by Chuck Logan
More than a month back from the desert, he’s still working out the vibrations since the explosion played tetherball with his skull. Among the residual concussion effects he’s experiencing are headaches, dizziness, and sensitivity to light.
Amanda prescribes rest and acetaminophen.
It will pass.
In the meantime he finds solace in the stone wall he’s building in front of a gazebo perched atop a slight hill on the north end of the lawn. Dry-rock construction, done with care, is particularly demanding bull work. A haphazard pyramid of the rock is piled ten yards behind him, where the dump truck dropped fifty tons of the stuff. It used to be a retaining wall in nearby Lakeside. An assortment of stonemason tools scatter around his work boots: a heavy-headed mash hammer, chisels, a rock pick, a tape measure, and a level. Shards of chipped stone sprinkle the lawn, debris from his three previous attempts to get this beast to fit.
Grunting, he wrestles the rock into the prepared slot and perfectly times releasing his grip as the rock locks into position with a dull crunch. The wall has been brooding in him all through winter and into the muddy spring. Last November, after deer season, he vacationed in Peru to walk the Inca Trail. On the way out he lingered for a whole day, appreciating the cunningly fitted stonework of the Cuzco Wall.
His careful meditation is jarred by a sudden phantom of desert heat. It’s the goddamn pilot. That’s why John got the call. I never should have left her to Amanda’s medical theories. They subcontracted her out to Roger Torres, who gives periodic progress reports—first from Germany then Walter Reed. Now, according to Roger, she’s vegging in a Minneapolis VA hospital.
The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee precedes the scuff of Amanda’s tennis shoes on the grass behind him. He turns and accepts the steaming cup. She’s six years his junior, with a trim technical climber’s body now tucked in faded 501 Jeans and a simple white blouse. She’s fixed her hair in a practical ponytail, and the top of her head comes up to his chin, a pronounced window’s peak striking a comma in the center of her forehead. The descending clip of hairline is a Rivard family trait, as is the subtle extra length of jaw that rescues her face from being impossibly beautiful.
“So where’d he go?” she asks after she inspects the courses of leveled stone set into the hillside.
“Traverse City.”
“To meet whoever it is?” She asks with a bored drawl that John explained she acquired at the Cranbrook Academy.
“Yeah,” Morgon can’t help grinning. “Whoever it is.” She has this blasé, priviledged art of knowing it all but not really.
Then they hear the approaching wap-wap of helicopter rotors. The Bell helicopter clears the trees, flares slightly, and then settles its skids into the lawn fifty yards from the house. Kelly waits until the props stop rotating, then gets out, his ponytail swinging, as he saunters around the aircraft and opens the right-seat door for John, who struggles out with one veined, marble hand clutching his cane, the other holding an empty pipe to his lips. Doctor’s orders. Cut out the tobacco. At ninety, John is rangy and able to remain active with the help of his cane. Sometimes anger brings a shadow of his robust prime to his shaggy face. Like right now.
Seeing Morgon and Amanda approach, he stirs a hand in mock agitation. “Bunch of paranoid idiots. They think the sky is falling.” Every month there’s more gravel in the old man’s baritone. The wrinkles around his watery eyes tighten in a crocodile scowl.
“Is this about the pilot who survived the crash?” Morgon asks.
“No, her brain’s grazing out where the buffalo roam. It’s someone else.” John grumbles, “I hope there’s coffee. I’m seeing double.” He opens the screen door and clomps toward the kitchen. Amanda gives a big-eyed Betty Boop expression—I’m outa here—and tiptoes into her office. Morgon continues down the hall and joins John, who has poured a cup of coffee and holds the carafe out to warm Morgon’s.
“So?” Morgon asks.
“So it seems a certain party is snooping around in our business,” John says as he removes a photo from his cardigan pocket and places it on the island. Morgon leans forward. The lighting is not real good, a night shot in the rain. A man and a woman sit on a picnic-table bench, talking. The man’s face is obscured by the shadow of a baseball- cap bill. Physically he holds himself like a trained man. Morgon notes the signature Rolex on his wrist like a Spec Ops charm bracelet.
“Who is he?” Morgon asks.
John smiles tightly. “You know how it goes. We know who he is, and we don’t know who he is. His name is Joe Davis, born 1976, Caribou, Maine. Graduated the U of Maine with interesting twin majors—Criminal Justice and Drama. Two years with Bangor PD. After 9/11 he went to New York and spent two weeks on the Pile, then enlisted in the Marines. He got into Force Recon and made the cut into the Agency’s Special Activities Division for a while. Just like you.” He takes a sip of coffee, peers briefly into the cup, and looks up. “So he’s a hard target; mistakes with Mr. Davis could be unforgiving.
“Wounded in Iraq in ’05, twice more in Afghanistan. Then he left the service and went on the market as some kind of lone-wolf contract cop. He turns up in places where large amounts of money, drugs, and arms deals mingle with terrorist connections. After he disappears the Feds move in with subpoenas or Predator Drones, depending. His covert work is also linked to some big contractor fraud and corruption cases.”
“So we’re on the same side?” Morgon suggests.
“Not this time.” John taps his teeth together. “The other helicopter at Turmar? He was in it running a raid for the Iraqi cops when they bumped into you. Totally unrelated. And now it seems that Mr. Davis has taken the resulting dustup personally. He started asking all these questions over in the Sandbox.” He pauses for emphasis. “The picture was snapped last week in Memphis. The woman he’s talking to is Richard Noland’s ex-wife. He’s a regular bloodhound, this guy.”
“So what’s he know?” Morgon asks.
“In the big city they worry they aren’t the only ones who have a phone intercept off Noland to the wife, in which he alluded to a big score. They’re worried that Davis has picked up the scent. What’s worse, they’re worried he may have powerful friends.”
“First the pilot, now this,” Morgon probes his cheek with his tongue. “How deep does the damage control go? Like, are we worried about the Iraqi end?”
“They don’t foresee problems with cleanup there. Davis found an atropine syrette at the crash site, but they quashed it same time we sanitized the after-action report on the crash. We called in some chits with the Iraqis, who put out a story he was dabbling in drugs and missing development funds. They tossed him out of the country.” John looks him straight in the eye and says, “Bottom line, we have to make him go away.”
“Somebody upstairs made a bad call, John. And I’m stuck in the middle of it,” Morgon exhales.
John temporises. “Now, now. It can’t all be Hollywood raids into Abottabad. Sometimes they give you the scutwork. And the way they see it, Noland wasn’t just a jerk trying to make a buck. He didn’t care who bought that stuff.” He tosses his head, taking in the surroundings. “Out here, we fall asleep listening to the crickets. At Langley, the Bureau, and Homeland Security, they toss and turn with visions of the dirty bomb. Timothy McVeigh took down a federal building with a truck full of ammonium nitrate—fuckin’ fertilizer. What if the bad guys did McVeigh one better and added a hundred of Noland’s artillery rounds to the mix? Imagine that Ryder truck parked in Times Square.” He points the stem of his pipe at Morgon. “It was a legit targeted kill. The threat assessment was exemplary. You took 400 rounds of nerve agent off the table. Accidently losing three helicopter crew was not excessive collateral damage when judged against the military advantage obtained.”
“Obtained? C’mon, John,” Morgon interrupts. “You’re the one who taught me only one thing is more sensitive than national security . . .”
“Indeed. Political security.”
“Turmar
was about swatting a WMD mosquito with a sledgehammer. It was a reach.”
The old man’s stooped shoulders heave in a Gallic shrug. “Sure, on hindsight, you can argue they should have handed it off to the Bureau, arrested Noland, and put him through the system. Sets a bad precedent, we go whacking some good old boy from Tennessee every time a White House staffer comes down with an early case of election-year butterflies.”
John reaches into his pocket, pulls out a pouch, and proceeds to stuff his pipe with tobacco. “Fuck it,” he quips. “This is worth taking a few days off my life.” Wheezing with laughter, he pops the end of a blue-tip match with a yellowed thumbnail and fires up the pipe that once belonged to Hermann Goering. Through the cloud of smoke, he chuckles, “Bin Laden is three weeks at the bottom of the North Arabian Sea, and Peter Bergen is on CNN predicting the demise of al-Qaeda. You know what they’re afraid of? If Noland’s stash went public, some nitwit would get up on cable and start braying about finding WMDs after all and Cheney was right. Just when our president, the College Boy, is flauting bin Laden’s scalp and is pulling out the troops.” Recovering quickly, John ambles to the sink and knocks the smoldering tobacco from his pipe. “Okay, I’ve had my tantrum. Now we have to get to work.”
Morgon gets up, crosses the kitchen, and looks out the window to where the sun is breaking through the clouds and dancing on the jumble of stone at his work site. When a glare of sunlight stings his eyes, he turns and asks, “Do we have a location on Davis?”
“He flew out of Baltimore International last week to Memphis and returned. That puts him somewhere in the D.C. orbit at that point. But beyond that, they haven’t got a clue. They did a global search. He doesn’t show up on mortgage or rental roles. He lists his parents’ place up in Maine on his tax returns. Same with his credit-card statements.”
“They run a credit history?”
John nods. “Except for the round-trip ticket to Memphis, his accounts are inactive for the last year.”
Morgon thinks about it. “So maybe going to Memphis was impulsive, a slip. Could be he’s off his game. They have any idea who he works for?”
“That’s the question. Like, is he this solitary wing nut? For a guy operating on his own, he has a habit of winding up in the middle of things. Or does he have an inside player feeding him information?”
“So is it a capture or a kill?” Morgon asks.
“They’d like it both ways. They want to know who they’re dealing with if Davis has a handler.”
“They don’t want much, do they? And here I thought we didn’t do domestic.” Morgon weighs it, exhales, and his voice turns laconic. “It’s splatter from Turmar. I’m still at bat.”
Later, John and Morgon sit on the porch and stare out across the lake and listen to the rollers break on the cobble beach.
“I wouldn’t let the Turmar fiasco bother you. Like Sherman said, ‘War is cruelty,’” John says.
“War my ass. This is turning into fucking thug work.”
“But it has a piquant flavor of hide-and-seek among the federal agencies I find appealing.” John leans back and squints into the middle distance.
“It’s politics. I say again, thug work.”
John sucks meditatively on his now-empty pipe and ponders, “So you hand it off to a thug . . .”
Morgon sits up. “Me?”
“Yes, you. I recommended that you move up a notch and start handling the operational details here. I’m getting too damn old to take 4 a.m. phone calls. So?”
“So,” Morgon says after a moment, “we give it to Roger Torres. He has an endless supply of thugs, and he can keep his mouth shut. Plus his company is joined at the hip with half the defense establishment. He has the contacts to track Davis.”
“And,” John breaks in, “it has the added advantage of using his Zeta operatives. Mexican Nationals connected to the drug trade. And we’ve already floated a story Davis is dirty around drugs. Can’t have Americans killing Americans on American soil, now, can we?” John sketches a diagram in the air with his pipe stem. “He can front it off as a head-hunting expedition. It would make perfect sense for Roger to want to recruit a knuckle dragger like this Davis. But you have to manage it carefully. Some of Roger’s lads can get out of hand.”
“Okay, so Iraq was my last field trip?”
John nods and then says circumspectly, “It’s the smart move, Morg. My end of things are—shall we say—winding down here . . .”
“So that’s it. I’m being kicked upstairs.”
John grins and tips his head back toward the sound of Amanda typing in the office. “And whatever will you do after you hang up your guns, boyo?”
Morgon’s eyes drift across the lawn to his jumble of old limestone. “How about I build a wall that lasts a thousand years and settle down with Amanda and live obscurely in the country.”
John chuckles. “In that case, I’m not sure who to feel sorry for, you or her.” He pauses and strokes his chin. “But seriously, you and Amanda have turned out to be a good team . . .” His eyes travel over the grounds. “As stewards . . .” his voice trails off. After a moment, he continues, “Brett and I have talked about what a good fit you’d be for the Sheriff’s Department. It’d be the perfect cover for your new duties. My friends on the county board agree. It’d mean working patrol for a couple years, then fast promotion. First deputy. I might even last long enough to see you become sheriff.”
Morgon nods and says, “It’s come up.” Brett Hamry, the local sheriff, is eyeing retirement. Morgon conducts classes for the department in grappling, marksmanship, and SWAT tactics.
“Think about it, son. You’ve spent half your life breaking every law known to man on your government’s service. Maybe you should make amends by enforcing them for a change . . .”
A moment later Amanda appears at the screen door and asks, “What’s so funny? Why is everybody laughing?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Reinvent yourself.
After turning over his temporary ID card and dropping Mouse outside the gate, Davis clears the guard station and turns north on 295, the Washington-Baltimore Parkway. His eyes crank from the rearview to the side-view mirrors, looking for a tail.
Mouse had made preparations against this day.
Inevitably they would step on some really big toes attached to a really big foot that would try to stomp them.
Later. Focus. Check the mirrors. Watch your speed.
He doesn’t go to the apartment, which is merely a safe house, a duplex owned by Mouse and his discreet allies in other federal agencies, to put up agents like Davis when they pass through town. He’s left nothing of value there, just a bag with clothes and toiletries.
So get your butt to Baltimore. Ditch the car and the old phone—not the new phone—and take a cab to the safe garage and retool.
A flock of descending and ascending jetliners on his right tells him he’s passing Baltimore-Washington International, coming up on the city. He follows 295 right into the heart of the spaghetti junction of downtown freeways and veers right on Patterson. After fifteen minutes working a jigsaw, he’s reasonably sure no one is following him. Then he shakes out the copy of this morning’s Sun on the passenger seat and checks the “Crime Beat” section. He scans a headline about a triple homicide on the northeast side, on East Monument St.
Sounds like fruitful ground, so he takes a turn and trolls into an urban DMZ of overgrown yards and shabby houses. Still early, so the street trade isn’t out yet in force. But there’ll be some lurking around; it’ll do. He pulls the Vic over to the curb, kills the motor, and tosses his phone on the seat in the crumpled newspaper. That should lure in some enterprising day-tripping lad. People with the resources Mouse alluded to can track his phone through cell-phone towers even if it’s turned off. So hopefully some joy-riding kids will direct them on a merry chase. He leaves the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked as he gets out, jogs into an alley, and works another jigsaw through the back streets.
On the lookout for a cab, he turns north on Patterson Park Avenue and picks up a trio of fine young men dressed like menacing clowns in their baggy butt-crack jeans and warm-ups and maybe one 9mm for ballast. They pace him for half a block, trying to figure out if he’s lost or a cripple or a stray or just plain crazy. Then he hears their steps speed up, and two of them pass on either side, brushing his shoulders. One stays behind. The two in front turn abruptly and block his path.
Okay, they’ve decided I’m not a cop. Not sure how to process that. Ego’s taking a regular beating this morning.
“Wuz up?” one of them inquires through lidded eyes that scour him like a TSA scanner at the airport, assessing for threat, weakness, panic . . .
It’s a problem. This grunt on his old recon team would say, “Hey, Davis, don’t’ take this wrong, man, but sometimes when the light hits you right, you can come off as a cross between De Niro in Taxi Driver and Woody Allen.” And clearly these early rising gangsters are not seeing Travis Bickle.
Instinctively, Davis sidesteps and grabs some wall for a backstop. “Old Chinese proverb,” he says with his best lopsided smile, removing his sunglasses—with his left hand—to give them a good look at his scarred face. “Do not remove fly from dumbass gangbanger’s forehead with cleaver.”
“Say what?” Some eye whites are showing.
“Okay, look,” he explains to the trio crowding in on him, “I know I don’t sound the part. And I probably don’t look the part . . .”
In a blur, the .45 is out, cocked, and pressed up under the biggest one’s chin. “But I assure you—I am the fucking part! Now take off.”
After the lads boogie, Davis hails a cab, checks the address on the storage key, and gives him a long fare up around Timonium in the northern suburbs.
