Mad Dogs (37 page)

“So give it a shot,” said Russell. “With Eric eyeballing, what do we got to lose?”

Lang sat at the computer. Following Zane's command to
‘Watch what he does there so he can't alert help,'
Eric scooted next to Lang's chair, Hailey's hand on his shoulder. Eric entered commands into the computer until a “window” appeared in the lower left hand corner of the monitor. To me, it looked like flashing cyberspeak. To Eric it decoded the operations of the computer whose keyboard he relinquished to Lang. Zane stood behind the CIA master spy, while Russell leaned against a wall where he could see the crowd at the computer and the locked front door.

I stood next to Cari. Feeling the beer relax me, I whispered to her:
“Thanks.”

“For what?”
she whispered back.

Lang said: “Can I start?”

Zane said: “Go.”

Colored light flashed from the computer monitor as one screen of security warnings gave way to the next. Required code words got typed in by Lang.

I whispered to Cari:
“I could never have gotten him to believe us without your help. You were terrific.”

“All I did was be a spy. Report.”

Lang said: “OK, I'm at the full indices search. This is top access. Not just Agency systems, everywhere from NSA to the Pentagon to the White House.”

“My ass is on the line, too,”
Cari told me.

“I couldn't ask for better company.”

In the search mode, Lang typed in Kyle Russo, Nurse Death's real name, the SAD building and other ‘hard data' we'd logged on our index card matricies. Hit ENTER.

Cari turned and found me softly smiling at her. She shook her head. Closed her eyes. Opened them, said:
“Victor, I don't, it's not, you're not—”

“What the hell is going on?” said Zane.

All of us stared at the computer screen except Russell, who from the far wall flowed to combat ready.

ACCESS DENIED filled the computer screen. Colors and images flashed behind those blazing white letters. Lines of code streamed through Eric's peek-a-boo window.

“Crazy!” yelled Lang. “It can't deny me access! I'm on the fucking National Security Council! An Agency double-D! And fully black cleared!”

Eric blurted: “The system's backtracking! Machine trying to turn camera on!”

BAM! BAM! BAM!

The computer hard drive box on the floor slammed into the desk with crackling sparks. The high security modem whirled off the desk to the floor. The monitor screen cracked and shattered and glass splinters rained down on the keyboard and the hastily jerked-back hands of D.D. (covert) John Lang.

Russell whirled from blasting the computer to scan the cabin door and windows.

Left Zane to press the bore of his own pistol against Lang's head as that man rose and backed away from the crackling corpse of his machine.

“Did you do this?” yelled Zane, his free hand again taking the .45 from Lang.

“Do fucking
what?
You watched me the whole time! So did Eric! It was that maniac in black who shot—”

“It'll be me who shoots you
if
,” said Zane. “Eric?”

Our engineer shook his head: “He did standard stuff. Hit a trapdoor.”

“So it wasn't him?” said Zane.

“His queries hit snatch-to-blast program. Anybody who logged in some component of data we searched would have been locked out. Backtracked.”

Zane lifted his gun bore off Lang's silver-haired skull.

“Whatever's going on in your guys' heads,” said that spymaster, “take a few more seconds to think before you react.”

“You're still alive,” said Zane.

“What you watch, watches you.” Russell kept his eyes on the door. “Even if the camera was unplugged, who knows what got turned on—to us.”

“Eric,” I said, “how much time?”

“Human factor. Soon as he hit the trap door, even if his box's signature wasn't known, trace-trap the link. He says his known response team hit in two minutes. Figure, co-opting them or triggering bad boys is more difficult… Three minutes minimum. Max… Who knows?”

Lang stared at us: “What did you people do?”

“Not us, man.” Russell pointed to the computer corpse. “You hit the tripwire.”

“'Xactly.”

“Now you're one of us,” I said. “And we've got less than three minutes.”

Lang said: “But I'm… An Agency executive. Hell, a White House star!”

“So was Dr. Friedman,” said Cari. “Or he would have been,
if
.”

Those words from a probably sane colleague made Lang blink.

“We gotta go,” I said. “Hard. Fast. Now.”

Eric added: “No gear of his. No electronics. No cell phones.”

“Can I grab a coat?” said Lang,
getting it
.

And he did, pulling a worn Navy Pea coat out of his closet, letting Eric and Zane pat it down. The two of them burdened Lang like a pack mule with the coat, the weapons vest, the tranquilizer gun. We took his dented Land Rover because the 30 seconds we used to grab his keys, race out to the street and cram ourselves into it bought us at least 15 minutes we didn't need to spend crashing through the woods to get back to our Caddy. We dumped his trackable Land Rover in the shadows of the pool shed, he dumped his burdens of coat and weapons vest and guns in the trunk of the Caddy. I keyed the white beast to life as Eric jumped in beside me, Hailey taking shotgun next to him. Our backseat was door-to-door meat: Zane, Cari, Lang, Russell.

We roared off into the night, blasted through the neighborhood's gate and onto the main road, turned left because that way looked the darkest.

Russell hummed:
“Bum bum-pa-bum, bum ba bum-bum-bum…”

“We're not
‘The Magnificent Seven'!
” said Lang, recognizing that movie theme. “We're seven spies on the run from some phantom taped to the roof of this stolen car.”

Russell said: “Yeah, we need our own theme song.”

“No,” said Lang, “we need a plan. What have you got left that you haven't—”

“The bank!” I yelled. “They'll have the records of the cashier's check to set up Nurse Death's Op! It's only three hours away! You could badge them and—”

“Great idea. Except Eric didn't let me grab my I.D.”

Eric said: “Could have been micro-wired.”

“What about his clothes and body?” said Zane.

Cari said: “You guys! No!”

“Now, let's all be professional,” said Russell. “Double-D… strip.”

“Right here? Crammed in like a sardine with all of you? Buck naked in traffic in a white vintage Cadillac? Don't you think that might draw attention?”

“Only need shoes,” said Eric. “Probably.”

“Check them, don't chuck them,” said Cari, who'd complained about first dead Harry Martin's sneakers being too big, then the spare pair from Hailey being too small.

Crammed into the back seat, Lang couldn't reach his feet. Zane took off the D.D. (covert)'s lounge-around-the-house black Chinese
gung fu
shoes, passed them up to Eric.

“Doubt it,” said Eric, passing the shoes back to be put on Lang.

“I'm Seventh Floor shadow exec,” said Lang, “not a street dog on an Op where tracking me might be worth the budgetary expense and effort.”

The rear view mirror showed me arms and bodies turning and shifting to get comfortable with a chorus of groans, apologies and anger.

“This won't work,” said Lang. “We can barely breathe back here, and you want us to drive three hours to some town on the Eastern Shore, wait until the bank opens at what, 9 a.m.? Packed in here like this, we're a magnet for policemen's eyes, a bright white classic violation of no seat belts and over-crowding. We're a traffic stop waiting to happen, and when that does… Did you say you already got away with burning up one police car?”

The turn signal blinked as my answer.

“Where are you going?” asked Lang.

“Car shopping,” I answered.

“To go where?” said Hailey.

“The bank. The more we get, the better to nail Kyle Russo and skate clean.”

“Director Lang doesn't have his credentials,” said Cari. “Mine and those of my guys are probably hot. If we flash them and the bank officer checks…”

“Don't worry,” I said, cruising past homes where lights snapped off for the night. “We'll think of something.”

Thirty minutes later, in the parking lot of a strip mall where the nail salon, bicycle shop and health club were closed, our Caddy sat parked beside a four-door maroon Volvo with Maryland plates and a bumper sticker for kids' soccer. The parking lot glowed with lights from the quick stop market where Hailey bought the last four plastic wrapped things posing as sandwiches and convinced the bored cashier who never took his earphones off to let her make fresh coffee in their machine, fill white Styrofoam cups while we took turns using the dimly lit rest rooms. Our group huddled for a picnic on the hood of the stolen Volvo.

“I can't believe this,” said Lang. “I mean, OK, the over-ride wipe outs in my computer happened. I know they did. I saw them with my own eyes. But… still…”

“You should have seen Dr. F,” said Russell, chewing his sandwich, that like mine, tasted somewhere between cardboard and catsup.

“I did,” said Lang. “I got pulled into the loop for the hunt of you guys. Saw all the… crime scene photos. Him on that fence.”

He shook his silver-haired head. His exhale was visible in the cool night air.

“CIA boss Helms, Kissinger on the NSC, and Nixon, they hid that the Agency was propelling the Chile coup from all the Deputy Directors, Congress, the press. But that was back then!”

“So were we,” said Zane.

“But nowadays,
me
, in the huge spy wars we got slammed with after 9/11, my job is to know what all the clowns in our circus are up to! You think that's easy? Hell, long before it came out in the press, I had to do my own ‘spying' to find out that the National Security Agency was breaking all sorts of post-Watergate,
Big Brother
privacy laws to snoop on anybody and everybody. Petty bureaucrats and blind believers on the White House National Security Council accuse me of being a spider walking on all their webs. If I hadn't figured out how to get the Vice President and Secretary of Defense to like me, I'd be in bureaucratic solitary confinement, stuck in an isolated executive suite over in Langley. Instead, I set up the Ops compartmentalization program so it all links to me! And now… Who could hijack my system? Terrorists from al Qaeda or ghosts from Saddam's Iraq or the Taliban? Cartels of some kind? The Russians—one of their
mafiyas
or whatever faction runs Moscow these days. Iran, noway, North Korea, maybe, but China doesn't want a flap with us, so… who?”

“What if it's an inside job?” said Cari.

“Inside us
is
us!” insisted Lang. “This isn't the movies. There's no grand secret internal conspiracy of evil. Hell, I'm a boss inside the mother organization legally designed to be a grand secret conspiracy targeting evil, and even with the best hearts and minds in America, we can barely keep track of ourselves!”

“Exactly,” said Zane, “so a renegade Op—”

“What ‘renegade'?” said Lang. “In the real world, in the rational world, there's always some agenda. What agenda requires a renegade group when the gigantic octopus spy beast of our country already has fear and ambition on its side?”

Hailey said: “Why kill Dr. Friedman?”

Lang shook his head. “Why any of this? It doesn't make rational sense.”

“Don't ask us about rational sense,” said Russell. “We're mad dogs.”

“Taking me where?” Lang waved off his own question. “I know. The bank.”

“Even stopping for gas,” said Cari, “I figure it's only about four hours.”

“I'm tired of road tripping,” said Russell. “Let's get to a stone certain gig.”

“Almost there,” I said, hoping that wasn't a lie.

“Sure,” said Russell, knowing that lie or not, what I said didn't mean good news.

“We got the cell phones to keep in touch,” said Zane. “Getting separated shouldn't be a problem.”

“So no tight caravan?” asked Lang.

“Probably best to be spread out,” I answered. “Trying to stay tight will attract attention. If one group hits trouble, the other will get the call and be able to catch up or double back, surprise the opposition.”