The Stickmen (10 page)

Judge Farrell didn’t see the shadow slide
like a pool of ink from out of the book cove. And he didn’t hear
the tiny
pop!
of the CZ83’s chamber-silenced .380 round.

The Honorable Willard G. Farrell was dead
before the modest bullet had time to exit his skull. The judge
slumped forward, his face landing on a sheet of review criteria
outlining the functions of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The clandestine field operative, sometimes
known as QJ/WYN, sometimes known as John Sanders and an array of
other aliases, emerged from the shadowed book cove.

He cast a passing glance toward the window,
noticed the U.S. Capitol dressed in spotlights. Next, he removed a
small black notepad from his jacket pocket. He flipped it open to
reveal a simple list of names.

The first name on the list was URSLIG, J.,
and it had a red X through it.

QY/WYN drew another red X through the next
name: Farrell, W.

SWENSON, N. came next, and after that: UBEL,
K.

The last name on the list was GARRETT,
H.

CHAPTER SIX

“Don’t be nervous,” Myers said, running a
finger under his tight collar.

“Aren’t you nervous?”

“Yes.”

Lynn wore a nice dandelion-yellow business
dress, and Myers, his best charcoal-gray suit. They both stood
uneasily in the spotless, well-appointed office.

The crested plaque on the white wall behind
them read: THE OFFICE OF THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED
STATES.

A grumpy, matronish secretary with bunned
hair and an immense bosom sat at the reception desk. She seemed
disapproving at she pretended to proofread some stenography.

She knows spooks when she sees them,
Lynn considered.

She and Myers were here for a quick
congratulatory meeting with the vice-president, pretty much just an
official pat on the back for an operation several months ago in
which they’d burned a Red Chinese double-agent at Sandia National
Laboratories, and left him no choice but to come over to them.

“Best thing about field commendations is you
never have to worry about where to

hang them,” Lynn remarked.

“Yeah,” Myers agreed. “Can you imagine how
pissed off Willie Mays would be if he was ordered not to reveal his
entry into the Hall of Fame?”

“Duty and service, that’s all we care about,
right? And the great pay.”

Myers chuckled. Awards and commendations
such at this were, of course, classified, and only existed as
indexes in some computer file or book in a safe. It seemed as silly
as the CIA’s memorial to operatives who’d died in the line of duty;
a wall in the lobby of Langley Headquarters displayed fifty-one
brass plaques that were blank.

The frumpy secretary shot up a pinched
glared when Lynn’s cell phone rang.
Damn it! Who’s calling me
here, for God’s sake!
Lynn quickly retrieved the phone from her
purse.

She began to whisper, “Cred 667-401—”

“Hi, honey, it’s me—”

It was Garrett.

Lynn winced, stepped back deeper into the
office. “Damn it, Harlan!” came the fierce whisper. “How did you
get my field number? It’s classified!”

Garrett’s tone over the line reeked with
calm arrogance. “I hacked it out of a discreted directory from
Arlington Hall’s intra-server net. Also got your new home number,
your new fax, and your new email. Took me all of—oh, say, two
minutes. You got a new car too, huh? And a new hopper-frequency
chip for your laptop? Screencode L-26-12?”

Instant rage made Lynn’s face feel crushed
by a vise. “You know I can never, ever take personal calls on this
line! Never, ever—”

“This is important, Lynn, I mean really
im—”

God! This is embarrassing! In front of my
boss even!
“Right now I’m standing in the Old Executive Office
Building, and I’m about to meet the Vice President for God’s sake!
Call me
later!
On my unlisted
home
line that you’ve
obviously already illegally ascertained!”

Seething, Lynn turned the phone off, put it
back into her purse.

“Your crackpot ex-husband?” Myers took a
good guess.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“So how’s our favorite paranoid, oddball
tabloid writer doing these days? Has he found Bigfoot yet?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.”

“Hell, last time I saw him, he
looked
like Bigfoot. The long hair and the shaggy beard.”

“He shaved the beard. So now he just looks
like a—”

“—a paranoid, oddball tabloid writer.”

The dour secretary’s bosom seemed to heave
when she huffed at them, “The Vice President will see you now.”
Then her weasely eyes indicated the double doors across the
room.

“I thought Aunt Bee died a while back,”
Myers said in the lightest whisper.

The double doors opened as they approached,
a Secret Service agent on each knob. Lynn and Myers prepare to
enter, adjusting their collars, checking for last-second lint.
Butterflies bloomed in Lynn’s stomach; she could see the VP reading
something at his broad cherrywood desk.
Here goes,
she
thought.

Just as she would enter the office, her cell
phone went off again.

No, no, NO!
She snapped it right up
to her ear. The secretary was scowling at her.

“I’m onto something really hot here, Lynn,”
Garrett said, “and I need your help. I want you to come to my
apartment tonight.”

“Harlan!” she said through her teeth, to
keep from screaming at him, “I just told you, I’m about to
meet—”

“Yeah, yeah, the Vice President, big deal.
He’s washed up anyway. He’ll never beat the fund-raising rap and
the tobacco-lobby contradictions. If he thinks he’s gonna be the
next president, my name’s Colin Powell.”

“Harlan!”

“But like I was saying, honey, I really need
you to—”

“There’s no way in hell I’m coming to
your—”

Garrett sighed over the line. “Promise
you’ll come or I’ll keep calling back. You and I both know you’re
not authorized to turn off your field phone.”

Homicidal images sun in her head. “I could
have you arrested for this!”

“Promise, or I’ll ring that phone every five
minutes… Pretty please?”

Lynn grit her teeth, sputtering to herself.
Myers looked at her with a raised brow, and now the Vice-President
was peering at her as if to say
Is there a problem?

“All right!”

Lynn quickly put the phone back in her
purse. “I kill that kill that son of a bitch,” she breathed to
Myers.

“I’ll help you.”

She propped up a phony smile, primped her
hair, then hurriedly followed Myers into the Vice-President’s
office.

««—»»

What glowed on Garrett’s computer screen
would be gobbledegook to most but was all in a day’s illegal work
to Garrett. The prompt on the brightly lit screen read:

Below that: FILE COMMAND ACCESS REQUEST:

U.S.A\A.S.A.\C.I.C.\1947-1979 AND
U.S.A.\D.I.S.\1980-PRESENT

de…milnet.spec.dod.gov.

And below that:

m__ALLOCATE: ACCESS REQUEST DENIED. CAUTION:
YOU HAVE MADE AN ILLEGAL SEARCH REQUEST. INTENT TO INFILTRATE
CLASSIFIED FILES IS PUNISHABLE BY A $250,000 FINE AND A MAXIMUM OF
50 YEARS IMPRISONMENT VIA THE UNITED STATES CODE, SECTION 25, PARA.
17-36.

Next, a bright yellow a cursor blinked:
“Enter Prefix Password:”

Garrett recited aloud the words that Swenson
had spoken, “‘Don’t let something as trivial as a
password…
hamper
you, Harlan.’” Six clicks on the keyboard
did it. When Garret typed the word “hamper” a second menu flashed,
that read:

“Enter Ancillary Password:”

Sweat beading his forehead, he recited
further: “’They say that if you fly too close to the sun, the heat
will melt the wax that holds the feathers in your wings.’”

Six more clicks on the keyboards, as Garrett
typed ICARUS which appeared as “******”

The screen went blank for a moment, the
computer’s guts suddenly percolating.
If this whole thing is a
set-up,
Garrett thought,
then I’ll find out soon.
He
could see it all now: an insular counter-command virus had just
been filtered back into his computer. The computer would shut down,
all files destroyed, in a minute, and a few minutes after that, the
door would be kicked down by a Bureau rapid-response team.

The word “working” continued to flash on the
screen. Garrett stared uneasily, then actually covered his face
with his hands and watched between his fingers. If Swenson was
lying…

The computer beeped, then a bright
blue-and-white screen opened up. It read:

TOP SECRET/SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE

File allocation command for following
security designations:

TS

SI

SAR

TEKNA

BYMAN

ULTIMA

DINAR

U.S. ARMY SECURITY AGENCY

GOODFELLOW AFB/FT. GOODFELLOW, SAN ANGELO,
TEXAS

ENTER REQUESTED DOCUMENT INDEX AT PROMPT:
__

Garrett’s hands fell away from his face in
sheer bewilderment. “Un-fucking-believable,” he uttered. “Holy
ever-loving Jesus Christ in a hot-dog stand. Swenson’s for real.
This is the real friggin’ thing!”

His heart pounded, and it felt like
jubilation rather than blood which now ran through his veins.
“Let’s see… Where to start? Uh—uh…”

Just as he commenced to typing in a what was
known as a ‘roving-loop” search index…someone began knocking on the
door.

Garrett’s nerves locked up at the terminal.
Then, relieved, he thought,
No, no. A rapid-response team
wouldn’t knock.

“Thank God,” he said when he answered the
door to find a very-irritated Lynn standing there.

“I ought to kill you, Harlan,” she greeted,
her face dead-pan. “I ought to shoot your rag-tag ass right here
and now.”

“You can do that later,” Garrett said,
yanking her inside, then paranoically closing and locking all of
the apartment door’s seven deadbolt locks. “Calm down. When I told
you this was important, I wasn’t joking around. You won’t believe
what I’ve got going here.”

“No, Harlan, I probably won’t—unless it’s
something illegal, in which case I probably will.”

“Well, it’s illegal, but never mind that.”
Nearly giddy, he rushed her into his work room, but then a wisp of
her perfume sidetracked him. “Wow, you smell good.”

“And you smell like cigarettes. As
usual.”

More sidetracking then, when he finally
paused to look at her. This was the first time he’d seen her in
months. The sweeping blond hair and curvaceous figure, the long,
long legs. She seemed toned, vibrant in good health and beauty.

“Wow, you
look
good too. You been
working out?”

“Yeah, Harlan, I’ve been working out, and
right now I could probably kick your skinny ass with one hand tied
behind my back, and you know what? That sounds like a damn good
idea.”

For a moment, Garrett’s focus snapped, and
he forgot about the dynamite keg of information he was sitting on.
He was looking at Lynn and could scarcely believe he’d once been
married to her, could scarcely believe that this beautiful woman
had once lived with him and loved.

Boy, did I screw up…

Her rage flared back at him. “Harlan, I
didn’t come all the way over to this hellhole of an apartment just
to be eyeballed by you. You said you had something important to
show me, and now I’m here. This
better
be good, Harlan. This
better not be more of your usual cockamamie conspiracy crackpot UFO
bullshit.”

“Uh…”

“No, Harlan. Please. Not the UFO stuff
again.”

“Well, uh…” Garrett shrugged. “You tell me.”
He pointed to the beat-up black suitcase lying on his unmade bed.
“Check out my new luggage. It ain’t Samsonite, I can tell you
that.”

He sat back down behind his computers as
Lynn peered at the case. “Harlan, if there’s a chalice in that
suitcase that you claim is the Holy Grail, I really
will
kill you.”

“It’s not the Holy Grail, and it’s not a
piece of the Stinger A3 missile that shot down the Commerce
Secretary’s flight to Bosnia. It’s something better.”

Garrett got back to his inputting while
Lynn, smirking, sat down on the bed and opened the scuffed
suitcase. First, a sharp, vaguely unpleasant scent drifted up which
she guess must be rotten leather. From within the case she removed
a large cardboard box with no lettering, and then a fat folder of
papers.
Documents, photographs,
she thought when she flipped
open the folder.

She flipped through a short stack of 8x10
glossy photographs.
He’s at it again, he’s let somebody make a
fool out of him…again.
The photographs, in grainy color, seemed
to depict a “crash-site” at various distances and angles. The final
few showed a black cylindrical object—flat at one end and jaggedly
broken at the other—in a bank of desert sand. An Air Force enlisted
man stood next to it, presumably for scale.
Late-50’s,
early-60’s,
she guessed, judging the style of the airman’s
field fatigues. On the object’s side was a trapezoidal inlay that
appeared to be a window.

Lynn actually paused, as if considering the
potential credibility of the photographs, but then she dismissively
shook her head. And she shook her head again when she leafed
through a number of Air Force and D-O-D documents that followed the
photos.

“Harlan, this is easily explained,” she
finally responded. “The photographs are mockups, and these
documents are forgeries. Sure, they all look good, but the truth
is, these days, any practiced computer nerd with a good desktop
publishing program and a good color ODE printer could make these
documents.”