With a Vengeance

by Marcus Wynne

  SAC McLaughlin blustered in. “Agent Coronas…”

  “I think she knows exactly what she’s doing, Agent McLaughlin,” Sam Waters said. “It’s pretty obvious she sees something we don’t. At least I don’t.”

  “Thank you, Congressman,” she said. “I’m operating on the premise that this…attack…is part of our larger investigation. That this…man masquerading as an agent is in fact part of the machine of Ahmed Samir Said. And that this is part of my investigation.”

  “I’ll be talking to the Director just as soon as I get a line out, Agent Coronas,” Sam Waters said, looking hard at SAC McLaughlin. “I’m going to tell him what I saw here today, how you saved my life, and I’m going to ask him to lend you every possible resource you need to run this down.”

  Basalisa nodded, gave SAC McLaughlin a cool look, then turned away to talk to her team. Sam Waters looked at Hunter.

  “And I owe you some major thanks, Agent James. If you hadn’t moved when you did…”

  “Not necessary, Congressman,” Hunter said. “I’m glad you’re not hurt.”

  “Thanks to you,” Sam said.

  “Thanks to Agent Coronas,” Hunter said.

  “Well, she surely played a part, didn’t she? That was some damn fine shooting. Looked like one or two of those rounds parted your hair!”

  Hunter allowed himself a smile. “Yes, sir, I believe they might have.”

  “Damn son!” Sam Waters went on, encouraged. “You’re just as cool as can be, you two. I believe we have the best that could ever be working on this case…you and Coronas, that’s a match made in Heaven. Or Hell, I suppose, depending on your point of view.”

  Hunter had a genuine laugh at that. “Yes, sir. Depends on your point of view.”

  Sam eased Hunter aside, away from the other agents. “She a handful?”

  Hunter took his time answering that question, evaluating the Congressman. Waters was no fool, that was for sure, and much cooler than he’d expect from a career bureaucrat.

  “She’s probably the best investigator I’ve ever seen,” Hunter said. “She’s hard and focused and brilliant. You could do no better.”

  “And she’s got you watching her back,” Sam said. “Smart woman. Or lucky. Or both.”

  A detail of heavily armed Chicago Police Department cops hustled down the hallway and took up a cordon around the Congressman. Several of them nodded to Hunter.

  “I know these guys,” Hunter said. “They’ll make sure you get on the plane okay.”

  The Congressman nodded. “Use that number I gave you, Hunter James. I want to hear from you.”

  “Yes sir,” Hunter said. “You will.”

  “You and Agent Coronas both.”

  Sam nodded, pulled out his Treo and punched a number. “Hello, dear, this is Congressman Sam Waters calling for the Director. Put me through, will you?”

  Hunter watched the congressman disappear down the hall, surrounded by heavily armed cops in black, fragments of the conversation trickling back to him.

  He sensed Basalisa coming up behind him; with the respect only another gunfighter would recognize, she cleared her throat and came up on his non-gun side.

  “As my father would say, isn’t this a pretty little pig fuck?” Basalisa said softly.

  Hunter grinned. “Been awhile since I’ve heard that phrase.”

  “I thought perhaps you might have, Hunter.”

  Hunter turned and faced her directly, smiled, nodded. “Does this mean I can call you Basalisa now?”

  “I prefer Lisa,” she said.

  “Lisa it is.”

  “So what do you make of this? A Filipino assassin…I’ll bet that when we track him back, we’re going to find some links to Abu Sayeef,” she said. “Big balls to take out the head of the Congressional Investigation Committee.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he was here to do,” Hunter said.

  “That’s what it looked like to me,” she said.

  “If he wanted Waters, why didn’t he go for him?” Hunter said. “He was focused on me.”

  “Of course he was,” she said, irritated. “You were the immediate threat. He needed to clear his line to get at Water, and you were blocking his line.”

  “A sparrow wouldn’t have used the knife,” Hunter said. “He’d have used his pistol. This guy didn’t. He was waiting with knife in hand…but he didn’t go directly for Waters. He went for me.”

  “Now why the hell would he want you? Assuming you’re right, and not drunk on too much adrenaline.”

  “I don’t know,” Hunter said. “But that’s what it felt like.”

  “You’re stretching,” Basalisa said. “Unless…unless you think that killing the only Air Marshal to survive flight 193 would make a bigger statement than killing the head of the Congressional Investigation into Aviation Security.”

  “Who knows what he was thinking?” Hunter said.

  Lisa grinned, a gamine face that brought out hidden laugh lines. “I’d ask him what was going through his head, but I already know the answer…”

  Hunter grinned back. “Let me guess…230 grains of jacketed hollow point?”

  Lisa laughed out loud, and several agents turned to look at the unexpected -- and unfamiliar -- sound. “Remington’s best. 230 grain Golden Saber. Guaranteed to put brain and hair on the wall.”

  Hunter looked over where a technician scraped at the paneling in the hall. “And I reckon it did…”

  They walked down the hall laughing.

  One of the junior agents looked at his partner and said, “That looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  “Casablanca. Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart,” the other agent said without looking.

  “Huh?”

  Chapter Seven

  Gene Polchek backed the fork lift into the farthest corner of the barn, then got off and wiped his hands, even though they were clean, on the seat of his overalls. Stacked against one wall were barrel upon barrel of fuel oil, diesel, and a portable trailer with a tank of anhydrous ammonia mounted on it. Stacks of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in 50 pound bags were heaped upon pallets nearby. A neat, orderly row of blue plastic barrels, their tops laid open wide, were placed in front of a mixing table. Sitting on the floor, away from everything else, was a green wooden box.

  Gene limped over to the box, stood over it, studied the DANGER: EXPLOSIVES hazmat label, then opened up the box. The box was half-full with plastic sheathed blocks of C-4 military explosive; the other half of the box was filled with neat coils of det cord. The blasting caps he’d set on a work table away from everything else, in a radio shielded safe box he’d rigged out of an old cake box.

  Gene rubbed the small of his back, which always hurt him, worse in the mornings when he got up, and caused him to work his way through a bottle of Motrin a week. According to the doc, he was destroying his kidneys with the pain meds, but the truth was, he didn’t care anymore.

  He wasn’t going to be around long enough for that to matter.

  There was something caught in his teeth, though, and that bothered him.

  He went to the driver’s side mirror of the rented Ryder truck parked inside the barn, and checked his tooth for the fragment of cereal he felt certain was lodged underneath one of his molars, near the gum. He took no notice of his face; that wasn’t his way. It was a battered, flabby face with a pointed nose, legacy of his Bohunk heritage, with pale blue eyes that weren’t mean, just uncaring.

  He didn’t have anything to care about any more.

  Gene spat out a fragment of cereal he’d dislodged, then scratched himself while he thought through what he had to do. In Korea, and then in Viet Nam, he’d learned to take his time and think things through. He smiled to himself, just briefly, a wrinkling in his face, remembering one of his instructors at the Engineer school telling him that engineers that rushed with explosives didn’t live long.

  He’d certainly lived long than he thought he would, and that was in large part
because he thought through what he did.

  The first order of business would be to mix the ammonium nitrate and the fuel oil. Those barrels of low order explosive would be the larger, outer ring within the back of the truck. The high order explosives, which would set off and initiate the larger blast, would be in the center. Those charges wouldn’t take long. The time intensive piece was filling the barrels for the main charge.

  He sighed. It would be easier if he had someone younger and stronger to do this for him. But that wasn’t going to happen.

  Gene set up his work bench, then rolled an empty barrel over beside it and began, slowly, to lift the heavy bags to the work bench, slit them open with the belt knife he’d worn for 50 years, and slowly pour the fertilizer in, then stop to soak it in fuel oil pumped from a barrel, then add more fertilizer. His hearing was never good, and as was his habit, he became so immersed in his work that he didn’t pay attention to much of anything.

  His wife had complained about it, and he’d given her the back of his hand more

  than once for that, but now that she was gone, he missed her nagging in a strange way. Wasn’t it strange, after all those years of complaining about her, that once she was gone all he could think about was how much he missed the warm lump of her in their bed, the coffee she made that always had a touch of something special about, the little dash of vanilla she’d put in the pot that made each cup seem real special and fancy, like they sold at that fancy schmancy Starbucks place for some ridiculous amount like five dollars for a cup of coffee. She complained about him, and him not paying attention to her, but now that he thought about it, she never once complained about not having enough money, about the hard life of a farm wife to a not-so-successful dirt farmer eking it out on a meager enlisted man’s pay from Uncle Sugar and a series of subsidy loans from the government.

  Never complained about raising a boy pretty much by herself, or so it seemed; Gene never really knew how to be around children, even his own boy. And she’d lavished on that boy, who always seemed to be underfoot, or in the way, tugging at his sleeve and demanding attention, and he’d given the boy the back of his hand more than once.

  It was only now that he remembered the look of surprise and betrayal on that little boy’s face.

  He furrowed his face, and banished that thought from his memory. That wasn’t his way. He was a man that always did things, did things with his hands, that’s how he did it. And maybe he wasn’t once of these touchy feely types, as the guys down at the feed store called them, these daddies always hanging on their kids, making them weak. His boy hadn’t grown up weak. No, he hadn’t grown up weak at all. He turned out to be just like his dad, in the long run. Though the wife had said over and over again that he was just doing that to get his attention, to get his approval.

  But in the end, Gene knew he loved his boy. Loved him, at least as much as he knew how. He’d do anything for him.

  And would.

  He rocked the almost full barrel to make sure the fertilizer and the fuel oil settled in there properly. A little bit of room for the vapors to rise would be good. That was when he heard what he should have been listening for.

  “Gene? Gene? What are you doing in here?”

  He looked up and there was a touch of surprise, panic, and fear in those mostly empty eyes. It was Margaret Simmons, from the church committee. What the hell was she doing here?

  She was a small, dowdy woman wrapped in a faded dress, but her spirit was loud and so was her voice. She was a widower, and her whole life wrapped around the hub of the church, and she managed to find a way to wheedle her way into everyone’s life -- and she was better than a public broadcast when it came to getting something known in town.

  “Gene, what is all this? Explosives? What are you doing?” she said.

  Margaret stood there with her fists on her hips, staring at him.

  Gene stood. He was confused. He hadn’t considered this possibility.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Margaret. Not without calling. I’m busy…”

  “Busy doing what? What are these explosives for? And this truck…Gene what are you doing? This just doesn’t look right.”

  Gene sighed. He knew what he had to do. Didn’t make it easy, didn’t make it right, but he was long past caring about easy or right. There was just what had to be done, and the doing of it.

  He knew how to do that.

  The knife in his hand felt as though it weighed a ton, and he was conscious of it’s razor edge resting along the seam of his worn blue overalls.

  “I’m sorry, Margaret…” he said, coming to her.

  1

  Hunter stood alone on the airport observation deck and sipped from a good cup of coffee, courtesy of the Starbucks down the concourse. French Roast. He savored the slightly burnt taste, let it swell in his nostrils. He always felt this way, after a killing, after combat. Everything seemed fresher, newer, more…just more. His arm stung where the doctor in the O’Hare infirmary had thrown the few stitches; Hunter had refused to go to the hospital, not for a minor cut. He’d slipped away then, got his coffee and took time to himself.

  Lisa had told him that the agent had impeccable credentials; there was in fact an agent named Tatsu Nakamura in the Los Angeles office; he was supposedly on a month’s vacation hiking somewhere in the Canadian Rockies. There was a search team out looking for him, but Hunter had a suspicion that if Nakamura was ever found, it would be his lifeless body and nothing else. The picture of the LA based Nakamura didn’t look much like the body laying on the coroner’s table downtown, Hunter would be sure of that.

  “What is the Way of the Warrior?” Raven said. The table between them was littered with the remains of a German meal; jaeger schnitzel, fried potatoes, beer steins half empty, bread basket half full. “The Way of the warrior is death. It means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. It means nothing more than this. It means to see things through, being resolved…the Hagakure, Hunter. Yamamoto Tsuenori. That’s where that’s from.”

  “I’ve never read it,” Hunter said.

  “You will,” Raven said. He pushed a tattered paperback copy across the table. “Add it to your reading list…”

  Hunter smiled at that memory. There were three books that formed the Holy Canon of the Way according to Paul Raven: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, and the anonymously authored Thirty Six Stratagems, almost a companion piece to The Art of War. Raven had given Hunter all three of his first copies. He still had them, though for reasons he would never admit to being sentimental, he’d retired them to a special place on his bookshelves, and bought what he called user copies to go with him on his travels, and underline and dog ear and fold till they were worn and battered like the best of old companions, like trusty brothers in arms.

  Like Raven had been.

  Even at the end.

  And what would he make of this latest?

  Deception within deception within deception. Hunter felt as though he stood in a hall of mirrors, with image upon image reflecting and becoming distorted as it reflected with the speed of thought. The truth was something that he couldn’t see, though he got brief glimpses of a version of it.

  A fake FBI agent? Who was actually a highly skilled Filipino sparrow, the chosen and heavily trained assassins of the Filipino Muslim insurgents?

  And had the Congressman been the target.

  No.

  Hunter knew that in his heart of hearts. He knew what intention was like, had felt it both in training and far too many times in the real world. There is a line of intention that runs from a killer to the one to be killed, and in a killer as well trained -- and seasoned -- as Hunter knew the dead man to be, that line of attention and focus stayed true and constant, despite the sidetrack of dealing with temporary obstacles, which Hunter would have been, on the way to the target.

  No.

  The killer had come for him.

  So why? What made him importan
t?

  Lisa had pointed out that killing the “Hero of Flight 193” would be a big blow for the terrorists in their war on aviation security. That was true, but why give him priority over the congressional head of the committee whose job it was to look into the whole sorry state of security and do something about it? What better statement could that be? Could it be that he was seen as some kind of threat to the investigation? He was no investigator; he was a shooter, pure and simple, and even his field work for CIA had centered on his ability to fight and kill all alone. Basalisa Coronas made a more logical target according to that line of thinking.

  There was something else going on here.

  He felt it.

  His intuition was something he’d learned to trust, and to trust unquestioningly. It had been tested and tried again and again. Though it was something that the conscious, logical, analytical mind rebelled against, Hunter had learned that the conscious was only a small part of the mind, and that the unconscious mind was always working and finding a way to bubble up into consciousness the information that it found.

  Like all these small pieces that came together and said, within all else that was going on with this investigation, with Ahmed Samir Said, with Flight 193, there was a part of this that had to do with him.

  He put that bit of information away on a shelf in the back of his mind, and left it alone. When he’d gathered enough information, the answers would be there for him. In the meantime, he had work to do.

  His Treo rang, and he picked it up.

  “Hunter, it’s Lisa,” she said. “You need to get to the situation room right now. There’s something I need you to see. Where are you?”