Crosshairs

by Harry Hunsicker

  “A rogue. Never would have believed it.” The woman laughed.

  “No.” The Professor felt his face blanch. The implications of her words stunned him. The vast network of agents at her disposal, now coming after him. “Y-you don’t understand.”

  “Oh, sugar. You used to be the best.”

  “Everything is in place.” The Professor stood up, trying to project his voice as stronger. “The assignment will be executed as ordered. You’re not a field operative; these things take time to do properly.”

  “As much as you want, you can’t turn the clock back.” The drawl in the woman’s voice had returned, but she sounded distracted now.

  “Fine.” The Professor managed to get a sense of outrage into his voice. “I’ll take care of the job right now.”

  He listened for a reply, but there was none. The phone was dead.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Anita Nazari sat behind her desk at the administration building and stared at the Starbucks latte cooling on her blotter, next to the picture of Mira as a baby nestled in the arms of her father. The picture had been taken six months before his final trip to Afghanistan, almost ten years ago, three months before the divorce was final.

  A classified mission gone bad, according to the man in the charcoal gray suit who had visited her at Johns Hopkins, where she had been serving her internship at the time. The man in the suit had eyes that never blinked and reminded her of a Savak agent, a member of the shah’s secret police, tense and arrogant at the same time.

  A stack of files and correspondence needing her attention sat on one side of her desk, a Dell desktop with twenty or more unanswered e-mails on the other.

  She ignored both and sipped coffee, thinking about the man named Lee Oswald, wondering where he was, what he had learned, if anything.

  Her assistant, a thin young man named Dave, entered her office without knocking, a manila folder under his arm. Dave bleached his hair until it was the color of straw and wore a small gold hoop in each earlobe. Anita wondered if he did these things to annoy her.

  “This needs your signature.” He put the file on her desk by the picture of Mira.

  “Thank you.”

  “You want me to wait?”

  Anita stared at the insipid young man but didn’t reply.

  “It’s almost the end of the quarter, you know.” Dave tugged on an earring. “Administration wants everything in on time.”

  “We mustn’t keep the administration waiting.” Anita picked up the stack of papers and signed the three top pages where Dave had left yellow Post-it notes indicating the proper line. Signing right now didn’t matter anyway. The result had been transmitted earlier in the day. This was just a formality, and the final report would need her signature yet again.

  “Now leave.” She tossed him the file, a few errant papers sliding out and hitting the floor.

  Dave looked like he was going to say something, a smart retort, no doubt, but apparently changed his mind. He shook his head slowly, picked up the loose pages, and left.

  Anita spun around in her chair and stared out the seventh-floor window behind her desk. Her office overlooked downtown Dallas, the skyline smudged with ozone and smog.

  The administration wouldn’t particularly care one way or the other about her latest project. Her efforts were not directed toward the glamour research areas such as AIDS or breast cancer, or to topics that might lead to a patentable drug—the money shot of medical research, to use the crass vernacular of some of her male colleagues.

  In fact, her latest effort was even more obscure than usual, merely proving that a certain substance was evident in the blood of veterans suffering from the so-called Gulf War Syndrome. She doubted the work would even get published, another factor sure to anger her superiors.

  She was used to angering people. It provided a buffer of sorts she found comforting. The more she considered her tenuous position at the med school in Dallas, as well as the continued threats, the more she realized it was time to move again. At a conference last year she had met the head of recruiting for UCLA. She tried to remember where she had left his card.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Ari’s Social Club, watering hole for much of the criminal element in Dallas, was on Samuell Boulevard on the east side of town, a few blocks from Interstate 30. The bar sat in the middle of a worn-out strip center, between a fried chicken joint called the Crispy Clucker and a liquor store with iron burglar bars in the windows. Across the street was a topless bar and a decrepit motor hotel so ancient it looked like a set piece from the Perry Mason show.

  I pulled the VW into the parking lot, past a couple of tired-looking streetwalkers wearing fishnet hose and sports bras, and a skinny guy sitting on the curb in a long-sleeved shirt, sniffing and shaking and talking to himself.

  The front door to Ari’s Social Club, portal to a world I never imagined seeing again, taunted me. I closed my eyes for a few moments, hoping it would go away. Unfortunately the bar remained in place, much as the earth continued to turn, and bad guys kept being bad.

  I stepped inside. Nothing had changed. A bar on the far right wall, tables clustered in the center, pool tables on the opposite side. Sports memorabilia dotted the walls: signed pictures of long-retired Dallas Cowboys and a framed poster from their first Super Bowl win in 1972. There was a story attached to that world championship, something about Ari not laying off enough action and a group from Miami being none too happy about it. Details were sketchy. A guy from Florida getting his hands chopped off. One of Ari’s goons ending up a floater in the Trinity River.

  A handful of people were sitting at the tables, watching ESPN on the big screen by the door leading to the back. I recognized a few of them. Two pimps. A bookie from South Dallas. A strip club owner and his main squeeze, a call girl I used to see a lot at one of the downtown hotels.

  One of the pimps nodded hello as I walked toward the bar.

  Stinky Larry Delgado, the manager of Ari’s, stood behind the beer taps, drinking seltzer water.

  Stinky Larry suffered from hyperhidrosis, or uncontrollable sweating. Didn’t matter the weather, the dead of summer or a January blizzard, Stink oozed sweat like a union scab at a Teamsters’ beer bust, leaving a puddle if he stood still for very long. He covered the stench ineffectively with off-brand cologne that smelled sort of like spoiled fruit.

  “Heya, Stink.” I sat down on a stool by the beer taps. “How’s it hanging?”

  “As I live and breathe, the Kennedy killer is in the house.” Stinky Larry mopped his dripping brow with a bar towel. “Heard you were out of the life.”

  “You heard right.” I leaned away from the bar for a moment as an invisible cloud of Larry funk drifted my way.

  “Just dropping in here at the Ritz to shoot the breeze about old times?” Stink drank some more seltzer. The armpits of his baby blue oxford shirt were navy with perspiration, matching the half-moon slices of moisture underneath his flabby pectoral muscles.

  “Ari here?”

  “Who wants to know?” Stinky Larry frowned, looking serious.

  “Uhh…me.” I looked around the bar to see who else might be asking.

  “Not a good time, Hank.” He leaned across the counter, motioning me closer for a tête-à-tête. “Gee’s in the house.”

  “Who?” I suppressed my gag reflex as much as possible. Up close, Stinky Larry smelled like a thousand sweaty jockstraps lying on a brothel floor.

  “The Effe.” Larry leaned away, raised one eyebrow, and nodded knowingly. “Getting their freak on.”

  “Not following you, Stink.” I remembered now that Larry, despite being a pudgy, sweating white guy in his late fifties, liked to think of himself as hip and trendy and urban, all down with the gangstas and stuff. Unfortunately, he was usually a few years behind the times and rarely used the lingo correctly.

  “Shizzle.” He rolled his eyes.

  “The Gee and the Effe.” I scratched my head. “That some new rap band?”
>
  One of the pimps sauntered up to the bar, an empty beer pitcher in his hand. Stinky Larry dribbled his way over and filled the container with Bud Light. When he returned he said, “Time off from the street make you all stupid or what?”

  I sighed. “A moment of His Excellency’s time, I beseech you. I pray to ask his indulgence in releasing a modicum of information.”

  “The hell you talking about, homey?” Stinky Larry frowned and a fresh sheet of perspiration dappled his face.

  “Ari. Me. Talkie-talkie.”

  Stinky Larry leaned across the bar all the way, the stench unbearable now. He looked both ways and then said, “The Man. Is here. Capische?”

  I held my breath, willing the smell away as Stink’s gobbledygook began to make sense.

  The Effe, the Gee. Federal. G-Man.

  Federal agents. At Ari’s Social Club, a virtually unheard-of occurrence. Ari was as crooked as a vice cop with three ex-wives and a dime- a-day coke habit, yet he prided himself on avoiding scrutiny from the Feds.

  No guns, no drugs, no money laundering. Nothing that might trigger a federal eye being cast his way. Merely old-school stuff: prostitutes, gambling, loan sharking, that sort of thing.

  I had started to say something when the bell over the front door jangled.

  Larry and I turned.

  The midafternoon sun sent shafts of light through the smoky bar as a sea of men in navy blue fatigues coursed through the narrow opening like dark water rushing through a canyon.

  They wore flak jackets and carried MP5 submachine guns, pistols strapped to thighs, extra magazines in nylon pouches Velcroed to their vests. One man turned around to check the far corners of the bar, the yellow stenciling on the back of his jacket clearly visible from across the room.

  F-B-I.

  No one spoke. Not the patrons of the bar nor the agents. The sound on the big screen was off, no music playing on the jukebox. No noise at all in what had been a lively place only a few seconds before.

  The agents fanned out, not drawing down on anybody, their weapons pointed downward at a forty-five-degree angle where they could be brought to bear in an instant.

  All of the patrons were extremely still, most no doubt wondering how to ditch whatever illegal substances and/or weapons they were carrying. I didn’t move either, but not out of fear. I had nothing illegal on me, nor was I wanted for anything.

  The front part of Ari’s was one big room, and it didn’t take them long to determine no immediate threat existed. I counted eight agents. No one person appeared to be in charge, though they functioned as if they’d rehearsed securing Ari’s Social Club a hundred times.

  One agent spoke into a microphone clipped to his lapel.

  The door to the back rooms opened and Ari appeared, a cigar in his mouth, standing immediately in front of a taller man in a dark gray suit and with close-cropped hair.

  Ari had the lifts in, so he was nearing five feet tall. He wore a pair of dark slacks and an untucked yellow-and-lavender-patterned silk shirt so obnoxiously bright it hurt the eyes to look at for too long. He could have been an extra on The Sopranos if they ever staged an all-midget production.

  Ari looked around the room before his eyes settled on me. He swaggered to the bar where I was standing, the man in the suit trailing behind him.

  “That’s him.” Ari pointed a stubby finger at me. “That’s Lee Oswald.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The guy in the suit stepped around Ari, a pair of cuffs dangling from his hand.

  One of the fatigue-clad agents slung his machine gun over his shoulder and approached me. “Hands on your head.”

  “What the hell?” I held my palms up and looked at the stubby wiseguy. “Ari, I haven’t been in here for a year. What are you busting my chops for?”

  “Book him, Danno.” Ari grinned and rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

  The suit and the agent came at me from different directions. The suit said, “We can do this the hard way or the easy way.”

  I put my hands on my head and let them do it the easy way. Suit grabbed my left wrist. Agent grabbed the right. They flipped me around so that I faced the bar. Pulled my hands behind my back at the same time they pushed me over the bar. My face squished down on top of Stinky Larry’s sweat rag.

  “Arrrgh.” My revulsion at the grotesque stench was overwhelmed by the slimy feel of the cloth against my face. Click-click went the cuffs, cold steel on my wrists. Hands grabbed my elbows and pulled me away from the bar, the smoky air seeming as fresh as the wind roaring through a mountain pass in the Rockies.

  “Lee Oswald?” Suit stood in front of me, hands on his hips. He was in his midthirties, but the look in his eyes and the way he carried himself were as old as death itself. He was a warrior, a Roman centurion or one of Rommel’s tank commanders if he’d been born in a different time.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “Thought we’d already established that.”

  “I have some questions.”

  “Me, too.” I tried to look tough, but that didn’t work well with the handcuffs. “I’ll go first. Who the hell are you?”

  Ari snorted. The rest of the patrons of the bar sat silently watching the drama unfold.

  “Special Agent John Jordan.” The suit flipped open a wallet, displaying a badge and photo with the seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation partially embossed across the agent’s face.

  “You get the decoder ring to go with that?”

  “It’s like the handcuffs.” Jordan cocked his head to one side. “We can do this the hard way or the easy way.”

  “I got nothing you want.”

  Jordan squinted and stared at me as if I were the zoo’s newest chimp, his expression one of mild curiosity overshadowed by the unshakable fact that he was the higher-functioning primate despite our common DNA structure.

  “What’s with the handcuffs anyway?” I said. “Not like I’ve done anything wrong.”

  No reply.

  “I want to talk to a lawyer,” I said.

  Jordan nodded slowly, as if he were pondering it. Then he turned and faced the people watching us. “During the course of our investigation, a person of interest, to wit one Lee Henry Oswald, has refused to answer our questions.”

  “Don’t you dare.” I kept my voice low as a trickle of sweat meandered down the small of my back.

  “Because of Lee Henry Oswald’s refusal to cooperate”—he turned and looked at me when he said my name—”we will have to conduct interviews and search each of you.”

  “You little piece of monkey shit.” Ari hopped up and down, pointing his cigar at me. “Worm food is what you’re gonna be.”

  One of the pimps muttered something under his breath. The bookie banged the table.

  Jordan kept going. “We have officers from the Dallas vice squad standing by—”

  “You win,” I said softly.

  Jordan turned. His face was still impassive, but there was a tiny gleam of triumph in his eyes. He spoke to the agent in the blue fatigues standing by my side. “In the back.”

  The agent pushed me toward the door leading to the rear rooms of Ari’s Social Club, Jordan following. We were in a long hallway. To the right was a small open area that served as Ari’s office, complete with a desk, a safe, and enough closed-circuit TV monitors to keep tabs on a casino.

  The hall stopped at a room about the size of a large suburban den. On one side was a craps table, on the other a blackjack setup. The walls had been painted red. A broken pool cue lay on the floor next to a spent twelve-gauge shotgun shell and a chewed cigar butt.

  The uniformed agent pushed me into a chair by a jukebox.

  Jordan flipped another chair around and sat facing me with the back between his legs, forearms resting on the top.

  “Good thing the vice cops aren’t back here.” I looked around at all the gaming equipment.

  Jordan didn’t reply.

  “You ever see Casablanca, when Claude Rains tells Bogie h
ow shocked he is to see gambling going on in his place?”

  Jordan scratched his cheek once but didn’t say anything.

  “Were you born without a personality or did you have it surgically removed when you joined J. Edgar’s outfit?”

  “Do you know this person?” He pulled a five-by-seven photograph from his breast pocket and held it in front of my face. The photo was a portrait of a man in his early to middle thirties, close-cropped, sandy blond hair, wearing desert camo BDUs and a green beret with the distinctive insignia on the crown indicating he was a member of the special forces.

  The background reminded me of my own formal picture taken before I had shipped out almost twenty years before.

  “That’s from Desert Storm, right?” I said.

  Jordan nodded.

  “I don’t recognize him. Got anything more recent?”

  “Sorry.” The agent shook his head. “Newer stuff is not available to anybody without a security clearance.”

  “What’s the guy’s name?”

  Jordan smiled tightly and shook his head. He turned and nodded at the uniformed fed, indicating for him to leave. The agent did.

  “Uh…what’s he done?” I wasn’t all that happy to be alone with the man.

  “You went on a raid, late January 1991 I think it was.”

  I shrugged. “That was a long time ago.”

  “You and your best friend, a former Cowboy named Olson and two other guys from your Ranger squad.” He drummed his thumbs on the back of the chair. “You hit a villa in-country pretty far, way into Iraqi territory at the time.”

  “You’ve got some good security clearance mojo yourself.” I nodded.

  “It was a spook operation,” Jordan said. “A colonel in the Republican Guard, one of Saddam’s cousins, guy with high intel value. He’d turned the villa into his own private brothel. Lightly guarded.”

  I didn’t say anything. The operation had been classified, so far off the books that something really messy must be going on if an FBI agent sixteen years later knew the details.