Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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Gideon's War and Hard Target

“Fuck you, you fucking cunt,” Ervin Mixon said.

A figure separated itself from the darkness. Mixon recognized it as Jim Verhoven. How long had he been there? Mixon hadn’t even seen him enter.

“I’d ask you not to speak to my wife that way,” Verhoven said.

Ervin Mixon didn’t even look at him, though. He couldn’t take his gaze off Lorene’s face. She returned his stare with a faint smile, her eyes wide and fixed.

Verhoven put his hand on his wife’s shoulder.

#82 hi

“Who have you told about our little operation?” Verhoven asked.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” Ervin Mixon heard his own voice, high and shaky. He was trying to control his terror. But there was nothing he could do.

Verhoven held up the recording Mixon had made of his conversation. That’s when Mixon knew he was truly fucked.

“Eyelids,” Verhoven said mildly. “I think we’ll save his eyes for later.” She reached toward him with her blade.

“Wait!” Ervin Mixon tried to thrash around, but he was secured so tightly with the tape that he could barely move. “I’ll tell you what you want to know—”

But before he could continue, Lorene made one quick stroke with her blade, slicing open his left eyelid. Before the searing pain had even begun, blood pooled in his eye, obscuring half his vision.

Ervin Mixon began to scream.

12

ANDERSON, WEST VIRGINIA

Tillman drove his fifteen-year-old Dodge pickup around the rear of Circle Seven Packing Company. With the hog tied to the hood, he backed up to the loading dock and parked with the engine idling. He honked once, and the metal door scrolled slowly open.

The man standing on the loading dock was the owner of the shop, Jim Verhoven. As usual, he was dressed in BDUs and combat boots. Circle Seven was a thinly veiled front for Verhoven’s real business, a way for him to pay the minimum in taxes to avoid federal inquiry. Everyone knew his employees were busy distributing meth while Verhoven tended to the occasional slaughterhouse and meat-processing business.

“My goodness,” Verhoven said as Tillman climbed out of the cab, “that is one monster hog.”

His speech was excessively formal, Tillman noted, as if he were a foreigner who had learned English from a book. Tillman looked into the bed of his truck and nodded. “Yup,” he said.

“What’d you take him with?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Tillman said.

Verhoven raised one eyebrow.

“I was shooting a longbow,” Tillman said. “He spooked, I blew my shot, and I ended up going hand-to-hand with the sumbitch. Lost my knife in the scuffle, finally had to stab him to death with an arrow.”

There was a steel track extending out over the loading dock, with a chain and a hook attached to it. Verhoven pulled the chain down and hooked it to the rear legs of the hog. “Look at those tusks!” he said as he hoisted the carcass up by the legs. “Lucky he didn’t gut you like a fish.”

Tillman laughed. “Wasn’t for want of trying.” He pulled up his pant leg to show off the eight-inch-long bandage on his calf.

“My, my,” Verhoven saids sssssch-lo. Then he turned and hauled the hog down the steel runner back into the little slaughterhouse. After a moment he came back out and said, “Normally it’d take until tomorrow around noon.” Verhoven studied Tillman impassively for a moment. “Might could do it while you wait, if you was to keep me company.”

Tillman looked at his watch. He knew that Verhoven was interested in him—and had been for a while. Guys with Tillman’s résumé didn’t come around every day. Members of Verhoven’s militia group had spoken to Tillman in the past, inviting him to come over for briefings or maneuvers or training now and then. But Tillman had always put them off—and not always politely.

This time he wanted an invitation he could accept. But he didn’t want to press or seem overeager. He needed to let Verhoven come to him.

“Sure,” Tillman said. “I guess I could stay a little.”

He followed Verhoven inside, watched in silence as the “colonel” sharpened a long boning knife on an Arkansas stone. There was something sinister about the room. Everything was sparkling clean, and the fluorescent fixtures overhead flooded the room with pale, shadowless light. Chains and hooks and cutting implements lined the stainless steel walls, everything gleaming and sharp and purposeful.

With one swift stroke Verhoven slit the boar from pelvis to breastbone, the guts spilling out onto the floor in a glistening blue pile.

“Sorry I didn’t field dress it,” Tillman said. “I was pretty much whipped by the time I got the bastard home last night.”

“Truth be told, I’d rather do it myself.” Verhoven cut the anus out of the pig in two swift motions, then yanked the intestines free of the body. “I can’t tell you how many times a day I end up spoiling a great deal of meat because some cretin poked a hole in the guts and flooded the body cavity with fecal matter.”

Verhoven worked silently for almost a minute before he said, “I know who you are.”

Tillman gave Verhoven a long, hard look. “The reason I moved up here was to be left alone.”

“I would, too,” Verhoven said, “if I’d been as wronged by the United States of America as you’ve been.”

Tillman let the comment pass.

“I don’t know if you know it,” Verhoven continued, “but to people like me, people who believe in the true America, the pure and unspoiled America that our founders envisioned, the name Tillman Davis epitomizes true heroism.”

“Kind of you to say,” Tillman said. “But whatever I did or didn’t do for the United States, it’s in my past. I’m just trying to get on with my life.”

This was not a pose. Tillman knew that he had become a sort of Rorschach blot during his trial. Those on the far left of the political spectrum saw him as a rogue military adventurer, while those on the far right claimed him as a kind of folk hero, a scapegoat for a failed foreign policy. For a while after he’d gotten out of prison, he’d been assailed by self-serving people who’d wanted him to speak or to write or appear on television or otherwise serve their oned my wn ends by either making him into a whipping boy, or by holding him up as the victim of a tyrannical government. Neither had been a role he was willing to play. So one day he’d simply thrown his cell phone in a ditch and driven him up here, where he could live unmolested.

“Would you be interested in mounting this fine specimen?” Verhoven asked, indicating the boar’s massive head.

“Wouldn’t have any use for it.”

“Shame for it to go to waste. A hog like this, I’d mount it here in the shop as a conversation piece.”

“It’s yours for the mounting.”

“Much obliged. I’ll give you my services for free in exchange.”

Tillman nodded. He could feel Verhoven working his way around to something. But he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Maybe it was just an invitation to come up and play soldier with his militia group. But Tillman had a feeling that there was something more in the wind than just that.

Verhoven caped the boar silently, his movements slow and methodical as he cut the delicate skin of the head free from the skull. Occasionally he stopped to sharpen one of the small knives, shaving off little patches of hair on his arm to test the keenness of the edge.

“You have to be especially careful around the eyes,” Verhoven said finally. “One slip, and the entire effort is wasted. I’m not bad at this, but I’m just a butcher compared to my wife. You’ll have to meet her sometime. She’s an extraordinary woman.”

Tillman folded his arms, leaned against the concrete wall.

“Would I be prying if I inquired as to how you make a living?” Verhoven said. “I only ask because I read that you were robbed of your military pension.”

Tillman didn’t speak for a while. “I live pretty simple. Hunt, fish, grow a little corn, some tomatoes, some beans.”

Verhoven continued scraping the skin free of the pig’s eyes.

“Now and again, though,” Tillman continued. “Now and again, I’ll take an assignment for somebody I trust. Or maybe put one person I trust in touch with another person I trust.”

Verhoven didn’t look up from his work, his face a mask of concentration. “I only mention it because I’ve recently come into a rather pressing need for several unusual items. Items that one can’t just buy off eBay.”

“And, what—you think I might be the kind of guy who could help you get them?”

Verhoven pulled the cape free of the boar, covered the interior surfaces with a heavy coating of salt, then set it carefully inside a large plastic bin. He began butchering the hog in earnest now.

“There’s a good deal of markup when one sells things that the federal government finds objectionable,” Verhoven said. “I only mention this in the context of what seems to be the unfairness of your circumstances.”

“It gets better by the day, too,” Tillman said bitterly. “I recently had my righght f st to get treated at the VA hospital taken away from me. Got a form letter in the mail. Fifteen years honorable service in the US Army, then another ten with a certain agency that shall go nameless, and the federal government just . . .” He rubbed his palms together like he was washing his hands.

Verhoven’s face grew pinched and angry. “Goddamn traitorous bastards,” he said. Then his face relaxed again. “I’m sorry, but it angers me.”

Tillman felt briefly as though something very cold had been permitted to melt inside him. He realized how lonely it had been, how hard it had been to stand up straight every day when he’d been accused of betraying the trust of the very country he risked his life to serve. For a moment he felt terribly grateful to Verhoven.

The moment passed, though. He was here for a purpose, and he knew he needed to stay focused on that. He had promised Gideon.

“You get to where you have a hard time trusting anybody,” Tillman said. “I want to trust people. I do. And yet I can’t afford the luxury.”

Verhoven shook his head sadly. “That is a very, very keen insight, sir,” he said. “I feel much the same way myself.” He sliced a long section of backstrap free of the big beast, set it on a package. “It seems to me to be the central tragedy of our nation. We need to trust each other. We need to feel a sense of brotherhood. We have such a hunger for it. And yet, we are surrounded by enemies in our midst.” He chopped the ribs free with a small hatchet. When he was finished chopping, he added, “I sense a bond between us, sir. And so I’m going to take a leap and trust you. The items I spoke of . . . I need them quite soon. A gentleman promised me these items and then welshed on the deal. It’s put me in a very, very uncomfortable position.”

Tillman said nothing.

Verhoven took the last bones off the hook, tossed them in the garbage, and then began hosing down the concrete floor. “If I were to give you a list of items I needed, would you be able to get them for me? Would you extend me that trust?”

Gideon's War and Hard Target

Tillman watched the bloody water circle the drain. “You got...

Verhoven pulled a piece of butcher paper off a roll, scrawled something on it, and handed it to Tillman.

Tillman read the list.

Det cord

.50 caliber BMG—armor piercing incendiary

Blasting caps

C4 breaching charges

“Sounds like you’re throwing quite a party,” Tillman said drily.

“All I can say is that something historic is about to happen. If you were to help me with this, you would be contributing to an event of great importance.”

“Why would I want to do that,” Tillman said, “after all I’ve been through?”

“We all have to decide where we stand, don’t we? I can’t answer that question for you.”

Tillman paused, put a thoughtful look on his face. He’d set the hook perfectly. Now was the time to begin reeling him in.

“I could make some phone calls,” Tillman said finally.

Verhoven finished spraying off the floor. “Why don’t you join me for dinner this evening and we can discuss the details?” he said as he hung the sprayer on a hook. “My wife, I know, would consider it a privilege to meet you.”

“I’d like that,” Tillman said. “I’d like that very much.”

13

POCATELLO, IDAHO

It’s over! We’re going home!”

It took Amalie a moment to get her bearings. She woke feeling groggy, slightly nauseated, and with a pounding headache. The sound of the other women laughing and exclaiming was like knives piercing her head. She sat up and looked around, still feeling disoriented. She had been lying in her bed in the windowless dormitory where she and the other Congolese women had been housed.

“Sleeping beauty rises,” said Estelle Olagun, the oldest woman, looking at Amalie with her lips pursed in her usual attitude of disapproval.

The other women laughed. All the women from the factory were in the dormitory, a palpable air of jubilance about them.

One of the younger girls held up a fan of money, American hundred-dollar bills. “Monsieur Collier paid us!” she shouted joyfully. “Look! He even gave us each a five-hundred-dollar bonus. We’re going home rich!”

The women began to dance. “We’re going home! We’re going home!”

Amalie shook her head—partly to clear the cobwebs and partly in disagreement. It was coming back to her, her exchange with Collier, the pinch he’d given her. It had made her sleep—she saw that now. He’d been shutting her up. He’d lied about taking her to see Christiane at the doctor.

“No!” she shouted. “He lies!”

The women stopped dancing and stared at her accusingly. “Why must you always be so negative?” Estelle said.

“He told me he was going to take me to Christiane!” Amalie said hotly. “But he didn’t. Instead he gave me a poison that made me sleep.”

One of the women pointed at the little table next to her bed. A thick envelope lay on the table with Amalie’s name written on it. “And I suppose the one thousand five hundred dollars he left you is poisoned, too?”

Amalie grabbed the envelope and held it over the bed. Sure enough, a thick pile of money fell out onto the blankets. She picked up one of the bills, held it against the light. Even in the Congo, you learned how to spot real American money—the watermarks, the little security stripes, the shifting colors. The rebels from Burundi and Rwanda were always printing fakes, so you had to know. It was obvious: The money was real.

For a moment, doubt infected her.

“Look at her face!” one of the other girls hooted, pointing at her. “She’s been so sure that something horrible is going on, that when something good actually happens, it makes her angry.”

The other women laughed.

The laughter continued until the loud, ominous hissing noise started in the far corner of the room. She smelled something odd, too, the faintest tinge of a sour, nutty odor.

Everyone turned to look. It was a noise unlike anything she’d heard inside the big metal building before.

“The heating is making a strange sound,” Estelle said, frowning.

But Amalie knew it wasn’t the heating. She didn’t know what it was, but she knew something was wrong, and she didn’t want to be here anymore. She ran toward the door and twisted the handle. But the door wouldn’t open. She scrabbled at the lock and shouted, “Ouvrez! Ourvrez la porte!”

The other women had begun screaming. Then one woman fell. Then another. Two more began clawing at their throats and foaming at the mouth. Another began raking her face with her own fingernails, slashing so hard that blood began trickling down one side of her face before she fell.

At last only Amalie was still alive.

She continued to pound on the door. “Tu bâtard! Monsieur Collier, tu putain bâtard!”

The girl’s anger turned to panic. She began shrieking—a horrible inhuman noise like the grinding of some unoiled engine. Then she fell to the floor, where she began spasming, slamming her head into the door so hard it boomed.

From the other side of the one-way glass, Collier and Wilmot observed the dying women.

“According to my model, there’s a little air pocket around the door,” Collier said. “It creates a sort of whirlpool effect and it takes a while before the gas reaches the door. Whoever gets there is the last to die.”

Wilmot watched Amalie writhing in agony.

“She’s tu-toyezing me,” Collier said. “It’s very disrespectful. Frankly I’m a little hurt.”

Wilmot didn’t think it was funny. The glee that Collier took from poisoning and killing sickened him. But that was the cost of enlisting a sociopath. Wilmot still had enough humanity, however, to feel pained at the death of these innocent young women. But collateral damage was an inevitable part of war, he told himself, and the innocent were often sacrificed for the greater good.

“Cyanide gas liquefies at seventy degrees Fahrenheit,” Collier said. “The moment that the jets come on the liquid sodium cyanide turns to gas.” He looked at his watch.

Amalie was foaming at the mouth. Her body twitched with one last spasm, and then went still.

“Eighteen seconds,” said Collier.

The fans continued their work, but the cyanide had already been dispersed. There was no movement behind the glaain widss.

Collier handed Wilmot a respirator, and the two men placed gas masks over their faces. Then Collier unbolted the door, and the two men stepped inside.

The dormitory in which the women were housed had not been constructed randomly. Its dimensions were carefully chosen: 181 feet by 209 feet, with a 47-foot ceiling. The contours of the walls, the height of the ceiling, designed precisely according to plans revised and signed by the architect Thomas Walter in 1851 when he expanded the US Capitol and added its famous dome. The air volume of the room was precisely 1.777 million cubic feet.

Wilmot had secured the new heating and air contract at the Capitol last year. The idea had been Wilmot’s, but the plan was Collier’s. It was the only reason Wilmot had gone to West Virginia to find him. After Collier poisoned Evan’s horse, Wilmot banished the boy from his home. He never expected to see him again. But in war, as in politics, you couldn’t always choose your allies, and Wilmot needed someone with Collier’s expertise and loyalty.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

Now Collier pointed to the massive set of fans and ducts...

Wilmot pushed at one of the bodies with his toe, suddenly anxious to get out of there.

“I’m sorry. I’m talking too much.” Despite the frigid air inside the building, Collier’s upper lip glistened with sweat and his hands shook slightly. A terrible, empty smile came and went briefly.

“Why don’t you just give me the bottom line?”

Collier cleared his throat. “Bottom line? When we override the system we’ll have about forty-five seconds before the ignition turns on, then another thirty seconds until the gas jets fire. By the time they realize what’s happening, it will be too late.”

Because cell phone and most radio transmissions were jammed, they would have to go into the belly of the beast themselves and trigger the ignition manually. There would be no coming back, but they were willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater cause.

As he surveyed the corpses—the panic of the women still reflected in their lifeless stares and in the impossible angles of their limbs—Dale Wilmot realized he had crossed a line from which he could no longer step back. Before now, their plan had been an abstraction, but for Wilmot, killing these women had made it a flesh-and-blood reality. As he watched the life draining from their bodies, he felt draining from his own body whatever residual uncertainty remained. Flashing in his mind’s eye like a rapid-fire slide show, he saw the faces of the hypocrites—the politicians and the corporatint re.e titans—whose photographs hung on his wall.

“Take care of the mess,” said Wilmot. “We’ll leave first thing in the morning.”

14

FBI HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, DC

Ray Dahlgren remained seated behind his desk as Nancy Clement entered his office. The office was nondescript, with no trappings of authority, no family photos, no framed diplomas on the wall. It could have been the cell of a monk. His desk was entirely bare, except for a single piece of paper situated squarely in the middle of the desktop.

Dahlgren was typing on his computer, attacking the keyboard like a boxer trying to batter an opposing fighter into submission. He did not look up, or even turn away from the screen, nor did he invite Nancy to sit.

“Is it me?” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Is there something about me that invites disloyalty? Hm? Something that begs for insubordination?”

Nancy cleared her throat but did not answer. When Dahlgren engaged in this sort of performance, it was always a solo act. He was not inviting participation.

Dahlgren typed a few more lines. Then, with one last stab at the keyboard, he finished savaging the computer and swiveled around in his chair to face her. He made a minute adjustment in the location of the piece of paper in the middle of his desk, as though to square it perfectly with the rest of the furniture. “I trust you are aware of our computer system, VORTEX?”

Nancy was. VORTEX was a computer system designed to cull and correlate vast quantities of data to isolate potential terrorist threats. Phone records, pharmacy purchases, credit card data, flight records, computer searches—the list of databases went on and on.

“I’m a simple man,” Dahlgren said. “I don’t pretend to understand how VORTEX works. It’s been explained to me a dozen times. But when I start hearing about third-order correlations and stochastic variates, my eyes glaze over. What I do understand is that when the computer generates a report that so-and-so is connected to such-and-such, I pay attention.

Nancy nodded. She had been tangentially involved in the development of VORTEX and found that it had been a fairly disappointing tool, given the hundred or so million dollars invested in it. But on occasion something useful popped out.

“My understanding of VORTEX, though, is that it operates by drawing connections. Vectors, I believe they’re called? And then those vectors are assigned a numeric value based on the potential connection between one scumbag and another scumbag. The higher the number, the more profound the connection. Hm? That about right?”

Again Nancy nodded. Her heart was beating a little harder. Dahlgren was not one who usually beat around the bush. In the rare instance when he didn’t come right to the point, it was because he wanted to beat you up and humiliate you.

“The reason I bring this up,” Dahlgren said, “is I tracked your friend Gideon Davis because usssssv heiI didn’t trust he’d leave well enough alone. And now I find here a report linking one Gideon Davis to one Jim Verhoven. I’ll spare you the technical mumbo jumbo about threat nodes and assessment vectors. But look here. I drill down into the details a little and, guess what I find? Your pal Mr. Davis bought gas two and a half hours ago in Anderson, West Virginia. Last I heard, Ervin Mixon was occasionally bunking at the camp owned by Jim Verhoven in Anderson, West Virginia.”

Nancy didn’t speak. Nothing she could say at this point would do her any good.

“You might have noticed I was typing when you came into my office,” Dahlgren continued. “I was starting an OPR file on you.” Dahlgren hesitated, relishing the moment, before he continued: “For requisitioning equipment without authorization, disobeying direct orders, various irregularities in your expense reports . . . I’m still coming up with examples of your insubordination.”

OPR was the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility—analogous to the Internal Affairs found in police departments. OPR investigated everything from corruption to sexual misconduct to treason. An OPR file, at best, was a career killer. At worst, it could result in firing, criminal charges, and even prison.

Dahlgren continued, his voice dripping with condescension. “Our office has two missions, Nancy, with respect to potential domestic terrorist organizations. One is to pursue those who violate the law. That’s a simple matter. But the other is more delicate. Our other mission is to monitor, anticipate, and control those who might break the law but have not yet done so. The vast majority of militia groups, neo-Nazis, racists, and Aryan nut jobs, are just saber-rattling cretins who do not and will not ever threaten the good order of the United States of America. But there are some—and Verhoven’s group is one of these—which are on the fence. They could fall either way.” He took off his reading glasses and set them on the desk. “Nancy, it is critical that the FBI never, ever, be the one to push them off the fence. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is not going to create another Waco. Not on my watch.”

“Sir—”

“Shut up, Nancy.” Dahlgren did not raise his voice. “I’m a reasonable man. You are a valuable agent in your way. I’ve opened the OPR file, checked the little boxes, filled in all the forms, typed in the relevant paragraphs. But I haven’t sent it yet. Whether I send it or not will depend on whether or not Gideon Davis has pushed Verhoven off the fence.”

“I don’t know what you’re asking me.”

“Did you send Gideon Davis up there to snoop around and ask questions about Mixon?”

“Send?” Nancy said. “I didn’t send him.”

Dahlgren shook his head sadly. “Jesus Christ, are you entirely incapable of giving me a straight answer to a simple question?”

Nancy was silent.