by Chuck Logan
Hearing that, the woman next to Rivard teeters and her face blanches white and she puts out her hands, like she might lose her balance. Trembling visibly, she steadies herself on the chair handles.
Rivard, mildly curious, stares up at Jesse and asks, “Really? What’s on your mind, Captain?”
Jesse takes a moment to review her limited options as Rivard’s watery but piercing gray eyes peer out from under the broad hat brim. She knows her classic movies, and with his gravel voice and commanding air, she could be talking to John Huston in freakin’ Chinatown. At least the cops are here to hear what she has to say. No sense coming all this way and clamming up. “Just curious, sir,” she answers. “I saw you testify on C-SPAN. When you were fielding questions from that Senate committee last week, how come they didn’t ask you about CIA involvement in a helicopter shoot down on April 12th, in Turmar, Iraq, that killed three crewmen?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.” Rivard shows no reaction other than a sidelong glance to the man in the boating cap.
“Maybe you should ask the guy who works for you, who was at the hearing - the one with the scar on his neck . . .” With her shoulders squared, Jesse stares directly into Rivard’s eyes and finishes, “Since he was there.”
Rivard’s eyes click to the young man with the ponytail, the dancer, who steps back, turns, takes out his cell, punches a button, then raises the phone to his lips.
Morgon, curious about the commotion, is starting out the kitchen door with his platter of ribs when his cell phone rings. He places the platter on the island and brings up the phone.
“Stay in the house, Morg,” Kelly says. “We got a situation out here, and it’d be best you stay inside ’til we sort it out.”
“What’s going on?” Morgon asks.
“Remember the helicopter pilot? Well, looks like she just showed up out of nowhere asking about a guy with a scar on his neck.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
Conversation has dried up, and Jesse feels diminished. Clearly she’s overplayed her hand, and now she’s sinking into the lawn and, all the while, she’s involved in an odd staring trance with the dark-haired woman who has her arms clamped tight across her chest except when she raises one hand and nervously tugs at the widow’s peak that marks her forehead. Like she’s looking at me but seeing something else? When it goes on too long, Jesse lowers her eyes and watches ants crawl on her bare feet.
It gets worse. A police car rolls over the lawn toward them. Blue type on the side of the tan cruiser: Rivard County Sheriff’s Department. A deputy gets out.
“Jenny at the QuikShop called dispatch about a young woman asking directions to the place,” the deputy explains to the older guy in the boating cap, who Jesse gathers is the local sheriff. He nods toward the trees. “After we found the car I told you about, parked over off the public access, we were pushing the woods, and Carl”—he indicates the other uniform, the one who spotted Jesse—“saw her and she ran.” When he’s closer to the sheriff, he lowers his voice and says, “Mental patient.”
Then he walks up to Jesse and asks gently, “Ma’am, are you Captain Jessica Kraig?”
Jesse nods and then goes silent as the cop explains she’s a patient at the VA hospital in Minneapolis who apparently borrowed her psychologist’s car. Jesse winces as she hears the cop say, “I talked to the shrink, who says she’s not a threat, just maybe confused. They’re making arrangements with the military to get her and the car back to the Twin Cities.”
Rivard turns to the sheriff. “Let her down easy, Brett. I wouldn’t file any paperwork on this. She’s evidently got enough trouble.”
“Sure. If that’s the way you want it, John,” the sheriff says.
It’s all low-key now, in deference to the sick person, like charity or pity. Rivard’s eyes drift back toward the curious crowd of people standing around the grill and banquet table. “Are you hungry?” he asks Jesse. “Amanda could pack you a plate for the road.” At this, the dark-haired woman’s face twitches deeper into startle.
“Thank you, no, sir,” Jesse says, eyes lowered. The young guy who caught her walks up and hands her the cast-off flip-flops. “You take care, Captain,” he says. Maybe Jesse detects concern in his eyes and in his voice. Not real sure at this point, she’s not tracking too well . . .
“Good luck to you, soldier,” Rivard says politely as the deputy ushers her to the car. As she bows her head to get in the back of the police cruiser, she appreciates how strange it is where she finds herself when the bottom falls out and you’re left with a sensation of mere folly. Like they were waiting for me? She can feel the flush creep over her face, this awkward, preadolescent embarrassment, a sense of shame she thought she’d avoided all her life. Head downcast, she hugs her goosebump-speckled arms across the grass stains on her halter.
As the police car goes down the drive and exits the property, Rivard turns to the assembled guests and says, “Nothing to be concerned about. Just a little misunderstanding.” Then he realizes Amanda has seized his shoulder with both hands to steady herself.
“It’s her,” she mutters, her eyes wide and unblinking in her bloodless face.
“Yes, it is, and it appears she’s off her meds.” Rivard’s breathing rasps shallow, labored, as he sees Morgon walking toward them, wiping meat juice off his hands on a kitchen towel.
Chapter Fifty-Three
When the secure cell jangles at quarter to three in the morning, Davis lurches up in the strange bed and grabs the phone from the bedside table.
“What?”
“Am I a fucking genius, that’s what,” announces Mouse.
Davis blinks, then squints at the red numbers stamped on the bedside clock. “Hey, asshole, you know what time . . .”
“Just listen. I been up all night on Ripped Fuel and just a wee bit of pharmaceutically pure cocaine, and I’m on my third bag of Cheetos. You listening?”
“How stoned are you?”
“Relax. Listen up. You remember captain Jessica Kraig? Black Hawk pilot you got a thing for last April in Iraq? You with me?”
Davis’ eyes click all the way open. “Go on,” he says.
“Where’s she from, Joey?”
Davis plants his feet on the floor. By the time he stands up straight, he’s less groggy and getting oriented. “Grand Forks,” he says slowly.
“Negative, good buddy. That’s where she lives. She was born in this little town, Long Shot, North Dakota, and, in this case, geography is definitely fate . . .”
“You’re losing me, Mouse.”
“Then allow me to find you. At 2:36 p.m. Eastern Standard Time yesterday, a call was placed from the Rivard County Sheriff’s Department. That’s in Michigan. The call went to a Janet George in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A deputy Thomas Caniff informed George that her missing 2008 Blue Subaru Forester had been recovered in Lakeside, Michigan. The cop asked Miss George, who is a psychology intern at the Ft. Snelling Veteran’s Hospital, if her patient—a Captain Jessica Kraig, who swiped the car—had ever expressed any animosity toward Lakeside’s leading resident, a John Rivard . . .”
Mouse’s words thud like soft sledgehammers. “Who’s Rivard?” Davis shakes his head, trying to catch up.
“When you were in elementary school he was a heap-big spook. He left the Agency but not the work. Now he’s a sort of elder-statesman, country-gentleman spook. He comes from old Michigan money—lumber, shipping, banking. And he lives like a baron on an estate and has a foundation named after him. Which is all totally legit as far as it goes. But the rumor from the shadows is he has a sideline, namely that he runs very black, very precise operations when absolute deniability is called for. Remember you telling me, when you were an asset for the Agency’s Special Activities Division, how the boys would josh about this secret office?”
“The Office of Perfect Crimes,” Davis says slowly.
“The same. It started as an idea under Clinton, who wanted to knock off Slobodan Milosevi
c in Belgrade. They actually had a working plan to whack Saddam, but the White House pulled the plug at the last minute. After 9/11 the Neo Cons turned them loose. At this point, Joey, you should be getting a bad feeling . . .”
Now dry-mouthed, Davis asks, ”How’d you get on to this?”
Mouse’s tone turns breezy. “The mechanics are way too elegant for a passé knuckle walker like you to comprehend. Face it, Joey, basically you’ve been replaced by nerds sitting in trailers in Nevada twirling remote joysticks on Predator Drones . . .”
“Try me.”
“Okay. Remember I told you I designed this little capture program that flagged every time Turmar or Captain Jesse Kraig showed up in electronic communication anywhere in the fucking world? That’s how I reeled in the call from the Michigan cop about Kraig.”
“So I guess she isn’t brain-dead?”
“No, but crazy is a real possibility.”
“Is it a coincidence I’m standing two hundred miles from Ft. Snelling, where she’s doing rehab?”
“Let’s say she’s the one wild card we had to rule out. She’s the only one who was there in the desert who lived. So maybe she knows something, but she was all banged up, and now she’s getting better and maybe she’s trying to put the pieces back together.”
“So how’d she get to Michigan?”
“There was a follow-up call from Officer Caniff. Off the record, like just a concerned cop trying to help a veteran. He told the shrink that Captain Kraig had this obsession. Apparently she saw Rivard on C-SPAN. Some hearing. Get this: She questioned Rivard about a guy who works for him who was involved in a helicopter shoot down in Iraq . . . real crazy shit, like she saw him . . .”
“How the hell did she connect all those dots?”
“Exactly what we have to find out, huh? Welcome to the bigs.”
“You’re suggesting that making Noland disappear could have been a Rivard operation we interrupted.”
“Given the way somebody came after you, we can’t discard it out of hand, can we?”
Davis is now completely awake, and his voice speeds up. “The dust cloud. We couldn’t land. Kraig was buried in the cockpit, which was, believe me, a mess. She couldn’t move, but maybe she could still see. So they missed her.”
“Yeah,” Mouse says, “and figured she was a head case, permanently out of play, like no problem. Except now, apparently she came back and got hooked in to Rivard somehow—enough to go AWOL from the hospital, steal a car, drive to Michigan, and confront the old man.”
Davis assesses a contradictory rush of sensations; his spine has turned to a column of ice and his heart is expanding, filling his chest. “Christ. Where is she now?”
“She’s en route back to the Minneapolis VA with an MP escort. But I got a feeling she could use some company . . .”
“If you’re right, they’ll get to her,” Davis says.
“No they won’t, because you won’t let them. You have to get in there and find out what she knows, or thinks she knows. Get her clear and debrief her. If it’s material, we call Appert. Maybe you ran the Ramil mission, but he signed off on it. That chopper went down on his watch. It’s our only shot, Joey. Maybe she can unravel this whole mess.”
“So I just walk in and buy her a cup of coffee? I don’t think so.”
“Jesus, I’m over the time,” Mouse says. “I’ll call you back in five.” The signal goes dead.
Davis starts a pot of coffee in the kitchen. Then he takes the phone out on the deck and looks into the night sky, where he imagines Mouse’s pudgy corpus forming a constellation made out of NSA satellites. His eyes drift toward the southwest. Just over there, three hours away. Not a vegetable. She’s warm and alive and wiggling her toes. And stealing friggin’ cars. Sonofabitch. Three drags into his cigarette, the cell rings again.
“Okay,” Mouse starts back in, “William Lemmer’s records have been transferred to the Ft. Snelling polytrauma ward, where’s he’s expected for an inpatient evaluation for traumatic brain injury.”
“You can do that?”
“I already did. Now Joey, you have a shitload of homework to do in the next couple days. It’s what, Wednesday? The army will putz around, and they gotta get the car back—so a day on the road—figure she gets back, say Thursday. You gotta be ready to go in no later than Friday. Fire up the laptop. I sent you a floor plan of the hospital. There’s background on Jesse Kraig, and you need to study Lemmer’s bio. He’s you—wounds and duty stations match. After he left the Marines he went back to the Sandbox as a private contractor and started experiencing headaches and blackouts. He couldn’t do his job, so he came home and checked into the Madison VA, who recommended the folks at Snelling take a look at him for possible TBI complications. They run the flagship polytrauma ward in the system.”
“Hey, Mouse, kicking doors and shining dope dealers and dumbass contractors down the road is one thing, but that’s a hospital full of doctors.”
“You can do it. Go in quick, make contact with her, and get her out. They tried to kill you, Joey. You really think they’ll give her a pass after the stunt she pulled? You gotta check her out. We can’t go to Appert with moonbeam speculation; he’s old-fashioned FBI. We need something solid.”
“Friday,” Davis says.
“There you go. And don’t sweat times and dates too much; foggy memory fits in with the diagnosis. Main thing is, you have to internalize moderate TBI and balls-out PTSD. Shouldn’t be a problem; you’ll chart borderline antisocial on the MMPI walking away . . .”
“Very funny.”
“Just saying. Okay, here’s your big chance, you ham. One last thing—there’s no metal detectors in the Minneapolis VA. That’s all for now. Gotta go.” Presto-chango. Mouse vanishes into the electronic ether.
With a tall cup of black coffee and a fresh pack of smokes, Davis sits down, turns on the laptop, and starts going through the files to construct the Lemmer role. So it’s back to Drama 101—theory of mind, empathy, and emotional regulation. Learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture. Okay, this kind of job you have to play it method to the max. Think real fucked up.
Davis always liked the original pre-Technicolor method actors. So channel Montgomery Clift. Punctuate moody and twitchy with an eerie smile. He turns from the screen, and his reflection stares back silvery-black as a negative from a night-filled window. What was it Hitchcock said about Clift? He looks like he has the angel of death walking beside him.
Timing is the problem. He has to spirit her out of the place without getting tripped up by staff, who are professional watchers and readers of records.
Captain Kraig.
Jessica Kraig.
Jesse.
Click goes the dead Mexican’s lighter in his hand as he evolves a simple plan to kidnap her, after hours, when there’s less staff around. Gotta be. So read, chain-smoke, and chug coffee nonstop up until, and after, you get into the car and start driving around sunup on Friday. By the time you walk in that hospital and they strap on the blood-pressure cuff, you’ll blow the mercury right out the top of the gauge and through the friggin’ roof.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Four hundred miles east of Dummy Lake, it’s five in the morning on the patio in back of the Rivard house. Trash cans overflow; paper plates, gnawed cobs of corn, beer bottles and plastic cups litter the grass. John Rivard slouches forward in his wheelchair with a shawl around his shoulders. An oxygen feed runs into his nostrils, and his jowls sag, parchment-veined, in the yellow glare of a yard light. Morgon and Amanda sit across the table. Both are smoking cigarettes. Kelly Ortiz stands to the side, his arms clamped across his broad chest.
John clears his throat. His voice wobbles then steadies down. “According to Roger, the Ft. Snelling hospital is not what you’d call a secure facility. There are no metal detectors and the on-site security is contract. In case of trouble, they call in local jurisdiction; that’s the Hennepin County sheriff. Some of the wards are controlled-access. The polytr
auma ward, 4J—where Captain Kraig is quartered—is one of those.”
A clutch of colored helium balloons bobble from a ribbon tethered to a lawn chair at the edge of the patio. Kelly removes a jackknife from his pocket, opens it, and methodically pops the balloons one after another. Then he closes the knife, puts it back in his pocket, turns, and folds his arms across his chest. “So you’re going to kill her?” he says.
“Not me.” Amanda nervously tugs on her widow’s peak.
“Yes, you are.” John states matter-of-factly. “This is off the reservation. On American soil. Read the RICO language sometime about conspiracy.” He smiles a tight, wrinkled smile. “We’re going to kill her the way a politician does: by sending a message and some money.”
“Fuck it,” Kelly says, “I thought our mandate was strictly overseas.”
No one speaks as the words fade into the damp, predawn darkness. Even the waves flopping on the beach sound exhausted.
“Fuck it,” Kelly repeats. “I will not be a party to going into a VA hospital to silence a serving army officer.”
“No need; we’ll use Roger’s cutouts.” John says, “I’ve already talked to him. He’s assembling the team. It should be easier than the Maryland fiasco. It’s an unarmed woman in a hospital bed. She’s already tried to run once. It’ll look like she escaped again. They just go in, slip her a toddy, and roll her out in a wheelchair. Except this time she won’t be found.” After a pause, he adds, “One thing you can count on in a VA hospital is a lot of wheelchairs sitting around.”
“Well, count me out. I’m packing a bag and vacating the premises. I’ll get the rest of my stuff and settle up later.” Kelly walks off into the darkness toward the house. Morgon takes his time lighting another cigarette, then turns to John and Amanda.
“Well, at least he didn’t commandeer the mansion and set us adrift in a rowboat.”
With an effort, John jerks his head toward Kelly’s second-floor window where the light has come on and asks, like a surgeon evaluating a tumor, “Think he’ll talk?”
