True fiction, p.8
True Fiction, page 8
Victoria was half-asleep on the vinyl couch in the employee break room, her phone clutched in her hand, her head on the hard armrest. Her phone vibrated, waking her up. She opened her eyes and squinted at her text screen.
It’s done.
She smiled. About fucking time.
Seattle, Washington. July 19. 2:18 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Ian powered off the phone the instant he got the “delivered” tag on the text message. He went to the sink and dropped the phone into the disposal.
Margo followed him. “What was the point of that?”
“I’ve either convinced them we’re dead or did something so outside of their regular protocol that they’ll know we’re still alive.” Ian ran the faucet and turned on the disposal. It chewed the phone with a labored grinding and then jammed up with a mechanical whine. He turned off the disposal and shut off the water. “Either way, I hope it bought us a few hours.”
“To do what?”
“Run,” he said.
He started for the door that led to the entry hall.
“Wait.” Margo gestured to the assassin. “Aren’t we going to clean this up?”
“Hell no. We need to get as far away from here as we can and we don’t have time to waste.” He opened the door, careful not to let the dogs in. “Are you coming?”
She nodded and walked out with him. “I’m going to get a terrible review on Yelp.”
It was a funny thing to say and he found it reassuring because it told him several important things:
She was a fighter.
She had her shit together.
She was going to stay with him and not go running to the police.
She understood they were both fucked.
“They’re dead.” Victoria called Cross, waking him up for a second time that night to tell him the news.
“Finally,” Cross said.
He hung up the phone, settled back into the sumptuous bed in his office apartment, and thought about what he’d done and what was yet to come.
From an operational standpoint, he was glad that Ludlow and French were dead. But he took no pleasure in killing them or the hundreds of people in Honolulu. They were all innocent civilians. But it had to be done for the greater good.
He considered himself a patriot and for years it had sickened and disturbed him to see the CIA’s resources and abilities decay due to bureaucratic incompetence, political cowardice, and public apathy while the terrorist threat to America intensified. On top of that, the agency was crippled by ridiculous legal restrictions imposed on it by people more concerned with privacy and civil liberties than with the survival of the country.
The answer was obvious to Cross: Give the CIA’s job to Blackthorn. They had the technology, the people, and the freedom to do it right. But it wouldn’t happen through politics as usual. The biggest hurdles wouldn’t be getting the public to agree to the outsourcing of the CIA’s key responsibilities to Blackthorn or dramatically limiting the government’s oversight into their activities. It would be repealing all of the laws and international treaties that stood in the way of America doing its necessary spying, stealing, and killing effectively.
To make it happen, Cross used history as his guide. It had taken 9/11 to get the Patriot Act passed, and with it the sweeping relaxation of civil liberties that gave domestic law enforcement agencies the broad, and deeply intrusive, surveillance powers they’d sought for decades. It also made the government secretly eager to go far beyond that, at least until Edward Snowden ruined things.
Cross knew it would take another attack, one that terrified the public and outraged politicians, to expose the CIA’s impotence and give the president the moral imperative to give Blackthorn the nation’s covert operations, free of any legal or bureaucratic restraints.
Ludlow came up with the idea of the plane crash, and how to do it, but it was Cross who refined the plan and targeted Hawaii so it would echo back in the nation’s consciousness to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
Cross had crashed that plane for the good of the country and, yes, for the money it would bring to Blackthorn. He didn’t think the windfall profits clashed with his patriotic motivations. Blackthorn would spend the money better, and more productively, for the security of the nation than the CIA would.
And why shouldn’t he, and the people who worked for Blackthorn, be generously compensated for the hazardous duty they undertook, personal sacrifices they made, and emotional burdens they endured on behalf of their country?
No one deserved that compensation more than he, the man ultimately responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children. He’d need all the luxuries and indulgences money could buy to help him live with that. Not that he had any regrets about doing it. The dead were patriots who’d sacrificed their lives for the future safety and prosperity of their families and their country. In his business, he firmly believed the ends justified the means.
But when he pulled up his sheets, laid his face on his soft pillow, and tried to imagine those nubile nymphs sewing his Egyptian sheets, the only faces that came to his mind were those of the screaming passengers of TransAmerican 976.
It only proved to him how much he deserved all of that money.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Seattle, Washington. July 19. 2:20 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
“Your cast is falling apart,” Margo said as they walked out of the kitchen. “Come with me.”
Ian looked at his right arm. The cast was crumbling, riddled with gashes from the knife, and barely hanging together. Some of the gauze underneath the plaster was bloodstained where the assassin’s knife had pierced his skin. He didn’t think any of the cuts were very deep, but even if they were, the cast would probably be an adequate bandage. He based that on the medical knowledge he’d gained from watching Dr. Dick Van Dyke on Diagnosis: Murder.
She led him to the laundry room, which was the size of a one-bedroom apartment and fitted with the same custom cabinetry as the kitchen. In addition to a high-end washer and dryer, there was also a steam press, an ironing station, a sewing station, and other equipment that Ian assumed was for dry cleaning. There was a center island for folding laundry, with a wide roll of tissue paper on a dispenser at one end.
Margo sat him down at a stool at the island, opened one of the nearby cabinets, and pulled out a roll of duct tape and a pair of scissors.
“How many people live in this house?” Ian asked.
She sat down next to him and began wrapping silver duct tape tightly around his cast. “Just the two of them. Eight people, tops, when their kids, their spouses, and the grandchildren stay over.”
Ian shook his head. “They could start a business out of this room, doing laundry for the entire neighborhood.”
“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “Some people don’t know what to do with all of their money.”
“Now that you mention it, we need money.”
“I need money,” she said. “You’re loaded.”
“I’m rich but I don’t carry around wads of cash. I use plastic for everything. I’ve only got about two hundred dollars on me. What have you got?”
“Ten bucks.”
“We need more.”
“Don’t look at me,” she said. “That ten bucks is nearly all of my liquid assets.”
“We aren’t going to get very far without money. But we can’t use our credit cards or go to an ATM or they’ll know exactly where we are. We also can’t go to family or friends. The CIA will be watching them all.”
“So what are we going to do?” she said. “Steal stuff from here and hock it?”
Ian shook his head. “Pawn shops have surveillance cameras and the CIA is probably watching the pawn shops, too.”
“They can’t watch everything.”
“They can come pretty close,” Ian said. “And they probably have experts who are trying to anticipate our next move, based on their experience and detailed psychological assessments of us that they’re putting together using everything they’re learning about us from our school records, medical records, social media, tax returns, you name it.”
“You’re making that up.”
“Yes, I am but does it sound credible to you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then let’s assume I’m right,” Ian said. “Everybody has some loose cash in their house so there must be some here. We have to find it.”
“I’ll start looking for the money.” She cut off the tape with scissors and patted the last strip down on his now silver cast. “You need to take a shower and change your clothes.”
“We don’t have time for that,” he said.
“You can’t go out in public reeking of whiskey and BO in soiled clothes you’ve been wearing for two days.”
“I don’t smell that bad,” he said.
“You also look like a mass murderer,” she said. “Anybody who sees you will scream and call the police.”
“Because my hair is a little messy and I haven’t shaved? It’s the grunge look. It started right here in Seattle, where mass murderer Ted Bundy killed a bunch of women and he looked like a lawyer.”
“That’s true,” she said. “But your clothes are spattered with blood and that never creates a positive first impression.”
Ian looked down at himself, saw the red spots, and remembered the moist sound the poker made going into the assassin’s stomach. He shivered.
“Okay, you have a point.”
“Take off your shirt,” she said.
He did as he was told, working his cast back through the right sleeve. It wasn’t easy getting shirts on and off with his arm bent at a ninety-degree angle and encased in plaster . . . and now duct tape, too.
Margo went to another cabinet and pulled out two Hefty trash bags. She stuffed his stained shirt into one of the bags and pulled the other one over his cast, then used the duct tape to tape it closed at his shoulder.
“Now you can shower,” she said. “Take the bag off when you’re done.”
“You’ve had experience with this.”
“I broke both of my arms when I was a kid,” she said. “I sucked at soccer.”
“Soccer is played with your feet.”
“Not the way I played,” she said.
Ian went up to the master bathroom, which was about a thousand square feet of marble and had a steam shower for two and a Jacuzzi for six that was fed by a waterfall. He undressed, stuffed his underwear, pants, and socks in the Hefty bag, and took a shower at the hottest temperature he could stand.
As hot as it was, he started shivering again. He’d killed a person tonight. It wasn’t guilt over taking a life that shook him up and it wasn’t because he was afraid of consequences he might face. It was the realization that he was something he wasn’t before. Before he was a screenwriter and an author. Now he was also a killer. It wasn’t something he’d trained for or expected. It was something that happened to him. Something that had changed him. He was shaking like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. How it had changed him was something he didn’t know yet and didn’t have the time to worry about. Right now he had to keep looking ahead, not backward or inward.
Steadied by his new resolve, Ian got out of the shower, removed the wet bag from his arm, gargled with Listerine, and rummaged through the man of the house’s five-hundred-square-foot closet for some fresh clothes. He quickly learned that Brooks Brothers got most of the guy’s clothing business. The guy also owned several blazers with yachting, fraternity, and golf club crests on the breast pocket, which made him a douchebag. He probably owned a few cravats, too. The guy was a little taller and heavier than Ian. But if Ian tucked in the shirts and rolled up the sleeves, they fit fine, especially over his cast. He had to keep his own shoes, though, because the guy had tiny feet.
Ian got dressed, stuffed some extra clothes, toiletries, and the Vicodin into an overnight bag, and lugged it and his trash bag downstairs, resisting the childish urge to slide down the huge curved railing of the grand staircase. The last thing he needed now was to break his other arm, too.
He found Margo emptying a huge bag of dry dog food into a pile in the center of the living room beside a bucket of water. The two dogs watched her but seemed bewildered, their heads cocked and their ears up. It was a crazy night for all of them.
“Don’t eat this all at once,” she told the dogs and then walked over to Ian. “Do you know how to crack a safe?”
“Nope,” he said.
“Clint Straker would.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he said.
“I found a big safe that’s probably full of money, hidden behind a painting. But since you can’t open it, we’ll have to settle for this.” She led him to a table in the entry hall, where she’d placed a Costco cashew jar full of pocket change. “I found it in the master bedroom closet, where they probably empty their pockets each night. There’s probably a couple of hundred dollars in there. And we’ve got this.”
She picked up a leather travel wallet that was beside the jar and handed it to him. “I found it in Mr. Barber’s desk drawer.”
The wallet was filled with euros, Canadian dollars, British pounds, and about five hundred American dollars in twenty-dollar bills.
“Good job,” Ian said. “That should hold us for a while. Now we need transportation.”
Ian headed down the hall to the garage. Margo grabbed the jar of coins and followed him.
The garage was immaculate, with white walls and a polished concrete floor. There were four cars for them to choose from, all gleaming like they were in a showroom: a 2017 two-door Ferrari twin turbo 488GTB, a 2015 four-door Porsche Panamera, a 2016 Range Rover SUV, and a mint-condition 1968 Mustang 390 GT fastback in highland green like the one Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt. The keys to the cars were on a pegboard on the wall.
Margo made a beeline for the Ferrari, reconsidered, and moved to the sensible Range Rover.
Ian shook his head. “Wrong choice.”
“It’s a big, roomy car and not something flashy that will attract the police. We can even sleep in it if we have to.”
“I appreciate the practicality of the Range Rover but we don’t want any cars with electronics that can be hacked or tracked. That rules out all the cars but one.”
He snatched a key chain with a running-pony logo on it from the pegboard and went to the Mustang. The car didn’t have a single electronic component. And if it was good enough for Steve McQueen, it would be good enough for him.
He popped the trunk and they stuffed their things inside. Then he went to the driver’s side of the car. He was relieved to see it was an automatic transmission, not a stick, which would have been impossible for him to drive with a broken arm.
It made much more sense for Margo to do the driving, especially since, technically, she was still his author escort. But he was taking charge of this operation and she was glad to let him. It allowed him to sustain the illusion that he had a master plan, which he didn’t. He was acting on panic and some of the things that he’d learned writing cop shows and Clint Straker novels. All he knew for sure was where they were headed but he had no idea what would happen after that.
He asked Margo for directions to the seediest part of town. She told him how to get there and he drove up and down dark alleys until he found an abandoned pickup truck sitting on blocks. He parked behind it and, at his direction, Margo swapped their license plates for the ones on the truck. Then Margo peeled off the current registration stickers from the Mustang’s original plates and affixed them to the former truck plates with folded pieces of duct tape from Ian’s cast. This was all done to protect their asses. Ian didn’t want to get pulled over by the highway patrol for driving a stolen car or having expired plates. They tossed the Hefty bag full of Ian’s bloody clothes into a trash bin, and as dawn began to break on the Jet City, Ian drove onto the I-5 South.
He was a man on the run, though careful not to exceed the fifty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. July 19. 11:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
It had been a rough forty or so hours since the seven senators last sat in this chamber and first heard about the catastrophic crash of TransAmerican 976. Now they were back again, weary and anxious, to listen to a classified briefing on the situation from acting CIA director Michael Healy, who sat alone at the witness table.
Healy was a career CIA employee, recruited while he was a student at Harvard, studying foreign relations, who rose over the course of nearly two decades from analyst to deputy director. He was a Mormon and so clean-cut in appearance and lifestyle that he could have risen to the top at Disneyland, though the two jobs did have some things in common: Both were Mickey Mouse operations that took place in a world of their own.
Five weeks ago, the president had appointed Healy as the agency’s acting director after his boss was forced to resign in scandal when the Washington Post had revealed that the decorated former general, married father of four, and grandfather of two had been having a long-term affair with a field agent’s young wife. The airplane crash in Hawaii was the first major crisis Healy had to face as the man in charge, and at that moment, he would have preferred to be seating people in a bobsled for the Matterhorn ride.
Senator Ramsey Holbrook, the chairman of the committee, got right to the point. “Is this an accident or another 9/11?”
“It’s still too early to tell, Mr. Chairman,” Healy said. “We didn’t hear any uptick in chatter about a pending terrorist attack prior to the crash nor are we hearing anything now that points to a particular party being responsible.”
“What actions are you taking?”
“We’re doing ‘molecular-level’ deep-background checks on all of the passengers and crew for ties to overseas terrorist groups or foreign actors. We’re also exerting intense pressure on our intelligence sources worldwide.”
Senator Sam Tolan sighed, releasing more indignation than air. “So you were taken completely off guard and you’re still in the dark, playing catch-up.”
