The Second Shooter (13 page)

"What?"

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

He gestured with both hands at the small airfield. "For this."

"You mean about there being no meal service during our cross-country flight?"

"I'm serious," Jake said. "I really am sorry I got you involved."

"You didn't get me involved. I got myself involved. There's something going on here, Jake. I don't know what it is. Not yet, but—"

"Neither do I, believe me."

"I do believe you. And I think that whatever it is, it's either illegal...or it should be. Whoever was in that helicopter almost killed us, and that can't be justified as part of a covert operation no matter how important it is to national security."

Jake touched her arm. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For believing me," he said. "When even Chris didn't."

"Can I tell you something about Chris?" Stacy said. "I know he's your best friend and all, but..."

"What?"

"He's a jerk."

Jake laughed.

"What?" she said.

"I've heard that before," he said, "especially from women."

"Well, he's a jerk in that regard too, but I'm talking about what he did before we got to the park. As your friend, he at least owed it to you to listen to what you had to say before he reported you to the bosses. He should have trusted you."

"Why did you trust me?"

She traced a finger along his cheek. "Because I know you, Jake."

From inside the cockpit, Favreau said, "Can you two lovebirds make some room so an old man can get out?"

The Cessna 310 only had a starboard cockpit door, and Favreau was climbing over the right seat trying to extricate himself from the tight space.

Jake jumped down from the wing, then reached up and took Stacy's hand. Her breasts brushed against his arm as she hopped to the ground. She looked into his eyes and smiled.

As Favreau climbed out onto the wing, Stacy turned so she could look at both him and Jake. "So is this it?" she said. "Is this the world famous Shady Point International Airport?" Her tone carried a light-heartedness that Jake was sure she didn't feel, couldn't feel, not with the weight of a huge chunk of the federal government pressing down on them. He sensed she was faking it for his benefit. He really liked her. She was one in a million. Unfortunately, they were probably both federal fugitives by now.

Favreau waddled toward the trailing edge of the wing with a groan, and both Jake and Stacy reached up and gave him a hand as he stepped to the ground. He held Stacy's hand and gave her a chivalrous bow. "Madam, we have indeed arrived at the Shady Point airport, although I am not certain that there are any international flights." Then he released her hand and stretched like a man without a care in the world. When he finished limbering up, Favreau glanced around. "Now all we need to do is find ourselves a car."

Jake shot him a stern look. "We'll call a cab. No more borrowing from your friends."

Favreau shrugged. Then he smiled.

Inside a darkened room at a rundown roadside motel on the outskirts of Dallas, a man using the name Frank Walsh sat in a chair facing the room's single window. The thick curtains were drawn together so that only a thin strip of daylight shown between them.

It was 8:30 a.m.

Walsh was in his second hour of peering through a Leupold 15-45X variable-zoom spotting scope that was mounted on a tripod and aimed out the window through the gap in the curtains. What Walsh was looking at as he stared through the spotting scope was another crappy roadside motel, similar in almost every respect to his motel, except that it was on the opposite side of the four-lane divided highway.

Both motels had been built in the 1950s, and typical of the period, they were low-slung single-story buildings, with all the guest rooms facing the road. Before the advent of the Interstate Highway System, these motels had probably attracted travelers of all kinds, but now they catered exclusively to the low end of the socio-economic scale: hookers, dope fiends, grifters, drunks, and assorted other scofflaws, people who were basically only a week or two this side of living in a cardboard box or under a bridge.

Walsh sharpened the focus on the scope as a man dressed in old work clothes and a cap stepped out of room seventeen across the highway. The man's name was Ray Fluker. He was in his late twenties. He had a full beard and wore a Texas Rangers baseball cap over his buzz cut hair. The beard didn't quite hide the scars on his face. Carrying a battered aluminum lunch pail, Fluker walked to the bus stop in front of the motel. Walsh tracked him with the spotting scope.

The cellphone lying on the table at Walsh's elbow gave a shrill ring. Walsh turned away from the scope just long enough to reach the phone. "Yeah," he said as he returned his eye to the rubber cup that surrounded the ocular lens.

"Has he left?" asked Gertz, who was Walsh's partner on this operation. Gertz was a German. His name wasn't really Gertz, of course, but in this business no one ever used real names. Gertz spoke perfect English but with an accent. Walsh didn't know enough about Germans to be able to identify what part of Germany the man calling himself Gertz was from, but he really didn't want to know. Another thing about this business, most of the time, the less you knew the better. Walsh knew all he needed to know about the man. Gertz was a specialist, brought in for this one mission. Walsh had never worked with him before and never would again, not after this. Neither one of them would ever be able to work after this.

"He left his room thirty seconds ago," Walsh said as he watched Fluker. "Right now he's waiting on the bus."

"Did he go anywhere last night?"

"He never does."

"At least he's consistent," Gertz said.

"You making the pitch today?"

"After he gets off work."

"Good luck."

"Luck has nothing to do with it," Gertz said. "Success is the inevitable result of proper preparation."

Walsh opened his mouth to respond, but before he could get a word out he heard the line click as Gertz hung up. Walsh shook his head. "Prick."

Gertz never offered a greeting or said goodbye on the telephone. Always straight to business. Maybe it was a German thing. If so, they sure were a bunch of arrogant assholes.

Walsh laid the phone on the table and pressed his eye to the spotting scope. Across the highway, a bus was pulling up. Through its windows, Walsh tracked Fluker as he climbed up beside the driver, swiped his bus pass, and shuffled down the aisle to an empty seat.

The bus lurched away in a cloud of diesel smoke.

***

The taxi that picked them up at the Samuel R. Kerr Municipal Airport was a battered Mercury Grand Marquis with at least ten hard years on it. The driver was somewhere between forty and seventy, and fat, with greasy, gray-streaked hair that clung to the back of his neck and left stains on his frayed collar. He was missing a few teeth and the rest were stained the color of tobacco. Favreau sat up front with the driver while Jake and Stacy sat in the back. Stacy held Jake's hand.

After a fifteen-minute drive, the cab driver turned off the two-lane highway into a small trailer park. The peeling sign out front read 'HAPY VALLEY'. Jake couldn't help but notice that the trailer park wasn't in a valley and nothing about it looked happy.

About forty mobile homes sat in various states of dilapidation on concrete pads around a horseshoe-shaped gravel driveway. Weeds sprouted along the edges of the pads, and many of the trailers didn't have skirting and were showing rusted axels and stacks of cinderblocks. Mixed in among the mobile homes were a dozen recreation vehicles, none of which, Jake thought, seemed to be in the midst of any kind of recreational activity. Shady Point, at least this spot on the jagged edge of Shady Point, could not by any stretch of imagination be considered one of the garden spots of Oklahoma.

The cabbie took them around the driveway, leaving behind a contrail of dust, until he found lot number thirty-six. The Mercury's worn-out front brakes ground metal-to-metal as the driver stopped in front of a battered Winnebago so old it made the taxi cab look brand new. A big antenna that looked a lot newer than the motorhome jutted up from the Winnebago's roof.

"What are we doing here?" Jake asked.

The driver looked at Favreau. "That'll be thirty dollars. Plus tip."

Favreau turned back to Jake. "I'm a little short."

"How short?" Jake asked.

"All I have is a credit card?"

"No credit cards," the driver said.

Jake turned to Stacy. "They took my wallet...at WFO," he said.

Stacy pulled two twenties from her pocket and handed them over the seat to the driver. "Just give me a five back."

The driver spit tobacco juice into a dirty plastic cup and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Sorry, miss, but I'm temporarily out of small bills. All I got is twenties."

Stacy shook her head. "Keep it."

As soon as they climbed out of the cab, the driver left them under a pall of dust. Jake looked at the motorhome's faded paint and rust spots. "Someone lives in this thing?"

"I hope so," Favreau said, "or else we just went to an incredible amount of trouble for nothing."

On the side of the motorhome, two retractable steps led up to a thin aluminum door with a window set in its upper half. A sheet of yellowed newspaper covered the glass from the inside, and an extra set of rusted hinges indicated there had once been a screen door.

They walked closer to the motorhome. Favreau stood next to the steps and knocked on the door. A few seconds later, they heard footsteps and saw the motorhome rock slightly. Then the door opened. And Jake got the shock of his life.

The man who stood in the open doorway was about sixty, clean-shaven, with a thatch of salt and pepper hair. He glanced at Favreau and Stacy, then stared at Jake, his face showing total amazement. "Jake?"

Staring back at the man, Jake felt the ground fall out from under him, leaving him without any anchor points except for the eyes staring back at him. Eyes that looked just like his. "Dad?"

The true ownership of the Gulfstream V twin-engine corporate jet that Max Garcia and Bill Blackstone had boarded at a small private airport outside DC would have taken a forensic accountant six months to unravel. The bottom line, Garcia knew, was that the CIA, through a web of interconnected front companies, owned the jet and leased it to a security consulting firm called Dynamic International, which was the company Blackstone and his men worked for, or at least where they got their paychecks.

Wendell Donahue had driven them to the airport and seemed relieved to find out he wasn't going to Shady Point with them. "Call me if anything develops on this end," Garcia had told the FBI ASAC, "and I mean anything."

Donahue had nodded vigorously. "I will. Absolutely, I will."

"There are some important people monitoring this situation," Garcia had added. "Play it well, you'll be able to finish out your career. Play it really well...you'll be the next special agent in charge." It had been a lie, but a believable lie. Donahue had practically saluted before he drove away.

Now as the G-V cruised at 450 miles per hour, 25,000 feet above West Virginia, Garcia and Blackstone sat in the main cabin, across a coffee table from each other in matching overstuffed leather chairs. Agency front companies rarely skimped on luxury. There was a pot of coffee and two mugs on the table. Blackstone spiked his coffee with a minibar-sized bottle of Jim Beam while Garcia argued on his satellite phone with one of the CIA liaisons at the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland.

"We'll be wheels down in an hour and a half," Garcia said. "That's how long you have to get me an exact address on him."

"That's ridiculous," the Agency liaison said. "This guy has been off the grid for...years. And besides, I don't work for you. In fact, I don't even know you."

"You may not know me," Garcia said, "but you do work for me, because you work for Uncle Sam, and right now, I'm Uncle Sam. My clearance and my priority come from the very top. You're free to waste time verifying that if you want, but I promise you, you have ninety minutes to find him, or find a new job."

Garcia ended the call before the man could respond.

"You really have that kind of stroke?" Blackstone asked as he took a sip of his spiked coffee.

"Ask me again in ninety minutes and we'll find out."

Blackstone pulled another mini-bottle of bourbon from his pocket and offered it to Garcia.

Garcia laid the sat phone on the coffee table and shook his head. "No, thanks."

"Snagged them from the galley. Saw bourbon, vodka, and gin, but no rum. That's your drink, right?"

"Yes, it is," Garcia said. "And I plan to drink a whole bottle of añejo when this is over," Garcia said. "But if I start now, I'll just fall asleep."

Blackstone checked his watch. "That's why I'm drinking. Well, that and I like to drink. I'm planning on catching about an hour's worth of Z's before we hit Fort Smith."

"Why Fort Smith?"

"Closest airport that can handle a jet. It's on the state line, forty minutes by car from Shady Point. I have a fully-equipped tactical team meeting us on the Tarmac." Blackstone pointed to the sat phone. "Think your guy can get us an address by the time we land?"

"He better."

Blackstone took another sip of juiced coffee. "Then we can put this thing-whatever the fuck it is-to bed."

"What kind of operators are on your team?"

"All of our operators come from Special Forces, Rangers, SEALs, or Marine Recon."

"So hard cases," Garcia said. "Like you?"

Blackstone smiled. "I served my country."

"Army?"

"Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment."

"I worked with some Rangers in Vietnam, in MAC-SOG and on the Phoenix Program."

"That was before my time," Blackstone said. "But I've heard about it. You guys did some good work, kidnappings, assassinations, what they now call enhanced interrogations. Very effective."

"We still lost the war."

"The politicians lost the war because they couldn't make the hard decisions. Just like that chickenshit we got now did in Iraq and is about to do again in Afghanistan."