by John Grit
“You expect them to hang their own ass out to dry? Friendship only goes so far.”
The eggs crackled. “There are people in Langley and Washington who not only owe me their careers, but their freedom. They would be rotting in prison if not for me and my silence.”
She got up and stood close to him. “That could be the very reason you’re wanted dead after all this time.”
He looked at her solemnly. “Why now? Like you said, it’s been a year since I left the company, and I’ve said nothing to no one. I’ve kept my oath of silence.”
She pushed her body against his and ran her fingers though his hair. “Maybe someone has a shot at the brass ring and wants to take no chances with you.”
He smelled the coffee on her breath. “One of those senators planning to run for president?”
“Maybe. Or maybe someone at Langley about to be picked for Director.”
He turned from her and checked the eggs. “They have a Director.”
“Dulling’s so crooked even Washington will get enough of him sooner or later. Maybe it’s later.”
The eggs were done. Raylan scooped them onto two plates. “I’ll make toast while you set the table.”
She smiled at his back. “Cold, Raylan, cold. You knew I was coming on to you. And what do you do? You choose eggs over me.”
He laughed. “I’m highly trained in the many methods of resisting a woman’s charms. Eggs are just one of them.”
“Naw. It’s more like you’re past the big forty. Face it; you have ice water for blood now. Old age will do that.”
“Carla,” he said, “I’m still in my thirties. Your mistake has always been the fact you believe all men have less brains in the head on their shoulders than the head on their dick.” He sat at the table and sprinkled hot sauce on his eggs. “It’s about time someone told you you’re mistaken.”
She leaned back in her chair and laughed. “That’s the biggest crock of BS I’ve been handed since…well, since yesterday when I called my former handler at Langley.”
He faked hurt. “Well…I’m not over forty. Not even close.”
She put her cup down before she blew coffee all over the table. “No, but you might as well be eighty.”
He stopped chewing. “Damn. I aged over four decades in three minutes.”
She became serious. “Forget Langley, Raylan. There’s no such thing as a friend in Langley or Washington, only backstabbers. Just disappear, like you did before.”
He looked at her from across the table. “And you? You want to live out the rest of your life in a trailer slum in Hicksville? I would rather face this and get it over with. At first I thought about disappearing again, but now I realize there’s no running from it.”
No words passed between them until their meal was finished.
Carla pushed back from the table. “I think since we’re tied together in this, we should work together to the end. You dumping me won’t make it safer for either one of us.”
He stared across the table at her, thinking about the time she dumped him for no discernible reason. “Well, it’s not like you don’t understand what you’re asking for. It’s also not like you’ll be a liability.”
She crossed her arms. “That’s settled then. What isn’t settled is how the hell we’re going to find a way out of this mess.”
Raylan put the dishes in the sink. “We’ll rest here another day and think about what to do next.”
“We better plan several moves in advance, not just the next one.”
The sun peeked over treetops in the east. Rays filtered in through the scrim of window curtains behind the sink. He brushed a curtain aside and looked out the window and watched a couple arguing in front of the trailer next door. “I hope that doesn’t get out of hand. We don’t need deputies out here working a domestic abuse case, knocking on doors, asking if we saw or heard Billy Bob beating his girlfriend.”
Carla got up and disappeared in the bedroom. She came back with a compact laptop. “I’ve an idea, a way to hurt them politically and PR-wise. She cleared the table and set her laptop down. “Let’s tell the whole story as we know it. Lay the whole thing out. Put it on a dozen flash drives and send them to major news agencies.”
Raylan raised an eyebrow. “Fear I might violate my non-disclosure oath is probably why they came after me. I never went through the separation process before quitting. They certainly didn’t like that.”
“Why did you quit so suddenly?” Carla examined his face closely, waiting for his reaction.
He ignored the question. “We’ll have to give them enough inside information on the CIA and our past employment to lend gravitas to our claims. Things only a CIA insider would know but just enough info without endangering the country or any CIA operatives, past or present.”
Carla leaned back and crossed her arms, presenting an interesting view for Raylan. “Okay, Boy Scout. But we should rip the politicos a new ass, ruin their careers.”
He shook his head. “Not the senators. I still don’t know if they’ve turned their backs on me. I’m talking about the two who claim to be my friend. They could prove to be a lifesaver sometime down the road.”
She tilted her head and stared at him. “Damn it Raylan, you don’t have any friends, and forget that oath of silence. Worry about saving your ass.”
“It’s that other oath I’m thinking of. The one about protecting the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. As far as I’m concerned, it’s open season on any senator, CIA bigwig, or any other asshole who is an enemy of the Constitution and the American people, but I don’t believe in spraying accusations at everyone in range and hoping some of them are actually guilty.”
She pointed a finger. “Boy Scout. That’s what you are.”
“I do think you have a good idea. There would be no point in killing me to defuse a bomb that’s already gone off. The only reason they would have to keep coming after me would be revenge. And revenge is a very dangerous motivation for governments.”
“Isn’t much money or political capital in it either,” she added. “Unless it’s someone like Osama bin Laden. You may have something there. Oh, wait, it was my idea and you stole it.”
“Before you get started, go put a shirt on. It’s distracting.”
She laughed. “My boobs? Distracting?”
“It’s probably dangerous, too. You could get them caught in a door or something.”
She laughed all the way down the hall. Emerging from the bedroom in a T-shirt, she sat down and continued to laugh while typing.
An hour later, she was still suffering from bouts of laughter.
Raylan sat in an easy chair and watched the morning news on a small black and white TV that looked like it came out of Noah’s Ark. Former renters had left it, because it wasn’t worth taking with them. Reporters spent five minutes on the barge explosion and the killing of those men at his shop, pinning all of it on him and implicating that Carla was his accomplice. When the reporters went to another current event, he switched the TV off. Pissed, he sat there and fumed. A spy gone bad, they called him.
“Okay. I’m finished,” Carla said. “Your turn.” She got up and waited for him at the table.
He sat down in the chair she was in. “Me asking you to put a shirt on couldn’t have been that funny. You’ve been giggling the last hour.”
She stood behind him and massaged his shoulders. “Watching them lie about you on the news pissed you off, huh? I was laughing at what I was typing. Read it before you do yours. See if it’s not good for a thousand laughs.”
He stopped reading after three paragraphs. “Oh shit! You’re going to have to take that out.”
She giggled. “No way. You do yours and refrain from editing mine.”
Even he had to laugh when he read that a senator asked CIA Director James Dulling to have his twenty-year-old daughter’s ex-fiancé’s legs broken for cheating on her, and he did. Dulling was a congressman for eight years, until he lost an election. Two years later,
he somehow pulled enough strings to convince a past president to nominate him for Director and more strings to encourage select persons on the Senate to approve. It mattered not that he had zero experience. He had been Director ever since, probably because he had enough on every politician in Washington to ruin them. The longer he stayed in power, the more dirt he had. It was getting to be like Hoover and the FBI.
Carla knew about what was jokingly called “Operation Broken Legs,” because she was the honey part of the honey trap, luring the hapless young philanderer to a hotel room where a man was waiting with a crowbar. She learned of the reason for the CIA’s involvement only after the fact. Furious, she complained to supervisors, but to no avail. “I was told this was a matter of national security, and it turned out to be bullshit,” she told her immediate supervisor. All she got for her complaining was a threat of dismissal.
It read like a Hollywood gossip rag, but he knew it was all true. Senators, congressmen, former presidents, all involved in lurid crimes and sexcapades. By the time he had read her complete testimony, he had involuntarily uttered “Oh shit!” nineteen times. She responded by breaking out into full-bore laughter, stopping only to catch her breath and wait for his next outburst. He wished for a stiff drink. “If you tell all this, half of Congress will be forced to resign.”
She rolled on the couch, laughing. “Serves the bastards and bastardettes right. They’ve pissed on us and I’m not going to pretend it’s raining.”
Raylan started typing, using the fingers on his right hand and index finger only on his bandaged left. “They’ve been pissing on the American people and those who fight and die for this country since forever. Don’t change a damn word.”
“That’s the spirit, Boy Scout.” She giggled and watched him type.
The tone and mood of his testimony was different. It included detailed accounts of assassinations all over the world and drone strikes on civilians. He recounted how he and a team of six operatives had been ordered to rescue an American soldier. They managed to get him and five other soldiers being held in a cave out alive, losing three of their team in the effort, only to be reprimanded for not leaving the others behind. Taking the others with them was considered a needless extra risk to the soldier they wanted saved. They had been told the soldier had valuable intel they didn’t want the terrorists torturing out of him, but learned later he was a senator’s son and had no sensitive intel at all. At the time, he felt an American is an American and the mission had saved six soldiers, though at great cost. But typing about it made him angry; those three men who gave their lives to a lie were the best men he ever knew.
The dirty details of another shameful incident involved an attack on a U.S. embassy in the Mideast, and a president’s refusal to give cross-border authority for Special Forces to go in and save the Americans there. Several ex-SEALs working embassy security were killed, pissing off the entire Special Forces community. What even they didn’t know and what Raylan revealed to Carla as he typed in anger, was the fact that the CIA had a Predator drone circling over head and could have taken out many of those who stormed the embassy that day, before they ever got to the people inside.
Another fact only he and a small handful of men knew about was that he and a CIA team were within helicopter range and could have saved the ambassador and many of those who served under him, if the president had given the okay. But it was too close to Election Day, and the president wouldn’t risk any operation going bad. Added to all of that, the president was running on a lie that he had beaten the Great Recession and radical Muslim terror. He wanted no mention of a terror attack on an American embassy to remind the voters he was lying. The president had remembered also, how a similar attack on an American embassy cost President Carter his second term. Americans died so the president wouldn’t suffer Carter’s fate.
He typed:
This was the last straw; I’d had enough, so I quit. It should be mentioned that you don’t just quit the CIA; you must ask permission and go through a long process. So, when I left, I went into hiding and started a new life, not because I had committed any crimes or betrayed the American people. I hid to avoid bloodshed. Events have proven my efforts were in vain. I’m not privy to any information that would help me understand why now, why someone wanted me dead on that particular day. Perhaps it has something to do with the barge explosion that I would bet was no accident.
The next part of his testament covered the events of that afternoon and night; when he was attacked by the men in his shop, and then went on to cover the hourly events up to when Carla ran from her apartment and the sniper just missed him as he slid over the wall. He ended the account there, but added a complete denial of all charges against him and Carla. He also reiterated that he had no idea why killers were sent to his scuba shop and the barge destroyed. He added: I do believe it is of the upmost importance to the security of our nation that this crime be investigated thoroughly. There is more to this than someone in the CIA deciding I needed to die.
His last sentence stated:
I have never failed to fulfill my oath to protect the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I never will. There is no expiration date on that oath. On this day, for the first time, I violate my nondisclosure oath only because I must, as it is in conflict with my higher oath to protect the Constitution and the American people. They can lie about Carla and I; they can hunt us down and kill us, but they can never deter us from our duty to protect the American people. This isn’t over and it won’t be as long as we live.
Carla read his words with sober interest. There was no laughter or glee in her eyes. She looked up, her face solemn. “This will cause fireworks from the White House to the streets of Cairo.” She sat down at the laptop. “I think I’ll add to my list. I should have at least included the Colombia Massacre.”
Raylan had only a vague idea what she was talking about; he didn’t work that part of the world. He opened his money belt and pulled out some cash in preparation to go shopping. “Washington and Langley both are overflowing toilets that need to be flushed. That’s just what I could put down fast. If I had the time, I’d write a thousand pages and send it to every news agency around the world.”
She swallowed grimly. “Now that would be hilarious.”
He pulled a chair from the table to the middle of the tiny dining area. “I need you to do your thing, so I can go buy a few dozen flash drives and some other supplies.”
She headed for the bedroom. “I’ll get my kit.”
Forty-five minutes later, she was finished. “Check it out.”
He went into the bathroom to look in the mirror.
She stood behind him. “What do you think?”
He had a graying beard, crowfeet around his eyes, longer, grayer, hair, and appeared to be around sixty. “Beautiful,” he said.
He left her in the trailer and told her to try and get more sleep while he was gone, because he would need her to drive when they headed north. “I want to be near Langley ASAP.”
She seemed to have something on her mind but just nodded. “Play it safe and get back here in one piece. You wouldn’t want to miss the fun once the fireworks start.”
Chapter 4
Raylan parked in a small parking lot in front of a hardware store, backing into the parking space, so checking the tag number would require a cop to get out of his patrol car. Most cops were not going to do that, considering the chances of this particular Crown Vic being the one they were looking for – if they were looking for it yet – were slim. He had a little walking to do, but it was worth it to avoid parking in front of the discount store he planned to clean out of flash drives. He would probably have to go to another store to buy more, since they seldom had more than a dozen on display.
Forty minutes later, most of it spent walking, he slid behind the wheel and headed for another place to buy more flash drives. That went okay.
The nearest large discount store that would likely ha
ve more than a few flash drives on display – he didn’t want to ask an employee if they had more in the back and give cause to be remembered or his disguise closely scrutinized – was on a dangerous side of town, where gangs often shot it out. He had no idea of the crime problem, but it was obviously not the most affluent part of this small community. He found a place to park. It was a fast food restaurant.
He would have to walk several miles, but it was a major artery with plenty of traffic and witnesses to discourage any muggings, at least in open daylight. Several small groups of young thugs loitered on street corners, wearing different colored shirts to signify their particular gang and to warn other gangs away, all sporting baggy pants that hung down six or more inches lower than modesty would dictate. They eyed him and glared with hatred in their eyes, but must have considered him unlikely to have anything worth taking. He went on to the store unmolested.
Raylan came out of the store with bags containing seventeen more flash drives of various capacities and other items he had purchased with one hundred dollar bills from the money belt he left in the trailer with Carla. He headed back to the car. At the second intersection, he observed that the thug convention had doubled in size from three to six. Several had heavy pants that hung down more on one side than the other that they kept pulling halfway up their buttocks but never up to where normal men wore their pants. He stood there seventy-five yards down the sidewalk and waited for a break in the traffic while they conversed and glared at him. When a break presented itself, he darted across the street.
He continued on, catching them out of the corner of his right eye, as they darted across the road behind him. Horns blared, because they didn’t wait for a real break in the traffic. He kept moving and showed no sign he had noticed. He walked at the normal pace of a man of the age he appeared to be – Carla’s makeup and gray beard taken into account – but they rushed at him like a pack of wolves on the hunt.
He barely had time to swerve into a wooded vacant lot and screw the suppressor on his pistol before they were on him. He stepped behind a cluster of heavy brush and turned to wait for the trouble he knew was coming.
