Second Solace

by Robert Clark

  ‘Well,’ said Miles. ‘That would be entirely up to you now, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Whyte. ‘You would have to make peace with everything before you could step foot outside.’

  ‘And that’s entirely your choice,’ said Miles. ‘We aren’t holding a gun to your head.’

  ‘But you’ll want to hear what we have to say first,’ said Whyte, gum bouncing around his mouth. ‘Because it’s real important. The fate of the world hangs in the balance.’

  ‘Well, maybe that’s a little brash. The fate of the United States hangs in the balance.’

  ‘Yes. Our great nation is in dire trouble, and we believe that you might just be able to lend a hand.’

  I frowned.

  ‘And how exactly do you expect me to do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, we need you to do what you do best,’ said Whyte.

  ‘We need you to kill someone,’ said Miles.

  I stared at those stupid, polished teeth grinning at me. I could practically see my own reflection in them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, taking my eyes off his ridiculous teeth. ‘I didn’t realise my arsehole was that big.’

  I watched their looks of confusion grow.

  ‘You’ve got me beat there, James,’ said Whyte, teeth smacking against the gum. ‘Can’t say I know what the heck you’re talking about.’

  ‘Well, I must have quite a big arsehole for you to mistake me for a puppet.’

  ‘There’s the wit again,’ said Whyte. ‘You’re not one for talking coherently are you?’

  ‘Well, the same could be said for you two.’ I replied.

  ‘We’re simply asking you a question,’ said Miles. ‘We could have taken you down the proper channels. Just imagine the prison sentence you would be facing for all your crimes. Hell, we could have popped you execution style, two in the chest and one in the head. Ain’t no way to walk that off, is there?’

  ‘So it’s not a question of whether or not I’ll choose to do it, but more whether or not I want to get shot in the back of the head on my way out?’

  ‘Nobody is saying that James,’ said Miles. ‘We just want to lay out the facts. Then you can make the decision whether you want to do some good in the world.’

  ‘Then beguile me, won’t you?’ I said. ‘Clearly, you’re dying to tell me who it is you want me to kill.’

  ‘That’s the spirit, James,’ said Whyte. ‘Cooperation is key, remember?’

  ‘You help us, we help you,’ said Miles.

  ‘Quid pro quo, as they say,’ said Whyte.

  ‘God, you two are annoying.’ I said, rubbing my face in frustration. ‘Just spit it out already.’

  Agent Jonah Miles smiled at me.

  ‘What we’re about to tell you is classified,’ he said. ‘Only a handful of people outside this room really know what is going on, but only myself and Agent Whyte here know the full score.’

  ‘Let me start at the beginning,’ said Whyte. ‘I don’t need to remind you what state the world was in last November, do I?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘The whole world went into high alert,’ continued Miles. ‘We had chatter coming in from each and every angle about the next attack and the next target. It’s our job to syphon the real threats from the bullshit and put those assholes down before they blow up a school or something. Since 9/11, we’ve been the best in the world at it. So when we hear reports that Tariq Al-Assad had resurfaced, we take it pretty damn seriously.’

  ‘Who is Tariq Al-Assad?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you asked, James,’ said Whyte. ‘Tariq Al-Assad is one twisted motherfucker. You know what Operation Iraqi Freedom is, right?’

  ‘The US invasion of Iraq three years ago,’ I said.

  ‘Correct,’ said Whyte. ‘Well, one of the many spoils of war we managed to get our hands on over there was a Nuclear Arms Specialist by the name of Tariq Al-Assad. One of the best the world has ever seen. His blueprints have been sold all across the world. Russia, North Korea, China. We could rip this world a new asshole thanks to the knowledge inside that man’s head. And luckily for us, we managed to scrape him up and bring him home.’

  ‘Except that there were some pretty serious complications,’ said Miles. ‘Al-Assad wasn’t a healthy terrorist. Poor safety conditions mixed with a couple kilo-tonnes of radioactive material do not go well together. You don’t stick that kind of environment for long without taking your work home with you, so to speak. We picked him up out of his hole and put the pieces together pretty fast. Tumours up the wazoo. The man was not long for this world.’

  ‘But the American Government doesn’t care much for the wellbeing of terrorists,’ said Whyte. ‘We figured we could squeeze a good couple of months out of him before he went to meet his Gods, so we shipped him home and put him to work.’

  ‘Only problem was,’ said Miles. ‘We lost him.’

  ‘You lost him?’ I repeated.

  ‘Not in the sense a guy looses his keys,’ said Whyte. ‘We put him through a couple rounds of chemotherapy to try to help the guy out, but there was a complication. The doctors came out and told us he was dead. We asked for the body, and they told us he was gone. End of story. He was there one moment and gone the next. We suspected foul play, but it never really went anywhere. It was a whole thing, I don’t want to get into it. We tried looking for him, but we couldn’t make it public. We couldn’t let the American people know we’d gone and lost one of the most dangerous minds this world has ever seen.’

  ‘So we shut it down and counted our lumps and moved the hell on,’ said Miles. ‘And that was that. We went two whole years thinking the man was fertiliser, then one day in November last year, we heard news contrary to our beliefs. Al-Assad was alive, and not only that, he was still in the country.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of a place called Second Solace?’ asked Agent Whyte.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’m not surprised. Most of the country hasn’t. Second Solace is a small, isolated settlement set up by a bunch of hippies in the mountains of Montana,’ said Miles. ‘They named it after this failed experiment to colonise Mars. Taking the name was some kind of statement, like they weren’t going to crash and burn just as hard.’

  He took a moment, drumming his fingers on the desk. Agent Whyte chewed louder.

  ‘We hadn’t heard of them ourselves until we got this break.’ Miles continued. ‘A small time clinic in a place called Whitefish got a strange visit from a group of people. They were armed, but not hostile. The doctors didn’t feel threatened. Not until these guys bring in this patient in desperate need of help. They aren’t idiots, these docs. They see the man brought in is suffering from some pretty serious radiation poisoning. He’s got lesions, blisters, lumps, bumps and scrapes. He’s got significant hair loss, and his white blood cell count is in the toilet. He’s on deaths door, but the guys who brought him in are adamant that the docs have to help him. So they do what they can, and after a day or so, the sickly guy leaves with his bills paid in cash. The docs think nothing more of it. They fill out their forms and process their paperwork, and a little beacon at FBI HQ goes ape shit.’

  ‘Because we had some of Al-Assad’s DNA on record, back from when we shipped him stateside,’ said Whyte, ‘and the sickly guy in Whitefish matches the records one hundred percent. So we go up there and question them, and look through their surveillance, and who should we find but one sick ass Al-Assad on the monitor.’

  ‘We’ll spare you the play-by-play account,’ said Miles, ‘but we managed to track the people accompanying Al-Assad back to this hippy camp, Second Solace. So we send a guy up there to look around. No dice. The place is just a bunch of log cabins and like-minded fools. They say the land is privately owned, so we do what we can, but without proof he’s in there, we’re screwed. We pack up and leave and wonder just what the hell a Nuclear Arms Specialist is doing hiding in the woods.’

  ‘We couldn’t leave it, and we couldn’t investi
gate it. So we did the next best thing,’ said Agent Whyte. ‘We sent an Agent in undercover.’

  Agent Miles leaned back in his chair and pulled a bag over to his side. From inside, he retrieved three bottles of water, and handed one to each of us. I broke the seal and drank the bottle in one. The Agents watched me do it. I placed the empty bottle on the table, and Agent Miles handed me another. I repeated the process, so Miles handed me the third. Only when three empty bottles sat between myself and the two agents did they continue their story.

  ‘We spent months working on a comprehensive back story that would fool those hippies up in Second Solace,’ said Whyte. ‘It had to be thorough. The people up there aren’t dumb. Lots of them are ex-military, and they’ve got some serious funding behind them, which makes the whole thing a bazillion times harder. God only knows what resources they have access to up there. So we couldn’t send someone up there without having every base covered, and every millisecond of their life in the Bureau scrubbed from existence. That kind of thing takes dedication, and with only a small team, it takes a lot longer than we were comfortable committing. By the time we were ready, we had heard more news of an impending attack. So we sent our Agent up there as soon as we possibly could.’

  ‘Agent Jessica Noble arrived at Second Solace on the July first,’ said Miles. ‘Her back story was clear. She was ex-Navy. Honourably discharged due to a sexual harassment case against a superior officer that was brushed under the rug. We figured that kind of thing would be easy to stage, and awkward enough to be left alone by the residents. Noble played the part like a champ. She had the physique and attitude nailed down on account of being genuinely ex-Navy. They took her in as another damaged castaway and lapped up her stories of a broken system. She was in much faster than even we had expected.’

  ‘Everything was going great,’ said Whyte. ‘Noble got herself a job working the farm, which gave her free range of most of the settlement. She did an amazing job. We had Intel on all the main players, and a detailed lay of the land that our satellite’s couldn’t have managed in two years. It was great.’

  ‘Then one day she went dark,’ said Miles. ‘That wasn’t a shock. She couldn’t call in everyday. It would have looked suspicious. But we got nothing the next day, or the day after, or the day after that. The tracker we implanted in her just stopped transmitting, which isn’t supposed to happen. It’s a high tech piece of kit. If the host dies or tries to remove it, the tracker sends out an alert. But we got nothing. No alert. The internal battery is designed to last up to six months. No way did it run out after just a couple of weeks.’

  ‘So we kept waiting and watching and hoping,’ said Whyte. ‘Because Noble ain’t a quitter. She wouldn’t turn on us, and she wouldn’t give up. Even if by some act of God, the tracker short circuited and lost power, she still had access to a satellite phone we managed to sneak in. She would have called us with an update, but we got nothing. Which had to mean one thing. They had found out real identity. She had become their prisoner.’

  Nine

  The Mission

  Agent Whyte let the statement hang in the silence like the realisation was going to make me sign my life over to the duo all by itself. I let them come to the right conclusion by themselves while I thought about what the point of this whole conversation was. Agent Miles reached that milestone a little faster than his partner.

  ‘Agent Noble getting captured naturally presented a problem to us,’ he said. ‘We had two choices. Wait for her to find her own way out and make contact, or send someone else in to go get her.’

  ‘Wrong,’ I said. Both agents fixed me with a look of confusion.

  ‘You want to tell me what it is I said you’ve got a problem with?’ Miles asked.

  ‘You had a third option. You could go in there and take her back,’ I said. ‘It’s not hard. You could have owned up to your mistake, rounded up your colleagues, and gone up there to get her back.’

  ‘Except it isn’t that simple,’ said Whyte.

  ‘Oh yeah, how so?’

  ‘There’s a number of reasons,’ Miles said. ‘First and foremost being the fact that we didn’t have due cause for sending Agent Noble there in the first place. We had circumstantial evidence to begin with, and we joined the dots just enough to get the go ahead from our superiors. If anyone had come along and picked this operation apart, they wouldn’t have needed a fine-tooth comb to realise how many leaps we were making.’

  ‘Except that we know we are right,’ said Whyte. ‘We can’t prove it yet, but we’re damn certain of it. You don’t do a job like ours for ten years without learning to listen to that inner voice. And ours were screaming the same damn thing. Al-Assad is up there in Montana, and he’s been working on something big.’

  ‘What makes you think he’s up there working?’ I asked.

  ‘To answer that, we have to give you some more context,’ said Miles. ‘About Second Solace, and the people running it. Chief among those being Maddox Cage.’

  ‘I can tell by that blank look on your face that you don’t recognise the name,’ said Whyte. ‘I don’t blame you. Not many would. His legend slipped out of the limelight over the last decade. Anyway, let me give you a little back-story on Mr Cage.’

  Agent Miles got up from his seat and exited the room, leaving me with just the maddening snap of Agent Whyte’s gum. A minute later he returned, wheeling in a cart, on top of which stood an old television. A product of the nineties, it was a huge plastic box with a video cassette player built into the base. He plugged the device in and retrieved a video cassette from behind the desk. I noticed there was more than one cassette on the pile.

  Agent Miles inserted the tape into the machine. After a couple of seconds of static, an image appeared on the screen. It was of a man in black fatigues standing before a group of soldiers. With no sound, it was impossible to tell for certain what he was saying, but I guessed he was barking orders at them. In unison, the soldiers dropped to the ground and started doing push ups with incredible speed. All the while, their commander watched and shouted silently at them.

  ‘That is Maddox Cage,’ said Agent Whyte. ‘Formerly of the United States Army. One tough son of a bitch. Worked his way up to Colonel about thirty years ago, hence the rather unorthodox footage we have of him. Top of his class, rose up the ranks like no other, yada yada yada.’

  ‘You don’t need to know the details of his military career, the real juicy stuff comes after his discharge,’ said Miles. ‘Well, it started shortly before he left, but you get the gist. At that point it was just conjecture, nothing concrete, you understand? He took a nasty bit of shrapnel to the chest in Vietnam which was the beginning of the end for him. Those under his command saw it as a blessing in disguise. They said his ideologies had grown a little too wild for some of his men. Not all of them mind. Some of those men he commanded left shortly thereafter to join him. But most had had enough of him.’

  ‘An American with big ideals? Stop the press,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, you’ve got to shit big or get off the pot, yeah?’ Whyte chuckled. ‘But there’s no harm in talking. It’s after he left that things started going south. Now, our boy Maddox here had left with his purple heart and honorary discharge, and a sizeable sum in his bank account, but really all that ain’t worth a damn when you have dreams as big as his. You need someone with real collateral to make a change, and who should Maddox find than none other than Cornelius Fenwick himself.’

  Both men looked at me as though the name should shock me into a physical response. When none came, they looked a little deflated.

  ‘Seriously, you haven’t heard of the Fenwick family?’ Miles asked. ‘Christ, you ever open a book on American history?’

  ‘I’ve had other things on my mind,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus. I don’t even know where to begin with the Fenwick Association.’ Whyte scratched his head. ‘We’re going to be here a long time.’

  ‘Which means we’re going to need a lot of coffee,’ said Miles.
‘Wait right here, I’ll be back in a bit.’

  He got up and headed for the door once more, leaving me with Agent Whyte.

  ‘The Fenwick Association is one of the biggest charitable organisations in the entire country,’ said Agent Whyte. ‘But don’t get your panties in a bunch thinking that makes them patron saints. They’re as tainted as they come, the Fenwick family. They started off in the oil business, back when Americans ruled the game. Then they sold up to the Saudis when the cash came rolling in. They’re billionaires. And right at the top of the table is Cornelius. He’s got enough money to build his own country, but instead, he’s decided to set up shop with Maddox Cage and play make believe off in the mountains. Guy’s got to have something wrong in the head.’

  ‘You don’t have to be crazy to want to live off the grid,’ I said.

  ‘And for the homeless S.O.B's out there, that may be so, but for Cornelius Fenwick, it’s downright insane. Anyway, we aren’t here to discuss his mental health. We’re talking about the Association. They do work all over the world, but for every mouth they feed, they put a Kalashnikov in the hand of a soldier. That’s all part of the business. There're all sorts of people looking into it. Reporters, CIA, whatever. What matters is what the ATF found.’

  ‘What’s the ATF?’ I asked.

  ‘The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And what they found was the proverbial mother-lode. Do you know how many components you need to build a suitcase nuke?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Not nearly as many as you’d hope. If you can get your hands on the trickier components, you know, the uranium and all that, then it’s shockingly easy to pick up the rest. Some of it is store bought. Some of it needs ordering from a specialist. And what the ATF found were a stack of invoices for approximately eighty-five percent of it while they were poking around for something else. Call it dumb luck. So that’s when we started taking this real serious. We sent our boys down to go check, and what should we find when we got there?’