I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (37 page)

“I would have let it go,” Spencer realized. “But not now. Not ever.” They weren’t going to leave him alone. He wasn’t ever going to disappear, to live a quiet life. He was going to die. He knew that. All he could hope to do was die on his own terms.

Spencer reached over to the passenger seat, tilted the HK, and released the clip. He counted out four rounds, then replaced a fresh mag and switched the trigger setting from 4 to 2, semi-automatic. He pushed all but two of the credit cards and IDs into the wallets, opened the window, and tossed them deep into the bushes. He had plenty of cash. The tank was only a quarter-full; he would get food and water when he bought gas.

“They didn’t put out an APB before.” He was betting that they would keep law enforcement out of it now, too. With four hundred miles to cover, he counted on that bet to get him through.

He knew where he had to go; he had a long night ahead crossing Pennsylvania. By morning, he could be back to New York. By morning he intended to be crossing the bridge into Tarrytown. First order of business: he had to get a real weapon. The HK was for close-quarters work. He was coming for the Barrett.

“XMercy and Mouse aren’t anybody’s ‘collateral damage,’” he determined aloud. “They were my friends. I’m done with running away.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“There is never going to be a better time than now,” Jeffers said in his introduction to the assembled Vision Partners. “Some would argue that we should put our tails between our legs and lie low, but we have nothing to apologize about and we are not adopting a victim mentality! The takers, the do-nothing losers who want to drain our economic lifeblood, they always attack those whose hard work and vision makes us successful! I am proud to announce that Americans for Patriotic Action, along with the American Legislation Network, will be putting forward legislation in all fifty states, in Washington, D.C., and in Congress, to secure the rights of all American citizens to be free from discrimination based upon our economic status.

“We, Vision Partners, we are going to send this message loud and clear: Class warfare is a hate crime! Americans never need to apologize for success!”

*****

Owen couldn’t raise Bishop by telephone. He tried getting Miller on the hotel phone and cell phone; both times he was answered by automated voicemail: “the guest is not available, please leave your message at the tone.”

“Damn it!” Owen yelled. “I’m not here to sit in a hotel room!”

Miller wasn’t available because he was fully engaged in a video-conference, seated on the guest-side of Jeffers’ giant oak desk and speaking to Jeffers’ image on the monitor while APA’s leader was in flight. Jeffers was returning from a triumphant monthly meeting only to have his mood spoiled.

“Seven men dead,” Jeffers noted miserably.

“And two women,” Miller added. He had been fully briefed.

“Let’s say the entire operation has been crude,” Miller continued, “to keep the conversation polite. I have never met Mr. Rooks Bishop. All I can say is your sheriff left a trail of breadcrumbs leading right back to your desk here. He flew commercially, rented a car and a truck in his own name, and multiple witnesses can tie him to the death of Felicia Diane Reynolds. That moves Bishop from the asset column to a liability, and I don’t like loose ends.”

Jeffers paused, considering. Miller pitched before he came to the obvious conclusion.

“I’ll say it bluntly because I don’t think you’ll respect anything less. I get it. You’ve got yourself in a pickle. Every lie, every manipulation, every move you make, you get in deeper. You’re way outside your comfort zone, you have a lot to lose, and you need all of this to go away. So I’ll be your Mr. Wolf and I’ll clean up this mess. I’ll make it all go away. Secret prisons, enhanced interrogation, and this laundry list of federal, state, and international felonies that can’t be folded behind the corporate veil. Not even you can pull that off,” Miller said. “Spencer just took down a six-man assault team. It is going to get uglier; I don’t need to tell you that.

“I’ll find him and I’ll kill him for you, period. Make him disappear. My fee is $2.5 million, $500,000 up front, paid into an account that I’ll provide immediately, with an additional $2.5 million to follow upon delivery.” Downtime and good meals aside, he hadn’t left a good thing in Afghanistan with a short remaining shelf life to do real work for spare change. “Those are my terms. That’s about one percent of your gross this year. A rounding error. We both know his weapons stash was never uncovered. My hunch is he is right on it just about now. It’s going to get downright exciting, I’d say, but until I see money and support, I’ll be finding a quiet corner and taking a nice long nap.”

“And what about Bishop?” Jeffers wanted to know.

Miller considered momentarily then responded on the fly. “Bishop is fungible; he’s an anachronism, a superfluous Good Old Boy. And right now he’s a speed bump getting in the way.

“Remind him that he has signed your Non-Disclosure Agreement and that all provisions remain in full force and will be enforced to the fullest measure if he discusses his employment with anyone. Tell him that he will still be paid, but that he needs to disappear until West Virginia blows over,” Miller advised. “After that, have him leave the country. Give him airline tickets for a long vacation. Let’s say Brazil or Thailand. Better yet, you let him choose. Tell him that final compensation will be wired to either location. Then get the destination and flight number to me.”

He always paused ahead of making the conclusive close. “APA will never again see or hear from Rooks Bishop.”

*****

Stephen Nussbaum’s team continued tracking Spencer’s movements. Kip, the fourth tech, reported the first probable sighting when Spencer stopped at a Marathon Gas Station outside Cumberland, Virginia. The second hit came through by auto-text. Spencer ate at a Denny’s just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at 3 a.m. No Bishop, not that it mattered.

They can only plot his whereabouts
, Miller reminded Jeffers by text. Without an Operations Unit, they couldn’t intercept Spencer.
He has just decimated your team.

Miller intended to have his assets in place by 09:50. He texted:
Ready to get the job done. Still waiting on your wire.

Based upon Spencer’s present trajectory, Spencer was returning to the scene of the crime. Round 2.

Miller booked early morning flights, ExpressJet from Dulles-Newark.

They would be working from new facilities located in New Jersey. The techs were entirely portable; the Jersey warehouse had the one thing they required: screaming fast broadband. Miller located two of his Afghanistan snipers back at Ft. Bragg; he put them to work assembling separate fully outfitted six-man squads. He sub-contracted helicopter transport and was on task selecting a heliport to serve as their assembly point and the nearest cheap motel to put them up when they arrived.

“Where we heading?” Owen asked Miller.

“We’re going to North Bergen.”

“Proud home of James J. Braddock,” Owen observed. “
The Cinderella Man
.”

“What?”

“They made a movie,” he began to explain, and then shrugged it off.

“Nevermind,” he told Miller.

*****

Miller read through the case files, FBI/NYPD/NSA. They were all delivered straight to his internal storage, which meant, to his conclusion, that “The Client” had roving access wherever they wanted to go. Bringing himself up to speed on the killings was straightforward enough. He harbored no doubt as to Spencer’s capabilities; Spencer was an outstanding killing machine, proven time after time.
But why the “I Kill Rich People”?
he wondered. He couldn’t make sense out of that one. Miller thought Spencer was a Boy Scout, never imagined Spencer was a lefty. Then again, he had literally dropped ten thousand dollars into Spencer’s lap and he had passed on free money.

By all rights, Spencer should have been stabbed dead. If the Afghan hadn’t failed, none of this would be happening. They would have folded the flag and given it to Spencer’s next of kin. Case closed. He wouldn’t have just had the best meal of his life a few hours ago, on Bishop’s nickel, and he’d be light $2.5 million with $2.5 million more to come.

Thank you Afif,
Miller thought
.

“You want to kill this sonofabitch, right?!” Miller told Owen. “Your standard police procedures don’t apply, so let them go. I don’t want to hear about putting out any APB. City, state, and federal law enforcement aren’t coming into play. This gets buttoned down quietly. The people paying the freight want it that way and they get what they want. You got that?”

“Why?” Owen challenged.

“Again. Why all the secrecy? The last time, they left forty thousand cops in the dark. No APB, no suspect information whatsoever. A shoe size.”

“You’re the one who’s been champing at the bit to get going,” Miller snapped. “Cullen, it is what it is. You don’t like it; you can go home right now.”

“I still say having more eyes and more feet on the ground makes a difference,” Owen insisted. “Tell me, how do you contain and apprehend without physical resources? Are we going to call in a drone strike for Christ’s sake?”

“Maybe we will. Mine is not to reason why, mine is but to make them die,” Miller said.

“Irish, you keep thinking like a NYPD detective, you’re heading in the wrong direction. Last time I say this. You have any second thoughts, go home when this plane touches the runway. If you’re still here, you better have your head in the game.”

“He killed twenty-three people the last time,” Owen reminded Miller, “Tremaine Bull, the last one, was my best friend. A six-man Black Ops team dropped on his head yesterday and he massacred them, plus their pilot. Ex-Special Forces. All dead.”

“He killed my partner,” Owen told Miller a second time. He didn’t tell Miller the rest, how the case had messed up everything: career, family, everything that mattered.

“I’ve scanned the reports,” Miller quipped. “Funny. He seemed more like the type to hole up in a tower and blast away in blaze of glory. Now he’s got wannabes showing up in these Dimitri Vosilych clubs.”

Miller found it interesting, engaging; he felt a rush like nothing he had sensed in months. With $2.5 million bouncing along a dead-cover trail outside the prying eyes of the IRS and NSA both, Afghanistan was already in his rearview mirror.

“Criminy,” Owen exclaimed.

“Criminy?” Miller questioned.

“Something my father used to say.”

Miller’s eyes squared on Owen. “You need to get focused. We’re keeping this one cozy, not bringing too many people to the party. This is going to be handled discretely, Irish.”

I’m good,” Owen affirmed. “All good.”

“I had Spencer working on special assignments for me,” Miller explained to Owen. “Not a friendly guy, certainly no conversationalist, but after six months you get to know things about a person. Spencer likes his habits. He did what I told him to do and he went about it meticulously, examining every tiny detail. He sticks to the formula, practices it like a religion, hours and hours and hours. Me, I could never be in the military. I need to make sense of things, even when they boil down to the basics, greed and ego. I need that global picture. The military is about compartmentalized thinking; that’s how you run a war that makes no sense to the men fighting it, men like Spencer learn to do their job and leave the thinking to others. That’s how he got squared away for the next mission; he didn’t think, he just did it. Thinkers contend with fight-or-flight; soldiers don’t get to choose, ergo, soldiers better not think.”

Not thinking holds a whole lot of appeal. Owen got that. Just accept the Lake Success bullshit and make life easier.
Keep ordering fake strawberries that taste like a thousand real strawberries put together into one.
Because real isn’t good enough.

“He was in love with being the perfect army tool,” Miller continued. “He worked his ass off to be all he could be, like the army was going to love him right back if he did that. Man… looking for love in all the wrong places…”

He leaned and looked up the airplane’s narrow aisle. “What is this crap? No drink service?” He leaned back hard, shifting his attention back to Spencer.

“Get yourself ready for I Kill Rich People two,” Miller told Owen, who was staring at his tray table.

Bishop was gone. Now Miller was in charge. And nothing about Miller added up. The drinking and the hookers Owen could understand; a government guy with an expense account. But the gourmet stuff, the diction, and Miller’s clothes… none of that connected.

“Those couples next to us were saying they waited six months to get reservations,” Owen commented. “How did you get us in?”

Miller chuckled under his breath. The plane flew through some bad air, getting bumpy. “I’d tell you,” he started, “but--”

Owen finished the sentence for him: “But then I’d have to kill you.”

He shook his head. “I never knew food could be like that, turned inside out and controlled. ‘Magic,’ my mom used to say. Magic.” He loved it and it pissed him off; he was there for Jonathan Spencer. For Tremaine. What the hell did fancy food have to do with anything?

“Molecular gastronomy,” Miller corrected. “Getting in there is simple math, by the way. That maître d’, the guy at the restaurant podium, probably brings down fifty-K, tops. He takes in another Benjamin a night, tax-free, even one, and he’s almost doubling his take-home pay. It ain’t rocket science.”

“Should food even be like that?” Owen asked. “Make your brain get all fired up? It’s still just food, too, you know?”

Miller leaned again, on autopilot, looking up the aisle. “What kind of airline doesn’t have drinks?” he grumbled.

Owen checked his watch. “It’s six-thirty in the morning,” he replied.

Miller shook his head. “Not in Afghanistan, pal.” He threw up his hands and turned back to Owen.

“Take me through the attacks. Not the facts; I have ballistics, autopsies, victim profiles. Walk me through what distinguished your investigative approach. At least six state and federal task forces were after Spencer and nobody except you and your partner ever got close. How did you pull that off?”

Owen strained against his seat belt and looked around the tight airplane. “Not in here. Too many people.”

“Secrets are overrated,” Miller philosophized. “You want to know why secrets stay secret? It’s not because people don’t talk, it’s because people don’t listen. Oh, they care about gossip, celebrities and all that, but 99.9 percent of people don’t understand and they don’t give a shit about things that really matter. That’s why.”

Miller leaned his seat back and closed his eyes. “Keep your secret. If I can’t get a fucking drink around here, I might as well be sleeping. Wake me in Jersey.”

*****

Nobody shouted “Draw,” but the second the airplane’s wheels touched ground Dilip, Kip, Dale, and Stephen were a split-second apart in firing up their cell phones.

Stephen was checking texts when a new one came in. Jonathan Spencer had crossed the intersection of the 80 and 287, Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey, at 04:51.

He planned to forward it to Bishop, and then realized that Bishop was off the project. He had no numbers for Miller and Cullen, the new consultants.

Each of the six received a text message with the address and their individual lock codes to open the doors into a non-descript tilt-up warehouse building.

Owen looked again at his watch. Just about then, the boys were leaving for school and Callie was heading to work. For Doctor Marc. They were less than forty-five minutes away, just cross Lower Manhattan and head up the Expressway.

Inside the stark interior, motion sensors automatically turned on the lights inside a secure lobby the size of a big elevator. Red LED lights turned to yellow when the outer door closed. Concrete floors, office space bolted together within a cavernous outer shell, generic furniture, glass offices along one outside wall. The singular distinguishing feature was a full-wall AV hub with a digital, multi-channel projector. Single green lights attached to cameras circled them on every wall. At the center of the open space was a bullpen.

The four techs had already checked broadband speeds and set up shop before Miller and Owen arrived.

“Last sighting was fifteen minutes ago,” Stephen announced by way of greeting when Miller and Owen entered. “No,” he corrected, “sixteen minutes ago.