When Charlie awoke, he felt like he was floating in the air with thousands of diaphanous bits of light in orbit around him. He’d previously thought seeing stars was just the stuff of cartoons. It was the most magnificent and glorious experience imaginable, he decided, when- WHAM — he found himself prone on the cold forest floor.
The stars were gone, replaced by trees as far as he could see, and it felt like his head had absorbed the majority of the helicopter’s impact with the ground.
He tolerated the pain to take inventory of himself. His mouth tasted of dirt. His nostrils were caked with it. His skin was burned and scraped in multiple patches. The rest of him stung. Although slick with blood, his appendages remained attached. Incredibly, everything seemed in working order.
Fifty or sixty feet away, Drummond was pacing by what remained of the helicopter. The crumpled fuselage lay on its side, looking like it originally had been constructed of papier-mache. Drummond appeared to have suffered only scrapes. Of course, if half his ribs were broken, would he show it?
His gun was trained on Cadaret, who sat in the dirt, arms behind him, wrapped around the trunk of a tree and bound at the wrists by wire-probably from the helicopter. Blood trickled from his mouth, welling at his collar.
“Who hired you?” Drummond asked. His eyes were still sleepy, and he spoke clumsily, hunting for words as if English were foreign to him.
“It’s need to know and a day player like me doesn’t need to,” Cadaret said. He was oddly chipper.
Drummond took a running step and kicked him in the jaw. The killer’s head snapped back. His mouth went slack and reddish vomit spilled out.
“Again, who hired you?” Drummond said.
“How about I tell you what I do know?” Cadaret said, his congeniality intact.
Either he’d learned to disregard pain, Charlie thought, or he liked it.
“Fine, fine,” said Drummond.
“They call my office voice mail. The caller poses as a buddy wondering what I’m up to over the weekend. If he mentions the Jersey Shore, I check my Hotmail for instructions-the details of the op will be imbedded in a piece of spam hawking diet pills. If he says Hamptons, I service a dead drop.”
“And?”
“And I do the job, my bank balance goes up, I fly down to my vacation house on St. Bart’s, and spend all my time hunting for carpenters and roofers and painters to undo whatever the hell the latest hurricane’s done.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all I know.”
“That’s nothing.” Drummond toed the dirt, preparing for another field goal attempt with Cadaret’s head.
Cadaret appeared no more alarmed than if Drummond were preparing dessert. Probably he would act the same way before a firing squad, Charlie thought. But whether or not another blow to the head bothered him, it could leave him unconscious. Or worse.
“Dad, don’t!” Charlie called out. He tried to stand. Pain grabbed every part of him that flexed. The ground seesawed.
Keeping the gun fixed on Cadaret, Drummond stomped over. His look of annoyance was that of someone interrupted during study. He declared, “This is war, and only one thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war can understand the profitable way of carrying it on.”
Charlie recognized this as a ragged version of the wisdom of Sun Tzu, the centuries-dead general whose wisdom Drummond used to recite impeccably, apropos of everything from current events to why a boy needed to make his bed every morning.
“I’m not thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war,” Charlie allowed, “but he’s useful only if he can speak, so how profitable can it be to knock him senseless?”
“Good point,” Drummond said. “Thank you.”
He trotted back to Cadaret with a benevolent air. Then swung the gun by the barrel. The heavy grip cracked the bridge of Cadaret’s nose, creating a spring of scarlet and leaving his head bobbing.
“Great,” Charlie said, putting it at fifty to one that Cadaret clung to consciousness.
But there he was, sitting upright and vigorous as ever. Wipe the blood and the pine sap off, comb his hair, tighten his tie, and he could be delivering a sales presentation.
Drummond pointed the gun’s muzzle at the inside of Cadaret’s knee. “Who hired you?” he asked again.
There was every reason to believe that Drummond would pull the trigger. Still, no trace of panic in Cadaret. Maybe he thought of losing the kneecap as a cost of doing business; he could get a replacement, maybe a bonus along with it. He said, “Sir, basic as that information is, I do not have it, the reason probably being that I might fall into a situation exactly like this one.”
Drummond nodded. “Fine, fine. Who hired you?” He seemed entirely unaware that he’d just posed the question.
Cadaret’s eyes widened with-of all things-trepidation.
Charlie followed Cadaret’s stare to Drummond’s trembling gun hand. Drummond added his left hand to steady the gun. He could have used another hand still. No wonder Cadaret was afraid: Normally Drummond could shoot the head off a pin at this distance. Now, it was three to one that he would miss the kneecap and hit something irreparable. And even money that he would create a wound that didn’t conform to Spook Interrogation Standards-and one from which the flow of blood couldn’t be staunched in time to preserve Cadaret’s life.
“Dad, please, put the gun down, just for a second?”
“Why would I do that?”
“I think your subject just remembered some more.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Cadaret exclaimed.
Drummond lowered the gun.
Cadaret looked to Charlie with unmistakable gratitude. “I was in Atlantic City last night, I got a text message with an encrypted number, and I called it from a secure line,” he said. “A middle-aged woman with a Midwestern accent told me to fly immediately to the Red Hook Heliport in Brooklyn, where I’d be met by a young guy called Mortimer. He would ask me if I was with Morgan Stanley and I was supposed to reply, ‘Regrettably, yes,’ and then we’d grumble about the stock market. So I flew, we met, we grumbled, then we headed for a precinct house near Prospect Park. On the way, we got word to intercept a Daily News truck. You know the rest.”
“Do you know who the woman with the Midwestern accent works for?” Charlie asked.
“Nope. Probably she doesn’t either; probably she’s just a cutout. But an educated guess would be a government-or someone able to buy into a government. Pitman and Dewart-the kids who tried to take you out on your block-used Echelon to track you here.” Cadaret stressed “Echelon” as if it proved his case.
“Does Echelon mean anything to you?” Charlie asked Drummond.
“Just tell me what I want to know,” Drummond told Cadaret, punctuating the demand with a wave of his gun.
“You got it, sir,” Cadaret said. “It’s a bunch of drab office complexes around the world that everyone takes for call centers or whatnot. Really it’s a network of listening posts code-named Project Echelon, sponsored by the United States and some allies.”
“Oh, that, right, right,” Drummond said, though clearly he had little idea, if any, what Cadaret was talking about.
Charlie gestured for Cadaret to continue.
“It records billions of domestic and international phone calls from homes, offices, pay phones, cells, sometimes even walkie-talkies,” Cadaret said. “Once sound is captured, a word like uranium or Osama raises a red flag. Voiceprints can raise flags too. Somehow Pitman got your voiceprints added to Echelon’s hit list early this morning. A few hours later, when you called Aqueduct Racetrack from a pay phone, he tapped into your conversation real-time, so of course he knew where you were. He texted Mortimer saying you were probably on your way to do some ‘hunting and fishing.’”
“And since the average joe can’t just surf on over to the Echelon Web site, you think these guys are government?” Charlie asked.
“Exactly.”
“Foreign?”
Cadaret spat a piece of hardened blood as if it were a sunflower seed. “Or American and, for the usual reasons, keeping it black.”
“Black for the usual reasons.” Charlie looked off, pretending to chew this over. He was reluctant to expose his ignorance. Fuck it, he thought, that toothpaste was out of the tube. “Let me just clarify two things: What are ‘the usual reasons,’ and what do you mean by ‘keeping it black’?”
“Whether you’re the Mafia or the CIA, killing people is illegal,” Cadaret said. “And if you’re the CIA, your problem is it’s easier than ever to get caught. So you go ‘black’-you leave nothing to link what’s being done to the organization doing it. And if Mr. Clark here’s outfit stands to get wind of it and take you to task, you go blacker still. You make it look like an accident, if you can.”
“His outfit?” Charlie said.
“The Cavalry,” said Drummond. Remembering, it seemed.
“Actually, I think they disbanded,” Charlie said.
“It’s just a nickname.”
“Okay?” Charlie waited for more.
“Clandestine operations…” Drummond couldn’t summon anything else.
“They’re a legendary special operations group,” Cadaret said. “Probably CIA, maybe SOCOM, but who knows? Whichever, you’d find them on the books, if you could find them on the books at all, as ‘Geological Analysis Subgroup Alpha’ or ‘Research and Development Project Twenty backslash Eighteen’ or something like that.”
“Isn’t CIA already secret enough?” Charlie asked.
“If only.” Cadaret laughed. “Bureaucracy and oversight have a way of effectively revealing the best-laid clandestine plans to their targets, let alone gumming up the works. At the end of the day, it’s best for everybody if the bureaucrats and overseers are lulled into complacency by an hour-long PowerPoint presentation on the subject of geography, allowing the spooks to get down to their real business.”
“So other than geographical analysis, what’s the Cavalry’s business?”
“It’s hard to say how much is apocryphal, but word is that they recruit the ballsiest of the best and the brightest, and they run covert ops that no one else can-or would dare. The one you hear the most is that, in the mid-nineties, they replaced the king of one of the less-stable Arab countries.”
“Replaced?”
“One day the king jumped off his yacht for a quick dip. When he climbed back aboard, he was literally a new man.”
Things were beginning to make sense to Charlie. Turning to Drummond, he asked, “So Clara Barton High graduation day, when you had that appliance expo in Tucson you couldn’t get out of, were you really in the Red Sea in a frogman suit?”
“What appliance expo in Tucson?” Drummond said.
“So how do we call out the Cavalry?” Charlie asked Cadaret.
“To me, the most astounding thing in all this is they haven’t tried to get hold of you.”
“We’ve been trying to be hard to get hold of lately,” Charlie said.
“We use the horses,” Drummond said.
“I think that’s the other cavalry,” Charlie said. A fraction of a second later, it dawned on him that he’d missed the patently obvious for years. Playing the horses was about a thrill, and thrills were practically anathema to Drummond-at least the Drummond he knew. Taking him aside, Charlie asked, “Or is that why you always bought the Racing Form?”
“Right, right, the Daily Racing Form. There was something in the ads.”
“That could be more than just an interesting piece of information, couldn’t it?”
Drummond brightened. “Do you have today’s Racing Form?”
“As my luck would have it, today is probably the first day in ten years I didn’t buy it. But if I had, what would I find in the ads?”
“A number for us to call maybe.”
“Placed by this Cavalry?”
“Possibly.”
It wasn’t a lot to go on. Still, at the end of the long, dark tunnel Charlie’s life had become, a bulb flickered on.
He looked around, trying to determine which way east was. The general store was to the east-after all the driving, he had no doubt about that. They might find the Daily Racing Form there-it was sold everywhere there were gamblers, which is to say it was sold everywhere. Alternatively, they might access it online or find transportation to someplace else that sold it.
The trees partitioned the woods into narrow alleys, and those alleys formed a maze. Charlie had dreamed of camping and outdoor adventure as a boy. The closest he got was reading about it. He’d spent maybe eight weeks of his adult life outside urban environments, and most of that time was at racetracks. Still, he remembered that the sun travels west. He looked up. The treetops obscured the sun. But the shadows were shifting slightly, clockwise, enabling him to determine west.
“Dad, what do you say we take a walk?”
“Do us all a favor and let me go along with you,” Cadaret said.
“Your gang will be here soon,” Charlie said. “Probably too soon.”
“They’ll be looking for you. And they’ll find you. If I’m with you, I can vouch for the fact that you don’t know anything.”
“So? Didn’t they kill my friend for knowing only the address of the Monroeville club?”
“Ramirez?”
“Yeah.”
“That was just a math thing. He added up to better off not alive.”
Guilt and horror pummeled Charlie anew. He felt a hand on his shoulder and jumped. Drummond wanted a private word.
“Let’s not leave him like this,” Drummond whispered.
“You really think he can help us?”
“No.” Drummond retrained the gun on Cadaret.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Neutralizing him.”
“Neutralizing him? You and I would look like lasagnas now if it hadn’t been for him.”
“Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.”
“Listen, I don’t mean to diss the Big Book of Bloodshed, but what’s he going to do if he’s stuck here? I’ve got a twenty-dollar bill that says you know some good tying-guys-up knots.”
Drummond relented with a grunt.
With more wire from the helicopter, he bound Cadaret at the ankles, knees, and thighs; and in the time most people take to tie a pair of shoes, he near-mummified the assassin from waist to shoulders.
Standing by and watching, Charlie wondered why Cadaret had put forth such a specious argument on behalf of being freed. Did he really expect them to trust someone who murders people for a living?
His eyes fell to Cadaret’s five-buck wristwatch: not the sort of watch he would expect on someone who has a vacation house on St. Bart’s.