the Second Horseman (2006)

by Kyle Mills

  "I'm chauffeuring a fugitive around with open alcohol containers in the car," she reminded him.

  It was amazing how trivial that sounded now. Obviously, the slope was a lot slipperier than she'd planned on. A month ago, she'd been the type of person who went back into a store to return excess change.

  Brandon shook his head. "No, you're not. You picked up a hitchhiker you thought was going to die of thirst in the desert. And all you had to drink in the car was this cooler full of beer that you were taking to a picnic for your coworkers at the Ronald McDonald House."

  He might be a psychopath but he was right. At this rate, could a stroke be far off? She sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly, leaning her seat back a few clicks.

  "Feeling better?"

  "Not really, no. So? What do you think?"

  "About what?"

  When she turned to glare at him, he countered with a smile so relaxed and penetrating that it would have acted as a sedative on anyone unprepared.

  "You know damn well what I'm asking."

  She hadn't slept much the night before, instead rereading the information she had on Brandon and thinking about what he'd told her about his mother -- assuming any of it was true. Maybe you really couldn't fight genetics. If someone programmed a computer to predict the personality and profession of a person born of Brandon's preternaturally charismatic mother and analytical father, it wasn't that far-fetched to think it would churn out a description of the man sitting next to her.

  She'd read an article once on the evolution of psychopaths -- how any population of people could be expected to have leeches attached to the society they created. Remorseless people completely devoid of morality, who produced nothing and lived entirely by using others. It was hard to reconcile that description with her feelings about Brandon, though. Not surprising, she supposed. According to the article, most psychopaths had evolved to be incredibly charming and attractive. For obvious reasons, the ugly, obnoxious ones hadn't been all that successful.

  "The heist," she said, realizing that she was being tested. He wanted to see if she could say it out loud. "Tell me about our chances of stealing this money."

  "You want the truth?"

  Her smirk at hearing the word "truth" come out of his mouth wasn't as heartfelt as it should have been. She found herself having to constantly remind herself that everything he said was probably a lie. Or was it? Christ . . .

  "Yeah. I want your honest opinion."

  "Okay. Even with Richard whispering his secrets in my ear, this is going to be dead hard. Impossible might be a better word."

  "What do you mean 'impossible'?" she said a little too loudly for the confines of the car. "I thought --"

  "You were relaxing, remember? Look, they're all impossible when you first start thinking about them. But there's always something. Some security flaw. Some angle they didn't think of. Unfortunately, as much of an unimaginative asshole as he is, Richard doesn't miss a lot."

  "So you think you -- we -- will be able to do it?"

  "If I had a gun to my head and a year to plan, maybe. Probably. But all I've got is the gun to my head."

  "You talk in circles a lot, don't you?"

  "Undiagnosed attention deficit disorder. The truth is, if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have walked away from this deal. Too many unknowns and uncontrollables. Even at two hundred million, the risk-return sucks."

  "But the return isn't just money anymore, Brandon. It's millions of lives."

  "Yeah."

  She went back to staring out the windshield and he went back to sipping his beer until they began closing in on a slightly wider than normal area in the gravel shoulder.

  "Stop up there, Cath."

  "Why?"

  He jumped from the car before it had completely stopped and walked along the shoulder, rolling his cold beer against his forehead. Catherine set the brake and ran after him.

  "Is this it?"

  "Is this what?"

  "It! Where it's going to happen?"

  He stopped and faced her, examining the white cotton sundress she'd chosen that morning mostly because she figured it made her look less likely to commit a major felony than the rest of her wardrobe. The moment the scrutiny began to make her feel uncomfortable, he started walking again.

  "Nah, this isn't it. It's just nice out here. Prison's funny. Everything's so closed in. So crowded. At first you hate it, then you get used to it, then you get to kind of rely on it. This --," he motioned to the silent emptiness around them, "it's like the ocean."

  He tossed his empty can on the ground and sat on a low boulder.

  "But it seems good," Catherine said. "We've only passed five cars in the last hour -- I counted. I'll bet there isn't anyone within thirty miles of us right now."

  "It's probably less perfect than you think," Brandon said.

  "What, you'd rather be in Manhattan? We could hijack the truck right here and no one would even know."

  "Stealing money is easy, Cath. Keeping it long enough to spend it is hard."

  "But we know everything! Richard's given you this thing on a silver platter."

  He sighed quietly. "There are a thousand details. And if you miss just one of them, you're done. I mean, if every piece of information we have is dead-on and I can actually figure out a workable plan, our chances of getting busted are still about seventy percent." He motioned around them again. "Enjoy the open space while you can."

  "You can stop trying to scare me. I've made my decision."

  He nodded thoughtfully and began appraising her with even more intensity than before. This time he either didn't notice her growing discomfort or he chose to ignore it.

  "Are you sure you want to be involved in this, Catherine? I mean, I have no real choice, and as much as I hate to admit it, I got into this line of work because I love it. What about you, though? You're a million miles from where you started."

  "I don't have any more choice than you."

  "Sure you do. These Ukrainians aren't really your responsibility. Besides, what if you do manage to stop them? What's to keep the next group of Eastern Eurotrash freaks from doing the same thing? Are you potentially giving up your whole life to just postpone the inevitable?"

  Of course, she'd asked herself the same questions a hundred times. Almost verbatim, in fact. And she always came up with the same answer. "What if everyone took that attitude, Brandon? Then where would we be?"

  He poked at his empty beer can with his foot. "Funny how things can escalate, isn't it? One day you're sitting in some office at the NSA programming a computer to pick out Arab-sounding names, and the next, you're hijacking trucks full of cash."

  "Yeah. Funny."

  A low hum began to encroach on the silence, and they both turned toward the sound. The glimmer of a chrome grill became visible, followed quickly by the unmistakable outline of a semi moving toward them through the haze. They watched it close on them, listening to the shifting of gears as it began to slow. A moment later, the passenger-side window slid down.

  "You kids okay?"

  "Fine," Brandon said. "Just enjoying the view, you know?"

  "Whatever you say," the driver responded, obviously not sure why anyone would want to be outside the safety of their air-conditioned car in the middle of the Nevada desert. "You wouldn't want to break down out here."

  "Can't argue with you there," Brandon said while Catherine held her breath and pretended to look out at the landscape, positioning herself so the driver couldn't see her face. She tried to will him to drive on, but then Brandon spoke again. He sounded like he didn't have a care in the world.

  "You travel this road a lot?"

  "All the time."

  "Doesn't get much traffic, huh?"

  There was a grinding of gears and the truck finally started moving away. "Like being on the moon, son."

  Catherine realized she was still holding her breath and let it out in a noisy rush. When she turned back toward Brandon, he was sitting cross-legge
d on the boulder watching the semi through unfocused eyes.

  What was he thinking about? How to steal the money? How to escape?

  When he had been working his way into Scanlon's good graces, had it been a calculated effort? Or had Brandon genuinely liked the man and separated that from what he was really there for? Scanlon, even after being substantially harmed by Brandon, was the first to admit he wasn't evil -- that he'd never really injured anyone in a material way. Who the hell was Brandon Vale?

  "Can I ask you a question?"

  For a moment she wasn't sure if he'd heard her, but then he seemed to come out of his trance. "Go ahead."

  "How much of you is real and how much is a lie?"

  It had come out sounding more like an accusation than a question, but he didn't look angry or insulted.

  "If I knew that, I wouldn't be as convincing, would I?"

  Chapter NINETEEN

  "What the hell's going on?"

  Paul Lowe, the director of the CIA, and Edwin Hamdi both rose from their seats when President Morris walked in and slammed the door behind him. Lowe, a little more slowly -- a mannerism designed to make clear his long personal friendship with the president.

  Morris, though, was a much more complex man than his old friend gave him credit for. He tended to encourage what Hamdi saw as Lowe's arrogant flights of fancy, but was generally good at separating them from fact. The president's preference on most difficult issues was to listen to diametrically opposed sides and then make his own decision based on the effectiveness of the respective arguments. It was a reasonable approach, Hamdi supposed, but one that gave Lowe a dangerous amount of power. The man's knowledge of the history and politics of the region was admittedly encyclopedic, but because he viewed those facts through a filter of American, Israeli, and Christian patriotism, many of his conclusions were utterly wrong.

  "Can't we get two goddamn months of peace and quiet?" Morris said. "Is that too much to ask? What happened, Paul?"

  "We have a video, if you want to see it."

  "Turn it on."

  "It was taken by one of the attendees," Lowe said, standing and aiming a remote. The screen came to life, showing the steps of a New York City synagogue crowded with well-dressed people clapping as a bride and groom descended.

  He paused the video and pointed to the corner of the screen where a yellow cab was coming up the moderately congested street. "One-way, two-lane road. The cab is on the right side, away from the wedding."

  He began clicking forward frame by frame, keeping his finger trained on the cab as it swerved into the left lane, taking advantage of a small gap that had formed between two vehicles. A few frames later, it had hopped up on the sidewalk and was plowing through the crowd, bouncing wildly up the steps until a stone pillar finally stopped it.

  Hamdi concentrated for a moment on the frozen image of a young man pinned between the cab and the pillar, then scanned the rest of the screen, examining the broken and bleeding bodies strewn out on the ground. The bride herself had disappeared -- the only evidence of her existence being a wisp of white train wrapped around a tire. Hamdi winced in a facsimile of horror and sadness that he didn't feel.

  He had spent a great deal of time in the Jews' country. His first childhood memories were of how his father -- an eminently reasonable businessman -- was treated as a second-class citizen. How he had been forced to scrape and kowtow to get work that was well beneath a man of his abilities. Later, as a college professor, Hamdi had studied the Jews' fanaticism and racism. And finally, as a politician, he had witnessed their brutality.

  It never ceased to amaze him how the world had been so fooled by the Jews. Why had this one group been persecuted so long and so energetically by the rest of the world? Because they brought it on themselves.

  Not that Hamdi had any real passion for the destruction of the Jewish race -- it was hardly practical and would create a great deal of unnecessary human suffering. But it was time for the Jews to be recognized for what they were -- a small, relatively unimportant group of people who were putting the entire world in danger. It was a situation that, with Richard Scanlon's unwitting help, he intended to put an end to.

  Lowe turned off the television and settled back into his chair. The president didn't speak for almost a minute. Finally, "Who was it?"

  "The driver's name was Daftar Abaza. He's originally from Syria, but he's been living in the United States for almost three years. Spotless work history, no criminal record. We have very little on him at this point -- nothing suggesting he has any terrorist ties. Obviously, we're digging deeper."

  "So we have no idea who was behind this?"

  Lowe paused to calculate the most advantageous spin. "We believe that if this was premeditated, he would have been in the correct lane. With the traffic, he risked not being able to move left. We think it was . . . an impulse."

  "An impulse? Jesus . . . Did he survive?"

  "He's alive, but in a coma. There seems to be some brain damage."

  Morris folded his hands across his stomach and fixed his stare on the back wall for a few moments. "So no known terrorist backing. Essentially, this guy is just a nut who doesn't like Jews. It was a hate crime more than a terrorist act. So, that's good. Right?"

  "Yes, sir," Lowe said. "There's no suggestion of any kind of coordinated effort."

  Hamdi sighed audibly. Another example of Paul Lowe coming to precisely the wrong conclusion based on all the facts.

  "You disagree?" Morris said, turning toward him.

  "That it was an impulsive act? No. That this is good news? Yes. This incident is lighting up the extremist Web sites, sir -- for the exact reason that it had no organized backing. The spin is that a devout Muslim doesn't need leaders, or even an organization to fight. This man, with no preparation and no weapons, killed or wounded a fairly large number of Jews. That is the message the terrorists are working to get out there. While we spend billion of dollars and thousands of American lives fighting wars against countries we think are terrorist sponsors, individuals and small groups can destroy us. The truck at the Mall of America was a fertilizer bomb full of nails. No matter how much we want to believe that it would take a massive organization and the support of Iran to succeed in an attack that devastating, it's simply not true. This is just the logical next step in a terrorist network that is becoming increasingly decentralized."

  The president drummed his fingers on his stomach, and Hamdi glanced over at Lowe, who wasn't bothering to hide his animosity toward his half-breed detractor.

  "I'm already under heavy criticism for not retaliating for the mall attack. And now I'm going to have every Jewish person in the country screaming for blood."

  "Of course," Hamdi said. "All these people understand is retaliation."

  "Here we go . . . ," Lowe said.

  Hamdi ignored him. "Who would we retaliate against? This man's family? An eye for an eye? Besides, the Israelis are continuing to mass their military on the border of Gaza. They're more than capable of extracting their own pound of flesh."

  "And Egypt is doing the same," Lowe said. "We're still waiting for moves from Syria and Jordan."

  "Goddamn Arabs," the president said, in an uncharacteristically obvious attempt to bait Hamdi. "They don't care enough about the Palestinians to take them in, but they're willing to set the entire region on fire for them. I'll never understand these people."

  "Mr. President . . . ," Hamdi started, but Morris ignored him.

  "Look, I've told Israel in no uncertain terms that they need to stay out of Gaza. But they know how powerful the Jewish lobby is here, and they sure as hell know how the average American voter feels about Arab terrorists. I don't think they're taking my threats seriously. And frankly, there's no reason they should."

  "Sir," Lowe said, "the Israelis are an important bulwark in the Middle East. I think even Dr. Hamdi would agree with that."

  "It's all moot," Hamdi said. "We've put ourselves in a position that we have no choice but to do whatever
is necessary to protect Israel. They have a nuclear arsenal that they wouldn't hesitate to use if their country was in danger. We have no way of stopping them from using that option, so we have to make sure they're never put in a situation that they would be forced to consider it."

  Morris turned toward Lowe. "Do you agree? Would they use nukes?"

  "Sir, I think --"

  "Yes or no question, Paul."

  "Then yes. Their main concern is their own security, and they aren't going to walk away from it for us."

  "And yet we walk away from our security every day for them," Hamdi interrupted.

  "Come on," Lowe said. "The Israelis may not be perfect, but they're the most reasonable friends we have in that region. Are they unfair and heavy-handed with the Palestinians? Sure. But wasn't it you, Edwin, who once said that there are no victims in the world -- only the poorly armed? Bet you didn't know I read your book, huh? The Israelis are just giving back a little of what they've been getting for years. The Arabs run around expecting everyone to bow down to them because God loves them best and then they don't have the juice to back up their big mouths. And thank God. I mean, if an Arab country ever had military power -- I mean real power -- can you imagine what they'd do with it? They'd kill every infidel they could get their hands on, then they'd start going after each other. In fifty years, there'd be about a hundred people left on the planet and they'd all be skulking around trying to stab each other in the back because their Koran was printed in a different font than their neighbor's Koran --"

  "Goddamn country the size of New Jersey," the president said, silencing his two advisors before one of their infamous shouting matches started. "And nobody can agree on anything except that I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. I'm looking for solutions here, not academic arguments that dead-end in the fact that the situation is hopeless. Edwin?"

  "Are we talking about the synagogue attack or Israel in general?"

  "Both."

  "I guess the answer is the same. There really isn't anything you can do. The cab driver is already in a coma and seems to have no connections to anyone we can reasonably punish. And Gaza? Well, Gaza has turned into just the disaster the Israelis had hoped. They'll use the chaos as an excuse to take it back and to stop any talk about further moves from the West Bank. What they'll do with the millions of Arabs who live in Gaza, I'm not sure. My guess would be that they'll foment terrorism against the U. S. so that we'll support whatever measures they want to take. I have to assume that their long-term goal is to kill or drive the Arabs out of the Occupied Territories so that they can settle them."