Against All Enemies

by John Gilstrap

  “Is it a good job?” Jonathan asked.

  Venice laughed. “Good Lord, I wish I had the skills you think I do,” she said. “I will send her apartment information to your GPS.”

  “Thank you.”

  Venice stopped typing and stared at her screen for a few seconds before giving Jonathan a scowl and leaning back in her Aeron chair.

  “What?” he said.

  “What makes you think she’s going to tell you anything?” Venice asked. “What motivation could she possibly have to help you close the loop on her husband?”

  “We’re kind of her best bet,” Boxers said.

  “Silence seems like a very viable option,” she countered.

  “Only at first glance,” Jonathan said. “I believe Roleplay when he talks about the Agency wet-work yay-hoos breaking their necks to kill him. If Christyne stays silent, she only helps the killers.”

  Venice wasn’t buying. “That’s what you say. I don’t doubt that you’re right, but how will she know that? The last time she saw you—”

  “We damn near died saving her,” Boxers said.

  Venice went back to her keyboard. “I’m just saying that if I were her, based on what you shared about that night in the mountains, any vision of you is going to be pretty hardwired into bad times. I don’t see that as a basis for great trust and sharing.”

  “Then I just need to be convincing,” Jonathan said.

  Venice looked back to him again. “I can see it now,” she said. “Hi, Christyne. Last time I saw you, I was pulling you out of a river of blood, but now I want you to help me save your husband from a different river of blood.”

  “I think I’ll use different words,” Jonathan said.

  “Of course you will,” Venice said. “But will she hear them? And what about that boy? How are you planning to deal with his trauma?”

  Jonathan saw the precipice of his patience approaching. “You’re treating this as if it’s a social visit, Ven. It’s going to be an awkward visit. Our past history notwithstanding, there’s the inherent awkwardness of Boomer betraying the nation he was sworn to protect.”

  “If that is, in fact, what he did,” Venice said.

  Jonathan conceded that part of her point. He still could not wrap his head around the notion that Dylan would do such a thing, but neither could he ignore the evidence that had been presented to him.

  “Let me throw something into the debate,” Boxers said. “Suppose Roleplay is just friggin’ lying to us? Suppose Dylan never did anything remotely like the things he says he did, and this is just some kind a witch hunt they’re wanting us to take point on?”

  In all candor, Jonathan had not considered that possibility, at least not at that scale. He expected some of the details to be incomplete or misrepresented, but not the entire incident. “Why would he do that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It wouldn’t be the first time Stanley’s lied to us.”

  Without question Stanley Rollins’s association with the truth was tenuous—perhaps even adversarial. But a lie of this magnitude—involving a fellow operator—would be of a scale that Jonathan could barely comprehend. “No,” Jonathan said. “Rollins is an ass, but he’s an ass who saved our lives. He came to us on this. I don’t buy that he would be that dismissive of our safety.”

  Boxers raised his eyebrows and leaned back further into his seat. “I’m just sayin’ . . .”

  “And I’m just saying we made a commitment.”

  “Trust, but verify,” Big Guy said.

  “Always,” Jonathan conceded. “And Ven, if it helps, I’ll plan my visit to Christyne to make sure that Ryan is nowhere to be found. I’ll do it during school hours.”

  Venice said nothing, but he saw the smile. It disappeared as her computer dinged, and her attention was diverted to another screen. “Huh,” she said. “Don’t you know Senator Haynes Moncrief?”

  Jonathan nodded. They went way back. They were in Ranger school together, but Haynes hadn’t made the cut for the Unit. Now he was a bigwig in the United States Senate. “Yeah, why?”

  “I got an alert from ICIS,” she said. Pronounced EYE-sis, the Interstate Crime Information System was a largely unknown post-9/11 system that was put in place through funds distributed by the Department of Homeland Security to keep various jurisdictions informed of criminal investigations real-time. “He was arrested last night for discharging an illegal firearm in DC.”

  Jonathan recoiled. “Discharging . . . What, was he shooting at streetlights or something?”

  Venice read a little more. “No, he was defending himself against an alleged attack.”

  “What’s an alleged attack?” Boxers asked, leaning on the words. “Seems to me somebody is attacked or they’re not.”

  “I’m just reading you what I see,” Venice said. “It says here that the man he killed had a sawed-off shotgun on him, but that it hadn’t been discharged. The senator shot him twice in the chest and killed him.”

  “Haynes always was a good shot,” Boxers said.

  “Who attacked him?” Jonathan asked. “Was it an assassination attempt like that other congressman, or a random street crime?”

  Venice read some more. “The record is still new, so it may be too early to know much for sure, but it seems to be leaning toward the senator as the aggressor.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Jonathan said. “He’s the Senate minority leader. Not exactly the profile of an active street shooter.”

  “Do you want to know what ICIS says or not?” Venice snapped.

  Jonathan and Boxers exchanged looks. Whoa.

  “So far, the investigation is focused on the fact that Senator Moncrief had a heated exchange over dinner with some White House official—”

  “How could he even digest anything after breaking bread with one of those assholes?” Boxers said.

  Venice continued as if uninterrupted. “—and he had had a few drinks.” She looked up. “That’s not the best set of circumstances after you shoot someone.”

  “Didn’t you say that someone tried to shoot him first?” Jonathan asked.

  “Some witnesses say that the senator drew his gun first—a gun that he was breaking the law just to have on his person.”

  “So, he should have shown the courtesy of letting himself be killed,” Boxers said.

  “Witnesses say that he made no effort to run away.”

  “From a gun?” Jonathan said. His voice had spiked an octave. “How fast a sprinter do they think he is?”

  “Remember that I’m just the messenger, okay?” Venice said. “The police narrative emphasizes that the senator challenged his victim, drew his gun first. If he hadn’t done that, then the victim would never have felt compelled to draw his gun to defend himself.”

  “The dead guy,” Boxers said. “Was his gun legal?”

  “Of course not,” Jonathan said. “This is all politics. I say Haynes is screwed.”

  “I hate DC,” Boxers growled. “It’s a den of rats, every one of them waiting to feed on the mistakes or misfortunes of others.”

  Jonathan and Venice gaped in unison.

  “What?” Boxers said.

  “Mistakes and misfortunes of others?” Jonathan parroted.

  “Positively eloquent,” Venice said.

  Boxers blushed. “Y’all suck.”

  Chapter Six

  Lieutenant Colonel Ian Martin’s heart sank when he saw the man enter the Washington Metro car at Foggy Bottom. Reflexively—instinctively—he saved the document on his laptop to its heavily encrypted home on his hard drive. When the computer sensed a connection, the drive would upload to the World Wide Web and then cleanse itself.

  This was the third time in two days that Ian’s path had crossed with this guy. He was on the tall side of average height and the thick side of average build, with a shaved head whose ring of shadow above his ears spoke more of male pattern vanity than tough guy fashion statement. A voice inside his brain told him that he was just being paranoid,
but far fewer graves were filled with the bodies of paranoid people than people who chose not to trust their instincts.

  Paranoia had been a driving force in Ian’s life in the months since he’d launched his Uprising website. He’d covered his bases as best he could, thanks to the unwitting assistance of Uncle Sam’s bazillion-dollar encryption software, but everyone knew that there was no such thing as true anonymity on the Internet. Ian wasn’t even sure that he’d broken any laws—at least not yet—but just the notion that he might have meant that it was a good time to listen to the paranoid voices when they sang a unison chorus in your head. He just wished that the paranoia would be less of a shadow over his life.

  Ian had started the Uprising website as a lark, maybe even as a joke—a place to anonymously post his frustrations as an army officer under the clueless leadership of the Darmond administration. It was hard enough to cast one’s lots as a pawn to political gamesmanship, but Ian wondered if there’d ever been a time in modern history where incompetence had touched the cluelessness of this team. The asshole in the presidential palace—and let’s be honest, that’s what the White House had become—was ready to surrender to anybody at the slightest provocation, and as a result, the world hailed him as the new prince of peace. Just be sure not to ask the residents of fallen democracies in the Middle East or the former Soviet states. They might confuse the American sense of peace with thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees. But apparently, they weren’t the United States’ problem, either.

  The fact that the media so loved Tony Darmond, despite all of the scandals that had plagued his administration, frightened Ian more than the incompetence itself. The media lauded peace at all costs. The media outlets that had noticed the Uprising had already labeled the site as a terrorist link, and painted those who’d joined Ian’s side to be anti-American racist homophobic killers of senior citizens. Or something like that.

  As a military officer, Ian had dedicated his life to turning a blind eye to politics. He’d been sent to good wars and he’d been sent to stupid wars, and the secret to escaping the meat grinder with a sane mind was to embrace the truth that his was not to reason why. His job was to salute and make sometimes stupid stuff happen. To be a warrior for one’s country was among the noblest callings a man could answer.

  Until the orders he received tilted away from the lawful and reasonable. Once that line was crossed, Ian’s duty to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, trumped the orders of the day.

  As the rules changed around him over the five decades he’d walked the planet, Ian was reminded of the old story of the boiled frog. Put a frog in boiling water, and he’ll jump out to save his life. Put him in cool water, however, and heat it around him, and he will allow himself to be boiled to death. So it was with the American people, who continued to sit passively as their God-given rights were stripped away by ambitious politicians.

  Ian hated the thoughts and the feelings that had come to dominate his days. He hated the perpetual anger and the pervasive sense of helplessness as he watched with the rest of the silent masses as day after day evil triumphed over good. He knew there was a better way, and he knew that he was the one to spearhead it.

  His plan was a simple one, requiring only a small band of loyal followers with very specific skills. He needed muscle, and he needed brains, but most of all he needed anonymity for everyone. His plan involved no invasions and no shoot-outs in city streets. Shots would need to be fired for sure, but if things went as he envisioned them, those shots would be fired one at a time, and a single box of ammo could accomplish everything that needed to be done.

  The Uprising message boards had been his recruitment tool. By laying out red meat for people who were as frustrated as he, he’d baited a trap that would snare the kind of talent he was looking for. But he had to sift through the trolls and the nutjobs to single out those who truly were what they claimed to be.

  The Uprising didn’t need an army. It needed a team, a handful of maybe one hundred operators who could, in coordinated surgical attacks, eliminate the structural barriers that kept voters from having the voice they earned. It wouldn’t be that hard, not with the right cadre of professionals. On Ian’s side was the fact that the Department of Homeland Security was a muddled, bureaucratic mess, and the US military—one of the last bastions of sensible organization, albeit impossibly fat and inefficient in its own right—was forbidden by posse comitatus to do battle on American soil.

  Among the delicate balancing challenges Ian had had to manage was how to share enough of the plan to attract good recruits, yet keep it secret enough that no one operator would ever have adequate information to betray him, the Uprising, or its other members. It had been a stressful few months feeling his way through new territory where the tolerance for a mistake was exactly zero. His efforts toward strict operational security had left no traceable bread crumbs—he was sure of that—but with each new human being in the mix, with their own personalities and weaknesses, bread crumbs began to form and multiply. Thus far, while he knew the true identities of the recruits he’d signed, none of them yet knew the identities of each other, but as their numbers swelled, that anonymity would become unsustainable.

  And that was why the third sighting of the man on the Metro was so disturbing. In their first encounter—in a Starbucks—the man had attracted Ian’s attention with a loud sneeze, and then had made a point of steadfastly avoiding eye contact as he read his newspaper upside down. Their second meeting played itself out in a CVS Pharmacy where Ian was picking up some nasal spray as a hedge against his summer allergies. There, the stranger hovered over the candy selection while Ian checked out, and then he followed him out of the store, only to peel off and go the other way once they were on the sidewalk.

  And now this. The man stared with a malevolence that was intended to intimidate, and it was having its desired effect. Ian tried to appear disengaged, unconcerned, but as the man continued to stare, Ian could no longer fight the urge to stare back.

  Finally, as they approached the Rosslyn Metro Station on the Blue Line, the man stood from his seat and approached.

  Ian searched his memory for his quick-response training from long ago—a place to seek refuge from the fight he knew was coming, or, alternatively, some form of advantage over the attack. But there was nowhere for him to go, and it had been far too long since he’d thrown a punch to entertain a fantasy about throwing one now.

  Whatever was coming was going to take its course without Ian having a vote.

  At five foot nothing, Stella Pence was hands down the most intimidating person per cubic inch in the entire United States of America. She was already perched in her seat in the Leader’s conference room when he entered at the appointed time. “Really, Haynes?” she said as his six-five frame cleared the door. “You had to shoot the guy? There wasn’t an alternative?”

  “Good afternoon, Stella,” Haynes said. He helped himself to his seat at the end of the long table. As many staffers had suspected, his chair was in fact about an inch taller than the others.

  She pantomimed for him to zip his lip and then she threw away the key. “You be quiet. Do you realize how much trouble you have caused? For us?”

  Haynes let the words hang for a few seconds. “You can’t want answers if you tell me to be quiet,” he said.

  Stella turned purple. Well, more purple. She’d been the heart and head of every one of his campaigns since the beginning, which felt like sometime around 1904. He understood that he owed her better than this.

  “Look,” he said. “The guy came off the park bench with the intent of killing me. I was faster than him. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Not according to the Metropolitan Police,” Stella said. “They remember something about laws that make it a felony to carry a weapon in the District of Columbia. What were you thinking?”

  “Mostly about survival,” Haynes said. “He was going to kill me. I
realize that this situation is an annoyance, but remember that my demise would leave you totally out of a job.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Stella snapped. “There are roughly ninety-nine senators and four hundred thirty-five members of the House who would fire everyone to hire me.” It was more true than false.

  Haynes laughed. “Truer words,” he said. “So, how are we going to control this?”

  “I told you that that gun would get you in trouble one day.”

  “Which part of ‘it saved my life’ are you having trouble with, Stella?” Haynes didn’t mind tolerating a bit of grandstanding, but there were limits to everything.

  “Are you armed again today?”

  “That’s an inappropriate question, and I will not answer it.” Translation: Of course he was. The MPD had confiscated the LCP from last night, but there were more in his safe where that one came from. “Where we stand right now is that the Senate minority leader is alive despite DC’s gun laws, and, parenthetically, no doubt contrary to the desire of the fellow in the Oval Office. I have been released on a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bond, and I will stand trial in three or four months. We have exactly that long to change the focus of the debate. That, in fact, is my plan.”

  “Have you spoken to John Bevis about this yet?” Stella asked. A steadfast contributor to Haynes’s campaigns over the years, John Bevis was also the best defense attorney in Northern Virginia.

  “He’ll be fine with it,” Haynes said.

  “Are we taking bets on that? If so, I’m in for a grand.”

  Haynes was done with the banter. “Objections noted for the record,” he said. “Now, let’s shift from what I did to what you should be doing. Tell me about the man I shot last night.”

  Wherever Stella went, she carried an enormous leather portfolio that was half as thick as she was tall, and had to weigh more than she did. Haynes had never dared to look inside, and feared to ask what it held, but he imagined that it was the Holy Grail of the political opposition. Though Haynes was far from the most progressive member of the Senate when it came to technology, his limited knowledge made Stella’s system look like stone tablets and an abacus. She opened the black leather monster and read from the page on the top. She always read from the page on the top.