Annoyed, he made it a point to stay inside the trailer whenever he heard one, although once he snapped and pulled his trousers down to his knees, bending over to moon the bastards while shouting curses at the sky. Then, like pretty much everything in life once it’s repeated enough, he got used to the damn things and went about his business as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Although he never stopped looking.
So, yes, go ahead and laugh, he thought, watching the two reporters as they waded through the noise and jumble of the casino on the hotel’s ground floor. They were clueless about what was possible, or about how the so-called rules no longer applied. But they would learn soon enough.
CHAPTER SIX
“So tell me something,” Cole said.
He ate as he spoke, wiping the plate clean with the last shred of pancake from their moo shu pork. They’d picked a Chinese place, not a takeout but a real restaurant with a hostess, a wine list, and white tablecloths. A little touch of civilization that Steve hoped would continue Cole’s process of normalization. Judging by the man’s appetite, it seemed to be working.
“Tell you what?” Keira asked.
“Why Baltimore? I mean, I know that’s where your friend lives. Steve, too. But is there some other reason you guys decided to bunk there, maybe even having to do with the story?”
Steve was impressed, although he was still a little worried about the double shot of Jack Daniels that Cole had downed with his meal.
“Go ahead,” he said to Keira. “You tell him.”
“There’s a security company based out in Baltimore County. IntelPro. One of those Blackwater-type outfits. Steve and I were both working stories related to them, independent of each other, when we started picking up traces of Fort1’s misadventures. He’s blown some of their ops, too.”
“Burned a few of their field men,” Steve added.
“Or so they say.”
“I’ve pretty much verified it.”
“Barb was working another angle, but she ended up on some of the same trails, and we all kind of bumped into each other through IntelPro. And, well, since they’re right in Steve and Barb’s backyard, it seemed like the best place to hole up, at least for a while. Not that we’ve been able to take the IntelPro connection much further.”
“Okay.” Cole nodded. “IntelPro. That makes sense. What about the ground rules?”
“That’s Barb’s department,” Steve said. “Her house, her rules.”
“Not sleeping arrangements. Rules of the road, expenses, that kind of thing. I’m done with charge cards, too easy to track. Cash only. And before I travel I’ll need a fake ID, something to keep the Air Force off my trail. You can buy ’em in the pawn district out by Nellis for about a hundred fifty. You guys are probably flying, but I’ll go by bus. Airports are just about the worst possible places for showing up on security cams.”
Already setting down rules before he even knew Barb’s address. The man certainly had his nerve. And, frankly, some of the rules were pretty wacky. A bus? To Baltimore? More evidence of paranoia.
“You sound like you’ve been reading too many spy novels,” Steve said.
“This is stuff from training.”
“The Air Force teaches countersurveillance techniques?”
“Sort of. Infowar training, part of some war gaming we did at Nellis.”
“I thought war games were for fake combat,” Keira said.
“That’s the fun part. We’d go up against ‘aggressor’ units that flew MiGs, or other foreign birds. But they do a lot of situational stuff on the ground. Testing your security awareness, seeing how leaky everybody was.”
“And?”
“We were like a beer can with a hole in the bottom.”
“Loose lips sink airships?”
“Loose lips weren’t the problem. A lot of it was paper stuff — credit card receipts, postcards home, or dumb shit people did online. Turned out there was a special unit dogging us the whole time, hacking our PC accounts, even dumpster diving outside our barracks, the PX, everywhere we went. On our last day they ambushed us with the results. Some obnoxious techie laid out everything they’d learned, all our fuckups. Pretty mind-blowing. Then he tipped us on how to avoid it next time, stuff we could use in the field to disguise our movements, our intentions. So those are my conditions: cash only, fake ID, a bus ticket to Baltimore.”
“You seem to be forgetting the price of admission. Keira said you got a look at a file?”
“I did. But if I tell you now what I saw, what’s to stop you from ditching me?”
Steve looked to Keira for help.
“Our word of honor?” she said.
Cole snorted. Steve tried again.
“Give us nothing and we’ll ditch you for sure. Right now all we have is your word of honor that you’ve got anything we can use.”
“Fine. Then leave without me. I’ll hitch back to the trailer.”
Steve looked again at Keira, who touched Cole’s hand so quickly that he almost missed it.
“Look,” she said, “this isn’t easy for us, either. We’re all in favor of making you feel safe and secure, and we’ll buy you an ID if you’re strapped for cash. But you have to give us some kind of an idea of whether you’re worth the investment. We’ve got sources to protect, proprietary information. Things that took us months to find out. And we’re not used to letting just anybody into the club, especially people we don’t know.”
“Okay. I get that. Where would you like me to start?”
“How about the op at Sandar Khosh?” Steve said. “Who were you really looking for that day? What was your objective?”
Cole took the request like a blow, then stared down at his empty plate.
Keira threw Steve a look, like he’d moved in the wrong direction. She again touched Cole’s hand, more noticeably this time.
“Only if you don’t mind talking about it,” she said.
Steve held his tongue and watched them. This was Keira’s strength, getting people to talk when they didn’t want to, drawing information out of them like poison. Afterward you could almost see the relief in their faces, as if she’d done them a favor. And maybe she had.
“It was a hit job, plain and simple,” Cole said. “One HVT and his entourage.”
“High-value target?”
“Yeah. But I don’t have a name. They never tell us, and we didn’t hear it later.”
“Meaning you missed him?”
“Probably. The trigger cue for the mission was a white Toyota truck with orange markings on the hood. It was supposed to be bringing the HVT to some kind of meeting. All the other bad dudes were supposedly already inside, waiting.”
“Why not just shoot the truck?”
“We discussed that. Vehicles are a more reliable kill as long as you can land the dart right on the roof. It’s laser-guided, so as long as you keep the crosshairs in the right place you’re golden. But it can get tricky. From ten thousand feet a Hellfire takes about a minute to reach the target. At the last second the vehicle might move behind a building, or into the trees. A flock of sheep might come along, or a bunch of kids. Then what? So we decided to stake out the house, wait for the truck, get ’em all.”
“What went wrong?”
“You tell me. Three seconds before impact, three kids come running out the front door. The first was a girl, same age as my daughter. I still dream about her.”
“Jesus,” Steve said.
Keira put her hand on Cole’s forearm and left it there. “How did Fort1 react?”
“Hard to say. We were only in contact by chat. But he kept asking to see the wreckage.”
“Looking for the HVT, maybe?” Steve asked. “For a positive ID?”
“Maybe. There was a body toward the back that he seemed interested in, but mostly he wanted to scan the rubble, the ruins. We must have spent half an hour going back and forth. Not a pretty sight, let me tell you.”