Paying Back Jack (38 page)

“What was Casey doing at an eye clinic on Thong Lo?” asked Calvino.

“Getting glasses or his eyes checked.”

“You don't know? You didn't take two minutes to go inside and ask?”

“I didn't have fucking time. This guy is running around like an Olympic sprinter. Did you want me to go in the clinic and yap about whether Casey is twenty-twenty or to follow circus boy to where he was flying to next?”

“You did the right thing.”

“Of course he did the right thing, Calvino.” Old George was eavesdropping while pretending to listen to the music. He couldn't help himself from making editorial comments.

“We all know that, George. I'm trying to have a conversation here.”

“Have your conversation. Go ahead. Get your specials and talk. What do I care if some punk goes into some high-priced eye clinic in Thong Lo? It's no skin off my nose. I know Casey. He's been in my bar. He seems to have no eye problems. A man who goes to an eye clinic who doesn't have an eye problem is looking at some other problem to solve. I'm eighty-four years old and don't wear glasses. You see this black hair? That ain't dyed black; it's natural. And my
kishkes
are as good as when I was twenty-one years old. Ask any of these girls if I've got a problem with my kishkes. Just ask them.”

Calvino thought sometimes he should put Old George on the payroll.

“How many times can you use your kishkes? One day they're gonna blow out like cheap tires on the expressway,” asked McPhail.

“Don't you start with me, McPhail. I just got you full medical coverage and you're threatening my kishkes. They'll be bumping and grinding long after you're gone.”

TRACER WAS PARADING around the condo in black boxer shorts and an undershirt, sidestepping the pool table with the balls racked. The previous night hadn't changed anything. They'd awoken in Bangkok to another hot day, a day of work in progress. A bank of clouds closed in on the distant horizon. He opened the balcony door and stepped outside. The air was heavy. Squatting down, he read the dial on the wind meter he'd clipped to the metal railing. The readout gave direction and speed. He glanced over his shoulder at Jarrett sitting at the table and nodded. Wind was down. That was good news. One factor in the calculation of targeting over distance was wind. Ignore it and the chances increased that the sniper would miss the target. Back inside, Tracer picked up a notebook and made notes.

“Wind check?” asked Jarrett.

“Five kilometers an hour, some gusting. Wind coming from the east.”

“The weather report predicts rain. It shouldn't be raining this time of year, should it?” asked Jarrett. He hated rain on the job. Shooting in a rainstorm not only knocked visibility down to twenty meters, it interfered with the flight pattern of the round. Bullets did funny things in the rain, and funny things weren't what a sniper wanted a bullet to do. It wasn't a standup comedy act; it was a closing act.

“It's been raining most afternoons,” said Tracer, looking up from his notebook.

During the preparation for a job, Jarrett sometimes thought of himself as something like a professional golfer. His assistant, the spotter, was like a combination coach and caddy, a man whose wisdom, experience, and knowledge were indispensable on the course. But there was an important difference between the two games. A professional golfer who shot eight under par would go on to win nearly every tournament he played in and walk away with fat promotion contracts, a busload of groupies, and of course the prize money. Shooting the equivalent of eight under par for a sniper was failure. The expectation was a hole in one every time he teed off. Not even Tiger Woods could do that. Jarrett rotated his left arm in a wide arc, then his right arm. After that he dropped to the floor and did fifty push-ups.

Waiting for the shot caused Jarrett's muscles to stiffen up. The total focus and concentration made him feel edgy. He stayed alert and depended on the blues to pull him into the psychological zone he needed to occupy before pulling the trigger. Every sniper had his trick for finding that zone. Jarrett found it with Tracer's help and the blues.

So far it had been a normal job and normal conditions. The aborted shot came with the territory; Jarrett could deal with it. Sometimes they would set up in the field and wait three or four days for the target to appear. Then they got one shot, what in the trade they called the JFK special, the headshot that seals the deal. Pack up and leave the scene. In a few seconds the downtime is logged into the past as forgotten history.

Something different was playing in Tracer's mind. Jarrett looked up from his position at his friend. Tracer's restlessness, his constant high-alert mode, was obvious, for instance in the way small things like a noise in the outside corridor spooked him.

“Something's bothering you, Tracer. It ain't the wind. It ain't the possibility of rain.”

Tracer slowly moved his binoculars clockwise, scanning the buildings and the road below. “The first time we set up, the target didn't show. An abort makes me uneasy. An abort is a whisper from deeper voices that somethin's wrong.”

“What else is the whisper saying, Tracer?”

“They never tell you straight out. But they give little hints. Like, Tracer, you keep your eye out for what's out of place. Look for what
doesn't fit in the picture. Is there anything or anyone who breaks the pattern of what you should be finding?” Tracer scanned the scene, finding vans, police cars, and a chopper that flew overhead; people in the windows of apartments, offices, and shops.

“Anything stick out that shouldn't?” asked Jarrett.

Despite the long hours of waiting, a mission could roll faster than a dog with a back full of fleas. It made them both uneasy.

Tracer lowered the binoculars; he had a ritual to perform. He touched them with his mojo bag, gently rubbing it down the barrel of the lens in neat, measured strokes. He muttered some words his father had taught him. Ever since Jarrett had known him, Tracer had had his touch of magic, a pinch of good-luck thing, and Jarrett never complained or made fun of it. Only this time, the ritual had gone on longer than before. That troubled Jarrett, who liked everything to be in place exactly as it always had been.

“Not yet,” said Tracer. “But I'm lookin' hard. What you look for is partly inside your head and partly something on the ground.”

“I'm looking, too, but I don't see anything different,” said Jarrett.

Tracer shook his head, his back turned to Jarrett. “Finding a needle before a needle finds you takes more than just looking. You have to feel where a needle might hide.” The binoculars dangled from a string around his neck, resting solidly against his mojo bag.

“A needle can hide wherever it wants,” said Jarrett.

Tracer had gone out early in the morning to jog, stopped at Starbucks, and read the papers. “I saw something in the paper about how Casey's disappeared. He's part of some big investigation in Washington. I'd thought Waters would've called and said something. He phone you?” asked Tracer.

Jarrett shook his head. “What'd the newspaper say they were investigating?”

“Stuff happened in one of the prisons.”

“We've been paid for the job. Nothing from Waters to say stand down.”

“I don't like it,” said Tracer.

“It's just another day, Tracer. I beat your sorry ass at pool and you're in a bad mood. That's all. We've done jobs like this one before. Sorry to hear about Casey's problem. But it's got nothing to do with us.”

Tracer shook his head; jaw clenched, binoculars hanging around his neck, he walked around the large room. He'd gone into his thinking mode, observed Jarrett.

“You remember Mark?”

“One of the suits who fetches for the CEO.”

“That's him. The paper quotes him as saying Casey could've been involved in activities outside the scope of his authority. You ever think about the name?”

Jarrett blinked at him and shrugged.

“I am talking about Logistic Risk Assessment Services. It seems they've done an assessment on the risk of Casey's hurting them. From the paper, I'd say it sounds like the company's gonna cut him loose. Hang him out to dry.”

“That's fucked,” said Jarrett.

“That's what I've been trying to say.”

Tracer looked back, nodded, then bent over his computer, feeding in and adjusting the formula for sighting Cat's condo balcony. Wind, distance, the velocity of the round, temperature, and humidity would play a role on the drop rate of the .308 caliber soft-nosed slug from the end of the rifle barrel to the impact point on Somporn's body.

Tracer looked up from the computer screen. “Technical analysis gets us to the target. But what we do isn't mechanical. Otherwise, Colonel Waters could send along a robot to do the job. We ain't robots. I look for things in the field of vision that no formula could predict.”

Jarrett nodded, upper teeth biting into his lip. Tracer working the mojo bag overtime wasn't like him. He was part of a no-nonsense, straight-ahead, focused killing machine. It was normal to feel nervous as the anticipation of the moment came closer. But they were still hours away from the time the target would appear.

“Talk to me. This could turn into some seriously bad shit.”

Jarrett ran his hand through his hair and breathed out. “Where do you think Casey's gone?”

Tracer punched his forefinger against his own chest. “Me? I think he's on the run from Congress. They want him to testify. They might as well kill Casey as make him a scapegoat for their secret prisons. The man's had nothing but a streak of bad luck. Was Casey dragged into his bad luck? You gotta think about that.”

Jarrett rose from his chair, walked over to the pool table, picked up his cue stick and sent the balls scattering across the table. “Okay, I've thought about it.”

“What if our first day to do the job wasn't really a screw-up over Somporn's schedule? What if someone wanted to put us through a trial run? They wanted to see how we'd set up. What if we were told he'd be on the balcony so our location could be compromised. It could have been intentional.” Tracer's pushback was always the same; after a succession of belly jabs from the voodoo handbook, he countered with an unexpected uppercut to the jaw by appealing to reason.

Jarrett hadn't seen that one coming.

Jarrett aimed at the one ball and missed; the white cue ball rolled into the side pocket. He put the cue down on the table and leaned back, his arms folded over his chest.

“Talk to me about why someone would set us up,” said Jarrett.

“I've been thinking about a couple of things. You were supposed to meet Jack Malone with your dad in Hua Hin. What do we find in this condo? A newspaper from Hua Hin. Man, come on, this is fucking Bangkok. And this pool table. You tell me what was the color of the felt on the table you played on in Hua Hin?”

“Blue.”

Tracer nodded. “That right. It was blue. Same as this.”

“What're you saying?”

Tracer threw up his hands, a look of anguish on his face. “Fuck if I know. But, I don't like that we gave away our position on the first day. We've done that. If it wasn't a real abort, someone's locked to us right now, watching us. The other thing I already told you, but you think it's some voodoo bullshit. The money Casey gave to Colonel Waters had the smell of earth. That money had been buried. And when I said something to Colonel Waters about it, he said not to worry.”

“And you're saying it has something to do with what happened in Hua Hin with my dad?”

“I don't know,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with his right hand. “All I'm saying is the Hua Hin newspaper and that pool table gotta mean something. Like that night you walked into the bar in Hua Hin and found that guy with red hair and it wasn't Jack. You told me it gave you a bad feeling. But you couldn't say why.”

Prior experience strongly suggested to Jarrett that when Tracer had a bad feeling, it was time to listen carefully. A couple of times Tracer's sixth sense had saved them from getting shot. When a team sets up an ambush, the way they stay alive is to appreciate that on the other side there are sniper teams just like them, hunting for them, looking to ambush them before they can carry out their mission. In every hellhole they'd been sent to on a job, there had always been another side. And the men on the other side shot back. Jarrett and Tracer had friends who'd been killed because either the sniper or the spotter hadn't had that extra feature beyond the formula for getting to the target. Tracer had an ability to put dates, smells, tones, and tiny wrinkles in the fabric of a mission into a larger frame and then focus and adjust until the danger around the target revealed itself.

“You're saying maybe we've been targeted?” The hair stood up on the back of Jarrett's neck. He slapped his neck as if a black fly had landed on his skin and started racking the balls.

Tracer closed the lid on his laptop and stretched out on the sofa, facing the balcony. Standard operating procedure in an urban fire-zone was to set up a clear line of fire to the target and to shelter against any countersniper team deployed inside that zone of fire. It was a little insurance policy against being ambushed. It had become a habit, even though it had been years since another sniper had taken a shot at them.

“Somethin's telling my mojo that someone's out there,” said Tracer, one eye opening, as he twisted his finger around the string of the mojo bag. “I haven't found him, but I ain't stoppin' until I do.” The same determination had made Tracer a top prospect for professional football. But back then, the thing that had been out there had caught him by surprise, dragged him down, put him in court, and shot him out the mouth of a cannon straight into the Marine Corps. By the time he'd picked himself up and dusted himself off, he was in the field spotting skinnies for Jarrett to pick off in Mogadishu. He wasn't ever going to let that happen again.