Reckoning (8 page)

Kertzman waited, folded the notebook.

Radford's face was concentrated.

"So," he added, "it looks like we got somebody using a fancy Israeli knife technique on one of our ex-Special Ops personnel." Kertzman studied the faces surrounding him. "Well, that certainly adds a new spin to things, doesn't it? And what about the three marines that were discharged from RECON, the ones found in the professor's home? Three men, all of 'em with specialized training in a marine fast-attack unit, all cut down with a high-tech weapon."

Radford tapped his pencil absently on the desk, stared at Kertzman. "So?"

"
So!
" Kertzman repeated. "So I'm saying that the same guy did 'em all! He did the guys at the professor's house and the two guys at the seminary. And this wasn't the work of some old geezer professor or a security guard, either. Or even a cop. It's the work of a professional. And not some idiot Mafia hitman or a terrorist. This was the work of a real heavyweight. Somebody who might have millions of dollars' worth of training. Somebody who knows how to play the game."

Radford slightly stared off, focusing slowly on Kertzman as he spoke.

"Alright," he submitted. "I'm not an idiot, Kertzman. None of us are. I agree that whoever did this is probably real good at killing people. But we aren't here, exactly, to find out who, specifically, did it. That's the Bureau's job. Or the police department's. We're here to find out if this fiasco was part of some kind of governmental action gone awry. We're here to find out if anyone can verify an active federal agent's involvement."

Kertzman shifted, focused on Radford.

"Whoever did this was active," he said quietly.

Radford paused in vague astonishment. "How can you say that, Kertzman?"

"Because whoever did this couldn't have gained this level of proficiency if he hadn't seen extensive, and I mean
extensive
combat experience. I know. I've been there, and combat ain't easy. It's chaos. It's confusion and fear and everything
but
efficiency. Almost nobody is really efficient at combat. Nobody. They're crazy if they are. A normal guy doesn't do very well in a situation where people are trying to blow his brains out. It ain't natural. The natural thing is to get out. That's the only thing I ever wanted to do."

"A lot of our inactive personnel have combat experience,
Kertzman," countered Radford. "They're all dangerous."

"Not like this," Kertzman continued, unfazed. "Whoever did this is beyond that. He's either the luckiest guy on earth or he's trained to be something that's way beyond a normal field operative. And I'm puttin' my money on training. In the old days we called it brainwashing. Nowadays they call it conditioning. Training. We spend millions of dollars making people like this, and we just call it training. There ought 'a be a better word. But whatever, this guy ain't no normal man because he obviously don't feel fear like a normal man. Somethin', maybe some kind of real intensive
training, like we give to some Delta or SEAL guys, has made him cold. Stone cold. He might even be one of the best in the world at what he does. And that means he was in a unit that saw almost continual action. A unit that has cross-trained with some real heavy hitters, like Israel, the SAS, whoever. And that would put this man, our man, in a very narrow category. He might even be easy to find once we know where to look."

"You're getting all this from a knife technique?" Radford
appeared irritated.

Kertzman was deadpan. "There's a few other things."

Radford shook his head. "Kertzman, even if this guy is real good, why does he have to be one of ours? He could be Russian. He could be Egyptian for all we know."

Shrugging, Kertzman replied, "Everybody else in this is
American. We haven't seen anything to indicate any kind of foreign interest, no kind of power play. All the dead agents are ours. So I figure this is something internal." He paused, considering his own argument. "Yeah, that seems right when you think about it. I'd say it's probably safe to assume this guy is ours."

Radford challenged him. "What about the student?
Bartholomew O'Henry? You know, Kertzman, if you want to conjecture, we can do it all day long. What if he's not really a language student at all? What if he's part of some foreign support system? What if he's the one who's doing all this? That would make a lot of sense. The woman and the professor might have discovered him. And now he's attempting to eliminate them. The professor might have hired Sims and Myrick and the rest of them for protection."

Kertzman's stone-faced stare revealed nothing, but he pursed his lips as he considered the hypothesis. "No. I don't think so," he said after a moment. "I've studied that guy's file. I don't think he has the physical ability to pull this off."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because, like I said, real fighting ain't techniques and fancy moves. Real fighting is strength, speed, endurance, toughness. Who can last the longest? Hit the hardest? Who can take the most damage while putting the other guy through more than he can survive? That's combat. It's ugly. It's the meanest, ugliest thing on God's green Earth. And you've just got to be mad-dog strong, tough, able to take anything that comes to you while dishing out a whole lot more. It ain't pretty. And there ain't no rules. No, this student doesn't fit the profile. Not at all." He hesitated. "
No, it ain't him."

Radford was silent a long time.

"You might be right, Kertzman," Radford said, and Kertzman was intrigued to sense a slight surrendering in the tone. "But you didn't answer my question. Why does this guy have to be active?"

"Because people this good never leave," said Kertzman in a flat tone, unyielding. "Sure, people like Sims and Myrick leave. That's no great loss. But we have too much invested in a guy like this. Too much money. Too many secrets."

Radford was probing the theory. "He still might not be active, Kertzman. He might be old. Retired."

"I don't think he's old," said Kertzman.

"
Why
?"

The pencil tapped on the desk.

Kertzman shifted, leaning forward. "An old guy couldn't have done this," he said slowly. "No. This guy is too young to retire and too good to quit." Kertzman nodded, convinced. "He's active."

Radford stared distantly at scattered reports. The pencil had
abruptly fallen silent. No comments were offered, no responsibility accepted.

Nothing but an uncomfortable silence.

Finally Radford met Kertzman's eyes. "We still have no real evidence, Kertzman. I can't write this report up the way you put it. You don't have anything but opinion. And that's not enough. There's really nothing but conjecture to indicate that this is the work of a professional, especially ours. If you were still a cop, Kertzman, you might have enough for something. But this is not enough for an intelligence finding. We're supposed to, at least, look like we can back up what we say."

Kertzman grunted. "Gentlemen," he said, his natural
belligerence asserting itself. "This guy is active in some element of our government. He's an ex-SEAL or ex-Delta or maybe even Special Forces. But SF would make him old, because they haven't seen continuous combat since seventy-two. So he's probably not regular Army. I think he's cross-trained in covert civilian warfare with us and with foreign intelligence agencies like the Mossad. Of course, this guy could be foreign. Israeli, Russian, whatever. But I don't think he is. I think he's family. Maybe a CIA tactical guy out of Delta. Maybe a counterinsurgency guy out of SEALs. He might even be one of those guys we plant in foreign countries and wait to activate, the kind of guy trained to do it all, anything, whatever it takes to get the job done." He gazed around the table. "An artist. A psychopath."

Kertzman shook his head. "No, I don't have any proof. At least, not yet. This is all just a hunch. But it's based on evidence. And, like I said, if this guy isn't active, then he's not long gone, and he's on a rampage. And that, gentlemen, is a situation. He might be settling old debts or using what he's learned against us. Anything's
possible."

Kertzman stared at everyone in turn. "You have to ask yourself, what is so important that one of our own operatives, if he is one of ours, would kill Sims and Myrick to protect? Or to hide?"

He let the question settle. "And what do all these people have in common? The college? What is the key that ties 'em all together? The Army? Special Forces? Rogue covert ops running some underground financial scam that's gotten out of hand? What kind of situation could be bad enough to cost five men their lives, two of which had security clearances to the highest levels of this government? What can be that bad? Or that big?" He paused. "When we find the answer to that, gentlemen, I can assure you that we'll find something that leads straight back to this room."

Radford folded his hands. "That's a little out of line, isn't it, Kertzman?"

Kertzman waited, allowing whatever influence he possessed to work its way into the nervous impatience of his listeners. He knew that they hated his words; and he knew that his determination to find the bottom-line truth was the only real power he had. If he allowed himself to be swept in with the rest of them, they would own him, giving him what they wanted, when they wanted. He would be a puppet, a yes-head nobody with no guts, no respect. He couldn't settle for that. Ten years as a city street cop, Vietnam, twenty years in the FBI, and four years as a Pentagon criminal investigator had given something to him, meant something. He knew that, now, if he ever sold out he would lose the soul-weight of every right decision, every back-against-the-wall gutsy move he had ever made, lose the center of what he had risked his life a thousand times to defend. It would have all been for nothing, meaning nothing. He couldn't do it, had decided long ago that he couldn't do it. So since his first days in the Pentagon with the stonewalling and the complexity concealing game-playing he had adopted one unbending code of conduct; anybody came at him hard, tried to crush him, he came back at them harder; pushed into a corner, he'd burn the house down laughing his guts out and nobody gets out of here alive, boys!

Kertzman smiled at the thought; better to be hated and feared than to live on his knees.

"Gentlemen," he began, with only the slightest trace of a Midwestern upbringing in his words, "regardless of what I can prove, if something looks like a bull, if something walks like a bull and smells like a bull, then it's probably a bull." He winked at Radford. "If you know what I mean."

He let that solidify, gazed around the table. Radford didn't move, stared at him. Then, allowing his anger to brace his
boldness, Kertzman stood up, slowly walked down one side of the table. "Do you know what we need to understand here, Mr. Radford?" he projected. "We need to understand a little bit about trackin'. About huntin'."

Confusion, or shock, blinked in Radford's eyes.

"Before I left South Dakota," Kertzman went on, "and came to this godforsaken part of the country, I did a lot of huntin'. Moose, elk, bear. Whatever. Any of you ever tracked a bear in the high country, brought it down with your own hands?"

Silence.

"Well, I have. They gave a lot to me, and I gave a lot to them. And I'd do it clean. No guides. No fancy machinery flying around chasing 'em into trees like the cowards do nowadays. It'd just be him and me, alone in the high ground. And sometimes when the rock would be so hard that I couldn't track, I'd begin to wonder if he might not 'a circled back around. Maybe he was tracking me."

Kertzman paused, eyebrows slightly raised. "Believe me, boys, that's a bad feeling. And I would always use a Casull .454 so I'd be close when the moment of truth came."

Radford gazed distantly at the wall. "Is this really important, Kertzman?"

"So there I'd be," Kertzman continued, smiling, "alone in the high country. And he'd be with me, huntin' me just like I was huntin' him. And do you know how I would realize it when he had finally come up in back of me?" Kertzman stopped at the far end of the table, looked around. "It was the silence," he said, a remembered fear steady and centered in his gaze. "One minute I'd be trackin', looking for sign, not finding anything. Bird and squirrel and every other kind of critter would be chirpin' and hollerin' and making a racket. Then, all of a sudden, this terrible silence."

Kertzman waited, allowing a quiet to settle on the room. "Then there'd be that ol' strong ammonia smell 'a bear. He'd be hunting me, right on me. The meanest thing you've ever seen on four legs was right beside me in the trees and I couldn't even see him. But I'd know he was there. Because of the silence."

Kertzman walked along the table, stopped at the opposite end. He put both hands, fingers spread, on the smoothly polished wood. Radford appeared reluctantly impressed. Absently, he once again tapped his pencil on the table.

"So what are you saying, Kertzman?"

Kertzman leaned forward, meeting the NSA man's gaze.

"What am I saying?" he repeated, palms flat on the table. "I'm saying that it's awfully strange that I can't see no tracks in any 'a this. I'm saying that it smells like I'm real close to something I
should
see, but I can't." He nodded to Radford.