The Short Drop

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  He walked alongside the wall, dragging his hand along the smooth surface. In theory, the gap was wide enough for one person to cross through, but the top of the wall was ten feet high and even an experienced climber needed handholds. You would need… a ladder.

  Something yellow in the underbrush caught his eye. He trotted over for a look and was lucky not to trip and gouge himself on the missing section of razor wire. He saw it at the last second, coiled like a snake in the tall grass, wickedly sharp, and he had to pirouette awkwardly to avoid it. He lost his balance and, backpedaling, caught his heel on something solid and went down hard on his back.

  He lay there wincing until the pain faded, then sat up to look at the brand-new extension ladder he had fallen over.

  What the hell is going on?

  He was still contemplating that question when a length of rope flew over the wall from inside the compound. It hung a foot off the ground, swaying back and forth. Gibson stared at it stupidly for a moment. He scrambled to his feet, barely making it behind a tree before Jenn threw her leg over the top of the wall and shimmied down the rope to the ground. She called out that she was down, and the rope disappeared back over the wall.

  He watched her unlock the padlock and slide back the gate. Hendricks drove the Cherokee out. Its back was empty, which meant they’d unloaded the gear inside. It made him wonder what had been in the other black duffel bags. And where Hendricks had been while he had been coding the program for the library.

  Jenn relocked the gate, and Gibson watched them drive away for the second time today. He thought about going over the wall to do a bit of recon, but it might take a week to find wherever they had set up camp inside. Better to stay with them and see where that took him. He brushed himself off and walked back to the car.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The red dot led Gibson east through a series of small lower-middle-class townships, each bleaker than the last. By the time he passed through the last one, dusk had fallen, and the sky was a charcoal red in his rearview mirror. He slowed to check his phone—Hendricks’s dot had been stationary for thirty minutes. Not far now.

  A grim certainty had settled over him since he’d left the storage facility, and he was afraid he knew exactly where Jenn and Hendricks were headed. He hoped he was wrong, but it was the only thing that made sense of their actions. He’d know soon enough.

  The houses thinned out until more than one hundred yards separated one home and the next. Out here, there was no clear demarcation between one property and the next. No fences. Just wide-open spaces that bled into each other.

  The properties might be large, but the houses themselves were modest single-story ramblers or double-wides on cinder-block foundations. Satellite dishes dominated most of the yards. Not a lot out here to do at night except watch TV and surf the Internet, and it would be a long time before anyone bothered to run cable out in the sticks.

  He rounded a bend and spotted the Cherokee ahead on the left. It was parked in the gravel driveway alongside an old wood-paneled station wagon. Whatever color the house had once been had long since faded and mottled into a sloppy bowl of old porridge. One of the front windows had blown out, but instead of a replacement, plastic sheeting was stapled across the opening. The gray shingle roof sagged lamely in the middle, and the whole house looked like it was one swift kick from toppling down. A brown-and-yellow couch had been dragged under an elm tree, where it moldered forlornly in the knee-high grass.

  It was depressing to think what would drive someone to live out here. This was no one’s first choice.

  He saw no place to pull over where he wouldn’t be seen, so he drove on. He didn’t see anyone in the Cherokee; presumably they were in the house.

  Two properties down stood an old Baptist church. The roadside sign read, “C me Wors p With s,” but it looked like years since anyone had taken them up on the offer. Not even God wanted to live here. Gibson pulled in and circled around to the back, where the Taurus couldn’t be seen from the road.

  He took the binoculars and crouched behind a low brick wall to watch and wait. He checked his phone, but there was no cell service.

  Hours passed.

  It was a moonless night. A storm system rumbled to the south but passed without a drop of rain falling. There were no streetlights, so the only illumination came from the odd porch light or the faint blue of a TV flickering through a window. But the house where the Cherokee was parked was pitch black. If the lights were even on inside, he couldn’t tell, because the shades were drawn. It troubled him to think what might be going on inside.

  He weighed the pros and cons of sneaking up to the house. Pro: he’d get a much better idea of what was going on inside. Con: they were armed, and he wasn’t. If they saw him, he wasn’t sure which way it would go. It was funny. This morning all he’d been worried about was that they’d chew him out. What a difference twelve hours made.

  When Jenn and Hendricks finally moved, Gibson didn’t catch it until Hendricks started the SUV. The running lights came on, and through the binoculars he saw Jenn silhouetted against the SUV’s dome light. She pushed a figure out of the house. A black hood covered his head, but it was a man, judging from the broad, powerfully built shoulders. His arms were bound behind his back, so she used the back of his neck to guide him as she bundled him into the backseat. Then she got into the old station wagon parked in the driveway and pulled out behind Hendricks.

  Gibson slumped behind the wall. Jenn and Hendricks hadn’t called in the feds. At least not yet, but he had a feeling that the feds had never been on their agenda. This wasn’t about bringing WR8TH to justice. This was about revenge. That’s why they had sent him home. What had Calista Dauplaise said to him in Georgetown? That the person responsible for taking Suzanne Lombard would pay. No, that wasn’t the word she’d used. Calista had said he would suffer.

  Neither George nor Calista had any loyalty to Benjamin Lombard. They’d both borne the loss of Suzanne heavily. He had heard it in their voices when they spoke of her. The vice president didn’t know anything about this, and Gibson doubted that he ever would. This was between George, Calista, and the man who took Suzanne.

  What had he allowed himself to be pulled into? How culpable was he? Would he be able to prove he didn’t know what they had planned? Would that matter? He had hacked a public library… how would a creative district attorney spin breaking into a government building? Not to mention the cash payments he’d received. All of a sudden that seemed pretty damning too.

  He considered his options. Call the police now. Probably what most people would do, but he wasn’t quite ready to go back to jail. He could call Lombard. Tell the vice president what his old political ally and chief of security were up to. Yeah, Gibson thought to himself, Lombard will shield me while he rains down vengeance on everyone else involved.

  When Jenn and Hendricks were gone, Gibson waited ten minutes and walked up the road to the house. The gravel driveway under his feet sounded like a rock band warming up for a show. The next house was a football field away, but that did little to settle his nerves.

  The front door was locked, as was the back. He tried all the windows, but they were all firmly latched too. Gibson frowned. He went back around to the front and used his car keys to cut a slit in the plastic sheeting covering the broken window. He reached through and unlatched the frame and slid it open.

  The house was a sty. At first he thought Jenn and Hendricks had trashed the place, but this was the work of years, not hours. He didn’t want to risk turning on the lights, but he had a flashlight app on his phone that he used to survey an ocean of trash, broken furniture, and empty cardboard boxes. A stack of at least forty umbrellas. A shattered accordion. An unmounted deer’s head stared blankly up at the ceiling.

  The kitchen was diseased; there was no other word for it. The smell. Jesus, someone lived here. Gibson couldn’t even bring himself to cross the th
reshold to the kitchen and decided he’d save it for last. The only clean area was a spare bedroom that had been converted into a gym. There was a bench press, rusty barbells, and a chin-up bar. Several crooked full-length mirrors hung side by side to create a vanity wall. Against another wall stood stacks and stacks of fitness magazines: Muscle & Fitness, Muscular Development, Natural Muscle, Planet Muscle . . .

  Gibson hunted for anything personal, something with a name that would confirm what he already knew in the pit of his stomach. He thought maybe the fitness magazines, but they had all been bought off a newsstand. A photograph would do, but nothing hung on the walls, and it didn’t feel like a framed-picture kind of home. There was nothing helpful in the bedroom. Gibson waded back to the front door and found a mountain of unopened mail.

  He held letters up to his phone one at a time, looking for a name. Most were addressed to “resident” or “current occupant,” but eventually he found a letter from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. The name was the one he expected to find: “Kirby Tate.”

  The sound of someone testing the front door startled him. The doorknob was only inches from his face, and he looked up in rapt fascination as it turned back and forth. He hadn’t heard a car pull up the driveway. Could it be a neighbor stopping by? Did Tate have friends? More likely Jenn or Hendricks had forgotten something and come back for it. Or for you, a voice whispered uncharitably in his head.

  He shoved the letter into a pocket and backed away from the door. With the element of surprise, he would have the advantage with one, but if both had come back, then he had no chance. He didn’t feel like waiting around to find out. The glinting sound of metal on metal whispered through the silent house, but thankfully the door didn’t open. He remembered a closet near the kitchen and slunk backward among the trash piles. Would they kill him? Had it gone that far?

  He slipped into the closet, put his back against the wall, and slid down into a crouch. He couldn’t get the door all the way shut behind him, because there was no handle on the inside. It was wet beneath his feet and smelled like piss. He put his phone in airplane mode and listened to the front door swing open.

  As far as he could tell there was only one of them. Whoever “them” was. The intruder didn’t call out and didn’t switch on the lights. He heard the front door shut quietly. A flashlight came on, and through the crack in the door he saw the beam dance across the walls. He had been very aware of the creak of the floorboards when he had first arrived, but whoever was moving through the house either knew it exceptionally well or moved like a ghost. He could hear their footfalls, but only because every ounce of his concentration was focused on listening for them. A strobe went off. Then another and another. Pictures. Someone was moving through the house, taking pictures. Methodically taking an inventory of every room. Did that include closets?

  If the door opened, he was going to hit them low and hard. Keep hitting them until they stopped moving. He was worried, though, that he would slip in the soupy mush under his feet. He moved slowly, shifting his feet, seeking a dry surface to brace against.

  He didn’t think he’d given himself away but was immediately aware when the pictures stopped. A silence so thick dropped over the house that it pulsed in his ears. He held his breath, senses straining. It was like two submarines playing cat and mouse in the murky depths—each listening for the other, deathly afraid to give away its position.

  Minutes passed. Gibson heard those ghostlike footsteps retreat toward the front of the house. The door opened and then closed quietly. Then nothing.

  He exhaled but didn’t move. He waited there in the closet for what seemed a lifetime. Afraid that whoever it was might double back or, worse, that they hadn’t left at all and were trying to bluff him out of the closet. He listened until his temples throbbed, but the house was dead.

  Gibson slipped out of the closet. For half a second, he panicked as the deer’s head played games with the shadows and took the shape of a man. He let out a little cry and shut his mouth in embarrassment.

  Pull yourself together, boy.

  He sank down onto a couch and rubbed his calves, cramped from squatting in the closet. He switched on his flashlight app and looked around. The couch was clearly where Kirby Tate spent most of his time. Gibson was sitting in the only bare patch, but otherwise it was stacked with dirty dishes, empty junk-food containers, and pornographic magazines. Hundreds of them. He hadn’t even known they still made dirty magazines.

  He chuckled silently to himself but stopped as a thought occurred to him. You know who would know? A guy with no Internet would know. There was no satellite dish in the yard. No satellite dish meant no TV and, more importantly, no access to the Internet.

  Was he supposed to believe that the person responsible for hacking ACG had no Internet? He searched the house again. This time looking for anything that he would expect to find in the home of someone who was computer savvy. He found nothing. No tools. No books. No workspace. No storage media. Nothing but trash, porn, and gym equipment. If Kirby Tate was a hacker, then he was the only one Gibson had ever come across who could live without twenty-four-hour access to high-speed Internet.

  You spent enough time working with computers, and the Internet became a second home. A refuge. A place to share ideas, trade snippets of code, and meet people who shared your interest in the extralegal applications of programming. Could such a person live without the Internet? He supposed it was possible. Yes, a voice countered, but was it probable? He was more certain than ever that whatever Jenn and Hendricks were planning at Grafton Storage, they had the wrong guy for it. Whatever was on Kirby Tate’s laptop, it couldn’t have gotten there without someone’s help.

  So who was helping him? Did Tate have a partner?

  Gibson let himself out of the house as quietly as he could. By comparison to the house, it looked like high noon outside. He saw no one but to play it safe took a looping path back to his car. He didn’t turn the headlights back on until he had put several miles between himself and Tate’s house.

  Tinsley stood in the dark of the house. So Vaughn was back. That was an interesting piece of information. He was supposed to be home by now. Well, apparently Vaughn had other ideas. Not that it changed anything. Actually, it saved Tinsley a trip back to Washington. All the eggs, as they say, were back in one basket.

  He sat on the couch where Vaughn had been. An idea had come to the computer man. Tinsley had seen it on his face. They had been so close that Tinsley could have reached out and touched him. He could only imagine Vaughn’s reaction if he had seen him. But Vaughn hadn’t; they never did. It was just as well, because this was not the place for him to die. Ironically, this was one place where Vaughn was safe.

  Tinsley looked at the dirty magazines that Vaughn had picked up, but whatever they had whispered to Vaughn, Tinsley could not hear it. He frowned. Why had Vaughn come back at all? He didn’t like that he couldn’t see it. No matter. If Kirby Tate was the man who had evaded him a decade ago, that meant Tinsley’s work was almost done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jenn watched Kirby Tate on a bank of monitors. It was dark in his cell, Tate a ghostly green on the screen. From bound wrists he hung, arms outstretched. She watched Tate dance on his toes, trying to keep his feet under him. When he slipped, his shoulders took the full weight of his body until he could get his feet back under him. It was exhausting. It was intended to be.

  Through the walls she could feel the bass from music bombarding Tate. Some speed-metal band that believed anything less than 250 beats a minute was elevator music. It amazed her what some people listened to voluntarily. She only knew it as the playlist of CIA black-site detention facilities around the world.

  She wiped sweat out of her eyes. Even with the rollaway door open, the heat of the sun baked the units like ovens. It was much worse for Tate. How far was she willing to take this if Kirby didn’t fold as readily as predicted?
She pushed the question away. He would break. They might have to tiptoe up to the edge, but she was sure he would break before things crossed the line. He had to.

  In her time at the Agency, Jenn had sat in on more enhanced interrogations than she cared to remember. No matter how hard you thought you were, you carried each one with you. That she had believed in their necessity did nothing to help her sleep at night. The subjects had been men of principle and faith. Principles she despised. Principles that had led to unforgivable crimes. But principles nonetheless, and on some base level she could respect their devotion. Interrogating such men took time. It took time to break a devout man of his beliefs, and it was a terrible thing to witness. Worse still to be the one responsible.

  Kirby Tate, on the other hand, believed only in his need. No principles other than his own ghoulish desires. A man like this was already broken. She did not expect to be here long. How much steel could there be in a man so weak he preyed on children?

  She yawned and stretched. It had been a long night. She looked enviously toward Hendricks, asleep on the cot in the corner. She’d wake him in another two hours, and they’d go back to work on Tate.

  Tate was a career criminal. In addition to the botched Trish Casper abduction, he had a lengthy record and had been in and out of lockup since he was fifteen. A child of the system, he would think he knew how it worked. Its rules. She’d known he would be confident about his ability to play it to his advantage. So after they had grabbed Tate at his house, they’d built the illusion in his mind that he was no longer in the United States. Leading him to believe that he was far, far from home and that no one was coming to rescue him. He had to learn early on that his concept of legality didn’t apply here—no lawyers, no Miranda rights, no bargains to be struck. Only answers or pain. Answers or pain.

  Creating the illusion had involved driving Tate to a little-used airstrip, boarding him onto a plane, and strapping him into a seat. Of course, the plane never left the hangar, but in Tate’s mind they had flown halfway around the world.