Paying Back Jack (43 page)

Jarrett knew that the intel had troubled Tracer. It was no different in the marines. Intel was like women: some of them were good,
a lot of them bad, and the man who survived had an instinct for navigating the switchbacks in the field and had planned his exit. No father, mother, doctor, brother, brilliant sister, or friend mattered on the job—nothing but the crosshairs and the feel of the rifle against his shoulder. Nor his Muslim heritage from Istanbul, the same background that had made him so valuable an asset on the ground. But at the moment of truth, it had to be submerged like all other distractions.

He'd been trained to see the target as a math-and-physics problem. Depersonalize it, turn the killing into an equation. He'd learned to take the curvature of the earth into account, to measure wind and distance, and to calculate the velocity of the round. Like all snipers, Jarrett had the formula tables imprinted. In his dreams he saw them tumbling out of a hat with a white feather. The numbers wrote themselves on a whiteboard inside his sleeping mind. He dreamed of rows and rows of numbers, and at the end of each row was a picture of a dead man. Sometimes an error crept into the calculation and the shot splashed. The margin of error was unforgiving. It could be that the wind gusted, or the bullet had to travel through a pane of glass, or the target moved. When that happened, the target knew the score. All the formulas, tables, and calculations went out the window.

“It don't feel right,” said Tracer. “Can't tell you exactly what's wrong. But it's a feeling in my bones that something's gone sideways. Something we should see. Something right in front of us.”

“For instance?” said Jarrett.

“We were told to set up for a daytime shot. Now it's a nighttime deal. Did anyone sight the infrared? I don't know. Mooney took the scope out early in the morning and sighted the day scope. But we ain't using that scope. And what if there's a counter-surveillance team? They now know our exact location.”

“You picking up any infrared out there? I'm not.”

“They don't need to turn on their infrared until the last second. They know we're here. You can ignore what I'm saying.”

“I never ignore what you say.” He was thinking about what had happened on their mission in Gijón. And he was thinking about how Casey had matched the pool table from a bar in Hua Hin—not any bar, the one where Jarrett and his father had arranged to meet Jack years before—and just so the point of Casey's inside information
had not been overlooked, he'd gone to the trouble of leaving behind a newspaper from Hua Hin. Through the infrared scope Jarrett couldn't find the signature either.

“Don't get all superstitious on me,” he said. “Today is just another day. It's nothing special. We do the job. The assignment is a matter of honor. It's paying back Jack. It's a good thing we're doing.”

The word “honor” hung like a mantra as they fell quiet and concentrated on their work. It was a word Harry'd used that night as they had dumped two bodies over the side of a boat and watched them sink into the Andaman Sea. Honor was also the word that had taken them to the room in Gijón. For centuries, it had been a reason to kill. Nothing much had changed since the beginning of time when someone first discovered that honor ranked above a life degraded into a state of disgrace.

Honor had once been one of the most important virtues. Some said it had been knocked down the list by big new money. Others said honor only worked alongside the mystical. Just as superstition was on the retreat in the West, so was honor, and people had forgotten that everywhere else, relations were secured by a code of honor. Tracer loved Jarrett because he was one of the few men he knew who still believed in the original idea of honor. Though it might have fled from the lives of most people, it had stuck in Jarrett's heart ever since he and his daddy had nearly died learning that lesson years before in a beach house outside of Hua Hin.

Both Tracer and Jarrett had been briefed about Casey, and each step leading up to the mission had been given the green light. Waters told Jarrett that at first the case to help Casey had been a stretch for a paying-back-Jack assignment. Joel Casey hadn't been a soldier. But his father had been, and a highly decorated one. He'd been green-badged by the CIA. Colonel Waters said Casey's assignment had rolled around the rim a couple of times before it had fallen into the basket. The son had been tortured and then murdered. His father had been ex–special forces and had served his country, even though he fucked up on a mission. The fuck-up had caused another officer to die. Waters said that Casey had been to see him a couple of times, asking for the special-ops team from the company. Casey's security clearance meant he had knowledge of the team. Waters had told him that nothing was going to happen until the Thais refused to act. Casey
had waited. When the local authorities had refused to bring charges, claiming insufficient evidence, he'd asked Waters again. Waters went around company protocol and took the assignment directly to his team.

Jarrett remembered the newspaper clipping Waters had given them of Joel Casey's murder in Thailand. It occurred to him that if that had happened to someone in his family, he wouldn't have gone asking for help. But then he didn't need to ask; it was what he did.

Tracer reached behind, picked up the remote, and pressed the
OFF
button. The blues gave way to the faint buzz of the air-conditioning compressor.

Tracer stood to Jarrett's right, holding the binoculars and rotating left to right. He started at Cat's balcony—Zapper three-nine—and worked a ninety-degree sweep across the landscape of the other buildings—Ripper, Papa Bear, Grizzly, Scorpion, Firebird, Rooks, and Black Sheep—taking a close look at the ninth floor of each one, and then sweeping back on the tenth floor. After each sweep he raised his binoculars to get the next row of windows and balconies. Office or residence, Tracer gave them equal attention. It was possible that an ambush team had been set up nearby. Shooting up or down in a city wasn't difficult; it was nearly impossible.

“Check out Scorpion. Four degrees right, two degrees above current position.”

At the midway point between their location and Cat's balcony, Tracer saw something that stopped him cold. Jarrett moved his telescopic sight, bringing the crosshairs to the windows of the residential building. Lights turned off and on in hundreds of windows, and there was movement as people crossed their rooms in front of the window. “What do you see?” asked Jarrett.

“I'm picking up light bouncing off something. Like a lens.”

Jarrett looked again but couldn't find any glint. The clutter of lights created a noise of flashpoints—flickering TV screens, lamps being switched on or off, digital cameras flashing, small-but-bright reading lamps in bedroom windows, candles. Jarrett adjusted the focus on the lens and swept across a bank of buildings until he found Scorpion again.

Tracer clicked his tongue, stretching out to brush the edge of the telescope. “If you're seeing what I am seeing, that's not good.”

“If it's a sniper, he could have shot me thirty minutes ago,” said Jarrett. “I'd have taken my shot.”

“Maybe he's waiting for something.”

“Like what?”

“Waiting until we've finished the job.” He rubbed his mojo bag. “Then he takes his shot.”

Jarrett sat up, looking away from the rifle. “What are you saying, Tracer? Who's going to shoot? Where are you looking?” He pushed his hat back on and pulled it forward on his forehead. “This is crazy.”

Tracer shook his head. “Man, it's not crazy. Think about it. What if it's Casey? Did you know he was state-champion marksman in high school? He could have passed sniper's school. He likes close-up contact. So he let it pass. He has the skills. The guy's on the run. He's got himself in a deep hole, one he ain't never climbing out of.”

“He checked out with Waters,” said Jarrett. “And he's a tough son of a bitch.” The bedrock of Jarrett's training was to follow his orders without question. A senior officer's authority was unquestioned. It was disturbing for him to think that Tracer could even suggest such a thing was possible. Casey was part of their community, one of them, like Waters and the others they'd served with. They were a band of brothers who understood each other in a way no outsider could begin to understand. And they understood the inner workings of the field. Small things like knowing drug dealers buried mountains of money. All those wrinkled tens, twenties, and fifties; hundreds counted and wrapped. Every day there was more. No way that flow could be spent; no way the dealers would risk putting it in a bank, and because there was so much of it, the only way to hide it was to bury it. The rich loam smell of the earth took up home in such money. Like the smell of death, once it entered the nostrils, the scent could never be confused with anything else.

“What if Casey paid for the job with money that'd been buried? It's not the way you do things. People who use buried money do bad, evil things. You need special mojo against that kind of thing.”

“I need more than that, Tracer. Give me something that shows Casey's not one of us. That glare could be from anything. From an old hooker's glass eye to a piece of crystal. Are you trying to get me spooked?”

Tracer trained his binoculars on the light source. A light went on at five-nine Firebird. A woman stood behind an astronomer's telescope looking at the stars. The lens was clear. The woman was joined by a man who gave her a glass of red wine. They kissed, and a moment later the light in the room went out and the balcony light was switched on.

Jarrett looked up from his scope. “There are two of them, Tracer. They're lovers. Star-gazers.” They were ghostly images in the crosshairs, heat vapors rising from their bodies.

Tracer let out a long sigh, rubbing his thigh with the flat palm of his hand.

Jarrett leaned forward, eye to the scope. “It's time to go to work.”

Somporn had stepped out onto the balcony with an arm wrapped around Cat's waist, drawing her close to him. She wore a low-cut evening gown and a small tiara with glittering stones in her hair. Smiling and laughing, in her high heels she was eye-level with Somporn as they kissed. He looked like a man about to win an election, a man confident enough to leave the campaign trail for time with his mia noi.

Jarrett had been at that precise moment before; the narrow lane between life and death. The target appeared on time. Jarrett's finger touched the trigger. There weren't many moments to compare with it; this presented a slice of time just before the final moment ran out.

She danced with Somporn like she'd danced with Ball. This woman, Cat, had blues flowing through her soul, thought Tracer. But she also kept the target in motion, and Jarrett waited for the dancing to pause. All he needed was one brief moment.

IN THE DARKNESS of Casey's living room, Calvino worked his hands behind his back to unhook the small laser pen from one of the pockets sewn into the hem of his sports jacket. He thought of how Fon had held out the laser pen, insisting he take it as a gift. The pocket had a Velcro strip that he wedged his fingers into to open it. He slipped the laser pen out, pointed it toward the window, pressed the button with his thumb, quickly released it, and repeated the sequence of three short bursts, followed by three long ones, and then three more short bursts.

“With all of their resources, they'll find you, Casey. Wherever you go, they'll have some connection who'll let them know your precise location.”

“You chase around after cheating husbands. You don't know fuck.”

Calvino sent Morse code for SOS with the laser pen again.

“What don't I know?”

“That'd be a long list.”

“You're settling the score for your son. Somporn's enemy number one.” Casey coughed up phlegm and spit across the room, missing Calvino by a couple of feet. “How are you going to settle that score?”

“If your crooked friend the Colonel hadn't paid off the Pattaya police, you'd be in jail, but at least you'd be alive. That was the idea, Calvino. But having you here works out just fine.”

“Pratt's never paid or taken a bribe,” said Calvino.

“This place is a Mafia state. You think your colonel friend is an exception?”

“Fuck you, Casey.”

Casey laughed and pushed back his baseball cap. The anger rising off Calvino had given him some satisfaction. He had experience in knowing which buttons to push. It seemed to relax him in a strange way. He believed that an enemy is defeated with a combination of violence, fear, and surprise. Calvino, as far as Casey was concerned, was no different; his being a civilian made everything much simpler.

Calvino had no way of knowing if whomever Casey had targeted would see the flash of light, and if they did, whether it would stand out and mean something. He punched out the Morse code for SOS. A man in uniform, or a
mee see
in Thai, would immediately recognize an SOS message. Judging from Casey's position, he had the target in a direct line of vision. One way to be sure the laser message was delivered was to get on the outside and on to the balcony. The first principle of communication is to eliminate the noise. With all of the lights shooting from the building, seeing one point of light wouldn't be easy, unless someone with training was looking. Calvino decided he had to get on the other side. Calvino thought about the glass in the windows. His fingers pressed through the blind, touching the glass. There was only one way through. He started to rock back and forth in his chair.

“I've got to take a piss,” said Calvino. He squirmed in his chair. After a lull he started rocking the chair again.

Casey lay flat on a bench behind the rifle with his right eye pressed against the scope, waiting for the muzzle flash from Jarrett's rifle. He hadn't turned on the infrared scope. He'd fixed the location of Jarrett's rifle and scope and was locked in.