“Of course you don’t. None of the media does. Neither did Hayley. She was so shortsighted.”
Jordan went over and threw open the apartment’s front window, letting in a wave of cool air. “Better,” she breathed.
And that’s when Aloa saw it, the tattoo low on Jordan’s back: two angel wings supporting an arch with the single word “sapper” on it.
CHAPTER 42
Aloa calmed her mind, keeping her voice neutral.
“You mentioned patriots. Were you in the military?” she asked.
“PMC. Private military contractor. Two years in Afghanistan.” Jordan turned back toward Aloa. “Why do you ask?”
“Your tattoo.”
“My fiancé was a sapper. He was killed over there.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Charlie was doing his duty.” Jordan pressed her lips together. “He was a good man. The only man I ever loved.”
“That’s his burial flag, isn’t it?” Aloa inclined her head toward the red, white, and blue standard above the fireplace.
“I was his PNOK, his primary next of kin.” Jordan lifted her chin. “They gave me his stuff.”
“His uniforms too?” Aloa knew she was walking a dangerous line.
“What are you getting at?” Jordan’s eyes narrowed.
“Nothing.” Aloa backtracked quickly. “So tell me, what did you do in Afghanistan?”
“Worked in a prison for high-value targets. We were saving lives, stopping the terrorists, and why are you asking about Charlie’s uniforms?”
“Just wondering. What was the name of the contractor you worked for?”
“Atlas TRD.”
“It must have been a tough job.”
“I did what was needed.”
“What kind of training did you get? Weapons, interrogation, psychology?”
“We had six weeks of training,” Jordan said. “Psychological, physical, weapons, yes.”
“I’ll bet you’re a good shot.”
Jordan moved back toward the fireplace. “Why do you care if I can shoot?”
“I don’t.” Aloa backpedaled. “I’ve just heard that women are often better shots than men. We should talk about what’s in the papers.”
“No,” Jordan said. “How come you want to know about Charlie, about whether I know how to use a gun?”
Aloa felt the chill air through the window. “I guess because I was surprised. I didn’t know you were in the Middle East. I didn’t know you knew your way around guns. That’s all. I have a lot of respect for our servicemen and -women, people who do their duty.”
The fingers of Jordan’s right hand curled and then released.
“I know you’re in a hurry. Let me take those papers off your hands,” Aloa said. She kept her gaze direct. Show no worry, she thought.
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea now.”
“You changed your mind?”
“I think maybe you’re on a witch hunt.”
“I just want the truth.”
“That’s what journalists always say.”
“Suit yourself.” Aloa rose and shouldered her pack. The tension in the room was ratcheting up. Time to leave.
“What are you doing?”
“There’s no reason for me to stay if I can’t see the documents. You have my number. Call me if you change your mind,” she said.
Aloa measured the distance to the door. Twelve feet, maybe less. She moved toward it.
“You can’t make an accusation and just leave,” Jordan said.
“I didn’t make an accusation,” Aloa said.
“It seemed like one.”
Aloa was at the door.
“Wait,” Jordan said.
Aloa put her hand on the doorknob. She heard a scrape, the fumble of a lid opening.
“Stop right there,” came Jordan’s voice. “Move away from the door.”
In the trials Aloa had covered, witnesses who’d had guns pulled on them could describe, down to scratches on the barrel, what the weapon looked like but often couldn’t recall a single detail about the person who held it.
It was that way now. The pistol that Jordan held drew Aloa’s attention the way a mirror draws a narcissist. The weapon appeared huge, ugly. Its angry black eye was aimed straight at Aloa’s chest. Aloa’s heart gave an arrhythmic thump.
“You shouldn’t point guns at people,” Aloa said. “Somebody could get hurt.”
“That’s the whole idea of guns,” Jordan said. The hand that held the weapon trembled slightly. “Come back here. Sit down.”
For the briefest of moments, Aloa considered flinging open the door and running down the stairs, but she knew she couldn’t outrun an athlete like Jordan, or a bullet. She let her hand fall away from the knob and moved back toward the leather love seat. She clutched her notebook to her chest like a shield.
“This is a bad idea, Jordan,” Aloa said as she lowered herself onto the sofa.
“I think it’s a worse idea to let you leave knowing what you know.”
“I don’t know much, really,” Aloa lied.
“It seems to me like you know too much. You know about the blackmail, the Pro-Power 500, about giving it to the terrorists in Africa.”
Aloa sagged. “Well, now I do.”
“Dammit,” Jordan said.
“Why did you tell me that?”
“I thought you already knew.”
For a moment, both women seemed to scold themselves for the mistakes that had brought them to this moment in time: Aloa’s clumsy questions, Jordan’s admission.
“Listen,” Aloa said, finally. “I’m just a freelancer. I don’t really care about the story. I can walk away. Nobody has to know anything.”
“I doubt it,” Jordan said. “I googled you. All those prizes.”
“I don’t care about prizes. I don’t care about this story either. It’s just a paycheck.”
Despite the cool temperature in the apartment, Jordan appeared to still be in the flush of her workout. Or maybe it was adrenaline now.
“And in case you missed it, I got let go for being a bad journalist,” Aloa continued. “I have no problem walking away from this story. It means nothing to me. I don’t have a stake in it like Hayley did.”
“You think I killed her, don’t you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Jordan lifted her chin. “Sometimes a patriot has to make choices for the greater good.”
A chill ran down Aloa’s spine.
“Stand up,” Jordan ordered.
Aloa hesitated.
“I said, let’s go.” Jordan came over and pressed the gun into Aloa’s ribs until she stood up.
“It’s not too late to change your mind.”
“Stop talking,” Jordan said. Movement seemed to make Jordan more confident. She grabbed a jacket from a hook near the door. “Don’t even think of yelling for help.”
At that moment, Aloa didn’t doubt Jordan had it in her to kill. In fact, if she were a betting woman, she’d wager Jordan had already done that at least once before Hayley’s death. War changed people. It turned some into the walking wounded, a few into sadists and killers. Look at the jailors at Abu Ghraib.
Think, Aloa told herself.
She walked slowly down the stairs and out the front door of the house, stalling for time. An old man was walking his dog across the street but he paid no more attention to Jordan and Aloa than he did to the tiny Pekingese straining almost to the choking point at the end of its leash.
“Is that yours?” Jordan asked as they neared the illicitly parked rental car.
Aloa could only manage a nod.
“You drive,” Jordan said, and poked her with the gun.
It was then that Aloa saw the rusted motorcycle hidden underneath the steep stairway to the house where Jordan lived, the same one she’d seen at T.J.’s mountain home. “Is that bike yours?” she asked.
“It belonged to my dad. Still runs great, though.”
“Did you t
ake it to the campout?”
“Shut up. Get in the car.”
Her attention still on the motorcycle, Aloa took a step and stumbled on the uneven sidewalk. She staggered forward, her pack sliding from her shoulder and knocking the Moleskine out of her hand.
What Aloa did next was more instinct than decision. As Jordan grabbed the pack and yanked her backward, Aloa kicked her notebook under the rental car. Maybe some Good Samaritan would find it. Maybe they would see Aloa’s name and phone number on the inside cover and connect it to the story of a missing woman on some back page of the Chronicle. If something happened to her, maybe someone at Novo would use the notes to figure out the whole story and Jordan would get her due—although that was slim consolation if you were soon to be dead.
“You think you can get away?” Jordan said. “You think you’re smarter than me?”
“I didn’t say that,” Aloa replied, and watched as an angry Jordan retrieved the car keys from Aloa’s pack and then ordered Aloa to climb across the passenger seat to sit behind the wheel.
Aloa backed the car out of the driveway and, at Jordan’s indication from the passenger seat, steered the vehicle uphill and turned at the first intersection.
The notebook lay on the cracked pavement of the driveway, gathering moisture from a dark-gray sky.
CHAPTER 43
Aloa piloted the car north onto Highway 1. Any thoughts of signaling passersby or causing a crash so she could escape were cut off by the hard metal of the gun Jordan pressed into her rib cage. She imagined the way the bullet would pierce her skin and rattle around inside her, crashing through liver, lungs, heart. As a girl, she and her father would pore over his anatomy book, with the consequence that she was the only kid in fourth grade who could recite the name of every bone and organ in her body.
“So Hayley was messing things up?” Aloa glanced over at Jordan. Her eyes had gone hard. Perhaps it was the gun in her hand. Perhaps it was a shift back into the past where she had learned how to regard her prisoners as subhuman in order to do her job.
“After Hank left the campout, she told me she was going to screw him over. She was going to take the money he paid her and then call a magazine reporter she knew to tell him about what was going on. We got into an argument. She would have ruined everything.”
“Which was?” Aloa prompted.
“To make it so the terrorists couldn’t fight. To save American lives.”
They were entering the Presidio, its serene trees and green lawns belying its more than two-hundred-year history as an active military base.
“With the Pro-Power 500?”
“Of course. You mix it with this flour everybody uses over there, make a special delivery to the jihadis, and after a month or two of eating the stuff, the ragheads are useless and we take them down. It’s brilliant.”
Only if your sense of right and wrong is skewed, Aloa thought, because even though it is tempting to want to rid a corner of the world of terrorists, how could you justify killing two innocent people in order to do it? Not only that, but allowing a small group of individuals to wage their own chemical warfare could have very real, and very dangerous, consequences—especially against those who believed in revenge.
“So Hank dreamed up this plan?”
“He went along with it.”
Aloa was quiet as parts of the puzzle fell into place. “Because after Hank discovered the side effects of the Pro-Power stuff, he needed somebody to clean up what would have been a PR nightmare,” she said. “So he hired somebody, fixers, and they came up with this idea to kill terrorists with the bad supplement.” She paused. “But why Chad?”
“You’re not so smart after all, are you?”
Aloa didn’t say anything. Let Jordan feel superior, she thought. You might be able to use it to your advantage later.
“Because there was this diamond mine in Chad that got taken over by a bunch of jihadis, the Holy Army, they called themselves,” Jordan said. “They slaughtered everybody and were using the profits from the mine to finance their cause. The fixers, as you called them, got hired to clear them out. So they figured, why not kill two birds with one stone.” She snorted. “Actually, they were going to kill a lot of birds. Once the stuff got delivered and those ragheads couldn’t fight, a bunch of ex–special forces guys were going to get dropped in and get rid of them all.”
“And Ethan and Hayley were going to expose this?”
“Ethan was going to write a book about it. He had a recording of Hank explaining everything.”
“But how did you find out?”
“I was there when Hayley got the flash drive with the book and the recording. Ethan wrote that all she needed to do was add the science part and send the book off to the agent.”
“That’s why she broke into Hank’s office. To get the formula and have Sayat help her figure out what went wrong,” Aloa said.
“She was on this mission. I tried to talk her out of it but she wouldn’t listen. That’s when I told Hank.”
“Which is why Ethan was killed.”
“He wouldn’t take the cash they offered. He told them he’d been a slave to corporate greed and now he wanted his freedom.”
Aloa’s hands tightened on the wheel. “And then you killed Hayley. You ran her into the desert until she died.”
“She was going to ruin everything. Think of the other terrorists we could stop with this stuff.”
“It was a horrible way for her to die.”
“It was her choice. I told her if she’d tell me where the flash drive was, I’d drive her to town so she could get her truck fixed. It quit on her.”
Aloa thought of the starter interrupter. “Were you following her when her truck died?”
“What? No. I was trying to figure out what to do when she called me.”
“Even though she was angry with you?”
“She said she’d already called that mechanic friend of hers and he was on his way, but she ran out of water and it was hot. She wanted out of there, so I turned around.”
Aloa thought of Calvin muttering “finder-minder” at his shop. Was he actually saying, “find her”? She pictured him arriving at the empty truck, taking out the offending device, then looking for his friend.
That’s why he gave me the starter interrupter at his shop, she thought. He thought whoever put it in the truck had killed Hayley.
Aloa glanced at Jordan. “But you argued again when you got to her.”
“I told her I’d help her if she gave me the flash drive. She called me a hillbilly loser. I shoved her and she hit her head on her truck. Then she, like, went crazy and attacked me,” Jordan said defensively.
Aloa touched the brake as cars slowed in front of her.
“There was a sapper tab found near Hayley’s body. You were wearing Charlie’s jacket when you fought, weren’t you, and she tore it off?”
Jordan pushed the gun a little harder into her ribs. She’d hit a nerve.
“And you fired your gun.”
“Only to let her know I was serious. I made her take off her shoes, but she started running anyway.”
“And you chased her on your bike. You left her out there to die.”
“She could have given me the flash drive and I would have taken her back. It’s called suicide when you won’t listen to reason.”
“No. It’s called murder, and two people are dead because of it.” Aloa didn’t mention Calvin, although she thought his death was also connected to the plot.
“It was more like collateral damage,” Jordan said.
“Deliberately killing someone is hardly collateral damage,” Aloa said. Below the bridge, ships made their stately way toward ports unknown while a few sailboats bobbed on the pewter-gray water.
“Let me ask you this,” Jordan said. “If you could have stopped the planes from flying into the towers by killing one person, would you do it? What’s a couple of lives in exchange for our safety, our freedom?”
“It sounds like E
than and Hayley died for diamonds, not for freedom.”
“The diamonds were just a side benefit. They died like my Charlie, in the fight against terrorists. He was a hero. A patriot. I won’t let his death be wasted.”
Aloa looked over at Jordan. Her lips were pressed into a tight, angry line.
“But where do you stop?” Aloa said. “If it’s OK to kill two people like Ethan and Hayley, how about five or fifty? It’s a slippery slope.”
“You think those jihadis play nice?”
“I’m saying when you deliberately poison people, when you murder two people whose only crime was getting in the way of your plan, you become no different than the people we’re fighting against. Our country was built on justice, on morality, not on murder and chemical warfare.”
Jordan lifted her chin. “I did what I had to do.”
“Only now you’re a murderer.”
“Shut up and get into the right lane,” Jordan ordered.
Aloa looked in the rearview mirror in preparation for the lane switch and saw a sight that nearly made her yelp with relief. Three cars behind her was a sedan with roof lights. Sheriff? Police? Highway Patrol? It didn’t matter.
“What are you waiting for? Move over,” Jordan said.
Before she’d gone on the reporting trip to Juárez, Aloa had taken a defensive driving course. The instructor had showed her how to swerve without losing control of the car. Aloa did that now, hitting the brakes, jerking the car into the next lane inches in front of an SUV and then accelerating to regain control, her hands firm on the wheel. A cacophony of horns erupted.
“What the hell?” Jordan said.
“You said to change lanes,” Aloa answered, and looked into her side mirror, praying to see a flash of red lights, hear the blurp of a siren, but there was nothing.
“Try that again and you’ll be sorry,” Jordan said.
Aloa could see the telltale spotlight of the patrol car. Please, please, she prayed in her head.
“Take this exit,” Jordan said.
As Aloa took the off-ramp, she begged whatever higher power there was to have the patrol car follow her. Instead it continued on, the officer behind the wheel talking intently on a cell phone.
CHAPTER 44
See Her Run Page 22
