage children.”

  “How about we go see them because they’re witnesses to Reverend MacDonald’s murder?”

  Cameron nods. “Now you’re thinkin’ right, partner. We’re goin’ out to talk to witnesses. Not apprehend,” he holds his arms in front of him and wiggles his fingers as he speaks in the voice of a TV horror movie host, “scaaaaary terrorists.”

  “If I say yes, will you shut up?”

  Cameron smiles. “That usually works.”

  “Fine. So where are they headed?”

  Cameron sits down, folds his hands across his chest and looks at the table, pondering. Then he looks up. “Keller’s girlfriend. She’s an SRO at their school.”

  Fletcher nods. “As good a place to start as any.”

  “And we’re just going there to talk to them, right? To interview witnesses in the homicide case of Reverend MacDonald.”

  “Right. Okay. Can we just go now?”

  “Sure.”

  NINETY

  The man living under the name of Adnan Khoury pulls to a stop behind a van he’s never seen before parked in his driveway. The woman he knows as Ms. Gray is sitting in the passenger seat of his compact car, still holding the gun on him.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks when she sees the look on his face.

  “Everything.” He opens the door.

  “Wait,” she says.

  He ignores her. He gets out and surveys the scene. The tire tracks in his driveway and yard look as if someone’s been holding a demolition derby at his house, then left in a hurry. He sees the open front door and starts to run, ignoring the shout from his passenger seat.

  Inside, the house is quiet and empty. There’s none of the usual noise and commotion that forms the background any time his children are home together. He leans against the doorjamb in the kitchen, breathing hard. As much as all that chaos used to annoy him, right now, he’d give anything to have it back again. He can see the glow of a light from down the hall. He frowns. How many times must I tell them to turn the lights off? Then the reflex fades and the cold knot of apprehension in his stomach returns. He walks down the hall to his bedroom. When he sees the pried-open drawer where his pistol used to be, he lets out a cry of dismay.

  It seems to him that the more he tries to insulate his children from the violence he’d committed in his life, the more it falls upon them. Or maybe, this is his punishment for the way he’s lived. In his youth, the mullahs had taught him that rewards and punishments only awaited men on the Day of Judgment. It was then, and only then, tha
t every speck of good or evil done in life would be judged by Allah. But while living in the West, he’d heard about the idea of karma, the idea that the things you do in life come back to reward or punish you in that very life. And now, it seems, karma is ascendant. His sins are being visited upon him, and upon his children, in this life.

  He jumps as he feels the pressure of a gun barrel in his back. “Don’t run from me again,” Gray snarls. She leans over to look past him. “What’s this?”

  “My children,” he says, then stops. He doesn’t want to tell her any more about his children than he absolutely has to. “Out back,” he says, hoping he sounds broken enough to satisfy her. “The money’s out back.”

  But it isn’t. He stands in the doorway to the back patio and looks out at the ruin of his yard, and particularly the tumbled wreck of what used to be the backyard grill.

  Gray prods him with the gun. “Is that where the money is supposed to be?”

  He takes a few steps toward the hiding place he thought was so safe, stumbles, and comes to a halt.

  Her voice rises. “What happened here?”

  He turns and looks at her. “I don’t know. This is where the money was. And now it’s gone.”

  She stares back at him for a long moment. Then she lowers the gun and fires a round into his left ankle.

  The pain is like a lightning bolt, all the more agonizing because it’s so unexpected. He drops to the ground, howling in pain and clutching with frantic hands at the wounded ankle.

  She stands over him, pointing the gun at his other leg and speaking through gritted teeth. “You need to tell me who took that money, Mr. Al-Masri. I am losing patience here.”

  “I don’t know,” he sobs. “I swear I don’t know.”

  “Then you need to choose.” She points the gun at first one leg, then the other. “Where does the next bullet go?”

  “Please,” he begs. “Please don’t.”

  “Then tell me. Who might have taken the money? Is it your children? Are they hiding it for you?”

  “No,” he gasps. “No. They wouldn’t…” A sharp report, a sudden brutal pain, and he screams as he realizes she’s shot him through the other ankle.

  “I think you’re lying,” she says. “I think you know where they are. And I think they’ll turn around and give me that money if you call them and let them hear me making you beg for mercy.”

  “There were…” He pauses, trying to organize his thoughts through the haze of anguish he’s feeling. He knows he may never walk again. He knows that there will be more pain to come, more damage that can’t be healed. The despair of that nearly overwhelms him. He’s dimly aware of her face a few inches from his.

  “The best part of this,” she whispers, “is that this is exactly the kind of interrogation you used to deliver. Isn’t it, Mr. Al-Masri? Except it wasn’t always for information, was it? If I remember the report correctly, you performed this very procedure on a member of the Iraqi national soccer team. To punish him for missing too many shots on goal. Remember?”

  “It wasn’t me,” he sobs. “It wasn’t me.”

  “No,” her voice is almost crooning. “It wasn’t nice, middle-class immigrant Adnan Khoury, was it? It was Captain Al-Masri of the Mukhabarat.”

  He looks up at her, eyes streaming with tears. “And how are you any better?”

  She smiles, a smile so sweet it makes him want to vomit. “I’m not better, dear. I’m just more honest.” She straightens up and points the gun at his thigh. “Now it’s time for you to be honest. Where. Is. That. Money?”

  He struggles desperately to piece together what he wants to say. In all his years working in the dim basements of the Mukhabarat, he’d never considered that the reason the subject didn’t talk was because the pain had short-circuited their ability to put an answer together. Now he knew. What was that if not karma?

  Finally, after a few seconds that seem like a decade, he manages a response. “There were two men,” he said. “Mercenaries. Keller…” He takes a deep breath as another wave of pain racks his body. “Keller told me. I don’t know who they were working for. But I have an idea.”

  “Al-Mansour,” she says, and stands up. “It has to be Al-Mansour.”

  “Correct,” a voice says. “And those men you saw? That would be us.”

  NINETY-ONE

  Waller and Tench hoof it through the woods, falling into long-practiced techniques of moving quickly and silently in rough terrain. Both know without discussion that the first priority is getting clear of the murder scene. When they think they’ve gotten far enough away for the time being, they stop.

  Waller sits down on the trunk of a fallen tree, the tangle of roots to his left dangling like the tentacles of some nightmare being. He’s breathing hard from the run, but not gasping. He lowers his pack, filled with what gear and weapons he could take from the truck in a hurry, to the ground. “Well,” he says when his breathing slows, “that didn’t go as planned.”

  “Shut up,” Tench snarls.

  “Am I dreaming,” Waller says, “or did we just get owned by a fifteen-year-old girl?”

  “No one got owned here. Except maybe that fucker who tried to distract us.”

  “You mean the guy who was clearly local, driving a church van, who we just shot?” Waller looks around. “Shit’s escalating, bro. We’re drawing attention. That’s going to raise the operational tempo to the point where we can’t keep up.”

  “Which is why we need to close this operation out. Pronto.”

  Waller raises his eyebrows in surprise. “You mean walk away?”

  “Fuck no.” Tench looks around the woods into which they’ve fled. “We just need to get that money and go.”

  “What about Al-Mansour?”

  “Fuck Al-Mansour,” Tench says without any particular heat. “If that’s even his real name. Long and the short of it is, we’re making the money. We need to be the ones who keep it.”

  It’s an argument Waller never seems to be able to answer, probably because he doesn’t want to. He wants that money as much as anyone. Perhaps more than most. “So where do we go from here?”

  Tench frowns and rubs his chin. “First we need a vehicle. That shouldn’t be hard.”

  “So, we take a vehicle. That draws more attention. Which brings us back to our original problem.”

  Tench shakes his head at Waller. “What’s happening to you, bro? You’re getting really negative. Tell me the truth. It’s this Keller guy. He’s got you rattled.”

  “He’s a wild card,” Waller says defensively. “I don’t like wild cards.”

  “There are always wild cards. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, right?” He shrugs. “But hey, if you want to bail, go ahead. More money for me.”

  “Fuck you.” Waller stands up. “Let’s go find us a vehicle.”

  It takes them less time than either had expected. After a brief hike, they stumble onto a wooded lot. A dented Nissan Pathfinder sits beside a single-wide trailer at the end of a gravel driveway. The driver’s door is unlocked, so as Tench stands guard, Waller hotwires the ignition. When the motor roars to life, Tench raises his weapon and points it at the front door. No one comes out. Either there’s nobody home or anyone who is is too scared to come out. Either way, they’re soon back on the road.

  “Where to now?” Waller says, although he knows the answer.

  “Where else? Let’s pick up the trail at the Khoury house.”

  NINETY-TWO

  Gray whirls towards the voice and raises her pistol. When she sees the barrels of the machine guns pointed at her, however, she lowers it so quickly that it bruises her thigh before she releases her grip and the weapon clatters to the ground. “I’m unarmed.”

  “Smart.” One of the gunmen, the shorter one with a narrow, pinched face, nods his head.

  The other, a broad-shouldered, broad-chinned bruiser, doesn’t speak. He just looks at Khoury, lying on the ground an
d whimpering with pain, and smiles. Gray resists the temptation to smile herself. The man obviously has sadistic tendencies, and men like that are easy to manipulate.

  Gray raises her empty hands. “Gentlemen. I know we may have different agendas here. But I suggest—”

  The man with the narrow face breaks in. “What the hell happened here?” He nods at the torn-up yard.

  She smiles ruefully. “It looks like the money we’re all after has disappeared.”

  The bruiser frowns. “So where did it go?”

  Gray nods at Khoury, lying on the ground. He’s only half conscious now, consumed with his own pain. “That’s what I’ve been trying to find out.”

  The narrow-faced man looks at Khoury, then back at her. “And what have you found out?”

  “Before I answer that, let’s all figure out who the players are here.” She smiles with a poisonous sweetness at them both. “I think you’re working for Mr. Al-Mansour. And we’re all looking for some stolen USAID money.”

  The bruiser sneers and starts to speak, but the narrow-faced man speaks first. “We’re trying to recover some money. But who we’re working for is our business.”

  “All you’ve done is confirm what I think. But it’s not important. We’re all after the same thing. And tell me, gentlemen, considering the amounts involved, and,” she smirks, “how much I figure that cheap bastard Al-Mansour is paying you, wouldn’t it make more sense for us to work together? And keep the money for ourselves?”

  The two men look at each other, the question bouncing between them, and Gray knows she’s won. “Let’s talk percentages,” she smiles. “I think I can better Al-Mansour’s deal.” She smiles at the bruiser. “Especially if you can get Mr. Khoury here to talk about where the money may have gone.”

  The bruiser looks down at Khoury. “He hasn’t told you already?”