Ghost Rendition Read online

  “The one I saved you from is as dangerous as a crew of Israelis.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “I’m the one who took the bullet,” she said.

  “Your plan is to keep Pratt alive long enough to complete Tiresias and steal it for who?”

  “It’s not that simple,” she said.

  “For who?”

  “For us. Me and you,” she said. “How many senior citizen contractors do you know? We don’t get retirement plans for a reason. We don’t live long enough to collect. This is our chance.”

  “We sell it, and you and I sail into the sunset together. Don’t you want to get down on one knee and ask me?”

  “It could be fun. But even if we go our separate ways, we still need this,” she said.

  “And all that stuff about getting revenge on Westfield for killing Rob was a bunch of shit.”

  “I still want to get him, but I want to take care of myself first,” she said.

  “And me.”

  “That’s the deal.”

  “And Pratt and his two minions?”

  “They’ll need to disappear. New lives, start to finish. You won’t have to worry about them spilling your identity,” she said.

  “That’s quite a plan. It would have been nice to know before all the killing, but I’m glad you decided to share it with me now.”

  Caroline gave me one of her blinding smiles.

  “What?” I said.

  “Unlike the boys, I do appreciate sarcasm. And you’re cute when you’re suspicious.”

  “It’s not going to work.”

  “It’s an excellent plan and has at least a small chance of working,” she said.

  “You’re not going to charm me or seduce me or flatter me into letting you sell this thing, or hand it to someone who is already paying you, or do whatever else you have planned.”

  “I need you,” she said and drew close.

  “I mean it this time.”

  “I need you to help me pull this off. I can’t do it alone.”

  “We’re down to flattery already,” I said.

  “Westfield has a fleet of contractors looking for us. The Russians are after us. And a crazy Israeli. I have three code geeks. I can’t keep them alive alone. I need you,” she said.

  “I get it,” I said, suddenly weary.

  “Now I mean it the other way.”

  “We’re back to seduction?”

  And then the conversation was over.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  We settled into an odd version of a domestic routine. The boys worked almost round the clock, splitting their time between working on Tiresias and trying to track down Westfield. That was the compromise Caroline and I agreed on. The boys swore that they would get to Westfield before he got to me and my family. I didn’t have much choice but to trust them.

  I worked on my Morons book by day and got visits from Caroline at night. Pratt managed to get my alimony payment into Suzanne’s account. I did my shocked but concerned parent routine when the headmaster called and assured him that Devon would never break school rules. He told me that they would be investigating further, but days went by and I didn’t hear from him.

  The only time I left the house was to get my poor Camry taken care of. I wanted Lino to change the paint job. As anonymous as my car was, if Westfield scanned enough security camera footage, he could get lucky.

  I always felt ridiculous in my disguise. It wasn’t what an undercover cop looked like. It was like the movie version that Lino would believe they would look like. As it turned out, it saved my life.

  Westfield must have been following up on every brown Camry in the tri-state area. His contractors were set up inside his shop when I pulled in. Lino came running out to greet me, which immediately set off my internal alarm. The guy usually had the classic mechanic’s saunter, like he was grudgingly coming out to see what kind of mess you’d made of his work now.

  I guess their plan was for him to get me inside and get a better look at me. He told me he wanted to show me all the shades of gray paint I could choose from. He made it sound like he gave a shit, which was another giveaway. And when we got close to the shop, I could see it looked empty, which was strike three. Lino put most sweatshops to shame in how hard he worked his crew.

  “How many of them are they?” I said to him with a smile and laughed as if I had told him a joke.

  “How many of who?” which confirmed my suspicions. His normal response would have been something along the lines of, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “They probably gave you a bunch of shit about national security. They work for a drug dealer I put away. Act like you’re telling me a joke back, and tell me how many there are and where they’re set up.”

  Lino hesitated. I could almost smell the brain cells he was burning trying to figure this out. “If we walk into that shop, you get killed in the crossfire along with me,” I said.

  “Two guys, one on each side. They told me you were some kind of terrorist,” he spat out.

  “Now laugh,” I said.

  His fake guffaw was pathetic, but it made me laugh too, so it worked.

  If they’d been smart, these clowns would have grabbed me as soon as I got out of my car. But they were well-armed clowns and if they managed to shoot me in the head, it would have still made me just as dead.

  “You’re going to tell them I went into your office to take a dump. And if you fuck this up, Lino, I’m going to find you and take you apart piece by piece with your own tools.” I gave him another good fake laugh to cover the fact that he turned sheet white.

  Lino walked into the shop like he was going to the firing squad. I detoured into his office. Minutes later two oversized muscle heads rushed in and kicked down the bathroom door. It would have been fun to see the perplexed look on their faces when they saw it was empty. I stood up from behind Lino’s desk with my Browning out.

  This was different from when I had tried to subdue the Suit. When you are facing two adversaries, the right thing to do is shoot them, not talk to them, period. If they turn and fire at the same time, it’s hard to hit them both before one of them gets a shot off. But I wanted at least one of them alive, and I knew they weren’t trained nearly as well as the Suit.

  “Drop your guns and turn slowly, and you won’t die in a service station men’s room,” I said.

  The one on the left whirled with his gun extended. I shot him in the head. The other one froze.

  “Your partner didn’t know how to follow instructions. What’s the lesson of the day?” I said.

  The one on the right dropped his gun and turned around like he was in slow motion.

  “At least one of you is a fast learner.”

  Lino came into his office, saw the dead guy and puked.

  “You’re closed for the day. Lock up and leave me the key.”

  Seeing dead people encourages cooperation. Lino had the place closed up in record time. I sent him on his way with a warning not to talk about anything he saw. He looked like he took it to heart.

  A body shop turns out to be a pretty good place to conduct an interrogation. I felt stupid for not using it before. I fastened the contractor’s feet to the tracks on the garage floor and his hands to the lift. A push of a button and I had a hydraulic version of the rack.

  “Who hired you?”

  No answer.

  I pushed the button. The contractor screamed in pain. It wouldn’t take long.

  “I thought you were the fast learner. Should I ask again?”

  No answer.

  I pushed the button. I could hear his shoulders dislocate with a pop. His scream was higher pitched now. I gave him time to live with the pain.

  I moved my finger slowly toward the button.

  “I don’t know. They use an anonymous drop.”

  “How did they recruit you?”

  “Contacted me through a chat room. A lot of ex-military use it.”

  “Why you?”
<
br />   “I applied to the CIA over a year ago. They dinged me. Then they came back and said my country needed me. They knew everything I’d put in my application, that’s how I knew it was legit.”

  “What’s your mission?”

  This was the key question and we both knew it. He hadn’t told me anything yet. This was crossing a different line. He was in a lot of pain. I respected that he hesitated. I didn’t want to hit the button again. He was close to passing out.

  “I haven’t done any permanent damage yet. The next time I hit the button, you’ll have to pay someone to help you jerk off.”

  I moved my hand toward the button.

  “Grab the kid. Kill you. Kill the Israeli.”

  “Why the Israeli?”

  As a rule, we try not to kill our allies’ agents unless we have to. What had the Suit done to merit termination?

  “Why were you supposed to kill the Israeli?”

  I realized I wasn’t going to get an answer. The contractor had passed out from the pain.

  I cut him down and dumped him in the passenger seat of one of the cars in Lino’s lot. I was unlikely to get more out of him and the longer I stayed at Lino’s the bigger the risk. The smart move would have been to kill him, but he had only seen me in disguise, and with shock setting in, he wouldn’t be able to tell Westfield much. It did mean that I could never go back to Lino’s, which was a shame.

  I dragged the dead contractor to the car and sat him on his buddy’s lap. I drove them to a deserted lot. I called 9-1-1 on a burner cellphone, which I dropped at the scene, and sprinted back to Lino’s. I got in the Camry and headed home.

  I called Pratt on a secure cell on the way. He and Caroline each had one. Pratt had set them up. He changed the encryption every time we used them. “I need you to erase the satellite and security cameras between the garage and home,” I said.

  “Okay. Caroline wants to talk to you.”

  That was it from the kid. No questions.

  “What happened?” Caroline asked.

  “Ambush. I handled it. Got one of them alive.”

  “Anything good?”

  “He said they want to kill the Israeli. Does that mean anything to you?’

  “Nope. We shouldn’t stay on. No matter how good Pratt says his encryption is.”

  “I’m on my way home,” I said.

  “See you soon,” she said.

  It was almost like we were a normal couple.

  “Honey, I’m home,” I bellowed when I arrived home.

  The house was empty. At first, I had the weird feeling that they were all going to jump out and yell surprise. I looked in every room. I was exasperated that they had ignored my warning about not going out. I called Pratt’s phone and heard it ring from the living room. His and Caroline’s phones were sitting side by side on the coffee table. Next to them, there were two messages, written in lipstick on the table. The first said, “Thanks for everything,” and was signed Danny Pratt. Like if he had only signed Danny, I wouldn’t know who it was from. The second was from Caroline. “I got the boys out without compromising your identity. I’m sorry it had to end this way. L’Chaim.”

  “The worst kind of fool is the one who fools himself,” Nachash murmured in my head.

  And of course, he was right. I had convinced myself that we had common cause and that keeping her close was the best way to figure out what she was up to. And she had literally shouted the answer at me. The contractors had been ordered to kill the Israeli. It wasn’t the Suit they were after. It was Caroline.

  It was a classic strategy. The Suit worked the outside and she worked the inside. I had to give her credit for her commitment. Sex was one thing, but taking a bullet to gain my confidence was hard-core.

  I still should have figured it out. When she was hurt and semi-delirious she had yelled, “Tchaaaa.” I thought it was a foreign curse that I didn’t know, but she had been slurring her words. She was saying, “chara,” the same as the Suit had. I had made the classic counterespionage mistake. I had believed what I wanted to.

  My cell phone rang and for a moment I thought it might be her. It was the headmaster at Devon’s school. He wanted to know if I could be in his office in half an hour. Why not, I thought. I had no idea what I was going to do next anyway.

  Suzanne was already seated in his office when I got there. Two other sets of parents, presumably belonging to Devon’s partners in crime, were there as well. Suzanne glared at me either because I was the last to arrive or just because. The only good news was that there was no sign of Rowan.

  “Thank you all for coming in on such short notice. We have had a disturbing development in the hacking issue with your children,” the headmaster said.

  He let this hang in the air for a moment. It was a typical interrogation technique. The subject becomes uncomfortable enough to blurt something out and fill the silence. I pre-empted any blurting. If the boys had done something else that they could get in trouble for, I didn’t want one of their parents spitting out a confession.

  “What kind of development?” I said. Turning the question around was also textbook.

  “As you know, this is a very serious situation. Your sons are suspected of hacking into the school servers and changing grades,” the headmaster said, looking from parent to parent.

  He said “suspected,” which was a good sign. And he didn’t offer any new information. Were his IT guys having a hard time using the server logs to nail the boys? The other parents looked puzzled and nervous, which meant they didn’t know anything either.

  One of the dads started to speak. I interrupted. “Yes and we are all very concerned. What more can you tell us about this awful accusation?”

  If the headmaster had a weapon, I would have regretted not wearing my vest. As it was, all he could do was stare daggers. Staring Daggers, that actually would have been a funny chapter name for my Stabbing Weapons for Morons books.

  “Someone has hacked into the servers again and erased the backup logs. We questioned your sons about it earlier this afternoon and they denied it, but who else would have the skill and the motive to do this kind of thing?”

  “I don’t mean to be naïve, but are our sons the only computer literate students at the school?”

  “Of course not. We have an excellent computer science program,” the headmaster said.

  “Then it would seem there would be any number of students with the skills to do this.” I escalated the tempo of the conversation, to put the headmaster on the defensive.

  “Our IT group set up extremely powerful security to prevent that.”

  “It would seem unlikely that our seventh graders could have the skills to circumvent them, wouldn’t it?” I said.

  “They had the skills to hack into the servers to begin with. I don’t know what they’re capable of.”

  He had made a mistake and he knew it. I waited to let it sink in. “So your position is that our sons had to have hacked into the servers, which there is no proof of, because they hacked into the servers again and erased the logs. But your only reason for believing that they could have erased the logs is that they hacked into the servers in the first place. It’s been a long time since I was in school, but they used to call that circular logic.”

  “I hope you aren’t trying to make light of this, because this is a very serious situation,” the headmaster said, his tone rising.

  “On the contrary. I take this very seriously. I only consented to taking this meeting without my lawyer because my wife insisted. I had assumed that this school would not level accusations that our boys committed an act worthy of expulsion unless it had incontrovertible proof. Now I am finding out that there are only suspicions and baseless inferences. Your IT staff has serious issues if they have allowed your servers to be hacked a second time despite what you describe as extremely powerful security measures. It sounds like your issue is with them, not with us and not with our sons.”

  I had hit all the bases: lawyers, false accusations, in
competence. Now we would see how much belly he had for a fight.

  “We take our honor code here very seriously. We are obligated to pursue any and all breaches aggressively. I hope you can appreciate that,” he said.

  “That’s one of the things that makes this such a great school. And why we feel lucky to have our sons as part of it,” I said, accepting his surrender.

  “Well then, thank you for coming in. I will keep you apprised of any further developments,” was his final capitulation.

  “Thank you,” I said, and stood up and shook his hand. I ushered Suzanne and the other parents out before anyone could say anything stupid.

  “That was weird,” one of the mothers said.

  “What he said was slander. Maybe we should sue him,” the father added.

  “Maybe we should go home,” I said.

  I took Suzanne by the hand and led the way out. I was encouraged that she let me.

  “I might have a shot at PTA president,” I said to her when we were outside.

  She pulled her hand loose. “How did the boys erase the logs?”

  “I have no idea. It sounded pretty complicated.”

  “You see, I don’t know if you’re telling me the truth or manipulating me like you did the headmaster.”

  “I kept our son from possibly getting expelled. How does that make me a bad guy?” I said.

  “Because you twist things like it’s second nature. I’m not sure if you know when you’re doing it anymore. I certainly don’t.”

  “I want the best for you and Devon. That’s all I care about. And you know that’s not a lie,” I said.

  “I look back at our marriage now, and I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t. I don’t know what parts of you are real. Did you become this way, or is this who you’ve always been and I couldn’t tell because you’re such a good liar? And I’m afraid that our son is turning into one too.”

  And then she was gone. What was I doing wrong that everyone was leaving me? With Caroline I was too honest, and with Suzanne I wasn’t honest enough. Whatever I did, the result was the same.

  I drove back home and found a large man peering through the front window. I jumped out of the car. As he turned, I delivered a flat-handed blow to his solar plexus. It was the same blow I had given Rob and it had the same effect. Connor fell to the ground, gasping for breath.