Unmanned (9780385351263) (14 page)

As if that explained everything, all those Americans working for the same side. That’s probably how Mansur saw it, which would certainly explain how he could have been manipulated so easily by one faction or another. If one American offered to pay you more than another, what was the harm in switching if they were working for the same side?

“What about Hector?” Steve offered, trying out Castle’s code name.

“No,”
Mansur said, his voice rising. “I say everything. I say everything and
no more
!”

Now he was downright angry. Cole worried the landlady would hear.

“Do you know about Magic Dimes?” Steve asked. “Did Hector or Lancer ever talk about that?”

“Magic? No magic. No one.” He was drifting away from them, on a cloud of either weariness or indifference.

“Shit, this is useless,” Steve said. “His English sucks.”

Cole tried another tack.

“Your family. Where is your family, Mansur?”

“Family?” His eyes brightened again.

“Yes. Your wife and children. Where are they?”

“Children, no.” He went glum, shook his head. “My children make toy. They make toy and it is ruin!
Ruin!
”

“Easy, Mansur,” Steve said. “Shit, he’ll wake up the whole house.

Cole, utterly baffled now, was about to try another question when a woman called out in Spanish from down the hall. Mansur went rigid.

“Great,” Steve muttered. “The bitch is back.”

“What is she saying?” Cole asked.

“The angry men. Here.”

“The ones in the black truck?”

“Yes. Here now.”

They heard the sound of car doors slamming from out front, an engine revving. Probably the same SUV as before.

“She say they bring movie.”

“A movie?” Steve whispered.

Mansur nodded. “Movie from taco.”

“What the hell?”

With a sinking feeling, Cole realized what Mansur must be talking about.

“From the security cam at Taco Rojo.” They heard the slam of a downstairs door, footsteps coming up the stairway. “They want to show him, see if he knows us. Or me, anyway.”

“He will now. Let’s go!” Steve said.

He and Cole moved to the window. Cole decided he had better do something about the fallen blinds, lest they rouse unwanted suspicion, so he hastily slid them beneath Mansur’s bed while Steve heaved up the sash. Cold air poured in. Cole half expected Mansur to try to come with them, but the young man sat impassively on the bed, rubbing his arms against the chill. He felt a stab of pity for the man, stranded alone and obviously lacking the means to help himself. And who knew what he’d say about this visit?

“Mansur,” Cole whispered, getting his attention one last time. “This is our secret, okay? Our secret from the angry men, or we will never be able to help you. You and your family. Okay?”

Mansur shook his head.

“My family. It is away.”

“Away where?”

“You not know? Then how you help?”

He was growing agitated again, so Cole moved to calm him.

“We will help them, Mansur. We will help them. But you must help us. You must keep our secret.”

Mansur nodded solemnly, then flinched as the footsteps pounded closer and stopped on the third-floor landing. The landlady called out. Cole followed Steve onto the fire escape, pulling down the sash behind him as he heard the snap of a deadbolt lock. He stepped away from the window just as they heard the door to Mansur’s room rattle open. A pool of light appeared at the spot where Cole had just been standing. He backed away slowly and followed Steve down the metal stairs. They heard the muffled voices of men in consultation, but no one was shouting in anger or alarm. Still, Mansur might tell them anything in his current state of mind, so they moved fast.

Steve clambered onto the ladder at the bottom. It sank toward the
ground, the steel cable groaning as it raised the counterweight. Cole followed him down, dropping lightly to the ground. Figuring that it wasn’t yet safe to return to Steve’s Honda, they headed down the alley in the opposite direction from the way they’d come. It was nearly midnight, and the empty streets made them feel hunted and exposed. With the video from the security camera, these men would now know what Steve and he looked like. With good enough connections, the men might soon even learn their names.

Cole felt they’d gotten precious little information in exchange for their trouble. A location for Mansur, yes, and another tantalizing trace of the mysterious Lancer, whoever he was, plus some sort of link between the villages of Sandar Khosh, which he knew all too well, and Mandi Bahar, which was familiar, but he couldn’t recall why. But where was Mansur’s family now? Who was holding him here, and why? Steve and he were leaving with more questions than they’d brought.

They trotted across Fayette and disappeared up another alley. Checking over their shoulders for pursuers, they picked up the pace and headed deeper into the city.

THEY FINALLY MADE IT
back to Barb’s at one in the morning. Every light was on. Steve recounted their adventures, with Cole chiming in here and there. But mostly he watched Barb, intrigued by her still and watchful silence, lips compressed. She reminded him of a card player careful to conceal a winning hand, and he wondered what she was holding in reserve.

“Nice work,” Keira said after Steve finished. “Between that and Bickell, we’ve got plenty to keep us busy.”

“First we need to find out who’s holding Mansur, and why,” Steve said. “Maybe property records will help.”

Barb played her hand.

“My guy at DMV ran the tags. That SUV is registered to IntelPro. Your guy’s been lying to you, Steve. They’re involved in this way deeper than we thought.”

“
My
guy? I’m not the only one with an IntelPro source.”

“Okay, then. All our guys. But yours is supposedly the most plugged in, the closest to the top.”

Steve kept a game face, but his earlobes reddened. Cole sensed that something more than a professional disagreement was at stake. Up to now, Steve had been the closest thing to a chief executive in their tenuous little democracy. Barb was challenging the pecking order.

“Maybe Steve’s guy is also in the dark,” Keira said, trying to mediate. “We don’t really know how high up the ladder he is.”

“Steve knows, he just won’t tell us. Maybe his guy is just covering his ass.”

Steve frowned and shook his head, but his earlobes had faded to pink. Then he sighed deeply and gave in. Sort of.

“Entirely possible,” he said. “I guess he could be using me for just about anything. I’ll certainly ask him about this. But none of it explains why Castle’s missing, or where he’s gone, or whether he’s working for himself or for the Agency.”

The concession blunted the force of Barb’s attack, and for the next few minutes they kicked around other possible motives and scenarios. Most involved names Cole hadn’t yet heard of. It was obvious he had a lot to learn about IntelPro, the role of the Agency, and the state of their reporting if he was going to stay abreast of them. He wondered how much they would be willing to educate him.

“Your corneas are glazing over, Captain Cole,” Barb observed. “Are we boring you, or are you just craving a drink?”

Baiting him, so he held his tongue. Intemperate remarks would become part of the record against him, just as on Predator missions.

“You guys are talking about a lot of people I know nothing about. Maybe you could bring me up to speed.”

“How ’bout tomorrow?” Keira said, drawing sharp looks from the other two. “After we’ve all had some sleep.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“We could all use some shut-eye,” Steve said.

Barb seemed about to object. Then, as if thinking better of it, she nodded, and soon afterward the three reporters were heading upstairs to bed. Keira, leading the way, paused halfway up.

“I’ll check the deeds for the Pickard Street house first thing tomorrow,” she said.

“You’re the morning person,” Barb answered.

“Just be careful,” Steve said. “Keep it as quiet as you can.”

Alone downstairs, Cole took stock of his new billet. Barb had made up the couch with fresh linens and a spare duvet. The cat was gone, presumably out on a prowl. His only company was the pair of boys on the photos, facing him from the shadows of the dining room. He thought back to his trailer in the desert, wondering whether the coyotes were still visiting nightly. That monastic existence felt like the distant past. His only connection now was a mild urge for a drink. He
turned out the lights before it had a chance to sharpen, not even bothering to brush his teeth. Then he settled beneath the sheets and drifted off to the pinging of halyards against masts on the sailboats docked across Stansbury Creek.

For the first time in months he dreamed of his wife, Carol. She was smiling. They were here, the whole family, seated on their couch four abreast in the house on Wilson Point Road, alone downstairs with the TV on. All the furniture and photos were from their old place in Summerlin. Or, no, now the room looked like the vacation home they’d rented at Lake Tahoe a few months before they split up, with the kids asleep in a loft upstairs and Carol and he in bed, no television. A half-empty bottle of wine stood on the bedside table. Cole raised a glass to his lips, swallowed greedily, then tasted it on Carol’s lips as they kissed, a wonderfully familiar sensation, although the touch of her hands on his arm, his back, his face, was somehow Keira’s—feathery and thrilling, her short fingernails brushing like a caress. When he looked up into Carol’s face he was shocked to see she had red hair, uncombed, like Barb’s. Now they were half undressed, unbuttoning and unzipping, everything moving fast, their clothes shedding as easily as bath towels. Carol lay back against the bed, eyes closed, but it was still Barb’s hair fanned against the pillow. She smiled slyly as Cole entered her, as if harboring a secret, which only thrilled him more. The body beneath him was warm and sinuous, but indeterminate now, belonging to no woman he had ever made love to before. It left him feeling strange but no less passionate as he rocked and bucked with abandon, then release.

Cole jolted awake in a silent room. The air outside was still, the masts no longer pinging. His surroundings were barely visible in the pale glow of a streetlamp seeping through the blinds. His boxers were wet with semen.

“Shit!” he whispered.

He threw back the top sheet. The air smelled like baked mushrooms, a simmer of sex.

“Shit!”

The bottom sheet was damp. He groped his way into the kitchen, where he tore off a paper towel and ran it under the tap before dabbing it to the wet spot, hoping the couch wouldn’t be stained in the morning.
His first night as a houseguest and he was ruining the furniture, exactly the sort of animalistic influence they probably feared most. And now he truly craved a drink, preferably two fingers of bourbon in a glass tumbler.

He returned to the kitchen to throw away the paper towel, taking pains to stuff it out of sight beneath the garbage on top. Then he opened the fridge. Maybe a beer would tide him over. He grabbed a cold bottle, unscrewed the cap, and drank half of it while standing in the light of the open door. He carried the rest into the dining room, where the reporters’ laptops were all open, like place settings for a party of three. He touched a key on one and the screen lit up, a phalanx of icons on a field of blue. They weren’t exactly security conscious among themselves, which he supposed was a good sign. With his left hand he pressed the beaded bottle to his forehead. With his right he moved the cursor to the icon for Internet Explorer and clicked. The Google homepage came up.

Might as well begin his education.

He eased into a chair and typed in a search for IntelPro. The company website was the first hit. A sober home page, even dignified, with the company slogan—“Protection Is Our Watchword”—splashed atop an impressive slide show depicting IntelPro employees in action around the world. Things loosened up a bit once you started clicking on the links.

A page headlined “A Company of Global Reach” displayed an interactive map of the world with IntelPro logos marking every country where they were doing business. Cole clicked on Kabul. Up popped a summary of local manpower and a brief description of duties. An IntelPro security detail guarded the presidential palace. There was a reference to support units based in various provinces, but no mention of any work in the tribal borderlands out where Mansur had lived and worked. No mention of either Mandi Bahar or Sandar Khosh.

Cole clicked on another page and activated a video. It opened with a shot of a dozen or so muscular, heavily armed fellows in skintight T-shirts advancing across a swampy field at the company’s two-thousand-acre training facility on the Maryland Eastern Shore. Gunfire erupted, loud enough to awaken half the household. Cole quickly shut it down.

He returned to the map and clicked on the logo just north of Baltimore. A photo of corporate headquarters popped up, a gleaming three-story building in Hunt Valley. Close enough to Washington to keep a hand in, but not so close as to appear to be breathing down the neck of the Pentagon, or the CIA. And it was certainly convenient for keeping tabs on Mansur.

He searched the site for any reference to “Lancer,” just in case, but came up empty.

The deeper he explored, the wackier things got. Embedded in the section for prospective employees was a page offering company logo products like T-shirts and caps, so you could dress like a mercenary in your own backyard. At the bottom, in a deft bit of cross-marketing, you could click a link to join the National Rifle Association, a paid advertiser.

He navigated to the description of IntelPro’s corporate structure.

The founder and chairman was Michael “Mike” Boardman. Former U.S. Army Ranger. West Point, class of ’87, meaning he’d be in his mid-forties. Decorated during the Persian Gulf War in ’91. Family man. Self-made millionaire. In his picture his hair was clipped as short as on the first day of basic. Not even a hint of a smile. Charcoal gray suit, white shirt, red tie. Just another uniform, in other words. Below the photo were links to profiles in the news media, plus a
Wall Street Journal
editorial that praised him as a “visionary entrepreneur” and concluded, “While some misguided souls inevitably label him a mercenary, Boardman has found a creative and muscular way to serve his country even as he serves his company’s impressive bottom line.”