Point and Shoot

by Duane Swierczynski

  “You sure this isn’t about revenge?”

  She’d asked Doyle this as he was still recovering in a private hospital back east after his last encounter with Hardie. Doyle had been beaten senseless and hooked up to life support in the trunk of a car as Hardie drove down the Pacific Coast Highway. The only respite from the relentless nausea were stops so that Hardie could open the trunk, interrogate him, then beat him some more. Doyle, buddy, we’re going to Hollywood.

  “No,” Doyle had said, clearly lying. “He’s a resource. We don’t squander resources, remember?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Doyle had sighed. “Fine. Perhaps there is a small, insignificant element of revenge. The man did leave me to die in the trunk of a car.”

  In the blazing sun of a long-term car lot at a California airport, no less.

  But instead of destroying their enemies, which was more or less Cabal m.o. going back decades, Doyle had talked Abrams into sparing Hardie’s life temporarily, squeezing some use out of him. Doyle had been talking about his fantasy of an “unbreakable vault” for many years now, to the point where Abrams realized she probably signed off on the venture just so he’d shut up about it already. For Doyle, the idea of an “unkillable” man inside his “unbreakable vault” became an obsession, an idée fixe, and it had finally come to fruition.

  Now, apparently, it had blown up in their faces. There wasn’t much Abrams could do about it except follow it through to its logical conclusion.

  Originally there had been three ruling partners of their organization: Gedney, Doyle, and Abrams herself. Charlie Hardie had done the unthinkable and killed Gedney, though even Abrams had to admit that the man had it coming. You don’t put someone as volatile as Charlie Hardie inside a secret prison and expect him to languish there forever. Wood chipper, people. Wood chipper. Abrams assumed her partners thought she was joking about the wood chipper, but they didn’t realize it had been a fetish of hers since that infamous Coen brothers movie. You don’t know bliss until you’ve walked barefoot through the freshly pulped remains of another human being. Especially if you’ve had a conversation with them not five minutes before.

  Gedney’s way: hadn’t worked.

  Doyle’s way: failing miserably. The Cabal was hurting and was forced to hide underground while their enemies picked away at their various fronts and operations around the globe.

  Which left Abrams’s way.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said to Doyle on the phone now. Poor Doyle, even a year later, was still going through rigorous rehabilitation sessions at a private facility on the East Coast.

  “This isn’t my fault,” he said. “The craft was impenetrable. All systems in place. Hardie had no way of knowing how to knock the craft out of its orbit, and there was no way anyone could have transmitted that information to him. It’s a locked room mystery. An inside job!”

  “I told you, I’ll take care of it. I want your people reporting directly to me from here on out. No exceptions.”

  “You sound angry.”

  “I’m not angry. I’m annoyed,” Abrams said.

  “Because of what was inside the craft.”

  “Because of what had still better be inside that craft.”

  It was time to initiate her contingency plans: recovery teams on opposite sides of the country. And complete sedation for her old friend Doyle. Better he sleep through this next part. This was no longer a holy trinity. Abrams was God, and the world was about to feel her wrath.

  Life had been pretty quiet for Factboy.

  Which really sucked, because a quiet life meant no money.

  For a while there, in the glory days, the frenzied big money days, he couldn’t open offshore accounts fast enough. He and the wife didn’t get along, but that didn’t matter because the checking account was always fat, the credit limits on all of the cards were sky-high, and there were vacations galore. (Even if Factboy spent a lot of time in the bathroom.)

  Factboy was an information broker for the organization that used to call themselves the Accident People. He was known as sharp, quick, and reliable. Not the best, to be sure. The top-tier guys were at another level entirely, and formed a tight little clique that called itself—and how freakin’ pompous was this—the Architects. Factboy would never be an Architect. Nor would he want to be. He had enough to keep his family happy, and that was fine.

  Until three years ago, when the work started drying up.

  And the Architects snapped up all of the high-paying gigs, leaving everybody else with scraps.

  Factboy especially.

  Try explaining to your wife why your computer consulting job—one that had previously afforded them European vacations and the latest minivans and the fattest, tallest Christmas trees on the lot—suddenly paid a whole lot less, and they had to settle for the occasional trip to the beach, and hey, yeah, maybe we should just keep the Odyssey this year, it’s been good to us, right, and wow, look at this artificial Christmas tree—a genuine blue spruce!

  Ms. Factboy started to get suspicious, and Factboy started to get real worried.

  It wasn’t as if he could level with her. Tell her what he’d really been up to all of these years. Not only would that be a five-alarm security breach, and the next thing Factboy knew, he and the entire family would be wearing matching black hoods and feeling needles jabbed into the crooks of their arms. Don’t worry, kids, everything’s going to be allllllllllllllll

  thud

  No, honesty wouldn’t work. Honesty never worked with wives. Factboy had come to learn this. Like the American Public, wives wanted to be lied to. But you had to do them the favor of lying creatively and plausibly. Otherwise, it was just insulting.

  Factboy ran out of creativity and plausibility about, oh, two years ago. Marriage-wise, he’d been running on fumes ever since.

  So Factboy was ridiculous, crazy, giddy happy when his cell phone buzzed one day and he picked it up and he heard the most glorious voice in the world: Mann’s.

  Crazy, creepy Mann. A voice that normally would chill him down to the marrow of his skinny, osteoporosis-in-the-waiting bones.

  But now Mann meant big money.

  Mann meant a return to the glory days.

  Mann meant a lifeline.

  Mann still frightened the crap out of him, but whatever.

  With Mann, life would be good again.

  “Sooooo good to hear from you,” Factboy said, wondering if Mann could feel the soft impressions of his firm lips on her tender buttocks.

  Mann had been waiting for this day for six years now.

  Kind of sick to admit it, but she even fantasized about it in the hospital, after they’d removed one of her tits. Somehow it helped ease the aching loss and the horrible itch of her freshly scarred skin.

  Just the idea of it.

  Killing Charlie Hardie’s family … and then Charlie Hardie himself.

  Squeeeeeeeeeee … oh the sheer delight.

  Mann knew it was ridiculous to pin so much fulfillment on one job—but Hardie had long ceased to be a job. He had become a bona fide obsession. You can look back at your life and see the places where you suddenly veer off in the wrong direction, recasting your entire life in the process. Mann had veered off when she failed to kill Charlie Hardie the first time, in that backyard in Studio City.

  Now it was time to get it done right.

  This was her dream assignment! To erase Charlie Hardie’s wife and son from the face of the earth! And, of course, to make it look like an accident. Payback, at long last. She was told to plan it, scope it out, and prepare a suitable narrative within twenty-four hours … but not to pull the trigger until Abrams herself gave word. The family must be kept alive as leverage until Abrams said, “Sic ’em.” Why? It was not Mann’s place to ask why. Mann truly didn’t give a shit why. She was the finger on the trigger, nothing more. Just the way she liked it.

  Besides, what was twenty-four hours? Charlie Hardie was the outstanding balance in the accounting sheet
of her life, and she knew that one day she’d have to set the numbers right.

  Mann gave herself credit for bouncing back through some of the worst years of her life. For one thing, she thought her employers would most definitely have her killed after the monumental clusterfuck that was the Lane Madden job from seven years ago. Instead she’d been spared and allowed to make good on the Cabal’s investment in her. That was a nice affirmation, even if they made her jump through countless hoops before she was allowed to direct an accident again.

  There also had been personal trials. Mann had already sacrificed one breast to the Great God Cancer, but as it turned out, the god was not so easily appeased. It returned for more. Mann, though, was not about to surrender her other girl, so she dug in her heels and fought, all the while navigating the hopelessly complex alliances and internecine wars of the Cabal as it expanded. Some days she’d roll straight from chemo, ripping the plastic hospital bracelet from her wrist, and right into an assignment. Later she puked in little bags to keep her personal forensic materials away from the scenes of the accidents. She bought lots and lots of little bags.

  After a few of those dark years, however, she beat back the Big C and emerged on the other side a stronger, sharper operative. Mann developed an icy detachment that helped her considerably.

  Exceptin one area …

  And that was Charlie Hardie.

  Charlie Hardie

  Charlie Hardie

  Charlie Hardie, burning blinking neon in her brain, which slammed her into wakefulness at 3:00 a.m. with a dry mouth and a racing heart.

  So when the call came and Mann heard the name of her nemesis once again, she was full of conflicted feelings and emotions, and all of that hard-won icy detachment went bye-bye.

  This was an old-school assignment; the Cabal wasn’t as generous with supplies as it had been in the past. Abrams would never admit this to a freelancer, but the Cabal was clearly an organization on its ass. The instructions were to keep it cost-effective, small, and precise. No grand narratives. Just the basics. For such a thing, Mann knew she needed to skip the overpriced fact architects and bring in one of her old boys.

  Besides, she knew he’d be grateful for the work.

  “So great to hear from you,” he said, and she could practically feel his cold, narrow lips on her ass.

  “I need two things from you,” Mann said. “One will be easy. The other, not so easy.”

  “Done,” Factboy said, a little too quickly. “Um, we talking about the same rates? From, you know, the last time we worked together?”

  We don’t work together, Mann wanted to say. You work for me. You’re like the guy behind the counter. I place an order, you deliver.

  But you need to properly motivate a freelance contractor, not break him down completely from the start. She could apply threats and pressure later.

  “Competitive rates,” Mann said. “Does that work for you?”

  “Of course,” he said—again, a little too quickly. In that moment, Mann knew he needed the money and that he’d do practically anything for the paycheck.

  13

  If I am not me, then who the hell am I?

  —Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall

  RIGHT NOW YOU have regained semiconsciousness. You’re bobbing up and down in the cold salt water, being held up by who knows what, wondering what the hell has happened to you.

  And then you sinkdown …

  down,

  down,

  down,

  sinking and flailing and wondering where it all went so gloriously wrong, to be drowning in the ocean.

  Where had it gone wrong?

  Well, it all started the day you drove to the quiet suburban office complex where you’ve been spending the past year and your handlers told you, Congrats! You’re going to become someone else, permanently leaving your own facial features and identity behind.

  You said sure.

  Because what else could you have said? They have such a fierce grip on your balls it cuts off your vocal cords. Been that way for an entire year now, ever since you came in from the cold. You allegedly have your “freedom,” but still your life is micromanaged to the nth degree. They know what time you get up in the morning, what time you take your first piss, what time you brush your teeth, what time you shower, what time you order your first (and only) cup of coffee of the day. They know how many reps you do in the hotel gym, how many miles you run on the treadmill, how many ounces of water you drink during your workout. They know the clothes in your closet and routinely inspect them. They watch you as you drive away from the four-star residence hotel and drive the 1.7 miles to the office complex; they watch you make the return 1.7-mile trip at the end of the workday. They know what you order for dinner. They know what you zone out to on the flat screen. They know when you close your eyes. They even know when you fall asleep for real.

  So what else can you say other than: When do we start?

  The trick to becoming someone else isn’t selling it to others. Most people don’t look too closely.

  The trick is selling it to yourself.

  If you’re going to give yourself away, you’ll do it to yourself first. You’ll think, I’m just playing around. My name’s not really Charlie Hardie, it’s [REDACTED]. And then, boom, you’ve just given yourself away in a hundred little ways.

  Hence, the year of intense study and surgeries. You don’t mind the studies, actually. It’s something else to wrap your mind around. The year you’ve spent being debriefed could only be described as a bureaucratic purgatory. Daily recitation and repetition of biographical and operational details, followed by the finest middlebrow American entertainment available, and then, all too infrequently, blissful sleep. But even that is interrupted by all of the recitation and repetition, so that you find yourself reliving huge chunks of your life on a nightly basis. As if your brain was taking its revenge for making you open up all of its secret cupboards and drawers and dump out the contents. Hey, you wanted all these open, pal. So I’m going to keep opening them whether you like it or not. Yeah, yeah, I’m not getting any sleep, either.

  Someone else’s life, however … the chance to wallow around in the weird and mundane and complex details of someone else’s existence … that came as a nice break.

  Your handlers tell you: You’re going to become someone named Charlie Hardie.

  You met Charlie Hardie before—briefly but intensely. Certainly not enough time for you to do a Rich Little–style impression of him or anything. But at least you did meet him, which gave you a definite edge over other candidates.

  As if other people were lining up to be this guy? You thought this to yourself at the time.

  They bring out these cardboard boxes of this guy’s life. School. Military—a lot of it classified. Police files—so many Philadelphia Police Department files, it’s sort of sick. What had Hardie been up to all of these years? As you flip through dust-filmed manila folders, you quickly realize the answer to your own question: A lot. Hardie was never officially a cop, he played the strong-arm/muscle to a genius crime solver named Nate Parrish. The more you read, the more you’re convinced that Parrish should be given his own series of books, maybe even a cable movie of the week. Too bad he was killed in his prime. It was Moriarty who’d ultimately brought Sherlock Holmes down, tumbling with him over the Reichenbach Falls. With Nate Parrish, it had been Hardie—and as it turned out, Hardie had survived the fall, too.

  You read the case files and it’s truly heartbreaking. And you’re not the kind of guy to get all choked up over heartbreaking details. But Parrish, his entire family … wiped out because of a stupid Charlie Hardie mistake.

  This is key to understanding the man. The thick layer of guilt that serves as the bedrock for everything else.

  My God, you’re going method.

  But seriously, it all snaps into place once you’ve absorbed and digested these files, which are essentially an Annotated Charlie Hardie.

  Hardie exiled himself beca
use he felt guilty for surviving what should have, by all rights, killed him. Hardie exiled himself because he no longer felt capable of doing the one thing that a man is supposed to do: keep his family safe and alive. Hardie exiled himself across the country and drowned his emotions with booze and other people’s dreams on DVD and thought that would be best for everyone involved.

  But here’s the thing Hardie doesn’t realize but you do, because you have the Annotated Charlie Hardie sitting open in front of you.

  Hardie—make that you—shouldn’t feel guilty about not dying.

  Because of the contents of a classified military record sitting open in front of you.

  Oh, Chuck, you want to say. You could have been so much more. And yet you’ve squandered a decade doing … what? Running? Fighting? Thinking you were already dead?

  Such a goddamned shame. Someone should have opened this file for you years ago. It would have cleared up so much.

  Then you think to yourself, You know, it’s not too late.

  So you go through all of this insanity, with the studying and the surgeries and the slingshot into space, and you meet the real Charlie Hardie again and it’s more of a psychological shock than you could have ever imagined.

  You’ve studied him.

  You’ve been tricked out to look just like him.

  You’ve become him.

  Still, nothing prepared you for the fact that he is kind of a giant dick.

  And then because he is such a stubborn dick, you end up unconscious inside the spacecraft as it splashes down into the Pacific Ocean. Ideally, this would be an awesome time for you to be awake, because, you know, the mission is not over. Somewhere on the spacecraft is the point to the whole goddamn thing, a crazy-tiny hard drive containing the silver bullet that will slay the global werewolf.

  So that brings you to the present:

  Semi-conscious, bobbing up and down in the cold salt water, being held up by who knows what, wondering where it all went so gloriously wrong.

  You rage against the ocean itself, pumping your arms and legs furiously because, of all the ways to die, drowning in the ocean is not one you’re okay with.