In the Company of Liars

David Ellis In the Company of Liars

© 2005

For Jennifer, Jim, Jenna, and Ryan Taylor

JUNE SATURDAY, JUNE 5

McCoy is first through the door. She hears the man running through the house, his bare feet slapping across the hardwood floor. “Back bedroom,” she is told via her earpiece by a member of the team at the rear of the house, looking through the kitchen window, blocking an escape route.

They flood in behind her, a team of eight agents, but she is first down the hallway. Her back against the wall, both hands on the Glock at her side, she shuffles up to the bedroom door and listens. Over the sound of her team’s shoes on the hardwood, she can hear sobbing. She reaches across the width of the door and tries the knob. The door opens slightly, then McCoy pushes it open wider with her foot and pivots, her Glock trained inside the room, and she sees what she expects.

He is standing at the opposite end of the bedroom, near what appears to be a walk-in closet and then a bathroom. A large bed separates the man and McCoy.

McCoy holds a hand up behind her, freezing the other agents in place, before returning her hand to the Glock trained on the suspect.

“Put the gun down, Doctor,” she says.

Doctor Lomas, she knows, is a broken man, nothing like the proud figure she has seen in the company brochures. She stifles the instinct to think of him as a victim, though a victim, in many ways, is precisely what he is. It is hard to look at this man, barefoot in boxer shorts and a rumpled white T-shirt with stained armpits, with flyaway hair and an emaciated frame, and see the promising scientist he once was.

The doctor is crying uncontrollably, his chest heaving and tears flowing. Part of her job is seeing the worst in people, watching them feel, firsthand, the collapse of their lives. But she doesn’t often confront a man holding a revolver to his temple.

Behind her, McCoy hears one of the agents on his radio, calling for paramedics. Others are searching the remainder of the house, kicking open doors to rooms and closets.

“I didn’t know,” Lomas manages through halting breaths, but of course that statement itself means that he did know, or at least suspected. “I didn’t. I didn’t know, I didn’t-”

“I believe you, Doctor,” she says calmly. “Put the gun on the bed and let’s just talk.”

“They’ll kill me,” he says.

He’s not talking about the federal agents swarming outside the bedroom. She knows it. Doctor Lomas seems to assume she knows it.

“There’s no ‘they’ anymore, Doctor. ‘They’ are all in custody. You’re the last one.”

He doesn’t seem to be listening. Fear of death does not seem to be foremost in his mind. No, what’s causing the heaving of his chest, the trembling of the arm that tries to keep the gun pressed against his skull, is not what will happen now but what has already taken place.

The television, resting in a dark oak armoire, is on a cable news station. The headline blaring across the bottom of the screen is “Muhsin al-Bakhari Captured.” Reporters are live from northern Sudan, the cameras on the assault that took place last night on a convoy of terrorists resulting in the capture of the Liberation Front’s number-two man.

“You know why you’re the last one we picked up?” McCoy says to Doctor Lomas, as evenly as she can. “Because we know you’re not a threat. We know you’re not a bad person. Because we know you were tricked.” McCoy motions to the television set. “You see that, Doctor? You see we caught Mushi?”

Doctor Lomas blinks, as if surprised by the change of topic. Suicides, in these instances, often go down a single track on their way to pulling the trigger or slitting their wrists. The key is to pull them away from their tunnel vision, to make them think about anything at all that might sober them up.

“So what?” His voice breaks, trembles. His trigger finger twitches.

She is ten feet from the doctor, but the bed prevents any interception she might attempt. If this guy wants to die, she won’t be able to stop him.

“So,” McCoy says, “you helped make that happen. This,” she says, nodding to him, then gesturing toward the TV set, “was aboutthat.”

“That-” Lomas’s face contorts, a hideous, trembling snarl of a mouth struggling with the words. “That’swhere it went? To-tothem? Toterrorists?”

“We intercepted it,” McCoy says quickly. “We have the formula in our possession. It’s over, Doctor. No one was hurt.”

“Allison Pagone,” he whimpers. “She’s dead because of me. I knew she didn’t kill herself,” he adds, more to himself. “Iknew they killed her.” He starts to quiver again, his whole body like a shot of electricity has hit him.

“Listen to me, Doctor, Allison Pagone-”

“No closer.”Lomas takes another step back and brushes the wall. With the jerk in his movement, his right elbow drops, and the gun slides off his temple, pointing upward.

McCoy fires once, into the brachial nerve near the collarbone on the doctor’s gun side. The doctor’s hand immediately releases the gun, which falls to the floor and bounces into the closet. Two reasons for severing the brachial nerve-he can’t hold the weapon and he can recover, for the most part, from a shoulder injury; had she gone for his hand, he’d never be able to use it again.

She is on him immediately, as he slides to the floor. Lomas makes no effort to reach the gun. He doesn’t even seem to notice the wound, a red, widening stain on his T-shirt, dark at the center.

McCoy finds the nearest piece of laundry, a pair of underwear, balls it up and applies pressure to the wound. Doctor Lomas stares wide-eyed, a deep, consistent moan coming from his throat.

McCoy talks to him. She tells him to hang on, everything is going to be okay. She looks up and sees the bullet mark in the wall, which means it went through cleanly, no ricochet down to a major organ. He was lucky. Luckier than some.

The paramedics arrive and take over. In the bathroom McCoy splashes some water on her face and lets out a groan. Her partner, Owen Harrick, is behind her, smiling at her in the mirror.

“It’s over, Janey,” he says. “This is the end.”

“Yeah.” She shakes the water off her hands.

“What you have to do,” Harrick advises, “is forget about the beginning.”

ONE DAY EARLIER FRIDAY, JUNE 4

He knows immediately that no one will escape, and that few will survive. He knows it the moment he is blasted out of his drowsiness in the back of the dark truck by a deafening boom, the explosion of what he assumes to be the lead truck in the convoy. He knows it as the truck in which he is traveling screeches to a halt over the uneven terrain, as the men seated on benches on each side of the darkened cargo area fall into each other, and as the truck behind them slams into their rear, sending the men sprawling to the floor.

He knows it as he and the others in the second truck scramble for their weapons. He knows it when he hears, over the sounds of his brothers’ cries, thethwip, thwip, thwip of rockets cutting through the air-undoubtedly in the direction of the rear truck in the convoy-followed quickly by the explosion upon impact with the gasoline engines.

He knows that the Americans have found them.

And they know who is traveling in this convoy. That is why the obvious security flanks have been eliminated from the outset. In no more than ten seconds, the front and rear trucks have been obliterated, trapping the two middle trucks on a narrow, winding road.

Ram Haroon looks toward the rear of the truck, where the sheath covering the back is flapping open. He sees small flashes from the red-orange gasoline fire two trucks behind.

Haroon races for the exit as the gunfire erupts-thepop pop, pop pop from the M4s, therat-a-tat-tat from the stationary machine guns-lead splitting the canvas exterior of the cargo cabin and hitting skulls, torsos, bone. Haroon extends himself horizontally as he dives through the sheath, trying to minimize himself as a target, trying to freeze out the sudden smells of blood, of bowels releasing, of death.