The Clause (21 page)

Fifty-one

The morning before I
was supposed to leave it was sunny with a light breeze. Good conditions. My bags were all packed, my flight left around noon.

One last time I saddled the bicycle and headed out to Turtle Bight—I hadn’t seen a permit since tying my purple crab pattern. While wading out to that clump of mangroves, I was reminded of another Western. It was a funny one, about an ambitious, sarcastic gunslinger, played by James Garner, who was passing through a town. Of course, the townspeople hire him to be their sheriff to protect them from a local gang. He throws one of the gang in a jail—a jail with no bars around the holding cell—and manages to scare the inmate into staying put. The rest of the gang begin a series of attempts to break out their comrade but are undone by the gunslinger in inventive ways, like sticking his finger in the end of a pistol. Of course the gang is foiled, and the town is happy, but all along this gunslinger had been warning the townsfolk that he had only taken the sheriff job temporarily because—ultimately—he was on his way to Australia. It’s a better movie than it sounds. I liked that part, though, where he’s always telling people that he’s on his way to Australia. The commitment to a personal agenda over the expectations of others sat right with me.

Sure enough, as the flats at Turtle Bight flooded with the incoming tide, I saw the dorsal fin of that permit slice the water’s surface as he came into the shallows, headed for that mangrove clump with the purple crabs. I put my new crab fly in the air, cast it next to the clump, and then waited for that permit to draw near enough to see it. I knew where he was headed, so why not get the crab cued up and in place before the permit got there? Less chance of spooking the fish.

The permit went to the far side of the clump first, and I lost sight of him. I thought maybe he’d eaten and left when that tail flopped into the air near my fly. I leaned forward and gave the line a small strip.

The tail turned, angled at my fly.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi
…

Another small strip.

He followed.

Another small strip.

Tug.

Big strip.

That tail slammed the water and the shallows exploded. The permit shot out toward deep water, my reel screaming as the line peeled off.

On the second run the permit wrapped me on that mangrove and escaped.

I’d rather have landed the fish, but I’d fooled him. I’d figured it out and made it happen.

Reeling up, I headed to shore at the point. Crunching over the beach litter, I turned the corner of the brush.

There was a man in what looked like a mechanic’s jumpsuit standing at the water’s edge. His back was toward me.

Hair: short and gray.

Neck: pale, a white man.

He stood very straight looking out to sea.

I slowed. “Hello?”

He turned.

One half of his face was badly scarred, the ear gone. He held out his right hand and there was a piece of wrinkled paper in it.

I stopped a few paces away.

“Your gum wrapper.” The accent was Eastern European.

It was Vugovic.

The first seconds I don’t remember. I know I saw the flash of a knife but I can’t picture it. I felt the icy slash across my chest.

My memory clicks in mid-dash down the beach toward the point. My eyes saw blood on my chest. My ears heard him behind me, grunting as he ran. My nose smelled my own perspiration. I veered into the skinny water hoping that would trip him up. He was just strides behind me.

I turned the corner of the point, around a clump of mangrove.

Tim was standing on the beach, in cutoffs and a black bikini top, wide-eyed when she saw me. In one hand she held a spear gun.

I vectored away from her out along a spit of sand into a little less skinny water.

To run in the water like that is hard and I didn’t know how long I could keep it up. You have to lift your feet as high as possible to keep from tripping.

Shark: dead ahead, in slightly deeper water, the black form unmistakable.

I was bleeding.

I was splashing.

That dark shape with the fins out to either side changed course and vectored toward my path.

He smelled the blood.

He heard the thrashing.

I began to curve back toward shore but found the water getting deeper. Next to shore was a draw, like a trench with deeper, darker water created by the tides. I tumbled forward and plunged head-first into it. Now I was bleeding and swimming, with a shark nearby. The draw was only twenty feet across. The beach was five feet beyond that.

It was exactly like those dreams when you’re being chased but struggle to move, the danger closing in, the desperation at the boiling point. This was a nightmare, but I was not asleep.

Water was up to my armpits, and the muddy bottom clung to my feet. I could only hear my own gasps and splash as I lunged through the draw for that shore.

Dragging myself into the shallow on the far side, I shot a look behind me, expecting to see the jaws of a shark or the flash of Vugovic’s knife at my feet.

I didn’t.

Vugovic was on the far edge of the draw, knee deep, knife in one hand, the other arm contorted, reaching for his back. He pivoted, and I saw the white shaft of the fish spear just below the shoulder blade where he couldn’t quite reach it, his blood mingling in the water with mine.

In the distance beyond him was Tim watching from shore. Her spear gun: empty.

Between them, a dark shape angled through the water and shot toward Vugovic.

The first shark rolled and took Vugovic down by the one knee. He twisted and stabbed the shark in the head with his knife.

Now there was even more blood in the water. Dark shapes vectored in from all sides.

The second shark got him from the other side. It was only a three-footer, but with one swipe it ripped all the muscle from Vugovic’s upper arm as he was trying to stand up. He fell back to his knees, head just above the water.

Those flat, depraved eyes locked on mine—not the shark’s.

Vugovic’s.

He grinned.

He grinned like what was happening to him was nothing.

He grinned like I was too weak to understand that being ripped apart by sharks didn’t faze him.

Vugovic grinned because he was superior, and always would be.

The next shark was larger, maybe a five-footer, and it rolled up out of the water and clamped its vice of white teeth onto Vugovic’s face with an audible crunch.

The water erupted in blood, arms, legs, and fins as Vugovic was pulled under. More dark shapes vectored in for their share. Vugovic was still fighting even though the big shark had him by the head, its tail whipping back and forth above the water. A large, dark shape approached the draw to my right, and I scrambled the rest of the way onto shore in time to watch the six-footer turn away from me and veer toward Vugovic.

Or what was left of him. Different sharks were fighting over different parts of the body by then, tails lashing the surface of the water.

That Vugovic had managed to find me, that he had escaped the FBI, that this shitbag had tracked me all the way to that cay, that he had been following me for days to know to find me on that remote beach … all just to kill me … it was beyond terrifying. Gum wrapper?

Tim approached.

“Nasty cut you got there, sport.”

I just shot her a look of dismay, my breathing all gasps.

“You got sloppy, Gill. You dropped this back there on the beach.” She sat next to me and held out the gum wrapper.

I managed to focus on it. My handwriting was on the wrapper, and it was the address of the fly shop in Manhattan. I didn’t even remember writing it down. But Vugovic must have found it at the Plaza, in my saddle bag.

“Here, let me help you off with that shirt.” Tim ripped the shirt open, backed it off my arms, soaked it in sea water, and rolled it. “Hold this against the cut.”

I did as instructed, still trying to get my breath back. “How did you … what were you …”

“Gee, funny thing happened last week. We got word that Vugovic had been released.
By accident
.”

“By accident?”

“Yeah, pretty amazing. Somehow the ICE computers told them he was free to go.”

Mouth open, my face contorted. “What?”

“Even stranger, his name didn’t register on the No Fly List when he took the flight to Nassau.”

“How is all this possible?”

“How is anything possible?” She shrugged. “Our guess is that the NSA subsystem profiled you when the FBI started looking into Gill Underwood and decided that you were a liability to the intelligence community.”

“Why would it think that?”

“The odds. The odds were that coming to the notice of the FBI and making yourself a target threatened exposure.”

Seemed to me it was the agency that put me in that situation.

“What would someone at the NSA care if a handyman for the CIA is exposed?”

“Not
someone
. The subsystem. It cares because it considers itself the guardian of all U.S. intelligence ops. Things have changed, Gill. Not like it used to be. Same as with us, there has to be a huge disconnect for X50 ops to continue undetected. That’s why we don’t even tell you what your mission is. We just put you in the situation and you figure it out. If the NSA subsystem operates on its own, there’s no paper trail, it covers up for itself and deletes X50 ops as it goes, and what people at the NSA don’t know can’t hurt them. Plausible deniability inside and out.”

“So it can arrange terminations.”

“Some say the NSA subsystem can even use OnStar systems to cause fatal car crashes, make it look like people fell asleep at the wheel.”

“Linked into every license plate reader, every face-recognition app, every credit card swipe, every phone call, every flight reservation, every Web purchase?”

“Like Google or Amazon, it profiles people on the grid, looks for patterns, then flags people of interest for deeper scrutiny in the subsystem. You’re more or less off the grid here, but not enough that the subsystem couldn’t track you using facial recognition cameras at the airport to link you to your new name and airline reservations. It probably knows where I am and that you’d come to me. So it eased Vugovic’s way here. They have profiles on him, too, and played the odds. It knew the Kurac are relentless.”

I removed the shirt and looked at the chest wound. The deepest part was about a quarter-inch deep. I’d need some stitches, butterfly bandages at the very least. The salt water had puckered the wound and made it stop bleeding, for the most part.

“Tim, does this mean the NSA subsystem will continue to hunt me down?”

She bit her lip and examined the horizon. “You’ll have to keep an eye out. And so will we.”

I studied the blue water, out where the sharks had taken the remainder of their meal, out to deeper water. You could see the flash and flicker of baitfish following the sharks, snapping up shreds of Vugovic.

“Question is: am I now a liability to you guys?”

“You’ve done good work, this time and before. You got Spikic. We’re the good guys, Gill. Would I have saved you from Vugovic if you were a liability? Would we be flying you to San Diego and setting you up there?”

“That’s hard to say.” I reached into my pocket and came up with the bullet that killed Trudy. Tim looked at it in my outstretched palm. “You know where this came from, don’t you?”

Her eyes examined the flat-nosed slug, then met mine. “And?”

“This didn’t come from an M70, the kind of guns Serbs smuggle in through diplomatic pouches. Likewise, this is not the kind of ammo the Kurac throw. It’s special-ops ammo, the kind for shooting through cars and windshields. While I suppose it could be .40 S&W or 10mm Auto, this seems more like a SIG .357, possibly fired from a P229, the kind of pistol a lot of ops use. To have hit Trudy at that distance the shooter had training, the kind only professionals get. Now, I can’t see any reason why the NSA would kill her, or the FBI or even the Secret Service. But I can see why you would. Two reasons.

“First reason was to make sure Spikic was taken out. You knew if it looked like the Kurac killed Trudy I wouldn’t stop until I got them. But you guys also live and die by redundancy. So I’ve also got to believe that once you guys set your sights on Spikic you wouldn’t want to risk all your eggs in one basket by having just me chasing him down. You’d have had someone on the inside with the Kurac. Someone who just might have been on a detail with Vugovic’s gang.

“Second reason was that next to operational redundancy you guys love economy, you love two birds to drop with one stone. Killing Trudy not only kept me motivated, but it also got her out of the picture. You people didn’t like us hooking up to begin with, much less the way the heist of the Iraqi antiquities went down.”

“You’ve been thinking about this the whole time you’ve been here?”

“The whole time since Trudy was murdered.”

Tim sighed and squinted into the distance. “Gill, it wasn’t up to me.”

I unwrapped a piece of gum and put it in my mouth. “Then who was it up to?”

Tim shook her head at her feet. “You know The Clause, Gill. Trudy witnessed some things in Iraq she shouldn’t have. They felt we had to close the door on that.”

I held out the pack. “Gum?”

Fifty-two

There was one Western
I saw at Portsmouth that had a bed-ridden old man who pays Lee Van Cleef to coerce information from a crook and then kill him. Van Cleef confronts the crook, and the crook hands him his life’s savings to kill the old man instead of killing the crook. Lee gets the information, takes the crook’s life savings, kills the crook anyway, and returns with the information to his client. The old man is very pleased to pay the balance of his fee for the information and murder. However, just as he told the crook, Van Cleef tells the old man—and for some reason I remember this word for word: “But you know, the pity is, that when I’m paid, I always follow the job through. You know that.”

Lee picks up a pillow and uses it as a silencer to shoot the old man in the head.

Ten minutes after Tim took and chewed the end piece of gum, I dragged her body into the shallows and tossed my bloody shirt next to her. The sharks came back. Eagerly.

I went the long way around into the lodge and slipped into my room without anybody seeing my chest wound. I bandaged myself up and went to the airport, where I made my flight out. The little plane banked out over the ocean, the sun blinding me through the window.

Tim was right. It was time to redeploy, but not for anybody except myself. Aside from the fact that she had planted someone with the Kurac to kill Trudy, putting her down was the only way
for me
to close the door and get out. I had little doubt that despite what Tim said I was a liability to her, and thus my time was winding down. Who knows what was really waiting for me in San Diego? My next assignment might be as a decoy that gets caught in the crossfire. It happened before when I was set up in the Gulf. The point was that Tim and the agency had become a liability
to me
.

The Clause works
both
ways.

My ulterior motive to complete the mission was so that Tim would let me come in for a re-deploy. I needed to confirm why Trudy fell victim to The Clause, and to keep from being expendable myself.

Nobody would ever find Tim’s body, nobody would know exactly what happened to her, but the organization would connect the dots. True, the NSA subsystem might still come after me, but maybe—just maybe—it would see that I had tidied up after myself and therefore wasn’t worth coming after, so long as I went out and stayed out. After all—wasn’t it Tim and the agency that created my situation? Weren’t they the ones letting X50 ops rise too close to the surface? I had to believe that The Clause was part of the subsystem’s logic algorithms.

Well, it didn’t matter. You have to take it one adversary at a time. I really had little choice but to put Tim down. Just as with the Chinese friends, the Kurac, and the FBI, it was a matter of eliminating one enemy after the other, playing them at cross-purposes, taking advantage of their weaknesses, until there were none left. There’s probably a Western like that. I haven’t seen it. I guess I lived it.

I shielded my eyes with my hands. From the plane’s window, I could see Turtle Bight a thousand feet below, and make out the sinister silhouettes of a few hopeful sharks gliding the flats.