by Joseph Flynn
McGill said, “The best way to scare a strong person is to make a plausible threat against someone he or she loves.”
Zara Gilford’s eyes went wide, her chin began to quiver.
“So your husband does love you?”
She bobbed her head.
When McGill had opened his firm, he’d told his first client he didn’t do bodyguard work. Now, though, he knew someone who might fill that bill. “Mrs. Gilford, you have to persuade your husband to tell you everything he knows or suspects about what scared him. Before that, though, I think you should have someone to protect you.”
“Is that something you can do for me?”
“No, but I have a man in mind.”
“Is he competent?”
“He used to protect the president.”
“He’ll take the job?”
As far as McGill knew, Celsus Crogher was still looking for a meaningful way to occupy his time. “I think so, and once your husband sees what you’ve done, maybe he’ll feel better about sharing what he knows with you.”
“But you’ll talk to Jordan, too?”
“If you’ll tell me where he is,” McGill said, “I’ll go see him right now.”
Chapter 2
Madison Drive NW — Washington, DC
Jeronimo “Jerry” Nerón sat in a tan Ford parked opposite the National Mall that Saturday morning and waited for his target. He’d been given the range of times during which Jordan Gilford’s weekly thirteen-mile run should bring him past the point at which he sat. Jerry had arrived an hour early. When you were being paid to kill someone, the client wouldn’t accept tardiness as a reason for not getting the job done.
Exactly where along Gilford’s running path the hit was done was up to Jerry. He could shoot the man from his car. He could exit the car and press his weapon against the man’s skull if, say, he stopped to tie his shoelace. The client’s only concern was that Gilford die; Jerry’s focus was on completing the job and getting away clean.
The grandson of Cuban exiles, Jerry had been trained since adolescence by men, now aged, who had been trained by the CIA. Their compatriots’ mission had been to reclaim the homeland. Even as a young boy, Jerry had his doubts that would ever be accomplished. He’d heard all the bitter stories about the disaster at the Bay of Pigs from the time he took his first steps.
Did he really want to trust his fate to men who had failed so badly?
His grandfather, Dario Nerón, had comforted him on that point. There were those who had seen the tragedy coming. They’d called in sick, found excuses to stay home, and had been spared being killed by either the Communists’ superior forces or their firing squads. It was these farsighted patriots who would train young Jerry.
His mission, of course, would be to kill Fidel Castro.
As soon as Jerry became a man at twenty-one, he was presented with the first plan to accomplish that glorious goal. He took one look at it and called in sick. There was nothing his elders could say about that. They went back to the drawing board.
Over those years of being taught the ins and outs of assassination and spycraft, Jerry had also learned the skills that provided his cover profession: tailoring. His grandmother, Arcelia, the heiress to a sugarcane fortune stolen by the Reds, had learned to sew in Miami. She opened her own shop, designed and created bridal gowns and dresses for quinceañeras. She developed a large and devoted following among the women in the exile community.
Jerry took to the needle and thread immediately. His grandmother said it was in his blood just as it was in hers. The boy also liked having the women and girls who visited abuela’s shop fuss over him and give him candy. As he grew older and ever more handsome, he would steal kisses from the fifteen-year-old beauties who were being introduced to society. He even managed, in later years, to have more than a few midnight trysts with brides-to-be who wanted to be sure they were marrying the right man.
At twenty-one, having passed on his first opportunity to kill Castro, he opened his own shop. Jerry Nerón, Custom Tailoring for Men.
He specialized in fine suits and evening wear.
With grandmother having paved the way in Miami’s huge Cuban community, his customer base was present from the start. Jerry had the native intelligence to give special attention and deals to prominent politicians and businessmen in the city. From there, his name spread beyond his ethnic community by word of mouth. Show biz people, filming in town, started coming to his shop.
They took his suits and tuxes with them across the country and around the world.
The label Jerry Nerón, Miami quickly achieved a cult cachet.
If anyone in Washington happened to notice his presence in town that increasingly dreary March day, he had a perfectly legitimate reason to be there. He was doing a fitting for a client, one of several he had among the town’s power brokers. Not that he intended to be seen by anyone but that particular lobbyist.
Because while he was never presented with a plan to kill Castro of which he approved, and the exile viejos eventually gave up on the idea, he hadn’t let the lethal skills he’d been taught go to waste. He made them a part of his business. The private sector had its uses for assassins.
As he sat in his car, waiting patiently, he had a police scanner on at a low volume. It wouldn’t do to step out of his car and pop his target if there was a police patrol unit racing to answer a call around the corner. He also had an iPad Mini 3G resting against his steering wheel, streaming a broadcast from CNN.
You never knew. The media might learn of a crime in progress before the cops did.
It paid to be careful, and Jerry took all available precautions.
He thought he’d take Gilford right there on the running path bordering the Mall. The morning had started out sunny and crisp, but rain was predicted and the sky had become overcast and the air had turned chill. The last two pedestrians Jerry had seen passed by ten minutes ago. He’d been assured, though, that Gilford wouldn’t skip his run for anything short of a blizzard.
Jerry thought the job should come off just fine. Then a breaking news story came into the CNN newsroom; he dropped the volume on the police scanner to a whisper. The studio personality on the streaming TV feed turned the broadcast over to a field reporter.
“This just in: There’s been another school massacre, this time on a Saturday when classes weren’t even in session. The football team of the Winstead School, an elite private high school in Georgetown, was having its first spring football practice this morning when a man with an automatic weapon appeared. He killed the team’s three coaches, who apparently tried to keep the man away from their players. He also killed five of the team’s players and seriously wounded three others when the players apparently ran toward the killer in support of their coaches. The remaining members of the team ran for their lives and are unharmed.
“The killer has been identified by survivors as Abel Mays, the head football coach of a District public high school. The teams of the two schools don’t compete on the playing field, and police sources said it would be pointless speculation at this point to say what might have set Coach Mays off on this murderous rampage.
A photo of Mays filled Jerry’s iPad screen. Must have been a candid shot. The man looked like he was screaming. Maybe yelling instructions to his players during a game or practice.
As that image lingered, the field reporter said in voice-over: “Once he stopped his attack, Abel Mays left the grounds of the Winstead School and drove off in what witnesses described as a forest green SUV, possibly a Toyota or a Subaru. His whereabouts are unknown. The police, underscoring the obvious, say Mays has to be considered still armed and extremely dangerous. Anyone who sees him should stay as far away as possible and call the police immediately.”
The picture switched back to the newsroom personality.
“A horrible tragedy, Jeanine” he told the field reporter. “Once again, we need to remind our viewing audience —”
Not to try their luck against a pissed-
off guy with a machine gun.
Jerry lowered the volume on his iPad and boosted the sound on the police scanner.
All sorts of units, patrol, detective and crime scene, were racing to the school where the shooting happened. Ambulances were en route, too. And even an evac helicopter. Must be some fancy school, Jerry thought.
Damn shame, all those kids and coaches getting shot.
His money said it had to be bad blood between the coaches, the cause of it all.
The kids, thinking they were immortal, probably influenced by stupid video games, had thought they could save the day. Paid the price to learn they were wrong.
That pissed Jerry off. He liked kids. Only in his early thirties, he looked at teenagers like they were kid brothers and sisters. Thought he might have children of his own some day.
Some asshole ever killed one of his babies … he’d teach the bastard taking lives had to be left to the professionals. That last thought reminded him he still had a job to do. He looked at the dashboard clock again.
If Gilford was on the early side of his run, he should be passing by in ten minutes.
Wasn’t another passerby in sight. Not even any motorized traffic.
The day kept getting darker as the cloud cover thickened. Felt like temperature was still dropping, too. Just the kind of weather he needed to discourage casual strollers. The cops would be concentrating their people at and around that fancy school for the next little while. Then they’d be out looking for a green SUV not a tan Ford sedan that looked like it might be some kind of government vehicle.
Jerry couldn’t have asked for better conditions.
Not that he wanted those kids to die just to make things easier for him.
It really pissed him off, them getting killed. Fucking amateurs and the collateral damage they caused. They were a curse.
His kids or not, if Jerry spotted that Mays guy, he’d show the prick who was armed and dangerous. The thought of going vigilante had no sooner occurred to Jerry than somebody pulled into the parking space behind his car. His first reaction was, “Christ, no end to the empty slots on this block and …”
He remembered the description of the school killer’s vehicle. Green SUV. Maybe a Toyota. Just like the one behind him now. Jerry shifted his attention to the guy behind the wheel.
Sonofabitch.
Did he have the time? Yeah, he did. He could pop the guy who’d shot up the high school football team and still get Gilford.
Then he had an even better idea.
Firepower America — Falls Church, Virginia
A visiting hit man wasn’t the only one monitoring police calls and cable news in the Metro DC area. The lobbying and public relations arm of the country’s gun manufacturers kept around-the-clock surveillance on mass gunshot killings. The phone rang on the desk of Auric Ludwig, the CEO of FirePower America. A middle-aged man, so tightly wound he looked as if his bulging eyeballs might burst at any minute, Ludwig worked six-and-a-half days per week.
The joke was he needed the other twelve hours to have his bile drained.
So he didn’t shoot somebody himself.
Ludwig’s office was a study in Spartan simplicity. An American flag and the flag of the Commonwealth of Virginia hung from six-foot poles standing to either side of the office doorway. On the wall behind his desk, resting on brackets, was a replica of a Revolutionary War muzzleloading flintlock musket. From the tip of its barrel to the end of its stock, it measured over four feet long.
In the days when such weapons were used in anger, they were mounted with long triangular bayonets that added another eighteen inches in length. But Ludwig didn’t represent bayonet makers and didn’t want anyone to confuse the issue. Guns were what mattered to him.
As exemplified by the plaque beneath the musket.
The Gun That Made America Free.
He didn’t say a word when he picked up his phone.
The voice on the other end offered only two. “Code black.”
Another mass murder. Ludwig replaced his phone and turned on his TV, saw that the killing had happened just across the river in DC. Wouldn’t have been that big a deal if it had happened in a poor neighborhood. Could have been written off as gang violence. Even if it had happened in an upper reach of the 47% of the population his constituents wrote off, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. All the usual suspects could be blamed. Failed family structure, the perverse influence of a deranged popular culture and … he’d have to see what the latest talking points were.
But this time, goddamnit, the shooting had happened in a preserve of the top one percent.
He knew all about the Winstead School and what it represented.
Hell, most of the families there were the top one tenth of the top one percent.
He was going to feel real pressure this time. The only good thing he’d seen so far was the shooter was African American. People on the other side of the gun-control debate would be careful how far they went in blaming him. Ludwig thought he could make the case that any black head of household, mom or dad, living in a big American city, needed an automatic weapon just to protect hearth and home against the hordes of gang-bangers.
Maybe he’d get lucky and the kids who got killed would all be scholarship students.
Not have the megabucks needed to fight back in any meaningful way.
Ludwig picked up his phone, hit a button and said, “Crank up production.”
Code black meant more than the color of death.
It stood for profit, too.
There’d be a run on gun stores across the nation within minutes.
Sales would go through the roof. People who owned more guns than they could ever use would scurry to buy still more. Fearing lawmakers in Congress might finally grow a pair.
To meet the uptick in demand, supplies would also have to rise.
Truth was, in America, bloodshed was good for business.
The gun business anyway.
Third Street, NW, Washington, DC
After Zara Gilford told McGill that her husband, Jordan, was somewhere along the route of his Saturday morning thirteen-mile run, and told him that Jordan ran at an eight-minute-per-mile clip. Consulting her watch, she said he should be finished in a little more than forty minutes. She also asked him to please call her Zara.
After Celsus Crogher arrived, got the details of the situation and agreed to protect Zara, she decided that maybe a small shopping trip was in order after all. One that would give her time to learn how the meeting between McGill and her husband had gone.
Rather than intrude on Jordan Gilford’s run and risk putting him in a bad mood, McGill decided to make his approach after Gilford had the satisfaction of completing his exercise. He waited for the man outside the luxury, high-security condo building on Third Street that was his new home.
The structure had no gun turrets that McGill could see, but it did have a narrow sharply curved driveway leading up to the front entrance. The hairpin turn, McGill thought, would make it difficult to do a drive-by attack on the building. God forbid that such a thing would ever come to pass.
McGill had chosen not to clog up the driveway.
He had Leo park at the curb just short of it.
A street sign advised Leo that parking on that side of the street was prohibited, day and night. There was no obvious traffic-flow reason for the restriction. More likely, the security-conscious developers had made a pleading to the District government, perhaps a campaign contribution or two and, voila, the commandment was delivered from on high.
Thou shall not park here.
Not that a cop writing a ticket was a worry for McGill. Leo would talk to him. If that didn’t work, Deke would badge him and send him on his way. Should the cop still proved recalcitrant, McGill would call him over and ask a simple question. “If we each escalate this matter to the tops of our respective chains of command, who’s going to win?”
President trumped chief of police, simple as that.
Shoul
dn’t come to that, though.
McGill felt sure there was no city cop so pigheaded as to force the issue that far.
The guy who strode out of the condo building, however, with his buzz cut and square jaw, stretching the seams of his blue blazer and gray slacks with heavy muscle, looked like he was used to getting his way and taking no back-talk at all.
Leo yawned, flipped down the passenger-side visor.
So the hard charger could see the Secret Service star logo thereon.
Deke sized the man up, not pleased that Leo’s effort hadn’t slowed the guy down. He was reaching for the door release when McGill gently laid a hand on his shoulder. He said, “Let’s give it a moment before we go nuclear.”
He lowered his window. That diverted the security brute off his path toward Leo and redirected him McGill’s way. The guy could move quickly. He had his face in the opening McGill had provided for him in the blink of an eye. Before he could get a word out, though, McGill extended a business card.
“Mrs. Zara Gilford asked me to speak with her husband, Jordan. She said he should be along shortly,” McGill told the guy. “If you’re unfamiliar with the Gilfords, they just moved in.”
The guy took the card and stepped back, crouching so he could keep a eye on McGill.
“I’ve met the Gilfords.” He shifted his gaze from McGill to his card. He did a quick read and looked back at McGill and nodded to himself. “I saw the video of you on the National Mall, taking care of that militia clown. I’m retired USMC.”
“Thank you for your service,” McGill said.
“You, too. You can wait inside, sir, if you’d like.”
“Let’s see where Mr. Gilford would like to take our conversation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Special Agent Ky will need to check out the lobby if we get that far, if you’d care to let him have a quick look-see.”
“Yes, sir. May I keep this card?”
“Sure. You have one?”
The question took the Marine by surprise, but then he smiled and gave McGill his card. Karl Vasek, Security Supervisor. McGill looked at it and extended a hand.
