Final Target

by John Gilstrap

  The words startled her. She fought the urge to ask how long it had been since Jonathan had expressed that sentiment. If it had been in the past eighteen months or so, she had reason to be very confused.

  Gail slid in behind the wheel and cranked the engine. “Where are we going?”

  Sacco pointed to a worn spot in the grass that might have been a footpath. “Down there. There’s a barn at the back of the property. That’s where we do our, uh, recycling work.”

  Until she met Jonathan Grave, Gail had never thought about the underworld that existed to support covert activities overseas, as well as in the United States. Wounds had to be treated, ammunition and supplies had to be purchased, and none of those things could be traceable through normal law enforcement avenues. And, as she understood all too well, evidence had to be destroyed. The underworld of covert logistics was small yet thriving, not infrequently serving the needs of both government and private operators simultaneously. In Gail’s experience, the cloaked underworld operators were some of the most overtly law-abiding companies in the world. How better to disguise their real focus?

  “You used to be FBI, right?” Sacco asked as Gail bounced the Plymouth down the grassy path. Then he laughed at her expression. “Don’t look so horrified. Dig and I go back quite a ways. We never served together directly, but we crossed paths a lot. I never did think it was right how they mustered him out of the Army.”

  Again, Gail checked her poker face for cracks. She knew that her one-time lover had separated from the service under difficult conditions, but he’d never discussed the details with her. In fact, he actively avoided that discussion. She decided to let it go for now. Their relationship was over, a thing of memory. It made no sense to dredge the difficult times back up.

  She chose to say nothing—either about her own past or Jonathan’s.

  The worn path led to the bottom of a long hill, where it disappeared into a dense stand of trees, beyond which she could hear the incessant growl of what sounded like an electrical generator. After a couple hundred feet, the trees opened up to reveal a pole barn, inside of which two men were 100 percent committed to the disassembly of two sedans that had already been reduced beyond recognition. Both of the workers had the same muscular military bearing that seemed to be required of this community. One was ripping through the skin of a quarter panel with an air chisel, while the other cut the frame of a different vehicle with a torch.

  “If it makes you feel safer,” Sacco said, “neither of those vehicles has been here for more than two hours. We spin ’em pretty quickly.”

  Gail looked across the center console. “There’s really that big a demand for destroyed evidence?”

  Sacco laughed. It was a throaty sound, genuinely amused. “Well, these are really just recycled vehicles. We towed them in off the road. We’ll tear them apart, sell the parts we think are worth the effort, and send the rest to a scrap yard.” His eyes flashed. “As a matter of fact, the yard these will go to is one of the ones started by Simon Gravenow, Digger’s father. He sold it a long time ago, but I’m always intrigued by the smallness of the world.”

  Gail pulled to a stop just outside, where the front wall would be if a pole barn had walls. “Okay, we’re here,” she said. “What’s the next step?”

  “Well, that depends.” Sacco turned and slung a knee onto the seat. “Are you going to insist on watching us dismantle this thing, or are you ready for new wheels and getting on your way?”

  Trust didn’t come easily for Gail. She threw the transmission into PARK, turned off the ignition, and handed over the keys. “I guess it’s time for me to move on.”

  Sacco took the keys and placed them on the center console. “Rest assured, there won’t be a single traceable part of this vehicle by the time I go home tonight.”

  “I believe you,” Gail said. And she meant it.

  Sacco opened his door. “Now you discover the weakness of your distrustful personality,” he said.

  She waited for it.

  He tossed a nod back where they came from. “A long walk,” he said.

  “I can use one of those,” Gail replied. “I spend too much time sitting as it is.” From force of habit alone, she pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of her jeans and wiped down the steering wheel and the gearshift.

  Sacco laughed again. She liked his laugh. It made her laugh, too.

  “You’re nothing if not thorough,” he said. “May I escort you back up to the office? I’ll sell you a car that is way better than this piece-of-shit Plymouth.”

  “I’m on a budget, you know,” Gail said. When she heard her own words, she realized she was flirting. “I can’t afford very much.”

  “Bullshit. You’re spending Digger’s money, and he can afford a throwaway Bentley.”

  In fact, in all the years she’d been working at Security Solutions, she’d never been presented with a budget, and she’d never been denied an expenditure. Sometimes, she wondered if Jonathan would rather be rid of his fortune than burdened by it. As if it were possible for him to outspend his bank account. Even if he tried, Venice wouldn’t let him. Of that inner sanctum, Venice Alexander was unquestionably the leading adult presence.

  Gail and Sacco walked in silence for most of the two-hundred-yard stroll.

  “I get the sense that you don’t approve of what I do for a living,” he said. “Even though I do exactly what you need me to do.”

  “If you know Digger as well as you say you do, then you know that I am slow to adjust to extralegal activities.”

  She felt his stare, hot enough to draw her eyes to his.

  “I think you need to know something about my company,” he said. “We don’t do the covert stuff we do for bank robbers or mobsters. We have a very exclusive list of well-vetted operators. The vast majority—and I’m talking sixty, seventy percent—are lettered agencies that you would recognize.”

  She returned his words with an unblinking stare.

  “You don’t need to hear the speech,” Sacco said. “There’s shit that has to be done, and it falls to people like me—and Digger and Big Guy and others like them—to get it done. I don’t apologize to anyone for any of it. If it wasn’t for people like me, I couldn’t begin to estimate the death toll. Politicians talk and make promises. The overt arms of those alphabet agencies make headlines that stroke the political egos and give the impression of safety. It’s people like Digger who make the impression real.”

  It was true that Gail did not need to hear the speech, because she’d heard it a hundred times before, from both Digger and Boxers. It was like a song whose lyrics she knew by heart and a message she wanted to love but just couldn’t bring herself to embrace. Yet here she was again, swimming in toxic waters that were way over her head. Her choices were to paddle along or drown. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was exactly how people got sucked into the dark side, from which there truly was never an escape.

  And what chance did she have, now that she thought about it, when that same dark side was able to capture Dom D’Angelo, a deeply religious and good man?

  At the top of the hill, in the office, as she took delivery of a ten-year-old faded yellow Toyota Camry, it occurred to her that maybe it was time for her to accept the inevitable.

  And maybe it was time to be honest with herself, too. While this clandestine shit pinged on her senses of ethics and justice, it was a hell of a lot more engaging than running investigations.

  “You know where the Security Solutions offices are, right?” she asked Sacco as she accepted the keys.

  “Still in the old firehouse?”

  “Right. I don’t have time to get back there before I move on to the next step in what I have to do. I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

  Sacco beamed. Yeah, he had a crush. “Sure,” he said.

  “Do you have a bag?” Gail asked. “Preferably paper.”

  Sacco reached under the wooden counter and retrieved a rumpled sandwich bag, removed a half-eaten sandw
ich from it, and put them both on the counter, next to each other. “It’s a little used, but it’s clean enough.”

  Gail didn’t know why that amused her, but it did. She lifted the bag, blew it open, then retrieved from her pocket the stack of hundreds that she’d taken from Randy’s body. “Can you find somebody to deliver this to the office?” She slipped the bills into the bag. “And it’s important that no one touch the bills.”

  Sacco gave a low whistle. “You sure you want to trust me with that much money?”

  Gail winked at him. “I’ve already entrusted you with my life and my freedom. What’s a little cash? Besides, if you steal it, I’ll tell Big Guy.”

  Sacco accepted the bag, folded it closed around the bills, and kept it in his hand. “I’ll take it myself,” he said.

  “Thank you.” She hesitated. “And one more thing, if it’s not too much of a bother.”

  Sacco raised his eyebrows.

  “How are you fixed for a nine-millimeter Luger?”

  CHAPTER 19

  The rain had finally slowed to a pervasive, oppressive mist that somehow felt even more penetrating than the deluges. Jonathan swore that the accumulated water that had soaked him had added ten pounds to his fifty-three-pound load of equipment. He could only imagine how much Boxers was suffering. But he wasn’t about to ask.

  As the weather worsened, so did the terrain. What once had been a challenging but doable forced march through ever-steepening rolling hills had now turned into an unrelenting uphill slog through jungle so dense that visibility was limited to no more than ten or twelve feet. Jonathan held the lead on the column, and Boxers continued to pull up the rear. In the middle, Jonathan had dispersed Gloria and Dawkins to serve as monitors to keep the kids from getting separated.

  Still, it was tough going. Each angle looked like every other—green and wet—and as a result, the usual tricks of land navigation wouldn’t work. In normal woods, you used a compass to shoot an azimuth to a point of reference in the distance—a rock, a building, a tree, whatever—and then you walked to that reference before shooting another azimuth and repeating the process. With so little to differentiate one place from another, the leader of any group was required to more or less bury his nose in the compass—or, in Jonathan’s case, the GPS monitor—during every step.

  This was the kind of terrain that swallowed inexperienced hikers whole. There was no state of lostness quite as thorough as the lostness of the jungle. Without navigation tools and the skill to use them, you’re boned in an environment like this. Everybody has a dominant leg—the one you kick with, the one that is stronger, if only by a little. Left to our own devices, we naturally walk in a circle that loops the weak side. Survival meant knowing precisely where you were going and having the focus to keep the level of concentration that was necessary to maintain your lines.

  The GPS made it possible to get back on the right path if you wandered off, but every step off course meant at least one step back, and there was a limit to how hard these kids could be pushed. That’s why it was Jonathan’s job to—

  A scream split the air from somewhere behind him.

  Jonathan reacted instinctively. He pivoted to his right and dropped to one knee as he brought his M27 up to his shoulder, ready to confront whatever was there. “Everybody, down!”

  But everybody had already figured that part out for themselves, if not to avoid whatever danger had arrived, then to avoid being swept by Jonathan’s muzzle.

  The scream never stopped. It carried words, but they were driven by so much panic that Jonathan couldn’t make them out. He rose to a crouch and advanced toward the noise. “Nobody move,” he said to the members of the team who could hear him. Then he keyed his mike. “Big Guy, what do you have back there?”

  “Unknown. I’m closing in from the west.”

  “I’m closing in from the east.”

  These were good things to know when advancing from opposite directions. Circular firing lines rarely ended well.

  From his right periphery, Jonathan saw someone approaching. He pivoted his head to see Tomás, rifle at his shoulder, approaching with impressive form, triangulating from a third side.

  Jonathan keyed his mike. “We’ve got a third good guy approaching from your left.”

  “Roger.”

  And the screaming continued. Jonathan considered telling the yeller to shut up, but adding his loud voice to the active loud voice would only compound the problem. On the positive side, the commotion made the squalling kid easy to find.

  It seemed important to Tomás that he get there first. The kid in question was 10-year-old Leo, and he was scared to death. He stood amidst the foliage, his arms to his sides, screaming with his mouth wide open.

  Tomás dropped his M4 against its sling and closed on the kid like a torpedo driving into a dinghy. He grabbed the boy by the back of his collar and yanked him first to his butt and then around to his knees. “Leo, shut up!” Tomás hissed at a whispered shout, in Spanish. “Do you want to get us killed?”

  Leo screamed again, earning himself a wicked slap across the face.

  “I said, shut up!”

  Boxers took a step forward to intervene but stopped at Jonathan’s raised hand.

  A hard shake seemed to expel whatever demon had possessed the smaller boy. He raised his eyes to Tomás; then he wet his pants. Urine streamed down his leg through a leg opening of his shorts. Tomás saw the flow and quickly stepped back and away.

  “Stand up,” he ordered.

  The kid took his time, but he complied. Jonathan wasn’t sure where this was going, but like Big Guy, he’d set his feet in a combat stance, ready to intervene if this spun out of control.

  “Grow up, Leo,” Tomás snapped. His tone was quiet, yet urgent. “You heard what Scorpion told us. We are being hunted by the Jungle Tigers. If they find us, they’ll torture and kill us. What were you thinking?”

  Leo snuffled.

  “I want an answer,” Tomás said.

  “Hey, kid,” Boxers began, taking a step forward, but Tomás whirled on him and thrust a forefinger at his face. It was like pointing to the sky, and it would have been comical were it not for the intensity of Tomás’s glare.

  “Stay out of this,” Tomás ordered.

  Boxers froze in place and closed his mouth. From the look Big Guy shot to his boss, it seemed clear to Jonathan that the kid impressed him.

  Tomás turned back to Leo. “Tell me why you were making so much noise.”

  “I—I thought I was lost,” the boy said. His voice cracked when he spoke.

  “You were lost,” Tomás said. “That’s no excuse for making all the noise.”

  “W-what was I supposed to do?”

  “Not get lost in the first place! How did that happen?”

  Leo clearly did not know how to answer. He looked over to Jonathan, who saw no benefit to getting in the middle of this.

  “You need to pay attention, Leo,” Tomás said. “You need to stay with the others. If you need to stop, then we all need to stop. This is how people get killed in the jungle. Don’t you understand that?”

  Leo nodded. But he still looked ready to cry.

  “I won’t tell anyone about your pants,” Tomás said, these words barely audible. “You’re already so wet, no one will be able to tell.”

  A smile started to emerge. “Promise?”

  “I promise.” With that, Tomás rumpled the boy’s dripping mop of hair. “Let’s go back to the others.”

  When Tomás made eye contact with Jonathan this time, it was with a smile and a wink. I’ve got my people under control.

  Jonathan gave a curt nod. “Lead the way back, Tomás,” he said. “I need to speak with Big Guy.”

  Tomás beamed. “Okay.” His hand disappeared elbow-deep into the front pocket of his khaki shorts, and when it emerged, it clutched a compass.

  “Hey,” Boxers said. “Is that weapon on safe?”

  Tomás shifted his body to display the left-hand side
of the receiver without muzzling anyone. “See for yourself,” he said with a grin.

  Big Guy’s jaw locked. He didn’t like kids with attitude.

  “Let it go for now,” Jonathan said, and he motioned for Boxers to hang back with him while the kids led the way back through the impossibly thick jungle.

  When the boys were out of earshot but still visible, Jonathan whispered, “I want to see if Tomás knows land navigation as well as he thinks he does.”

  “You want to take him down a peg or two?”

  “No,” Jonathan said. “I want to know if he’s as impressive as I think he is.”

  CHAPTER 20

  With her Glock reloaded and her pockets carrying two spare magazines, Gail was ready to pay a visit to a man named Raúl, whose property was of generous enough size to allow for a private airstrip. Her portable GPS was able to find the address that Randy Goodman had been good enough to proffer before he died.

  Venice had been able to research the property. A commercial satellite picture of the place had confirmed what Randy had told her. It had a lot of land, but the house itself appeared to be old construction—and not of an old money design. It was a 1960s suburban house that happened to be located in the middle of nowhere. As was her way, Venice had droned on about original owners and transfer dates, but all Gail had wanted to hear were the details of the current owner.

  His name was, in fact, Raúl, Raúl Nuñez, and he owned a collection of convenience stores throughout the Washington metropolitan area, more than a few of which had closed in recent years. He had a history of voting in every election, though since Virginia was an open primary state, there was no way to tell his party affiliation. Not that that mattered, she supposed.

  Raúl had one son, a thirty-two-year-old named Hector, who, as best Venice could tell, was a member of the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division. Those were the cops who provided physical security for the White House. They were not to be confused with Secret Service agents, whose duties were investigation and personnel protection.