High Treason

by John Gilstrap

  “Ask any one of the passengers on that airplane in Chicago,” Pyotr said. “Americans are bullies. It’s not about your religion or about your so-called freedom. The world hates you for making war against peaceful people.”

  Jonathan suppressed a sigh. With zealots, lectures all too often came as part of the package. Islamists were the worst of the lot, but former Communists came in a close second. He’d learned, though, that if you waited long enough, they’d abandon the bullshit and get around to the point.

  “For Christ’s sake, Scorpion,” Arc Flash said, hefting his sledge.

  Jonathan held out his hand to stop him, though he sensed that Horne was bluffing.

  “Everybody benefits if you speed this along, Peter,” Jonathan said.

  Horne said, “Screw this,” and he crashed the sledge down onto Vasily’s other shoulder, caving in that side, too. The blow elicited another shriek from the otherwise unconscious man.

  “Screw you,” Boxers growled. He closed the distance to Arc Flash in three long, quick strides.

  The little man tried to back up, but he couldn’t move fast enough.

  Boxers ripped the sledge away with one hand, and drove Arc Flash into the back wall with the other. A shelf broke, raining torture tools onto the floor. When there was no place left to go, he pressed the sledge’s head under Horne’s jaw, at the spot where it met his neck, effectively cutting off his ability to breathe.

  “No more,” the Big Guy said. His voice had turned raspy, a tell that Jonathan had come to recognize as the last station before Homicideville.

  Jonathan considered intervening, but then decided that he didn’t care.

  “Once more,” Boxers continued, “and I’ll gut shoot you and watch you bleed to death.”

  Delivered by a different guy, those words might have sounded empty. Coming from Boxers, they sounded like a promise. As Horne’s face reddened, his eyes showed real terror.

  His point made, Boxers pulled the sledge away and let the man breathe again.

  Horne’s hands shot to his neck and he slid to the floor, gasping for air.

  “Sit,” Boxers said. “Stay.” To Jonathan: “Sorry, Boss. He got on my last nerve.”

  Big Guy recovered as quickly as he’d erupted, and Jonathan reminded himself for the millionth time how much better it was to have Boxers as a friend than an enemy.

  Jonathan returned his attention to Pyotr. “They never did get along,” he said. “The good news is, for now Big Guy is on your side. He gets that you lost a friend—or will as soon as he dies of his injuries, but the fact remains that you are trying to blow up my country. In the process, you tried to kill the president’s wife. That’s bad juju, Pete.”

  Pyotr scowled. “Jew?”

  Jonathan laughed. “Juju,” he said. “Like voodoo.” The Russian still didn’t get it. “Never mind. The plan, Pete. What’s the plan?”

  “Is already in play,” he said. He’d never sounded more Russian. “You cannot stop it.”

  “Humor me.”

  Pyotr looked down to his feet, a gesture of resolve to shut up. He’d said enough.

  Jonathan inhaled noisily. “Please don’t make it go this way,” he said.

  Pyotr continued to look at the floor.

  “Hey Big Guy,” Jonathan said without shifting his gaze. “Do you still have the sledge?”

  “Yup.”

  “Would you shatter Pete’s left knee, please?”

  “Love to.”

  Jonathan more sensed than felt the Big Guy’s approach from behind.

  Pyotr’s eyes grew huge. “No, no, no,” he said. “I tell you.”

  Jonathan dared a look over his shoulder and saw the Big Guy with the sledge raised over his shoulder, poised for a home run swing. He’d never know if he was bluffing because he’d never ask.

  “One chance, Pete,” Jonathan said. “I abhor torture, but I’ll watch you scream for mercy for hours before I let another tourist die on an airliner. Do you get where I’m coming from?”

  Pyotr nodded like a bobble head. “Yes, yes. I understand. Please don’t hurt knee.”

  Boxers’ shadow retreated.

  “I won’t hurt knee if you tell truth,” Jonathan said. His Russian accent sucked.

  “We have sleeping cells in your country,” Pyotr said. “They wait for orders to do violence.”

  “What kind of violence?”

  “Big violence. Big as East-West Airlines and even bigger.”

  “Was that you?” Jonathan asked. “Did your sleeper cell shoot down the airliner?”

  Pyotr smiled as he nodded. “Was perfect operation, no? You still do not know who was person who shot down.”

  Jonathan shrugged. “We will,” he said. “We Americans aren’t good at everything, but we’re really good at ferreting out our enemies.” He didn’t add that Pyotr would be the very man to give them the intel they’d need to close that loop. “What does any of this have to do with Mrs. Darmond? Why did you attack her?”

  Pyotr smiled. “Did you know she used to be one of us?”

  Jonathan said nothing. In an interrogation, it was of utmost importance that information flow in only one direction. He asked the questions and the prisoner provided the answers. “Is it revenge?” he asked.

  Pyotr scowled as if he didn’t fully understand the question. “Revenge is same as payback, yes?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Payback for how she betray her friends?”

  “You tell me, Peter.”

  “No. We are not interested in revenge. She knows secrets.”

  “Of the targets you’re planning to hit,” Jonathan presumed.

  “I don’t know what the secrets are,” Pyotr said. “I only know that she needed to be silenced.”

  A piece of the puzzle fell into place. “So, the hit on the Wild Times Bar was an assassination attempt?”

  Pyotr looked away.

  “I need an answer, Pete.”

  He nodded.

  “And what about the police officer on the Mall?” Jonathan asked. “DeShawn Lincoln.”

  “He saw too much and talked too much,” Pyotr said.

  “What did he see and say?”

  Pyotr shook his head. “I do not know. It doesn’t matter that I know. I do not design the machine. I am merely a mechanic.”

  Across from Pyotr, Vasily managed one more giant breath, and then he died. The death rattle seemed to give Pyotr a moment of peace. Jonathan wondered whether it was because his friend was finally out of pain, or if it was because his boss could never rat him out for telling.

  “By mechanic you mean killer,” Boxers clarified.

  Pyotr did his best to pivot his head to see the Big Guy. “By mechanic I mean I fix things and make them right. I am a soldier.”

  “Don’t honor yourself, asshole,” Boxers said. “You’re no soldier.”

  Jonathan knew that the current path couldn’t lead to anywhere good, so he changed the subject. “And what about David Kirk and Becky Beckeman? What did they do that you had to fix?”

  “The girl meant nothing to us,” Pyotr said. “She was—what is your word? Collateral damage. She was with Kirk.”

  “And what had Kirk done?”

  “Is that not obvious?”

  “I need to hear it from you.”

  “He also knew too much. He was Officer Lincoln’s last phone call.”

  And so it was with cover-ups. Jonathan had seen the pattern a hundred times. Once a secret is blown, the only way to get the genie back into the bottle is to engage in a scorched-earth strategy of cleanups.

  “The group that is doing this,” Jonathan said. The group you’re a part of. Does it have a name? Is it organized?”

  “We don’t need a name,” Pyotr said. “We have memories and we have a mission.”

  “Who’s the leader?”

  Pyotr shook his head. “I do not know.”

  “Then who is your boss? Who do you take orders from?”

  He said a phrase i
n Russian that Jonathan didn’t understand. When pressed, he said, “I do not know the English. Perhaps drop dead?”

  Boxers bristled. “Easy there, pal.”

  “I think he meant dead drop,” Jonathan said, a term of art in the espionage trade that meant a pre-established location to leave and retrieve messages. It remained one of the most reliable means by which clandestine people communicated with each other. “Explain to me how it worked.”

  Pyotr hesitated, but Jonathan sensed that it was mainly for show. The thing about breaking somebody was once the information started to trickle, a flow was generally close behind. As much as Scorpion hated to admit it, watching Vasily be tortured to death had loosened Pyotr’s tongue. People in pain may or may not give reliable information; but people in fear of pain would give up anyone and anything.

  “My phone would ring at a precise hour. If it rang, then I would go to the drop dead. Dead drop. The instructions would be there.”

  “Who called you?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Well, who was on the other end of the line when you answered?”

  “I did not answer it,” Pyotr said. “The phone would ring at only one of two times per day if it was going to ring at all. At four fifty-seven exactly. Same time, morning or afternoon. Not a minute sooner or later. If it rang, I would go.”

  “He’s lying,” Arc Flash said. He hadn’t yet dared to stand from where Boxers had planted him.

  “Shut up,” Big Guy said.

  Jonathan said, “You mean to tell me that you were never curious?”

  “Of course I was curious. But I have orders, and the orders were not to answer when phone rang at four fifty-seven.”

  Soldiers the world over suppressed all manner of emotions and foibles when their orders told them to. The story made sense to Jonathan.

  “What sorts of things would you be instructed to do?”

  “Mostly, I would be deliveryman. Pick up a package at one place and drop it at another. And before you ask, I never saw the people on either end of the delivery. I would pick up at a place and drop off at a place.”

  “Always the same pick-up location?” Jonathan asked.

  “No. Always same dead drop. It would then give location for pick-up. At pick-up, I get instruction for drop-off.”

  It was a good way to control the flow of information, Jonathan thought. You never wanted human assets to know more than they needed to. Even now, under the heat of a coerced confession of sorts, Pyotr’s betrayal of his superiors could only go so far.

  “Where is the dead drop?”

  “In a restroom in Fairfax, Virginia. In hotel.”

  “Which hotel?”

  “Hilton Garden Inn on Route Fifty. Instructions would be taped behind toilet in men’s room off of the lobby. No one could see it if they were not looking for it.”

  “And these packages. What would be in them?”

  “Always orders not to look.”

  “How often did you and Vasily work together?”

  “Never before now. Never before this mission.”

  “This mission to kill,” Jonathan clarified.

  “Da. This mission to kill. But I do not know why. The dead drop told me to go to the park outside of the Foggy Bottom Metro Station wearing New England Patriots knit cap with blue Levis and white tennis shoes. I would meet a man wearing brown shoes, tan pants, and a blue ski parka. I would say to him, ‘sure is cold,’ and he would say, ‘I am ready for vacation in Saint Kitts.’ That person was Vasily.”

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve seen him,” Jonathan said.

  “Was first time in years. Since we arrive in America. He had orders for killing. I only assisted.”

  “Who did his orders come from?”

  “Should have asked him,” Pyotr said. It was his first jab back at his captors.

  Jonathan shot a look to Horne. “Would have been nice to have a chance to. In fact—”

  His earpiece popped to life. “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”

  He pressed the transmit button on his vest. “Go ahead.”

  “Two bits of news. First: Our recent houseguests have left. I have no idea where they went.”

  “Idiots,” Boxers said to Jonathan. He was plugged into the same net and heard everything.

  “I just received a message from Wolverine. She needs to see you ASAP. No details. And she said it has to be here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “In the Cave.” While they spoke on encrypted radio channels, Jonathan was keenly aware that there was nothing that couldn’t be listened to or jammed by someone who knew what they were doing. The Cave meant the office. And it was an extraordinarily odd place to meet.

  “That’s crossing the worlds a little too closely, don’t you think?” Boxers asked on the air.

  “No argument from me,” Venice said. “I’m just reporting the request.”

  “What’s her ETA?” Jonathan asked.

  “You are to notify me when you’re an hour out, and then I will notify her.”

  Jonathan looked to Boxers, gave his signature shrug. “I don’t like it,” Big Guy said off the air.

  Jonathan pressed the transmit button. “Make the call. We’ll be there in thirty.”

  “Stand up, Arc Flash,” Jonathan commanded.

  The little man did as he was told. He might have been beaten, but he hadn’t been cowed. “More problems afoot?” he asked.

  Jonathan took a step forward, and Horne responded with a concomitant step backward. “Listen to me, Torture Boy,” he said, leveling a finger at the man. “What’s done here is done, and by that I mean that you leave both of these men alone. I’ll get some of Wolverine’s people out here to take care of them. You just lock the door. Are we clear on this?”

  Horne recovered his lost ground with a step forward. “I hear you, Scorpion, but never forget who I am, and where you are. I do my job, and you do yours, and if we both do them right, the world becomes a safer place. But don’t think for a moment that you scare me.”

  “How about me?” Boxers said, stepping forward. “I figure I’ve got to make you at least a little nervous.”

  He stood close enough that Horne had to crane his neck to see Big Guy’s face. He showed wisdom in not replying.

  “Just don’t hurt them any more than you already have,” Jonathan said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was as if Billy Zanger had investigative reporters in mind when he selected his home. Out here in Prince William County, Virginia, the primary industries were support services for the midgrade military officers who comprised the main demographic. Neighbors might be impressed with Zanger’s title of deputy press secretary, but they wouldn’t obsess over it. Awareness of national politics decreased exponentially with every mile outside the Beltway. In Prince William County, the chances of being seen and reported by a curious blogger were pretty slim.

  Becky and David had been sitting in their rental car in the parking lot of the little townhouse cluster for over an hour, awaiting Zanger’s return from his late shift at the news desk in the West Wing.

  “He should be getting home anytime now,” David said. “He was supposed to get off at midnight. Even if he stays to work late, he should be here soon.”

  “How sure are you that he’s going to cooperate?” Becky asked from the driver’s seat. “What’s his incentive?”

  “I told you. He either speaks with us, or we out him.”

  “Would you really do that?”

  David forced a laugh. “You bet I’d really do that. Journalistic integrity is important to me, but I’m more concerned about my ass.”

  He felt the chill radiating from Becky, and as much as he wanted to ignore it, he couldn’t. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry about all of this. You have every right to be pissed at me, and I have no business asking you to participate as deeply as you are. You did a good deed letting me into your place, and now, true to the saying, you’re not going unpunished.”

&nb
sp; “That was a double negative,” she said without dropping a beat. “You’re better than that.”

  She seemed to enjoy his confusion.

  “I’m not pissed at you,” she said. “I’m not pissed at anybody.” She reached across the center console and gripped David’s arm. “What I am is scared. Shitlessly.”

  “I get that,” David said. “And as adverbs go, ‘shitlessly’ is a pretty good one.”

  “But really, David. This thing has the White House involved. That’s huge.”

  “We don’t know that the White House is involved,” David said. “Correlation and causation are different things.”

  “Oh, good,” Becky mocked with a smile. “Freshman logic. That’s what we need. Where I grew up, if it walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, we drew conclusions and lived with the margin of error.”

  David watched her as she spoke. In the deflected silver light of the street lamp, he saw cheekbones that stayed hidden most of the time. When she smiled, her teeth actually flashed.

  Becky pointed through the windshield. “That’s him,” she said. “Drives a Fusion, right?”

  David followed where she was pointing. They knew he drove a black Ford Fusion, and in the darkness, the one they saw parking in front of Billy Zanger’s townhouse could just as easily have been brown or navy blue.

  “Okay,” David said. “Let’s try not to get killed.”

  They opened their doors in unison and stepped out into the frigid night. David noted that the dome light didn’t come on as the door opened, and he realized that Becky had already thought of that. Damned impressive.

  When the door on the Fusion opened up ahead, that dome light did work, and its glare revealed exactly the person they were hoping to see. Billy Zanger was far too absorbed in whatever was playing through his head to notice the two approaching strangers.

  Zanger climbed out of his car, slung his European man-bag over his shoulder, and pressed the button on his key fob to make the Fusion chirp as its locks set. He was in no hurry as he dragged himself across the sidewalk and up the three concrete steps that led to his front door.

  The whole time, David and Becky closed the distance that separated them. The timing worked out perfectly, with them arriving at the steps the moment that Zanger turned the lock and opened the door.