CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Pallies”
Wednesday evening.
White and Hornbuckle went to the Irish Public House and took a booth at the rear. Cops and firemen sat at the bar. Otto ordered a beer and Hornbuckle ordered a Gray Goose vodka straight up with an olive from the young pony tailed waitress whose badge said Linda. Otto ordered a bowl of water for Steve.
“What kind of service dog is he?” the waitress asked petting Steve on the top of his head.
“He’s a pant licker. He licks your pants and can tell whether you’ve committed a crime or not.”
“Really?” she asked incredulous.
“No. He’s a tracker.”
The waitress left. Lady Gaga--or Katy Perry--played on the sound system.
Otto and Hornbuckle stared at one another for a second. Otto spoke first. “What happened at the raid? Why’d you leave the room?”
“That’s classified.”
“Bullshit, Hornbuckle. Bullshit. I was there. You nearly got me killed. I have a right to know.”
“I had nothing to do with whatever happened in that room after I left. I had my orders and you had yours.”
“Who else got out of the building?” Otto said. It had been less than five minutes after Hornbuckle left him with Malik that the sidewinder hit the building.
Hornbuckle stared unblinking.
“What about that freak Benson?”
“He was killed in the missile strike.”
“What was on the laptop?”
The waitress returned with their drinks, stopped several feet short of the booth and stared. Otto unclenched his shoulders and sat back. Hornbuckle leaned back and smoothed his tie. It was dark blue, held in place with a tiny ceramic pig. The agent turned toward her and smiled.
Reassured the waitress set down the drinks. They waited until she left. Hornbuckle hoisted his.
“Cheers.”
Otto felt like throwing his beer in Hornbuckle’s face but he hoisted his glass and drank. He wasn’t going to get anywhere being surly.
“What was on the laptop?”
“I don’t know. I turned it in. Those were my orders.”
“I tried to find you when I got out,” Otto said. “You fell off the edge of the earth.”
Hornbuckle shrugged. “You know how it is. My last assignment ended a year and a half ago. I joined the FBI in March.”
And already agent in charge of the cyber crime unit. It was an unusual career move. Federal agents held most agency guys in contempt. Elliot Ness vs. Frank Nitti.
“You know why I’m here?” Otto said.
“We were informed that you were investigating Senator Darling’s death. I thought he died in a car accident.”
“Darling self-combusted. Moment after you left Malik and me, he self-combusted.”
Hornbuckle nodded. “I see. They didn’t believe you at the time.”
So Hornbuckle had been privy to his debriefing.
But you did, didn’t you?
“Naturally, if there’s anything I can do…” Hornbuckle said.
“So you’re cyber crime,” Otto said. He didn’t know what else to say.
Hornbuckle reached into his briefcase. “Let me show you something.” He took out a manila folder and slid it across the bar. Otto opened it. It was BOLF for Randall Kleiser wanted for criminal tampering, smishing and vishing and mail fraud. The black-and-white mug shot showed a young man with a shaved skull glowering at the camera. Save for the tats and piercings he looked remarkably like Otto.
“You see why I mistook you for Kleiser?”
Otto shrugged and slid the file back. “Perfectly understandable.”
“Kleiser lives in Arvada and boasts that he’s going to walk into FBI HQ and personally erase our hard drives. He’s head of a group of cyber-hackers call themselves Black Widow. They’re going to smash the capitalist structure blah blah blah. They have a website but don’t go there--they’ll come back at you. I think they’re dealing meth too.”
“Is DEA involved?”
“I have no evidence. Just a hunch.”
“What’s his problem?”
“In 2008, his girlfriend Patty Ivan died aboard a SW flight from Denver to Austin. Kleiser blames the TSA and the whole federal apparatus in fact for her loss.”
“Really,” Otto said. “Why would he do that?”
Hornbuckle shrugged. “Maybe meth has turned his brain to mush?”
“You met Kleiser?”
“Not yet. But I will. So you’re the go-to guy on spontaneous human combustion. There must be other cases.”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”
“So you married? Got kids?”
“No and no. You?”
“Not me. I have bad luck with the ladies. I’d rather pay for it.”
“Good for you.”
Hornbuckle laughed, drained his martini and looked around for the waitress.
“What’s funny?”
“They throw us together on some clusterfuck deal that goes ass end up, and you and I are the only survivors. We’d never met until Cairo, right? And here we are years later getting to know one another.”
Steve whined and nudged Otto’s leg. “’Scuse me while I walk Steve.”
“Sure.”
Otto held the door for an elderly couple entering then he and Steve walked outside into the warm Denver evening. They walked around the corner to Palmer Street where Steve relieved himself on a construction site. When Otto and Steve went back inside, Hornbuckle was at the bar with some other agents and a fresh martini in front of him.
Otto quietly retrieved his backpack, put money on the table and left.
***
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“The Wrong Room”
Wednesday night.
Quinn the Eskimo knelt in his motel room, ground floor end, stripped to the waist wearing black sweat pants. His lean torso glistened with sweat, veins and muscles popping after a forty-five minute work-out. His black hair was cut short, pale blue eyes fixed on some point in the mid-Pacific, miles from Indio, where he was.
Five years. It had taken him five years to catch up with Master Gunnery Sergeant Alec Hathaway who saw something at Surir he should not have seen and had been running ever since. Hathaway was no fool and had that survivalist mind-set so that when the time came he was ready. Benson never could figure how Hathaway got out of the Mideast. He intended to ask the sergeant about that. It was Benson's own fault he'd spent the past five years tracking Hathaway. Benson had come along to insure that there were only two survivors. Not that he’d spent the entire five years on Hathaway. ’He had also performed scores of minor ops from drop-offs to security to intel. He’d performed four sanctions, slightly less than one a year.
Quinn rose silently and turned toward the nightstand on which lay his Old Testament. Why did the motels only have the New Testament and the Book of Mormon? Quinn was grateful there was no Koran.
He picked the Bible up and opened it to the ribboned bookmark. “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”
He set the Bible down, went into the bathroom, stripped and took a shower. He toweled off and slipped into olive green cargo pants, black Adidas, black turtleneck and a black watch cap he could pull down over his face. He grabbed his gear, locked the door and got into his battered ’88 Ford F-150 that he’d bought from a Mexican for $250 one week ago sans license or title. Quinn had his own license and title.
He got on the 111 and headed southeast toward the Salton Sea. It was ten p.m. and the highway was feverish with vehicles heading west, heading east. Quinn wondered who they were, what series of events had brought them to this place, driving across one of the bleakest stretches of America, a sort of American Negev complete with its own Dead Sea. He saw illegals, coyotes, dope dealers, gangbangers, and mercenaries. He never saw people, only hustlers or marks.
When Quinn’s father made the difficult transition from the Yukon to Detroit to build a better life for his family he plunked Quinn down in the middle of an inner city school where he was bullied on a daily basis by the mostly black student body for his looks, his hair, his strange manner of speech. He got beat on a lot. One day he discovered Bruce Lee at the Roxy, Special Matinee:
The Big Boss
and
The Chinese Connection
, one dollar. Quinn remained in his seat long after the credits had rolled and they’d turned up the light, mesmerized by what he’d seen.
Thereafter he spent every day at the dojo, turning his scrawny body into an anatomy lesson. He was a black belt at sixteen. He was ungodly fast. He fucked up a couple star athletes and word began to get around.
Don’t mess with the Eskimo. They sang “Quinn the Eskimo” behind his back but not so he could hear it. Quinn studied pre-law at Michigan State, which he attended on a gymnastics scholarship. The Agency recruited him when he was a sophomore. He could pass for white, Asian or Latino. He had a gift for languages. English was his second.
And here he was driving to Slab City to perform a sanction. He never really wanted to be a lawyer.
How low did a man have to fall to end up at Slab City, the sad remains of a failed subdivision at the north end of the Salton Sea, now a campground of last resort for losers, fugitives, or those who simply wanted to be left alone?
Hathaway knew how to forge documents and disappear. He’d slipped up when he ordered his favorite cigars from Tobacco Imports in Miami and had them delivered to a post office box in Indio. Quinn had been tracking the company’s orders for years. For five years he’d chased down one false lead after another. Fortunately there weren’t too many as the cigars were very exclusive and very expensive. Quinn figured Hathaway was out of the country for a lot of that time, probably in Costa Rica.
But Quinn had been unable to find him in Costa Rica. So he staked out the PO box in Indio and one day a Mexican kid driving a rattle-trap pick-up stopped in and emptied the box. Quinn intercepted him in the parking lot, showed him a badge and a photo.
“You know this guy?”
The kid was scared shitless. Hathaway, who called himself Meeks, had paid the kid twenty bucks to go and get his ‘gars. Quinn paid him a hundred to show where “Meeks” live, and to keep his mouth shut. Quinn promised another hundred the following day.
There would be no following day.
Quinn saw the sprawling encampment from the highway, glowing low and softly like a phosphorescent swamp. Hathaway was living in a run-down Grand Courier that he’d taken over from an old drunk whom he paid cash. It was still in the last owner’s name, not that anybody gave a shit. Nobody at Slab City paid federal taxes. The only taxes they paid was when they bought food or booze.
Quinn despised them.
He parked his battered truck on cracked concrete near a pile of rubble consisting mostly of concrete with rebars. Plastic grocery bags tumbled gracefully past in the steady breeze. Even at this hour of night it was warm. Quinn got out and looked up. He saw a million stars. There was something to be said for living in the country.
Just not this country.
Quinn carried a 9 mm Sig with suppressor made from a plastic liter Pepsi bottle and duct tape. There was no moon but a million stars cast a glow on the desert. Quinn jogged silently through the streets with names like Lilac Lane, and Moon View Court, heading toward the far fringes of the settlement and Hathaway’s trailer.
It was two-thirty. A faint amber glow emanated from the living room window of the trailer, which rested on concrete blocks with a propane tank at one end. The nearest trailer was ten meters. The old pick-up truck was parked next to the front door. Quinn crouched by a dumpster and surveilled the trailer. He looked beneath the trailer, between the concrete blocks and saw several lawn chairs on the opposite side, and a pair of legs.
The faintest whiff of a Cohiba wafted his way filling him with rage. What kind of patriot buys Cuban cigars? If Quinn weren’t intent on killing Hathaway, he would have arrested him for trafficking in illegal materials.
“And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou?,” Quinn mouthed silently to himself. “Then Satan answered the Lord, and said: From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
Silent as the grave Quinn dashed to the propane end of the trailer and slunk around with his back to it. From a crouching position he saw Hathaway, now with a gut, sitting in his lawn chair, the faint red glare of his cigar flaring. Quinn brought the Sig up and approached Hathaway from his left side, no more than a shadow.
Two big hands reached out from beneath the trailer, grabbed Quinn by the ankles and jerked savagely causing him to slam onto the concrete slab and lose his pistol. The real Hathaway who had been hiding beneath the trailer ever since Miguel had told him of his strange encounter was on top of Quinn in an instant, straddling him and beating the shit out of him.
Quinn reached for the eye gouge creating a little room that he used to buck off the much heavier Hathaway, draw back and slam his heel into Hathaway’s crotch. Hathaway was wearing a cup! It provided little protection from Quinn’s dragon stomp and Hathaway folded gasping. Quinn sprang to his feet like a pop-up frog and scooped his pistol.
Both men were breathing hard.
That little prick Miguel.
“I knew…you’d come…” Hathaway rasped.
“Why…why’d you come back?” Quinn said keeping his voice low.
“I just got tired of running. You nearly got me in Sao Paulo. Freelancers in Belize. I thought I was through with the killing.”
For a second both men gasped for breath.
“It was the lab, wasn’t it?” Hathaway said at last.
“Yes,” Quinn confirmed.
“Did you know it was there?”
“We knew something was there. We didn’t know what it was.”
“A lab where they burned people to death. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since.”
“‘He giveth his beloved sleep,’“ Quinn said, putting two in Hathaway’s head.
***
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Spreads”
Wednesday night.
Otto and Steve walked two blocks back to the Best Western. Otto let himself into his room from the patio never passing through the hotel lobby. The little red light on the house phone blinked rapidly.
Otto filled the ice bucket with water for Steve, sat down on the bed, opened a notepad, took out a pen and listened to his messages. First was Stella.
“Just checking to see if everything went okay. Call me.”
The front desk wanted to know if he needed anything.
Otto took off his shoes, got on the bed and pulled out the laptop. He brought up the vic files. Forty-five minutes later he learned that in ‘09 Froines had been a guest at Pawnee Grove, a think tank/campground outside Estes Park.
It rang a bell. Otto set down the file and gazed unfocused at the wall, hearing the whoosh of traffic on nearby Stout Street, faint television chatter through the walls, the clink of dishes in the corridor.
Pawnee Grove. Sen. Darling had also been a guest.
Otto glanced at the clock--nine-thirty. He was usually asleep by now.
But Otto couldn’t sleep. His mind was a roiling sea of conjecture, apprehension and anticipation. Uneasy. He thought about the last time he’d been to confession. Five years ago, was it? Just before the Libya mission. He made the sign of the cross.
He thought about the things he’d done since then. Surely he was damned.
Steve jumped on the bed jolting Otto from his reverie. He automatically ruffled the big dog’s fur, reached for the remote and turned on the TV. He ran through channels until he came to CNN. Fire fighters and pumper trucks arcing water into an Atlanta office building. An unctuous young thing appeared in front of the image.
“Firefighters believe the blaze started on the top floor. We are trying to confirm if Boogie Down Productions President and CEO Fonzelle Armstrong is still in the building. Chet?”
The image switched to the anchor desk, a middle-aged man of serious mien. “Thank you Charlotte. Please keep us updated.”
Otto hit the mute. Fonzelle Armstrong had come up from Atlanta’s hard streets to forge a career as a rapper and a record mogul, signing Los Negativos, Darius Strange, and Little Miss Money Maker. He had signed the bizarre and diminutive Korean hip-hopper Sis Boom Ba, whose eerie wail had even penetrated Otto’s skull during the long wet spring whenever he ventured into town or turned on the truck’s radio. Her noxious ditty “Boom-Ba Style” was everywhere like a jackhammer.
May I please have your atencio! My plan is reprehencio!
Won’t keep you in suspencio, BOOM-Ba BOOM-Ba BOOM-Ba!
Armstrong had since branched out into clothing and become unlikely friends with Richard Branson.
Bad juju.
Otto sensed impending crisis. He’d sensed it all his life and tried not to let it dictate his actions or personality. As the senator once told him, attitude is everything. Paranoids may be right but they were miserable. The history of mankind was one crisis after another.
But something new was in the air--something vile, gelid and unnatural. Otto felt it gathering force in his blood. His instinctive reaction was to stock up on ammo and ready meals and head for the hills. He’d been convinced mankind was on the brink of extinction since he was twelve years old. The Professor was big on Toffler, Malthus, Ehrlich. The sky was always falling. On this, Otto and the Prof saw eye to eye. The Prof installed a bomb shelter the year Reagan was elected, convinced of imminent nuclear conflagration. Otto used to sneak down with his pals to get high.
He got up, let Steve out for a tinkle, stripped off his clothes and got in bed.
Otto tossed and turned. Hornbuckle’s appearance was upsetting. Otto worked his way through a jungle of maybes and might-have-beens before finally vowing to go to confession. Get it off his chest. Come clean. Eventually he fell asleep.
***