Monkeying Around

  “We will be spending countless dollars not on expensive religious facilities, but on building medical clinics and supplying food banks and helping fund agricultural projects. We are a church of the people, by the people, for the people. God lives within us, and the spirit of Christ directs me to give all my support to our government to provide for our nation and its people regardless of their spiritual path.

  “From now on, our church will be about showing our faith through humanitarian acts, not simply preaching it. Thank you for your support, and thank you in advance for helping us spread the word of God throughout the world by helping heal this world and showing what kind, loving people we all are. Merry Christmas, and may the love of Christ bless your life.”

  Chills ran up and down Hannibal’s spine. He couldn’t have written anything better himself.

  Or said it as convincingly as she did.

  The man switched the camera off. “Okay.”

  She turned and smiled down at Hannibal before she patted him on the head. “See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  The man stepped forward, the gun pointed at Hannibal’s chest. “Now?”

  “No, honey. Not yet.” She rounded the desk and took the gun from him. “First, he has to know what he did to you and your brothers.”

  * * * *

  Kali watched Ax’s face as he struggled against his tears. “My name is Ali Xavier. My mother was a reporter in Washington, DC, and doing a story about you and politicians. She and my dad were killed in a hit-and-run accident twenty-six years ago. Carli and Jorge Xavier. I know it was you, because a man came to our house even before the police did and stole her computer and notes from her desk. I saw him.”

  She cocked her head as she watched Hannibal. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I…I…that was a long time ago.”

  He clenched his fists. “You had them killed and don’t even remember? I have two brothers, Rami and Altoh. You took our parents, you sack of shit!”

  Kali laid a hand on Ax’s shoulder. “We looked back through church records, Hannibal,” she said. “You were doing a lot of one-on-ones with DC bigwigs back then. Travel records show you had been in DC around that time. We were able to go back and find traffic camera footage from the accident. Since it was a cold case, no one’s looked into it in years. Fortunately, the car’s license plate, which wasn’t legible back then, is legible with today’s technology.

  “We had friends trace it back. The man who’d rented it is dead now, no small shocker there, but when someone went through his old banking records, guess what they found?”

  Hannibal shook his head.

  She leaned over the desk, in his face. “They found a very large deposit transferred by a Saudi Arabian company. Now, that was back when Kendall was your little toady, right?”

  “I—”

  She waved him down. “Rhetorical question, Hannibal. I already know it was. And I called in a friend to go track Kendall down. He is still alive.” She giggled. “Well, he was. Guess what? He remembers that reporter and her husband. You yelled at the guy who did the job for taking down the husband, too, he recalled. And that’s all on tape, by the way. So I have no qualms about it being you behind it.”

  Walking behind him, she grabbed the back of the chair, pulled it out from behind the desk, and shoved him toward the door.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “The bathroom, Hannibal. This might get very messy.”

  * * * *

  Ax had always said he wanted to be the one to pull the trigger if the chance availed itself, but now he wasn’t sure. He definitely wanted Hannibal dead, but with the monster confronted and not much more than an old man, it didn’t feel…

  Satisfying.

  Kali turned to him and reached up, cradling his chin in her hands. “I want you to go play that video back,” she said. “Make sure it’s good.”

  “I want…” He looked into the bathroom where Hannibal was now struggling against his bonds, but the preacher couldn’t scream.

  She’d slapped a piece of duct tape over his mouth.

  Kali made Ax look her in the eyes. “I don’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with. After forty years of torture, if God really wants to send me to Hell for what I’m doing tonight, then, honestly? I’ll be happy to buy my first-class ticket like this. Fuck forgiveness. Hannibal never forgave. Not once. You know why he did this to me?”

  Ax shook his head.

  “Because he asked me out on a date in college and I blew him off. Was I a bitch back then? Probably. But he then had a friend of his spike my drink at a party, arranged for the whole frat house to gang-bang me, and then filmed it. If that wasn’t bad enough, he used the video throughout our marriage to threaten me, used it to force me to marry him in the first place. To keep me in line.”

  She looked into the bathroom. “He bought his own first-class ticket to hell back in his twenties, and I’m about to launch the flight into orbit for him.” She turned back to Ax. “But you are a good person. I will not think any less of you if you want to just stand by outside, or even go back downstairs.”

  He took a deep breath. “Let me check the video and then I’ll come back and we’ll talk.”

  She smiled up at him, a kindly, motherly smile. “Good boy. You do that.”

  He returned to the office and rewound it, played it back. Sure enough, it was there, and good. You couldn’t see him duct-taped into the chair. It looked like he was just sitting there. You could hear every word he said.

  Mary Silo, however, looked like the goddesses whose names she had empowered herself with.

  He returned to the bathroom and Kali stepped out of the doorway. It’d sounded like she flushed the toilet.

  Silo now sat slumped in the chair.

  “What happened?” He hadn’t heard a shot.

  She wore a beaming, peaceful smile. “Hannibal has gone on to his great reward.”

  He stepped into the bathroom and checked him out. Now there wasn’t duct tape on the man’s mouth, but there was a red mark where it’d been.

  And on his nose, too.

  When he looked back at her, she was leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed over her chest and still smiling.

  “Guess he just…stopped breathing,” she said.

  The laughter startled him, bubbling up from deep inside him, growing, flowing, until they were both laughing and holding each other, and their laughter turned to tears and then eventually back to laughter again.

  With his arm around her shoulders and hers around his waist, they turned to the monster in the chair. “Well, Mom. What now?”

  She laid her head on his shoulder. “Go call Bubba, please. Ask for his…assistance. Tell him what we need.”

  She reached into her back pocket and pulled out her official church ID badge, clipping it to her shirt. She’d left her jacket in the living room. “This is now my condo. No one gets in here without my authority. I want to go ahead and film another video clip to air in the morning, right after we air the first one.”

  “Saying what?”

  She sighed. “My poor husband. It’s so tragic that right after I returned, his heart gave out. I feel guilty that I didn’t fight harder to break free of my captors sooner, but I didn’t know how I was being used. I take full responsibility for my actions and will devote the rest of my life to doing good works with my sons. Because if it hadn’t been for your help, I never would have gotten away.”

  “Sons?”

  She smiled up at him. “You, Rami, and Altoh. I’m sure one of our lawyers somewhere can figure out how I can adopt the three of you, even as adults.”

  * * * *

  While Kali would have loved to watch Hannibal’s brains explode from his skull, there was something even more poetic about sitting there on the closed toilet seat, watching his eyes widen as she reached out with the piece of duct tape in hand and he knew.

  He knew.

  And she’d never tell A
x what words she’d sent Hannibal to hell with.

  Those were for her alone.

  “I have not one, but three sons, Hannibal,” she’d whispered as he’d struggled to shift away from her.

  But she’d grabbed his hair with her free hand, the fingers holding the tape right up to his nose so he could smell the adhesive.

  “You failed to keep me from being a mother. FYI, I will make sure that every last drop of your cursed seed is flushed down a fucking toilet. I will erase your name from our church’s history until you are nothing more than a footnote. My sons and I will be who go down in history as this church’s legacy, not you. Everyone will forget you in a year or less.”

  She’d smiled as she pinched the tape over Hannibal’s nostrils. “They’ll all be asking, ‘Hannibal who?’ when someone says your name. And, frankly, I hope there is a Hell and you’re there first, because I’m forty years ahead of you. Now I’m going to find me a handsome, well-hung man to fuck, preferably one who enjoys eating pussy, and enjoy every damn second of it. I mean, I will be a widow, after all.”

  Then she’d sat back and waggled her fingers at him in a coquettish wave as he’d struggled and struggled for air, until, finally, he’d quit struggling.

  It’d actually been far more satisfying than a quick boom and done.

  Lot less messy, too. Especially since she’d had the foresight to put a couple of towels under him for when his bladder let loose.

  Only when she was sure he was dead had she pulled the tape off his mouth and nose, balled the two pieces up, and tossed them in the toilet, flushing them away.

  Not that she was worried about an investigation.

  Bubba would fix this for her.

  Oh, they’d throw Hannibal a funeral, but a very modest one. Because he was sooo magnanimous that he wanted their church’s efforts to go toward healing, not fripperies.

  Of course she wasn’t going to show the videos she’d taken of Hannibal. Not the torture ones. Just the last one, of him reading the statement, which would publicly cement her role in the church. She would deny the audio portion of the released sex videos, now that she was back, and that, too, would all quickly die down without Ax or the blog being held responsible.

  “He’s really dead, right?” Poor Ax almost sounded like a lost kid.

  “Yes. He’s really dead.” She turned off the bathroom light, locked the door from the inside, and pulled it shut behind them. “He can stay there until Bubba’s crew gets here.”

  “Where is Jerald?”

  “In the tub in his guest bathroom. I have the keys to his condo.” She walked over to the couch and sank down onto it. “Would you like Jerald’s condo, or a different one?”

  He sat next to her. “I think I’d like Jerald’s.”

  “Whatever my son wants, that’s what my son gets.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  December 27, Tank was on her way to morning chow when she heard excited chatter coming from the dining hall. Quickening her pace, she arrived to find nearly all of the Drunk Monkeys, men and women, and some of her own group, celebrating and giving each other high-fives.

  Making sure her wary act was still in place, she walked over to Chief. “What’s going on?”

  “Apparently Hannibal Silo left this earthly plane sometime in the past day or so. Arliss just notified Papa.”

  She looked around and found Papa and Alpha over near the stack of trays, discussing something with Omega. Turning before she locked gazes with either of her men, she focused on Sylvan, who’d walked up to her with Paxton.

  “Did you hear?” Sylvan asked her.

  “Not the deets. What happened?”

  Chief filled them in with what Arliss has passed down through Papa. Official story was the man had died of natural causes just hours after his wife, Mary, had returned to their St. Louis compound for a Christmas Day reunion.

  And Jerald Arbeid had resigned as well, citing personal reasons, and apparently “disappeared.”

  Hmm.

  “This is great, isn’t it?” Paxton asked.

  “Yeah,” Tank said. “It’s good. One less aggravation.”

  “I wonder if Ax knows?” Paxton mused.

  Oh, I’m sure he knows. He knew before any of us.

  But Tank didn’t say that out loud. Instead, she said, “You know, I’m going to go message him real fast. I’ll be right back.”

  Not what she was going to do, but they didn’t need to know that. She hurried back to her quarters and pulled out the secret sat-phone.

  She didn’t bother with a greeting. “A little heads-up would have been nice.”

  Bubba chuckled. “Sorry, but there wasn’t time. Things happened fast.”

  “So what really happened? I’m guessing Ax and Mary Silo had a party without us?”

  “You could say that.”

  He gave her the quick version, which left Tank nodding and amused. “Good for her,” Tank said when he finished. “Does this impact my mission?”

  “Not much. Silo had no Kite fail-safe, apparently. Ax has things handled on that end. He’s in full control of their computer network and the other compounds. I’m having his brothers moved to join him there. Mary Silo’s going to legally adopt them as her sons and have them help her run the church.”

  She sat on her bunk and rubbed at her forehead with her free hand. “But we should drop the narrative about Hannibal being a mass murderer from our portfolio.”

  “Well, come to think of it, yeah, you probably should. We’re going to position the church to be a political partner to help solidify votes in November. Mary Silo is, obviously, fully in our corner.”

  “Any ideas on how to sell that to the kids?” It was difficult for her to think of them in any terms other than that. She’d known them pre-TMFU. Before going on the run, when they’d had no greater concerns than being politically active, acing their classes, and being politically vocal.

  Before their lives had been turned upside down and they’d been forced to grow up.

  “Give me a couple of days to think on that,” Bubba said, “and I’ll get back to you.”

  “One last thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did he suffer?”

  Bubba chuckled. “Based on what Arliss told me, Mary Silo did a number on him that sent him to hell on a perfect note.”

  “Good. I want to see the unofficial report when it’s put together.”

  “Roger roger.”

  She shut the phone off and slipped it into her jacket pocket. It was weird how…easily everything was falling into place.

  A vaccine was literally weeks away, or sooner.

  Silo—gone. Threat eliminated.

  Arliss had cleaned house in such a way as to ensure political success this next election cycle.

  The last few years of her life had been spent cloaked in espionage, living a fake life, telling lies and making them truths.

  Who am I, really?

  She stared at Gatsby and Connell’s urns.

  I’m a leader who failed.

  Pulling her mask firmly into place, Tank left her quarters and headed for the chow hall.

  * * * *

  “I’m worried about her,” Alpha said.

  Papa didn’t need him to clarify who he meant. “Me, too.”

  Tonight, they were alone in their quarters. Even though Tank wasn’t with them, they had the mattresses on the floor and pushed together. Neither of them could sleep now without it configured like that, even if Tank wasn’t between them.

  It always felt perfect with her there, and this was their way of keeping her there with them, even if she wasn’t physically present.

  “And here I thought Ak and Scooter were going to be the ones hit hardest by Silo’s death,” Alpha said. “Although Clara seemed really pissed she wasn’t going to get to castrate him.”

  “Go figure,” Papa said.

  It was nearing the end of January, and the entire unit’s mood had brightened. Contagiously, so had the hacker
group’s disposition.

  Except for Tank.

  Even when she was alone with them, she barely talked now, almost aloof, a cloak of emotional pain engulfing her that neither man knew how to penetrate.

  Without being needed as a guard, Chief was working with the hacker group to get them inside the LA county computer systems, those that were still live. Which weren’t many, but yay, cloud storage. They’d been able to pull video and data from them to bolster their case about what had really happened in LA and the military’s part in killing civilians.

  Reverend Silo was nothing more than a footnote to the narrative they were presenting, at that point.

  When someone knocked on the door to their quarters, the men exchanged a glance. If it was Tank, she wouldn’t knock. Not that she risked coming to their quarters very often.

  Both men were dressed in sweats. Papa sat up as Alpha got up, went to the door, and cracked it open a little. On the other side, Papa recognized Doc’s voice.

  “What is it?” Papa called out.

  Alpha opened the door a little wider. They usually pulled the mattresses back into place during the day. Might look a little…odd if someone else saw them sharing a larger bed without a woman between them, and they had to preserve Tank’s cover.

  Doc stepped in and pulled up short, staring at the floor, his train of thought glaringly obvious.

  Papa stood and motioned for Alpha to close the door.

  “This is a need to know scenario, and this is not what it looks like.”

  Doc held up his hands. “Hey, I don’t judge. Y’all are grown men. You don’t see me bothered by Dutch and Boris, do you?”

  The two scientists, Dr. Max Copper and Dr. Ivan Ivlonsky, who’d joined them just before they left Florida, were a couple.

  Papa rolled his eyes. “Tank is our third.”

  “Tank is…” He frowned. “Tank? As in student Tank who hates his guts?” He pointed at Alpha.