Dead or Alive

  So tomorrow he would begin assembling the team and begin actual mission planning, something more easily discussed over a dinner table than actually accomplished. But he’d considered that, albeit in the private confines of his flat and not actually in the field. Some of that could be done here, over the Internet, but only in broad terms. The particulars of their target could be assessed only once they were on the ground, but homework here would save them precious time in the future. Some of the logistical pieces were already in place, and so far their informant at the facility had proven steady and reliable.

  What did he need for the mission? A few people. Believers, all. Four. No more than that. One needed expertise with explosives. Untraceable automobiles—no problem there, of course. Good language skills. They had to look the part, which wouldn’t be hard, given the target’s location; few people could discern the subtleties of skin color, and he spoke English without much accent, so that wouldn’t present a problem, either.

  Most of all, though, each member of his team had to be a true believer. Willing to die. Willing to kill. It was easy for outsiders to think that the former was more important than the latter, but while there were many willing to throw their lives away, it was far more useful to discard your life only for something to advance the cause. They thought of themselves as Holy Warriors and sought after their seventy-two virgins but were in fact young people with few prospects, to whom religion was the path to greatness they would otherwise never achieve. It was remarkable that they were too stupid even to see that. But that was why he was the leader and they the followers.

  12

  EVEN IF SHE HAD not been to the motel before, she would have had little trouble finding it, sitting beside what the town of Beatty optimistically called Main Street, which was in truth nothing more than a half-mile gap of thirty-mile-per-hour road between highways 95 and 374.

  The hotel itself—the Motel 6 of Death Valley—had, despite its outward appearance, relatively clean rooms that smelled of disinfectant soap. Not only had she seen worse, but she had applied her . . . special skills in worse places. And with worse men, for much less money. If anything, the name of the motel bothered her most of all.

  A Keräşen Tatar by birth, Allison—her real name was Aysılu, which in Turkik meant Beauty as Moon—had inherited from her mother and father and ancestors a healthy respect for omens, both subtle and overt, and the name Motel 6 of Death Valley certainly qualified as the latter, she believed.

  No matter. Omens were mercurial, and meaning was always open to interpretation. In this case the motel’s name was unlikely to apply to her; her subject was too entranced by her to be of any threat, either directly or indirectly. And what she’d come here to do required little thinking on her part, so well had she been trained. And it helped that men were simple, predictable creatures, driven by the basest of needs. “Men are clay,” her first instructor, a woman named Olga, had once told her, and even at the tender age of eleven she’d known the truth of it, having seen it in the lingering gazes of the boys in her village, and even in the always watching eyes of some of the men.

  Even before she’d started going through her changes and her body had begun to blossom, she’d instinctively known which was not only the fairer sex but the stronger one as well. Men were physically strong, and that had its benefits and pleasures, but Allison plied a different kind of strength, one that had served her well, keeping her alive in dangerous situations and keeping her comfortable in hard times. And now, at twenty-two, with her village far behind her, her strength was making her wealthy. Better still, unlike many of her previous employers, her current one hadn’t required an audition from her. Whether that was a function of their strict religious ideals or simply one of professionalism, she didn’t know, but they had taken her bona fides at face value, along with a recommendation—though from whom was unclear. Certainly someone with influence. The now-discontinued program that had trained her had existed under closely guarded secrecy.

  She drove past the motel’s parking lot, then circled the block once and came back in the other direction, looking for anything out of place, anything that tickled her intuition. She saw his vehicle, a blue 1990 Dodge pickup, along with half a dozen others, all with in-state plates, save one from California and one from Arizona. Satisfied all was in order, she pulled into a gas station, did a quick Y-turn, then returned to the motel and pulled into the lot, parking two stalls down from the Dodge truck. She took a moment to check her makeup in the rearview mirror and retrieve a pair of condoms from the glove compartment. She dropped them in her purse and snapped it closed with a smile. He had begun to complain about the condoms, saying he wanted nothing between them, but she had demurred, saying she wanted to wait until they knew each other better, perhaps get tested for sexually transmitted diseases, before they took their relationship to the next level. The truth was, familiarity and caution had nothing to do with her hesitation. Her employer had been thorough, giving her a detailed dossier of the man, from his daily routine to his eating habits to his relationship history. He’d had two lovers before her, a high school girlfriend who had dumped him between his junior and senior years, and another shortly after he graduated from college. That, too, had been a brief affair. The likelihood he had a disease was almost nonexistent. No, the use of a condom was but another tool in her arsenal. The closeness he so craved was a need, and needs were merely leverage points. When she finally “gave in” and let him have her without the protection, it would serve only to strengthen her grasp on him.

  Clay, she thought.

  She couldn’t delay much longer, though, as her employer was already asking for information she’d yet to extract. Why they were impatient or what exactly they planned to do with the information she was funneling to them was their business, but clearly this man’s secrets were of critical importance. This sort of thing could not be hurried, though. Not if you wanted good results.

  She got out, locked the car door, and walked toward the room. As was his custom, he had left a red rose dangling in the gap between the doorknob and the jamb—“their” code to let her know where to find him. He was a sweet man, truth be told, but so weak and so needy that she found it nearly impossible to feel anything but disdain for him.

  She knocked on the door. She heard footsteps rapidly padding toward the door, then the chain lock rattling as it was unhooked. The door swung open, and he stood there in his corduroy pants and one of the half-dozen tattered T-shirts he owned, all of which referenced some science-fiction movie or television show.

  “Hey, there,” she cooed, shooting a hip like a runway model. Years of training had left her without a trace of an accent. “Happy to see me?”

  Her sundress—in the light peach color he liked so much—was clingy in all the right places and billowy in the others, the perfect balance of chasteness and spice. Most men, even if they didn’t realize it, wanted their women to be ladies in daily life and whores in the bedroom.

  His hungry eyes finished their scan of her legs and breasts, and then came to rest on her face. “Uh, yeah . . . God, yeah,” he mumbled. “Come on, get in here.”

  They made love twice over the next two hours, the first time lasting only a few minutes, the second time ten minutes, and only that long because she’d held him off. Muscles of a different sort, she thought. But no less powerful. When they were done he lay on his back, panting, his chest and face slick with sweat. She rolled off and snuggled into his shoulder, exhaling heavily.

  “Wow,” she murmured. “That was . . . Wow ...”

  “Yeah, it was,” he replied.

  Steve wasn’t a bad-looking man, with curly reddish-blond hair and light blue eyes, but he was too skinny for her tastes, and his beard made her face and thighs itchy. He was clean, though, and he didn’t smoke, and his teeth were straight, so all in all she knew it could be worse.

  As for his lovemaking skills ... They were almost nonexistent. He was an overly considerate lover and too gentle by far, always worried he was d
oing something wrong or should be doing something different. She did her best to reassure him, saying all the right things and making all the right noises at all the right moments, but she suspected in the back of his head he was worried about losing her—not that he “had” her, really.

  It was the quintessential beauty-and-the-beast syndrome. He wasn’t going to lose her, of course, at least not until she’d gotten the answer her employers needed. Allison felt a momentary pang of guilt, imagining how he would react when she disappeared. She was fairly certain he’d fallen in love with her, which was the point, after all, but he was so ... harmless it was hard not to occasionally feel sorry for him. Hard but not impossible. She pushed the thought from her mind.

  “So how’s work?” he asked.

  “It’s fine, the same old thing: making the rounds, giving my pitch, handing out my phone numbers, and showing the doctors a little cleavage. ...”

  “Hey!”

  “Relax, I’m kidding. A lot of the doctors are worried about the recalls.”

  “On TV, the pain meds?”

  “Those are the ones. We’re getting a lot of pressure from the manufacturer to keep pushing them.”

  As far as he knew, she was a pharmaceutical saleswoman based in Reno. They “met” at a Barnes & Noble, where, at the in-house Starbucks, she’d found herself a nickel short in paying for her Caffè Mocha. Behind her in line, Steve had nervously offered to cover the difference. Armed with his dossier—or what little of his dossier they felt she needed to have—and well aware of his habits, the meeting had been easy to arrange and easier still to exploit when she’d expressed an interest in a book he was reading, something about mechanical engineering that she actually cared nothing about. He hadn’t noticed, so thrilled to have a pretty girl paying attention to him.

  “So all that engineering stuff,” she said. “I don’t know how you do it. I tried to read one of those books you gave me, but it went right over my head.”

  “Well, you’re plenty smart, that’s for sure, but it’s pretty dry stuff. Don’t forget, I went to four years of college for it, and even then I didn’t really learn anything practical until I got on the job. MIT taught me a lot, but nothing compared to what I’ve learned since then.”

  “Like what?”

  “Ah, you know, just stuff.”

  “Such as?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Okay, okay, I get the point, Mr. Important Top-Secret Guy.”

  “It’s not that, Ali,” he replied in a slightly whiny tone. “It’s just that they make you sign all this paperwork—confidentiality agreements and all that.”

  “Wow, you must be important.”

  He shook his head. “Nah. You know how the government is ... paranoid to the end. Hell, I’m a little surprised they haven’t polygraphed us, but who knows?”

  “So what is it, then? Weapons and bombs and stuff like that? Wait a second. . . . Are you a rocket scientist?”

  He chuckled. “No, not a rocket scientist. Mechanical engineer—average, run-of-the mill engineer.”

  “A spy?” She propped herself up on an elbow, letting the sheet fall away to reveal a pale breast. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re a spy.”

  “No, not a spy, either. I mean, come on, look at me. I’m a nerd.”

  “The perfect cover.”

  “Boy, you’ve got some imagination there, I’ll give you that.”

  “You’re dodging the question. That’s a giveaway—a telltale spy move.”

  “Nope. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Then what? Tell me. ...”

  “I work for the DOE—Department of Energy.”

  “Like nuclear energy and all that.”

  “Right.”

  The truth was she knew exactly what he did for a living, where he worked, and what went on there. What she was looking for—what they were looking for—was much more specific. They were confident he had the information, perhaps already in his head, and if not, he certainly had access to it. She absently wondered why they had chosen to use her rather than to simply snatch him off the street and extract the information through blunt force. She suspected the answer had as much to do with where he worked as it did the unreliability of torture. If Steve disappeared or turned up dead under even remotely suspicious circumstances, there would be an investigation by not only the local police but the FBI as well, and that kind of scrutiny was something her employer was probably quite anxious to avoid. Still, the fact that they hadn’t chosen the more direct method told her something: The information they needed was both critical and extraordinary. Steve was perhaps their only viable source of the information, which meant it was either highly protected elsewhere or his grasp of it was singular.

  Not that it mattered. She would do the job, take the money, and then . . . well, who knew?

  Her fee was considerable, enough perhaps to give her a head start on a new life somewhere else, doing something else for a living. Something ordinary, like being a librarian or a book-keeper. She smiled at the thought. Ordinary might be nice. She would have to be very careful, though, with these people. However they were planning to use this information, it was clearly of deadly importance. Important enough to kill over, she suspected.

  Back to work . . .

  She lazily traced her fingernails over his chest. “You’re not, like, in danger or anything, are you? I mean, from cancer or anything?”

  “Well, no,” he said, “not really. I guess there’s some risk, but they’ve got protocols and rules and regulations—enough that you’d have to really screw up to get hurt.”

  “So it’s never happened—to anyone?”

  “Sure, but usually it’s dumb stuff, like some guy getting his foot run over by a forklift or choking on nachos in the cafeteria. We’ve had a couple close calls in . . . in other places, but that was usually because somebody tried to cut a corner, and even when that happens, there’re backup systems and procedures. Believe me, babe, I’m pretty safe.”

  “Good; I’m glad. I hate to think of you hurt or sick.”

  “That’s not going to happen, Ali. I’m very careful.”

  We’ll see, she thought.

  13

  JACK JUNIOR PRESSED HIMSELF flat against the wall and slid forward along it, feeling the splinters in the rough plank boards catch on his shirt. He reached the corner and stopped, weapon held in the Weaver stance doublehanded grip, barrel pointed downward. Not like Hollywood or cop TV shows, he thought, where they carried the gun pointed barrel-up beside their faces. Sure, it looked cool—nothing framed a hero’s lantern jaw and steely blue eyes like a chunky Glock—but this wasn’t about cool, this was about staying alive and putting down the bad guys. Growing up in the White House surrounded by Secret Service pros who knew guns better than they knew their own kids certainly had its advantages, didn’t it?

  The problem with the Hollywood model of gun handling was twofold: site picture and ambush. Real-world combat hand-gunning was about shooting straight and true under pressure, and that, in turn, was all about mind-set and site picture. The former was about conditioning; the latter, mechanics. It was a lot easier and a lot more effective to bring a weapon up, get a good site picture of the target, and snap off a shot than it was doing it in the reverse. The other factor—the ambush—was all about what happens when you turn a corner to find yourself face-to-face with a bad guy. Do you want your gun up, by your face, or do you want it down where you might, just might, have a chance to snap off a shot into the guy’s legs before he tackles you and the situation devolves into a no-holds-barred wrestling match? That didn’t happen very often, of course, but as far as Jack was concerned, and as far as real shooters were concerned, it was much better to be wrestling a bad guy who had a 9-millimeter slug or two in his leg than not.

  Theory, Jack, he reminded himself, returning to the here and now. Theories are for the classroom, not the real world.

  Where the hell was Dominic? They’d separated at the front door, Dominic moving
right to take the house’s back rooms—the potentially more “heavy” rooms—Jack to the left, heading for the more open kitchen and living room. Don’t worry about Dominic, worry about you. His cousin was FBI—at least officially—so he needed no lessons on this stuff.

  Jack changed the gun to his left hand, dried his palm on his pants leg, then changed it back again. He took a breath, took a short step back, then peeked his head around the corner. Kitchen. Refrigerator to the right; avocado-green counter, stainless-steel sink, and desktop microwave to the left; dining table and chairs down a ways, past the end of the counter, beside the back door.

  Jack scanned for movement but saw nothing, so he stepped out, gun raised to near shoulder height, eyes scanning, gun barrel following, then crept into the kitchen. Ahead and to the right was an archway, this one leading to the living room, he assumed, picturing the layout in his head. Dominic should be coming through the other room on the right to link up with him—

  “Jack, rear bedroom window!” Dominic shouted from somewhere deeper inside the house. “Got a runner! Out the side window! White male, red jacket, armed . . . I’m on him!”

  Jack resisted the impulse to charge ahead, instead moving slow and steady, clearing the remainder of the kitchen, then peeking around the corner into the living room. Clear. He stepped to the patio door, body aligned to the left of the doorjamb and hopefully behind the wooden 2×4 studs under the drywall that would, in theory, stop or slow down any bullets meant for him, then ducked down to peer out the porthole-style window into the alley beyond. To his right he saw a figure moving down the alley: blue windbreaker, yellow letters. Dominic’s FBI windbreaker. Jack opened the door, looked again, then pushed open the screen door. Directly across from him was a darkened doorway in the brick wall; to his left a green Dumpster. He moved that way, gun up, tracking for targets. He saw a shadow moving in the doorway and pivoted in time to see a man-shaped silhouette appear on the threshold.