On the way home from the Milwaukee Public Library, Roy Schermerhorn took a great deal of care with his tradecraft, switching buses twice, backtracking his way for several blocks downtown. Stopping to light a cigarette while he watched the reflections in a store window of people and cars. Watching the roof lines for snipers. Even a passing police cruiser gave him pause.
He turned suddenly and walked into a tavern already busy mostly with people in suits and ties stopping in for a drink or two before going home. This was beer town USA; stopping in for a beer and a shot after work was the norm.
Sitting at the end of the bar from where he could watch the front door and the short hall back to the restrooms, he ordered a Mich Ultra draught.
Ever since he’d moved here, his normal weekday routine was to stop at the library after work to use one of its computers to cruise the Internet, especially the CIA bulletin boards, and the numerous Kryptos sites. Until this afternoon nothing concrete had been happening, though the campus apparently was conducting some sort of a lockdown drill. One day of which would have been understandable, but it had been going on for three days now.
Then this afternoon he’d used an old password to get into one of the encrypted sites the Company used as a bulletin board, and the Alpha Seven message popped up.
His beer came, and he forced himself to raise the glass with a steady hand, though he was truly more frightened than he’d ever been since ’03, after they’d gotten out and George had disappeared.
Carnes had left first, and a couple of months later Coffin had come over to where Schermerhorn had been living at the time, in Chevy Chase, and said he was going to disappear for a while.
“Just to be on the safe side,” he said. “You know how it’s probably going to work out.”
“No, I don’t,” Schermerhorn had told him, though he did know what he expected everyone else had figured out. But he had wanted to hear it from Coffin’s mouth.
“Alex has disappeared.”
“Probably went with George.”
“That’s right, and you know damned well where that is. And why she left.”
“I know where. Why don’t you tell me why?”
“Don’t be so goddamned dense, you dumb Kraut. The shit’s probably about to hit the fan. My guess is that someone has either found the cache, or is about to, and all of us are going to be in the crosshairs.”
“You think one of us will be blamed for blowing the whistle?”
“Of course I do. I’m going deep, and I suggest you do too. Right now. And I do mean right now.”
They’d been sitting on the balcony of Schermerhorn’s third-floor apartment. He lived alone, except for Henry, his cat, and after his brief but superintense fling with Alex, he preferred things that way. “Where are you going?
Coffin got to his feet. “Take care of yourself,” he’d said, and walked out the door.
Schermerhorn had thought about going away too, but he could not leave things just like that, or else the Georges and Alexes of the world would win. He spent the next two weeks altering his appearance, thinning his hair, aging his face, and building himself a new legend, complete with social security number, driver’s license, military records, and even photos of a family he didn’t have. Bulletproof enough that when he applied for a job as a maintenance man at the CIA, he would pass the background investigation.
It took nearly six weeks before he was hired and had started on the job, and nearly another year before he got into the position he’d wanted. When he was finished, he walked away, changed his appearance and legend again, and disappeared to Milwaukee, where he got a job managing a Hess station and convenience store.
Mindless work, not satisfying but bearable because of Janet, his live-in girlfriend. They wouldn’t last for the long haul, of course, nor would Milwaukee. All of it here was designed to be disposable, like just about every previous day of his life had been.
And it had worked until now.
Someone in a sports coat and tan slacks, his tie loose, came in, and Schermerhorn stiffened, until the bartender pulled out a Bud and set it on the bar for the man. He was a regular, and he didn’t look like George.
Schermerhorn finished his beer, paid for it, and left the bar. Two blocks later he caught a cab and gave the driver an address a couple of blocks away from the small house he and Janet rented. She worked as a nurse at Columbia St. Mary’s Hospital on North Lake Drive and would be getting home about now.
He called her cell phone, but she didn’t answer, and the call flipped over to voice mail. A little thrill niggled at the nape of his neck. She always answered her phone when she was on break or away from the hospital. She had a lot of friends she texted on what seemed like an around-the-clock schedule.
“What do you guys talk about?” he’d asked once.
She’d just smiled at him. “Stuff.”
He didn’t normally carry a weapon with him, though his 9-mm Beretta was stashed behind some paint cans in the one-car garage. But since the bulletin board announcement and Janet’s not answering her phone, he wished he had it now.
The tree-lined street where the cabby dropped him off was a typical Milwaukee neighborhood—mostly small houses, some of them bungalows, many with brick fronts and almost all with fireplace chimneys. For now it was very neat and orderly, but once the leaves turned and started to drop, the place would be a mess. As fast as you raked them up and bundled them in big lawn and leaf bags, the more would fall.
Used to be you could burn them, and fall in the upper Midwest had always smelled of smoke. Pleasant.
He phoned her again, but she didn’t answer. He shut the phone off and then removed the back and pulled the battery. He tossed the pieces behind some bushes spread over a full block.
At the corner half a block from their house, he didn’t slow down, but almost instantly he cataloged everything going on. No strange cars or trucks or vans. The Wilson boys shooting hoops across the street two doors down from his house. Douglas driving up in his old Saturn SUV. He waved when he got out, and Schermerhorn waved back.
No cops, no sirens, no fire trucks or ambulances.
Their car was in the driveway. Janet usually put it in the garage.
Everything else was normal, but Schermerhorn’s instincts were screaming in high gear. He remembered an instructor from the Farm telling them one of the Murphy’s laws the SEAL Team Six operators swore by: if everything is going good, you’re probably running into an ambush.
It felt like that now.
He crossed the street in front of his house and let himself into the garage by the side door, got his Beretta, checked the load and the action, and stepped across the paved path to the kitchen door.
Janet was on her back in the doorway to the dining room. One leg was crossed over the other. She was still wearing her sneakers, but she usually took them off as soon as she came in the house. The shirt of her blue scrubs was completely drenched with blood. The left side of her neck had been ripped away, and most of her face had been destroyed.
He only knew it was her because of her clothes, her size, and the fact that this was their house. She belonged here.
Her blood was already well coagulated, so what happened here had happened an hour or more ago. Someone had to have called her at the hospital and told her there was an emergency and she needed to come home immediately.
Holding the pistol in the two-handed shooter’s grip, he checked the house, but the killer was long gone. They’d left a message: Not only aren’t you safe, but anyone close to you is a valid target.
Back in the kitchen, he looked at Janet’s body for a long ten seconds, not able to keep himself from imagining what it had been like for her.
But then he stuffed the pistol into his belt, got her keys from the counter, went back out to the garage—where from an old paint can he retrieved a plastic baggie that held an ID kit including a passport that identified him as Howard Tucker—then got in the car and drove away.