But now, somehow, some way, she wanted payback. Payback for what these people — who had come to her town, to her school, unbidden, and foisted their grievances upon an innocent and unsuspecting community — had done to her and her family. She may not have wanted to be at war with them, but somebody was surely at war with her.
“What you did,” she said at last, “was amazing.” Immediately, she hated herself for using such a cheap, modish word. There had been nothing amazing about it. Rory’s actions had been simply stone-cold brave, the lion cub defending his mother.
“I wasn’t brave, Mom,” he said. “I was scared.”
“Sometimes they’re the same thing.”
Rory picked up a cold pea and ate it. “That man, the one with the sword, he was brave.” He pushed his plate away.
“There’s still a chance, Rory,” she said. “I heard her voice.”
“I heard it, too. She’s still alive, Mom. I know it.”
Hope swallowed hard. “I do too.”
“So what are we going to do about it?”
The look on his face made her so proud so could cry. But she had to hold back the tears. “We’re going to find out the truth,” she said at last, “and if Emma is still alive, we’re going to find her.”
Rory managed to muster the simulacrum of a smile. “Promise?”
“Double-dog-dare-ya promise,” she replied, trying to put on a brave face. And then it hit her. What if they did find Emma’s body tonight? Hope was a midwestern girl, not given to strong emotions. Emotions were for easterners, ethnics, southerners. The people of Edwardsville prided themselves on their equanimity, on their ability to get along and go along, and while they might harbor private anger, private grudges, they would be damned if they would ever let such emotions show.
But now, she was not so sure. Now she was becoming ever more sure that, somehow, if she ever found the men responsible for what had happened, she would kill them with her bare hands.
She caught herself. That was the kind of thing hillbillies did, folks from Cairo and the Ozarks in Missouri, and farther south. Guys who secreted handguns in their pants and blew away the defendant as he sat at the lawyers’ table or, better, in the witness box. The kind of people she had instinctively recoiled from, but whose ranks she now, goddammit, all of a sudden very much wanted to join.
Kill them. And keep killing them until they stopped. Stopped coming to her country, stopped shouting, stopped gesticulating, stop firing weapons into the air, stopped making those ungodly noises, stopped killing our soldiers, stopped. Wrapped up in her private emotions, she swept her arm and the butter dish fell to the floor, shattered.
“He took her with him. Charles. I know he did.” Rory was talking to her. Hope’s eyes gleamed as she saw so clearly what she so desperately wanted to believe. “He got away and he took her with him,” he said. “And then the helicopter crashed—”
“And they said they found only one body, the pilot. So what? Remember when that Muslim from Canada turned up dead at that political convention in Denver with a suitcase full of cyanide? No link to terrorism, they said. Remember when that Arab kid crashed his plane into that building in Florida? No link to terrorism, they said. Remember when those two Arabs turned up in North Carolina or wherever it was with bomb stuff in their cars and claimed they were joyriding around to set off some fireworks? No link to terrorism, they said. No link, no link, no link.” She pounded the table at its iteration of the word, “link.”
“Our own government is lying to us. Lying to us all the time. What is it they don’t want us to know? What kind of fools do they take us for, us hicks out here in flyover country? They take our tax money and they buy our votes and then they treat us like idiot children. They fly over us and they laugh at us on their way to Malibu or the Hamptons. Well, I’m not going to take it any more.”
“Mom, who was that man?” At first Hope thought Rory meant the man with the tattoo, but he continued, “The man who saved me. The man who grabbed me — he came out of nowhere and we jumped into the Dumpster. I thought he was a missionary.”
That caught her up short — something she hadn’t thought about. It was so hard to concentrate at a time like this, but yes…who was that man? She had assumed he was a rescue worker. “A missionary?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Like cannibals and missionaries. You know, the game? I asked him if he was a missionary, and he said, ‘No, kid, I’m an angel.’”
“An angel?”
“That’s what he said, Mom.”
Hope thought for a moment: not one but two mystery men. She wondered if they had anything to do with each other. “Try to get some sleep, Rory,” she said at last.
“I’m not sleepy.”
“No, you’re not sleepy — you’re exhausted.” Finally, she broke down and started to cry. Rory rushed to her and held his mother. Then they both cried.
“I miss Dad,” he sobbed. “Why did it have to be him? Why, Mom, why?”
Hope brushed away her tears and tried to comfort her son. “I don’t know, Rory,” she said, letting the boy cry himself out. “It’s just part of God’s plan.”
“Well — it’s a sucky plan.”
“Shhh…” she said. “Try to get some sleep now.”
She led him into his bedroom and got him under the covers. He fell asleep before she even turned out the light.
Hope sat in the living room, trying to get ahold of herself. Her family may have been struck by unimaginable tragedy, but maybe there was something she could do about it. Some way she could fight back.
She knew exactly what she was going to do: find the man with the tattoo and hire him to find Emma. And maybe find the angel too.
She picked up the phone.
Chapter Twenty-eight
LOS ANGELES
“Daddy!”
Jade jumped into his arms, and Eddie hugged her tight. He hated leaving his daughter, hated even more leaving his wife, hated in fact everything about his job except the job itself. He was also bone tired, happy that he had been able to rescue that woman and her son, and profoundly pissed off that the job had gone so wrong at the end. That had never happened with a “Tom Powers” job before…
“How was your ride in the chopper?”
Eddie Bartlett put his daughter down on the ground, stepped back, and then kissed her again. His wife, Diane, beamed from the kitchen doorway. Eddie was never quite sure what if anything Diane knew about what he did, but one of the reasons he had married her was that she was smart and she was discreet, and so he never asked and she never told.
“Lots of fun.”
“Will you take me with you the next time?”
“You bet, pumpkin.”
Jade pulled a face. “That’s what you always say.”
“And that’s what I always mean. So there we have it — means, motive…now all we need is the opportunity—”
“Which I hope to God never comes,” said Diane. She wrapped herself around him, kissing him as passionately as propriety permitted.
“Get a room, you two,” observed Jade.
“We’ve already got one,” said Eddie. “In fact, we’ve got a whole house. A bedroom, too. How do you think you got here?”
“Awww…”
“What do they teach you in that expensive private school of yours, anyway?”
Jade took a step back and smiled that knowing smile of hers, so much wiser and older than her eight years. “You don’t want to know.”
Eddie was about to say something when Diane stepped between them. “All right, you two, enough of this banter. You and I have some serious shopping to do, young lady, and I know just where we’re going to do it.”
So did Jade: “The Grove?” The Grove was a kind of Disneyland for shoppers adjacent to the old Farmer’s Market at Fairfax and Third, turning a forlorn corner of the old Kosher Canyon into one of the most successful outdoor malls and entertainment complexes in America.
As Diane nodded,
Jade let out what sounded like a series of war whoops, which was the way young girls expressed enthusiasm these days. Then she turned to Eddie, “Are you coming, too, Daddy?”
Eddie shook his head. “I think I’m going to catch a little shut-eye, pumpkin,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”
Jade seemed a little disappointed, but Diane took her by the hand. “Your father’s been working hard and he needs a little nap, just like you do sometimes. By the time we get back, he’ll be tanned, rested, and ready — and then we’ll all go to Fat Fish for sushi. Okay?”
More war whoops. If there was anything Jade loved more than shopping at the Grove with her mom, it was sushi at Fat Fish, in West Hollywood.
“What are you spending my hard-earned money on today?” he asked, as a wave of exhaustion washed over him.
“Duh — a new MacBook? Can I get anything for you, Daddy?” asked Jade
Eddie looked at Diane and smiled. “Just bring your mommy home safe to me and we’ll call it even,” he said.
Diane kissed him on her way out the door. “Good-bye, Danny,” she said.
Danny Impellatieri was “Eddie Bartlett’s” real name, and the Impellatieri family lived quietly and unostentatiously in one of those houses in Los Feliz that most Angelenos never knew existed. Built by a random scion of the Chandler family in the mid-1920s, the house lay sheltered away on Hobart Street in the flats between Franklin Street and Los Feliz Boulevard, just west of Loughlin Park, the gated neighborhood where Hollywood had set down temporary roots between its founding in Echo Park and its later incarnation in Hancock Park, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air, and Pacific Palisades.
The great March to the Sea, however, was now over and many of the young Hollywood stars were now rediscovering the joys of living off the Wilshire-Beverly-Sunset grid and finding that they could somehow survive without getting shot in neighborhoods close to, you know, where “they” lived. “They” being LA PC-speak for People of Color.
The Impellatieri home boasted five bedrooms, a den, a swimming pool, a cabana, a billiards room, a formal dining room with fireplace and an elegant living room, all of which he bought half a dozen years ago for less than half a million. That was the beauty of LA, he thought: letting other people’s prejudices make you a fortune in real estate. The next thing you knew, houses in Echo Park would be hot again.
What a world, thought Eddie, kicking off his shoes and stumbling into bed. From Edwardsville he had traveled by car to a private airfield near Springfield, then flew to North Carolina to file his report with Xe and fill out the paperwork to get his men paid directly into their offshore bank accounts. He had caught the first commercial flight out this morning and so was back in LA by noon and home by one.
The pillow still smelled like Diane.
He grabbed the remote, to see what the cables were saying about Edwardsville. Sure enough, they were still running with the “Aftermath of the Tragedy” logos — these days, direct, murderous assaults on Americans were called “tragedies” instead of “acts of war”—interviews with the parents of the school kids, the local cops, even a clown or two from the FBI, whose pride was mixed with the egg on their faces from the explosion. He punched up the volume a couple of notches:
“We believe these were home-grown terrorists,” said a man identified as Leslie P. Waters, the special agent-in-charge for the St. Louis area. “Notwithstanding the allusions to Allah, etcetera, at this time there is no evidence that this was anything other than a…”
Right, thought Eddie, hitting the mute button. He supposed that the ability to make asinine weasel statements were part of the training at Quantico these days, but in this case he could cut Leslie P. Waters some slack, since there was no way anybody associated with “Tom Powers” was going to get fingered. Operational security in a Powers operation came before everything.
Although Eddie worked at his instruction, he had complete latitude in putting together his team. He had a few rules: no two men from the same past military unit at the same time, no two men with the same specialty, nobody except service members or those who had passed through Xe’s rigorous training program in North Carolina. Xe had come in for a lot of heat since the Iraq War, but it was still the goto protective service of choice for Republicans, Democrats, and journalists alike — those who wanted to live, anyway.
Still, there was something about the Edwardsville operation that was nagging him. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but the very fact that the operation had not been a complete success very nearly meant that it was a total failure. Not only in his eyes but, he was sure, in Tom Powers’s eyes as well. It wasn’t that the school assault itself was that surprising — hell, the government had been worrying about a Beslan copycat for years. It was that everything had gone so well, and yet ended so badly. He had never known Powers to fuck up like that, and it made him wonder. Wonder if Powers was slipping, wonder if their team somehow got compromised, wonder if something else, something he couldn’t see but only sense, was going on beneath the surface of an apparent terrorist operation.
Oh, well, plenty of time to hash that over when he was rested…
Sometimes, just before he fell asleep, he would think back to his days with the 160th. Although he rarely got behind the controls of a chopper these days, the gift of flight was still in his fingertips, and no matter how much the technology changed and evolved, his natural affinity for the soaring birds had not.
He left the tube on as he soared over, not rafted down, the River Lethe. His last memory was kissing Diane and Jade a little harder than normal, which hours later after uneasy slumber, he realized was just about the only thing he had done right.
Chapter Twenty-nine
CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND
If you were going to liquidate somebody, reflected Devlin, you couldn’t pick a better place than Camp David. For one thing, despite its deceptively idyllic mountain location in the Catoctins, its real name was Naval Support Facility Thurmont, with every sailor in the place, including the kitchen staff, boasting a “Yankee White” DoD security clearance — the highest available for this kind of duty. What happened at Camp David stayed at Camp David.
For another, it was guarded by an elite unit that even Devlin had to admire, the MSC–CD. This unit, whose acronym stood for Marine Security Company — Camp David, was the best the Corps had to offer, highly screened infantrymen handpicked for training at the Marine Corps Security Forces School in Chesapeake, Virginia. Camp David was 125 lethal acres of high-security rustication. FDR had dubbed it “Shangri-La,” a name later downgraded to Camp David by Ike, in honor of his grandson.
Devlin had forsaken all thoughts of monkey business straightaway. You came to Camp David and you took your medicine like a man. With Seelye, he normally insisted on as many security protocols as possible, but in a rural retreat with a handful of cabins and a whole lot of patrolled woods, there really wasn’t any place for him to hide.
He entered the camp using one of his false identities, this one proclaiming him to be a ship’s carpenter with a “Yankee White” clearance, which Seelye had determined was one of the two job openings on the base at the moment, the other being a gardener. As he passed through the gates, his practiced eye took in the myriad security cameras and other surveillance devices, not to mention the camouflaged Marines lurking just beyond the visible perimeter. Camp David was only sixty miles from Washington, not far from Gettysburg, and not exactly the biggest secret in the world, so many were the nutbags who packed their cars full of ammo and explosives and motored on up to see if the POTUS hunting was good that day. Some of them were detained until they sobered up, some of them arrested, and the worst of them sent off to prisons in Colorado and North Carolina for a very long time. A few of them were even shot, although their death certificates later read “automobile crash” or “hunting accident” or, his favorite, “domestic altercation.”
In the past decade, since September 11, security had been ratcheted up to a whole new level. It took only
a couple of would-be car bombers for the government to revamp its watch list from “good ole boys with a snootful” to “armed moonbats/wingnuts” and “full-throttle jihadis.” While there was still a certain amount of on-site triangulation, nobody thought a goober with a gun was particularly funny any more, and as for Dinesh from Dearborn, he quickly found himself on a plane to a very nasty Egyptian prison, or pushing up daisies, or both.
The thermal scanners, both ground-based and aerial, were just the beginning. The one at the main gate, whose presence was obvious to anybody, also doubled as an X-ray machine with the power of a CAT scanner. Radiation detectors were stationed at viable intervals along every roadway and pathway; a miscreant didn’t actually have to have anything nuclear on his person for him to be detected, he just had to have been, once upon a time, within kissing distance of any such device, whether suitcase-nuke or dirty bomb. The Marine guards surveyed everyone with the same dead-eyed suspicion, their trigger fingers transparently itchy (to him, at least), which is something he understood; if you were going to catch this shit-ass bucolic duty, waiting for the president to kick back or, worse, entertain some scum-sucking bottom-feeder of a foreign potentate, you might as well be ready to party if and when the time came.
Seelye was waiting for him just beyond the main gate. “Trouble?”
“Not today, thanks,” he replied, trying to sort out his feelings.
They rarely saw each other, which was fine by both of them. If Seelye had drawn this up on the blackboard back in 1985, it couldn’t have turned out better for him, or worse for Devlin. The man who had made a whore of his mother and a cuckold out of his father, and who had inadvertently gotten both of them killed. The man who had brought Devlin back to life as someone he was not, re-created him, trained him to become…
To become what he was. Whatever that was.
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