The Hunted (2 page)

“I see you’re an ex-Army guy,” Richardson said with a heavy Southern drawl which Willis couldn’t quite place. Maybe South Carolina. Maybe West Virginia. “According to your records you served two years in the Gulf where you did a fine job defending your country. My question to you, Mr. Willis, is whether you’d still be willing to do the hard work necessary for your country’s sake?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

“’Cause, Mr. Willis, our country needs men like you right now, and if you’re willing, we’d sure like to discuss the matter with you.”

Richardson refused to talk more about what the job entailed, but Willis agreed to be flown down to Virginia and be interviewed. Richardson transferred the call to his secretary who then filled Willis in on the details. The interview process would be a five-day ordeal and Willis was not allowed to mention the interview to anyone, was not to bring a cell phone with him and, further, was not to bring any device that provided GPS tracking—that he’d be searched and if he violated these terms he’d be sent back home. Willis agreed to this, and the secretary booked him on a flight leaving the next morning.

When Willis arrived at Norfolk International Airport in Virginia, he was met at the gate, then taken to a room where they searched him as they’d promised. After that they put him in a van filled with other candidates and whose windows had been blacked out so they couldn’t be seen out of. The candidates had been warned not to talk to each other, that if they did they’d be disqualified, and so for the three and a half hour van ride they all sat quietly without a single word being spoken. When they arrived they were taken for physicals and fitness tests. A few of the candidates washed out during this process. After that they were separated, and Willis was taken for a psychological evaluation.

With the questions they were asking, Willis figured out quickly that what they were really after was knowing how he’d react if he’d have to take a life or see people die, so he lied and gave them the answers that he knew they were after, which were basically making him look like a cold-blooded sociopath. He must’ve passed their psychological evaluation, because next came the lie detector test. Willis knew that for the most part they didn’t care about his answers and were after whether they could get a clear true-false reading from him. If the polygraph results were fuzzy, he’d be eliminated from further consideration. Of course, if he revealed something alarming to them he’d also be eliminated, but what they really wanted to know was whether they’d be able to plug him in at any time in the future and be guaranteed an accurate reading. Willis was able to relax enough to pass this test. Once the polygraph test finished, he was done with his second day of testing.

Starting on day three was what Willis could only figure was an IQ test. For two days they threw problems and puzzles at him, and put him under severe time pressure to solve them, often with a lot of background noise and other distractions. It was tiring, but Willis held up during the testing, and must’ve passed because they didn’t send him home at the end of day four. It was on day five that he met with Colonel Jay T. Richardson. Up until this point nobody had told him what the job was that he was interviewing for. He had his ideas, but they were only guesses.

Richardson was in his sixties. Built like a fireplug, he had thick silver hair cut like a bristle brush and a red face that wrinkled like a beagle’s when he smiled or scowled. At first he sat scowling at Willis, and kept that up for a good minute before signaling for Willis to take a seat. The two men were alone with Richardson seated behind his desk. Willis took the chair across from him.

“Son, what I’m about to tell you is highly classified. You know that, don’t you?” Richardson said, still scowling deeply.

Willis knew that and confirmed that he knew it. Before the process started he had to sign disclaimers acknowledging he’d be under the threat of treason if he ever mentioned a word about this place or anything he had learned.

Richardson nodded to himself, and leaned forward, his scowl weakening. “What I’m about to tell you will shock you,” he said with a sincere gravity. “Our country has been overrun by insurgents. These are everyday people like you and me who have been indoctrinated and are now hell-bent on destroying us. We’re at war, son, and like it or not we’re fighting for our very lives.”

Richardson’s lips pressed tightly together, his red face turning a bit redder, his eyes glistening with anger. “The problem is that while we’ve been able to identify who they are and what their objective is, it would be a severe security breach if this were to leak to the public. Because of that Congress created a new department, Homeland Protection, of which I’m a part of.”

Willis had never heard of a Homeland Protection department, but he didn’t doubt that what Richardson was telling him was the truth.

“We need foot soldiers, son,” Richardson continued. “This is maybe the most important war this country will ever fight, but it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to involve great personal sacrifice and you’d be doing assignments that you might find unpleasant. But they’re necessary. Are you interested, Willis?”

“How’s the pay?”

Richardson smiled at that. “The pay’s good,” he said. “Better than what you were making peddling liquor. And the job security will be even better.”

Richardson explained more about Homeland Protection and the job he was offering Willis, which was to be one of over four thousand new foot soldiers against this new hidden menace, soldiers whose existence would never be able to be acknowledged by the government. The problem was that while they were able to identify these insurgents, they didn’t have enough evidence to round them up or prosecute them, so Congress gave Richardson and Homeland Protection extraordinary powers to deal with this insidious and imminent threat to the country’s survival. Before getting Richardson’s call, Willis had been a coin flip away from either blowing his own brains out or committing crimes that could’ve resulted in innocent lives being taken. He accepted the job with little hesitation. He needed a paycheck and any kind of steady work, and the signing bonus they were offering would get him out of debt. He decided he’d be able to reconcile the job requirements with knowing that he was protecting his country.

Over the next three months Willis went through extensive training  with a squad of forty-seven other new hires. It was weird and very different than his army training. The rules were no communication among each other, so while he was part of a squad everything he did was in isolation with any sense of camaraderie banished. During those three months Willis learned efficient ways to kill, stage fake suicides, and cover up murders so they’d appear to be accidental. Firearms were his strength, as well as hand-to-hand fighting. Back when he was in the army, Willis could’ve been a sniper, he was that good with a rifle.

Upon completion of his training, Willis was assigned to the Boston area. His only contact was going to be his immediate handler, a man whom he would know as Barry, and who he would only have a phone number for. Barry would monitor Willis’s performance and would provide support as necessary, such as intel and access to weapons and drugs. The Factory, as Willis would learn his division of Homeland Protection was called—which he surmised was short for The Death Factory, had some sway with the local authorities. While Barry couldn’t have a murder covered up, he could sometimes arrange for a lower police presence in a certain area and other such things, which could make Willis’s job easier if he planned ahead properly.

During the time that Willis had been actively working for The Factory, he had eliminated twenty-three targets. Brian Schoefield was to be number twenty-four.

Chapter 3

Schoefield left his house an hour and ten minutes later. He had that same cautious look as he made his way to his car, again seeming as if he knew he was being watched. Willis didn’t believe that was the case, but even if Schoefield knew he was under surveillance, Willis didn’t much care. After Schoefield drove off, Willis used the opportunity to relieve himself and then slipped out the back entrance so he could walk to where he had left his car three blocks away. He wasn’t in any hurry. A tracking device had been planted on the undercarriage of Schoefield’s car. He’d have no problem finding where Schoefield was heading to.

It turned out Schoefield drove to a coffee shop in the downtown area where he lived. Willis was able to spot Schoefield through the window as he sat alone engrossed in his newspaper, a large coffee on the table next to him. Willis could’ve set up surveillance to see whether Schoefield was meeting anyone, but he guessed this wasn’t the case, and instead drove back to Schoefield’s house.

He already knew from Barry that Schoefield didn’t have an alarm system. If he did have one, the odds were Barry would’ve been able to get him the security code to disable it. The locks on the house were decent, but it still didn’t take Willis much effort to break in using his burglar picks.

Willis was surprised at how clean and well kept up the inside of the house was, especially given the disrepair of the exterior. The house was a small two-bedroom ranch, but it had a pleasant feel inside, and while it seemed decorated by a woman’s touch, Willis saw no clear evidence that Schoefield had ever been married; at least there were no photos of children on display, or alimony or child support bills.

Willis started in the kitchen as he searched through any mail or papers he could find, then moved to the living room, and finally Schoefield’s two bedrooms, the second of which had been set up as an office. What Willis was doing represented a breach of protocol since he wasn’t there to figure out a way to kill his target, but instead to satisfy his own curiosity. It was just hard to believe that this sad sack that he’d been observing was an insurgent, but then again he felt that way with almost all his targets. As Richardson told him, these were people who looked and acted like any of us, and in many cases, natural born citizens who had been indoctrinated into the insurgency. Still, these assignments had been nagging at Willis, and with Schoefield he wanted to see the evidence himself. After going through Schoefield’s file cabinets, he still hadn’t found anything unusual. What did stand out was that Schoefield had his computer password protected. Why would anyone password protect their computer inside their own home? Willis considered making this look like a home burglary so he could take the computer and have someone crack into it and find the evidence that Schoefield was a traitor, but he couldn’t think of how he could explain the need to steal Schoefield’s computer to Barry. It probably would only put him in deep trouble with The Factory. A beep alerted Willis that Schoefield’s car was on the move. He’d been in Schoefield’s house for almost two hours with nothing gained. He cleaned up any evidence that he’d been there and left through the back door. After that he made his way back to his surveillance post. The GPS tracking unit indicated that Schoefield was heading back home. If he ended up going someplace else instead Willis would track him down.

Chapter 4

After five days of surveillance Willis had Schoefield’s routine mapped out. He’d wake up between nine-thirty and nine-fifty, pick up the newspaper from his driveway, then leave his house an hour later so he could sit anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours in the coffee shop by himself reading his newspapers while lingering over a large coffee. When he’d return from the coffee shop he’d spend most of the afternoon on his computer, and some of it just puttering around his house. Schoefield would then eat dinner alone—usually either hot dogs or a cheap frozen dinner—and then around seven o’clock would head off to a local bar where he’d watch the Red Sox while stretching out two beers so they’d last most of the evening before heading home. By all appearances a loner, although from the time he spent at the coffee shop and the local bar, he wasn’t necessarily a loner by choice.

Of course, Schoefield could’ve been at those locations each day awaiting contact from the insurgency, but Willis couldn’t shake the thought that all Schoefield was was a sad little man and not part of any terrorist or revolutionary organization. He had dug as much as he could into Schoefield’s background, and what he found was an ordinary, middle class life. Schoefield had majored in computer science in college, and after graduation worked as a programmer for an insurance company until being laid off four months ago. No arrests, no unusual political activity, nothing to signal Schoefield as a terrorist in the making. Willis had been warned about that—that these insurgents were keeping low profiles until it was time to strike, but still, Willis had a nagging feeling that they had made a mistake with Schoefield, although there were other factors that pointed to something being wrong about him, such as his wariness each morning when leaving his house and his keeping his home computer password-protected.

Willis could have gotten the job done in less than a week, but he kept his surveillance going and let his bonus slip away. Something felt very wrong. Almost all the jobs had felt wrong, but this one in particular. Or maybe it felt no more wrong than any of the others, but he’d finally reached a point where he couldn’t keep on doing this on blind faith: that he needed to see some evidence of this insurgence. He had two days left in his deadline when Barry called to warn him that his deadline was quickly approaching, if that was even his supervisor’s real name. If it was, Willis didn’t have a clue whether it was his first name or last. Most likely it was a code name. Whichever it was, this was the first time Barry had called him worried about whether Willis would get his job done on time, but it was also the first time Willis had let himself come this close to a deadline.

“I wouldn’t have thought that this assignment would be as challenging as you seem to be making it,” Barry opined good-naturedly, but his voice contained a hint of sarcasm. Willis so far hadn’t been able to place the accent, but if he had to bet he’d go with upstate New York. It certainly wasn’t Boston.