PATRIOT ACTS

A Fixer Novel

By R. H. Emmers

 

Six Weeks From Now

THE MEXICAN BORDER

The place where Dahl was to die was at the foot of a low hill three miles from the missionary woman’s house near the border town of Imperial. A perfect location for an ambush, the black SUV blocking the dirt road visible only after he’d driven over the hill’s crest. He hadn’t really expected this, but now that it was happening, he realized he wasn’t surprised: They’d twice approached him with offers, once before he went to Thailand and once after he returned; both times he’d told them to fuck off. This was the obvious next move. He just wished he knew what it was they’d wanted to buy and now wanted to kill him for. Of course, they’d say it was all in the interests of national security, but still…

A three-man sanction crew flew into LAX Saturday morning. Rented an SUV and drove to a safe house in Glendale where weapons were cached along with a thumb drive containing a briefing which revealed, among other things, that the subject, a 60-year-old white man, had once been an Army Ranger.

The fact that they were going to take on a former snake eater didn’t bother the crew: Their own experience was a great deal more recent and, they confidently judged, more extensive. Besides, as the team leader, Mike Cortez, pointed out: Dude might have once been a Ranger, now he was just old.

Cortez himself was 34, a big guy, former Recon Marine, wore his hair in dreads, got off on the poetry of T. S. Elliot. He’d been doing this work a long time. Now his dreams had come to be filled with featureless faces, and he had the sense he could hear the footsteps of his ghosts coming closer every day. The second member of the team was Roddy Johnson, 33. He was wiry and balding, great joker, a former Army sniper who took pleasure in meticulous marksmanship. The newest and youngest member of the team was Wayne Geragos, 27, his baby face marred by a scar from temple to jaw, a private soldier with Blackwater until an unfortunate incident involving the daughter of an Afghan Army major. Mike and Roddy didn’t like him and wished him gone: Too eager to please, too gung-ho, thought being with Blackwater made him a seasoned life taker. And what about that fucking scar? Might be good, might be bad, depending on how it was acquired and what happened to the guy who gave it to him. Wayne wouldn’t talk about it.

Based on intercepts of the subject’s phone calls, the crew knew they could relax until Monday. So they cleaned weapons and listened to music on the safe house’s excellent stereo system. Wayne went off to check out Hollywood, especially the House of Blues, where Bone Thugs in Harmony were playing. Mike and Roddy sent out for four whores.

This sanction was looking easy: They knew where the subject was going to be and it was an ideal place for an ambush and losing a body. And even if the body was found, dude had enough enemies a bullet in the back of the head wouldn’t really shock anybody.

Besides, dude was old.

After returning from Thailand, Dahl found himself adrift. The wounds of his last case – the physical wounds – were healing (although strength was slow to return to his knife-slashed hand), but his nerves were still jangled by a strange sense he’d somehow failed. He knew he needed another mission. But there wasn’t one.

So he spent time at the gym. Went to the shooting range. Drinks or dinner with Roberta but they avoided any talk about what had happened during that last case, with all its blood and death. Long, wandering drives in the desert. No particular schedule.

Then, on a whim the week before, he called a woman he’d met during that case, the case that went so bad. Stout, sharp-tongued, widowed and into her seventies, she ran a mission for migrants in Imperial, a dusty desert town south of the Salton Sea near the Mexican border. Dahl drove down from LA, bought her lunch at a local diner. They didn’t talk about the recent case. Instead, the memories they voiced were of El Salvador, where Dahl had been a soldier of the American Empire and the woman a missionary of Christ. But only those memories that skirted the truth of the guilt they knew to reside in their hearts: The blood Dahl could never wash from his hands, the failure of faith that made the woman flee when so many others stayed, and died.

On this Monday, after buying her lunch at the same diner and dropping her off at her house at the end of a long, rutted dirt road, he headed back toward the paved road and the town.

Dahl was fiddling with the Bronco’s radio when he crested the low hill. Then he saw the SUV blocking him and the glint of light that had to mark the shooters in the ditch at the side of the road.

He knew only speed might let him live a few minutes longer.

He hammered the throttle, hauled the steering wheel sharply left. Throwing a plume of dust and nearly tipping over, the Bronco bounced violently off the dirt road into a field strewn with rocks. The shocks slammed against the frame. Automatic rifle fire shattered the passenger side windows, hammered the sheet metal.

The land was featureless except for a line of stunted greenery fifty yards ahead. Had to mark an irrigation ditch. The tires slewed back and forth across the rough ground, threatened to tear his grip from the steering wheel. The firing kept up. Bullets shattered the rear window. Something sharp and fast sliced his cheek.

Then a tire blew. The Bronco swerved, buried its bumper, pitched onto its side. Dahl was thrown violently against the door. Through the rear window, empty of glass, he saw two men rise from the brush on the far side of the dirt road. One of them, dreadlocks flowing from beneath his cap, shouted, and a third man hopped out of the SUV. They spread apart, began to walk forward. They wore identical blue windbreakers and blue caps and they came on slowly and implacably, weapons carried easily, workmen setting about an accustomed task.

Dahl kicked out the windshield, slithered to the ground, crabbed his way to the irrigation ditch. Rifle fire kicked up dust spurts left and right as he tried to stay in the cover of the Bronco’s carcass. Rolling into the head-high ditch, he floundered downstream through greenish-brown water lapping at his thighs to a small pump house where another ditch came in at right angles. He crouched behind the concrete blocks of the enclosure. Humid, fetid air wrapped him like a shroud. His chest heaved. He could smell the fear in his sweat.

Raising his head, he saw the man with dreadlocks standing beside the ditch fifty yards away, to his right. The man wiped sweat from his forehead, then turned and shouted something to one of the other shooters. Dahl saw his meager options disappearing further. Soon, the dreadlock man, the leader, would call in his companions. They’d make their way along the ditch, approach the pump house with rifles ready. Then they would kill him. He found himself wishing again he knew what knowledge he possessed that they were going to kill him to suppress.

A man appeared on the bank of the ditch opposite Dahl. Blue cap, blue jacket, rifle cradled in his arms, long scar down his baby face, the third man, the one from the SUV. Standing on the bank, he was gazing back toward the dreadlocked leader rather than keeping his focus where it belonged.

Dahl flung himself up and forward. He slipped in the muck but got his hand around the man’s ankle. Jerked with all his strength. Off balance, the man tumbled into the water, losing his rifle on the rim of the ditch. Then Dahl was on him, punching his face until he heard the crack of a cheek bone. He held him under water while his thrashing diminished. There was shouting farther up the ditch, the sound of running. Dahl got an arm lock around the man’s neck, pulled him upright as a shield. He found the man’s pistol in his waistband.

The man with the dreadlocks had stopped twenty-five yards away, on the far bank of the ditch. He was joined by a second man, tall and wiry and carrying a scoped rifle, who muttered something. They both laughed.

Hauling his man by the neck, pistol to his temple, Dahl shifted closer to the pump house. “Back off!” he shouted.

The dreadlock man squinted at him. “Are you kiddin’ me?”

“I’ll kill him!” Dahl shouted, for lack of anything better.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” The dreadlock man, Mike Cortez, lifted his cap and scratched his head. He looked at Wayne Geragos, head lolling, mucus and blood dripping from nose and mouth, and felt anger pinch his temples. My friend, he thought, I knew you were going to fuck up, I just didn’t think you’d fuck up this bad. Then he looked up at the streamers of clouds ghosting across the vast, uncaring desert, and felt a sudden oppressive weariness. His flesh itched from sweat and grit and his sinuses throbbed and the old wound in his hip ached. It’s an issue of national security, they tell you loftily, but it always ends up in shit like this. Jesus, what I ought to do is say fuck it all, go back to the city, get drunk, fuck a whore.

He looked over and nodded at his partner, Roddy Johnson. Johnson dropped to one knee and brought his rifle to his shoulder.

Wayne Geragos regained consciousness with an arm crushing his windpipe and a pistol screwed in his ear and a man next to him shouting, “I’ll kill him!”

Kill who? Wayne wondered, and then he wondered how he’d gotten here up to his ass in muck when the last thing he remembered was standing above the ditch waiting for Cortez to tell him what to do. Then some of the fog lifted. His belly heaved and he vomited up gouts of brown water. He suddenly realized that the guy crushing his windpipe and screwing the pistol into his ear was the subject, the guy they were supposed to sanction. What the fuck!

“Dude,” he managed to croak, “I’m just a driver. I got nothing to do with any…”

“Why do you want to kill me?” the subject said.

“I don’t…”

The subject cocked the hammer of the pistol.

Wayne began to shiver. This was not the way it was supposed to go. It was as if he could actually hear the subject’s finger tightening on the trigger. Oh Jesus, bad mojo, bad moon rising, that old song playing when he paid a surprise drunk visit to his ex-, just wanted to get some for old times’ sake before leaving for Afghanistan but she wasn’t up with it and sliced the side of his face open with a pair of scissors when he wouldn’t get off her. Bitch.

“Please,” he said. “All I know is it’s something about this big-shot senator in Washington and apparently you have a picture…”

And it was as he was trying to fashion the rest of the words that would let him go on living that Wayne realized he was staring directly down the barrel of Roddy Johnson’s rifle and he thought Oh no no no no and then there was the briefest instant of the brightest sun and then his head blew apart.

Laughing manically, Roddy Johnson began spraying the pump house with three-round bursts. “This is for Helper!” he shouted.

Helper!

That name and what it meant! Dahl was distracted for an instant. Then another barrage of M-4 rounds erupted around him, cracking the air and flaying cement chips from the pump house. Ducking, he tossed the body aside and threw himself across the ditch into the meager cover of its bank. His chest and arms were splashed with blood and gristle and bone chips and brain matter. Another volley rang above him. Somebody shouted: He thought it was the shooter saying he was out. The firing paused.

Fuck it all, Dahl thought. He stood up and began firing the pistol at the the man with the rifle, who was inserting a new magazine. Didn’t really expect to hit anything, the guy was too far away. But his second, lucky shot caught the man in the chest, throwing a bright rainbow of blood and knocking him on his back. Dahl kept firing.

Then the pistol clicked empty.

On the other side of the drainage ditch, the man with dreadlocks had brought up his rifle. Thirty-five yards, no wind, standing target, easy shot, dead man.

Dahl stood there and waited.

The man sighted on him for what seemed a very long time. Then he lowered the rifle, shook his head and walked away across the stony ground.

And Dahl?

Dahl ran.

Understanding that if he wished to keep on living, he’d have to keep on running.

Now

LAGOS

We had not expected to see you here in Lagos. How was your flight?” the Facilitator asked. Behind him stood his new assistant, a young man as tall and thin as the Facilitator, with inquisitive blue eyes in a bland, wholesome face partially covered by a reddish beard – according to Eric, he was originally from Ottumwa, Iowa.

“A change of plans back home,” Helper replied. “The flight was long and a little rough, but on the plus side, nobody hijacked us and flew us into a tall building.”

“Oh, we try our best, but there’s always a certain amount of luck involved in such matters,” the Facilitator said dryly.

“Praise be to Allah,” the assistant added with a distinct Midwest accent.

Helper scrubbed at his head, stretched and pointedly consulted his watch. “I need to finish our business, folks; I have a meeting in Rome with Marko to discuss our split on future shipments.”

“Everything is well in hand here,” Eric said.

They all turned to the glass wall of the office that looked out on the vast floor of the warehouse, into which the auto-carrier, docked at the Ro-Ro terminal of Tin Can Island Port, was disgorging its cargo. Mechanics were taking apart and putting back together various hidden cargo spaces in the disembarked vehicles.

The product had arrived.

In a far corner of the warehouse, a group of five men in white shirts and blue ties lounged on folding chairs, smoking, drinking beer and playing cards. The inspectors from the Nigerian Customs Service, studiously ignoring the proceedings in the warehouse. Watching over everything were a dozen armed guards:  Eric’s men who, according to Helper’s plan, were to hijack the shipment.

A blaring of sirens dopplered by on the boulevard just beyond the warehouse. The Facilitator raised an eyebrow.

“A tanker blew up a few days ago and is still burning,” Eric explained. “It is believed to be the work of Boko Haram. Islamic terrorists.” He started, and sweat popped out across his forehead. “Your pardon, excellency, your pardon! That’s just a phrase the news media uses. I meant… freedom fighters.”

The Facilitator waved his hand.  “No, they’re a bunch of primitive cretins stuck in the 10^th century who believe education is sinful and the earth is flat.”

“Sounds like our Republicans,” Helper said. He watched the activity in the warehouse for a moment, then scrubbed at his shaved head again. “Okay, I’m heading to the airport. Eric will take care of things here.” Eric gave him a faint nod back. “All the account numbers and electronic transfers are set up,” Helper added. “Your transport crew is ready?”

“They are in an apartment near the amusement park,” the Facilitator said.

Helper regarded the Facilitator for a moment, thinking he sensed something odd in the man’s gaze. But he shrugged it off. “Eric, you good to go?”

Eric had turned his back.

“Dude, what’s going…”

“Deposit your weapons on the floor, please,” the Facilitator said.

Helper stared at Eric’s blank back. In an instant everything was clear and in that same instant his emotions swung through astonishment to boiling anger to a wild, exhilarating and almost unbearable urge to laugh out loud.

“So that’s what I get for being ambitious,” he said, whether to Eric or the world at large he wasn’t quite sure. The Facilitator’s assistant was holding a large pistol pointed at his stomach. The man’s hand shook not at all and all trace of blandness had left his Midwest farmer’s face, replaced by grim planes. “Your weapons on the floor,” the Facilitator repeated.

Helper took his pistol from behind his back and set it on the floor.

“And the one on your ankle as well, please.”

Helper set it down beside the other. “Have you thought this through?” he said, straightening. “I can tell you what Marko would say.”

A door opened behind him. “Can you really, my friend?” a gruff, accented voice said.

Helper felt a sudden overwhelming weariness. You spend your life fighting in deserts and mountains and jungles and cities and villes filled with screaming fanatics. You spend your life fighting for reasons and causes you can never quite identify. But you fight because you are a man of your country. A patriot. And then at the end you reach for the reward you never realized you wanted, but it’s there for the taking and it’s your due.

And this is what it comes to.

Through the weariness, his heart beat profoundly. His heart would not fail him. There must be one move left, one more door to beat down, one more barbarian to kill.

The Facilitator’s assistant must have sensed something: Helper saw his hand tighten on his pistol. He made himself be still.

With an old man’s shuffle, cane tapping, Marko moved around him – at a discreet distance – and stood by the Facilitator. Accompanying Marko was a slight, wiry young man who gave off a strong aroma of scented soap.

Helper forced a smile. “So, I guess the meeting in Rome is off.  And I see,” he added, nodding toward the aromatic young man, “that Iban has found a new employer.”

“Oh, he’s been very helpful,” Marko said, leaning forward on his cane. “My apologies, my friend, but the world being the way it is, a new arrangement presented itself and had to be taken advantage of, okay? I’m sure you understand. A proverb from my country: God created the beard on his own face first.”

“You’ve told me many proverbs over the years,” Helper said. “We’ve worked together a long time, haven’t we?” Even as he said it, he despised the supplication it implied. “In Sarajevo, Zagreb, Beirut. You remember those times, don’t you? Beirut and the Hezbollah cell and the gun at the back of your head?”

“Let’s move along,” the Facilitator said.

“Yes,” Marko said, “I remember it all. But the world is a gift to the young. An old man like me, he must grab whatever he can to see himself through the dwindling years ahead. And to provide for the next generation. My son Ratko, he has been brought up as a true vory. He can be a pakhan some day, but he must have what help I can give him. You understand, old friend?”

“I don’t understand anything until you tell me, old friend. You’re going to have to lay it out. The way we did in the old days when the bullets were flying.”

“The past is the past,” Marko said and struck his cane loudly against the floor. “But okay, you want a story, I will tell you a story. Your maneuver against Adizes was a smart maneuver. You make him out the big terrorist moneyman so you can assume his operation. Bravo!  But others can maneuver as well, eh? You and I, we were doing business, a good business, okay? But then one day out of the blue sky, the attorney contacts me and says, Mr. Marko, sir, listen to a proposal that will be even better business…”

“The attorney? That fat fuck Shipley?”

Marko rested on his cane.

“Jesus,” Helper said, “I knew he was a crook; I just didn’t know he was a smart crook. But look, the Admiral might have some thoughts about this new arrangement.”

“Ah, the all-wise supreme leader of the Equatorial Republic. It has been decided that a change must be made. The Admiral, you see, became a little too greedy. So certain people – you may know some of them – whispered in the ear of the Army, okay?” Marko, blinking to focus, regarded his watch. “As we speak, the Army is making the required regime change, okay?”

Helper made himself smile. “So there it is,” he said after a moment.

“Yes, there it is,” Marko agreed.

The Facilitator stepped forward. “Enough. We have made our own arrangements and no longer require your services.” He motioned, and his assistant went to Eric and nudged him with his elbow, like a man wanting to show a friend a ridiculous sight. Eric left the room, digging his car keys out of his pocket.

And I really am, here at the end, more or less ridiculous, Helper thought, as he regarded the pistol held by the assistant, noting with a small bite of grim satisfaction the man’s unwavering hand – at least I’m going to be killed by someone who knows his business.

A few words of the old song flitted through some part of his consciousness, muted and unintelligible, like a whispering in a dark tunnel, the old song from the jungles and the deserts. He thought he’d like to have a beer with that guy Dahl and talk over everything that had happened. He could be honest with the guy, he felt; after all, they were both patriots.

“Go ahead and take him away,” the Facilitator said to his assistant. Then he looked squarely at Helper. “Perhaps you would like to know that the boy you killed at the club in Ikoya was my nephew.”

Ah yes, that old song…

Don’t go around tonight,
Well, it’s bound to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.

“I found Boyd Shipley,” he told Dahl.It took Wilson three weeks to make his way through the spider’s web of bank accounts, holding companies, sales agreements and wire transfers. But in the end, he was able to locate where the subject had gone to ground: Phuket, Thailand. He was even able to locate, on a resort property website, a picture of the house: A stunning construction of teak and stucco and glass with a wide veranda on a bluff directly overlooking the beach and the sparkling Andaman Sea.

There was a Thai Airways flight from LAX to Bangkok the next day. Dahl booked a seat.

Nov. 2, 12:43 P.M. E.S.T.By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In response to the wave of terror attacks that struck six major U. S. cities, killing 334 people, the President today signed into law The Homeland Protection of Freedom Act, which gives security agencies an emergency appropriation of $80 billion and significantly enhances their surveillance and other powers.

The legislation, which was passed nearly unanimously by both houses of Congress, also prohibits civilian use of encryption software for email and portable communication devices and directs the Department of Homeland Security to register all Muslim immigrants who have been in the country less than 15 years.

The terror attacks struck public gatherings in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Kansas City and Los Angeles. The toll death toll might have been much higher but for the action of a well known local minister who threw himself atop a 16-year-old suicide bomber just as she triggered her device at a political rally in Los Angeles.  The minister and the suicide bomber both died; twenty-three bystanders were wounded.

And in the Coordinator’s Secure Room…

There’s no absolute confirmation, but we believe the incinerated remains found in the Olusosun dump in Lagos were his,” the Coordinator’s deputy said. “Of course, there are all sorts of wild rumors floating around: Helper did a last minute deal with the Serbian, he was seen in LA, Mexico City, Belgrade, he’s hiding in the jungle planning his revenge, etc. etc. etc. I suppose it’s understandable; he had a lot of friends in certain quarters.”

“He was a useful operative over the years,” the Coordinator said. “However, it was important to establish a covert means of channeling funding to the Facilitator. And with that accomplished, it was necessary that our exposure be curtailed.”

“In the interests of national security.”

“Oh, indeed.” The Coordinator stirred cream his coffee. “Helper was an intelligent man,” he said. “I suspect that at some point he must have realized that an operation to finance the Admiral was just cover for something else. Yet, he still thought he could pull off his own plan. I wonder if he actually would have tried to sell our own drugs back to us. Anyway, update me on the Facilitator.”

“Yes, sir. He’s sub-contracting the first operation to the Chechens who are working with the Islamic State. It’s a tricky operation timing-wise. Eight schools in different parts of Tehran. Simultaneously. Five to six hundred casualties, mostly children. Links back to Israel.”

“Good, constant turmoil is what keeps the machine running.” The Coordinator sipped coffee. “Alright,” he said after a moment, “there’s still the issue of the Lenois woman. It’s a shame Helper wasn’t able to conclude that matter. Is there any update?”

“The team has been unable to locate her so far. She could be living on the streets, a squat, who knows? She could be dead from an overdose. But, sir, as I said before, I don’t think there’s much exposure. She was always zonked for the Malibu parties, so I doubt she recognized the man. In other words, she has no idea what she knows. And as far as the photo goes, it’s just too dark and blurry.”

“That man Dahl has a copy of the photo?”

“Probably. But as with the woman, I’m sure he has no idea what…”

“We need to act out of an abundance of caution. Buy him if you can. If not, take the appropriate action.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Coordinator leaned back in his chair. Presently he began to chuckle.

“Sir?”

“Oh, I was just thinking about how you said the girl wouldn’t have recognized the Senator at the parties. As vain as he is, I don’t know whether he’ll be more relieved or chagrined. Anyway, inform him that we believe his brother is dead and offer condolences. And, of course, reassure him that his personal situation is under control. In the future, of course, it would behoove him to be a little more selective about the parties he attends. And remind him that when he’s elected President in two years, we have certain expectations.”

The End