Double Down

by Jameson Patterson

  Finch hurried back into the bedroom and said to the girl, “Look, I’m sorry, it’s a guy from the government. There’s been a development, I think.”

  “Oh God,” she said and starting pulling on her clothes.

  Finch had his iPhone out, tapping at the screen. “I’m getting you an Uber.” He squinted at the phone. “It’ll be here in ten minutes.”

  The girl was dressed, staring up at him guilelessly. For the first time he noticed she was young enough to still have a stipple of acne on her forehead.

  Jesus.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to wait outside, okay?”

  Finch walked her out of the house and left her standing on the porch, dazed. He shut the front door and he went through to the kitchen where the man sat at the table. The strip light made him look like he was embalmed.

  “Take a seat,” the gray-haired man said.

  Finch sat down opposite him.

  “Mr. Finch, your wife was killed in a drone strike in Raqqa, Syria last night.”

  Finch felt as if the wind had been kicked from him. “Jesus. Shit.”

  “The target was a known terrorist, Ahmed Assir. She was an unintended victim.” The gray man looked at him. “None of this has reached the media yet. We wanted you to hear it from us not Anderson Cooper.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But we can’t sit on it for more than another couple of hours. The media is going to descend in its hordes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now here’s where I need you to concentrate.”

  Finch nodded, blinking.

  “There’s a peace process underway in the Middle East. It has a good chance of succeeding. The death of your wife would upset things given her popularity among so many in that region.”

  “I can see that, yes.”

  “I imagine that she would have been sympathetic to the peace process?”

  “Yes, absolutely. A horrible irony.”

  “As you say, ironic. Thing is, we have a choice.”

  “A choice how?”

  “We can keep her alive long enough for the first part of the accord to be inked.”

  Finch gaped at him. “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who the fuck are you? God?”

  The man smiled sourly and shrugged. “No, but maybe I have his ear.” The smile evaporated and he stared at Finch. “If we keep her alive long enough for the signatures she’ll be getting what she wanted.”

  “Don’t,” Finch said. “Don’t speak for her.”

  “Okay, then let me speak for you. You’ve made quite the industry, haven’t you, out of her predicament?”

  “Now, that’s fucking unfair.”

  “Is it? You haven’t traded on her misfortune?”

  “Look, it hasn’t been easy for me, man. After she started those broadcasts attitudes hardened. There were the haters. There were people calling her a traitor. There was the abuse. You know how many times I’ve had to change my phone number? And the alt-right trolls have been fucking relentless.”

  The gray man’s eyes disappeared into a mesh of wrinkles as he squinted at Finch. “Come on, Rick, we both know the engine of your life for the last few years has been your captive wife. If she’s dead then, in a way, so are you.”

  Finch thought about trying to refute this, but he came up empty and said, “Keeping her alive for a couple more days isn’t going to change anything for me.”

  “Yes it will. You’ll be carried on the back of an avalanche of publicity that you can exploit anyway you want. Book deals. Maybe even a movie.”

  “You’re saying all the criticisms of her will just wash away?”

  “No, but your wife’s story is a very American one. Her notoriety has increased her fame exponentially, and, don’t forget, fame is the American version of glory. Believe me, it’s a story that people will want to tell. And to hear.”

  Finch, rapidly sobering, saw the potential. Saw the big score that could set him up for years to come.

  “How would we do this?”

  “You’ll get a text message from your wife, saying she’s wounded but alive. We’ll have it sent from Raqqa. Don’t worry, it’ll be credible.”

  “Won’t Islamic State say she’s dead?”

  “Islamic State says many things. Who are people going to believe, you or them?”

  “How will we convince the doubters that it’s really from Catherine?”

  “Did you have a name for her? A pet name? Something only you would know?”

  “We weren’t really pet name kind of people.”

  “Nothing?”

  Finch rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “Okay, there was something. A safe word.”

  “What’s the word?”

  “Dorothy.” He shrugged. “It’s a Wizard of Oz thing.”

  The gray man allowed a flicker of a smile. “Okay, good. We’ll prepare the text message and have it sent. And the news of her presumed death will break and then, in a few hours, you’ll stand in front of the media and read them the message on your phone and, maybe, just maybe, you’ll help save the world as we know it.”

  SIX

  Hunt Gidley, kneeling on the flagstones of the plaza known locally as Chop-Chop Square, was given a graphic illustration of how the name had originated: An executioner in a white thobe robe, a keffiah wrapped around his head, the hot breeze tugging at his beard, lifted his long-bladed sulthan and brought it down on the neck of a the luckless chump groveling before him. The sword bit deep into the man’s neck, but did not sever his head. Blood sprayed onto the swordsman’s robe as he set himself and brought the blade down again and again until the head fell to the ground.

  The executioner paused a moment as a loudspeaker blared a distorted rant, presumably listing the dead man’s sins, then he moved onto the next in the line of condemned. Gidley was one of five men being executed. He had no idea who the other four were or the nature of their crimes. He would be put to the sword last, the headliner if you like, whose death the big crowd, kept in place by ragged khaki-uniformed soldiers armed with AK-47s, had come to see.

  The death of the foreigner. The kafir. The infidel.

  Sweat dripped into Gidley’s eyes and he blinked. The tropical sun was molten and he instinctively tried to wipe his face, but his hands were tied behind his back. When he shook his head one of the soldiers swung a boot and kicked him in the kidney.

  The executioner stood over the next man. The blade lifted and the sun set the metal aflame, and when it fell Gidley heard the sound of the abattoir as steel bit into flesh.

  The recently ousted sultan of this island, a fleck in the Java Sea off Indonesia, had been Washington’s pet. Gidley, as a private contractor in the service of one of the murkier divisions of the U.S. intelligence community, had traveled here often over the last decade helping to suppress the militant Islamists who’d finally seized power from the venal royal family in a bloody coup. Gidley had himself tortured and killed many of the rebels, so it had come as no surprise to him when the sultan was toppled—his head lopped off in this very square—and the Islamists seized power that a price was put on his own head.

  Of course he’d had no intention of ever again setting foot in the dump—the heat, the toxic food and the scapegrace populace revolted him—but fate’d had other ideas.

  A year ago a bout of adventuring at Washington’s behest had sent Gidley to nearby Cambodia where he’d employed his singular talents hunting down militants in tiny Muslim villages located along the Tonle Sap River. But things hadn’t gone well—images of the corpses of the innocent villagers he’d tortured had appeared in the American media—and his bosses had disavowed him and Gidley became a wanted man in his own homeland.

  He had little fondness for Cambodia, but he’d found it the ideal place to disappear. He’d assumed a new identity, seemingly just another middle-aged foreigner going to seed in the Phnom Penh bars and brothels, though he didn’t drink and had no use for whores. He’d, frequented the e
stablishments favored by predatory sex tourists, whom he’d befriended, plied with knock-off Viagra, whiskey and yama, the locally produced crystal meth, before photographing them with child prostitutes and robbing them. The pickings were ludicrously easy, and the men, hungover, ashamed and afraid, never reported the attacks to the police.

  Gidley, a pasha in his little empire of pimps and hookers—all beneficiaries of his benevolence—had prospered.

  And had he become a little complacent?

  Perhaps.

  He’d come to enjoy a morning snack of snails spiced with red chili sauce served by a crone who had a stall on the sidewalk outside a branch of Vattanac Bank, overlooking the greasy Mekong River.

  The bank opened its doors punctually at nine every morning, and Gidley (his groin freshly powdered against the jock itch that plagued him) had often arrived for his snack in time to see the staff enact their daily ritual, standing at the doorway in their crisp blue uniforms, palms pressed together, welcoming the first customer of the day, while a colleague captured the moment on camera. Each day they uploaded the picture to Facebook.

  Three weeks ago the first customer had been a Swiss pedophile wanted by Interpol and he was spotted on Facebook and the picture was analyzed by face recognition software and not only did it identify him but it identified, too, the tall, pallid man passing by outside the bank.

  When Gidley was arrested at his sordid apartment by a bevy of diminutive Cambodian cops he’d imagined he’d be handed over to the Americans, which would have been inconvenient, and he would’ve had to resort to horse-trading (he knew where many bodies were buried, quite literally) to free himself. But instead, in a display of regional glad-handing, the Cambodians had tossed him across the Straits of Malacca to this island’s new leaders who had promptly dragged him before a Sharia court, tried him for political crimes, found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

  So here he knelt.

  He’d been held in a sewer of a prison for the last weeks. There were no American representatives on the island (they’d fled along with the few surviving members of the last regime) so he knew that no reprieve would be granted.

  His captors had enjoyed toying with him.

  Rotten food.

  Sleep deprivation.

  Beatings.

  Torture.

  All the techniques he had practiced with such relish during his long and varied career neutralizing America’s foes, real and imaginary, and as he knelt, hearing the sword slice into the neck of the man beside him, he decided this would come as a relief.

  The head of his neighbor hit the tiles with a hard slap and Gidley felt some of man’s hot blood land on his face, dripping from his nose. There was no way to wipe it.

  He looked up at the executioner, seeing him silhouetted against the sun, the sword swinging back in a wide arc.

  “Short back and sides, Abdul,” Gidley said and bowed his head, waiting for the steel to bite.

  But it didn’t and he was aware of a figure crouching before him and heard an American voice say, “Mr. Gidley?”

  A face so rosy, so youthful, like a ripe peach with just a hint of fuzz on its cheeks, came into view. The young pup wore a white shirt and dark slacks and his hair was short and parted at the side.

  Gidley laughed and shook the head that he was soon to lose. “Whatever brand of Christian snake oil you’re peddling, padre, I’m not buying.” He looked up at the executioner who stood with his sword at his side. “Do it.”

  The American said, “Oh, I’m not a missionary, Mr. Gidley.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m not here to save your soul. I’m here to save your ass.”

  Which was not the item of his anatomy most in jeopardy, but Gidley, as he was hauled to his feet and marched away to the disappointed jeers of the crowd, wasn’t about to be pedantic.

  SEVEN

  Pete Town stood at the window of his room at the Ramada on Wilshire looking out at a church with a very ornate steeple silhouetted against a pale L.A. sky.

  He couldn’t recall the name of the church, but he was pretty sure that Nat King Cole’s funeral service had been held there, sometime back in the mid-sixties.

  When Town caught himself whistling “Pretend” he spat a laugh that became a cough—the legacy of decades of a pack-a-day habit—and stepped away from the window and sat on the bed. The white comforter bore the imprint of his body from where he had lain propped up against the headboard, massaging his bad leg, watching the tube all morning to see what he and Rick Finch had wrought.

  Watching as the Catherine Finch story was chewed and spat out by a succession of anchors, pundits, consultants and analysts. It had, predictably, found its way into the stump speeches in the presidential primaries. She was everything from a hero to a traitor, depending on who was talking and her escape from death either a reward for her bravery and selflessness or an opportunity for the U.S. to bring her home and try her for treason.

  The notion that she had survived was prodded and probed. Again, those with a rosier take on her seemed to swallow it, the more cynical daring to infer that it was too convenient, too damned easy. More and more cynicism was bleeding into the water like shark chum.

  Town grabbed the remote and jump-cut between Rick Finch on three different channels, delivering the lie about his wife as he had on the hour every hour. The man with his greasy hair and too-youthful clothes looked like such a huckster that Town was astonished that his account had been met with any credulity at all.

  Maybe, to other eyes, his nervousness and shiftiness passed for stress and worry. And it was a good story, of course, and Town knew only too well how people loved a good story, the facts be damned. The only thing worse than being wrong on the news cycle was being boring, and the Catherine Finch story was not boring.

  Staring at Finch’s sweaty face he wondered how he was holding up. There was no way Town could reach out to him, he was in the clutches of the FBI’s Family Engagement Team.

  Town would have to trust that Finch wouldn’t crack. And trust was not something that came easily to him.

  He found himself looking at the squat burner phone that lay on the bedside table, a plastic device even lower on the digital food chain than his Motorola. It had remained stubbornly mute all morning.

  It had been given to him when he’d stepped off the Gulfstream G5 at Van Nuys after a five hour flight from Teterboro, still only 2:00 AM in L.A. Some faceless guy in a fawn windbreaker had given him a Costco bag containing the phone, keys to a rental car and a well-worn wallet before disappearing into the dark.

  A few minutes later, Town, sitting in the Toyota, had opened the wallet and, by the dome light, had found the Ronald Abernathy State Department ID, as well as a MasterCard, a Massachusetts driver’s license and a social security card in the name of James Goodhew, bearing his likeness.

  Paul Golding’s minions had been busy weaving their magic while he’d sat alone in the jet, reading a dossier on Richard Finch. He’d been assessed as a sexually promiscuous recreational drug user, given to self-aggrandizement and the retailing of untruths.

  In other words, the perfect subject for their manipulations.

  There was a number programmed into the burner phone. A number that would connect Town to Golding, or somebody close to him, but he did not call it. He had nothing to offer and recoiled at the idea of sounding like he needed reassurance.

  Which meant that he did.

  Town lifted the remote and surfed, landing on Fox News where a bony blonde who looked like a starved hyena in a cocktail dress flipped her long hair and gabbled manically. “Okay, what I’m saying, in the words of our soccer loving Brit cousins, is what if the administration scored an own goal and actually did kill Catherine Finch in that drone strike?”

  The anchor, a hunched man with a low brow and a Neanderthal jawline, said, “What about the text message?”

  “Yeah, what about it? I mean, if they killed her and they wanted to cover it up, they would do something li
ke that wouldn’t they? I’m just saying.”

  “You’re accusing the White House of lying?”

  “Res ipsa loquitur, as they say in tort law. The thing speaks for itself.” The furrowed man looked perplexed and searched his notes. The blonde plowed on. “I’m saying that the president has an agenda here and the death of the Patty Hearst of Palmyra—”

  “Catherine Finch was held hostage in Raqa.”

  “—the death of Catherine Finch will put a major crimp in his quest for glory. And, as we know, this is a man who is so transparently self-serving if you squint hard enough you can see what he ate for lunch.” She laughed and flicked her blonde tresses. “Probably shish kebab.”

  The anchor tried to look authoritative. “What would satisfy you that Catherine Finch wasn’t killed in that strike?”

  “Tangible proof of life,” she said as she flipped her hair again. “Hey, she’s the YouTube queen. If she’s alive let her make one of her videos. Show her face. Dispel all this doubt and conjecture.”

  EIGHT

  Hunt Gidley showered away weeks of sweat and grime, the tepid water, pink with the blood of his luckless neighbor in Chop-Chop Square, flowing down the drain between his hammer toes.

  He stepped out of the stall and as he toweled himself dry he saw his reflection in the peeling mirror above the sink, saw the gaudy profusion of bruises, yellow, purple and mottled brown that patterned his torso. His ribs beneath his left armpit felt spongy to the touch, probably broken, and a lower molar rocked when he probed it with his tongue.

  He approached the mirror and gripped the molar between thumb and forefinger and worked it free, tossing the tooth that still bore a blackened amalgam filling from his childhood into the toilet bowl. He spat blood into the sink and rinsed his mouth from the bottle of water that stood beside the drinking glass.

  Wrapped in a towel he left the bathroom and went through to the bedroom where a tired air-conditioner fought a losing battle against the heat. He lay a moment on the bed, staring up at the arrow painted on the stained ceiling, pointing the faithful toward Mecca. The mattress sank in the middle like quicksand and his feet hung over the edge, but it was all he could do to fight off sleep and stand and rip a pillow cover into strips and bind his broken ribs and dress himself in the clothes that his American savior had given him: boxer shorts, a pair of ironed jeans that didn’t quite trouble his ankles and a beige short-sleeved shirt with a palm tree embroidered on the pocket. The shirt was tight across his shoulders and bit into his armpits.