Second Solace

by Robert Clark

  He looked at me as though waiting for a response to his rhetorical question.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said eventually. ‘Nada. Diddly-fucking-squat. We searched everywhere for the components, but they claimed they never received their orders. When we asked why they ordered them, they said it was for separate projects. Nothing weaponised. But every last item on the list had gone missing. Now what are the chances of that?’

  ‘Sounds pretty slim,’ I said, because he had waited for another response.

  ‘You’re goddamn right. It’s statistically impossible. We ran the numbers. So the Fenwick Association is buying components for one of the Cold War’s dirtiest secrets, and we don’t like it.’

  I stretched back in my seat, because I’d had enough of story time.

  ‘I’m going to have to call for a time out,’ I said, looking at the man, not the teeth. ‘It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what it is you want from me. I’m not an idiot.’

  ‘Nobody said you are,’ said Whyte. ‘But we wanted to make sure you had all the information before you agreed to help us.’

  ‘And you think I’ll agree, do you?’ I asked. ‘I’m serious here. You really thought I, a man who has been hunted by law enforcement all across the globe, would want to help you with your missing weapons specialist?’

  ‘I’d hope you can see how serious this situation is. We spent months ironing out all the details for Agent Noble’s back story, getting her to a position where she could infiltrate. We don’t have time to restart that process with a new Agent. We need someone that can jump straight in, no questions asked. We need someone with a history, with whom it would be plausible to believe might want a fresh life away from the real world. And if they are up there, building a nuclear device, we have to stop it as soon as possible. Before any lives, American or otherwise, are lost. Helping us would be the right thing.’

  The right thing.

  ‘As of this moment, only three people know what we’re doing here. Myself, Agent Miles, and you,’ said Whyte. ‘Not even our bosses know what we’re up to. That’s how far off the book we are on this. It took everything we had to get them to green light bringing you up here and squeezing information out of you. If they knew what we were really doing, we’d all see the inside of a jail cell. So if this thing goes wrong, it’s all of our asses on the line. You say yes to this, you’ll be completely on your own up there. The only way we’d know where you are is with a small tracking device inserted behind your ear, same as Agent Noble’s. That’s it. We can’t lift you out if it all goes south.’

  ‘And that’s supposed to win me over, is it?’

  ‘It’s supposed to add some gravitas,’ said Whyte. ‘Because this situation is a big deal. If you say yes, we’ll be in your debt. We can offer you something you want. Something you won’t find anywhere else in the world. We can offer you a new life, in witness protection. You do this job for us, and we’ll set you up for life. A new identity. A life out of the limelight. We could get you a house anywhere in the US. Texas, Hawaii, Alaska. You name it. We’ll go the whole nine yards. A 401k. Health insurance. You name it. We’ll get it. All for the price of one job.’

  He watched me and waited for a response. Agent Miles returned balancing three cups of coffee in styrofoam cups in his hands.

  ‘What did I miss?’ he asked.

  ‘You missed the part where I declined your gracious offer to do your work for you,’ I said, looking at neither man.

  ‘You think you could sleep at night knowing you let some psychopaths detonate a nuclear bomb?’ Miles asked.

  ‘I sleep fine as is. If saying no to you means I have to go to the electric chair, then so be it, because I am not, and will not, work for you. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not in one hundred bloody years. You’ve wasted your time bringing me out here and telling me all about your screw ups, because I am done with you. I’m done with this country. I’m done with the entire human race. It’s full of deceitful, two-faced bastards who will stab you in the back for a bit of change. I’d rather watch the whole world burn than help you two arseholes out.’

  The FBI agents looked at one another with a resigned sigh.

  ‘I do wish you hadn’t said that,’ said Agent Miles. ‘It’s like we said, cooperation is key here. We didn’t want to have to escalate this to the next step.’

  ‘Because it’s the next step you’re going to hate, James,’ said Agent Whyte. ‘It’s not something we’re proud of. It’s not something we even wanted to consider. But you’ve forced our hand, and this, I’m afraid, is the price.’

  ‘I’ve been through enough to know there’s nothing you two can do that will make me change my mind.’

  Agent Miles and Agent Whyte exchanged a look that left a sense in my stomach like gone off meat. Agent Whyte got up from his seat and picked up a second tape from his bag. I could see a single word written in marker pen on the white strip.

  Collateral.

  Agent Whyte ejected the tape of Maddox Cage and replaced it with the new one. More static, then a picture. A figure sat in the centre of the room. A bag rested over their head. The reception from the playback was grainy and blurred, but I could see that the person was alive. They wore black clothes that looked way too big. They sat in front of a white wall that gave nothing away as to the location or time that the video was taken. The only thing I could gather was that the person was still breathing, and someone was standing just off camera.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked.

  ‘Just wait and see James,’ said Agent Miles with a crude smile.

  I stared at the screen. From off to the right, someone said something, although the sound was too distorted to understand what had been said. I watched the hooded figure react to the voice. They cowered, and the figure from off camera approached. A man stepped into view and placed his hand on the bag.

  Then he pulled it free.

  My heart stopped. I felt like I was going to pass out or be sick or scream or kill the two smiling Agents. But instead I froze, transfixed in absolute horror at the person hyperventilating on the screen. Because the person on the screen couldn’t be there. She couldn’t be. She was thousands and thousands of miles away.

  Sophie…

  ‘I take it I don’t need to introduce you?’ said Agent Whyte as his eyes flicked between my stunned expression, and the frightened face of my wife.

  ‘If you hurt-’ I gasped, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

  ‘Calm down,’ said Agent Miles. ‘No one is going to get hurt, alright? We already told you, this is about cooperation. We could hardly expect you to pull your weight if we went around killing hostages, could we?’

  ‘But still, this is up to you, James,’ said Agent Whyte. ‘We want you on board because you want to be, not because you feel obliged to be. See this as some insurance, nothing more, nothing less. You can still choose to get up and leave, but obviously-’ He pointed his finger up at the monitor and pulled an imaginary trigger. ‘So you get it, yeah? We’re all on the same page.’

  ‘I’ll kill you!’ I gasped.

  ‘Whoa, easy now, James. We’re all on the same team!’ shouted Miles. ‘You better understand that. This is all up to you now. You can leave right now, or you can do your part for the country, and for your wife here. What I can guarantee for certain is that you will not lay a finger on either of us. That just ain’t happening, you understand? You have two choices, and you can pick either of them without any resistance from us. But that is where the buck stops. You try to hurt us, you lay so much as a finger on us, and you and your wife die, understand? And it won’t be quick. We’ve got eleven days, after all.’

  He switched the television off, cutting the video short. But the image was burned into my mind forever. He thumbed the eject button on the remote and waited for the pre-loaded tape to come free.

  ‘We’d let you keep it,’ said Whyte, ‘but where you’re going, it might look a bit suspicious to be carrying around footage of your wife tied up, if you know wh
at I mean. We can’t have anyone thinking you’re not acting of your own free will.’

  ‘So let’s get down to business,’ said Agent Miles. ‘Because I can already tell which way the wind is blowing. Your mission, should you choose to accept it-’

  ‘He’s always wanted to use that line,’ chuckled Agent Whyte.

  ‘-is threefold. Locate Agent Noble.’

  ‘Uncover Al-Assad’s project.’

  ‘And kill Maddox Cage.’

  ‘Do you accept?’ asked Agent Whyte.

  I looked at the blank screen. Pictured her face, frightened and alone. I didn’t have a choice. My heart thumped against my chest. I struggled to bring my mind back under control. For Sophie. She needed me focused.

  I nodded.

  ‘Now that’s the spirit,’ jeered Agent Whyte. ‘I told you our boy here was a team player!’

  ‘And I owe you ten bucks,’ said Agent Miles.

  Ten

  Progress Report

  The satellite radio was the size of a brick and weighed about the same as one. On the top of the device was a small antenna which I extended as far as it would go. There were two dials beside the antenna, and three buttons below a small screen on the front. Far from a complex machine, so long as you knew how to use it. I pressed the leftmost button and waited for the screen to light up. The screen was no more than two inches wide, but the bright green glow it emitted was enough to alert anyone looking my way that something was happening. I shielded the glow with the palm of my left hand, and twisted the dials clockwise until the numbers on the screen matched the one I had memorised, and lifted the device up to my ear.

  ‘This is Wolf, can you read me? Over.’ I whispered into the receiver.

  ‘Well shit, it seems I owe Agent Miles one hundred bucks,’ came the crackled, distant voice of Agent Whyte. ‘I bet you wouldn’t make it through the front gates alive. And what did I tell you about codewords? This isn’t a dumb action film from the eighties. This signal is encrypted. God himself can’t hear what we’re talking about. Over.’

  ‘That’s fine with me, dick. It’s not my arse on the line if someone overhears. Oh no wait, it is. Over.’

  ‘Calm down and get a hold of yourself. You’re a smart man, aren’t you? You’ve held your own so far, haven’t you? I’m sure you’ll be able to tell if someone comes stumbling out of the darkness, right? Tell me you’ve got some good news? Over.’

  ‘Well if by good news you mean not being executed for being a spook, and only having one person try to kill me, then yes. Mission accomplished, I’m still alive. Over.’

  ‘And all it cost was one innocent life,’ he said. ‘Officer Gomez was a good cop, and he drowned in his own blood. Over.’

  ‘I did warn you not to go for such an exposed location,’ I replied. ‘You were almost asking for them to come at us with a sniper. We should have let them take me somewhere public. Somewhere the chances of a clean shot from a sniper go out the window. Over.’

  ‘You are not in charge of this mission, James. When we want your advice, we’ll ask for it. Now what about Noble, or Al-Assad, or Cage? What progress have you made? Over.’

  ‘I’ve met Cage,’ I whispered, looking around into the surrounding darkness for any signs of life. ‘But no, I haven’t killed him. Funny thing, he’s got a lot of followers here and all of them are armed to the teeth. Women and children too. It’s not exactly an opportune location to murder their leader. As for Noble or Al-Assad, I have no idea where they are, yet. Over.’

  ‘You know, I’m starting to think you don’t want your wife to survive,’ Whyte said. He was feeling confident. Several hundred miles of separation will do that to a person. ‘I advise you to start thinking about the ramifications of procrastination. This isn’t a holiday. You’re on the clock, and it won’t stop ticking for no man. Over.’

  ‘I said I’d do it,’ I snarled into the receiver. ‘But it’s not that simple. You said it yourself, this is going to take some time. If you want me to do the job right - all of it - then I can’t just shoot the man in charge and expect the whole place to carry on as normal, can I? Over.’

  ‘There is a Nuclear Arms Specialist hiding up there with all the tools he needs to blow up half the country. This is not a game. You cannot sit around and take in the sights without consequences. I’m sure Sophie is quite attached to her fingers. I’d hate to have to change that. Over.’

  ‘If you lay so much as a finger on her-’

  ‘You’ll do what?’

  ‘I’ll track your whole family down and feed them through a woodchopper. Then I will hunt you down, I will break your jaw, and I will drown you in their remains. And you didn’t say over, jackass. Over.’

  ‘My oh my, that’s quite the imagination you’ve got there,’ he laughed, but I could tell his confidence had wavered. ‘And you’re right, I did break radio protocol, so allow me to make something very, very clear to you right now. The time is two thirty in the morning, give or take. I’m going to give you twenty-four hours exactly to go out there and give me some actionable progress, or I’m going to order my men to cut off Sophie’s ring finger right down to the knuckle. And when I say actionable progress, I don’t mean something I could learn by flying a satellite over that position and snapping a few photographs. I don’t mean finding out what Maddox’s favourite flavour of ice-cream is. I want him dead, or the next best thing. You understand? Over.’

  I could feel the blood boiling in my veins. If he was here, if he was within one hundred miles of here, I would gut him like a fish.

  ‘I understand,’ I hissed.

  Whyte chuckled.

  ‘You didn’t say ov-’

  But I had ended the call before he had another chance to utter another syllable. My head was pounding. I felt like my eyes were going to bulge out of my skulls. I wanted to kill that man. I wanted to tear him apart with my own bare hands. I had thought of little else since the moment I saw Sophie’s face on that monitor. Those two FBI agents had plucked her out and used her as a pawn in their game. I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t know how long it had been since that video had been taken. But I knew one thing, Peter was not with her. Our son was out there somewhere, without his mother or father. That thought alone nearly killed me. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing Sophie, but if something happened to Peter, there would be nothing left to live for.

  I stashed the radio where I had found it and covered the spot over with snow. In twenty-four hours, I would be right back here, speaking to Agent Whyte or Miles, telling them that I had done as they had asked. Except that I knew that whatever I did, it wouldn’t be enough. They would demand more, and more, and more, until there was nothing more of me to give, or one of Maddox Cage’s followers executed me for treason.

  I made it back to Gail’s house without being spotted and shot, and climbed back up into my bedroom without a sound. Shotgun Joe had obviously not realised I had briefly escaped. I slipped off my boots and, using a spare sheet I found in one of the cupboards, dried them off as much as I could. I didn’t want to leave a large puddle in the middle of the room for Gail or Shotgun Joe to find in the morning. I did the same with my trousers and jumper, but kept both on as I climbed into bed. My body warmth would dry them better than hanging them up somewhere overnight. And with that, I drifted off to sleep.

  Dawn in December came around nine o’clock, but I was up long before that. Sleep hadn’t lasted long. The nightmares had seen to that, and around six in the morning, I knew I wasn’t going to get any more use out of lying there and pretending to rest. I climbed out of bed and began my morning exercises. I wasn’t one for the gym, but I’d found that a brief bit of exercise in the morning did wonders for my mind. It helped to clear the cobwebs from my brain, which right now was more important to me than a proper meal. If Agent Whyte wanted “actionable progress”, I was going to have to give it to him.

  But not by killing Maddox Cage. Not yet at least.

  Shotgun Joe opened the door to my room shor
tly before the dawn. He looked exhausted, but I knew he’d got some sleep at least. I’d heard his snores when I climbed back inside, and when I awoke. But the more lackadaisical he was with his guard duty, the better it was for me, so his negligence would go unnoticed. He stared groggily at me, then stepped aside to let Gail enter the room.

  ‘Morning sweetie,’ she said with an all too eager grin. ‘I made breakfast.’

  ‘That’s so kind of you,’ I replied, activating the jovial British accent that had won over many foreigners.

  I followed her downstairs with Shotgun Joe taking up the rear, and ate pancake stacks, which seemed surreal, given we were eating them off hand-whittled plates about a million miles from the nearest city. But pancakes were pancakes, and I figured I needed every ounce of carbohydrates I could get my hands on. I devoured them while Shotgun Joe drank coffee and Gail watched me with bemused interest. Only when I was finished, did she speak.

  ‘Daddy wants to speak to you,’ she said as she took my plate away.

  ‘About what?’ I asked.

  ‘He didn’t say. He should be up at the courthouse. He’s expecting you.’

  So with Shotgun Joe at my side, I made my way to the man himself. Maddox Cage was right where Gail had said he was. I could see his enormous figure looming ominously in the window as we made our approach. The way he stared at me sent all the neurones in my head on high alert, stirring the Wolf from his slumber. He cast cautious eyes up at Cage, but said nothing.

  As always, Cece lurked nearby. I ignored her attempts to burn a hole through my skull with her glare and headed upstairs. Maddox Cage was in the very same room I’d nearly died in the day before. He stood at the window and looked pensively out at his empire. I stepped into the room and let the silence carry Shotgun Joe away like driftwood in a current. When we were alone, Cage sighed.

  ‘What happened here yesterday is not something I am proud of,’ he said. ‘Second Solace is not a land for the lawless, and I deplore anyone who will treat it as such.’