by Chuck Dixon
The revolver was slick with blood and bits of down fluff stuck to it. The same with his gloved hand. Jerry winged the pistol into the woods in a high arc, then scooped up some leaves lying on the road and scrubbed his hands before wiping them on his jeans leg.
“We walk the woods or use the road?” Rolo asked. He stood with the lever-action balanced on one shoulder the way he’d seen Steve McQueen do in a movie.
“Woods,” Jerry said. He picked up his Savage and raised the tailgate.
“It’s going to snow,” Merry said. “I can smell it.”
“You can smell snow?” Esperanza asked, eyes wide.
“Uh-huh.”
They were booted and bundled and crossing from the house to the barn. Fella trotted with them. The hounds remained where they were, dozing in the warm kitchen.
“I have never seen snow,” Esperanza stated.
“You’ll be seeing a lot of it soon.”
Merry opened the barn doors, then closed and bolted them behind her. Tricky Dick gamboled from his stall to give Esperanza a playful butt with his horns.
“You better let him out into the paddock or he’ll drive us crazy,” Merry said. She had Bravo’s stall open and was slipping a bridle on him.
Esperanza went to the doors at the opposite end of the lane between the stalls. The goat skipped ahead of her. She unbolted the doors and swung them wide. Tricky Dick bounded and kicked his way across the grass. She leaned out to look at the sky, an open palm held upward to catch the first of the lacy flakes drifting down.
“It’s snowing!” She ran back to where Merry had Bravo cross-reined in the middle of the aisle.
“We’ll take a walk in it as soon as we’re done here.” Merry unfolded a horse blanket and draped it over Bravo’s back. With Esperanza’s help, they did the buckle tabs to secure it to the gelding’s flanks and around the base of his neck.
“I will tell my mama about the snow the next time I talk to her,” Esperanza said. Merry ran a comb through Bravo’s mane to undo a snarl.
Merry looked over the horse’s withers at the other girl’s eyes, which were dancing with delight.
Through the front doors of the barn, they could hear the bray of the hounds in the yard.
46
Gunny Leffertz said:
“One thing about Canadians. They fight as good on the sand as they do on the ice.”
Levon sat alone in the truth room.
The same room as before. Same table and chairs. They had secured him to the chair with two pairs of handcuffs linked from his wrists to the slats of the chair’s back. Flex-ties strapped his ankles to the front chair legs. He was still clothed. His right shirtsleeve was stiff with dried blood.
He gave himself up after he made his call and texts. He’d smashed the phone to pieces and dropped it in the shitter. After that, he stepped out into the yard, hands up. The yard was empty of all but guards. The prisoners had been herded inside and locked in their huts. The only prisoners who remained were the three bodies lying on the cold ground, dusted white with snow. The firetrucks had long departed, except for a lone fireman hosing down the ashes. The skeletal remains of the dining hall was still smoking.
The fights between prisoners had turned into a battle with the guards trying to control them. Spilled blood and the dining hall ablaze were a green light for misrule. In any situation like this—men forced into one another’s company for years at a time—nerves were rubbed raw and hatreds festered. Give them a moment where order slipped into anarchy, and that was the time when scores were settled. First with each other, and then with their keepers. It had taken more than an hour for the Prick to bring the place back to something like the status quo.
The beating they gave him was a nominal, workman-like affair. No one was going to mourn the Chechen and his goons. Some other player would rise to take their place in the illicit trades within the camp. The guards would continue to get their payoffs. And none of them ate at the dining hall anyway.
They left him in the chair all night. Through the door, he could hear ringing phones and the thump-thump of men running in boots.
“What am I looking at?” Brett Tsukuda asked. “What are these numbers?”
He sat across a conference table in a Level-Four secure room in the Back Nine, the section under his direction in the counter-terrorism division that dominated the west building at Langley. Seated across from him were his second in the Back Nine, Mark Neubauer, and Anita Sharpe, the division’s resident savant on global financials.
Mark was a garden-variety agency wonk near the end of his thirty, loyal, hard-working, and with no life outside the agency. He had prison pallor, thinning hair, and a roll of fat around his middle. Too many breakroom donuts.
Anita was practically a child soldier, recruited out of the University of Chicago in her junior year when her facility at deciphering mass quantities of numbers was revealed. She was a runner, a ten-mile-a-day gal. The only cholesterol in her system was her massive, restless brain.
The table between them was covered in files stacked by subject, color tabbed and indexed. It was all paper in this room. All hard copies. No electronics ever on this sub-sub-basement level. Not even wristwatches. Everyone and anyone entering this floor was wanded and weighed on a scale going in and out. Everyone and anyone, and every officer obeyed the rules with the religious fervor of a zealous monk. After the first time anything got leaked from this level, the director promised there would be regular, and painful, cavity searches.
“The first row is a GPS position,” Mark said. “It places the caller at Tekirdağ, a prison camp on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. An F-type prison under the General Directorate. Max security. A mix of violent felons and politicals.”
“Lovely,” Brett said. “And this bottom row of numbers?”
“The first row is a Swift code,” Anita said. “The next two rows look to me to be account numbers.”
“Bank accounts?”
“Presumably, almost certainly, given the transfer code at the top,” Anita agreed.
“To what banks?”
“I have no way of knowing that,” Anita said. “There’s no branch or bank or country code in the account numbers. No prefix code.”
“Maybe the sender didn’t know them,” Mark offered.
“Cade knows them. The man never forgets anything.”
“Cade?” Anita asked. “My file says William Hogue.”
“His name is Levon Cade. A former asset.” Brett pushed a thick file across the table. It was secured with bands. Anita undid them and began leafing through the papers inside.
“These are all police reports. FBI. Treasury.”
“The agency has no record of Cade. He worked for an unnamed unit that is no longer operative. That accounts for the delay in notification from CentComm.”
“Why is he contacting us now?” Mark asked.
“He’s letting us know he has cash, but not where it is,” Brett said. “I’d say he’s looking to buy something.”
“A Get Out of Jail Free card?” Mark said.
Anita was silent, her nose in the papers before her, eyes scanning.
“More than that. Believe me, Cade could leave that camp anytime he wanted to. He wants more than his freedom, and is willing to pay for it.”
Anita held up the stapled pages of a report and spoke. “It says here that Levon Cade/Mitchell Roeder/Oscar Bruckman may have access to foreign bank accounts registered under various aliases and holding companies to Courtland Blanco.”
“That con artist guy?” Mark asked.
“Who’s that report from?” Brett asked.
“Treasury.”
“Active?”
“It’s open, but no updates for the past three months.”
“Who’s the lead investigator on it?”
“Most of these are cosigned by the same agent. ‘N. Valdez,’” Anita read from one of the papers.
“Let’s talk to her,” Brett said.
The van was cold
, but not as cold as outside.
“It’s your turn to scrape the ice off the window,” Carl said from his chair at the bank of monitors.
She turned to look at the camera set up on a tripod and aimed out the panel in the rear door of the van. It was covered in a fresh skin of ice. Outside, the sleet had turned to a chilly drizzle. The coffee cup held in her mittened hands had gone cold. She couldn’t feel the end of her nose.
“I thought it was Bruce’s turn,” she said. She nodded toward the man in the hooded parka, sound asleep and snoring up front in the passenger seat.
“You promised to trade with him if he brought back coffee.”
“Cold coffee.”
“A deal’s a deal.”
“Fucking guys.” She pulled her scarf up over her head and exited the van, ice scraper in hand.
The van was parked on the third level of a parking garage near enough to the Mississippi to get a constant wind off the river. East St. Louis in winter was no one’s idea of a primo posting, but that was the shit sandwich she was handed after a months-long, very costly investigation came to fuck-all when her subject vanished like a ghost. In addition, she’d given the department a black eye when she overstepped her authority by having her subject’s minor daughter consigned to foster care in an attempt to leverage the asshole into breaking cover. That didn’t happen. What did happen was, she ran into a little firecracker of a child advocate who had friends in Birmingham. Before it was over, a fucking Alabama senator was calling her supervisor. Now she was staking out a print shop suspected of running off queer twenties. They were following up on a tip that the counterfeiters were waiting for a shipment of a rag paper close enough to currency grade to pass easily even in an ATM.
She’d gone from rising star to pariah. Sure, they’d have accepted her resignation, but she had bills to pay, and more than that, couldn’t imagine life without her T-badge and gun. So, it was a funny money unit or the marshals, and there was no way she was rolling with those cowboy motherfuckers.
Which left her scraping filthy ice off a filthier van in a sub-zero wind tunnel on a dreary day in the Heartland.
The cell in her coat buzzed and vibrated and she pulled it out to read the screen. A 204 area code. Washington. No name. She pulled a mitten off with her teeth and tapped to answer.
“Valdez.”
47
Merry stifled a cry at the first gunshot. At the second, Fella was up, ears back and hair bristling down his spine. The third and fourth shots turned the hounds’ howls to high, keening cries of pain. Bravo stamped in his traces, blowing and rumbling.
Esperanza backed toward the open doors at the rear of the barn. Fella bounded past her, out into the back paddock. The ridgeback turned out of sight on a trajectory toward the gunfire. Merry caught up with the other girl and gripped her arm. With a finger to her lips, Merry led Esperanza back to Bravo. Together, they undid the reins and led the animal toward the open doors and into the paddock.
A man’s voice shouted, the sound echoing off the wooded slope that rose from the rear of the property. More gunfire followed.
At a run, the girls led Bravo toward the fence line. Sensing play, the goat skipped after them. The snow was falling heavily now, the grass already iced with fat flakes. A man’s voice shouted again, and another answered. They could hear some of the words now. They were in Spanish.
Working together, the girls hauled on the top rail of the fence to pull it free. It was wedged tightly in place. They had no tool to help loosen it, and couldn’t risk the sound a mallet would make in any case. This was the only way out of the paddock with Bravo, and they would need his speed to see them clear.
From the far side of the barn, a man’s voice rose in a wordless roar.
Rolo Moreno stood panting over the body of his hermano.
Jerry lay on the ground, his throat ripped open. He was no longer making bloody bubbles. A feathery snowflake drifted down to melt in the body heat that remained in his open eye.
Near him, the still form of the dog lay in a pool of blood, sending steam into the cold air. This dog was different than the others spread out on the ground before the house. This chinga perro, this demon hound, had rushed up low and silent. It had gone for Jerry like a torpedo and its jaws had clamped down on his crotch. The big man’s knees went weak and he was down, screaming in rage and pain.
Rolo circled them, rifle raised. The dog was all over Jerry as the man tried to roll free of the snarling beast. They were too close together for a shot. Rolo spun the rifle to strike the dog’s skull with the butt, but the bastard had snapped and nipped its way past Jerry’s flailing hands to get a firm grip on his throat. The dog twisted clear with a wad of Jerry’s flesh clamped in its fangs. Blood sprayed everywhere. Jerry made a strangled, gurgling cry, his legs kicking and his hands trembling.
Taking two steps forward to meet the dog head on, Rolo pumped the lever of his rifle to send fat rounds into its head and torso. The dog tumbled to the ground, where it lay still.
“Mierda. Mierda. Mierda,” Rolo chanted under his breath, until it became an animal cry shrieked at the lowering sky.
They freed the top rail and set it aside to work at the second, middle rail. It was stuck fast, secured in place by time. The swollen wood was seated in the post like it would never budge.
To hell with the noise, Merry thought. She leaned on the next section and kicked at the rail end with the sole of her heavy boot. Three kicks and she felt some give, the tension broken. The two girls crouched, hands and arms wrapped around the rail to haul it free. Tricky Dick, tail twitching, watched from the center of the paddock.
An inch, then two inches, and it began to give. With one combined pull, it was free, and the end fell to the grass with a thump. Fingers laced together to form a stirrup, Merry helped Esperanza up onto Bravo’s back. The girl sat up on the withers, leaning out to take the reins. With a grip on the bridle, Merry led Bravo forward to step over the remaining bottom rail and onto the swath of coarse cogon grass that grew right up to the tree line.
At a shout behind her, Merry turned.
A man was coming from around the corner of the barn, moving in a wobbling gait. Through the swirling fog of snow, she could see the black shape in his fist. A long rifle. The man saw them and shouted again, breaking into a run.
There was no time. Merry released the bridle and drove a shoulder into Bravo’s flank to urge him clear of the fence. With her open hand, she slapped him across the rump as hard as she could.
Esperanza let out a startled yip as the gelding exploded forward, hooves flying, into the trees. Tricky Dick cleared the bottom rail in a single leap and the goat bounded after the galloping horse with a bleat like a baby’s cry.
Merry followed, sprinting full out, legs and arms pumping. The man’s voice shouted a third time behind her.
At the trees, she jinked left, then heard the crack of a rifle and the whickering sound of a round striking branches. She was inside the tree line now, and jinked right, running hard along a ledge behind the boughs of the big pines that grew there. A second shot, a wild one striking high in the trees behind her. The sound of hooves was gone now. Esperanza and Bravo were high above the holler and out of sight.
With the dense row of pines between her and the shooter, Merry pelted straight up the slope, going for distance. She glanced one time behind her for any sign of the man.
All she saw, to her dismay, were her own tracks in the fresh snow.
48
They sent a car for her that took her to Scott AFB, then put her on a noisy, bumpy C-12J for the flight to Quantico. At least it was warm. A driver and SUV were waiting for her on the runway with a box lunch and actually hot coffee for the ride into DC. She had finished the turkey club and waffle fries by the time they hit the Beltway.
At Langley, a smiling Asian man in a suit and tie met her at the middle of the eagle.
“Nancy Valdez? Brett Tsukuda. Ready to go into the matrix?”
Anything to
get out of Illinois, she thought.
“Lead the way, sir,” she said.
He escorted her through each vetting process as they made their way deeper into the maze of the counter-terrorism division. By the time they reached the Back Nine, she’d repeated and signed her name so often it no longer sounded right to her. They’d taken everything with a trace of metal from her: her phone, watch, bracelet, earrings, and badge. She’d had the sense to leave her sidearm in a lockbox back in the St. Louis office. They took the badge that had brought her this far and hung a lanyard around her neck with a plastic tag that contained only a bar code.
“Hungry? Thirsty?” Brett asked as the elevator went down one level, then two, then three. How deep did this thing go?”
“Water would be fine. I’ve had enough coffee for now.” It wasn’t all caffeine. She felt a tingle like a low electrical charge was being run through her body. This was the Well of Secrets she was descending into. None of the significance was lost on her.
The elevator opened on a slab-walled corridor lined down one side with doors of gray-painted metal. Tiny cameras along the ceiling turned to follow her and the deputy director to the one open door in the hall. Inside was a well-lit, wood-paneled room with a broad conference table surrounded by leather-upholstered chairs with upright backs. The table was covered with neat stacks of files, tabbed and color-coded. On the opposite side of the table sat a doughy guy in glasses and a wiry brunette who didn’t look old enough to buy cigarettes.
