Smoke & Mirrors

by John Ramsey Miller

  “You can join us,” the cutout told him. “Control told us to tell you that if we caught up with you.”

  Styer walked over casually, tapping the blade of a survival knife against his thigh. “If you failed to kill me, you mean?”

  “Our orders are to give you an opportunity if possible. He thinks you could be a valuable addition to our cell.”

  “I could be useful,” Styer said. “But even if it’s true, sooner or later a new control could decide my skills are less valuable than repaying me for leaving egg on the group’s collective face. I don’t trust anybody in a control position. Should I? Would I be able to trust him? Or your friends now that I’ve killed your partner?”

  The cutout nodded. “You wouldn’t be the first transplant we have. My partner was collateral damage.”

  “But I am an old man in our specialized business. My years of usefulness would be few.”

  “They don’t confide in me beyond need to know. I’m just a watcher.”

  “And not a very good one, based on how easy it was to take you. How did you people know I was here?”

  “I don’t know,” the man said truthfully. “I suppose NSA picked the intel out of a conversation over the wires.”

  “A key in on the toothpick thing, no doubt. I have certainly developed an affection for the taste of clove. So Keen and Massey talked about me over the wires?”

  The cutout lowered his gaze. All he could do was move his head. “Just get it over with,” he said.

  “What’s your hurry? Valhalla is open twenty-four/seven.” Styer reached up and drew his blade down the cutout’s forearm. Blood rushed from the wound, which, due to the sharpness of the instrument, merely felt like a dull pressure. Pain was something the cutout was conditioned to ignore—to a point, at least. But, as if Styer were reading his mind, he reached behind the chair and lifted a bottle of bleach.

  “I can’t just take your word for it. I know you understand that. We can’t just take each other’s word, can we?” Styer said, looking out at the coming dawn. “We have time to talk. I want to see how much I can learn from you first. You’d do the same for me, I am sure.”

  Styer tugged the cutout’s left nipple out and used the blade to excise it. The sensation was similar to having a concentrated jet of cold air aimed at the spot. He would not tell Styer anything useful, because he didn’t know anything that could be useful. Styer probably knew that already. The cutout could take a great deal of pain, and Styer was sadistic, which meant this was going to last a very long time.

  58

  SATURDAY

  WINTER CLIMBED OUT OF BED AND WAS GETTING dressed when he heard Brad open the back door. Seconds later he heard Ruger’s steady barking from the backyard. He slipped his gun rig on over his wool vest and went downstairs, where Brad stood at the back door in sweatpants and a T-shirt looking out through the screen. He whistled several times in rapid succession.

  “Ruger after a rabbit?” Winter asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brad said. “She’s going to wake up the neighborhood. This isn’t like her. She always comes when I call her.” He whistled again.

  “Come back from the door,” Winter said, drawing his Reeder and moving to a window in the den for a better view. In the wash from the porch light, Winter could see the dog standing at the picket fence, looking out at something from between the slats.

  “Get a gun,” Winter said. “Cover me from here.”

  Winter took his high-intensity flashlight from the vest pocket. Hurrying to the front door, he opened it as silently as possible and moved around the house, his trigger finger flat against the receiver, aiming the .45 as he went. When he got to the fence he turned the flashlight on, aiming the light spot and the gun at a figure seated at the base of a tree with his back resting against it. Winter slipped through the gate, keeping the shape illuminated.

  The seated man wore all black, assault boots, and a knit wool balaclava with eye and mouth holes in it. His gloved left hand held a pair of night vision goggles, and in the dew-coated grass next to his right hand lay a silenced HK SOCOM Mark 23 with a noise suppressor. Much of the left side of his head was missing, and a red toothpick had been jammed between his front teeth.

  Using his flashlight, Winter quickly scanned the neighboring yard. Thankfully there were no lights on in that house.

  Winter clicked on the thumb safety of his cocked .45 and waved Brad out before he moved over to the body for a closer look.

  He heard Brad and Alexa talking as they approached the fence, Brad commanding the dog to stop barking. Lights from a car pulling into the driveway washed the garage and trees in Brad’s backyard. Winter prayed it wasn’t the cops.

  “What is it?” Alexa asked.

  “Looks like a dead body,” Brad replied. “That’ll be my father coming for breakfast before he does his early rounds at the hospital.”

  “What are you kids doing?” Winter heard Dr. Barnett ask as he approached the fence.

  “Stay back, Daddy,” Brad said.

  Dr. Barnett ignored his son’s warning.

  Brad opened the gate for the others to enter the yard where Winter was using the harsh light to study the dead man.

  “I’ll call the police,” Brad said.

  Ruger whined.

  “You are the police,” Dr. Barnett said. “Quiet now, girl.”

  “This is a city matter,” Brad replied.

  “Hold up,” Winter told him. “We need to think this through.”

  “Who is he?” Brad asked. “Is it…?”

  Winter looked up at the three faces. “It isn’t him. But he did this.” He pointed at the toothpick.

  Dr. Barnett came through the gate, knelt beside the corpse, felt the wrist for a pulse, and lifted the head for a look at the wound while Winter held his light for him. “This neighborhood is going to hell.”

  “Excuse my father’s humor,” Brad said.

  Winter checked the dead man’s pockets. He removed a folding knife with a four-inch blade and three extra magazines for the HK. The corpse had an earpiece connected to a radio unit secured inside a jacket pocket. A green light on the radio showed that it was on. Winter turned it off. Reaching around behind the man, Winter worked a wallet out of his back pocket and opened it. “New York driver’s license. Andrew Mark. Manhattan address. Credit cards. Several hundred dollars in cash. Business card says he is an importer. Twenty-nine years old. Picture of two small children and a woman.” There was also an automotive key in the wallet.

  After laying out the items, Winter removed the right glove and inspected the corpse’s heavily callused hand and the chronometer on his wrist.

  “That handgun silenced? He some kind of hit man?” Dr. Barnett asked.

  “Something like that. Brad, we need to take a quick walk around,” Winter said.

  “Where?” Brad asked.

  Winter used a handkerchief to wipe his prints off the items and put them back where he’d found them. He stood, snapped off the light, and holstered his .45. “This guy had someone at the other end of the radio. Since he’s been here like this for hours, I doubt his backup made out any better than he did.”

  “You going to call the cops?” Dr. Barnett asked.

  “I don’t think we should rush into anything just yet,” Winter said. “He’s not going anywhere. Let’s see if we can find the vehicle this spare key unlocks.”

  “When I lived here, we almost never found dead professional killers in our yards,” Dr. Barnett said.

  59

  WINTER FOUND AN ABANDONED AND LOCKED GMC Yukon a block away, and opened it using the spare car key from the dead man’s wallet.

  Based on the thermos and the two cups abandoned on the console, there had been a team using the vehicle. The dead man’s partner wouldn’t have abandoned the vehicle, so Winter figured a second body could be close by. There was a laptop on the floorboard. Winter opened it and the small screen showed a map grid with three closely spaced dots representing three of the four ve
hicles in Brad’s driveway. In the backseat, he spotted a small receiver with digital recording capability for audio transmissions. He erased the contents. He’d look in the vehicles later for corresponding microphones.

  In the back, two Pelican equipment cases held an HK semiautomatic shotgun and a pair of MP5SDs, military-issue fully automatic 9mm machine guns with noise suppressors and rubber baffles. Armed with subsonic rounds, they were as silent as suppression sciences allowed. Neither had been manufactured with serial numbers. There were enough loaded magazines to supply an Army platoon patrolling downtown Baghdad.

  “Brad, we need to go back.”

  “He was a hit man.”

  “This was a two-man team.”

  “Where’s the other one?”

  “If he’s lucky, he’s dead. If not, Styer has him.”

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Can you trust your father to keep his mouth shut?”

  “Can you tell us why he should?”

  Winter nodded.

  “He can keep a secret.”

  “Good. If these people don’t know he knows, he’ll be safe.”

  “What about us?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” Winter said.

  After Winter and Brad took a quick look around for the second cutout’s corpse, and were satisfied he wasn’t close by, Dr. Barnett joined the trio in the gazebo fifty feet from the corpse to talk.

  “Our dead friend’s ID isn’t legit. The calluses on his hands aren’t from unpacking boxes of plastic flyswatters from China. The weapons and equipment in the truck point to him being the worst kind of professional.”

  “Hit man,” Dr. Barnett said.

  “The dead guy over there was a cutout. You familiar with the term?”

  “I am,” Dr. Barnett said. “Men, usually killers or intelligence gatherers, with false identities who work for the government running about the world engaging in dark ops and wet work. Very scary individuals who are immune to the legalities and societal conventions the rest of us are compelled to follow. They can do whatever they want and nobody can do anything to them, because our government goes all out to cover up whatever they do. They’re like guided bolts of lightning.”

  Alexa looked at William Barnett, puzzled.

  “Between medical journals, I read the occasional spy novel. Clancy, LeCarre, and Ian Fleming. Am I close?”

  “Yes,” Winter said.

  “They were here to kill us?” Brad asked.

  “If they were after us, we wouldn’t still be here. Best I can figure, they were hoping we’d turn over a rock with Styer under it, so they could kill him.”

  Winter went on. “I think it’s most likely that Styer followed us here, spotted this team, killed one, and took the other off so he could gather information. He knows this will distract us. The cutouts are after him, but I think he likes that because he loves to show off.”

  Dr. Barnett said, “Sounds invincible.”

  Alexa said, “He has some weaknesses. Most importantly for us, he is a narcissistic psychopath without any control to rein him in. The cutouts will get him eventually, and he knows that on some level.”

  Quickly, Winter recounted the story of Styer’s game in New Orleans. Brad and Dr. Barnett were clearly amazed. It was a perfect illustration of Styer’s talents.

  “So do you try to find the other cutout before Styer kills him?” Dr. Barnett asked.

  “We won’t find him alive. As soon as we report the body to the police, their team will move in to clean this up. In the meantime, since the corpse is in your neighbor’s yard, we’ll get a lot of attention from the cops, and we’ll be slowed down.”

  Alexa said, “Winter is right about these people. They don’t like Winter because he outgunned one of their teams and blackmailed them into a truce. We’re all vulnerable.”

  “Look at what happened in Roswell, New Mexico,” Dr. Barnett said.

  “So what do we do?” Brad asked Winter.

  Winter said, “First off, Dr. Barnett, can you go back to your normal life and just forget this happened?”

  Dr. Barnett stepped down onto the grass. “Not a problem. Just let me know if you need anything. And look after Brad. He doesn’t get this spy stuff like I do.”

  The trio watched the doctor until he walked around the corner.

  Winter told Brad, “The rest of the team that’s in the area will assume Styer got these two, and if they don’t know we’ve caught on to their presence, they should just keep monitoring us. Our vehicles are almost certainly wired, so we’ll let the bugs stay in place.”

  “Brad, can you go along with this?” Alexa asked.

  “Tell me what to do.”

  60

  PAULUS STYER STOOD UNDER THE SHOWERHEAD, letting the cold water wash a red river of blood down the drain. He was satisfied that the cutouts had been only monitoring Massey, the sheriff, and the FBI agent, figuring Styer would show up. That much they had certainly been right about. He smiled at the fact—which he had proved many times before—that the organized opposition was made up of lesser men. They had been on his trail for years and he had effortlessly stayed well ahead of them, leading them around by their noses and kicking them in their collective ass. Now he had killed two more of them. He hoped to kill a lot more before this, his last game played strictly for sport, was over and it was time to tally it all up.

  He turned off the water and dried his false face off carefully, running the towel over his body and combing his wet hair. He checked the seams and was satisfied that they were hidden. Using the towel might dislodge the latex panel at his hairline. He studied his features in the mirror and went into the next room to get dressed so he could get on with the business of killing Winter Massey and the Gardners. He also needed to check in on Cynthia and call her daddy again.

  61

  THE FIRST LIGHT FROM THE SUN ILLUMINATED THE vast Delta with a warm orange glow as they rolled across the barren landscape at sixty miles per hour. Brad was behind the wheel of an old station wagon that had been his mother’s, and Winter drove the Yukon. Six miles from Brad’s door, surrounded by cotton fields bisected here and there by long straight lines of leafless trees, twin hills made of soil stood just off the road. The dirt in the county-owned dumpsite was used for construction projects. Driving down a narrow dirt road, the vehicles entered a sixty-foot-wide valley crisscrossed with deep impressions left from dump-truck tires. The dirt would block the Yukon from the prying eyes of all living things except the birds, and perhaps some poor fool walking across the fields to collect scraps of cotton that were now being blown horizontal by a stiff northeastern wind. It was unlikely that anybody would stumble across the vehicle and, if they did, there was little chance they’d break in and steal the weapons with a corpse sitting inside keeping watch.

  Winter left the SUV without looking again at the body that sat belted in the passenger seat. He climbed into the Buick wagon to join Brad, who drove out fast. They were a mile from town when Winter saw an oncoming SUV and slumped down in the seat so he wouldn’t be seen.

  “Keep driving,” he told Brad.

  “What are you doing?” Brad asked.

  “An SUV at our twelve o’clock.”

  “I see it.” Brad pulled at the brim of his ball cap before the SUV passed, heading in the opposite direction at a high rate of speed.

  “Talk about close shaves,” Brad said, exhaling loudly. “Five minutes off and they’d have found us dumping their pal.”

  “Too close for my taste,” Winter said, meaning it.

  They entered a long curve and the SUV was out of sight.

  “There were at least three men in that truck,” Brad said. “How many more you think there are?”

  “Fewer than there will be pretty soon. They take losses very badly. They’ll swarm in now.”

  Brad opened the glove box, found a sealed pack of Kool cigarettes, and opened it. After he put one between his lips, he lit it with the car’s lighter and dropped his wi
ndow a good six inches.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” Winter said.

  “I don’t,” Brad said, inhaling deeply. “Want one?”

  62

  THE GRIME-ENCRUSTED EIGHTEEN-WHEELER, WHICH had been parked at a rest area just across the Mississippi state line for ten hours, made the trip to Tunica in twenty-three minutes. Despite the well-worn exterior, the working parts—the brakes, suspension, tires, and the motor—were painstakingly maintained. The electronics and the communication system, most of it hidden from prying eyes, were highly advanced. The transmissions it sent and received were encrypted and routed through the network of NSA satellites encircling the globe like buzzards.

  The truck’s two-man crew, both professional cleaners with twenty years of experience between them, had spent the idle hours watching movies in the cabin. The well-stocked selection of DVDs was all action movies. These men enjoyed critiquing films on subjects they knew best. They agreed that the action choreography between the two criminals in The Way of the Gun was perfection, and not something such criminals would have developed without the sort of training the cleaners themselves had received. Obviously the authors of the script had consulted with a talented professional with advanced training.

  When the emergency broadcast came in, the men were watching The Departed. Herf, the designated driver, climbed into the rig’s driver’s seat and rolled out south while his partner, Watts, watched the rest of the movie. As he climbed through the gears, Herf took an amphetamine and vitamin cocktail packet from a secret compartment in the dashboard and poured the pills into his mouth, washing them down with an energy drink. One of the pep pills was uncoated for immediate impact and the other was a time-release capsule buffered with a mild sedative to prevent speed nervousness.