RW12 - Vengeance

by Richard Marcinko

  The college he’d gone to, by the way, was MIT. He has three or four advanced degrees, including one he picked up while briefly under contract to No Such Agency, known to those of us who officially don’t know as the NSA. (Now that I’ve told you that, I’ll have to kill you.) I don’t know what Shunt did for the agency that doesn’t exist, but I’m guessing it didn’t involve basket-weaving. He now runs a computer consulting business, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he made most of his money by hacking into commercial systems and then selling them information on how he did it. Not that he’s felonious, far from it. He just seems to spend a lot of time pursuing hobbies rather than working. The hobbies include flying airplanes and picking horses. He’s pretty good at the first—he can handle a two-engined jet and at one time owned a timeshare in a Cessna—and very lousy at the second, which accounts for the fact that he no longer has the timeshare. Or owns his own home.

  Shunt came around dinnertime to start running some checks on my system. Before he got to work, he demanded his usual payment up front: two Rolling Rocks and a box full of Fig Newtons. He chugged the beers and went to work. After a half hour of chanting and typing—he tends to talk to himself while he works—he stood up from the machine.

  “Clean, Dude.” Somewhere along the way Shunt decided that computer geeks are supposed to call everyone they meet “Dude.”

  “Great, Shunt. We’re going to keep it that way, right?”

  “Oh yeah.” He stuffed a few Fig Newtons into his mouth and hunched back down. “Power filter is working,” he said. But with his mouth stuffed with cookies, it came out sounding more like “puwahfulakillswuksing.” This led to a long lecture on the evils of power fluctuations, which had killed one of the routers in the Rogue Manor network a few months back. Small fluctuations in the current apparently fry the shit out of microchips. Shunt seemed especially attuned to this thanks to the metal in his head.

  “So we’re cool then?” I asked him.

  “Done, Dude,” said Shunt. “I put a couple of upgrades in.” He started talking about adding the latest coding for wireless defibrillators or some such. My eyes glazed about midway through. “I can get to it tomorrow.”

  “Put it off for a while,” I told him. Then I asked how his cousin was.

  Sheila is a senior analytic cryptographer for the agency that doesn’t exist. That means, basically, that she’s a special kind of mathematician who breaks encryptions. As a point of information, they don’t call the things they “break” codes anymore, because they’re actually these very involved mathematical formulas that translate data bits from one form to another. Think of it this way: Sheila and her people aren’t so much interested in the message the Green Hornet sent for you to decipher on your secret decoder ring; they’re interested in recreating the decoder ring. She runs one of the top decrypting teams, and in a lot of ways her job is essentially overseeing and interpreting the work of computer hackers, who spend their days eating pizza and drinking Diet Coke, wondering if there’s any there there .

  She also has unbelievable equipment fore and aft, and lips that tingle when they touch yours.

  “Sheila’s good,” said Shunt.

  “She’s still handling internal analysis?”

  “Dude, you should call her. I know she’d love to hear from you.”

  “What’s her phone number these days? Better yet, could you get her on the phone for me?”

  Sheila was home. She smacked her lips as soon as she said hello, and I immediately regretted not having gone to talk to her in person.

  “I need a favor,” I told her after we got through the how-do-you-dos.

  “I hope it doesn’t involve breaking agency protocol,” she said, licking her lips again.

  “I’d never ask you to break agency protocol,” I told her. Of course not. NSA protocol was too secret to be revealed. The agency that doesn’t exist has very strict rules about what its employees can say and do, and Sheila was undoubtedly breaking one of them simply by talking to me. The NSA has its own special enforcement brigade, called the Men in Black, who enforce the protocol. They have more authority than any other legal enforcement agency in the world, and they actually train to do their job. In the Navy, about the only time you can use deadly force in peacetime is to defend nuclear weapons. Rumor has it that the Men in Black can use lethal force on anyone considered a threat to the agency, which includes anyone who wanders onto their property at Fort Meade. I once watched them blow up a car parked in the wrong lot. It was a new BMW, so it was kind of fun. They didn’t see the joke. At the NSA, a sense of humor is considered immediate grounds for dismissal.

  “What is it, Dickie?” said Sheila. Then she sighed. Only the fact that I had promised Irish a dinner kept me from commandeering a helicopter and rushing up to Baltimore to continue the interview in person.

  “I’ve been doing a little job for Homeland Security,” I told her, before launching into my best bureaucratese. “They’re having trouble figuring out which interface to intervene with to get information about intercepts regarding the Midwest. I was hoping you could find out who the right person was for me to talk to.”

  “The Midwest or the Middle East?”

  “Domestic. Illinois and Missouri, to be exact.”

  “Oh.” I waited, but there was nothing with the lips. “Have you tried George Boreland?”

  “I will in the morning.”

  “Do it the right way, Dickie.”

  “Oh, I will, I will.” I knew Boreland. He’d never take my phone call, let alone give me information. I’d have to hand off the assignment to Karen.

  “Dickie, we’ll have to get together.”

  “You know I’d love that.”

  “Say good-bye to my cousin.”

  “Good-bye to my cousin.”

  Trace returned from the wilds of the Beltway in time to catch dinner with Irish and me at a roadhouse tucked away from one of the traffic lights on the main highway. I could tell something had stirred up her Apache blood by the way she bounced her shoulder-length hair around.

  “Who the fuck is Tiffany Alexander?” she said as she sat down.

  “Hello to you, too,” I said.

  “Tiffany Alexander,” repeated Trace, giving Irish a perfunctory wave. “She’s a friend of yours?”

  “I’ve known Tiffany since she was three.”

  “What the fuck do we want a bellhop on the team for?”

  “I’m going to go catch a cigarette,” said Irish, excusing himself. “I’ll be right back.”

  No, he doesn’t smoke.

  I hid my smirk behind my tumbler of Bombay. I’d known Tiffany and her sister Brandy since they were three and four respectively. Yes, Brandy Alexander. Her parents had a sense of humor. Brandy has long since gotten used to the jokes. They tend to be popular with men of a certain age, and she claims to enjoy the attention. Brandy now lives in New York City, on the Lower East Side, where she’s doing whatever it is actresses do while they’re looking for their big break. She’s a talented young woman and has already had some roles onstage and in commercials. Brandy had just moved to New York the week before the terrorists struck at the Twin Towers. She breathed that dust for weeks and hated every breath.

  Tiffany is a very different sort, though she’s definitely a beauty in her own right. She’s always been a practical girl, even at three. Trace’s slur about the hotel bellhop was a reference to the fact that Tiffany had just completed college and gotten a degree in hotel management. If Tiff ever did become a bellhop, she’d be the smartest damn one ever. Her resumé also includes military school and six years as a counselor in an Outward Bound–type program for disadvantaged kids. She also won a bunch of Junior Marksman contests, and I think she was a finalist for a slot on the women’s Olympic archery squad.

  “So Tiffany showed up, huh?” I asked.

  “Don’t give me that. She says you promised her a job. You reviewed all the candidates. I know you know her.”

  “She said I pro
mised her a job?”

  “She implied it.”

  “I’d be surprised if she said anything except that she wanted a chance to make the team fair-and-square,” I told Trace.

  “I have to take her?”

  “Of course not. Treat her like everyone else.”

  “That means I have to take her. She came in first in every fucking trial.”

  Trace didn’t have to take Tiffany onto the team. That was the deal. Every one of the nuggets had already been screened by yours truly, as well as by Doc and Danny. They’d passed physical and mental tests and extensive security checks. But those were only the first hurdles, and Trace, as Nugget Mama, could bounce anyone she felt didn’t make the grade, no questions asked.

  Admittedly, Tiff lacked the military background that most of our other shooters brought to the table. She was also several years younger, and maturity is one of the things the War Master likes to see in a nugget, since the wisdom to stay out of shit is nearly as important as the smarts to get out of it once you’re in it. But, obviously, Trace saw the same promise in Tiffany that I did.

  And something else. Trace also saw her as a challenge from me: could she deal with a younger version of herself? Not that I thought of Tiffany that way—the two women were very different, though their builds were similar—but that was probably the way Trace did. And she wasn’t the type to walk away from a challenge. Her ancestors had marched across the desert, kicked the shit out of Mexicans, and harassed the American Army for the better part of a hundred years. A little female competition was the last thing Trace Dahlgren would walk away from.

  “You should’ve told me about her, Dick.”

  Trace looked up at the approaching waitress and ordered a seltzer. She keeps a strict limit on alcohol intake, mostly for reasons that have to do with her Native American beliefs, but it also helps keep her five-eight frame a trim one hundred and thirty-five pounds.

  “If I told you about Tiffany, you would have thought I was ordering you to include her on the team,” I said when the waitress left. “You would have kicked her off the team in spite, because you’re stubborn.”

  “Fuck you I’m stubborn. You’re not ordering me to take her on the team?”

  “Of course not. I told you, you’re Nugget Mama-san. You have the yea or nay. Besides, all senior members of the team have a veto. That doesn’t change.”

  “Fuck you,” said Trace. “You want her on the team. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been in the screening session.”

  “I think she’ll be damn valuable, yes. But you can say the same thing about every one of the newbies, without exception. And if Tiffany can’t hack it, or you have an objection, or Doc does, then she’s gone.”

  “Doc’s not going to object. He knows her, too.”

  “Or Danny.”

  “Fuck yourself,” said Trace. “Fuck yourself backward.”

  And thus was Tiffany Alexander officially accepted into the fold.

  Round about midnight, as I checked the last of my emails, I got a call from Doc with the latest info dump.

  “How’s your French?” he asked.

  “Allez-vous faire voir chez les Grecs,” I told him politely. It’s French for “go get fucked,” or “eat in a Greek restaurant.” I forget which.

  “There’s a connection between one of the phone numbers my Belgian called and the French ministry of black holes,” said Doc. “One of the subgroups under the DCPJ that doesn’t exist.”

  “Where’d you find that?”

  “I didn’t,” said Doc. “One of the Christians made the connection for me. I have a hunch our headless Asian is French, drawing a paycheck from the DCPJ and hiding his profession with a phony passport.”

  DCPJ is the Central Directorate Judicial Police, France’s central police force. There really isn’t an equivalent in America, but if you can imagine a cross between the Justice Department and every state police unit in the country, then throw in the CIA and Homeland Defense, you’ll get the idea. The Frogs don’t have quite the same taste for bureaucracy that the Krauts do, so the whole thing is arranged like the inside of one of their cathedrals—nooks and crannies all over the place. The Sub-Directorate of Criminal Businesses, which was set up to deal mostly with gangs, has at least one (and maybe more) national brigades specializing in antiterrorism. That’s the unit Doc was referring to.

  “You’re telling me this guy was a French spook?” I asked.

  “I’m not telling you anything, Dick. But it does look like a possibility.”

  “One worth pursuing?”

  “I hope so. I have an appointment in Paris day after tomorrow to talk about it.”

  “Good.”

  “There’s only one thing. I don’t speak Frog. And I’d like somebody we can completely trust, Dick,” Doc added. “I don’t like the smell of this. Nobody’s cooperating out here, and I can’t tell if it’s because they’re a bunch of ignorant shits who don’t know anything or because they’ve gotten the word to clam up.”

  More likely the former, but I sympathized. “What about Tiffany Alexander? She speaks French.”

  “Tiffany’d be great, if she’s available,” said Doc. He, too, had known her since she was knee-high to a grasshopper. Doc and Donna briefly had taken care of her and her sister when their parents divorced, and he’d kept close tabs on her as an honorary uncle and extracurricular guidance counselor.

  “Trace gave her a passing grade,” I told him. “She’s in.”

  “Sparks flew, I bet.”

  “As you predicted.”

  “She had to take her, because not passing her on the team would be like admitting she’d had her butt whooped. Just like you said.”

  “I’m not always right,” I told him. “Just often enough for government work.”

  Danny called a little later. He’d been working the police bar circuit and had finally managed to sift a few kernels of truth from the amber waves of grain waving in the fields nearby. Or at least they seemed like kernels after a long day and a few beers.

  “Homegrown terrorists,” he told me. “Like McVeigh. Only bigger.”

  “Bigger organizations, or bigger people, Dan?”

  “Both. A guy out here thinks there’s a militia connection, with people getting money from persons unknown. The persons unknown would be related to our Colonel Blanchard.”

  Max Blanchard was not a particularly patriotic American. You can read all about him in Violence of Action, but the short version is this: he had his paws on a nuke that he wanted to use to make his particular view of eternity fulfill itself. I put him out of action; eternity keeps ticking on its own timetable, far as I know.

  At the end of that particular nightmare, we believed—but could not prove—that Blanchard had received aid from other groups and was possibly even taking orders from someone else. The latter was particularly hard to prove, because he was tied up with some religious beliefs you don’t find explicated in your typical Sunday sermon. Danny had liked him even less than I did, if that’s possible, and was sold on the conspiracy theory. He just couldn’t decide who the conspiracy was with.

  “So how would Blanchard fit into this?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know that yet.”

  “Did they bring up Blanchard’s name?”

  “Nobody did,” said Danny. “That’s just a working theory.”

  “Why do they think it’s homegrown?”

  “Because they think foreign Tangos would stick out.”

  “They have any wetbacks working in the bar there?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “You think they’re all Mexicans, with maybe a Guatemalan thrown in?” I asked.

  “Uh, you could have a Guatemalan.”

  “How about someone from Yugoslavia. Doesn’t speak English, on the dark side.”

  “I get your point,” said Danny.

  “If the people were well-funded, why would they use C-3?”

  “That I have a theory on. They’re just fucking with you
r head, Dick. They’re trying to get you to think it’s Vietnam all over again.”

  “Could be.” Obviously, they were fucking with my head. Beyond that, though, there were no conclusions to be drawn—yet.

  “One of the guys has been checking around for the chemicals used to make C-3,” added Danny. “We may have it narrowed down.”

  “Good.”

  “Say, Dick, you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Fire with both barrels.”

  “What would you do if out of the blue you got an email from someone claiming to be your daughter?”

  “I’d wait for the subpoena.”

  “Seriously, what would you do?”

  If Danny had been sitting next to me at the bar, I would have prescribed him some Bombay and filled two glasses with the world’s best medicine. I settled for one myself, then I listened as Danny told me a story about the 1970s and his days immediately after making captain in the Marine Corps. The Marines had a program to give their up-and-comers a bit more polish in the civilian world, so they shopped Danny to a college out West to study engineering. It was more like a paid humpfest; he ended up sharing a bed with a girl named SueLi for most of the semester. After the final exams, they shook hands and never heard from each other again.