Shockwave (24 page)

“Seriously, Dell? I was the one who asked you in the first place.”

“I didn’t know you were such a dancer,” I said, quickly adding, “although you’re certainly built for it,” to take any sting out of my suggestion that she was sliding around the subject instead of facing it square.

But this didn’t even get a smile out of her. And I knew what it meant when she stood up, faced me with her hands on her hips, and pinned me with her eyes.

“If you think I’m not answering you straight, try straightening out your questions.”

“All right,” I said. “You want Homer out of jail; this I already know. And you also know that the man who was killed was killed by his … I don’t know what to call them. Friends? Comrades? It doesn’t matter. You know that if I start working, some of them may end up dead. And that could happen before I have even a
chance
of getting Homer out.”

“They would be no loss. To anyone.”

“No,” I agreed. “They would not. And you have confidence that I could do … something that needed doing without being caught, yes?”

“Oh God, Dell!”

I could handle Dolly’s temper—she never meant it, anyway. But her remorse was another thing entirely; it tore at my heart like a barbed-wire garrote. All I could do was hold her. And be patient.

“Il n’y a pas eu d’épouse pire que moi depuis Ève.”

“C’est la première fois que tu me mens.”

“I’m
not
lying, Dell. I
am
the worst wife since Eve. I didn’t even … think. Listen to me, now. I’m sorry if this makes me sound cold. Or even crazy. But I want you to stop. Stop right now. If Homer ends up in some hospital, I’ll be sad about it, but—”

“But you want me to be careful, I know.”

“Now you’re finishing my sentences for me?” my ready-for-battle wife challenged.

“I just thought—”

“You can do all the thinking you want, but unless you can read my mind, maybe you could just shut up for a minute!”

I made a gesture, a sorry imitation of how the French can say
“Mais oui!”
with their hands. It didn’t make her giggle, like I’d hoped, but at least she didn’t look so angry anymore.

“What I was going to say was this, Dell: Yes, I have confidence that you could do … whatever you felt was necessary, and no one would ever know. But there’s always
some
risk. And even the
tiniest
risk to you isn’t worth what getting Homer out would mean to me. Understand?”

“Yes.”

She stepped back a pace or two. Looked me over like I was a used car she was considering buying. Then she nodded. “I get it. I get it now. You were going to go on and on, weren’t you?”

“I don’t—”

“You understand just fine, Dell. If I hadn’t just realized what I did when I … set you loose, if I hadn’t stopped you from saying more, you were going to ask me if I was willing to risk something happening to Mack. Tell me I’m wrong,” she challenged.

“Well, he’s not trained, and what he does is really important, and—”

“Shut up!” Dolly snapped, punching me in the chest. I’ve been hit softer by men trying to hurt me. But I’d take another
few of the same if only my precious girl wouldn’t start crying again.

Dolly turned her back on me. “You really hurt my feelings, Dell. I … I can be stupid, I know. But for you to think that I’d be more worried about … about anyone more than you, that’s just …”

I put my hands on her shoulders, trying to think of what words might work. All I could think of was “I never thought such a thing, sweetheart. I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be you, to think that. All I thought was that you might believe that maybe I’m … better at some things than I probably am. To disappoint you would be more than I could bear.”

It seemed like forever until she turned around and let me hold her.

“H
ow bad do you want Homer out?”

“You’re not looking for adjectives,” Mack said.

I just nodded. I guess that wasn’t enough for him.

“Spell it out,” he said.

“Some people will do anything if they believe their cause is just. But there’s a difference between writing an essay and having a quarter-second to make a decision. You might be against capital punishment, but you wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a man climbing in your bedroom window at night.”

“You’re asking, would I kill someone to spring Homer? Like, do a copycat murder, so the cops would think the real culprit’s still out there?”

“The real culprit
is
out there.”

“Sure. But that doesn’t mean—”

“The guy the ocean washed up, he must have trusted whoever killed him to have let them get so close—and behind him, too. Or at least get close enough to show him a gun, walk
him up there. If they did it like that, they’d want him to die quiet.”

“What if—?”

“There’s no ‘if’ in this. No way they killed him someplace else—they’d have to haul a dead body all the way to the top of those rocks. That’s not just a lot of work; it’d take a lot of time, maybe leave an evidence trail, too. The longer you take to do anything, the better the chance somebody will see you doing it.

“Okay, look. None of that’s really important. But this is: the killers weren’t hired hands—they had to be some kind of Nazis themselves.”

“So you’re asking, would I kill one of
them
, then?”

“One or more.”

“On my own, or with you?”

“What difference?”

“Morally? None, I guess. But I know you’ve … I know I’d have a better chance of not being caught if you were in on it with me.”

“You’d have a much better chance of getting them killed, too.”

His silence was my answer.

O
nly one way for me to respond:

The answer came so quick that the round must have been chambered in anticipation.

So the Nazis had made “Welter” for a rat. But instead of some general KOS nonsense, they’d put a specialized squad to work. This Welter Jordan must have known a lot more than a few hand signs and a leadership chart.

And he
had
been running. That made him valueless as an informant, so he couldn’t look for any help from whatever agency had gotten his sentence shortened. Which told me he didn’t have a sleeve ace—hadn’t held back anything. Certainly nothing that would get him any more than some paper ID. That wouldn’t be near enough—he’d need plastic surgery for a new face, and even more for a complete tattoo-removal.

I almost laughed out loud when I thought it through—the fool had made a deal to betray his White Power comrades, but all it got him was some time cut off his sentence. And before whatever agency he’d made the deal with turned him loose, they’d already bled him white.

Death math, again. Agencies don’t share info. Even when they say they’re on the same side, with the same objectives, they’re adversaries when it comes to funding. So this “Welter” guy had been turned pretty recently—probably reached out himself, while he was still in prison.

But the steady-flow informant had been in place for a good long while. That explained the difference between “agency” and “agent” in the cyber-ghost’s last transmission. Whoever was running the still-working informant must have had access to more than just his own files. So he outranked whoever had turned “Welter.” Or he’d accessed files he shouldn’t have.

I felt safe ruling out that last one. The shadow who went everywhere without leaving a trail was as high-skill as it gets,
so he even tracked changes within internal-control systems. Years ago, he’d warned me that any unauthorized intra-agency access would be picked up instantly, and followed in real time. That’s why the cops in L.A. finally lost out on the money they used to make by scouring their data banks for info on movie stars: unlisted telephone numbers, traffic violations, stuff like that.

So the agent was a boss, then. Not a field man.

“Y
ou think this Detective Lancer would talk to me?”

“No,” Dolly said, emphatically. “Didn’t I tell you to—?”

“I’m not going to take any risks, honey. Any at all. I was just trying to figure out, if I walked him through the killing—showed him how it
must
have happened—whether that would be enough for him to look past Homer. But …”

“But something else might?”

“I don’t know yet. But I keep thinking about a newspaper reporter.”

“Around
here
?”

“Maybe not physically. One of those—what did you call them—those Internet people? Didn’t you say that they were the only real journalists out here?”

“I … guess,” she said, dubiously.

If nothing else, planting that idea was good enough to buy me some time.

I
don’t have any of that “tradecraft” stuff you see in movies.

I’d never been trained to be anything but a soldier. Not even an elevated one. A fighter in the field, not some high-rank boss sitting in a command post.

I sat in my cellar and thought about that. Until I realized I was doing this all wrong.

Feeling sorry for myself, that I already knew was wrong. But it wasn’t even close to the edge of how I’d been feeling. When I got close enough to see that edge looming, I realized I was being disrespectful to Luc. And that was unforgivable.

So I burned the self-pity out of my mind the only way I could—by going over the tradecraft I
did
know. The survival skills Luc had taught me. When I first entered La Légion, I’d lied when they asked if I could speak French. The same lie I’d told Dolly when I woke up in that field hospital:
Un peu
.

That was Luc’s training, and it encouraged some of the
légionnaires
to say stupid things right in front of me, the way some people make disgusting hand signals in front of a blind man, or twirl their forefingers next to their heads when a retarded person is speaking.

That wasn’t all. Luc had taught me to read body language. To watch a man’s hands—
“Dans cette ville, tout le monde parle avec ses mains. Ce qui est typique des Français. C’est leur façon d’insister sur ce qu’ils disent. Si les mains d’un homme ne collent pas à ses paroles, on ne doit pas lui faire confiance.”
Watch their hands. Not for weapons, but because most people talk with their hands, no matter what the language.

And to know a liar’s eyes.

From the moment my military training began, the word I heard most often was
“survie.”
Survival. The only god in the jungle. Not a god you prayed to, a god you obeyed.

But I already knew more about survival than soldiers three times my age. Even in a city famous for cheese, a gutter rat will starve unless it can forage. And even the most successful foraging will not feed you if you can’t defend what you stole.

“Tu ne dois avoir confiance en personne.”

“I trusted
you
,” I said to Luc, in the language I knew much better than French. I didn’t know why that was—whatever
years had been stolen from my mind before I’d fled that “clinic” in Belgium must have been in America, or with Americans. “Doesn’t that mean I had knowledge?
Some
knowledge?”

“You had nothing,” Luc told me, very calmly. “Including choice. I was an old man. You had been told about old men by other little boys who live in the alleys. It was
them
you did not trust. And you were confident that you could defend yourself, if I turned out to be one of those old men they had warned you about, yes?”

I nodded.

“So! You had no
real
knowledge. Why? Because you had no choices, so anything you might have known was of no value. Even your belief that you could defend yourself against an old man was wrong, was it not?”

By then, I had seen what amazing things that old man could fabricate from scraps others tossed into those same alleys I once foraged in. He knew a hundred ways to kill me. Or cripple me, if that had been his pleasure. So all I could do was nod again.

“You were fortunate,
mon fils
. Nothing more. Lucky. You may never be so again in your life. You know what a man who trusts in luck is called?”

“A gambler?”

“Yes. And
all
gamblers lose. Know that. You would think, the more a man does something, the better he becomes at doing it. That is true. But ‘better’ is not ‘perfect.’ Life is not equally
rouge ou noir
, as gamblers believe. That may be true of
all
lives, but you are concerned with only one—your own. And no ‘law of averages’ will ever help an individual. You must never trust in luck. If you spin that wheel too many times, it will betray you.
That
is the only certainty. And you will never know which spin will be your last.

“So, then, what
can
you trust?” By now, I knew such questions were not for me. They were just introductions to his answers. And this was no different. “Your skills,” Luc said.
“What you learn so well that your action comes even before thought. When you have choice—not the gambler’s
illusion
of choice; not which color of the wheel to wager on—then you must know
which
choice to make. That knowledge must live within you, and spring forth as naturally as a child’s instinct to retreat from cold and move toward warmth.”

“How do I learn this?”

“Every mistake you survive must become a mistake you never repeat. Never in your life. You trusted me. As I said, you were not ‘right,’ you were fortunate. Lucky. So—listen now: never trust another person as you did me, not ever again.

“You can never learn how to trust—to trust another person—unless you first face the world with total distrust.
Tu comprends?
Distrust
first
. Then you wait. Use that time of waiting to watch carefully, listen closely, and
then
decide. But know this, my son: no matter how careful you are,
all
trust is some form of gambling. The best you can do is push the odds more in your favor.”

Even back then, I knew the old man was speaking the truth.