Rose City Renegade

by DL Barbur

  A knot of tension I’d barely been aware of left my body. Deep down, I knew that if Dale thought I’d screwed up, he would have told me, directly and matter-of-factly, not so I would beat myself up and wallow in guilt but so I wouldn’t screw up that way again.

  “You know what your problem is?” Dale asked as he ground out his cigarette on his boot heel. “You take responsibility for too much. You’ve been beating yourself up for what happened to Mandy, and if you ain’t careful you’re going to beat yourself up for what happened to Struecker.”

  He looked around for a place to dump his cigarette butt, didn’t see one, and slipped it in a pocket. It was an old soldier’s habit.

  “My daughter was a big girl and knew what she was getting into. The fault lies with those men that beat her. Same goes for Struecker. I swear the world’s full of two kinds of people, the ones who shit all over the floor and act like somebody else did it, and guys like you that see somebody else shit on the floor, and think it’s their fault.”

  He hitched his rifle sling up a little higher on his shoulder and walked towards the command center.

  “Enough of this navel-gazing. I’m hungry. Can a man get a sandwich around here?”

  I laughed a little, at both him and me. I followed him into break room and we both assembled obscenely large plates of food, then carried them into the command center. Henry was nodded off over in a corner, surrounded by empty energy drink cans and fast food wrappers. Casey looked bleary-eyed but she was still functional. She had the phones I’d given her hooked up to a desktop computer, and numbers and letters were scrolling up a display faster than I could decipher them. Over in the corner, several screens were tuned to the local news. The sound was off, but I could tell the attack at the reservoir was the top story. Two channels were showing a reporter standing in front of what now looked like hundreds of police and fire vehicles on the access road to the reservoir. The third showed an aerial view of the moving van from a news helicopter. It was surrounded by tape, and as I watched, some unlucky bastard in a bomb suit was approaching the back of the truck. I winced as one of the channels cut away to shaky cell phone video of the Little Bird flying down Airport Way. I saw myself strapped to the bench on the side.

  “I was just getting ready to page you,” Casey said. “Bolle is on his way back here with Drogan and Byrd. He’s about twenty minutes out. He wants everybody ready for a briefing when he gets here.”

  “Ok,” I said around a bite of sandwich. “We should probably wake Henry up. Anybody know where Alex is?”

  “Here,” a voice said behind me.

  I turned, and there she was. I surprised myself at how quick I set the sandwich down and gathered her up in my arms. This time I was unselfconscious about the fact that other people were in the room.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey yourself,” she hugged me tightly for a long moment then let me go.

  “Rough day at work,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Rough day.”

  She pulled back, looked around the room for a minute, a little self-conscious, but she still held onto my hand. She opened her mouth to say something else, but something grabbed her attention.

  “Isn’t that the guy we’re looking for?” she asked and pointed at one of the TV screens.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Henderson Marshall was on one of the screens, talking into the camera. Casey scrambled to find the right remote and turn the sound on.

  “… unconscionable attack is further proof of the degeneracy of our society. It’s clear that despite stealing over a third of what every hard-working American makes, our corrupt politicians and lazy public servants are incapable of protecting us.”

  As he droned on, I studied Marshall and the background. He was wearing a khaki shirt with epaulets, the sort of almost military looking thing I associated with men who went on safaris or sat around gun clubs talking about how immigrants were ruining the country. The background behind him was a featureless white wall. He sat in a metal folding chair, and propped up next to him was an AR-15 rifle.

  Marshall picked up the rifle and showed it to the camera. “I’ve fought for this country my entire life. I’ve been prepared to fight in the halls of the US Senate, but lately I’ve been wondering if it’s time for me to fight in a different way. It’s moments like these that I think of the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord, and the brave men who fought for states rights during the Civil War. If it comes down to it, I’m willing to fight and to die for this country.”

  I noticed he had his finger on the trigger of the rifle. That was bad form at all times, but I thought it would be especially ironic if he cranked off a round by accident while delivering his little manifesto.

  “I’m calling on all the true patriots out there, the real men of action in this country to stand up and do what’s right. It’s time to take this country back, and if our so-called leaders aren’t willing to do the right thing, the rest of us need to be. Good night and God bless you.”

  The video ended and the broadcast cut away to a vapidly pretty local news anchor that I vaguely recognized. Casey cut the sound again.

  “Wow,” she said. “You know that asshole was in the Army for like a year and a half, and he never left the United States?”

  Dale shook his head, and muttered something under his breath about “chicken hawks.”

  Casey got up and shook Henry awake. Alex caught my eye and cocked her head towards the door. I followed her out into the hallway and then into a vacant office.

  She hugged me again, and as an added bonus laid a proper kiss on me. I was instantly horny, not just because it was Alex, but because of that good old-fashioned adrenaline afterglow.

  Alex broke away and laughed. “At ease, soldier. I don’t think we have time for that.”

  I wished we did but pushed it out of my mind.

  “How are you?”

  “I’ve been in a safe, well-lit place performing an autopsy. It’s you that I’m worried about. It looked like things got a little crazy at the reservoir.”

  I looked down at myself. “I keep checking myself for extra holes and not finding any. Struecker’s dead though”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  That hung in the air between us for a moment. The unspoken truth was that it just as easily could have been me. I wondered how many more times I could roll the dice and not come up snake eyes.

  “Todd wasn’t at the reservoir?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then it’s not even close to being over.”

  “I don’t know.” It was the most honest answer I could give. “I haven’t had a chance to even think about the next step.”

  “I’m tired of being on the sidelines,” she said. “I’m tired of playing your girl Friday that patches you up when you get hurt, and investigates things while you’re out saving the world. I want in.”

  I had a vision of her lying bloody and pale in the bed of that pickup truck, instead of Struecker, when I heard Bolle’s voice down the hallway. Our little respite was over, and it was time to go back to work.

  “Let’s see what Bolle has to say, and go from there,” I said.

  She nodded, clearly not happy. She gave me the barest peck on the lips and walked out of the office.

  The mood around the table was solemn. Drogan and Byrd kept looking at the chair where Struecker would have sat. The rest of us didn’t. I’d dealt with this before. Right now wasn’t the time to mourn our dead and injured.

  Bolle normally looked like he’d stepped out of the pages of GQ, but now he was rumpled and unshaven. His eyes were a little bloodshot. He was talking to Dale over in a corner when we walked in, and I was surprised to see them both nod and shake hands before Dale walked over and took a place at the table. Apparently, he was in.

  Bolle looked around the room, as if he was counting heads, and coming up a little short.

  “I want to thank all of you for your hard work these last few days. You�
�ve all taken great risks, and undergone sacrifices. Thanks to you, the water system for the city of Portland is safe, and some very bad people are no longer a threat.”

  He stood up, paced in front of the monitors mounted on the wall.

  “The local FBI field office has agreed to take care of arrangements for Special Agent Struecker, notifying his family, and all that.”

  Bolle trailed off, stared into the corner for a few seconds. I looked around the table, everybody looked glum and defeated, like dogs with their tails between their legs. These people needed a pep talk. If this had been the military, Bolle would have been the aloof, cerebral officer, and it would have been the job of a senior sergeant to rally the troops. The problem was, Al had been Bolle’s sergeant, but now Al was dead and there was no one to fill that role.

  The silence started to weigh heavy in the room. I tried to think of something to say, but this wasn’t my strong suit. I’d always felt that one of the weaknesses of Bolle’s unit was it didn’t feel like a team. It was an ad hoc collection of people thrown together on the fly. We didn’t train together, hadn’t gotten to know each other. We just went out and made it up as we went along. So far that had worked out, but it was times like this that really tested units.

  Dale cleared his throat.

  “I just want to thank you folks for all you’ve done,” he said. “These bastards hurt my daughter pretty bad, and for six months I’ve been waiting for somebody to hold them accountable. I know you all haven’t caught the people directly responsible for it yet, but I appreciate you trying. The Portland police just wanted to sweep the whole thing under the rug. If nothing else, we took some of those skinhead assholes out of circulation. My dad didn’t fight his way across Europe so Nazi assholes could blow up people’s drinking water right here in Oregon.”

  Bolle relaxed a little after that. I realized he’d recognized the need to rally the troops, and hadn’t had the slightest idea how to do it. There were a few people around the table nodding their heads.

  “We appreciate your help too, Mr. Williams,” Bolle said. “I’ve just returned from the reservoir. The Portland Police Bureau and the FBI are still processing the scene. All of the men found at the scene were known members of the West County Hammerheads. They were all dead at the scene except for one, Curtis.”

  My eyebrows lifted. The last time I’d seen Curtis, he hadn’t been in very good shape. I was surprised to find he was still alive.

  “Curtis is in custody, in the hospital being treated for gunshot wounds. He’s expected to survive, but as of right now we can’t question him. The FBI is following all the obvious leads: digital profiles, who rented the truck, that sort of thing. Right now we’ve got nothing concrete to link them to Todd, Marshall, or Cascade Aviation, other than the obvious fact that Dent saw them all together at their compound.”

  Casey spoke up. “Dent took some phones off those guys. I’ve got them hooked up now so I can brute force decrypt them. Hopefully, I’ll have some results soon.”

  Apparently, that was news to Bolle. He looked pleased.

  “Excellent. I was hoping Henry could give us an update on the aircraft that left Portland International immediately after the attack.”

  Henry cleared his throat. “It was a Gulfstream 650ER, with a range of over 7,000 nautical miles. The jet turned off its transponder and headed straight out to sea, where it fell off radar. They could be on their way to Asia or Central America. Right now the FAA has launched an investigation into the unauthorized departure from PDX and the subsequent danger it posed to all those airliners. They’ll probably be done in six months or so…”

  Henry and Bolle rolled their eyes simultaneously. One of the reasons Bolle was so effective was his unit was lean. The rest of the Federal government would have to have a dozen meetings with PowerPoint presentations before they even got moving.

  “We’ve got feelers out all over the world,” Bolle said. “I’d really like to know if Marshall or Todd was on that plane, or if it was a red herring. If they’ve fled the country, we need to be ready to take this operation international.”

  My eyebrows shot up again. I didn’t know Bolle had the ability to do that. That was an interesting twist. I wondered if we might wind up in some foreign garden spot like Afghanistan or Pakistan. Cascade Aviation didn’t tend to operate in nice countries where you’d want to go on vacation.

  “Did you learn anything from the autopsy, Dr. Pace?” Bolle asked.

  Alex shifted in her seat. “I did a complete autopsy on the man we identified as Abdel Lafif Farah. He was borderline malnourished. He’d been beaten, more than once, as there were bruises all over his body in multiple stages of healing. It’s no surprise that the cause of death was a close-range gunshot wound to the head from a large caliber handgun, but on autopsy, I found that his liver had been lacerated from a blow to the thorax, most likely a couple hours before he was shot. That would have killed him eventually if he hadn’t received medical attention.”

  She stared at a spot on the wall. “The toxicology reports will take a few days to complete, so we don’t know with any certainty that he was exposed to the PCP we found at the compound, but as I suspected, it appears that the wounds on his wrist were self-inflicted.”

  “He tried to chew his own wrist open?” Drogan said. He was a little pale.

  Alex nodded. The room was quiet for a bit as everyone absorbed that little fact.

  “Right now, we’re at a standstill,” Bolle said. “Based on Dent’s testimony alone, we have probable cause to arrest Rickson Todd. We just have to find him. I am concerned that we don’t know what was going on in that compound. Were there more men there like this Farah? If so, where are they now? If they left on that airplane, in some ways that’s a relief, as they are off US soil.”

  “But why bring them here?” I asked. “If you wanted to brainwash them you could do that somewhere else in the world, much easier than here. Why bring them here, then leave with them again?”

  “That’s why I don’t think Todd was on that plane,” Bolle said. “I think he’s still here and I think those men are too.”

  I nodded. This wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.

  “Right now, we have another concern,” Bolle said. “Up until now, our investigation has been secret, under the radar of the local police, and even the local FBI field office. Due to the high visibility events at the reservoir, and the airport, we’re out in the open now. Other agencies are clamoring for a part of the investigation and this is going to turn into a turf war if we aren’t careful.”

  He looked up at one of the screens on the wall. The sound was muted, but it was easy to tell we were the subject of the news report since they were showing the footage of us flying over Airport Way in the Little Bird again.

  “Before the shootout at the reservoir, nobody wanted to touch this investigation. I found few friends when I wanted to pursue an indictment against a rich man like Henderson Marshall. Now everyone wants in. Some of them want in because they want to say they helped break open the conspiracy to attack the Portland water system. Careers can be made on far less.”

  Now Marshall’s video was being replayed on the screen.

  “Some of them though, are complicit, and they want to be part of manufacturing the narrative, controlling what evidence disappears. Some of them wear military uniforms, and some of them wear badges. You’ll be tempted to trust them, but don’t. The only people you can trust are in this room.”

  It was like the old Bolle had come back. He had that fire in his eyes that I remembered from last year. He reminded me of an old school tent revival preacher, drunk on damnation and hellfire. For me, this was revenge. That was part of it for him too, but he was on a crusade. Part of me felt like I should share his outrage at the corruption we’d uncovered, but I just couldn’t. It was wrong, and I knew it, but my biggest concern was what had been done to the people I cared about.

  “Right now we all need some rest,” Bolle said. “We’ll convene i
n the morning and plan our next move.”

  The meeting broke up. I caught Alex’s eye and we both headed towards the door. The little trailer on the factory floor was the closest thing either of us had to a home at the moment, and spending some time there with her sounded pretty good right now.

  Over on Casey’s desk, something beeped. She walked over, wiggled a computer mouse and looked at the screen.

  “Hey,” she said. “I just cracked Curtis’s phone.”

  Thoughts of domestic bliss temporarily forgotten, I walked over to stand behind Casey’s chair.

  “I’m dumping the contents now, and running an association matrix,” she said.

  Casey typed so fast I was surprised the keys weren’t smoking. I couldn’t follow what she was doing, but stayed anyway, hoping she could give us something to go on.

  “Huh,” she said, then kept typing. I held my tongue, fought the desire to ask her what was going on.

  “Ok. He purged the phone relatively recently. I might be able to get some of that back, we’ll see. There is one call in memory. Looks like he made it about an hour before things started at the reservoir.”

  On another screen, she called up a map of the city.

  “The phone he called is still active, pinging cell towers.”

  The lines from four different cell towers crossed at a point in south-east Portland. As Casey zoomed in, I realized I recognized the neighborhood.

  “Nice,” Casey said. “We’ve got a good fix, down to a few houses. I’ll see who the properties belong to.”

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I know where we need to go.”

  She turned to look at me. I pointed at the screen.

  “That house belongs to Steve Lubbock, my old boss.”

  I would have said the expression on my face was a smile, but apparently, I was wrong. Casey recoiled from me. She looked scared like she’d turned and seen a wild animal standing there instead of a man.