I walked away after Bagram. I’m sure there are some people who would have quit the moment they saw that body bag being hauled out of the room. Or at any time before that, when they knew for a fact that they were being used, when their conscience couldn’t take it anymore.
I’m not quite that stupid. You don’t tell the commander of a black-ops unit to take his job and shove it inside a secret prison seven thousand miles away from the right to due process.
I didn’t wait long, though. I made the call to Cantrell from the airport as soon as I got back to D.C.
“I’m done,” I told him.
He was less than thrilled. “You seriously think you can quit?”
“Pretty sure I just did.”
He sighed, and I could tell he was thinking of the right way to phrase what he wanted to say, given that we were on an unsecured line.
“I told you to get your head on straight. Get back to me when you’ve had a little more sleep.”
“I’m wide awake now. I don’t need any more time. You need to believe me on this: I have had enough.”
He made a noise. Almost like gagging. “Oh stop it. You going to tell me you’re getting misty over that little stain we left on the floor? Bullshit.”
“Too many stains. Too much blood on my—”
Cantrell cut me off before I could finish the sentence.
“No. You don’t get to make that speech. You want out? Then go with God. You’ve done your time, and I’ve had damn few complaints about you, which is more than I can say for most of your fucked-up brethren. But don’t use this as an excuse. You’ve seen worse. Hell, you’ve done worse.”
“Not when the other guy was in handcuffs.”
“You want a fair fight now? Be honest. You haven’t been in a fair fight in your life.”
He had a point. But he wasn’t about to change my mind.
“Tell me something,” I asked him. “You think what we did in that room was right?”
“Fuck yes, I do. No, he wasn’t Osama bin Laden or a Taliban warlord. Yes, he was weak and young and pathetic and stupid. But he was still the enemy. He had chosen to take up arms against the force and power of the United States military and he was absolutely going to die for it. He was born to be a corpse. Now, personally, I’d rather watch him die strapped to a table than have him out in the desert waiting to put a bullet in my skull. Maybe you’d feel better if a Predator dropped a Hellfire missile on his ass from twenty thousand feet. But the result is the same. There’s no such thing as a fair fight, John. There’s just us and them. Today there’s one less shithead for the enemy to throw at us. Bottom line, I can live with whatever road we took to get there.”
I knew that if we were face-to-face, I would get absolute certainty from him. I couldn’t read him over the phone, but I knew. There was no question in his mind.
And there were too many questions in mine. Maybe it was selfish. But I was done being Cantrell’s weapon.
“I can’t,” I said.
There was a long pause on the line. For a moment, I wondered if he’d hung up. And then Cantrell’s voice came back. His southern accent had thinned, which was how I knew he was deeply angry.
“You’ve been the beneficiary of a lot of investment. We’ve put a great deal of time and training into you. And we’ve trusted you with a lot of—well, let’s call them trade secrets. Now, you can understand why we’d be reluctant to allow you to leave, given all that you’ve got in your head.”
“You don’t want to send people after me.”
I heard a fat, happy chuckle over the phone. “Do I hear an ‘or else’ at the end of that sentence? You think it’s gonna be like Rambo? Lot of body bags, is that it?”
“I was thinking more like Night of the Living Dead. Only a lot less living, a lot more dead.”
He laughed at that. His way of buying time. Then he made his decision.
“You’ve seen too many movies, John. We try to do right by our people. You did your bit. Uncle Sam’s got no more legal claim to you. You want to walk away now, I promise, there’s no need to look over your shoulder.”
“I never need to look over my shoulder. Remember?”
“Don’t lecture me, son. I know everything you’re capable of, better than you do.”
“Then we’re done?”
“What do you want, a going-away party and a cake? We’re done.”
I believed him, even if I couldn’t read him over the phone line. I suddenly wasn’t sure what to say. He filled in the gap for me.
“Just remember this: you’ve had us clearing the way for a long time. You might not like it out there on your own.”
That sounded like a threat again. I didn’t like it.
“Hey, Terry,” I said, using his real first name, the one he didn’t ever tell anyone. “I’ve always wondered, why the hell do you use that accent? You’re from New Jersey.”
That made him laugh out loud. “Shit, John,” he said, accent thick as molasses again. “Shut up before you make me miss you.”
He hung up.
BY THE TIME I got back to our apartment, Whitney was gone. Her closets were empty, and her side of the bathroom was so clean it looked sterile. At some point while I was out of town, she’d made the decision to move on with her usual ruthless efficiency. For her, there was never any sense in hanging around after she’d planned her exit strategy. There wasn’t even a note.
I never saw it coming.
She didn’t vanish from the face of the earth. I admit, I’ve run her name on Google late at night. She’s the director of a think tank and the wife of an up-and-coming congressman who swept into office as part of the backlash against Obama.
But I’ve always wondered about the timing. Did she leave because she knew me so well? Did she realize before I did that I’d reached my expiration date?
Or did she leave because someone told her what happened at Bagram, and it was time for her to get out? Was she always a minder from the Agency, or someone else? Did they decide I wasn’t worth her time if I wasn’t with Cantrell’s group anymore?
I don’t know. That’s the kind of useless paranoia that crawls around in your head when you’ve been in the community for any length of time. You tend to ask yourself a lot of questions that will never have a good answer.
Either way, it didn’t really matter. She was gone.
And just like that, I was alone, out in the world, for the first time in my life.
I CONSIDERED MY options. I could have gone back to being a soldier, only for a private corporation like Blackwater. I could have used my talent for blackmail or gambling, like so many people have suggested. I could have found a normal job, stuck behind a desk or a counter somewhere, dealing with all the mouth-breathing, slow-witted people like you, every day of my life, until I finally put a gun in my mouth.
But I knew what I really wanted. I wanted to be alone. And I wanted to have enough money to do it in style.
There are a lot of other guys with my military training. I’d met some of them. They rented their skills and their lives to the very rich, solving problems that the One Percent didn’t want to trust with the proper authorities. That is the point of having money, after all: you get to hire someone to deal with the inconvenient things. Rich people don’t have to scrub their own toilets.
I had the same skills as those other guys, plus one definite market advantage. So I went to work for myself.
I moved to Los Angeles because I was sick of bad weather. In a short time, I got clients. Word gets around among the very rich. I bought some good suits and a decent place to live. I even put a little cash away for the day when I’d finally retreat completely from the world.
It all seemed to be working out pretty well.
Until now, anyway.
But I’m not dead yet. And as smart as Preston is, even with the CIA and the government and a billion dollars on his side, he’s still only human.
I’m not.
It’s time for me to remind him just what that means.