Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Bang,” said Casey. He laughed as he examined the .38. “No one uses a thirty-eight except in the movies. It’s a good number if you’re talking bra size, but as a weapon for stopping someone from drawing down on you? Nah, you wouldn’t want to take it into a den of lions.”

  “What’s with the rifle?”

  “Big game hunting,” Casey said. He closed his left eye and, with his right against the telescopic scope, sat with the silence of a cat watching its prey.

  “You’ve got a lot of people looking for you,” said Calvino.

  “I’m not in the country.”

  Calvino looked around the condo. It was neat and clean. Not a shirt or a pair of underwear on the floor. No magazines, dishes, food or bottles, empty or full, in sight. The furniture polished, the floor swept, the smell of pine cleaner.

  “Who you planning to kill? Anyone I know?”

  Casey sighed, rose up from the rifle. His smile reappeared as he looked past Calvino. “That’s the wrong question, Calvino. You should be asking me who is going to kill you, if it ain’t gonna be me.”

  Calvino moved his head slowly. His chest felt like a stampede of buffalo had just passed over it, leaving the pain of hundreds of thundering hooves. He glimpsed another scoped rifle on a table no more than a foot away. He reminded himself of one of his laws: You are never as safe as you think you are.

  “Your beef is with Somporn,” said Calvino. “Maybe you special-forces guys specialize in trick shots, but I know that even you can’t hit him from this window.”

  “You’re the guy who followed Cat. So you have inside information.”

  “What’s the game, Casey?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “I thought your job was to get people talking. Or are you going through a career change?”

  Casey sat straight in his chair, arched his back, and stretched his arms over his head. “You had McPhail follow me. What underground school did that boy attend to learn surveillance one-oh-one? I’d like to see McPhail’s report card. Let me guess. Straight Fs, for fuck-up. He keeps on my tail across town. Not once does he lose me. Shouldn’t that have rung a bell? I’m following a guy who has spent a lifetime following people and would pick up a tail in a minute. But no, of course he thinks it’s his skill. He’s convinced that old Casey wouldn’t ever spot a tail. He thinks he’s Sherlock fucking Holmes, and he reports to you about seeing me go into an eye clinic. Jet, the girl behind the counter, she gives you my address. What did you think, it was your charm? No, you thought, I have the element of surprise. Casey’s not expecting me. What third-world detective training manual have you been reading?

  “Let’s play it the other way. I invite you to come here. And you think to yourself, Casey’s planning something nasty. I’d better ask my friend the Colonel to come along.” He stopped as if a silent bell had rung and looked through the scope again. “Not yet,” he says. “Modern society has forgotten the distinction between a predator and a voyeur. The doer and the watcher. To be a successful sniper requires that you must be both.”

  “Why kill Nongluck?”

  “Did she wave when she dropped past?”

  Calvino tried working the handcuffs behind his back. This pair wasn’t bought off a vendor’s table in Patpong. “Why not just kill her? Why go to all the trouble with a room upgrade so you could frame me for her murder?”

  “What would you do if your dead son’s girlfriend was screwing his killer for money?” Then his mood changed.

  “That doesn’t really answer my question,” said Calvino. “Why make me take the fall for Nongluck?”

  Casey had another look through the scope. The sniper’s rifle smelled of fresh oil, and the shiny barrel caught the light. When he looked up at Calvino, he rolled his head from side to side and exercised his jaw as if the air pressure inside an airplane cabin had suddenly changed.

  “Operational convenience,” said Casey.

  “But Somporn is the mission objective.”

  Casey smiled and lowered his sunglasses. “You’re not so stupid. I needed to settle some accounts. Nongluck’s account is settled. You know how bookkeeping works. Assets and liabilities have to balance. You were part of the accounting.”

  “There’s more accounting,” said Calvino.

  Casey grunted. “Ain’t that the truth. A couple of more books get balanced. I can never turn down killing two birds with one stone. It’s what I like to call a special bonus. But it’s not easy to make happen. You got to plan and anticipate what your enemy will do. What he’s thinking. You can’t underestimate his capability. In my line of work, you search through another man’s secret life, find out the things he can’t admit to himself. That’s the place where he’s most easily killed.”

  “And you passed these little pieces of wisdom along to your son, Joel. You tortured people in a secret prison. Did he know about your day job? Did you teach him your Chinese-fortune-cookie wisdom about how to interrogate people? Maybe that only works inside a secret prison. Maybe when he applied that wisdom in a Thai family business, it got him killed. He found the secrets. He demanded answers. But you didn’t teach him that unless you keep the man in a cell, he could come after you. You forgot that lesson. And it eats you up. So what do you do? You blame Nongluck. That lets you off the hook. Nice play, Casey. After you killed the ying did you feel better?”

  Calvino could see from the tension in Casey’s arms and neck that he was exercising every power of restraint to stop from crossing over and killing him. Casey inhaled loudly. “The first lesson is to understand your enemy, and a man who has this knowledge will never be defeated.”

  “That’s Sun Tzu,” said Calvino. “Only you left out an important part. A man has to first define his enemy and not confuse him with his friend. I get the feeling you got an F on your report card for not being able to pick out bad guys from good ones in the underground school the military sent you to.”

  “For a guy who has about ten minutes to live, you should be praying and not worrying about what Sun Tzu said.”

  Calvino saw what had been near him the entire time, but he hadn’t registered the meaning of until now. It was a second sniper’s rifle positioned behind his chair. He strained to look over his shoulder, twisting the best he could on the chair. For the first time, he saw the role that Casey had planned for him. One he walked right into without seeing.

  “I’m the decoy.” He turned back and looked over at Casey, the man who had been nicknamed the Ghost.

  “Give the man a cigar and a hundred dollars,” said Casey, removing his sunglasses and turning his baseball cap backwards so he could slip on a pair of night-vision goggles. A sloppy grin crossed his face as he examined the .38 in the light, turning it over and laying it on the table. “A hundred dollars for your secretary to give you the funeral you deserve.”

  “You know about Apichart and the coffin,” said Calvino, resigned to Casey’s ability to unearth the details from his personal and business life. Casey didn’t bother to reply. Calvino looked at Casey’s profile as he sat behind the sniper’s rifle. Fear-makers were what insurgents supposedly called guys like Casey. They have a carte-blanche license to be creative in producing real fear. “They’ve sucker-punched you, Casey. You’re going to be the poster boy for torture. Your face is gonna be on every newspaper, TV, and website as the man who inflicts pain and gets a regular paycheck for it.”

  “You ought to spend your last moments on this earth asking your creator for forgiveness,” said Casey. “Leave me to worry about my problems.”

  The masters of fear had cut Casey loose, tagging him as the fall guy. Leaving him isolated and with no possibility of escape, they were giving him his own taste of terror. Every man is a hero in his own story. Casey was no exception. Everyone he’d killed had deserved to die. There had been no innocent deaths on his watch. His service and company record, in his mind, had been perfect ones. He had only one regret, one blemish on his personal record, and that was his son’s death. A few hundred dol
lars had been paid to have Joel killed. Nothing in his life would ever deliver the satisfaction of seeing that stain removed.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  TRACER’S EYES CUT ACROSS the night skyline, window after window, swinging the binoculars back into focus on the balcony of Cat’s condo. The definition was perfect enough to see the petals on a potted orchid. It was half an hour from the appointed time when the target would appear; every one of those remaining thirty minutes threatened to stretch out into long and thin dimensions, making a one-minute segment into a unit that went on and on. He felt the thump of his pulse in his neck, the blood pumping as he worked buildings outside. He was looking for an infrared scope, which would identify itself with a telltale signature. Tracer knew that signature; he thought of an infrared marker as a squiggly line of thread that blurred into fuzziness. If someone out there had targeted them, Tracer would find him from that infrared signature. He turned up nothing except for the ghostly outlines rising off bodies and objects like steam. But Tracer didn’t give up, thinking somewhere in that landscape of heat-generated movement, a signature was waiting to write its name in blood.

  “In New Orleans, I knew a guy who had gone to Korea with the army,” he said. “Everyone should live for four years in a country where people eat rats and wash them down with rice wine. Then they’d understand the meaning of hunger, when empty plays the blues inside the guts. All other desires fall away when the belly wails.”

  Jarrett knew that the intel had troubled Tracer. It was no different in the marines. Intel was like women: some of them were good, a lot of them bad, and the man who survived had an instinct for navigating the switchbacks in the field and had planned his exit. No father, mother, doctor, brother, brilliant sister, or friend mattered on the job—nothing but the crosshairs and the feel of the rifle against his shoulder. Nor his Muslim heritage from Istanbul, the same background that had made him so valuable an asset on the ground. But at the moment of truth, it had to be submerged like all other distractions.

  He’d been trained to see the target as a math-and-physics problem. Depersonalize it, turn the killing into an equation. He’d learned to take the curvature of the earth into account, to measure wind and distance, and to calculate the velocity of the round. Like all snipers, Jarrett had the formula tables imprinted. In his dreams he saw them tumbling out of a hat with a white feather. The numbers wrote themselves on a whiteboard inside his sleeping mind. He dreamed of rows and rows of numbers, and at the end of each row was a picture of a dead man. Sometimes an error crept into the calculation and the shot splashed. The margin of error was unforgiving. It could be that the wind gusted, or the bullet had to travel through a pane of glass, or the target moved. When that happened, the target knew the score. All the formulas, tables, and calculations went out the window.

  “It don’t feel right,” said Tracer. “Can’t tell you exactly what’s wrong. But it’s a feeling in my bones that something’s gone sideways. Something we should see. Something right in front of us.”

  “For instance?” said Jarrett.

  “We were told to set up for a daytime shot. Now it’s a nighttime deal. Did anyone sight the infrared? I don’t know. Mooney took the scope out early in the morning and sighted the day scope. But we ain’t using that scope. And what if there’s a counter-surveillance team? They now know our exact location.”

  “You picking up any infrared out there? I’m not.”

  “They don’t need to turn on their infrared until the last second. They know we’re here. You can ignore what I’m saying.”

  “I never ignore what you say.” He was thinking about what had happened on their mission in Gijón. And he was thinking about how Casey had matched the pool table from a bar in Hua Hin—not any bar, the one where Jarrett and his father had arranged to meet Jack years before—and just so the point of Casey’s inside information had not been overlooked, he’d gone to the trouble of leaving behind a newspaper from Hua Hin. Through the infrared scope Jarrett couldn’t find the signature either.

  “Don’t get all superstitious on me,” he said. “Today is just another day. It’s nothing special. We do the job. The assignment is a matter of honor. It’s paying back Jack. It’s a good thing we’re doing.”

  The word “honor” hung like a mantra as they fell quiet and concentrated on their work. It was a word Harry’d used that night as they had dumped two bodies over the side of a boat and watched them sink into the Andaman Sea. Honor was also the word that had taken them to the room in Gijón. For centuries, it had been a reason to kill. Nothing much had changed since the beginning of time when someone first discovered that honor ranked above a life degraded into a state of disgrace.

  Honor had once been one of the most important virtues. Some said it had been knocked down the list by big new money. Others said honor only worked alongside the mystical. Just as superstition was on the retreat in the West, so was honor, and people had forgotten that everywhere else, relations were secured by a code of honor. Tracer loved Jarrett because he was one of the few men he knew who still believed in the original idea of honor. Though it might have fled from the lives of most people, it had stuck in Jarrett’s heart ever since he and his daddy had nearly died learning that lesson years before in a beach house outside of Hua Hin.

  Both Tracer and Jarrett had been briefed about Casey, and each step leading up to the mission had been given the green light. Waters told Jarrett that at first the case to help Casey had been a stretch for a paying-back-Jack assignment. Joel Casey hadn’t been a soldier. But his father had been, and a highly decorated one. He’d been green-badged by the CIA. Colonel Waters said Casey’s assignment had rolled around the rim a couple of times before it had fallen into the basket. The son had been tortured and then murdered. His father had been ex–special forces and had served his country, even though he fucked up on a mission. The fuck-up had caused another officer to die. Waters said that Casey had been to see him a couple of times, asking for the special-ops team from the company. Casey’s security clearance meant he had knowledge of the team. Waters had told him that nothing was going to happen until the Thais refused to act. Casey had waited. When the local authorities had refused to bring charges, claiming insufficient evidence, he’d asked Waters again. Waters went around company protocol and took the assignment directly to his team.

  Jarrett remembered the newspaper clipping Waters had given them of Joel Casey’s murder in Thailand. It occurred to him that if that had happened to someone in his family, he wouldn’t have gone asking for help. But then he didn’t need to ask; it was what he did.

  Tracer reached behind, picked up the remote, and pressed the OFF button. The blues gave way to the faint buzz of the air-conditioning compressor.

  Tracer stood to Jarrett’s right, holding the binoculars and rotating left to right. He started at Cat’s balcony—Zapper three-nine—and worked a ninety-degree sweep across the landscape of the other buildings—Ripper, Papa Bear, Grizzly, Scorpion, Firebird, Rooks, and Black Sheep—taking a close look at the ninth floor of each one, and then sweeping back on the tenth floor. After each sweep he raised his binoculars to get the next row of windows and balconies. Office or residence, Tracer gave them equal attention. It was possible that an ambush team had been set up nearby. Shooting up or down in a city wasn’t difficult; it was nearly impossible.

  “Check out Scorpion. Four degrees right, two degrees above current position.”

  At the midway point between their location and Cat’s balcony, Tracer saw something that stopped him cold. Jarrett moved his telescopic sight, bringing the crosshairs to the windows of the residential building. Lights turned off and on in hundreds of windows, and there was movement as people crossed their rooms in front of the window. “What do you see?” asked Jarrett.

  “I’m picking up light bouncing off something. Like a lens.”

  Jarrett looked again but couldn’t find any glint. The clutter of lights created a noise of flashpoints—flickering TV screens, lamps being swit
ched on or off, digital cameras flashing, small-but-bright reading lamps in bedroom windows, candles. Jarrett adjusted the focus on the lens and swept across a bank of buildings until he found Scorpion again.

  Tracer clicked his tongue, stretching out to brush the edge of the telescope. “If you’re seeing what I am seeing, that’s not good.”

  “If it’s a sniper, he could have shot me thirty minutes ago,” said Jarrett. “I’d have taken my shot.”

  “Maybe he’s waiting for something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Waiting until we’ve finished the job.” He rubbed his mojo bag. “Then he takes his shot.”

  Jarrett sat up, looking away from the rifle. “What are you saying, Tracer? Who’s going to shoot? Where are you looking?” He pushed his hat back on and pulled it forward on his forehead. “This is crazy.”

  Tracer shook his head. “Man, it’s not crazy. Think about it. What if it’s Casey? Did you know he was state-champion marksman in high school? He could have passed sniper’s school. He likes close-up contact. So he let it pass. He has the skills. The guy’s on the run. He’s got himself in a deep hole, one he ain’t never climbing out of.”

  “He checked out with Waters,” said Jarrett. “And he’s a tough son of a bitch.” The bedrock of Jarrett’s training was to follow his orders without question. A senior officer’s authority was unquestioned. It was disturbing for him to think that Tracer could even suggest such a thing was possible. Casey was part of their community, one of them, like Waters and the others they’d served with. They were a band of brothers who understood each other in a way no outsider could begin to understand. And they understood the inner workings of the field. Small things like knowing drug dealers buried mountains of money. All those wrinkled tens, twenties, and fifties; hundreds counted and wrapped. Every day there was more. No way that flow could be spent; no way the dealers would risk putting it in a bank, and because there was so much of it, the only way to hide it was to bury it. The rich loam smell of the earth took up home in such money. Like the smell of death, once it entered the nostrils, the scent could never be confused with anything else.