No Way Back (7 page)

I’m able to keep her down a bit longer the second and third times, but she manages to wiggle at least partly up and out from behind my body shield. The instructor’s abusing me like a Special Forces drill master, comparing me to insects and other puny things that live in the earth. I glance at Allison, see Westley has appeared beside her. They’re looking at each other, and I’m pretty sure they’re talking about me. I try to ignore the chill I feel from that, concentrate on my task.

I take Nadya down fast and hard the fourth go, pressing my groin down on her wriggling ass, hands locked on her wrists. “Do not for a moment entertain any wicked notions,” she says, small giggle following. As if. I have to let her get away again. The cost in verbal abuse is higher than ever. But I pay it gladly, because all through this drill I’ve felt so strangely shy, almost unbearably awkward and strange, body to body with Nadya.

The session lasts until past noon. “Tomorrow? Here?” Allison asks.

“Yeah. And every day for a while,” the instructor barks. “Then we’ll take it out to other places once I judge your man’s got the speed and the moves. He’s got a fuck of a long way to go yet. All these former special-ops shooters need their instincts rewired for this work.”

I don’t even feel miffed, let alone insulted. Any time with Nadya is fine time for me. Usually. But I’m baffled by how powerfully I felt like a scared schoolboy every time we wound up in a rough embrace.

We go back to the spook house, Nadya up front and me crammed in the tiny rear of the Mini. Allison starts to make some remark about the pin-the-package drill,
but Nadya cuts her off with “I don’t mind at all being groped by Terry, but you, snotty bitch, can take your turn lying on that filthy, scratchy concrete tomorrow, or I’m resigning.” She sounds like she means it, and there isn’t a lot of conversation over lunch. Afterward, during our Russian session, Nadya’s more businesslike and stiff than I’ve ever seen her. But a couple of times I catch a glint of that smile I’m starting to love so much, and there’s a hint of a new light in those arctic-blue eyes. I feel she’s on the verge of something I’d very much like, but our time runs out before she gets there.

I’m sorry to see her go when Eunkyong comes in, and not at full attention during our Korean lesson. She has to rebuke me several times. But I try to be fully focused during our tussle in the dojo. It doesn’t help much. I’m not sure which gets more battered, my ego or my body.

“Didn’t you say you weren’t field?” I ask Eunkyong when the session ends with me on my back again.

“I’m not,” she says. “But my father, who’s not real traditional, was very scared of American cities when he first came here and opened his little convenience store. In Korea, they don’t have anything like the robberies, the street crime that goes on in L.A. He got worried. Tae Kwon Do lessons for me, three times a week, starting when I was five.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and I liked it. I got into the competition circuit for a while. I’ve kept it up ever since. Actually I do a fair amount of instructing. Training new field agents. Contractors, we expect them to come fully equipped with the entire range of skills.”

“I’m beginning to wonder what happened to mine,” I say, touching a couple of fresh bruises.

“Oh, you’ve still got them. You just need a tune-up. I think once you were very, very good. Fast, instinctual.”

“That why I’m lying down and you’re still standing?” I laugh.

“Took all I had to keep you from killing me,” Eunkyong says. “Another week or so of this, I’m reporting you ready and asking for an immediate transfer out of this job. Before I do get killed. Because I think once you’re tuned and into it, you won’t be able to stop yourself.”

A few bad flashes hit me then. I work through them on the light bag in the room off the dojo, ignoring the heavy bag and the weights. What I need is more speed, not power or strength. I go through every combination of strikes I know, turning the bag into a blur of leather that’s never where I expect it to be when I start the next set of blows. Which is the point. I put everything I’ve got into it, end up exhausted, drenched in sweat, and still wondering if I’ve got some glitch that causes me to overestimate threat levels, react with excessive force. But surely Westley’s factored that. And surely I wouldn’t be here if my profile didn’t show I’d never turned on my own, always stayed on target, on the enemy.

So far. Westley must believe I’ll remain consistent that way. I’m not so sure. Sometimes I think somebody ought to take me out and kill me in the head.

I laugh. That’s been tried. Didn’t work. My contract in Sarajevo ended slightly early because a Serb counter-sniper got lucky one day when I was spotting for Mikla. A second after she’d canceled a guy’s ticket permanently at six hundred yards, I took a love tap from a 7.65 x 54mm Dragunov upside the head. A few millimeters lower and to the right and I would have been as gone as Mikla’s target. The Swiss surgeons found only a bit of skull too shattered to repair, so they picked out the bits of bone, sliced away a sliver of shredded brain tissue, patched the hole with a thin silver plate, and sewed flaps
of scalp over it. Whatever that tissue controlled, it appeared to have nothing to do with cognitive function or physical coordination. One bad aftereffect, true, but with the Klonopin, I was good to go within a year.

Not back to a war zone; I swore off that. And as a narc my personal body count was, naturally, nowhere near as high as Sarajevo or Desert Storm. Yet it was sufficient. More than sufficient; I seemed to have to take down drugistas and other bad guys at least ten times more often than any other cop I knew, or heard of.

So for the last year or so, usually late at night in bed, my pulse suddenly throbs, my muscles tense till they ache, and I find myself scared and seriously wondering if there’s any active principle of reciprocity in this world or whatever (if anything) comes after.
X
body count over
Y
skipped mercies equals
X
²
times pain. If that’s the equation, I hope it’s completed here in life, comes in types of pain I know I can handle. Not some nightmare that never, ever ends.

THE ROUTINES DON’T VARY: I RUN WITH ALLISON
every morning before breakfast, adding a few more laps each time. We go through the package-protection drills in that grubby warehouse for several hours; Allison even takes a few turns being pinned to the concrete, Nadya laughing quietly as she watches. I find I have no trouble at all keeping Allison down, even through she struggles much more than Nadya. And I’m scarcely aware the abuse from that broken-nosed, raspy-voiced instructor is diminishing until it’s almost gone, replaced by a few words of grudging, rough praise when my moves and timing hit his mark.

The best part of each day remains my hours alone with Nadya, sparring in the dojo with Eunkyong, and working myself to sweaty exhaustion on the light bag, adding kick practice on the heavy bag and some weight work as well. Most evenings I’m tired as hell but feeling satistified, having dinner with Allison and Nadya, sometimes in-house, Chinese or Thai or pizza with a couple of movies, or out somewhere.

The shadows fall only when Westley materializes, always when I least expect it. He’s never unpleasant, he behaves, on the surface, as if I’m his equal. But I’m always left feeling I’ve been visited by some presense from beyond the grave.

Maybe a week—or even two, as my time concept is changing—after I spotted him with Allison during that first day at the warehouse, I feel bony fingers grip my bicep the moment I enter the spook house after a morning run. Westley leads me into that parlor. Coffee and cigarettes are on the table as usual, but I skip the smokes; been cutting down. Westley sits next to me on the Chesterfield instead of in one of the chairs.

“Enjoying yourself a bit more now, Luther? Things becoming more interesting for you? Allison performing?” he asks easily. Yet it feels like the ambient temperature has suddenly dropped ten degrees, this close to the man.

“None of us have gone for anyone else’s throat yet,” I say. “So her management style must be adequate.”

Westley seems to consider this for a moment. Eventually he nods. “Has she spoken with you about the operation, filled you in at all?”

“Oh yeah. In some detail,” I say, watching for reaction. No change in his face, not even a blink. “Paraphrased, she’s said I’m too old, still too slow, too out of condition for rent-a-cop duty at a VIP wedding, let alone to go out on a field op.”

“Sounds like her.” Westley smiles. “You haven’t been able to pry out anything more than that? Hints or clues of places, schedules, personalities?”

“Nothing,” I say. “If it weren’t totally implausible, I’d be thinking she actually doesn’t know any of that. Because you haven’t told her yet.”

“She’s supposed to give that impression, Luther. She
knows as much as I do,” Westley says, standing up to leave.

“Give her an A-plus, then,” I say to his back. He raises his right hand in a sort of wave, not looking back.

There’s an acceleration, an unmistakable quickening. I can feel it, see it, though no one else remarks on it or gives any sign they notice. The routines are changing, becoming more intense.

The package-protection drills move out of the factory, go live-action. In a huge, deserted mall parking lot before a dozen dawns, we do simulated car ambushes, with the vehicles moving thirty miles per hour or more, fish-tailing with tires squealing when the trap’s sprung. Then, on maybe a dozen noons, we do a sort of mime of snatch attempts in front of a big downtown hotel, in full view of hundreds of passersby; almost no civilians seem to notice something odd is happening, the action’s so fast and subtle. I lose track of the mornings we spend at an airstrip in rural Virginia, where we’re hit by bad guys spraying loud AK blanks, my guys returning fire with MP5s. I’m given a SIG 220 but I never pull the trigger. Just throw Nadya into the rear seat of a big Merc, quickly lob a smoke grenade into the firefight before I jump in, and drop another out the car window as I bark at the driver to put the pedal to the floor and keep it there until we run out of tarmac.

It’s getting interesting.

The Nadya sessions are, too. We practice business-type negotiations, deal persuasions, rising tempers and threat levels, deal-gone-bad hostility, back-away diversion talk. She introduces me to current Russian military verbal slang code, too. Eunkyong presses hard on basic conversation way beyond standard experienced tourist
stuff. Close to what Nadya’s doing, though naturally I’m not expected to get anywhere near fluent, just understand the basic flow and respond halfway appropriately. Plus a couple of sessions that approximate a police interrogation, the objective being for me to understand the drift of questions but answer as if I understand nothing.

And she raises the violence level in the dojo, rachets it up day by day until the day I’m in the zone so deeply I don’t even realize I’m about to snap her neck until she screams at me to stop. When I get clear, I see her sitting slumped, rubbing her neck.

“God, I’m so sorry,” I say. “You’re okay? Sure you’re okay?”

She looks at me, fear palpable in her eyes. But she says, “Don’t apologize. I was supposed to get you there. Job well done, yeah?”

Through this stage, things begin appearing in my room, small surprises always placed there when I’m somewhere else. Shortly after Allison’s photo shoot, I come sweating from a session with Eunkyong to find a passport and driver’s license—Canadian, my face but in the name of Prentice, Terence—on my desk. Also a few valid credit cards, with varying expiration dates, naturally. I leaf through the passport. There are current multiple-entry visas for Japan, Korea, China, Russia amid some entry and exit stamps from Seattle, Vancouver, Taipei, Hong Kong, Manila, and other places, dating back as far as three years. Everybody in the spook house is calling me Terry, except for the real Terry. He looks annoyed the few times he hears me addressed with his name.

Other things show up at random: the new underwear and socks, laundered. A first-class suitcase, new shaving
gear, assorted toiletries, hair brush, nail clippers, a dop kit to carry all that stuff in. A Tag Heuer chronometer with a crocodile strap. Also, one day, some electronics I see no need for, unless they have sub rosa functions not yet revealed to me: a pager, like every kid crack dealer wears, an Olympus micro digital memo recorder, a battery-powered coded car-key holder with no key attached.

Finally, after the last Eunkyong session, I come back to my room shaken and unhappy, and see the bed heaped with boxes all wrapped in plain brown kraft paper. I grab one at random, I’m tearing it open when Allison and Rob walk in.

“Hey, Christmas come earlier for you than the rest of us, Terry?” she says.

“Told you Terry was connected, didn’t I?” Rob says to her. “If I asked for all this stuff, any chance I’d get it?”

“No way. Switches and coal, best case. You haven’t been a good boy like Terry this year,” Allison says.

First out of the box is the Wilson SDS, and it’s a beauty. Tapered-cone four-inch barrel, ultra-light hammer, and crisp light trigger, completely dehorned for smooth draw, everything hand-fitted and polished. Tight, but so very slick.

Allison grabs it from my palm, racks the slide, sights on the bedside lamp, squeezes off. “Ooh, smooth. Super-clean trigger break.”

“Hey, don’t dry-fire it,” I protest, grabbing it back. So she doesn’t shoot? My ass.

“Can’t hurt, Terry, you possessive bastard,” she says. “Stop playing with it and let’s see what else is here, okay?”

Everything’s here. I hesitate to lift the Korth out of its case, the gun’s so pretty. But I do. I feel the perfect balance, look down the sights, examine the muzzle crown,
swing out the cylinder and check the chamfering before spinning it, flipping it shut. “A work of art,” I say.

“Better be, at that price,” Rob says.

“Hey, Rob, know what?” Allison says. “Some guys—you, right now—really do get a greenish tinge when they’re envious.”

I give the Springfield XD and the Boker folder a faster once-over; fine utilitarian tools, wouldn’t pain you to scuff them up with heavy use. The briefcase looks utilitarian, too; nice enough leather but not overly showy for a mid-level executive to carry. The inside’s the neat part, and whoever designed it must be some genius. The grenades, speedloaders, and spare mags are already in secure but easily accessible pockets. I slip the Korth into its suede-lined place, find it’s angled for the fastest draw with the case only partly open. Then I slowly close the case, peering at the crack till the edges meet. Brilliant! No metal touches metal. Latch it, shake it, just to be certain. Nothing inside shifts, no click of metal on metal. Open it, tap the sides. Sounds like Kevlar under that leather.

I’m a little worried about the holsters. Custom leather is always so tight, hand-boned to the exact contours of the particular gun it was made for. It takes a few hundred practice draws before there’s no hitching or hanging up. I put on the Rosen shoulder rig, then the small-of-the-back, holster the Wilson and the XD, figure I’ll start the process right now. Both pistols come out like they’re greased, though they ride tight. Some gnome’s already done all those hundred draws for me. Very thoughtful touch.

I’m grinning like a fool. Which is certainly how I’m behaving. I catch Allison regarding me closely. There’s something in her eyes that says she knows this, has al
ways known it. But she smiles, makes whatever I thought I saw vanish.

“I’ll need range time. Lots,” I say. “To break the guns in.”

“Already arranged. Starting tomorrow afternoon,” Rob says.

“But that’s Eunkyong time.”

“She won’t mind, Terry,” Allison says. “Actually, she won’t be coming around anymore. At all.”

The pleasure I’d been feeling over my new acquisitions feels truly crass, idiotic. I liked that girl. Now the last image I’m going to have of her is scared eyes. Worse, her last image of me is…shit. I don’t want to think of that.

“Hold on. That can’t happen. I need more practice.”

“She doesn’t think so, Terry.” Allison smiles. “She says you’re ready. We trust her judgment. So should you.”

The peeling away, the vanishing, begins. People and things. One day it’s my wallet, all ID with Luther Ewing’s name on it. A few days later it’s every item of clothing—except a pair of jeans, a couple of shirts, socks, and boots—I brought to this spook house in my duffel—what was it…five, six, maybe even eight weeks ago? I realize I’ve lost all sense of time.

Worse, I’ve lost sense of my life. When’s the last time I thought of Annie or Helen, Dog or Ice Box? They seem a world away, maybe two worlds, not quite real, figures from a distant past, or an imagined one. Am I seeming as far from them as they’re seeming to me? Can I bear that big a loss?

Then Terry stops appearing at breakfast, not that I care, since I never connected with that cipher anyway. But it is another manifestation of the process. Whoever’s guard-dogging the house in his place—there has to be a
crew, working shifts—stays invisible. Yet there’s an increase in the comings and goings—people I don’t know and am not introduced to, huddling with Allison or Rob in rooms I’ve never entered. I feel like the house ghost; visitors look straight through me, don’t seem to see me at all.

Thank God for the shooting, out at the FBI range in Maryland. The instructor’s a tall, thin guy, maybe forty, with the slightly hooded eyes of a raptor. He doesn’t say much. He doesn’t need to. I feel in my zone from the start, which is simply putting two hundred rounds through each gun into steel silhouettes at ranges from seven to thirty yards. I don’t miss much.

Feel even better when we move on to combat town. It’s a block of buildings made of plywood and two-by-fours, like a Hollywood set minus any period details. The game is simple: as you move along the block, life-size photos on plywood cutouts pop up unpredictably at windows, come through doors, flash out from behind corners and jerk rapidly back. Most of the photo targets are bad guys with guns aimed at you, but every so often one of a young mother holding an infant appears. You fire at a mom, you lose major points and have to start over, even if you miss.

The instructor wants to begin with the most basic drill: pistol unholstered, cocked, and held at low ready with both hands, just as you would enter a known hot zone, real-world. The first time I move fast in a slight crouch, cold and clear, doing nothing fancy with the Wilson. When I’m through, the instructor reads the talley: fourteen of fourteen bad guys with one bullet each in the kill zone, no shot taken at three moms. I go twice more, once with the XD and once with the Korth. The place and timing of the targets’ appearance changes with each run. Same score, same time with the Springfield,
same score but six seconds slower with the Korth, because it takes longer to reload a revolver.

The instructor manipulates the target control panel and we go through as a team. He uses a SIG 226, fifteen rounds of 9mm in his mags. We cover each other; I take out a bad guy who jumps up behind him, he does the same for me. Our scores match: twelve of twelve shooters dead, no shots at four moms, each.

“Hey, can we give this a try?” Rob asks the instructor.

“Solo or team?” he asks.

“Team. Okay, Rob?” Allison says. Rob nods.

“Give me a minute,” the instructor says, flicking some switches on the control panel, then disappearing for a little while behind the buildings. He comes back grinning.

“On my signal,” the instructor says. He pauses.
“Go!”

They move into the block, looking pretty good, Rob holding an HK USP and Allison gripping her SIG 229 in the approved fashion. The targets and their pistols start popping early but, it seems to me, at a slightly slower pace than before.

“They look like they can shoot, they think they can shoot, but ten bucks says they’re going to be real surprised,” the instructor says to me.

“Won’t take that bet,” I say.

“Wise man.”

After they come back to the start and the instructor goes out to score, he waves us up about midway on his return. “Allison, eight of twelve dead, two moms wounded. Rob, seven of twelve, and one great shot.” He leads us to the corner of a building, pulls the spring on a target. It’s a mom, “Allison” printed in red Magic Marker at the bottom, and a hole right in the center of the infant’s head, which is positioned just in front of the mom’s heart.