Against All Enemies

by John Gilstrap

  “I’m reporting, not accusing,” Jonathan said. “And it doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is that that’s what the government thinks, and they’ve dispatched shooter teams to kill him.”

  Ryan’s eyes glistened red as he retreated into the sofa’s back cushion. “They’re trying to kill my dad?” He pivoted his head to engage his mom, who to Jonathan’s eye looked sad yet not shocked. “Mom?”

  “Either you want to hear this or you don’t,” she said. Jonathan doubted that she wanted her words to sound as cold as they did.

  Ryan redirected to Jonathan. “Who do they think he killed?”

  Jonathan watched for a reaction from Christyne as he said, “Some CIA agents.”

  “You can’t believe that,” Ryan said. “You know my dad. He would never murder anyone.”

  Jonathan said nothing. It was because he knew Boomer that he knew that he likely did do the killing—for precisely the reason why Jonathan had himself killed so many people over the years. There were bad guys in the world whose positions shielded them from the rules of justice that governed everyone else.

  Addressing Christyne, Jonathan said, “Colonel Rollins mentioned some unpleasantness—his word—that transpired during Dylan’s last tour of Afghanistan. Do you know anything about that?”

  Christyne’s face remained blank as something passed behind her eyes. Jonathan interpreted it as a flash of panic. She recovered by looking heavenward, as if to receive a divine answer. “No,” she said.

  She was lying. Jonathan drilled her with a glare, yet said nothing.

  “No,” she repeated, as if to fill the silence. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  Ryan clearly read the body language the same way Jonathan did. “Mom?” he said. “What happened?”

  Christyne showed fear. She’d been caught unprepared. She’d allowed a peek at her cards, and she clearly did not know how to recover.

  Jonathan let the silence rule. Ryan’s question had accomplished more than anything he could say.

  Christyne’s shoulders sagged. She was done. “Ryan, I want you to go to your room.”

  “The hell I will.”

  Jonathan’s peripheral vision caught Boxers’ flinch. He didn’t like it when kids cursed at adults. But Big Guy didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t need to hear this,” Christyne said. Something inside of her seemed to have broken. She seemed close to tears.

  “You said we were a team. You said I could hear anything.” He was close to tears, too. “I’m staying.”

  Christyne looked to Jonathan for help.

  “Nope,” he said. There was exactly zero upside to getting sucked into a family dispute. His vote had been overridden once. It made no sense to walk into the same propeller a second time. Besides, it appeared that one way or the other, he was going to hear the story he’d come to learn.

  “Please, Ry. I don’t want—”

  “No!” He nearly shouted it. “We’re talking about Dad! I’m not going anywhere. It’s not fair for you to ask me.” Tears overran his eyelids and tracked down his cheeks. “This can’t possibly get worse than it already is.”

  Christyne considered her son for a solid thirty seconds. Finally, she inhaled deeply. “Okay,” she said. “His name was Behrang, an Afghan boy, an orphan. The Taliban had slaughtered his family. His code name was Bulldog.”

  “An informant,” Jonathan said.

  “That’s how it started, for sure. Dylan developed him. I think that’s the right term.”

  “Close enough,” Boxers said. His tone told Jonathan that Big Guy had arrived at the same unhappy conclusion to which Jonathan had already jumped.

  “He developed him over multiple deployments. We’d actually—” A painfully uncomfortable look to Ryan. “We’d actually put the wheels in motion to adopt him.”

  “Oh, God,” Boxers said. Jonathan’s insides churned. It was the ultimate of terrible mistakes. Informants were resources, objects with heartbeats. Their purpose was to propel the larger mission, and then to be discarded if necessary. The relationship required abject coldness—the very opposite of what Christyne was revealing.

  Ryan gaped. Clearly, no one had told him that he’d been scheduled to be a big brother.

  Christyne continued. “We were almost to the finish line during Dylan’s last deployment. The paperwork was processed, and we were this close to everything coming together. Behrang had one last task to do. He knew a Taliban commander who was at the top of the Most Wanted list. The worst of the worst.”

  “Satan?” Jonathan guessed.

  “How did you know?”

  “I try to stay plugged in,” he said. He knew that this story wasn’t going to end well.

  Christyne said to her son, “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard any of this before.” He cocked his head. “I was going to have a brother?”

  Christyne offered up a kind, motherly smile and touched Ryan’s face with the tips of her fingers. You’re sweet. She returned to her story. “Dylan was scheduled to meet Bulldog in a town square or something—a bazaar, I guess—and they were within sight of each other when Satan arrived.”

  “Did Dad shoot him?” Clearly, in Ryan’s mind, there was only one right answer.

  “He had orders,” Christyne said. And then her voice stopped working.

  “It works that way a lot,” Jonathan explained. “On an intel operation like that, the rules of engagement almost always preclude enemy contact unless fired upon first.”

  Christyne pointed her agreement at Jonathan. Her voice was still not accessible to her.

  “Did Bulldog get killed?” Ryan asked. His nightmares continued to bloom.

  Christyne nodded some more and pleaded to Jonathan with her eyes. Please don’t make me do this.

  “You’re making this harder on your mom than it needs to be, Ryan,” Jonathan said.

  “I don’t care. This isn’t about Mom or her feelings. This is about my father. You had a father once, right, Scorpion? I have a right to know this.”

  The kid had no way of knowing that Jonathan’s father was serving a no-hope life sentence at a supermax prison—or that he should have been sent there a hell of a lot earlier than he was.

  Christyne’s eyes continued to plead for Jonathan’s intervention. Finally, he said, “I don’t know what you want me to say, ma’am. If you send him to his room, do you really think that you’re not going to have to fill him in eventually? It’s inevitable, and when you do, the pain of the message is going to be compounded by the pain of the insult.” She shouldn’t have played the we’re a team card if she wasn’t willing to see it through to the end.

  “Yes,” she said. “They killed Behrang. They . . . killed him.” In the hesitation, Jonathan saw the flash of an additional detail nearly shared but then abandoned.

  “How?” Ryan asked.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Boxers said. “Give her a break. This is hard enough.”

  Hearing it come from Big Guy must have made a difference. Ryan’s shoulders relaxed and he leaned back into the seat cushion. He looked spent.

  Jonathan let silence reset the emotion in the room. As much as he did not want to be a bully, the conversation had to go on. For the next part, he’d have paid Ryan ten thousand dollars to leave the room. He cleared his throat, then went for it. “Did he blame the CIA for the boy’s death?” He avoided using the name in hopes of gaining some distance from the horror of the event.

  Christyne seemed spent as well. “He never said that.”

  “But he implied it?”

  She looked to the ceiling. “Well, no. Not really. Not in so many words.”

  “Come on, Christyne,” Boxers said.

  “I’m really not trying to be difficult. Given the stakes, I want to take care to stick with what I know before I get to what I feel.”

  Jonathan got it. He resented the waste of time, but he got it. When it came to husbands and wives, intuition almost al
ways trumped the bare facts.

  “Over the years, I lost track of the number of times Dylan was deployed,” Christyne explained. “You know how it is. One time he’d be gone for a week, and then he’d be gone for three, four, six months. It’s the job. And I presume he was good at it. There was always a hard separation between his work and his life. He never brought the work home.”

  But this time was different, Jonathan thought.

  “But this time was different. He was so angry. So disappointed. I knew it was about Behrang, but I sensed there was more. For weeks, I begged him to tell me, but all he would say was things like, ‘I hate those assholes’ and ‘the spooks are running the military.’ But there were never any overt threats. Yes, he was angry, and yes, he’s clearly capable of violence, but he’s been angry before and he’s been trained in violence for a long time.”

  “We were told he abandoned the family,” Boxers prompted.

  Christyne cut her eyes toward Ryan again, but he seemed lost in a place inside his head. “I wouldn’t call it abandoned,” she said. “He told me that he was going to be going away for a while.”

  “Why?” Jonathan asked.

  “He said there was something that he had to do.”

  “Did you know that he had left the army?” Jonathan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Was that a sudden decision for him? Did it surprise you?”

  “He’d been in for a long time,” Christyne said. “He’d done his duty.”

  “But he was less than a year shy of his twenty,” Boxers said. “That’s a lot of retirement to leave on the table.”

  “I’d rather have him alive than retired,” Ryan said.

  Jonathan was grateful that Boxers let it go. Much of this conversation was beyond the understanding of a teenager.

  “Clearly he was agitated,” Christyne said. “I think he’d just had his fill and was ready to move on.”

  “To where?” Jonathan asked.

  Christyne’s jaw locked and she looked to the floor. This was the step too far, apparently.

  “You’re in this far, ma’am,” Jonathan prompted. “You wouldn’t have told us what you have if you didn’t trust us to help him. Trust us for the next part, too. Where is he?”

  Silence. She seemed to be on the fence, struggling deeply with the whole trust thing.

  “Is he in the country or out of the country?” Jonathan pressed.

  “Out, I think,” she said. “I’ m really not sure, but that’s what I think.”

  Jonathan saw that as a point of confirmation for what they already thought they knew. “Is it Venezuela?” he asked. As an added precaution against suspected listening devices, he more mouthed the word than spoke it.

  The flash behind her eyes told him what he wanted to know, even before she could mount an effort to deny it. Which she didn’t. “How did you know?”

  “Because I think that’s where the feds are looking for him. I assume you have the means to contact him?”

  Stone face.

  “Of course you do,” Jonathan said. “Tell him to remember Acid Gambit. There’s a huge graveyard across from where the Commandancia used to be.”

  “Acid what?” Christyne asked.

  “Gambit,” Ryan said, his first words in a while. “Like the X-Men character?”

  “Sure,” Jonathan said. He had no idea. “G-A-M-BI-T. Acid Gambit.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Dylan will know. And there’s no way to miss the cemetery. It’s huge.”

  “The Commandancia? What’s that?”

  “He’ll know. Trust me, he’ll know. How much time will he need?”

  “For what?”

  “To get mobilized to meet us in Panama.”

  Christyne stewed. “A week,” she said.

  Jonathan said, “Fine. Have him meet us there one week from today. At noon.”

  “What happens after he meets you?” Christyne asked. “If I can contact him, that is. And if he agrees.”

  “We talk,” Jonathan said. “After that, the rest is up to him.”

  “How will he know it’s not a trap?”

  “Because we all have to trust each other right now.”

  “No police, right? No FBI or CIA?”

  “Cross my heart.” Jonathan made a giant X over his left chest. “Our mission is far enough off the grid that we wouldn’t want their involvement any more than Dylan would. And by the way, make sure he knows that one mistake will ruin everything for him. He needs to be careful.”

  “Which brings up another point,” Big Guy said. “I get it that you love Dylan. I get that he’s your husband and your father, and that you’d do anything to protect him, but I want to make one thing as clear as it can possibly be. If you intentionally mislead us, jam us up and get us into trouble—if you set us up for some kind of a double-cross—I’ll forget all about you being part of the Special Forces family. All I’ll remember is that you tried to hurt us, and trust me when I say that that would be a terrible, terrible mistake.” He bored his eyes through Ryan. “The kind of mistake that keeps a teenager from seeing drinking age. Am I making myself clear?”

  Air leaked from the room as the reality of Big Guy’s threat made its mark.

  “I think that sounded more threatening than Big Guy meant it to be,” Jonathan said, aware that his statement was more lie than truth. “But this is the worst possible time for you to lie. If you have no intent of contacting Dylan—or, worse yet, if you intend to betray us—this is the time for you to tell us to walk away.”

  Jonathan pointed to Christyne with his whole hand, as if it were a knife blade, or maybe a karate chop. “You know that we work hard in what we do, and you know that we will fight to make things right. You don’t want to be the thing that is wrong. Tell me you understand that.”

  A new level of fear invaded Christyne’s face as she nodded emphatically. “I do understand. Just as you understand that if you ever harmed us, Dylan would not rest until you were dead.”

  Jonathan smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Victor Carrington,” the man said as he took the seat next to Ian. “You look frightened. Don’t be.”

  Victor Carrington was Ian’s avatar on the Uprising boards. Alternatively, he called himself the Commander. “What would I have to be frightened of?” Ian said. He thought he’d pulled off the causal disinterest thing pretty well.

  The man visually scanned the inner circle around them, as if looking for eavesdroppers. “I think that high treason would be a good start,” he said. “Most people I know in your line of work get jumpy at that one.”

  Ian felt an icicle form in his chest. He chose to say nothing.

  “David Little,” the man said, offering his hand. “Sorry to be so confrontational, but I wanted to make sure I had your attention.”

  Reflexively, Ian accepted the man’s handshake. “I don’t . . .” His voice trailed away.

  “I know,” Little said. “It’s a tough thought. Life imprisonment. Death penalty. It’s a lot to absorb.”

  “Why are you here?” Ian managed to ask.

  “I’m going to convince you to take a walk with me. If only as an alternative to the above.”

  “Where are we walking to?”

  Little allowed himself a smarmy smirk. “Wherever I take you. I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but sometimes there are no delicate ways to say something. If it helps, I think you will find the trip to be a worthwhile investment of your time.”

  “Who are you really?”

  “I don’t have the authority to tell you that,” Little said. “And whatever conclusion you can draw from that statement will no doubt take you very close to the answer.”

  Ian’s brain worked the problem in a second. The guy had a name—or at least a pseudonym—but he had no authority to offer more. Put that in context with the thick neck and the fact that he didn’t bring a contingent of cops with him, and Ian’s instincts brought
him to some form of covert operator. What he didn’t know—and apparently wouldn’t know until the appointed time—was for which agency. “You have my undivided attention,” he said.

  “Right answer,” Little said. “Really, this is good.”

  No one could possibly understand the garbled nonsense that poured from the loudspeaker, but Ian knew from experience that they were at the Rosslyn station, and when Little rose from his seat, so did he. Like every other corner of Washington, DC, and its surrounding suburbs, Rosslyn, Virginia, was the repository for a lot of spooky activity. Crystal City in Arlington housed much of the Navy, the farther-flung suburbs of Fairfax and Chantilly and Centreville housed the really scary parts of the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office, and the really, really scary stuff was in far-flung areas of western Virginia and eastern Maryland. That left Rosslyn with the lesser-terrifying elements of a dozen different alphabet agencies. In his mind, Ian imagined that each of the long-term leases for those agencies was officially registered to Acme Greeting Card Company.

  Little said nothing as he led the two-person parade out of the Metro car and up the escalator to the concrete canyon that defined this northernmost part of Northern Virginia. Ian squinted against the sunshine and pulled to a halt as they stepped out onto the sidewalk on Wilson Boulevard.

  “Your head’s in the wrong place,” Little said, apparently reading Ian’s thoughts. “You’re thinking that you’re somehow being kidnapped, or led away against your will. What you should be thinking is that you’re very, very close to achieving your dream.”

  If that was supposed to make things clearer, it missed the mark.

  “Is the Uprising real or isn’t it?”

  Ian’s insides seized. He knows. He said nothing.

  “Of course we know,” Little said.

  Christ, he can read my mind!

  “Relax. We’re on your side.”

  “My side of what?” Ian said, floating a bluff. “And who’s we?”

  Little chuckled. “The first question insults my intelligence, but I get that you’re vamping for time. And when you follow me, you’ll see the answer to your second question.” He thumped Ian playfully on the arm with his elbow. “Come on, Colonel. You’re a soldier. You’re supposed to embrace new adventures.”