Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  Once they were moving, Leger settled into his corner of the seat and crossed his legs. “Let me have the bad news,” he said.

  Brandy’s jaw dropped.

  Leger laughed. “Don’t fake surprise,” he said. “I can read you better than my wife. You’ve been guarding bad news since before the meeting.”

  Brandy had a better poker face than people gave her credit for, but she could be transparent as glass when she wanted to. Bad news was always easier to deliver when it was asked for. “Our special operation hit a snag,” she said.

  Leger’s ears turned red at the news, and his right eye squinted just a little. Apparently, it was not the bad news he’d been expecting.

  “It turns out that the team didn’t completely follow the protocol. We just recently found out that one of the targets was killed on U.S. soil.”

  Now Leger’s jaw twitched. “You mean the janitor? He died?”

  Brandy shook her head. “No, I mean one of the targets.”

  He closed his eyes and massaged his forehead with three fingers. “Which one?”

  “Bravo,” she said. Notwithstanding the fact that the limo was sealed and checked daily for listening devices, neither of them felt comfortable speaking of these matters in plain English. It’d be different if they were planning an invasion, but as it was, this sort of business needed to be guarded with the utmost secrecy.

  “Why am I just hearing about this now?” He asked the question through clenched teeth.

  “I was hoping to be able to report on solid damage control.”

  He looked at her like she was crazy. “Damage control? He’s dead, for God’s sake.”

  This was the part she’d been dreading most. Her strategy all along was to just blurt it out and let the storm happen, so she said, “We’ve got people going out to pick up the body.”

  Something happened behind his eyes. For an instant, she thought Secretary Leger might hit her. “ Pick up the body? Pick it up from where?”

  Brandy chose her words carefully. “Because of the shooting, the team panicked a little. They knew that the police would go crazy, so they were in a hurry to get out. The pilot of the chopper told them that he couldn’t handle all the weight, so they took Bravo to the woods and shot him.”

  Leger’s eyes grew huge, an expression of genuine horror. “Jesus.”

  Brandy went on, “I didn’t find out about it until Viper called at three this morning. He swears there was no alternative. He told me where they’d stashed the body, and I’ve sent a team out to recover it.”

  Leger scowled. “Viper called at three this morning? Twenty-four hours after the event?”

  “Yes, sir. Apparently there was a communication breakdown.”

  Secretary Leger stared at her, as if he wasn’t sure he understood the words. Then he shifted his gaze to the front of the limo, to the panel with the Defense Department shield that separated them from the security team. His face drooped.

  Brandy said, “Sir, I assure you that this is under control. We knew going in that there were risks, but overall-”

  “Brandy.” He turned his head and looked at her with an expression that defined exhaustion.

  “Sir?”

  “Shut up for a while, okay?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I didn’t do nothin’ to the kid,” the hippie insisted. Jonathan detected a slight Spanish accent. “I saved his life.” The guy kept putting his hands up as they walked toward the Batmobile, and Jonathan kept telling him to put them down. They were beyond the cover of the trees, back out in the open, and few images could draw attention quite like a scruffy man in full surrender.

  Jonathan thought it was important to move Jeremy away from the bodies as soon as possible. Poor kid already had enough to deal with; he didn’t need to see spattered brain tissue. Boxers was still back there, though, rifling through the men’s pockets and gathering intel.

  Jeremy might as well have been welded to Jonathan’s side. More behavior that seemed too young for the boy exhibiting it. Jonathan needed to get him to Father Dom’s head-shrinking couch as soon as possible.

  “Tell him, Jeremy,” Harvey said. “Don’t let me hang out to dry like this. Tell him I saved your life.”

  Jeremy wasn’t talking to anyone about anything. He kept his focus straight ahead.

  Harvey went on, “Look, Mister, I swear to God-”

  “I believe you,” Jonathan said, cutting him off. They were still thirty feet from the Hummer, but Jonathan stopped the parade.

  Harvey’s face showed only distrust.

  “Swear to God,” Jonathan said. “I saw how you were protecting the boy. I saw you pulling their aim away from the campsite, and I know you didn’t take him. So relax, okay?”

  Fear gone. Cue the anger. “Relax!” Harvey erupted. “How the hell am I supposed to relax when there are two dead guys in the camp that everybody knows is mine? And, all respect, how the hell am I supposed to relax when I’m talkin’ to the guy who killed ’em?”

  Jonathan shot a nervous glance down to Jeremy. He didn’t like this kind of talk in front of a child. Then he realized how far out of the bottle that particular genie was. “Any idea who they were?” Jonathan asked, softening his tone in the hope that Harvey would follow suit.

  “I know they were killers!” Harvey said. “They were there to get his body”-he thrust a finger around Jonathan to Jeremy, who continued to reside in his own world-“only he wasn’t dead because I saved his life. They’d drugged him-I could tell from the pinpoint pupils-and they were supposed to have shot him, only they missed.” The details spilled out in a rush of words and arm flaps. He covered all of the details of his medical ministrations. “I swear on a stack of Bibles that I didn’t do nothin’ but good for that boy. I sure as hell didn’t touch him inappropriately or nothin’ like that.”

  That struck Jonathan as an odd detail to emphasize. Why deny an accusation that had not been made? “Where did you get your medical training?” he asked. It was a legitimate question, but he intentionally timed it to pull the hippie away from his anger.

  “Who says I have medical training?”

  “You said you knew Jeremy was drugged because of the ‘pinpoint pupils.’ Not only is that specialized knowledge, but the phrase ‘pinpoint pupils’ is sort of…esoteric.”

  Harvey didn’t flinch a bit from the five-dollar word. “I was in the military a while back,” he said. “I was a medic. A good one. Saw action in both the Bushes’ wars.”

  “Which branch of the service?” Jonathan started leading them toward the Hummer again.

  “Marines.” Harvey glared for a few seconds, then shook his head. “No need to talk about bad times,” he said. “And who the hell are you, anyway?”

  Something about the delivery-the sheer incredulity-of the question made Jonathan laugh. “Well, now, that’s complicated,” he said.

  “You with the government or somethin’?”

  “No.” He didn’t bother to add, not today, anyway. “Let’s just say I’m a friend.”

  “Whose friend?”

  They arrived at the Batmobile. “Jeremy’s certainly,” Jonathan said. “And yours, if you’ll play along.”

  “Play along with what?”

  “Just answer the questions as they come. You’re not the only one who saved a life today, you know?” In case the hippie’s memory had failed, Jonathan tossed a glance back toward the woods and the bodies they concealed. He noticed that Boxers was just emerging and heading their way.

  “You look like government,” Harvey said.

  “Actually, I’m told I look like an aging Boy Scout.”

  Finally, a smile from the guy. “Yeah, that, too. But I think those guys you shot were government, too. It was the way they held themselves. The way their hair was cut.”

  And the car they drove, Jonathan thought.

  “At least give me a name,” Harvey said. “Somethin’ to call you.”

  He hesitated. His was a world of pseudonyms and
fake credentials; he didn’t like being this far out on a limb under his own name in his own backyard-almost literally. Jeremy knew who he was, though, and soon Harvey would know where he came from, so it didn’t make a lot of sense to keep unnecessary secrets. “My name’s Jonathan,” he said as Boxers approached within hearing distance. “My friends call me Digger.”

  Harvey considered that for a while. “Well, Jonathan,” he said, his eyes squinting to slits, “what the hell is going on here?”

  Jonathan unlocked the Hummer and opened the front and back doors on the passenger side. “You stole my line, Harvey. I wanted to be first on the record with that very same question.” He looked beyond the hippie to Boxers. “Did you get it all?”

  The big guy nodded. That meant he’d recovered the spent brass from the shootings, and he’d stripped the bodies of identification.

  “Good,” Jonathan said. He leaned into the truck, across the massive front seat, and into the center console, from which he removed a black box about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Turning to face Harvey he said, “I need to see your hand.”

  Harvey shoved them into his pockets. “What for?”

  Jonathan opened the box and displayed a flat surface that might have been an iPod but wasn’t. “I want a fingerprint from you. Just want to make sure you’re not scarier than you seem to be.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Boxers loomed over the man. “Watch your mouth, friend,” he growled. “The kid doesn’t need that kind of language.”

  When Boxers wanted to look intimidating, even the toughest of men cowered. Harvey Rodriguez was nowhere near the toughest of men. He withdrew his hand and held it out flat. It was trembling.

  “Thank you,” Jonathan said. He took the hippie’s forefinger and pressed it against the tiny screen, and then repeated the process for his thumb. After verifying that the images were clear, he pressed S END. Within minutes, Venice would begin the process of matching the prints to people.

  “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” he said. “Now I want you to climb into the backseat here, while Jeremy rides up front with Boxers.”

  The big guy shot a furious glare at the sound of his real name. Jonathan ignored it.

  “Why?” Harvey asked.

  “Because I asked you to?”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Where Boxers takes you.” He paused for a smile. “Harvey, you’re safe, okay? You’re no longer in any danger.”

  “What about my stuff?”

  “It’ll keep,” Jonathan assured.

  “Everything I own is out there.”

  Jonathan cocked his head and let the words hang, hoping that Harvey would hear the nonsense of his own words. “You think those two guys are the last ones?” he asked. “When they don’t show up to wherever they’re supposed to be, don’t you think there’ll be more? I don’t think you want to be around when they arrive.”

  Understanding bloomed in Harvey’s eyes. “People are gonna think I did that,” he said. “Whether it’s those guys’ friends or just some hiker, somebody’s gonna walk by and see those corpses, and they’re gonna think I’m the one who offed them.”

  “No, they won’t,” Jonathan said.

  “Of course they will.”

  Jonathan placed a reassuring hand on Harvey’s shoulder, and as he reached, the hippie flinched. “Trust me, Harvey,” he said. “I know how to take care of these things.”

  Lightbulb moment. Harvey got it.

  “Now, please get into the vehicle. And please behave yourself when you’re in there.”

  He hesitated, but finally climbed inside.

  “The front seat’s for you,” he said cheerily to Jeremy.

  The boy’s hand clamped tighter.

  “Jeremy,” Jonathan said. The boy kept staring straight.

  “He okay?” Boxers asked.

  “Not now he’s not,” Jonathan said. “Jeremy, please look at me.”

  The boy’s face pitched up.

  “It’s okay for you not to be okay right now. You’ve been through a lot, but you’re safe now. My big friend here, Mr. Boxers, is going to take you back to Fisherman’s Cove. He’s going to take you to see Father Dom. You like Father Dom, right?”

  Jeremy’s nod was barely perceptible.

  “Nothing can happen to you now, understand? It’s been a terrible couple of days, but you’re completely safe now. I need you to get into the truck.”

  “Are you coming, too?” Jeremy asked. His voice was a raspy whisper.

  Jonathan was glad to hear him finally speak. “I’ll be along in an hour or so. Maybe two. I have some things I need to take care of.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Jonathan exchanged glances with Boxers. “Stuff that doesn’t involve you. Now, be a good kid and hop into the truck. Boxers will drive carefully for you.”

  It took another two minutes of negotiation, but when it was done, Jeremy was strapped into the front passenger seat, and Jonathan closed both doors.

  “You sure you don’t want me to take care of this for you?” Boxers said when they were shut off from prying ears. “We can trade places.”

  Jonathan would rather walk through fire than deal with Jeremy’s anger and sorrow for much longer. “No, I’m good,” he said. “Just take them right to the mansion. Call Dom ahead of time and see if he can be there waiting.”

  “And your scraggly friend?”

  “Find a room for him. Make him comfortable while we sort him out.”

  Boxers handed over the keys he’d pulled from one of the dead men’s pockets. “Let me know if you have any trouble,” he said, and then he walked around to the driver’s side.

  Jonathan stripped to his boxer shorts to load the bodies into the Chrysler’s trunk. He felt more than a little ridiculous, but if someone wandered up in the next ten minutes or so, embarrassment would be the least of his problems.

  Among the biggest surprises of this day that was filled with surprises was the fact that the gunmen-he’d sent their prints off to Venice as well-had already lined the interior of the trunk with plastic. How could you not smile at the irony of that?

  Then the despicability of what they were planning came back to him, and the ironic smile dissolved to anger. These assholes’ mission had been to stash the body of a dead child in here. One of the House’s children, which made him one of Jonathan’s children. How dare they? Hell had two new residents tonight, and he suspected that even Satan held child killers in contempt.

  He’d moved the Chrysler as close to the bodies as he could without running over them so that once he had the corpses hoisted onto his shoulders it would be as short a walk as possible. Both of the dead guys had been in good shape. The muscle tissue made them a little heavy for their size, but the lack of flab made them less slippery and therefore easier to flop into the trunk bed. He took perverse pleasure in the way the heads collided when he deposited the second body.

  With arms and legs all tucked in, Jonathan shut the lid and looked himself over. Blood streaked his hands, chest and arms. It caked his fingernails. He could only imagine what his face looked like. It wouldn’t do. He wandered to the hippie’s tent, rummaged through his stuff, and found the bar of soap he knew had to be there somewhere. With the Ivory in one hand and his pistol in the other, partially concealed by a purloined towel that he’d draped over his forearm, he trudged through the tall grass all the way down to the river.

  He kept the bath to only a few minutes. Part of him continued to worry about being caught in such a compromising condition, but all of him worried about God only knew how many microbes were invading his body from the waters of the Potomac.

  Clean, dry, and redressed, he climbed behind the wheel of the Chrysler and dropped it into gear. When he’d put a couple of miles between himself and the crime scene, he slid his cell phone out of his pocket and pressed the button for the voice command. “Call Niles Decker,” he said.

  The man he was looking for answered on the third ring. J
onathan told him what he wanted.

  Decker sighed. “I’ll meet you at the office,” he said. “Drive straight to the back.”

  “See you in thirty,” Jonathan said, and he closed the phone.

  It only took him twenty-five.

  The Decker family had been in the undertaking business for generations, building one of the most recognizable brands in the Northern Neck. Their sprawling edifice on the outskirts of Montross was an architectural icon. Tall, fat pillars in front suggested the north portico of the White House. Inside, the viewing rooms rivaled the world’s most opulent mansions with fabric wall coverings and ornate chandeliers. For members of a community of working-class farmers and fishermen, this was the one chance they had to live in the style of their dreams. It’s a shame they had to live it when they were dead.

  Jonathan and Niles Decker had been classmates from first grade through high school. While they were never close, they were linked by the industry their fathers shared. Officially, Simon Gravenow-Jonathan’s father-made his fortune in the scrap recycling business. In fact, Jonathan still owned that business, and it still made more than enough money to support a very wealthy family. Jonathan had ceded direct control to Leonard King years ago, limiting his involvement to the occasional board of directors meeting, but he enjoyed the tie to real industry.

  In his spare time, Simon Gravenow was a thief and a murderer, a key player in what the press had glibly labeled the Dixie Mafia. He bought and sold politicians at will as he kept the drug trade thriving. Those who got in his way were removed with extreme prejudice. Now Simon was a guest of Uncle Sam in one of his finest maximum-security prisons, where he was scheduled to spend the rest of his life.

  Jonathan had made it a point to stay out of his father’s affairs-to know as little about that part of the family business as possible. That had always disappointed his father, and when Jonathan turned eighteen and legally changed his name from Gravenow to Grave, communications between them had pretty much shut down.