"Hello, Jack."
I nodded. "Martinez."
A second man appeared from the hallway. I recognized his face from the base in Iraq, but didn't know his name. His extended arm pulled at something from the hall.
Jessie.
Her glossy eyes and tear stained cheeks told me all I needed to know.
My eyes shifted from Jessie, to Keller and back to Martinez, who now aimed his pistol at me.
Keller laughed. "Didn't you think I was a bit too forthcoming with my confession, Jack?"
I felt Mike's hands touch my shoulders and then proceed to pat down my sides and my legs. He reached around my stomach. My Beretta pushed into my ribs when his hands discovered it.
"He's armed," Mike said.
Keller nodded. "Would have been surprised if he wasn't, though. Nice and slow, Jack. Put it on the floor."
I took a deep breath. I didn't know if Mike was armed or not. Martinez was and he aimed his gun at me. His partner probably was, but his weapon wasn't drawn. Keller didn't appear to be, but most likely had a weapon hidden somewhere in the room. The moment I pulled my weapon, Martinez would be on high alert and would shoot me if I made any movements that didn't lead to me putting my gun on the ground. I could try and take him out first. Two problems with that, though. One, he'd get his shot off at the same time, if not sooner. Two, his partner had Jessie and might kill her before I could manage a shot in his direction.
The next option was to take out the partner. There was nothing to stop a clean shot. Martinez would have the same clean shot on me, though. And then after he had killed me, he would kill Jessie.
"Jack," Keller said. "Remove the gun and place it on the floor. This is the last time I'll ask."
I held my hands out in front of me and then reached into my jacket. I froze in position. I had to stall as long as possible.
"Now," Keller said.
"I'm just moving nice and slow, just like you asked."
I pulled the gun from my jacket and held it out, extending my fingers so they weren't near the trigger. Martinez watched every move. He tensed. I sensed his urge to pull the trigger. He had probably dreamed of it since that night in Iraq, hell, maybe even before then. I held one arm out and gestured with the other for everyone to remain calm.
"Nice and easy," I said.
The door behind me crashed open. I didn't have to turn my head to know that Bear had kicked it in. The crash was enough to distract Martinez. I fired a shot at him. He collapsed where he stood. His partner took aim at me and I dove behind the couch and crawled toward the end. Bullets tore through the leather and thudded into the wall behind me.
Jessie's screams were silenced with a thud. I peeked over the couch and saw the man hovering over her. Then I checked over my shoulder and saw that Mike had charged Bear. The big man seemed to be handling him on his own. Keller had run upstairs. I'd deal with him in a minute.
I leapt up and fired at the man standing over Jessie. My shots missed. He dove into the hall. His footsteps echoed through the room as he ran down it. I hurried to where Jessie lay on the floor and pulled her by her feet so she no longer an easy target. She had been knocked unconscious by the man. I moved her further away from the hall and then backed up to the wall. I peeked around the corner and was met with a hail of gunfire.
"Christ," I said. "Bear, finish him and get Jessie out of here."
The big man delivered a heavy blow to Mike's head and dropped him on the floor. He ran toward me. Dove over the couch as a shotgun blast ripped through the air from above.
"Guess Keller's weapon wasn't as close by as I thought," I said.
Bear said nothing.
I pointed toward a hall that led to the kitchen. "There's a door leading out back through there."
He nodded, scooped up Jessie and started toward the hall.
I peeked around the corner again. Empty. I moved slowly down the hall. Each side had two doors. Three of the doors were closed. The last one on the right was open. I stopped a few feet from the door and listened. Complete silence. I checked over my shoulder to make sure Keller wasn't standing behind me. He wasn't.
I grabbed the TracFone from inside my jacket and threw it into the room. The man bumped the door as he turned to see what I threw. I exploded around the corner. He stood closer than I anticipated, and I had to strike him. I moved in sideways and hooked his right arm with my left. I applied pressure and bent his elbow in the wrong direction. He let out a roar and dropped his gun to the floor. I brought my right arm up to smack him across the face with my gun, but he managed to get his arm in between and the sudden jarring stop caused me to drop my gun too.
He continued bringing his arm forward and wrapped it around my head and took out my leg with a quick kick. A moment later he had positioned himself behind me and had me in a choke hold.
I fought for position. I fought to loosen his grip. I was losing on both counts.
"General," he yelled.
I heard Keller's footsteps as he walked down the hall. The barrel of his rifle appeared in the doorway. I knew he wouldn't be far behind.
I reached behind me and found the man's head. I jammed my thumb in his eye. That was enough to loosen his grip. I shifted my body weight and broke free from his grasp. Then I ducked and slipped behind him. I held his arm behind his back and pushed him toward the doorway.
Keller spun around and fired blindly. The bullet hit the man in the front of his chest and tore through the back, leaving an opening the size of a melon.
I lunged forward, using the wounded man as a body shield. We crashed into Keller and he fell backwards. He landed against the door across the hall. It broke from the latch and he continued his fall to the floor. He dropped the rifle. I tossed my human shield to the side and grabbed the rifle off of the floor and lifted it and aimed it at Keller.
"Jack," he said as he wiped blood from his mouth. "You don't have to do this."
"Do what?"
I fired into the back of the room.
He covered his head and cowered close to the floor.
I aimed the rifle at his head. "Get up."
He did.
"Down the hall." I backed up and let him slip by me. "Nice and easy, Keller. Arms up, hands behind your head."
He complied and walked slowly down the hall. When he reached the end he stopped.
"Keep going," I said.
He took a few more steps and stopped again. I stuck the end of the rifle into his back and pushed. He took a few more steps forward. Mike was sitting on one of the couches, holding his arm to his chest. The arm was bent at an odd angle halfway between his wrist and his elbow. It had been a rough week for Mike.
"Go sit next to your son," I said.
Keller did as he was told and walked to the couch. He stopped and turned toward me.
I kept the rifle steady and aimed at his chest.
"You won't get away with this, Noble."
"Why's that?"
"You broke into my house. Attacked me and my son. Christ, look at his arm." He swung his arm to the side dramatically and pointed at his son's twisted arm. "Then you killed my guests, two government employees, Jack. You killed them in cold blood."
"Who's going to believe that story?"
He laughed. "Who wouldn't? A General versus the word of a Sergeant?" He stepped toward me. "Put the gun down, Jack. You won't get away with this. Even if you kill me, you won't get away with it."
I circled around the front of the couches, toward the front door. Kept the gun aimed at Keller.
Keller continued. "They will hunt you down, Jack. The Marines, CIA, local authorities. Hell, even the FBI will get in on the action. Everyone will want a piece of you."
"Yeah, to take the fall for the murders you committed."
"In a round-about way, yeah, Jack. The murders are all on me. I ordered them all. But it was for a reason, Jack. A damn good reason. We have to take this fight to them, Jack. Don't you see?"
He stood ten feet from me. His head cocked to the side. The smile had left his face. He held his arms outstretched to the side.
I shifted the gun to one arm and reached inside my jacket. "Only problem, Keller," I pulled my hand out and showed him the digital recorder that had been running the entire time, "is that I got you admitting it on tape."
I stopped the recorder, hit rewind for a second and then hit play.
"The murders are all on me."
I clicked the stop button.
"Without a doubt, one hundred percent your voice, sir."
His face went pale and he backed into the wall. He shook his head and muttered something indecipherable under his breath.
I pulled the magazine from the rifle and dropped the gun on the floor. Looked around the room and soaked in the carnage. I turned and opened the door. Bear and Jessie had pulled the car to the curb and were waiting for me. I cut across the yard and got in the front seat. Bear pulled away without saying a word.
We drove north on I-95. Washington, D.C. was our destination. I'd wait for Marlowe by his house. Turn over the evidence and find out what he had planned for Keller. We stopped and picked up the cheapest laptop we could find. Jessie transferred the audio file to the computer and burned it onto a CD.
It turned out to be a good thing she had been held hostage by Martinez, notwithstanding the emotional scarring and baggage the ordeal would leave her with. She kept her spirits up, though, and regularly made jokes at my expense from the back seat.
We crossed the state line into Virginia. The topic of what her next steps were hadn't been discussed yet. I turned in the passenger seat and looked back at her.
"Do you want to go back home, Jess?"
"Do you think it's safe now?"
I shook my head. "Probably not."
"Yeah, I didn't think so."
"I can take you with me to New-"
"Dulles, Jack." She looked out the window to her side. "Take me to Dulles when we get to D.C."
"Where do you plan to go?"
"I don't know." She shook her head slightly. "I don't know."
I cleared my throat and turned back to the front and stared out the window for a moment.
"What about you, Bear?"
"What do you mean?"
"Pretty sure with everything that's happened we can convince Marlowe to give you an honorable discharge."
He shrugged and didn't say anything.
I waited a moment and then continued. "You're thinking about staying in?" The thought hadn't occurred to me. I figured he was as antsy to get out as I was.
"What else am I going to do, Jack?" He placed both his hands on the steering wheel. Gripped it so tight his knuckles turned white. "I've got two years left. I'm going to finish out those two years."
Bear had principles, and the commitment he made meant a lot to him. I knew that. But what about the commitment they made to us and the fact that they broke that commitment? I don't recall reading anything on my contract that stated permission to terminate at will. I brushed the thought aside.
"You know, even if they don't scrap the program, there's no way you're going back to it."
He shrugged and looked at me for a second, then back toward the road. He quickly scanned the cars. "That's fine with me. I'll take a desk job for a couple years."
I laughed. Bear behind a desk? The big man would go crazy.
"Where the hell are they going to find a chair and desk big enough for you?"
A few seconds passed and then Bear broke out into laughter.
"I know, right. What the hell am I thinking?"
"Why don't you leave? We'll go into business together."
"Doing what? Crime scene creation?"
Doing what?
The words hung in the air above me. I hadn't given any thought to it. I had a few hopes. I hoped that Jessie would be part of my own "doing what." I hoped that I could travel for a couple months before my official retirement while using up my accrued leave pay. I hoped that something would just turn up. I'd only known the Marines, and more specifically, the joint program with the CIA. The actual Marines were a mystery to me. Before that, my future had been planned by my father and high school football coach. I tried not to think about either of them, nor the future I had left behind.
"What about you, Jack?" Bear said, interrupting my thoughts.
"I've got three months leave built up."
"So you're done?"
"Yeah, Bear," I said. "I'm done. This is it. I'm giving this tape to Marlowe and getting him to put my honorable discharge in writing, effective the last day of my leave. Then I'm going to do-" I leaned back and stared at the ceiling. "Then I don't know what I'm going to do. I'll figure it out at some point in the next three months."
He opened his mouth to say something and must have thought better of it. His grip had loosened on the steering wheel. A smile crept up on his face. He seemed relaxed. At peace. I hadn't even thought about the possibility that our partnership stressed him out.
"Bear, does being around-" I stopped mid-sentence, deciding not to go down that road. "Never mind."
"Never minded."
* * *
We drove straight into the city. Bear dropped me off a couple blocks from Marlowe's place. He wanted to wait with me. I insisted that he take Jessie and find somewhere else to be in case something happened. I still didn't know if I could trust Marlowe. Sure, he gave up Keller, but he might have done it to protect himself. The fact that I returned might spur him into additional action. He might decide to get rid of me. I had no doubt that he had that power. If that happened, I didn't want Bear and Jessie in the middle. Plus, they had the backup files on the computer and the audio CD that implicated Keller behind everything.
Keller's confession was one reason I trusted Marlowe. Keller didn't mention him. Maybe he did it on purpose, though, in the event that I walked out of his house alive.
For a moment I doubted my decision to just leave Keller's house. My rational side told me he knew he was beaten. Despite his recent horrible decision making, he had once been an honorable man. I'd only known him for eight years. He had been a good man most of those years. Those who knew him longer than that held him in high esteem. Maybe I was reaching. Maybe I was letting the fact that he had known and served with my father influence me.