BAD DEEDS: A Dylan Hunter Thriller (Dylan Hunter Thrillers) (22 page)

“When Don Kessler recruited me, he already knew I was pretty much a loner.”

“‘Pretty much’?”

“Okay, a loner—period. I’m sure Grant told you that they never wanted me to be stuck under official cover in some embassy, making the rounds of diplomatic cocktail parties. They specifically recruited me to be a NOC. No official cover, out in the field, cut off from regular contact with station chiefs and ambassadors and—above all—the bureaucracies at Langley and at State.”

“He told me. Grant was to shield you from all that.”

“Exactly.” Through the diamond-shaped, leaded panes of the Tudor living room’s casement window, he watched Garrett’s silhouette in the front yard, hands in his coat pockets. A red dot glowed at his lips, then faded. “And for the most part, he did a fantastic job. I ruffled a lot of feathers. He was always there to smooth them for me. So I got away with plenty … But still, I couldn’t accomplish what I set out to do there.”

“They weren’t interested in justice.”

“It’s not that they weren’t interested. As you know, the Agency has a lot of good people. A lot of
great
people. It’s just that they were—are—captives of politics. The seventh floor—what Grant refers to, collectively, as ‘the Corner Office’—answers ultimately to politicians. And justice is the last thing on the minds of politicians.” He saw her weak smile, realizing that it must mirror the one he felt on his own lips. “I tried to do the right things, Annie, the things the Agency is supposed to do: You know—make sure our friends were rewarded, our enemies punished. But I was thwarted at every turn. Again and again, simple justice was sacrificed for political expediency and bureaucratic convenience. It took me a long time to realize that I didn’t belong there. That bureaucracy and justice just don’t mix.”

“God. You make
me w
ant to resign.”

“Don’t even joke about that. Look, it’s just me. I’m temperamentally unsuited for work inside an organization. Any organization, really. But you and Grant—you’ve learned to navigate the bureaucracy. To turn it to your own purposes and be effective. I can’t tell you how much I admire you for that. It’s a skill I lack. Annie, I’m glad you’re both there, doing what you do. You and he are keeping the wheels from falling off.”

She ran her warm palm over the back of his hand. “But you—you need to be autonomous.”

“As Kipling said: ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone.’”

She pouted. “
Alone
, huh? And
how
autonomous?”

He raised both her hands to his heart. “Not
that
autonomous, Annie Woods.”

They heard the door. Garrett entered, coughing, and saw them.

“Oops. Am I interrupting something?”

“Just a discussion about the boundaries of Dylan’s autonomy,” she said.

“Ah.” He looked straight at Hunter. “Something I wanted to chat about with him myself.”

“Well, let me give you that opportunity,” she said, rising. “I need to freshen up, then put on some going-home coffee for you and the gentlemen you left freezing outside.”

Rusty parked the truck behind a large pine off the opposite side of the road from the Silva place. He made sure it was invisible to the rare passing cars.

A few minutes later, Zak was back inside with him, explaining what he had found. Then they sat quietly for a while. Through a gap in the overhanging branches Rusty could make out a single glowing rectangle across the road.

“It won’t be much longer,” Zak said, giving voice to his own thoughts. “When that bedroom light goes out, I’ll wait ten more minutes, then go in and set the charges.”

“I’m sure glad he does have a separate lab,” Rusty said. “But how are you going to get him to go out there?”

“I’ll set off a small incendiary device in the back of his office, away from its entrance. Then I’ll phone him, posing as a passing neighbor, and tell him about the fire. I know his type: He’ll order his wife to call the fire department while he rushes out there to save his work.” Rusty watched a slow smile form on his friend’s lips. “But unlike what happened at the Flynn cabin, I’ll be hiding in the trees, watching it all happen.”

Zak picked up the cell phone resting on his lap and tossed it lightly in his hand. His smile broadened.

“And this time, I won’t depend on the bombs going off all by themselves. All I’ll have to do is place a call.”

Garrett took a seat in a recliner beside the sofa. He nodded toward where Annie had just left the room.

“You’ve got yourself a great future there, fella.”

“Don’t I know it. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me, Grant.”

“Then don’t blow it.”

The harsh tone startled him even more than the words.

“What in hell makes you think I’d ever want to do that?”

“I didn’t say you’d
want
to.” Garrett eased back the recliner and settled his hands onto the armrests. “But if you aren’t careful, you might do that anyway.”

Hunter fought down a jolt of anger. He was about to speak, but Garrett raised a hand.

“Hear me out. I speak from experience … In all the years you’ve known me, you must have noticed that I don’t talk about my personal life. Ever. Want to know why? Because I don’t
have
one.”

He looked past Hunter, into the distance.

“But I did, once. A long time ago. When I was in my thirties … A wife and a daughter. A really cute little girl …”

He paused. The jaw muscle was working again.

“I had it all, Dylan. Beautiful wife. Adorable daughter. The proverbial house in the ’burbs with the proverbial picket fence and the proverbial dog. A loving little mutt named Taffy … But I blew it. She put up with me for about seven years before she had enough. Because I was never around. Never on the important days. Never on the unimportant ones, either—which are just as important, if you think about it. No, Grant Garrett was always off somewhere in Africa or Asia or Europe, on some grand adventure, some holy mission for God and country. You know—those sacred missions of lying to people, stealing their secrets, corrupting them so that they will betray their countries. And sometimes killing them.”

He coughed a few times.

“I was like you, then, Dylan. An idealist. I always did all those things, those nasty and terrible things, for the noble cause. Or so I told myself … But do you want to know the truth? The truth was that normal life
bored
me. I was an adrenaline junkie. Danger was my drug of choice. The rest—the noble cause with its high-minded oaths, its codes of conduct, its mission statements—that was all just bullshit rationalizing. The pathetic fact was that I loved living on the edge. I became addicted to it. And you can’t make a normal life with a wife and a kid and a dog, and expect them to live out there on the edge with you. Or to wait forever until you come back from it.
If
you come back.”

He cleared his throat again.

“You’re not quite like that, though, are you, Dylan? No, I don’t think you’re in love with danger for its own sake. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have your own addiction.”

Hunter thought about it.

“It doesn’t feel that way to me, inside,” he said. “But I’ll bite: What do you think I’m addicted to?”

Garrett moved the recliner upright; rested his forearm on his knee. “Not a feeling. But an abstraction. An ideal. What you call ‘justice.’”

Hunter looked at him while he searched his feelings some more. Then shook his head.

“What I call ‘justice,’” he said, “isn’t an abstraction. Not to me.”

Garrett said, “So when you take action, it’s mostly personal.”

“When I take action, it’s
always
personal.”

“All right,” Garrett said after a while. “Good. That means you aren’t a fanatic. You only respond to personal provocations. When someone you care about is involved. Victimized.”

“That’s right.”

“Well then. I guess it’s only a matter of establishing some priorities.” Garrett’s eyes tracked down the hallway where Annie had disappeared. “Just make sure you keep your priorities straight, Dylan.”

“I’ll try to do that.”

“I’m worried about that word ‘try.’”

Hunter nodded slowly. “I hear you.” He heard Annie moving in the kitchen. “Sometimes—” He stopped.

“Sometimes what?”

“Sometimes it’s hard to know where your highest loyalty should lie.”

“You mean, whether it should be to the person you love—or to your own sense of personal honor.”

It startled him.

“Dylan, I get that. You sometimes wonder if you’d be able to love her as much as you do—or if she’d love you as much as she does—if you were the kind of man who could just ‘walk away’ from things, as you like to put it. You wonder if she could possibly understand why you sometimes feel compelled to do things that you know she would hate. Things that could threaten your relationship. Like all that vigilante stuff last year.”

Hunter didn’t respond.

“And sometimes, you hate the fact that you
can’t
just ‘walk away.’ Life for you would be so much easier if you could. But you can’t, can you? And that bothers you, doesn’t it? So, you worry about your future with her. You know yourself well enough to realize that sometime, somewhere, somehow, push will come to shove again. And then you’ll be forced to choose between her and your sense of honor … And you know what? That’s exactly why I picked you out of all our CSTs, son. Because such things matter to you. Because you’re that kind of man.” A smile grazed his lips. “Yeah, I had all that in your file, too.”

Hunter remained silent for a moment. Then:

“Are you talking about me, Grant … or about yourself?”

It was Garrett’s turn to be startled; the only evidence was that he blinked a few times.

Hunter said, “What you just told me about your family—about losing them because you were an adrenaline junkie—that wasn’t true, was it? You loved them. You hated to be torn from them. You weren’t off chasing cheap thrills. You were off doing the work you had to do, because you knew it had to be done. And
you
couldn’t ‘walk away,’ either—could you, Grant?”

Garrett didn’t reply. Only his jaw muscle moved.

“Thank you for caring enough to tell me … what you just told me,” Hunter said.

Garrett coughed. Then glanced toward the kitchen. “I wonder if that coffee’s ready?”

The dash clock said ten-fifty.

“You want to give it more time?” Rusty asked.

“No. I’ve allowed them twenty minutes after the lights went out. They should be asleep.” Zak stretched in the cramped front seat; rolled his neck. “I figured out how to lay out the charges. His lab is not big at all. I’d bet that he just does basic screening and preliminary work here, then farms out more complicated stuff to outside labs. But from what we surmise, he did all the work on the NLA report here, by himself.”

Rusty didn’t ask Zak who he meant by “we.”

He recalled the photos on Silva’s professional website. The guy looked youngish and pleasant: brown hair, squarish glasses covering soft brown eyes, gentle smile. His wife and kids, appearing with him in a family portrait, looked white-bread wholesome, too. She was a pretty blonde; the two teen kids, a boy and a girl, looked cheerful and intelligent. He thought of them losing their husband and father. It bothered him, a little.

“So … you can’t just burn down his lab and office, then.”

Zak rolled his eyes. “
No
, Rusty, I can’t just burn down his lab and office. As I explained, he would simply redo his tests with new samples. And that would undermine the whole rationale for the EPA fracking moratorium. So he needs to be taken out of the picture, too.”

“I suppose so … But this action—it’ll be so obvious that it’s no accident, Zak. Won’t the cops figure out that somebody targeted this guy because of his work on fracking?”

“Which is precisely why I’m sending out a statement to the media tomorrow.” Zak sounded impatient now. “It will say that Silva was targeted because of his
past
work doing toxicology testing on animals. That should throw them off the scent—at least long enough for the EPA’s hydraulic fracturing panel to meet in another ten days and recommend the moratorium.” Zak sat motionless, peering at him in the near-darkness. “Getting cold feet, Rusty?”

“No! Hell, no, Zak. You know you can count on me. I’m just wanting us to be, you know, careful.”

“You realize how important this is, right?”

“Yeah. Of course I do.”

He reached behind Rusty’s seat for the black satchel, grunted as he lifted it and plopped it into his lap.

“This job will be more complicated because of the number of charges,” he said, unzipping the bag. “And because of what I’m using. I’ll need about forty-five minutes in there. But we’ll do it the same way as last time, with the walkie-talkies.”

Zak went through his familiar rituals: checking the bag’s contents and his field jacket pockets, pulling down his black ski mask, donning his gloves …

Then he faced Rusty. In the pale light of the dash, through the holes in the ski mask, his dark eyes gleamed and his teeth looked sharp and yellow. It took a few seconds for Rusty to realize that Zak was grinning at him. The man reached out and gripped Rusty’s shoulder.

“You know I couldn’t undertake these actions without you.”

Rusty felt a rush of pride. He swallowed.

But before he could think of what to say, Zak turned away and got out. He watched him cross the road, then once again vanish into the trees.

She laid aside the book she was reading and checked her bedside clock again.

11:15 p.m.

What is keeping him?

Grant had left a couple of hours earlier. Dylan told her he would be up “in a bit,” and she left him sitting on the sofa, a glass of wine in hand, staring into the glowing embers of the fire.

Something had seemed a bit off in his mood. She first felt it when she returned to the living room after she’d left the two of them to chat without her. Something in the way Dylan looked at her, then …

The thin curtains of her canopy bed hung around her, stirring slightly in the breeze from the slowly rotating overhead fan. She had expected him here an hour ago … perhaps to play their little game.