10
October 29th.
Matt Burke:
I order myself some kind of local mixed kabob like I know exactly what I’m asking for, trying to blend local. If I ‘raqed the pronunciation, the waiter is polite enough not to correct me, which would draw more attention than I want right now. I can only hope I’m doing a better job at avoiding said attention than the rest of Richards’ assorted jarheads out on the street.
At least I can flex a little in the Mediterranean ethnic department—I’ve still got the tan and the beard, so I can almost pass for local. And I’m used to the Human Intelligence game: get in, be casual, blend like you belong, press some flesh, make some friends, then blow some shit up and disappear.
The rest of the team, you can tell they’re not from around here. And it’s not just the ones with the German tans. The urban CT grunts—the Rangers especially—just can’t shake the hyper-vigilant thing, the “always on” super-soldier. You can read it in their body language: the “Somebody’s gonna shoot at me or try to blow my ass up any minute now so when they move I need to move faster” vibe. One day they’ll each figure out that everybody dies no matter how much training they’ve sweated, hopefully in time to loosen their sphincters because it just isn’t worth it to live in fear (even well-disciplined fear).
My plate comes fresh from the grill, already pulled off the skewer. It’s something like a dark-greenish meatball with veggies. It tastes like mint and garlic, which turns out not to be a bad combination at all. This would be my ulterior motive for insisting on taking the café position, though it means I’m almost breathing down Grayman’s neck in here, which means I have to look totally organic or we’re done.
And I mean done as in The Grayman is sitting two tables away from me and if he sees through my attempt at playing Eurotrash epicure and decides to take issue with it—well, I’ve seen what he can do, and I’m not sure I feel all that safe even with the snipers on him.
Which is the other sore-thumb issue I’m having right now with the soldier-intel crowd: After all these years, they still can’t place their people so that it doesn’t look completely like a stakeout. I know I’m not supposed to look at them because he’ll see me looking at them, but they’re so glow-in-the-dark that I can’t not look at them:
First there’s the pastry van down the street, nowhere near the deli or the café or any other place it might actually need to deliver pastries to. Then there’s the street crew working the same fiber-optic junction all morning, idly digging like they really not trying to get the job done. And the boz on the corner selling hot yummies off the cart we rented: he needs a translator rig to speak the local Greek, and has no hope of getting the accent—much less the pronunciation—right. And why would any real street vendor who’s actually sweating to make a buck put himself right between an open-air café and an authentic-smelling deli, in a neighborhood where there seems to be barely enough foot traffic to support one eatery?
Then, of course, there’re the snipers. They’re almost good. But this block isn’t lush with good nests: The architecture is that uniform 1960’s neo-modern boxy style popular in this part of the world, the type that makes the apartments look just like the office buildings, except with boxy balconies. And they’re all uniformly three and four story and built right up to the narrow two-lane street. So between the tightness and those big blocky balconies, they can’t get a shot down to street level without hanging their barrels out in plain view. They do what they can not to look like the local SWAT cops surrounding a bank robbery gone hostage, but I can see heads and flash suppressors poke up every once and a while. I actually feel embarrassed.
So I do my best to detach and chill, and I take the risk and look at Grayman like I’m not trying to look at him, because I figure he’d have to be blind and stupid not to have made at least half of the guns on him. I’m still hoping that my own performance is selling, that he’s picked out the jarheads but he hasn’t noticed me. But the vampire-pale fucker catches and locks my gaze through his smoky shades for just two very long seconds, and flashes me a little lopsided grin and something I swear is a wink. He’s either made me or is flirting. I feel my adrenaline twist at my lunch.
I try to dismiss and deny—maybe he just does the creepy eye-contact thing to everybody, hoping he’ll catch someone looking guilty—but my gut knows better. He absolutely knows we’re here. He’s probably known we were here before he even got here, but straight in he comes anyway and orders lunch and drinks and stays for dessert, like he’s daring the hammer to fall.
Maybe that’s the point.
Tracking him was cake, like he made it that way—despite how impressive that Becker geek claims his so-called Artificial Intelligence is at finding the unfindable.
What bugs me more, though, is the definite sense that we have no actual plan for how to proceed, and I think his sitting here for a three-course casual lunch right under our guns is his way of confirming that very thing. Are we here to take this guy or what?
We could have scooped him with reasonable discretion a dozen times in the last twenty-four hours—we had him eyed within three hours of the Bari massacre—but that dub Henderson keeps telling us to hold. Which means the higher-ups either want to see what he’s planning to do next, or they intend to sit back and watch him do it. My money’s on the latter, and I doubt anybody else on this little magical mystery tour would bet against me. It’s clear even Richards thinks this whole op is bullshit.
We could have had him straight off the ferry when he landed in Kerkira. Ballsy spooky bastard was still driving the stolen Lexus from Milan. He took enough care to have authentic documentation, though: flashed a passport and registration he must have lifted as a kit from Klemp’s. Quality merchandise: the Rads can not only customize their IDs, but they can even hack in and authenticate them locally, so the port scanners don’t pick up any problems. But he did have to cough up a thumb print at the port-of-entry checkpoint. That finally nailed him for us—positive ID—even though that webcam samurai massacre he dropped on the net gave us enough good FRS references to pretty much confirm it already.
But he knew all that, too, didn’t he? He wanted us to track and ID him. I can’t believe he risked the ferry just because he was in a hurry. Staying overland, he could avoid the more intense port security as he rambled across the in-Union borders. The worst he might have to do on an inter-Union crossing is flash a passport—and he could well have a hundred of those from Klemp’s alone.
And he would also know that the ferry out of Bari would be one of the first routes we’d sweep looking for him. He may be a nobody (which remains to be seen, despite what his file insists), but he’s not stupid. Amazingly far from it, in fact. If he’d taken his time and kept himself a bit less visible on the old-world back-roads, he could have kept us running days behind him, maybe even eventually melted back to the States and taken a shot at getting his old life back.
No. He can’t get his old life back. And I know exactly what that’s like—and it has nothing to do with that “once you take a life everything changes” chant. It’s more than that: I saw it in that Wab movie studio—what he did in there, it felt like I was back in Columbia. And I get the sick feeling I know just why I got assigned to this splatterfest.
But for right now that’s just me—no one else on this team, including Richards—has any insight into that at all. I can tell, just by the way they all stand around with that vaguely lost look that tells me this is beyond anything they’ve dealt with before. They’re chasing a monster. I’m chasing something like what’s been looking back at me from the mirror for the last six months. But I’m a good actor, so I can stand around and look as lost as the next guy.
So now we all stand around and pretend we’re not here and not more than a bit freaked out and not totally without clear orders, while the now-infamous Grayman sits casual not ten feet away from me in this cute little ethnic street café, nibbling chocolate-covered baklava and sucking on some iced milky drink I’m afraid must
be ouzo.
And he watches us and keeps playing like he’s humoring us, but if I watch I catch him locking eyes with the other players one-by-one—even the snipers through their scopes—and flashing them that chilly smile of his.
He’s even wearing the outfit: the big hat and bigger coat. Under it he’s got on what look like black fatigue pants and tanker boots that he must have taken off the Wabs in Germany. We assume he got the hat and coat there, too. Not sure if that’s a fetish or a look or just a good way to hide his face and guns and whatever else he’s carrying today (I remind myself again: he did leave the sword in Bari…). The cut down his face isn’t quite so red in the dull overcast of the early afternoon—it’s a nasty one, though: most of it is still almost black with deep scabbing. He didn’t bother with stitches, but it seems to be holding fine without.
He keeps the glasses on, so it’s hard to read him. He looks like some kind of eccentric film-star, covered up to be semi-incognito but still drawing plenty of attention with the whole mystique thing, carrying himself all self-confident and gracious with the waiter (who’s not sure what to make of him either but apparently appreciates a heavy tipper). But this isn’t what he should be.
What he should be is a fire-eyed twitchy slavering psychopath, or maybe a stone-cold walking zombie lost-it serial killer (the kind that has no problem lobbing bits of people off). I know people like that. They hide and don’t come out in the daytime and usually get themselves killed (which may, in fact, be what our boy is trying to do right now). They just don’t integrate, don’t smooth, at least not comfortably or for long. This son of a bitch—I don’t know—acts like he thinks he’s some kind of cool movie action hero.
What he should also be is pretty much covered in blood. He was fairly thoroughly hosed with it in the webclip, anyway, splattered like a Jackson Pollock head-to-toe in diced Wab. But the coat looks clean—and apparently was clean by the time he hit the Bari ferry dock, according to the security monitors (if not the fact that somebody would have noticed a guy covered in blood trying to leave the country)—less than half-an-hour after he did the Kurosawa routine on the Wabs. He should also have been splattered in blood after Sarah De Paolo blew up all over him. We just all figured he’d changed costumes—like he has a closet-full somewhere (his own personal Batcave?)—but apparently that’s not it:
The Datascan found rough trails of flaked dried blood that matched his targets, and assumes that the coat is some special stain-proof nanofiber that just shook the gore off as soon as it dried. Probably another reason he seems to like it so much.
Not totally sure what he’s doing here, though (other than fucking with us, which he could do anywhere), or what exactly he’s waiting for.
Satellite watched him all the way across the Adriatic, just kicking on deck (and apparently enjoying the onboard bar), until he debarked on the Grecian side, got back in the Lexus, and took a leisurely drive up over the Pindus Range, catching a sit-down dinner and a hotel in Trikala. Snipers on his ass the whole night, we watched him take a long hot shower, then catch the news, crashing with the headline network still live. Then two a.m. local he’s just sitting up in bed staring at the walls with his shades on. In close-up it almost looks like something’s actually got him a little spooked, or at least confused in that way that makes you worry, but he keeps up that cool-vampire façade so well he’s almost impossible to read—maybe he just had bad dreams, maybe his shit was starting to catch up with him in the wee quiet hours of a country half-a-planet away from home. Or maybe he was just bent that he couldn’t surf up a copy of his little show on the net.
By six, he’s checked out after spending the last few hours dicking with his lifted flashware. Then he drives straight here, to Larissa. Scopes this particular block out for a few casual passes, just like he’s a tourist, then finds parking and comes in here for an early lunch and cocktails. I’ve counted two of those milky highballs so far, slow-drained while he watches the deli across the street (and us too, but with what appears to be significantly less interest).
What the fuck are we doing here?
What he’s doing here: that may actually be painfully obvious. Henderson coughed that the deli’s run as a safe house and front for the local Wab chapter, but insists it’s “strategically insignificant.” I’m not sure if that means he can’t believe it was worth Gray’s time to come all the way out here to hit it, or if he’s saying that the higher-ups don’t care if he whacks it or not, and are idly debating whether to stop him or watch him.
The deli’s central yet out-of-the-crowd location has made it a decent place to cache weapons and coordinate semi-high-profile marts, but Wabs who base here do their actually hitting hell-and-gone off in the bigger cities. The extremists have been pissed enough at Greece since Iraq One and Two, despite the lengths the locals go to downplay all the Coalition strategic presence in-country. But since Greece also makes a great strategic position for them as well as us, they’ve tried not to be too naughty in-country so far.
But Becker’s Hal apparently has a different take: it says the Wabs have got something headline-ugly in the works, something Grayman would know about from his lifted flashware, and something his antics have very likely advanced the calendar on, especially now that he’s lit the fire under them with his samurai stunt. But that big hit—whatever it is—isn’t supposed to be happening here. The flashware he left us mentioned Athens. Which gets me back to the question:
What the fuck is he doing here?
Experience suspects that question may be why Henderson and his bosses haven’t pulled the trigger on him yet: It’s already too late to undo whatever Gray’s set in motion by stirring up the Wabs. So with nothing much to lose, they’ve either just got a morbid curiosity to see how this plays out (expecting Gray to mart himself in some big media-friendly way and save them the trouble of figuring out what to do with an American citizen who’s taken up slaughtering Radical Muslim Extremists in Europe), or maybe they’re thinking that somehow having Grayman still in-play and apparently way off-track might actually be a good thing.
Me… Well, I’m still pissed that they’ve been playing dumb all these years—letting the Wabs head and vest civilians at will so they won’t know what hit them when we do decide to act on our intel. So, unofficially, I think I’m actually rooting for Gray. (Which may, in fact, be the real reason why I’m here.)
(Making no sense at all…)
And then he’s looking at me. Not a quick glance-and-smile. Right at me. Like he’s reading my fucking mind.
Then he drains his drink, drops a stack of cash on the table, and gets up to go. Making very intentional eye-contact the whole time. Smiles at me like we’re old friends. Even tips his hat good-bye with a polite but effete little bow.
Then he’s headed straight for the deli.
11
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 9
