“The others, when they went up, they were by themselves, and I never saw them again. It’s a shame that the last one—I do remember his name now, it was Pierre, such a weird name—disappeared maybe half a day before I was rescued. Just a few hours.”
Ethan watched as Wendy wrote more notes. He waited for her nod before he picked up the story again.
“Tell me what happened to Joey,” she said.
It was both the best and worst memory of the entire nightmare.
* * *
Ethan wondered what made the dangling light move. The single bulb provided just enough light to see—maybe even enough to read if you really wanted, but there was nothing to read, so that meant nothing. There was also enough light to create shadows, and the shadows made the dark spots where monsters lived. He knew that there was no such thing as monsters, but knowing it didn’t make it any less scary. And because the bulb was always swaying, the shadows never stopped moving. Even when he closed his eyes, he could still see the darkness swirling.
The aloneness was beginning to get to him. He heard himself thinking thoughts that he shouldn’t think, about maybe killing himself, or about fashioning a weapon out of something, and fighting back. Something sharp, so next time Joey told him it was time to earn his supper—
The trap door moved and Ethan’s heart rate tripled. It must be suppertime, and there was no weapon. The door must have been heavy as hell because when it opened, it made a concrete-on-concrete scratching sound. It would lift slowly at first, and no matter who it was, they always groaned and cussed while they were doing it. The concrete hatch would crack open, and then they’d cuss, and when the hatch finally heaved over, it shook the whole ceiling.
Dust fell, as did a patch of light from the basement above. Ethan prayed—actually begged God—for it to be Bill, coming to sell him off. Anybody other than—
“Step back, kid,” Joey said. “Time for you to earn your supper.”
“I’m not hungry,” Ethan said. He scrambled to his feet and backed away from the ladder.
“Oh, but I am,” Joey said. The stink of cigarettes somehow washed away the stink of the shit pot. “I am very, very hungry.” He climbed down the ladder, and smiled as he turned to face his prey. He carried no food. “And I see exactly what I want.” His hands moved to his belt.
Ethan couldn’t do this again. He wouldn’t do this again. Joey hadn’t taken two steps forward when Ethan launched a shriek from his throat. It was a girly sound, high-pitched and impossibly loud in this small a space. He didn’t speak any words. It was just noise, the sound of panic and disgust and hate and pain.
Joey stopped in his tracks, seemingly stunned. “What—”
From upstairs, a voice yelled, “What the hell is going on? My God.”
Ethan retreated further toward the shit pit.
“Do it again, kid, and I’ll break that throat,” Joey said.
From upstairs, the voice—Ethan recognized it now as Bill’s—said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, you sick bastard! Leave him alone. You’re going to ruin him.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, boy?” Joey said. “You’d like a little ruining, wouldn’t you?” He advanced.
Ethan shrieked even louder.
Joey’s face turned crimson. “Don’t say I didn’t warn—”
The entire world came apart over the course of just a few seconds. First, the lights went out, and then half a second later, the house shook from an explosion. A real explosion—not like a slamming door, but an explosion, complete with a flash, though the flash seemed far away.
Someone yelled, “Hands, hands, hands!” and then there was a rapid series of gunshots. Bang-bang-bang. Bang-bang-bang. Bursts of three in less than a second.
Ethan moved quickly to his left, trying to put distance and an angle between him and Joey with the distended pants.
The air filled with cussing, yelling. “Hands!” Bang-bang-bang.
And then the most magic of all magic words: “Ethan Falk! Shout out! We’re here to take you home!”
“Here!” Ethan shouted. “Under the basement! Help! I’m—”
Joey was on him. Ethan couldn’t see him, but he could smell him. And he could feel his hands, one down low, and one up high. “Shut up, you shit. Shut up or I swear to God—”
“Help!” Ethan shouted. “Oh, God, help me!”
The world erupted again, only this time from an impossibly short distance. The blinding light and the deafening blast arrived together. The pressure wave took Ethan’s breath away, and suddenly, he was on the ground, in the dirt, trying to breathe and struggling to hear.
Then hands were on him again, and Joey’s stink was like a part of his skin. “Stay back!” he yelled. Ethan couldn’t see anything. The world was like black velvet at midnight, but with a big honkin’ white spot where the explosion had burned a hole in his retinas.
“Put him down, shithead,” someone said. It was a deep voice, deep enough to make the floor vibrate.
“I swear to God—”
BANG!
Another flash of light, this one not as bright, but somehow much louder, and then Ethan was on the ground, and hotness flooded over his naked flesh. He knew it was blood, and he knew he should have been horrified, but all he felt was relief.
“Are you Ethan Falk?” asked another voice.
“Yes!” Ethan shouted it because he wasn’t one hundred percent sure he could make noise with all this weight on his back. Plus, his ears felt as if they’d been stuffed with cotton. “I’m Ethan! I’m right here!”
“PC secure,” the voice said, though Ethan wasn’t sure who the man was talking to. “One more sleeping.”
The weight lifted from atop Ethan, and he clearly smelled blood. “Hey, kid,” said the man with the deep voice. “We’re here to take you home. Did that shithead hurt you?”
* * *
“And I couldn’t answer him,” Ethan said. “I just started to sob.” As he was about to do again right now. “It was over. I still couldn’t see anything, but the big one slung me over his shoulder like a sack and he carried me up the ladder. He wore all of this equipment. Like a soldier. The stuff on him—ammunition and shit—all dug into me and I remember complaining about that. He told me that it wouldn’t be much longer.”
“What did he look like?” Wendy asked.
“I told you. He was big. And I mean huge. And he was dressed like a soldier, only all in black. He had night vision goggles on him, too. I mean, I guess that’s what they were. They looked like binoculars fixed to a helmet, the same kind that you see in the news reports from Iraq. The guy dripped guns and ammunition. When he finally put me down, we were up on the main floor of the house, and there was some light up there, through the windows, I guess. He put me on a chair in the living room and told me not to move, that he’d get something to wrap me in. A few seconds later, he wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and when he pulled the binocular things out of the way, he still didn’t have a face. Everything but his eyes was covered with a ski mask.”
“How long were you on that chair?”
“I have no idea,” Ethan said. “Honestly, it could have been five minutes, it could have been fifteen. I don’t think it was as long as an hour.”
“What did the big man do then?”
“He just stood there. He kept his rifle up, like he was ready to shoot, but not at me. Like at anything else. Looking back, it was like being guarded by a big dog.”
“Did he talk to you?”
“No, not really. Not after he put me down and wrapped me up. Every now and then, he’d press a button on his chest and say something—I imagine it was a radio—but he never talked to me. After a while, the other guy came upstairs. He was dressed just like the big one, but he was a lot smaller. His face was covered, too, but I remember he had blue eyes. Not just regular blue eyes, but intensely blue eyes. He came over to me and kneeled down directly in front. He asked me if I was okay, and I said yes, and then he told me that I was o
ut of danger, but he wanted to know if there was anyone else in the house. Any other kids. I told him no, that I was the last one. He took the cuffs off my ankles and asked me if I could walk, and when I said yes, he said they could carry me if I wanted, but I said that I wanted to walk. I didn’t tell him that it was mostly because of the way their stuff poked at me. So, we left.”
It took a few seconds for Wendy’s note-taking to catch up with real time. “Just like that? You just left?”
Ethan answered with an extended shrug because he didn’t know what she was looking for.
“How did you leave?”
“Through the front door.”
“Don’t be obtuse, Ethan. In a car, by helicopter? How did you leave?”
That was a good question, not a part of the ordeal that he thought about very often. “By several cars,” he said. “First, they hustled me into like a station wagon, a real beater of a car. We were only in that for a couple of miles, and then we switched to a bigger one. An SUV, I think. Maybe a van. Then we drove for a long ways. It was still dark when we pulled into this big empty parking lot. We parked, and then they handed me off to another guy. This one looked normal. Dark hair, wore a suit. He then drove me to another parking lot, where my dad was waiting for me.”
More note taking. She was writing a book, apparently. “Were you frightened during this trip?” She asked that without looking up.
“No.” The strength of his answer startled him.
It startled Wendy, too. Her head snapped up from her journal. “No? Face masks, guns, ammunition, shooting, death, and you’re telling me you weren’t frightened?”
Ethan felt continually off-balance speaking with this lady. What did she want from him? “When the shooting was going on, of course I was scared. I was startled by the noise, but I never felt in danger once Scorpion had me.”
“Scorpion is the big man?”
“No, he’s the littler one. And he wasn’t what you’d call little. But next to the other one, everybody is little. When they were dropping me off with the guy in the parking lot, I asked him who he was, and he said I should call him Scorpion.” Ethan smiled at a memory. “He said it’s ‘a cool name for a scary insect that strikes fast.’”
Wendy wrote some more.
Ethan went on, “So, after my dad picked me up—”
Wendy raised her hand for silence. “No,” she said. “That’s all I need for now.”
Ethan gaped. There was a lot more story to tell.
Wendy closed her notebook and clicked her pen closed with a flourish. “It’s been a long session. Almost an hour and a half. We’ll pick up here next time.”
Ethan’s stomach fluttered. He didn’t want to go back to his cell. “When will the next time be?”
“How’s day after tomorrow?” She stood. This was not a negotiable decision.
Ethan said, “My schedule is wide open.”
Chapter Twelve
Like most associations of retirees, former Special Forces operators enjoyed a number of gossip lines. The best ones were heavily encrypted and shared the kind of unvarnished opinions that would cause politicians to shit pickles.
One such encrypted site was a listserv called Do or Die. Through it, Jonathan was able to keep track of the truth behind the worldwide terror threat. Hint: It was way, way worse than the general public comprehended. Jonathan’s listserv handle was Detn8or4life, and by tweaking a few known contacts, he was able to find out that Konan’s avatar was PipSqueakl. With a little help from Venice, he was able to find an e-mail address for Henry West. Two hours later, Jonathan spoke with him on the phone, and three hours after that, Jonathan was sitting in his BMW M6 in the lot at Edgewater Park in Edgewater, Maryland, awaiting the arrival of a white Lexus with Maryland tags ending in the number 856.
And there it was. The man behind the driver’s seat appeared to have changed little, and he waved as he passed. The spot next to Jonathan’s was open, but Konan chose a spot two rows over, and probably ten slots down. It was good tradecraft to take one’s time when establishing a contact.
Since it was Jonathan’s meeting, he moved first, unfolding himself from his sports car and strolling across the paved lot toward a paved path that led to a collection of four baseball fields. Ahead of him lay a squatty white building with a gray roof. He figured it to be restrooms, but by the time he approached closely enough to see the sign on the door, his interest had evaporated. Beyond the building, and between the fields, the park’s designers had left a thick grove of trees, which Jonathan imagined were intended to provide a buffer between the noise of the park and the saltbox houses that surrounded it.
Jonathan entered the woods, walked maybe twenty-five yards, then turned and waited. This was the time of year when the Washington Metropolitan Area was at its most beautiful. The brilliance of the autumn leaves had faded, but color remained, and the thermometer registered chilly but not yet cold. Jonathan’s jacket concealed a Colt Commander on his belt, making him a felon only ten miles from the other side of the Potomac River, where no one would raise an eyebrow.
Konan took long enough to join him that Jonathan wondered if maybe the man had changed his mind. When he finally did push his way into the woods, Konan greeted his old friend with a big smile and an extended hand.
“Digger Grave,” he said. “Man, it’s been a long time.” Henry West had softened a bit since Jonathan last saw him, but he remained an imposing man. At six-three, he still had a broad chest and narrow waist, and his biceps still challenged the fabric of his shirt, but there was just enough jiggle to show that civilian life had reduced his maniacal workout regimen. Plus, he was wearing a white shirt and Republican tie—a look that defied every memory Jonathan had of the man.
“How ya doin’, Konan?” Jonathan said, accepting the gesture of friendship. “Actually, it hasn’t been as many years as you probably think.”
“Where’s Big Guy? I thought you two were joined at the hip.”
“I keep him home sometimes,” Jonathan said with a chuckle. “In public places like this, he sometimes can draw a little bit too much attention.” He didn’t like talking about Boxers with others from the Unit. All too often, they allowed themselves to confuse Big Guy’s overt aggressiveness and overall quiet tone as a sign of limited intellect, and nothing could have been farther from the truth.
Jonathan made a show of looking at his watch. “I know you have work to do, so—”
Konan held up a hand for silence. “Before you get to what you want to talk about, I want to tell you how much I appreciate all that you do.”
Jonathan’s shields came up. He knew that some elements of his post-Army work had made it into the rumor mill, but he didn’t know how much was known by how many. The correct answer was as little as possible by as few as possible.
“What’s that look?” Konan asked.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, right.” He laughed, but when Jonathan didn’t, he dialed it back. “Okay, fine. Play it coy. Certainly neither confirm nor deny, but we all know how you went to bat for Boomer and his family—twice—and that kind of loyalty means a shitload to everyone in the Community.”
Boomer—real name Dylan Nasbe—had gotten crossways with some of the wrong people not too long ago, and Jonathan had reached out in friendship when the rest of the world seemed committed to being Boomer’s enemy.
Jonathan remained poker-faced.
“Yeah, fine,” Konan said. “We’ve also heard rumors about some pretty wild freelance antics that we lay at your feet. If the rumors aren’t true, please don’t tell me, because I really want them to be. Anyway, you need to know that there’s a whole lot of snake eaters out there who’d walk through fire for you. Number me among them. Now, what can I do for you?”
“I need you to bend some laws for me,” Jonathan said.
Konan snorted a laugh. “Yeah, I kinda figured that out when you spelled out that you wanted to meet in the woods in a public park.”
>
“What do you know about a group called al-Amin?”
Konan cocked his head and tucked his hands in his pants pockets as a smirk grew on his face. “So that was you, huh? That business on Route One a few days ago?”
“Jesus.”
“Looking at the elements, you were the first person I thought of when I heard that no one could figure out who the shooters were.”
Jonathan didn’t have the energy to go through the whole denial charade again. “So, the bad guys . . . ?”
“Freelancers, as far as we can tell.”
“For whose side?”
Konan chuckled. “Well, that’s the problem with freelancers, isn’t it? It’s hard to know. Tell me who their target was, and I’ll give you my opinion on where their allegiances lie.”
Jonathan cocked his head, trying to see the other man’s angle.
“What?” Konan asked. He sounded defensive.
“Are you playing straight?” Jonathan asked. “You really don’t know who the kidnapping target was?”
Konan drew an exaggerated X on his chest with his finger. “Cross my heart. I figure it had to be somebody important, but we haven’t yet been able to figure out who.”
“Then how did you even know it happened?”
“Because guys we were watching ended up dead. Even the local cops have figured out that it was probably a foiled kidnapping. You must have seen that on the news.”
“I haven’t watched the news since it became infotainment,” Jonathan said. “But you’re right. It was an important person. Mindy Johnson, daughter of William H. Johnson of Massachusetts.”
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