Back to the swamp – to the stinking salt water, the fearless mosquitoes, the slop covering me, and the stinging cuts on my arms.
That was everything that, to that point, I knew. Given how malleable a person’s memory is and how much I’m reshaping things in trying to remember it, maybe even a little more than I knew.
The most definite things I remember are the blur of confusion and shock, melding into rage. The least these jerks could have done was tell me why. I’m always ready for a good villain’s exposition. I’ll even take notes.
But, no. The only way anyone had communicated with me so far was in attempts on my life.
Revenge would have been very sweet. But I made myself hold off. I had to find out more.
So I sank down to my nose in the marsh and, as the ringing in my ears faded from an acute pain to just a background one, I eavesdropped. Lots of back chatter with a voice the guard addressed as “base.” A triumphant note in the guard’s voice, balanced with tension. Caution from “base.” The guard approached the remains of my boat, carbine in hand.
I’d gotten lucky in another way. Real, unfiltered luck this time. The guard had only seen one figure. Me. Because of his bad leg, Jonathan had been reclining in the back of the boat. The sun had been high overhead, the sparkling reflections off the ocean behind us blinding. He wouldn’t have been able to see my features through the glare.
I heard a low whistle. From my angle, peering through the marsh reeds, I could just see his shoulders tense.
“Yeah. Only one.”
I caught a glimpse of the wreckage of the boat. Half of the backside had been blown off, and what was left of the craft tilted precipitously into the water. The only reason it hadn’t sunk more was because we’d already almost nestled ashore. The bottom of the boat rested flush against the ground. All the weapons and ammunition we’d carried had been wasted by the rocket attack. And so had Jonathan.
His arm, what was left of it, dangled over the side of the boat. Most of the rest of his body was visible through the charred gash in the boat’s side. He was half-immersed in the brackish salt water. As the boat sunk, the water was bubbling up all around him, consuming him. At the angle at which he lay, his head, if he still had one, would have been wholly immersed.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t grieve for Jonathan, not until I had the time – but, as you’ve already seen, I wasn’t good at keeping promises to myself.
There was a reason why, after all this, it took a long time for me to trust myself to get close to someone again. I still have nightmares about how I felt then, looking into the wreckage of that boat and seeing Jonathan. Imagining it happening to Rachel, or Inez, or, hell, my little dog Pip.
Even at the time, I knew what I’d seen had affected me, but I thought I’d still be able to brush it off. I still thought I could get out unscarred.
I didn’t know that this was just the first blow.
I’ll say one good thing about myself: it did not take long for grief to crystallize into rage. First at Jonathan, the idiot. And then at this guard, and whoever it was he represented. Twice now, they had tried to kill me. Twice they had missed, and gotten people close to me instead. And for what? Because I’d started chasing a half-remembered face, on a whim?
These guys were professionals. Best cybersecurity measures either I or the hacker I’d hired had seen in a long time. If they were that well guarded in electronic space, they’d no doubt have better out here. More than cameras, more than armed guards. Surveillance the likes of which it would be a mistake to try to predict. (Even I hadn’t expected them to have security, certainly not of the shoot-first type, this far out. Goes to show that, in this business, no matter how paranoid you are, you’re not paranoid enough.)
The soldier who’d killed Jonathan uttered a vicious curse. It didn’t seem to be at the state of the body. No, from the ease with which he prodded Jonathan’s body with his booted foot, this man seemed inured to gore. “No,” he said to his headset, spitting it like it was poison. I stifled my breathing, trying to overhear as much as I could.
He pulled something out of his ear in disgust, waited. Probably getting lectured. After a moment, he plugged it back in.
“Heavily armed. Coming to stir up trouble, at the very least. No sign of… no, sir.”
We’d stumbled into some kind of sting operation. I wondered if the person this guard expected to see down there had been me. I got a chill down my back. Hard not to feel like people kept walking across my grave.
“Yes, sir. I’ll bring him in for ID.”
I risked pulling back a pair of reeds to get a better view. The soldier was dressed in all black, just like the sniper in Denver.
After sharing a few more words with whoever was on the other side of the radio, my assailant hoisted himself out of water and disappeared into a patch of trees. I was just getting ready to follow when I heard the rumble of a motor. A beat-up gray pickup truck pulled into view. Conspicuously out of place among the expensive weapons hardware he’d just used against me, but still well camouflaged for the area. It was rusted out, weighed down by age. Had someone passing by discovered it, they probably would have figured it was just an abandoned vehicle.
Sure enough, when my ears cleared enough that I could pay attention to the motor, it purred. Not at all what a mistreated old clunker of a truck should sound like. The skin was just that: a covering.
He loaded Jonathan’s body onto the truck, dumping it unceremoniously into the bed. While he was doing that, I was already swimming across the inlet. I pulled myself up onto drier land behind a patch of trees that had bent inward at a forty-five degree angle, like some hurricane or other had just about ripped them off their roots. They looked how I felt. The pain of the shockwave’s body-blow was just catching up with me as the adrenaline of the attack faded. My cuts’ stinging had turned into a scream.
One cure for that was more adrenaline. As the truck pulled onto a slender dirt road threading through the marsh’s dry spots, I darted after it. I kept my head low, keeping out of his mirrors. I lunged for the truck bed’s door and pulled myself onto it.
The next time the truck slowed, I unlatched from the door and swung myself underneath. Another thing the truck had going for it: good suspension. Other than getting the skin scraped off my back a couple times, the ride was almost comfortable.
The truck and its driver had been far from home base. Waiting for us, possibly, or maybe they just had a very wide security net. We stopped briefly outside a gate and guardhouse for an inspection. The truck was passed right through without anyone checking underneath. Love it when an improvised plan comes together.
What little of the compound I could see from my angle was illuminating. A cluster of tiny gray-green buildings, colored to blend in with the marsh. Had those been all that they seemed to be, they couldn’t have held much. But the buildings were small enough, and spaced far enough from each other, to hint at a significant underground presence.
Camouflaged or not, the buildings still should have shown up on satellite photography. But I’d checked more than one source, and nada. That meant one of two things. First option: cooperation from all the databases I’d checked through, both public and private, from commercial search engines to NASA. That would have meant a lot of people, and a lot of money. Second: it could have meant that someone had, after the databases had been put together, hacked into them and smoothed over the ground. Stitched together other pieces of landscape, or digitally altered the buildings out of existence.
Given what I’d seen so far, my money was on the second option. This operation was well funded, expertly crafted, but their operating principle seemed to be the fewer people involved, the better. Maybe if my hired hacker had stayed alive, seen the maps, he would have been able to spot the artifacts, the copied landscapes, that would have given it away.
I had just missed it. Negligence.
All very interesting, but I couldn’t do anything about it now aside from feel more and more uneasy. The truck stopped outside one of the smaller buildings. The driver hopped out. He was met by three men and a gurney. They dumped the body onto the gurney and took it toward the building. There was a ramp around that building’s back entrance, apparently for just this kind of thing.
The truck started up, kept going. I waited until it had rounded a corner before detaching, rolling to the side.
There were no guards posted on the exterior of any of the buildings. I did note plenty of cameras, though. I had no choice but to hide in the ditch until sunset.
Night wasn’t too far away, but it was still excruciating. I ever mention how much I hate mosquitoes?
Still – don’t do anything you hate without squeezing some bit of worth from it, even if you have to do it like a rolled-up tube of toothpaste. I did learn something from the wait. There was nobody around. I heard a distant rumble of another truck, a pair of muffled voices – maybe from behind one of the doors – but that was it. Even if somebody had taken a search plane directly overhead, looked down at the right time, they wouldn’t have seen much more than a cluster of buildings like shacks and some beat-up trucks. At best, unremarkable grinding poverty for rural Florida. At worst, a drug-smuggling operation. Both more innocent than what was actually going on here.
Coils of thick black greasy smoke churned into the sky from the building I’d seen the three men enter. The chimney was maybe overlarge, but otherwise looked just like you might expect on a rural cabin. But the smoke didn’t seem like wood smoke. Didn’t smell like it, either.
I never saw any of the men who’d entered the building exit it. Either they were all still there, or my guess about this complex having a massive underground presence was dead-on.
One of the many downsides of spending so much time alone is that my imagination won’t let me get too lonely. It conjures faces, voices, to keep me company. Sometimes friends. Sometimes enemies.
I couldn’t get Jonathan out of my head. I felt him, lying there beside me.
“You weren’t able to save a single weapon?” he asked.
Most of our arms had been on the boat. I’d carried my personal weapons on me, a Desert Eagle and a Beretta 92FS… but they hadn’t survived water immersion. I’d ditched them before leaving the marsh.
He asked, “How many ways could you have done this better?”
It was a fair question. I hadn’t been ready at all. Twice now, I’d been caught off guard by opposition I hadn’t seen any reason to expect. Certainly, after the first assassination attempt, I felt like I’d been on high alert. But that hadn’t been high enough.
After the hacker died, I should have been more aware. I’d stepped on somebody’s toes, somehow. I should have felt it.
“Do better,” he told me. It was a demand. A job he was giving me.
Even all the time we’d spent together – even after I’d gone to bed with him, never mind that it had just been once – I felt like I barely knew him. But I still saw him. Heard him. Felt him.
Pathetic, huh?
Well, that’s what happens to you when you’re alone for so long. You get pathetic.
I’m better these days, but I have Inez and Rachel to thank for that. Back then? Different matter. That was the whole reason I’d come out here to begin with – seeking that kind of connection, a feeling of family, that I’d only ever been able to invent for myself.
Or remembered feeling with that face.
After too many hours of listening to Jonathan, the sun touched the treetops. Time to move. With sunset to the west and most of the base to the east, the cameras – infrared or otherwise – would have a hard time balancing against the glare.
I couldn’t avoid all the cameras, though, so I didn’t bother to try. Just had to hope no one was watching live. If they pulled up the footage after the fact and found me…
Well, it wouldn’t matter by then.
I wasn’t planning on keeping meek and silent for long. I wanted answers. And, more than that, right now I wanted blood.
I’m pretty good about riding my rage, keeping it in check until I have an opportunity to inflict it on somebody. But I was having trouble now. It was something about this place. It was more than the mosquito bites, more than the itchiness of the swamp sludge drying on my skin and hair, more than the never-fading pain from the cuts. Something about this place had reached deep inside of me, found a deep chord of anger, and twanged. There are a million different shades of hate, and I hadn’t felt this one in a long time. But it was familiar. I could have placed it, if I’d wanted.
I sped down the ramp the men had taken the gurney. Quietly, I popped the door open and ducked through – and right into a smell of blood, ammonia cleaner, ash, and heat thick as a brick wall.
It took a moment for the rest of my senses to catch up with my nose. The room was rectangular, much longer than it was wide. The walls were filthy, ash-stained cement. The ducts of some kind of complex ventilation system ran overhead, no doubt linked to the disguised chimney. And, at the far side of the room, on the other side of a row of cabinets, was an enormous, industrialized metal box with all the aesthetic appeal of a water heater. It stood three times as tall as I was, and it was thrumming like an engine. I could feel the vibrations in the cement floor, through my boots.
All the heat in the room emanated from it. It was an incinerator. Sized for bodies.
It took my eyes a second to adjust to the bright fluorescents on the other side of the door. Fortunately, the incinerator technician wasn’t all that observant. He was facing away, checking something on his machine. I had plenty of time to hide among the cabinets and empty gurneys on my side of the room.
The technician was singing something to himself. Poorly. Some kind of crooning folk song. It told me a couple of things. He didn’t expect any of his companions to stumble upon him and embarrass him. And he was comfortable with what he was doing. He’d done this before.
The incinerator wasn’t large enough to burn more than one corpse at a time, but the fact that it was even here spoke volumes. Nobody got units like this to dispose of documents. These were for bodies, and only bodies.
And this facility produced enough of them that they expected to get a lot of use out of it.
The technician was alone. More evidence that, whoever these people were, they were short-staffed. Just about every body disposal I’d ever witnessed13 hadn’t been a solo operation. At the very least, you needed someone to listen to the jokes you told. People who work with corpses are real freaking comedians.
There was no sign of Jonathan. The coiled black smoke had started maybe an hour after I’d seen them take him in. There wouldn’t be much left of him now.
All the pent-up rage I’d bottled since the first time I’d been shot at – since I’d watched the hacker’s forehead explode – came rushing back up on me.
One of my weaknesses is that, between the moment when somebody recognizes what’s about to happen to them and when the violence really begins, I like to wait a bit. Let it sink in. Give them a second to think about all of the decisions they’d made that had led us both to this point.
I cleared my throat. “Hello,” I said.
The technician made a show of it. He opened with a double-take. His shock turned to recognition, to terror, to acceptance. A real one-man play.
Given my choice of violences, I prefer firearms. The pop and kickback are all I need from life sometimes. But feeling someone’s teeth crack loose against my knuckles is a close second.
By the time I released the technician’s collar, let him slump to the floor, my anger had only darkened. Usually the first burst of violence helped. It didn’t get rid of the rage, but crystallized it, helped me focus. Not this time. My head was still a fog of hate.
I didn’t, even then, have any inkling of what I’d actually found. I wonder if I could have recognized it if I’d let myself – what I could have pieced together if I’d stopped and thought about it for a moment.
But it wouldn’t have done me any good to figure it out then. It would’ve just made the rage worse.