Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  Halfway down the Boat America storefront toward Big Ten Sports, he noticed a bank of newspaper boxes. He walked over to see which ones were available, maybe he’d pick up a Richmond or Washington paper if there were any. He had read more newspapers in the last two weeks than in the previous two years.

  He was rummaging in his front pockets for change when a blue conversion van glided up alongside the curb. Brad paid no attention; he was looking for Ranya’s plain vanilla Econoline.

  Then someone in the van called his name, someone said, “I’ll be damned. It’s Brad Fallon!” and stepped out of the front passenger door. It was some guy with his light brown hair combed straight back, wearing wrap around sunglasses and a light green safari-style shirt and jeans.

  “Hey Brad, remember me? Bob Michaels! We went through Navy boot camp together at Great Lakes in ’93, remember?”

  Brad was momentarily taken aback, but after all, Virginia Beach was a Navy town…he wracked his memory trying to place this Bob Michaels, who was enthusiastically reaching out to shake his hand. A couple of Boat America customers passed the store’s front door in his peripheral vision. He somewhat reluctantly accepted the friendly stranger’s hand, the guy certainly seemed to remember him well enough, maybe he was somebody that he had just plain forgotten, it happens…

  But Brad, for the life of him, could just not place this Bob Michaels. Still, he wanted to be polite, because the guy sure remembered him! He must have left some kind of strong impression on one of the less memorable members of his training company. He tried to release his handshake, but the man clamped a second hand around his from the other side, and when Brad stepped back and turned the man stepped and turned with him, almost like a dancer.

  “Brad Fallon! What a great surprise to run into you. What are you up to these days?”

  Brad was about to jerk his hand out of this smiling lunatic’s grasp when he was struck on the neck by what felt like a Louisville Slugger. The blue van’s side door was suddenly wide open, and he was being shoved forward and pulled into it at the same time, even while he was still reeling from the painful blast to his neck.

  A second later he was slammed face-first down onto the carpeted floor, with what felt like a thousand pounds of weight on top of him as the side door slammed closed. There were fast clicks as his arms were pulled behind and his wrists were handcuffed together, his ankles were shackled, and a sack was pulled over his head and tied around his neck. He was flipped on his side and someone was digging into his pockets, he both felt and heard his keys being pulled out.

  Then most of the weight came off of him, the side door opened again and from the sounds he thought maybe somebody got out. The door closed once more, and the vehicle started moving again.

  Someone with a vaguely familiar northeastern accent said, “Take it easy down there partner, save your energy; you’re shackled to the floor. It’s been a while, eh, Brad? We should really try to stay in better touch. You remember me?”

  After a moment to slightly recover from his utter state of shock, Brad did indeed remember the voice. “…George...” came his muffled reply.

  “Right you are, boyo. And we’ve got a lot to talk about, you and me and my buds. A lot to talk about. So if I was you, I’d relax. Just chill out, and spend this little ride thinking about exactly what it is we might want to talk about.”

  ****

  Agony flooded in on top of the pain. Brad’s neck still hurt like he’d been clubbed with a hot branding iron, his wrists and shoulders were half dislocated and pinched by the tight steel, his face burned where he had initially been driven into the carpet.

  He’d been bagged by one of the oldest routines in the book, a method perfected by the Soviet KGB, but used in all police states. His mistake was that he had never anticipated seeing it used here in the United States! This was the secret arrest designed not to look like an arrest, but merely a chance meeting among “old friends,” an arrest designed to not alarm unaware witnesses, to preserve their placid serenity, right up until the day that they too were greeted on a street corner by an “old friend.”

  Brad had no illusions about his chance of a quick release, and he did not cry out his innocence to his captors, or beg them to reexamine their obvious error. He knew it was no mistake. He had seen no uniforms or badges, and he was read no warrant or Miranda warning. This was a secret arrest, by secret police, and that meant no lawyers, no phone calls, no protections at all.

  He bitterly cursed his own stupidity. He’d known as soon as he saw the door of the van slide open that his credit card had been his Judas, betraying him for $800 worth of extra boat supplies.

  It was just after noon when it happened, while he was waiting for Ranya. And the same people who had just captured him could even now be back at Boat America with another van, and pictures of Ranya. To think, that in spite of everything he knew about these things, he had used his credit card and then stood around in front of Boat America: he might as well have hung a sign saying “I’m Brad Fallon” around his neck...

  He had led them straight to himself and to Ranya as well, all because of his colossal stupidity!

  35

  Ranya wasn’t certain which block of strip malls along Shore Drive it was that Boat America was located in, and she was almost past it before she saw its blue and white marquee across the wide parking lot. Instead of driving straight in she pulled to the side of the service road which paralleled Shore Drive and parked, scanning for Brad, his truck, or any signs of surveillance.

  Traffic continued to flow past her normally; she had detected no vehicles following her on the way back from Suffolk where she had picked up her Enduro. Visiting the site of her former home and store, the place where her father had been murdered, both depressed her and re-galvanized her anger. On the way to Virginia Beach she had gotten on and off the highway several times to try to detect anyone following her, but she had seen nothing, and there were no repeat appearances by the same vehicles.

  Of course, she realized she could never rule out that she had already been discovered, and a hidden tracking device had been placed somewhere on her van…or that she might even now be under the unblinking eye of a federal helicopter, plane, or unmanned drone. Her level of caution and even paranoia remained extremely high, but she did not allow it to paralyze her.

  Ranya could only hope that she was still in the clear and not a suspect or “person of interest” in any investigation, and that her white van was still anonymous and unknown to the feds. When she bought the van, she had kept the previous owner’s tags, and their sticker was good until the end of October. She had planned to reregister it, but after stalking and killing Sanderson she decided to temporarily defer putting it in her own name. For the time being the lack of a DMV connection between herself and the van was an advantage.

  The same could not be said for Brad’s Ford truck: “George the Fed” had clearly known about it since the time of his attempted recruitment of Brad as an informant. This made his truck more than slightly radioactive in Ranya’s eyes, and she wanted them to be rid of it as quickly as possible. She didn’t even think selling it was worth the attention and the paper trail the transaction might bring, she would have simply abandoned it, or put it into long term storage like she was going to do with her bikes and most of her possessions.

  Wearing her Ruger ball cap and shades to obscure her face, she scanned the half-filled parking lot and quickly spotted the cab of Brad’s pickup in the middle, she recognized it by the small antenna which sprouted from the roof. But Brad was not in it, and neither was he standing around near the front of the store waiting for her. That meant she would have to go in and find him, a needless exposure she wished she could avoid.

  Each trip into a national chain store like Boat America would mean being recorded by several video cameras. For several years the federal government had been subsidizing the cost of upgrading the video surveillance systems of both local governments and major retail chains to the latest digital technolo
gy standards, and the quid pro quo was providing the government with their own access channels to the video output. This was the heart of the new “Universal Surveillance Act.” In this way and dozens more, America was quietly and with little fuss being turned into a total surveillance society, all in the name of fighting the war on terrorism.

  While she watched from across the lot, the automatic Boat America double doors opened, and a blond-haired man walked out just as a black Chevy Suburban pulled to the curb. When the big SUV pulled away across the front of the shopping center, the man was gone. Dark full-sized American SUVs with opaquely tinted windows always received Ranya’s full attention. She tended to consider them potential “fed-mobiles” unless and until she saw soccer moms and kids spilling out of them.

  At the far corner of the parking lot to her left, she saw a blue camper van driving away from the shopping center toward Shore Drive. Halfway across the parking lot it stopped, and two guys in jeans and loose shirts stepped from the sliding side door. The van then continued to Shore Drive a hundred yards in front of her, made a left turn across the traffic lanes, and headed west in the direction she had just come from.

  One of the two men from the van walked down the parking lot exit road toward the stores, and the black Suburban which had just picked up the blond man from in front of Boat America paused and picked him up as well. The rear side door had been opened for him, before he had even reached for it.

  Even stranger, the other man who had gotten out of the blue van walked directly through the lot’s parked cars, walking in the general direction of Brad’s truck. He was a tall man about thirty-five, with long swinging arms and reddish-brown hair and a mustache, wearing a brown and black plaid shirt which hung below his belt line, an indication that he could be carrying a pistol. Ranya gripped the wheel tightly and almost stopped breathing. There was a pattern unfolding, connectivity, a non-random series of events in an otherwise unremarkable sequence. And there was still no Brad coming out of Boat America, at almost quarter after twelve noon.

  While she watched, the man from the blue van who was walking across the parking lot stopped by Brad’s red truck; possibly a coincidence, she could not see from her angle if he was going to another car, but her pulse quickened. He was only about forty yards from her as she looked out the passenger window; she leaned back against the headrest and tried to observe as inconspicuously as she could. Then Brad’s driver’s side door opened, and the red-headed man got into his truck! He just climbed right inside! Brad always locked the doors, always, he never left them open, yet a stranger had just gotten in! The door opened again, and the stranger appeared to put something in the back, something brown, then the door closed again, and in moments the truck began to move!

  How? Duplicate keys, a slim-jim bar? Impossible. The man had to have keys, which meant that he had Brad’s keys, which meant…they must have Brad! Brad must be in the blue van, or the black Suburban! The van and the SUV were already out of sight, heading west on Shore Drive, back toward Norfolk.

  Could he still be in the store? Could his keys have been stolen by a pickpocket? Impossible. An entire team of men to steal a used truck? Was he possibly meeting someone to sell the truck, and gave him his keys? In Boat America? Absurd. That only left one possibility.

  Brad’s truck passed the front of the stores and left by the same parking lot exit road as the blue van and the black SUV, and made the left onto Shore Drive, crossing only a hundred yards in front of her van, still parked on the side of the service road. It headed west, in the same direction as the other two vehicles. There was no time for doubt now, Brad had been arrested or kidnapped, and not by any ordinary police.

  What a fool she’d been, thinking of ways to literally use Brad as live bait to capture George the Fed, and at this very minute he was being driven off to God knows where! But west was the direction of downtown Norfolk, and the federal building…

  His red truck picked up speed, getting several blocks ahead before Ranya threw the shifter into drive and pulled to the break in the service road, and made her own left turn onto Shore Drive. She could only hope and pray that Brad’s truck was being driven to wherever Brad was being taken. If it was being taken somewhere to be dumped, she would have to ambush the driver when he got out, and capture him alive, or her only chance of finding Brad would be lost. Her loaded .45 was in her fanny pack, on the passenger seat.

  She had to count on the driver of Brad’s truck not worrying about being tailed, about the possibility of the hunter becoming the hunted. It was a chance she had to take. If the driver did much checking in his rear view mirror, Ranya thought she would be spotted, but she had no alternative. The only thing that mattered was finding Brad, so today was a day to risk everything, and hold nothing back. At any rate, plain off-white delivery vans were extremely common...

  She hung back as far as she dared, relying on her 20-20 vision to keep slivers of his truck visible in traffic ahead, but she still had to run a red light once to keep from losing it altogether. The tiny antenna on the roof of the cab, which was not even connected to anything, was a Godsend, because it distinguished his pickup from any others in thick traffic. After only a mile the truck turned, making a left onto Northampton Boulevard, and then it made another turn onto a cloverleaf. She lost sight of the truck in the loop, but spotted it again heading south on Independence.

  For almost four miles they traveled like this, with Ranya staying as far back as possible, briefly losing him when a Virginia Beach Police cruiser in the next lane prevented her from driving up a right-turn-only lane to get ahead of traffic at a stop light. Once she was through the intersection, after the police car had made a left turn, she floored it and did 75 in a 45 zone for a few blocks, until she caught sight of his red truck again. Just north of the enormous intersection with Virginia Beach Boulevard, which ran east-to-west, the pickup pulled off Independence and drove through a shopping center. Ranya turned into the same shopping center through an earlier entrance.

  Brad’s truck pulled into the drive-through lane of a Burger King; it was only the second car in line but Ranya had time to catch her breath and think. She parked the van outside of a small stand-alone real estate office, in the shade of a maple tree a hundred yards from the drive-through. From there she could watch the truck while remaining inconspicuous, yet remain ready to take up the pursuit in a moment.

  She knew that she couldn’t stay in the white van and continue following him south indefinitely without being spotted. Independence would soon turn into Holland Road, and become much more rural and wide open. And whenever the red truck finally reached its destination, the van would be nearly impossible to hide. It would almost certainly give her away, depending on where the pursuit came to a conclusion.

  Her old Yamaha XT 250 was tied in the center of the van behind her; on the bike she could follow him much more inconspicuously. At the range that she could just barely make out the red truck, her black and tan primer-painted Enduro would be a nearly invisible dot in the truck’s rear view mirror. She could also use cars as a screen, effectively hiding from his view behind them, and she could swiftly surge ahead if she was left far behind by a traffic light.

  Brad’s truck was now at the window being served, he would be driving away in a minute, so there was no time to unload the bike. If she took the time to try she might lose sight of the truck completely; the giant intersection with Virginia Beach Boulevard and then the Expressway cloverleaf were coming up just ahead. She’d have to keep following in the van to be certain that she could keep him in sight after he left the Burger King, and take her chances with being spotted.

  The driver was handed his sacks of food and he pulled forward, but he didn’t turn back toward Independence Boulevard, instead he weaved a half block through the shopping center lot and parked outside a Virginia ABC liquor store. He stepped out of the truck, turned and looked all around him, and went into a shop next to the ABC store. He was a real ape; he made her think of a malevolent orangutan. Her angle
of view was poor for observing the shop, but Ranya remembered her small 8X20 binoculars which were in a cardboard moving-box full of odds and ends in the cargo area behind her. She quickly grabbed them and saw that the shop which was next to the ABC store was the “Midnite Sun Adult Books and Videos.”

  Ranya breathed a deep sigh of relief that the driver had gone into the dirty book store, she instinctively knew that she’d have time to unload the Enduro. She immediately went to work in the back of the van, first topping off the dirt bike’s gas tank from the metal Jerry can she had also retrieved from her motorcycle shed. She used the razor-sharp serrated edge of her folding pocket knife to slash through the nylon ropes holding the bike to the sides of the van, and in a moment it was loose. She opened the rear cargo doors, passed on using her loading plank, and walked the bike backward, bouncing it down onto the pavement, holding the handlebars and using the hand brake.

  A block away in its own section of the shopping center, the red truck was still parked outside the Midnite Sun adult bookstore. Ranya quickly went through the van, loading everything that might be useful into her black daypack and her butt pack: a Tidewater street map, her never-used prepaid cell phone in its sealed foil pack, the little pair of binoculars, a one liter plastic bottle of PowerAde sports drink, her black ball cap, the tiny compass she had used to locate the weapons cache and other items.

  Her custom .45 she kept in the fanny pack; a rapid draw was not as important now as the chance of losing it. She could not depend on leaving it shoved under her belt beneath her jeans, not riding the Enduro. When she arrived wherever she was going, she could move it to a better position for a faster draw. She was already wearing jeans and running shoes and a black Colt Arms t-shirt, her jean jacket was draped over the back of the passenger seat. She pulled it on, slung on her daypack and snapped on her fanny pack, and was almost ready.