Eden Plague - Latest Edition (32 page)

I sat there at the righted table and tried to concentrate on the present. The fog was closing down again, because the speed was wearing off. I wanted a drink. I wanted a nap. I was staring at a dead man leaking all over my old wall-to-wall carpet, and he wasn’t going to get any better if he hadn’t already, I was pretty sure. Elise, if she was telling the truth, had said Jenkins didn’t have the healing drug, or whatever it was.

But at least there were no sirens racing for my house, so no one had reported the gunshots or anything unusual. The basement walls were thick, cinder block set mostly below ground. I guess no one heard the two extra pops when I…my mind shied away.

On the other hand, Elise was probably already reporting to her Agency masters and there would soon be a cleanup team on the way. They might make it all go away, or they might set it up to implicate me, or they might come try to recruit me using a different approach - something a lot more certain. Like eight Men In Black with body armor and tranquilizer darts and beanbag rounds. I tried not to imagine, tried to stay on track, tried to stick to the facts.

Instead, I sat there staring at the body.

Should I call the cops? Was it easier to deal with the local authorities, claim a righteous shoot in my own home? But I’d have to rearrange the scene, because I’d just executed Jenkins. No matter how you sliced it, I’d killed him in hot blood, without just cause.

With Miss Wallis, had she stayed dead, I’d have had justification. She’d had a weapon, she’d fired on me. In fact, the weapon should still be down there, all the proof I needed. Elise had bolted out my still-open side door. She’d had no time to detour to the basement.

No, I had to either deal with the Agency, or I had to run.

Flight was an option. Disappear, get out of the country. Slip across to Mexico before the alarm went out, from there to points south. Take a tramp freighter to South Africa maybe, sell my skills. Private security firms there like guys with combat experience. They’d get me a new identity, if I was willing to be one of their quasi-mercenary security contractors and kick back part of my pay. I’d made some good contacts in the Green Zone in Baghdad. The Zone had been a patchwork of embassy territories then for a while, with South Africans, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Philippinos, even Gurkas providing security for each little walled compound.

I shook myself out of the fog of reminiscence. I had to do something, I had to act, or I was going to be acted upon. But I didn’t want to run. It was not in my nature.

My phone rang.

I stared stupidly at it for a couple of rings. Nobody called my home phone but telemarketers and work, and I didn’t have the kind of job that called you after hours. I heaved myself up and grabbed the handset, looked at the number. I didn’t recognize it but it was 703. Local, Northern Virginia. Telemarketers had other numbers, 866 or 877 or weird ones from foreign countries that tried to scam people.

I decided to answer it. Maybe they wanted to talk, whoever ‘they’ were. Maybe I wanted to listen. Maybe there was some way out of this mess.

“Hello?”

“Dan?” It sounded like Miss Wallis.

“Yeah. Elise?”

“Yes Dan. We have a little time. They don’t know what happened yet. When they do, they will probably want to clean up and they’re going to insist you join up. If you don’t play ball, they’ll either do you the hard way, frame you or disappear you.” She had a trace of Texas in her voice now, if I knew my Westerns.

“About like I thought. What are we gonna do about it?” I suddenly had a feeling she was in a tough spot, too, having failed and lost her boss. Or maybe she wanted out of their grip. She said she’d had no choice.

Or maybe it was all a crock of bull.

“I want to talk with you, but not on an unsecure line, and not at the wrong end of a gun. Something a bit more friendly.”

“How do we do that? You could be armed next time, and I can’t come back from the dead.”

“I didn’t do that, I wasn’t dead. I can be killed. It’s just harder. And it still hurts to be shot.”

“So you say. How and where? And don’t you think they
are
listening right now?”

“Possibly.” She sighed, audibly. “Look, I’m sick of being their slave. I have to get out from under, no matter how dangerous it is. So we have to meet, and we have to do it soon, before they can keep me from giving you everything. And I need your help too. You must have contacts. You spec ops guys always keep in touch.”

“Maybe. So if they
are
listening, why don’t they cut this line?”

“You know, it’s not like on TV. They can do a lot but they’re only human. Don’t give them too much credit.”

“Or too little.”

“Yeah. And even if they could, they would want to hear where we are going to meet. They'll be waiting if they can.”

“Well, you’re the secret agent,” I said sarcastically. “How do we do it without getting caught?”

“Dan, I’m just a research analyst that happened to get cancer. I’m not a field operative. But I picked up a few things in the last couple of years, so here’s what we’re going to do. Go to a nearby shopping center drugstore. Don’t tell me which one. Go buy a fresh prepaid cell phone. Call this number.” She rattled off a phone number. “Add the number of shots I fired at you to the digit in that position. Get it?”

"Got it." Right, I thought. Add four to the fourth digit. I wrote it down on a scrap of paper, stuck it in my pocket. I couldn’t trust my memory.

“Call that number in half an hour exactly. First and last number you ever dial on that phone. We should be able to talk freely on that connection for long enough to arrange a meet. As soon as we have, you stomp on the phone and throw the pieces into the nearest storm drain. Got it? And do the same with your own cell phone, right now. They might be able to track it.”

“Okay…”

“And don’t go home after that. Take anything valuable you can carry, but somewhere along the line you will have to ditch your own vehicle. I don’t think they have a tracker on it but they will eventually. And get as much cash as you can out of just one ATM near the drugstore. Then drive away and make that call.”

“Got it.” I think.
Keep my focus
. It was getting hard. My head hurt. She hung up.

I slammed an energy drink and dropped two black-market but genuine Ritalin. I stuck the bottle in my pocket, grabbed an old ruck and started packing. Magazines and ammo, a box of granola bars, three bottles of water, the other two cans of energy drink, my work badge and ID, and my runaway packet containing twenty grand cash in several foreign currencies and two passports, one mine, one Canadian with a different name.

I may not be a covert field operative but any special ops guy learns a few things in the black world, and I wouldn’t visit that ATM. I grabbed my travel Bible, tossed it into the rucksack. I might need it, and I was sure to need the twelve hundred bucks I kept zipped inside it. It made me feel better anyway.
Sorry, Lord, and please help me out of this one.

I threw in a few other things I thought I might want.

I put on a hoodie, then a windbreaker. It was still cold on the East Coast, especially at night, and the sun was going down. I threw my laptop into the ruck, too. Then I booted up my desktop computer and put in a suicide code, watched the special software start to burn my hard drive one sector at a time. They wouldn’t get anything off that. Then I smashed my cell phone.

I also grabbed my M4 in its case, ten full magazines, my Remington 870 pump shotgun, and my Army surplus ammo box, heavy with boxes of cartridges. The last thing I tossed into my van was my aid bag. Everything imaginable from band-aids to Benzedrine, scalpels to syringes.

Then I did as Elise had said, sort of. I drove to the second-nearest drugstore to my house in case they had been listening, and bought a disposable phone with cash. It was all cash from now on.

Back in the van, I drove out of town on the main road heading west as I waited for the half hour mark. I pulled over into a gas station and filled up. As soon as I was done, I drove around a corner onto a side street, parked, and then dialed the number.

“Yeah,” I heard Elise’s voice.

“It’s me. I’m mobile, I got money and some supplies.” I could hear traffic sounds behind her. I figured she was at a pay phone. Not many of those around anymore.

“All right. You know the Iron Saddle?”

“Biker bar, on Route One south of Quantico.”

“Yeah. Meet me there, one hour.”

“Roger wilco.”

She hung up, and I started wending my way south, then back eastwards to pick up US-1 at Dumfries north of Quantico Marine base. I was glad to stay in Virginia, where it was legal to carry around loaded firearms.

I laughed to myself, humorlessly. I was a recent murderer, or at least a manslaughterer, and no matter how justified it seemed, I had lost control and I was guilty, but I didn’t want to become a guest of the state just yet. And maybe I could do something to make up for it later. Some kind of penance.

Right. I kept trying to convince myself too. The serpent didn’t believe it either.

I passed the Marine Corps museum in the dark, the blazing spire on the roof reminiscent of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima. My grandfather had been there; Gunnery Sergeant Donald James Markis, USMC. I suppressed a strong impulse to turn into the parking lot. To put off this rendezvous for as long as I could. Driving south on US-1 through the cold quiet in my familiar musty van, time seemed suspended for a little while.

I wished I had a cigarette. Since I didn’t, I tortured myself by imagining I did. I thought of the last time I’d smoked one, with Gramps as he was dying of emphysema in hospice. I’d helped him out of the oxygen rig and onto the balcony, to suck down one last forbidden coffin nail before I said good night.

I should have said goodbye.

My eyes watered, and I squeezed them with thumb and forefinger.
Goodbye, Gramps. Maybe I
’
ll see you soon.

I realized I hardly cared at this point. I didn’t think I had much to live for. My brain was messed up, like my life. I barely held onto my job on Fort Belvoir, trying desperately to keep up with even the light workload they gave me. Hanging out with the other retired shooters and door-kickers, green and maroon and black berets and tabs and coins sitting in their sterile cubes and offices, marking time, milking our security clearances for a few more bucks. Staring at my own beret perched on the shelf above my computer screen, the Pararescue flash with its guardian angel, cradling the world in its arms, a symbol of what I was and never would be again. Reminiscing war stories. Trying to keep my hand in.

Trying to starve the serpent.

Trying to look myself in the mirror every morning, knowing I was useless. They wouldn’t let me put my hands on a patient, wouldn’t let me practice. I couldn’t even drive an ambulance, much less work trauma. Just push papers. Be a consultant.

A man who couldn’t do his job wasn’t a man.

But I had done the job today. I had taken a shooter down like the pro I used to be, and if she had been human, I could have patched her up too, if I hadn’t killed her. Only I hadn’t killed her, I’d killed the suit, and I couldn’t patch him up from dead.

My stomach clenched. No excuse for that. I’d crossed the line from watchdog to wolf. I’d bitten the hand that fed me, no matter how much that hand stank. I’d murdered a duly appointed representative of the United States government, and they never forget that.

They would never let me rest.

I could imagine what my father would say.
Come on, Dan, pull your head out. You have a vehicle, you have an ally, you have a mission
–
and you have resources as yet untapped.

Now all I needed was to care. That was the hard part.

The Iron Saddle came up on my right, a big parking lot filled with bikes surrounding a faux-western building with an enormous roof extension to the front, providing a covered space. Even tonight, temperature in the forties and a bit of a breeze, there were ten or twenty bikers and their camp followers outside, under the roof or sitting on the bikes, knocking back a few. Most of them would be inside, though it shouldn’t be too busy, being Wednesday night.

I steered the van sharply to the right, went around the building, parked nose-out in the left rear corner, under a hanging tree limb. Easy to see out of, hard to be seen. I sat there for a minute, checked the dive watch on my wrist. 300M, it said to me, and 18:56. Four minutes to seven. Close enough, and better to be early than late.

I used the time to settle the XD in a belly holster, threading the clip holder onto my belt. I reloaded with the rest of the hollow-points and finished the magazines off with ball ammo from the box. If it seemed likely I would have to shoot any of Elise’s super-healers, I had the 12-gauge and the M-4 assault rifle.

I got those ready too, and by that time it was four minutes after, so I slid the long guns onto the floor, threw an old sleeping bag over them, and got out of the van. I crossed the parking lot warily toward the back door, the Ritalin still singing in my veins, but I knew it wouldn’t last.

I shouldn’t have taken those extra minutes. My obsessive desire to be prepared had betrayed me, those eight precious minutes, as the back door flew open and Elise burst through.

She was running flat out and a man stepped into the doorway beyond with something big and gunlike in his hands.

BOOM, BOOM, like a shotgun but twice as loud, and Elise staggered and fell down, off to my left. Strangely, I felt like it was me that got hit.

The serpent hissed and I drew the XD and laid down covering fire in the direction of the lighted doorway while I crabbed sideways toward my fallen comrade. I figured that was what she was now. I grabbed the back of her jacket collar with my left hand and dragged her behind a convenient Harley trailer, popping off a couple more shots at the doorway. There was blood all over her, again, and all over my hand and arm now.

“Dan,” Elise gasped, “get out of here. Leave me. I’ll be fine, they just want me back on the leash. Here…” She reached up with one hand to grab my wrist. She pulled it down toward her face.