Open Chains

by D. F. Bailey

  A re-write of the so-called can-opener: Brodie's bid for the SOS office and his criminal past

  A report on the murders of the fifteen men on February 6, 2004

  A chronicle of the deaths of the US Army witnesses to the murders of February 6, 2004, up to the demise of Joey Kinsella and Tony Turino

  A summary of Joey Kinsella’s diary, with selected pull quotes

  A summary of Tony Turino’s interview with J.R.

  Finch’s confrontation with Brodie in his home

  On the third day, Friday afternoon, just as he completed the last draft of the final story, a stranger leaned over from the table beside him and said, “You’re Will Finch, aren’t you?”

  Finch studied the man a moment before he replied. Could this be one of Brodie's henchmen? Unlikely. He was lean, blond, somewhere in the north end of his thirties. He was clean-shaven and bore an intelligent, but troubled face. He could easily pass for a school teacher or librarian.

  Finch put on a smile. “Depends who’s asking.”

  The teacher drew closer and in a confidential voice, he whispered, “John Sinclair.”

  Sinclair? It took a few seconds for Finch to recognize the name. “John Sinclair?”

  He glanced away and then turned back to Finch. “Yes.”

  “Really?” Finch tucked his laptop into his courier bag and leaned toward Sinclair. “Maybe we should step outside.”

  Sinclair checked over his shoulder. “No. It’s better here. Safer.”

  “Safer?” Finch narrowed his eyes. “Tell me something. You were in Iraq in oh-four, right?”

  A nod.

  At once a dozen questions burst into Finch’s mind. He decided to start with the most obvious. “How did you find me?”

  “Joey Kinsella’s wife. After he was killed I paid her a visit. She told me that he’d seen Tony Turino days before her husband died. That he gave his diary to Turino. And that he’d mentioned you. The two of them had this idea that you could break the news about Brodie. I mean the real news,” he added.

  Finch’s eyes narrowed. “So you've been following their deaths in the news. Turino and Kinsella.”

  “And Chernovski.” He shrugged. “Google alerts. Years ago I set up alerts on the names of everyone in the squad. Sometimes I’d get a hit. When Chernovski won a local lottery in Detroit. Almost ten grand.” A thin smile. “When the others went down, it became clear that the final round of murders was underway. All of them weeks after the president nominated Brodie for secretary of state.”

  Finch listened, riveted by every word. He could barely believe that he was now talking to the soldier who’d disappeared from Iraq so many years ago.

  “That still doesn’t explain how you found me.”

  “I read the profile of you in the New York Times. Your first book, Who Shot The Sheriff? It said you like to come here to write in the afternoons. Since the story emerged about Brodie in BuzzFeed, I’ve been checking for you over the past two days.”

  Finch glanced away. Had it been that easy to find him? Suddenly he felt a knot of anger in his stomach. “Damnit, Sinclair, why now? I mean where the hell have you been the last fifteen years?”

  He shrugged as if he’d asked himself the same question many times since he’d fled Iraq, but never found a definitive answer. “In Oxford.”

  “Oxford?”

  “England. I was waiting until the time was right.”

  “Until the time was right?” Finch realized he was repeating Sinclair’s words. He still couldn’t believe his luck. The man sitting next to him could break the story wide open. “You mean until everyone else is dead except you?”

  Sinclair’s lips curled in a tight frown as if part of him was desperate to keep the truth from escaping his lips.

  “You waited fifteen years. Fifteen,” Finch repeated. “What kept you?”

  “Maybe … maybe it’s —” He hesitated and washed a hand over his face with a look of shame. “All right. Okay. You want the real answer?”

  Finch could see the question gnawing at him. The answer screaming to be heard.

  “Because I’m a coward,” he whispered. He nodded as if a second person hiding inside him was finally speaking the inescapable truth. You betcha. I’m a runner.

  “So you ran in Iraq.”

  Sinclair leaned closer. “Look. I overheard Brodie speaking with two hajjis. They killed the Chopper pilot. It was murder for hire. Plain and simple.”

  “Dutch VanHeussen.”

  A nod. “Then I caught wind of the attack on the Humvee that took out Rousseau and Cottrell.”

  “You knew that was coming? And you did nothing?” Finch’s voice descended to a low growl. Cottrell and Rousseau were shot on Finch’s run out to Abu Ghraib. The day he killed two Iraqis to save his own life.

  Sinclair shook his head. “No, afterwords. I heard about it later.”

  That deflated Finch’s anger somewhat, enough to settle him back into his chair. “What do you mean, later?”

  “Through my connections.” He studied Finch’s face and understood that Finch didn’t know the extent of his responsibilities in Iraq. “I was one of the few Americans who spoke Arabic. Fluent, no accent. I was expected to build a network. Informers, spies. Whatever it took.”

  Finch recalled Turino’s comment about Sinclair’s value as a translator. A rare skill. One to be exploited by all possible means.

  “Then what?

  Sinclair grimaced and looked away. “That’s when I realized that Brodie had initiated a campaign to kill everyone who was witness to his murders on the chopper. One by one, he’d take us all out. The man’s a demented genius. Everyone could see it. I was the only one who reacted before it was too late.”

  Finch stared at Sinclair for a few moments while he tried to digest all this. His heavy lips were fixed in a steady pout which gave him the appearance of perpetual disappointment. Maybe he had good reasons for that. Despite his personal troubles, Finch knew he had to interview Sinclair and get him to go on record about the murders he’d witnessed.

  “You realize that what you’ve told me will end Brodie's bid for secretary? And likely send him to jail?”

  “That’s why I’m here.” Sinclair opened his hands and lifted them two or three inches above his lap.

  “You’ll go on record?”

  He tipped his head to one side. “Not exactly. But I’m willing to be an anonymous source.” He raised his eyebrows, a look of speculation. “Is that possible?”

  Finch almost laughed. “Are you serious? You want to be an anonymous source going up against one of the most powerful men in the world.”

  His shoulders rolled forward. His chin dipped again. “First amendment. I thought you could protect your sources.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. With the pressure they’d put on me, I’d have to do it from the inside of a jail cell. I don’t think so, Sinclair.”

  Next to the barista’s station a minor argument broke out. Someone discontented with their drink demanded a refund. The interruption gave Sinclair and Finch time to reflect.

  “Well, that’s my offer,” Sinclair straightened his spine as if he’d decided to harden his position.

  Finch nodded. “So. Still the coward.”

  “Look, I’ve come here, haven’t I.” He pointed a finger at the table.

  “It’s a first step. But time to wake up, Sinclair.” Finch paused to consider how to alert a confessed coward to the coming battle. “Look, this is a war. It’s still on. The one in Iraq — it’s here. Now.” Finch jabbed his hand at the table. “We could die. Both of us. But here’s the thing. We’re on the same side. You and me. I’ll guide you through this. And here’s the other thing you need to focus on. We’re gonna win this.”

  Sinclair’s breathing became uneven. Rattled.

  “Besides, you owe it to the men who are already dead. Turino, Kinsella. Cottrell and Rousseau.” Mention of their names brought Finch’s past trauma to life. “And you know what? You owe it to me.”<
br />
  “To you?”

  “Yeah. I was with Rousseau and Cottrell when we hit the IED. I was driving the damn Humvee.” His eyes widened as he leaned forward. “I felt their pulses die in my fingers.” Finch stood up and slung the strap of his courier bag over his shoulder. His anger was about to boil into sheer rage. “So look. You either go on record as John Sinclair, US Army vet, and you walk out that door with me, or you crawl back into the hole in Oxford where you’ve been hiding for the last fifteen years.”

  ※

  It took Sinclair five minutes to catch up to Finch on Vallejo Street. When he called out — “All right. Okay. All right” — and when Finch refused to hear him, he sprinted the last ten steps that brought him beside Finch. The crowds and street traffic buzzing around them provided a bubble of privacy. They wouldn’t find more seclusion in a church confessional.

  “Look, okay. I’ll go on the record. In my name, the whole truth.”

  Finch tried to read his face. A deserter. Could he be trusted? “You know if you do this, you’ll be charged and tried in a military court for desertion. But if you come clean, explain what happened, you might get off.”

  “You think so?”

  “Honestly?” Second thoughts forced Finch to glance away. “I don’t know.”

  Sinclair replied with a curt nod. “Okay, but if I do this, I’ll need protection. Once Brodie knows about me, that I’m here — still alive — I’ll be dead meat.” He lifted his hands in a gesture of defeat. Where to go? Where to hide? He had no idea.

  Finch mulled over the possibilities. But why kid yourself, he thought. He knew of one possibility only. “I know a place,” he said. “You got a suitcase or backpack?”

  “In a hotel on Grant.”

  “All right, let’s go get it.”

  “Then where to?”

  “You remember Jeremiah Rickets in Iraq? Everyone called him J.R.”

  “He was with the MPs, right? He came to interview us after Dutch was murdered. He even took a picture of the seven of us.”

  “A picture.”

  “Yeah, for his field report, I guess.” Sinclair seemed amused by the memory. “I asked him for a copy. A week later, one arrived in my mail call. Believe it or not, I brought the picture with me.”

  Finch ignored this. He became preoccupied with the logistics of transporting Sinclair up to Ashland. First, he’d have to email J.R. about his plan. The problem was, if J.R. only checked his email in the town library once or twice a week, Finch could easily arrive at J.R.’s cabin before J.R. had time to read the email. It was a chance he’d have to take.

  “Why’re you asking about J.R?”

  “He’s up in Oregon. You ever been there?”

  “Never.”

  “Pretty country. You’ll love it.”

  ※

  A few minutes before one o’clock, Eve heard from The Post’s lawyer Lou Levine that Brodie’s legal gag order had been squashed. The whisper campaign was now simmering from coast to coast and the courts could no longer override The Post’s first amendment rights to publish Finch’s six stories about Brodie’s past and current crimes. However, the plan to wait until the next morning still held. That would give Fiona Page time to coordinate the breaking news from the managing editor’s desk. All the details had to align. If they stumbled onto the battlefield they could lose the war on the first day.

  Despite the risk that they might be discovered by one of Brodie’s men, Finch, Sinclair and Eve took a taxi from Wally’s condo over to their Alta Street home on Telegraph Hill. They had to pick up a car — either Eve’s Acura or Finch’s RAV4 would do. After a short debate they decided that Eve would drive the Acura while Finch and Sinclair sat in the back seat as passengers. That way Finch could record a formal interview while Eve drove them to Ashland.

  “I’m going to need ten minutes,” Eve said as the taxi pulled up to their door. “I need a change of clothes.” She held her backpack by the strap and pointed to Finch’s bag. They’d both been living out of their packs since the trip to Seattle. “And so do you.”

  “Right,” Finch said. “And I need a few minutes to email these stories to Fiona. Then I have to contact J.R.”

  They led Sinclair into their house and he crossed the hall into the living room. He dropped his bag at his feet, flopped onto the loveseat, and began to scroll through his phone. “Jeezus,” he muttered. “The story’s breaking everywhere. CNN, MSNBC, the works.”

  “Good. Tomorrow it’s going to explode,” Finch said as he climbed the stairs up to their bedroom and his adjoining writing loft. For the first time, he felt as though he’d gained an edge in the media battle.

  “Make it fast,” Eve said as she darted up the stairs two at a time behind him. She carried both backpacks, one in each hand. “I’ll grab some clothes for you. Then we go.”

  Finch pulled his laptop from his courier bag and opened his email. A stream of messages poured onto the screen. He ignored them all. Soon he had a note drafted for Fiona: Ready to rock ‘n’ roll. Find 6 stories attached. Post them at exactly 9 a.m. tomorrow. One more to follow. Blockbuster interview with John Sinclair. He attached the six stories that he’d written at Caffe Trieste to the message and watched the cursor wheel spin as the stories slipped into the ethernet. Next he wrote a message to J.R. Story breaking tomorrow. I have John Sinclair with me. Will bring him to you — he checked his watch and added six hours to the time — around 10-11 tonite. He clicked the SEND icon, waited for the confirmation — Message Sent — then closed the laptop, put it back into his courier bag and joined Eve in the bedroom.

  “So. I think I’ve got everything,” she said. She cinched the ties on Finch’s bag and handed it to him. “Just one more thing,” she added.

  He watched as she stepped into the closet, leaned over the square keypad to their safe and tapped in the vault combination. She pulled out her Ruger LC9s Pro and two bullet clips. She slipped the pistol — just six inches long — into her purse and looked at him with a dismissive glare. In the past he’d convinced her that a gun too often caused more problems than it solved. But today she was having none of it.

  “Not a word,” she said in an undertone. She tucked the bullet clips beside the pistol and pulled the zipper tight. “You know what Brodie’s capable of.”

  ※

  As the garage door shuddered into the lift bay above their cars a new thought struck Eve. She studied Finch’s RAV4 and her Acura TLX. Almost four months ago Finch had driven the RAV4 up to Mayne Island, then back and forth to the island village two or three times a week. Yet it wasn’t until the day she arrived at his cottage in her Acura that Turino put in his appearance.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Sometimes I’m so damned stupid.”

  Finch and Sinclair stood behind her as she stared at her car.

  “What are you talking about?” Finch asked.

  “My car. Why couldn’t Turino find you on his own? Instead, he followed me for over a thousand miles and shows up at your door the same night I arrived. How?”

  She set her purse and backpack on the garage floor, leaned over the right rear wheel well and swept a hand above the tire. She looked at Finch and frowned, then performed the same maneuver on the front right, front left — and finally, over the left rear tire well. A smile crossed her face as she tugged something free from the car frame. She stood and revealed a palm-sized plastic box.

  Sinclair stood next to her and took the device in his hand, rolled it over and examined it with care. “It’s a tracker. One of the better ones, in fact. Two-month battery life. You can follow the tracker on a laptop or phone. Even set up a geo-fence. Anyone can buy this thing on Amazon.”

  “What’s a geo-fence?” Finch leaned in to get a better look. It resembled a car key holder, a plastic box with a sturdy magnet strip on one side. The opposite side showed a bluetooth icon with an active LED light.

  “You can set up a travel radius so that when the tracker penetrates the digital fence, say fifty
miles, it will send you an alert.”

  “So no worries about tracking your prey until the alert triggers.” Eve shook her head with an expression of disbelief. She’d been duped by an off-the-shelf device available to any kid with the smarts to download a cellphone app. She fought to suppress the rage bubbling in her guts.

  “Exactly. But in the meantime, you can check in once or twice a day and see where the tracker has been routed. Useful if you want to keep an eye on a wayward spouse.” Sinclair chuckled and handed the device to Eve.

  “So can I change the boundary on the geo-fence?”

  “Only if you have access to the software — which is on the owner’s cell phone. The phone’s tethered to the tracker by bluetooth connection.” He rolled his lips together with a look that said, I wish I had a better answer for you.

  “How do you know all this?” Finch asked.

  A half-smile from Sinclair. “I just know stuff.”

  Finch stroked a hand over his chin. “Can you install the software on more than one phone?”

  “I guess. But you’d need to know the user’s password.”

  “Damnit. Who could have put this on my car?” Eve’s voice rose with an angry twist. She looked to Finch for an answer.

  “Likely one of Brodie’s men.”

  “Turino?”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “Why would he have bothered calling you and Dixie if he installed the tracker?”

  Eve’s lower jaw shifted back and forth. “What about Nine?” she muttered.

  Sinclair’s head turned from Finch to Eve. “Who’s Nine?”

  “Fuzzy,” Eve said and immediately realized she’d let out too much.

  Finch gestured not to say another word. “I better check my car and see if it’s been tagged, too.”

  “Fuzzy?” Sinclair blinked with an air of surprise.

  “Forget it,” Finch said. “It’s nothing.” He stepped over to his RAV4 and took a few moments to check the tire wells on his car. He stood up and wiped the dirt from his hands. “Looks clean.”