Brothers In Arms (4 page)

The Torture Rehabilitation Center is a large Victorian house surrounded by a few outbuildings in a green and out-of-the-way corner of the University of Minnesota campus. Within its quiet, pastel-painted rooms, some of the best medical and psychological practitioners in the country went about their business, which was the rebuilding of human beings. To this quiet place came people whose screams had beaten on walls in Guatemala, Iraq, Iran, Rwanda, China, and other places. Either thrown out of the country, or bought out by relatives, the broken ones found their way to the Center, which worked on only the worst cases, those in the profoundly broken psychological state that only the worst forms of torture could manifest.

Dr. Rowan Green was a slight woman in her late forties, with a perpetually frizzled hairdo untidily pulled back from her face. She wore her glasses round her neck with a chain for the practical reason that she would otherwise forget them in her rounds of the patients’ quarters and therapy rooms. Today she walked briskly down a polished hallway, her low sensible heels clacking a quick cadence, and as she walked she twisted her eyeglass chain around her finger again and again.

She came to a patient room and stood outside the door for a
moment, listening, then opened the door gently and went in. Inside, a man in an expensive sweat suit and running shoes sat in the armchair beside the powered bed. The man was dark complected, with shaggy black hair, and he was thin in the way of someone who had once been bigger. His shoulders, seemingly too wide for him, were hunched forward as though he were a ball player protecting the ball clutched tight to his chest. He stared at the small television mounted in the wall which was set to a local news station.

“Mr. Uday?” Dr. Green said. “Mr. Uday? What are we watching?”

The man smiled and looked at her, then his eyes rolled to show the white.

“Some days, they are very close,” he said.

“Who is very close, Mr. Uday?”

“I never know.”

“What are we watching?” Dr. Green looked at the screen. The sound was muted, but the videotape showed ambulances and bodies being carried away. She recognized the area immediately; she spent a fair amount of time in the Linden Hills area, and her children enjoyed going to the ice cream parlor that figured so prominently on the screen. She took the remote control from the unresisting fingers of Mr. Uday and turned on the sound.

“. . . the shooting of a business executive in West Minneapolis today has police . . .”

She turned the sound off again and looked at Mr. Uday.

“They think they are close, but they are not so far,” Mr. Uday said.

“Are they close?”

“Ask the one they found.”

“Who did they find?”

Uday looked at the television set with dark, dead eyes. “They found who they think they found.”

“It’s time for us to talk, Mr. Uday. Would you like to come with me now?”

“They want the talking for themselves. They want to have a sad holiday. They don’t want you.”

“Come,” Dr. Green said. She turned the television off, set the remote down, then took Uday gently by his arm. His muscles were flabby and hung on the bone like overdone meat. “Let’s go to my office, shall we?”

The man rose. He limped as he came forward.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Ray Dalton was a tall, aquiline man who dressed in expensive custom-tailored business suits when he came to his offices in Fairfax, Virginia. His offices were in a building owned and run by the CIA, and anyone entering the building had to run a gauntlet of security measures, some overt, like the big capable armed guards at the front reception area, others covert, like the hidden cameras and biometric sensors outside the doors to his suite. The security was there for a reason, as Ray Dalton ran one of the most secretive units in the US government, a special project called
DOMINANCE RAIN. DOMINANCE RAIN
was a black operation run completely off the shelf and reserved for only the most critical and strategic of special operations, which was why he had his pick of the best from Delta Force, the SEAL teams, Marine Force Recon, and the Agency paramilitary program.

He sat behind his sprawling desk and watched with intense interest the videotape of the Linden Hills hit, and quashed the feelings that rose in him when he saw Dale Miller and Charley Payne talking together. He knew of both men. Charley Payne he knew from the records; Payne was a former operator with the CIA’s Special Activities Staff, an elite paramilitary unit that had much in common with his own. The two units had worked together in the past on missions.

But it was Dale Miller who he kept coming back to. Dale Miller
had been one of Ray’s best, a hand-picked
DOMINANCE RAIN
operator. Ray had sent him out after an escaped convict named Jonny Maxwell, who had worked for Ray till he went bad and went to prison. He’d also been Dale Miller’s best friend.

And Dale, as ordered, found and killed him.

And then Dale orchestrated his own retirement and put himself on the outside by choice. Though
DOMINANCE RAIN
kept track of their own, their attempts at contact had been rebuffed by the bitter ex-operator. Dale had moved in with a woman, a female detective he’d met during the operation to find Jonny Maxwell, and found part-time employment as a firearms and tactics instructor for the Minneapolis Police Department. He kept a low profile and had no known contact with any current operators. He’d burned his bridges and seemed glad about it.

It was sheer coincidence that he was there when the Linden Hills hit went down. But the fact that he was there gave Ray Dalton an insight into how to solve the problem he had before him now. He sat back in his executive chair and riffled through his Rolodex. He found the name and the number he was looking for. The number he dialed was of an elite international security company headquartered in the Washington Beltway, its offices not far from his. He told the secretary who answered the phone his name and that he wished to speak to Michael Callan. After a moment the man came on the line.

“Hello?”

“Mike, it’s Ray Dalton.”

“That’s what my girl said. I looked out the window, but I don’t see any pigs flying. That’s how long it’s been since we talked. What are you up to, Ray?”

“Same thing as when you worked for me,” Dalton said. “Got a job over there for me?”

“I couldn’t hire you, you’d have my job in a week. But if you’re serious . . .”

Ray chuckled. “I’m not quite ready for the life of the corporate security pro, Mike. It’s tempting, but I’ve still got a few good years over here.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing. It’s not just the money . . . we do things right. There’s some politics, but nothing you couldn’t handle.”

“I could use some peace from that. But that’s not why I called.”

“I didn’t think so. What do you need that the G can’t get for you?”

Ray laughed again. It was a pleasure not to have to talk around a subject. “I need you, Mike. I need you to come have lunch with me and talk with me about having a talk with someone else. There’s somebody I need brought in on a job and he won’t talk to me. But he worked with you and would listen to what you have to say.”

“Worked with me but won’t talk to you? Is this a civilian we’re talking about?”

“He is now.”

Callan paused for a long moment, and then his voice grew hard. “That’s a short list we’re talking about. And if it’s who I think it might be, I’ll remind you he’s my friend. I didn’t think much about how that whole thing went down.”

Ray’s voice was soothing. “That’s why we need to have lunch and a talk. I’ve got some tape to show you. Then we can discuss what we’re going to do and I think you’ll find it to be okay.”

“What are you going to ask me to ask him?”

“I’m going to offer him a job.”

In the chaos of the crime scene in Linden Hills, Dale Miller and Charley Payne surrendered their personal weapons to a female forensics technician in a blue jacket emblazoned with
POLICE
across the back.

“I’ll take care of these for you guys,” she said. “We’ll see about getting them back to you as quick as we can.”

“Thanks, Francine,” Charley said. “I hate feeling naked in such a violent world.”

“That your only shooter?” Dale said.

The two men studied each other. Payne was tall and thin, but hard muscled beneath his baggy work shirt. His face was long and lined with grooves that started at his hairline and ran to his chin.

“Yeah,” Charley said. “You?”

“There’s always a spare if you’re a firearms instructor.”

“Lucky you. Want to lend me one?”

Dale looked Charley up first, then down. “I’d have to know you better. Maybe you should buy me a cup of coffee.”

“That would be an interesting conversation.”

One of the detectives standing nearby looked up from his notebook. “I’d’ve thought you two secret squirrels would have run into each other by now.”

“Is that right, Rocco?” Dale said. “We’re secret squirrels?”

“You were,” Rocco said. “Charley too, I hear.”

Charley pursed his lips before he answered. “Something like that. We’ll catch that coffee sometime, Miller. I’ve got to go.”

“All right,” Dale said. He pointed at the Sebastian Joe’s outdoor patio. “I’m over here every morning, just like clockwork. And you’re over there at the Linden Hills Diner, just like clockwork. Cross the street sometime, take a walk on the wild side. I’ll buy you coffee and a roll.”

“I’m that obvious, huh?”

“Not too many top-flight shooters working this block, big boy.”

“I’ll do that,” Charley said. “Maybe tomorrow. I’ve got to go.”

Dale watched Charley walk down the street and through the doorway that led to the apartments above the Linden Hills Diner.

“You know that guy, Rocco?” Dale said.

Rocco nodded. “In a way. He works for the department, forensics photographer. That’s how he knows everybody. He was friends with Bobby Martaine, that cop that got whacked in that Cannibal Killer case a year back.”

“What’s his history? You know?”

“Some kind of contract guy for CIA supposedly. Quit them and came out here to work as a photographer. Don’t know much else. He’s a pretty good guy, gets along, and the guys in the bag like him. Good sense of humor and he takes good pictures. Did a wedding for one of the guys not long ago.”

“What do you have on the guy that got whacked?”

“Which one? You may have noticed we have a few.”

“The one they were protecting.”

Rocco brushed back the long black hair that fell across his forehead and flipped through his notebook. “He had a Honduran passport on him, name of Rhaman Uday. His team was from United Security, expensive local outfit. The team leader, we knew him, he was an ex-cop from Minneapolis, sergeant on the ERU named Heritage. One of the other dead bodyguards was a cop, too.”

“Anything on the shooters?” Dale said.

“The women? They were stone pros. Disappeared without a trace. We’re canvassing the neighborhood and putting out the word on the TV that we want to talk to anybody that saw them or the moped. Nothing yet, and I’m not too hopeful. If we haven’t heard anything yet, I don’t think we’re going to.”

Dale rubbed his hands together, then stuck them in the rear pockets of his Levis and looked over the street, blocked with police cars and yellow tape. “I’m going home and get another gun. This neighborhood is getting too damn dangerous for me.”