Reckoning (7 page)

He didn't look back, didn't slow down.

For half an hour they raced through the night. In her arms Sarah felt Gage relaxing, even as he lay against her, her back against the door. Finally the lights along the highway seemed to grow thinner until they were driving through the darkness, away from the city.

Gage shifted, studying Barto.

"You're the translator," he rasped.

Barto executed a smooth lane change, exiting the highway. Busy.

Malachi spoke loudly. "Yes, Bartholomew was our translator in the desert. He was the last of the three. Now we are together."

Gage said nothing, stared at Barto.

"Where'd you learn to drive?" he managed.

Barto looked over his shoulder, smiling insanely, clearly enjoying his job. "Beirut," he yelled back, eyes gleaming.

Gage shook his head, leaned back against Sarah, sighed.

"We've got
to ditch this thing," he said.

"Good idea," Barto called back, nodding, squinting into the wind. "Where?"

Gage licked his lips, shifted, moaned in pain. "Go east ... I've got an LTD in storage ... at Patterson."

Barto looked back over his shoulder and nodded. Gage was struck by the excited eyes that glared down at him through the thick, tinted glasses.

Malachi bent over Gage, moved the coat aside, and studied his chest. A large patch was torn from his shirt, and Sarah saw that a white, fibrous cover, a ballistic vest, was also torn from the impact of the bullets. The old man helped lift him up, and Gage slowly removed the vest, rubbing his chest. Even in the darkness Sarah saw the bloody patch of skin.

Reflexively Gage placed a hand on his chest, examining his wounds by feel in the shadows of the van. There was no penetration; the vest had held.

Remarkable.

Must have been using subsonic 9mm rounds
…

He rubbed his chest, looked at Sarah,
and nodded. She was close, and he felt Malachi's hand on his shoulder.

Barto called back. "Does, uh, anybody wanna tell me what's going on?"

"Not now, Barto," Sarah answered.

"Whatever." A moment more and he called out again. "Do I need to take the interstate?"

"No," said Gage, drawing a deep breath to focus. "Where are we now?"

"East Rutherford."

"Alright. Go over the bridge. Take Central to Lakeview. Keep it... slow."

"Got ya," replied Barto, bunching at the wheel, eyes scanning.

Leaning back against Sarah, so soft, Gage stared at the ceiling, trying to concentrate, to forget the strong, cherishing arms embracing him. But he shut down his emotions as best he could, organizing. Things were changing fast, and he couldn't go with his original plan. New York City was too hot. Automatically he selected his second safe house. He heard Barto asking, "Where do we go from there?"

Gage looked at Sarah,
her soft green eyes touching him.

"North," he said weakly, feeling a slow shock settling beneath his fatigue. "To the Catskills. I've got a cabin
... at Panther Mountain."

Barto sailed the van into the night, and they were alone and silent, with shadows passing over them. Gage shut his eyes, weary from his wounds as the cold dark rolled over them in an endless sea, smothering them, dominating them, stronger than all of them together.

* * *

TEN

White fluorescent lights illuminated the massive oak table in the lower-level chamber situated beneath the visible complex at Langley, Virginia, but the light contrasted harshly with the mood that darkened the room.

Nathaniel Kertzman, civilian investigator for the Department of Defense, leaned back in his chair, staring at the grim faces surrounding the oval desk. He listened intently, wondering at what cruel twist of fate had brought him into this deplorable and sorry situation.

"We are not responsible!" United States Army Brigadier
General Sol Tessler shouted.

Again.

"These were not our men! They were not on any special assignment! They were not on some rogue mission! Both of them had been out of Special Ops for over six months!" He pounded a fist on the desk and half-rose from his chair. "You will not put any of this on us! The Army will not be blamed for this fiasco!"

"Just settle down, General," said a severe, calm voice.

Kertzman shifted his eyes to Jeremiah Radford, briefer and special investigator for the Deputy Directorate of Operations for the National Security Council.

Radford's impeccable gray Seville-Row, chalk-stripe suit was impressively well-fitted, as always. A perfect complement to his wide, darkly understated tie
and his white, spread-collar shirt and hand-made leather, lace-up Oxfords.

Nothing but the best.

Kertzman suppressed a smile.

Radford's tanned face was smooth and void of scar or blemish; the face of a movie star, an actor. The perfect man for the job.

Radford leaned forward placidly, lifted a hand.

"We are not here to assign blame, General," he added, smiling faintly. "We are here to ask the necessary questions. Now, please, do not think we are going to point a finger at the Army for this ...
fiasco. At the moment, we only want to know if there was any American intelligence or military personnel involved in this situation at St. Matthew's or the professor's house."

Brigadier General Tessler shifted, calming, but he still
punctuated his words with knifing gestures of his hand. "I can certainly understand why someone suspected the Army of involvement in this. But the rumors are unsubstantiated. Yes, Sims and Myrick were from Special Operations, six months out of Intelligence. But I want it in the minutes that I have personally completed my own investigation and confirmed that they were not working on any 'off the boards' assignment. They were discharged! Out! I want to make that perfectly clear." He lowered his hand, looked steadily around the table.

Radford nodded. "Thank you, General. You have, indeed, made that perfectly clear. Now let's get on with the agenda."

Kertzman scanned the room, noting faces from Naval Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Army, Federal Bureau of Investigations, and National Security Agency. Not surprisingly, everyone present was a heavyweight, a deputy director of respective special operations or holding a similar high command. All were long-term career men and Kertzman figured that they were all eager to handle the situation in ways favorable to their long-term careers.

"So," continued Radford, "has everyone read the reports?"

Nods all around, low murmurs.

"Gentlemen," he added, "we still have a few questions that need answers. We've all seen the ballistics reports, witness reports. We've read the cases made by police. I assume you've all read the homicide report of the men killed at the professor's home, the autopsy reports. All three of them are ex-military. I might add, our ex-military, with no significant clearance. The Agency doesn't know them, never worked with them. The only thing
compromising our integrity is the presence of Sims and Myrick, who were killed in the basement of the college. Their security clearances were favored, at least red line. They had access to a lot of information, a lot of people. The DCI wants to know if they were really working in the private sector and just got themselves killed or if this was some kind of renegade government operation."

Radford hesitated before continuing.

"You were all asked to investigate your departments for any possibility of an unsupervised operation." He tapped his pencil on the table. "Did anybody find anything?"

Kertzman watched as heads shook and a few empty hands
were raised to signify empty findings.

"I see." Radford gazed about the table. "Well, that's what preliminary inquiries through the NSA have deduced. They say that
we had no active agents involved. But there is a final question we have to ask." Wearily, Radford leaned back. "There is some concern about the missing woman, her father, and another student. For the record, gentlemen, all foreign agencies have denied any official or unofficial involvement with any of them. Germans, Soviets, Chinese, whoever. But we all know that doesn't mean anything. They would deny it, anyway. At least, if they had any brains, they'd deny it. But because Sims and Myrick died at the college we have to check these things out. So I asked each of you to try and determine if this woman, her father, or the student have any involvement with any American or foreign intelligence service."

Radford scanned the faces at the table.

"Well?" He tapped the pencil again.

Silence.

"I want you to all realize," he added after a moment, raising his eyebrows expressively, "that there are some very significant people who are extremely ... interested ... in this situation. As always, heads may be on the line. There are rumors circulating about some type of rogue military operation. But nothing provable, and there's probably nothing there. In fact, it looks to me like some private interest wanted the professor dead, and another private interest wanted him alive.

“
There's no evidence to indicate that it's any of our people, or that the government is even involved. Instead, it looks to me like this was a simple situation of deadly force which resulted in the deaths of three men at the townhouse. Then Sims and Myrick met their long overdue destiny at the seminary. But since they've already been discharged, I have to believe that they were freelancing. That's what the evidence indicates. They took a job, knew the risks. Their decision. Both of them lived on the edge. It was bound to happen sooner or later. And because they were freelancing, the NSA is not responsible. At least, not directly. I can't speak for the DCI but I'm going to recommend that he give the Bureau free rein to investigate this thing on a civilian level. That's where it started. That's where it should stay."

Radford leaned forward in his chair, elbows on the table.

"So," he continued, "let me summarize. As far as I can determine from your findings, the three missing persons are not ours. None of our active people were involved in any sanctioned or non-sanctioned government operation. Whatever this is belongs to the private sector. And I can tell the DCI that the intelligence community has been cleared."

Everyone nodded. Radford shuffled the reports, preparing. "Good. Is there anything else we need to cover?"

No one in the room seemed eager to offer counsel.

"Mr. Kertzman?" Radford said quietly, acknowledging his presence for the first time. "I don't know how any of this falls under your jurisdiction in Defense. I don't even know why I was instructed to allow you to sit in on the committee. But for the record I'll give you the opportunity to contribute. Do you have anything to add?"

Radford seemed ready to leave.

Kertzman leaned forward, face impassive.

"Well," he began slowly, eyes scanning the faces of everyone present, "I think you've got a cluster and that somebody's lying."

Radford stared at him for a moment as if he wasn't sure, exactly, what Kertzman had said.

Kertzman understood the absurdity of his statement.

Of course somebody was lying. Somebody was always lying. Lying was expected for senior supervisors of intelligence operations, even required, and no one would be present in the room if they were not both accomplished and silently dedicated to the unannounced necessity of the art. That was the nature of the business and it was considered rude, asinine, and even somewhat bizarre to point it out. To do so broke ranks, in a manner, and injected an unsettling anticipation of honesty into a discussion that was both dangerous and vaguely insulting. But Kertzman didn't really care how they felt about him. They didn't have any authority over him; he didn't have to maintain relationships. He belonged to the Pentagon's Department of Civilian Investigation and he could subpoena what he needed from them whether they liked him or not.

"Why do you say that?" Radford offered, finally.

Kertzman laughed gruffly. "Let's look at it. Number one, we've got three dead marines and two Army intelligence agents—"

"
Ex-
Army intelligence agents," General Tessler interrupted.

Kertzman stared a moment, nodded.

"Alright," he continued, "we have two of the Army's ex-intelligence agents. Six months out. Dead at a seminary. We have three ex-marines, dead at the townhouse of a seventy-two-year-old archeology professor who also worked at the seminary."

Kertzman leafed through two autopsy reports in front of him.

"Myrick," he added dryly, "the one police found in the hallway of the basement, was killed with a knife." He read from the page: "Respiratory function of subject was terminated by the vertical insertion of a double-edged tool between the first and second cervical vertebrae, severing the medulla from the involuntary respiratory section of spinal nerve clusters."

Kertzman folded the report, looked around the room. "That, boys, is not an easy thing to do. Not if it's done on someone like
Myrick, who weighed two-sixty."

Kertzman leaned back, his considerable bulk obscuring the chair. Gazing about at the Chosen, the Beautiful, he felt seriously out of place.

Even in general appearance, no one else in the room would begin to compare to him. Six inches over six feet, Kertzman was imposingly massive with a thick gorilla chest and a truck-tire gut, a striking contrast to the trimmed, lean career men surrounding him who sported tailored suits. But Kertzman had never known success with clothes. His arms, for one thing, presented a problem with off-the-rack coats. They were heavy, muscular, and long with the overlarge forearms of a mechanic – forearms enormously developed and which left a viewer with the disturbing impression of primitive, brutal strength. His face, so unlike the handsome countenances surrounding him, was broad and intimidating, the unsightly mug of a Depression-era street fighter; the faintly scarred face had seen a fair number of bar fights and hard times in youth but had weathered the worst and reflected a deep, thick-skinned toughness from the abuse.

Beneath his low, broad brow, Kertzman's blue eyes studied the room with a lion's awareness. Though the eyes could easily appear deadly in the wrong light, their ability to threaten was most often hidden behind a bland and sleepy
demeanor, moving with a focus that shifted easily, quickly, from one man to the next, concealing an almost invisible keenness of thought, discerning. That his brutish, bar-fighter face revealed none of the intellect that had led him through the bloodbath of Vietnam, police work, and the FBI to the secret corridors of the Pentagon and continually served to Kertzman's tactical credit. Never in a hurry to reveal his thoughts, he took advantage of the fact that his face often led people to perceive him as slow-witted or easily misled.

Kertzman saw that everyone was staring at him. He decided to take them along.

"Like I said, Myrick weighed two-sixty," he continued. "He was strong. Real strong. But somebody killed him in the blink of an eye with a fancy knife trick and then sent Sims into the Great Beyond with a broken neck. Now what's wrong with this picture?" Kertzman stared around him. "Anybody want to take a shot?"

No answer.

"Well, then, I'll tell you," Kertzman added. "In the real world you don't kill people like Sims and Myrick like that. You kill flunkey sentries like that. But Sims and Myrick were a lot better than that. They were hard to kill. Both of ‘em were Special Forces. Paratroopers." He hesitated. "If you've been there, you'll know that means somethin'. They were cross-trained in intelligence and urban survival, covert operations, the works. Six months out and still fresh. They weren't fighters. They couldn't even spell fight. They were killers. They were two very capable, very dangerous men, but they were killed in a matter of seconds by someone who knew the game a whole lot better than they did."

Radford shifted, appearing disinterested. "So what's your point?"

Kertzman snorted, contemptuous. "What's my point? My point is that whoever did this was a professional, and a good one. This knife trick isn't even something we teach to SEALs. I thought it was real interesting, so I talked to a few people. It's a technique used by the Mossad."

"The Israeli Secret Service," added Radford.

"Yeah," Kertzman continued. "Israel. We don't use it because it's considered..." He thumbed through the pages of a cheap, weather-beaten pocket notebook. "'.. .too narrow a technique.' That means there's too much room for error. It's too chancy. Too easy to miss, have the knife deflected by bone. Then it doesn't kill quick and you've got a sentry screaming his head off and alerting everybody in the camp. We teach other things with the knife to our elite boys, but not this. As far as I can tell, it's strictly Israel. They like the knife, use a lot of techniques that no one else touches."