I sullenly waited for him to get his lunch. I had no appetite. “That wasn’t the plan.”
He paused in his noisy slurping. “What?”
“Killing that guy.”
“Your way wasn’t working. We didn’t have time. I showed him my face because I’ve got a rep around here. He had to know he was dealing with someone who would just kill him, otherwise he never would have talked in time. If we let him go, and they caught him, he’d talk, we’d die. And once he told them what we asked about, your brother would die. I’m surprised. Katarina talked you up like you were a mad-dog killer.”
“I try to be a little more selective.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and watched the passing throng. There was still smoke rising from the PLA compound, but nobody was paying attention now.
“Well, you popped that soldier fast. He was about to shoot me when you got him,” Anders said with grudging respect. I had to assume that was his version of “thank you.” “Hey man, at least you know your brother’s alive.” He tossed some coins on the counter as he pulled out his radio.
I had been too preoccupied with Anders’ casual murder to think it through, but this meant Bob was here. I still had a mission and a purpose. “I’ll set up a meet between Kat and Exodus.”
Anders keyed his radio. “It’s on,” he stated simply, before shoving it back into his pocket. “Your crew will be released and sent back to the Glorious Cloud. We’ll be in touch.” Anders ordered another batch of noodles to go.
Kat had kept her word, and Jill and Reaper were waiting at the Glorious Cloud by the time I returned. Reaper had even had some time to do some research. He had taken the note that I had slipped Jill at the Montalban Exchange, containing everything I had gleaned earlier, and gone to work.
“Your note said Anders had a SEAL Team 4 tattoo on his arm, and he mentioned being HRT,” Reaper said. “So I started there.”
“Assuming he’s telling the truth.” Jill was sitting on the bed next to me, also studying the screen on Reaper’s laptop. She hadn’t said anything yet about my earlier meeting with Katarina, and I wasn’t going to bring it up either.
“Duh.” Reaper rolled his eyes. “Do I tell you how to look hot? Do I tell Lorenzo how to steal stuff? No? I used the Majestic files Val took that Bob dropped on the Internet. Then I cross-referenced Bob’s conspiracy nut notes. I digitized them while you were screwing around with Exodus, by the way. Then I wrote a—” And as soon as I recognized that he was about to drone on about his anarcho-crypto nerd brilliance I cut him off.
“Get to the point.”
“The Project Heartbreaker records had an operative under the name of Anders, attached to Dead Six, and working for Gordon Willis, code-named Drago. But that name was a dead end. He’s a ghost. No connection to a real identity.”
The way Reaper was talking, I knew he was itching to tell me more. I waited patiently. I had already killed somebody today, so I was feeling kind of mellow. “And with your ‘mad skillz,’” I made quote marks with my hands, “I’m sure you got more than that.”
“You know it.” He started rapidly clicking, bringing up other files. “One of Bob’s suspects for the Fourth Operative was a former FBI agent named Simon Andrew Sundgren. Bob said that he had some indication that this guy was a possible because of his prior training, but Bob didn’t elaborate what training, but he did mention the guy was HRT. Bob only wrote about the dude for one paragraph, but he was the only one that was former FBI.”
He must have noticed that my eyes were starting to glass over.
“Okay, okay.” He clicked a wireless mouse and the screen changed. It was a picture of Anders, only younger, clean-shaven, with a sharp buzz cut. He looked like one of those Nazi recruiting posters from World War II, a square-jawed, blue-eyed block of muscle.
“Wow. He looks a lot better without the beard,” Jill said. I scowled at her. She raised her hands. “What?”
I turned back to the computer. “So you cracked the FBI database finally?”
“No. I got slapped down hard when I tried that for Bob’s file. This is from Google,” he explained. “See, just like all the guys working at North Gap had shady pasts, and some of the people that Majestic recruited for Dead Six had legal problems, I figured the rest of their operatives would be similar. Special Agent Sundgren is a bit of an internet celebrity.” He brought up the next window. “He apparently shot some people in a standoff in North Dakota. They turned out to be unarmed and were trying to surrender. One of them was a pregnant lady.”
“I remember that one. I saw a thing about it on TV once,” Jill said. “There was this big standoff with some people that refused to pay taxes. When they teargassed the place, he said that the people came out with guns. The survivors said that they were unarmed and trying to surrender. Gotta love NatGeo.”
“So all the intel gathering about our new buddy, Anders, has already been done for us by the internet. Hell, he’s even got his own Wikipedia entry. It was really controversial. North Dakota tried to prosecute him. The Feds wouldn’t release the official records of what happened, and he claimed immunity. The next thing you know, he just quit the FBI and disappeared. We know he was recruited by Majestic.”
“Congratulations. You won the Internet.” I gently pushed past Reaper and stole his laptop. Anders had quite the resume. Annapolis graduate, US Navy, started out as a nuke tech on a carrier, and then transferred into Naval Special Warfare. Olympic athlete. Won a bronze medal in freestyle swimming. So not only could he fight, he was apparently one hell of a swimmer too. Multiple citations for bravery, left the Navy, joined the FBI, and eventually the elite Hostage Rescue Team. Until he jumped the gun and massacred some people. Then nobody had seen him since. And now former Special Agent Sundgren was kind of an iconic figure for governmental abuses of power.
They had no idea.
“So apparently we’re now in business with a jackbooted thug that shoots unarmed pregnant women. Majestic certainly wouldn’t want to let a set of skills like this go to waste.”
“Friggin’ awesome,” Jill muttered.
“Okay. Keep looking. None of this tells us what Project Blue is. There’s got to be something about Anders that keyed Bob in on him, and when we know what it is, maybe we can figure out what Blue really is.”
“I thought you didn’t care.” Reaper sounded surprised.
It really wasn’t my business, I need to take care of my family and get the hell out of here. The world’s affairs weren’t my problem. That altruistic bullshit was best left for good guys like my brother.
“Well, now I guess I’m curious.”
Chapter 16: Dead Leprechauns
VALENTINE
Exodus Safe House
Crossroads City
March 16th
Skunky and I sat and talked for a long time. I hadn’t seen him in a couple years, and both of our lives had been irrevocably changed after that ill-fated operation in Mexico. We had much to discuss. He had, of course, heard of the unrest in Zubara, hell, the whole world had. After reading the Project Heartbreaker Commission report, Skunky was sure that I had been killed there.
What was once the Confederated Gulf Emirate of Zubara was now the Zubaran Arab Republic, run by General-turned-President-for-Life Al Sabah and his so-called Arab Socialist Party. He ruled with an iron fist that would have made Saddam Hussein proud. I’d heard you could find videos of Zubaran security forces machine-gunning protesters in the streets on YouTube.
Fat lot of good we’d done there. I was personally responsible, at least in part, for the suffering of the people of Zubara. It took me the better part of an hour to tell him the convoluted tale of how Exodus helped me escape from Zubara, and Sarah’s death. I described my encounters with the Lorenzo brothers, the Montalbans, my falling out with Tailor, my capture and rescue, all of it.
When I was done talking, my former teammate closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Holy crap, dude.”
“You’re telling me. You know, every morning
I get up, I try not to think about it. By rights I’ve got no business even being alive. Almost everyone I care about is dead. Sarah is dead. The guys I worked with at Vanguard are, except for you and Tailor, and I’m not even sure about Tailor. I can’t even contact Hawk because it might put him in danger. Almost everyone that took part in Project Heartbreaker is dead, too. I don’t even know what the fuck I’m doing half the time. It’s like I’m running on autopilot. I just go along with the flow because I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Is that why you’re here?” he asked, a worried expression on his face.
I looked around, to make sure Ling wasn’t listening. “At first, that was my reason for coming along. I owe Ling—and I owe Exodus—my life. She pulled me out of hell, risking her own life and killing a bunch of people in the process. I can’t just walk away from that.”
“Even if you really want to,” Skunky interjected.
“Even if I really want to,” I repeated. “But honestly, as crazy as it sounds, this feels right to me. I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
“That doesn’t sound crazy to me. I was lost when I got home from Mexico.”
“That was a bad op,” I said.
“Yeah,” my friend agreed. “Bad op. I got home, I tried to go work for my parents, do a regular job. I tried really hard at that for almost a year.”
“So did I, Jeff.”
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Security guard.”
“I sold camera equipment.” He had always been an avid photographer. He had taken about three quarters of the pictures I had from my Vanguard days. “I did that for a while, but I got . . . I don’t know, restless. I couldn’t sleep at night and had nightmares when I could. When I thought about some of the shit we did, man . . . I don’t know. Someday we’re all going to stand before God to be judged. What am I going to tell him? How am I going to explain the shit we did? We got paid really well? It seemed like it was necessary at the time? It was what I was told to do?”
“I think I’d ask him where in the hell he was when all of those horrors we saw were going on.”
“It started eating me up, Val, bad,” Skunky said.
“Me too, sometimes.” In our former profession, we put on a legitimate facade, prettied up what we did by saying we were providing security, ensuring stability, or protecting VIPs. All of that was basically true. We got our hands dirty and fought other people’s wars. You can tell yourself that it was just a job, that they were bad guys you killed, but when you’re alone on a quiet night, you can’t fool yourself with that crap. You know what you did. It ate at me too, sometimes.
“We killed people for money.” Skunky was more religious than most of my teammates had been. He was the only one on Switchblade 4 that made any effort to attend regular church service. He was a good man, a better human being than a lot of the people I worked with. He didn’t really seem cut out for the work we did. He looked right through me. “So now what are you killing for?”
I didn’t deny it. What Hawk had said about me was right, whether or not I realized it back then. I’m a killer. It’s what I do. Everyone is good at something, and God forgive me, that’s what I’m good at. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. When I tried to do something else, I was miserable, and that was how I ended up in Zubara. I think that’s how I ended up at The Crossroads, too. Maybe it was just my calling.
“I don’t know.”
“Well I do.” Skunky was a more decent human being than I was, but he was a killer too. Deep down, he knew it. “Same reason you’re here now, I think. I was falling to pieces back home. The only time I’d find any peace was when I’d go camping up in the mountains alone. Even working for my parents I felt completely alone. They didn’t know what I’d been doing overseas. I think my dad sort of knew, but I never talked about it. I couldn’t bear to tell them. How do you tell your parents that, yeah, this one time, we mowed down a bunch of protestors in front of a government ministry with automatic weapons?”
I winced as I recalled the incident. That, too, had been a bad op. “Those protestors were shooting at us, Jeff. That’s how Roberts and Bigelow bought it, don’t you remember?”
“I know, I know. But how many people did we kill that day? Dozens? How many women and kids? God help me, Val, it was eating me alive. Once I got home, and had peace and quiet, and lived in the normal world, it was eating me alive.”
The protestors in that incident had deliberately brought as many women and children as they could with them. Many of the women and children were armed and were shooting at us. Not that that makes you feel any better when you’re surveying a mound of corpses.
“I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t relate to anyone. I was alone and I was miserable.”
“You had PTSD,” I said bluntly. “It’s okay, I’ve been told I do too.”
“I know. I didn’t know it at the time, but I know now. We’re both pretty fucked up, you know that? So then I get this email from Ling, asking me to join Exodus.”
“I got the same one. I damn near did it, too. If Tailor hadn’t approached me, I probably would’ve taken Ling up.”
“I did it. It took me all of a minute to decide.”
“So what’s it like?”
“I’ve been on a couple of missions. I can’t really talk about what I do. You’re not a sworn member of the order, blah blah blah.”
I grinned. “No worries, don’t get yourself in trouble.”
“Anyway, most of what Exodus does isn’t violence. I know that’s what gets all the press, but that’s not what it’s about. We help people. We free people from slavery. We bring down warlords. We allow food aid to get to starving people. We bring dictators and warlords down. Exodus helped overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, did you know that? We were in Syria too.”
I scoffed. “Look how well that mess turned out. I’ve been in the business of overthrowing nations, man. It never works out the way you think it’s going to.”
“I know. You can hand people liberty but you can’t make them keep it. After that, and what you guys pulled in Zubara, the order got much less enthusiastic about operating in the Middle East.”
“That’s a smart decision, I think. So I take it you’re a true believer? No offense. You just seem into it.”
“You have to be, dude. It’s given me a purpose. Once you learn about Exodus’ history, its founding, and the role it’s played in shaping history . . . we are trying to make the world a better place. And we’re not trying to do it by social engineering, or telling people how to live, or trying to take control or gain power. We believe in freedom, and that freedom is worth fighting for. Dying for.”
“Killing for,” I added.
“Yes,” he agreed grimly. “And that’s why we’re so damned good at what we do.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that.
VALENTINE
Crossroads City
March 18th
I found myself sitting in the left-hand passenger’s seat of a right-hand-drive Toyota Hilux Surf SUV. Ling was at the wheel, beeping the horn at a slow-moving ox cart as we tried to make our way across town.
She swore in Chinese as she stepped on the clutch, shifted gears, and passed the cart. Another horn sounded as we only very narrowly avoided hitting a huge Russian 6x6 truck head-on. Ling cursed again and stepped on the gas. I’d just learned that Ling had a case of road rage, but I still didn’t know where we were going. I’d been roused out of bed in the predawn darkness and told to get dressed. I had no idea what was happening.
“Mr. Lorenzo told Ibrahim that he has a proposal for Exodus. Ibrahim is the overall commander of this operation, but he wanted to consult with the leadership before making any decisions. We’re going to that meeting.”
Exodus spies had told us that Lorenzo and his team had safely returned to the Glorious Cloud. They did not approach him to ask where he’d been, though, for fear of tipping their hand.
“So why am I going?” I a
sked. I wasn’t even a member of Exodus, much less part of the leadership.
“You know Lorenzo better than most of us,” Ling said.
I supposed that was true. “Only because we’ve tried to kill each other.”
“That is the best way to truly understand someone.” She smiled. “Ibrahim doesn’t know him at all, so any of us who have worked with him will be there. We want to get a feel for what he has to say, whether or not he is telling the truth.”
“The man is a professional liar and that’s a giant understatement. I’m not sure having us there is going to help anyone know that Lorenzo’s being sincere. I’m sure he’s very, very good at feigning sincerity.”
“I’m well aware,” Ling insisted. “But you and I also know more of his background, and we’ve seen his home. We have leverage over him that he’s undoubtedly unused to. It might give us an advantage.”
I rubbed my eyes. “All this skullduggery is giving me a headache.”
“It won’t be so bad. Think of it this way, at least we get to—” Ling cut the wheel hard to the left as a rusted fuel tanker truck pulled out in front of us from a narrow alley. She laid on the horn and what she was saying melted into a swath of Mandarin obscenities. I grasped the “oh shit!” handle and hung on for dear life. Such was rush hour in a place with no traffic laws.
Somehow, we made it to our destination unscathed. We parked behind a deteriorating Soviet-era warehouse and, after having our identities confirmed, were hurried inside by the guards. The warehouse was dimly lit, and full of vehicles, supplies, shelves, and stacks of crates. The air stunk of dust, must, and years of neglect.
There were many Exodus personnel present, going about their daily tasks. Some were working on a truck engine. Others were cleaning weapons. Some were doing push-ups and pull-ups. We were hurried past them, through the warehouse, into a small office in the back. The echoing sounds of the building were muffled as the door was closed.
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