America Rising (31 page)

He drained his coffee and set the mug down on the table. “Sorry to be so long-winded, but that is the basis of my hunch. As soon as that video went viral, it was obvious that between Bernabe, the feds, CIA and other acronyms, someone would send a team after him. I thought it would begin with Bernabe. Bernabe usually uses Leland Elliott—he ran the old Tutis—for this kind of op. So I put the man I knew Elliott would go to first under surveillance. We’d gone dark anyway, and it seemed like the smart thing to do.

“I followed him to a meet another shooter, figured they’d head for New Orleans to begin tracking Doe. That’s when I was going to call you in. But I was wrong. Three nights ago I watched them pack their gear and get on 95. But instead heading for the airport they went to the Keys. I tailed them to the reporter’s house. They wanted to know about the Tutis package; they were about to chop off his finger. And they wouldn’t have stopped there.”

He shrugged and scanned their faces. “I did what I had to. After all, it’s basically our fault; we sent him the package. The story he wrote took a big bite out of Elliott’s operation. We had a responsibility.”

No one disagreed.

“What about the bodies?” Tactics asked with clinical dispassion.

“Bagged ‘em, put ‘em in their SUV, dumped ‘em in the Everglades. Alligators must have thought it was an all-you-can-eat buffet. Then I hiked out and called all of you.”

“What about the reporter?”

“He doesn’t know anything. He’s a smart guy, though. He’ll think this through and see there’s nothing to gain by talking to the cops. And he may be useful later.”

“What about Elliott?”

The man’s thin smile was one even those in the room didn’t want to see. “I’ve sent a message to Mr. Elliott.”

Even though it was late May it was still cold in Montana. Patches of frost hugged the ground, the wind gusted through the limbs of towering pines and firs. Leader pushed back his chair and made another pot of coffee. The others watched him without speaking. When the coffee was done he brought it to the table and filled six mugs.

“Now, the reason I called this meeting,” he said. “John Doe.”

He looked at each of his colleagues in turn and continued. “Our first mission is over, at least for now. But I believe we have a second mission, as important as the first. Maybe more. That is to keep John Doe alive. There is no way to pry the country out of the hands of scum like Frank Bernabe without a rising of the American people. And they need a leader, at the very least, a symbol. I can’t swear to you that John Doe is that leader, but my intuition tells me he is.

“So what I am proposing—with your approval, of course—is that we become John Doe’s own private Secret Service. I don’t know for how long or at what cost. Until the job is done. If any of you don’t wish to participate, I understand completely. You have made enormous sacrifices, sacrifices no one will ever know. Your country owes you a debt that will never be fully paid, and it is my greatest honor to know you as my colleagues and my friends. But I will undertake this mission alone if I have to.”

Weapons spoke up immediately, the affection in her eyes belying the harshness of her words. “Don’t be stupid.”

The others nodded in agreement.

“Of course we’re in,” Tactics said. “What next?”

The man bowed his head. “You honor me again.” Then, “Go back to your people, see how many will join us and give me a count. It will be all of them, I’m sure.” He turned to Intelligence. “For the duration of this mission, intel is our number one priority. If we can see the threats coming we can neutralize them before they get too close.”

Back to the group again. “I want all of you to task as many people as you can spare to intel. They’ll need all the help they can get. The rest of you: I want eight of your best people, two from each. There’ll be two teams of four. I’ll lead Blue team, Weapons will lead Red. We’ll rotate out at two-week intervals. This is going to be 24/7 protection so we need to stay sharp.

“And one more thing. Doe is not going to want us there, so we have to be invisible. If we’re invisible to him, we’ll likely be invisible to anyone coming after him.” Once more, he fixed his gaze on Intelligence. “Find out where Doe is. We’ll move as soon as you do. That is all.”

They stood up and filed out of the room as the embers crackled and glowed like little orange suns in the fireplace.

L
eland Elliott screamed. It was a soundless scream, as if the horror just visited upon him had robbed him of his ability to vocalize it. But it was a scream nonetheless.

He sat at his desk in his modest Kendall office and averted his eyes from the package he’d flung away across the room like a hot coal tossed flaming in his lap. There was no way he should have even received the small cardboard box addressed to him in his own name. No one beyond the few clients who’d stuck with him after he’d had to fold Tutis International and flee to this sprawling Miami suburb knew his real name or his new address. No one beyond the man he’d spoken to knew about the team sent to the Keys. But that
these people
knew—and had sent him this. . . He began to tremble as the implications unfolded before him. Barring divine intervention or some most unlikely quirk of fate, Leland Elliott knew his lifespan could now be measured in days, maybe hours.

He also knew he should do something—empty out his bank accounts and run, call “Mr. Flowers” and beg, pull the chromed Colt Combat .45 from his desk drawer and eat the barrel. But he was paralyzed with fear. He couldn’t be in the same room with that package either. At length revulsion won out. He punched his intercom and croaked to his assistant-slash-secretary, “In here. I need you.”

A minute later, the young man entered. He was ex-Marine, two tours in Iraq, dishonorably discharged for torturing Iraqi civilians—hushed up to save the government the embarrassment of a trial. His temper had washed him out of Miami Police Academy. Leland Elliott was the best he was going to get. He stopped when he saw his boss’s deathly pallor, the box on the floor. It was the same box he’d delivered just a few minutes earlier. He wondered what it could have contained to cause that kind of reaction.

Leland Elliott waved his hand in the box’s direction. He couldn’t look at it. “Take it away,” he said feebly. “Take it away.”

“Yes, sir,” the young man smirked, not bothering to hide his contempt for such a shameful display of weakness. He carried the box out of the office and set it on his desk, silently amused at the softness of the great Leland Elliott. He had to see what was inside, what had turned his boss into a mass of quivering goo. He opened the box. Blinked. Then clenched his teeth to keep from vomiting all over himself. On a bed of brightly colored straw like that in a child’s Easter basket were a pair of tinsnips and two severed fingers. The digits had been sliced off cleanly. The snips were crusted with dried blood. Next to them was a plain white business card, blank side up.

The young man clenched his teeth harder as he picked it up . He turned it over and read the single word printed in big black letters. His hand started to shake. Before the card fluttered to the floor he was out of the office and racing for his car. He didn’t stop driving until he reached the Florida state line.

* * *

Frank Bernabe sat contemplating the package his secretary had just set down on his desk. It was a small cardboard box, about six inches square, delivered by private courier.

There was something about it that was very disconcerting. Alarming, even. Not that it might contain a bomb or anthrax or whatever. Every item that came near Frank Bernabe was screened for such items. No, what made his danger antenna quiver was the address label.

PERSONAL

To: Mr. Flowers

From: Mr. Thorn

This wasn’t just a package, it was a message. A mocking message, at that. “Flowers” was the name he used only with Leland Elliott and a handful of other operatives. How could this arrogant “Mr. Thorn”—whoever he was—possibly know that? And what other insolent message might be lurking inside? Frank Bernabe’s temper ignited. He was not the object of intimidation, he was its instigator.

Angry now, he ripped the box open. Frank Bernabe was a much older and harder man than Leland Elliott and the young ex-Marine, but what he saw there still made him suck in his breath and yank away his hand as if the cardboard had suddenly glowed radioactive.

On a bed of brightly colored straw were two severed fingers and a pair of business cards. For several minutes he contemplated the bloody digits, wondering who they might have belonged to, the purpose of their being sent, the nature and intent of Mr. Thorn’s game. Then he picked up the first business card and turned it over. It was one of Leland Elliott’s. It read “Tutis International.”

Anger boiled hotter in Frank Bernabe’s face. That goddam fool Elliott has fucked up again. He waiting until the heat diminished and his mind grew clear. Then a thin smile played on his lips. Perhaps this was a blessing, after all. Perhaps there was a way to kill two birds with one stone. Literally. Maybe even wing a third.

The thought of such a neat solution widened his smile, but he put away his satisfaction and turned over the second card. He was not surprised by its single-word inscription, nor was he intimidated. It was inevitable that the people who had targeted so many of those who moved, knowingly or unknowingly, at his direction would eventually target him. He had prepared for that possibility, and would crush this Mr. Thorn and his associates as he’d leveled every obstacle that dared place itself in his path.

Even so, somewhere in the very furthest recesses of his reptilian brain a tiny voice was speaking, trying to make itself heard. This isn’t like the others, the voice was saying. This one is different.

But Frank Bernabe was a much harder man than that. He ignored the tiny voice and allowed himself to savor the sweet taste of payback.

* * *

The call the doctor had been dreading came just after midnight, Pacific Daylight Time. Ray Carmody was on the other end.

The conversation was short and brutal. The doctor would do as he was told. Immediately. Then report back when it was done. He had a wife and twin daughters whom he must love very much. No further threat was necessary.

Joe Josephson’s room and the entire wing around it had already been vacated, so there was no one there to see the doctor fill a syringe with three milligrams of fentanyl and plunge it into the still-sedated vice president’s vein. Within seconds Joe Josephson’s pupils contracted, his skin grew cold and clammy, his pulse weakened, his breathing slowed. Then it stopped. The doctor waited a minute, pulled a sheet over the corpse and texted Ray Carmody: “TOD 12:32:47 pm.”

He threw the used syringe in the biowaste bin, went home and woke his wife. “You know that place in Guaymas you wanted to buy?” he said. “I think we should do it now.”

* * *

The text message on the man called Leader’s phone was a single word: “Memphis.” He relayed the message to his three Blue Team members and gave them six hours to meet him at the modest downtown hotel he’d chosen as their base. By early evening they would all have checked in under false names and would begin planning how to find one man whose entire life was an exercise in anonymity in a city of almost seven hundred thousand. If he was still even there.

That Intelligence had located John Doe while the FBI and other federal agencies were still chasing wisps was a blend of intuition, legwork and a fair dollop of luck. Given Doe’s predilection for inserting himself in crisis situations, Intelligence compiled a list of communities where public distress and protest might draw a man who saw responding to them as his life’s calling. It was a long list. One of those communities was Nashville.

Intelligence made two more assumptions. One, that his quarry would continue moving east. And, two, that he was smart enough to leave his ancient pickup truck behind and flee New Orleans by other means. For a man broke, in a hurry, seeking to avoid attention, that would be by bus. These assumptions were all not without risk, but he had to narrow the field somehow. He sent an operative to the New Orleans bus depot to see if any of the clerks had recognized a slight young white man with reddish hair and a diffident manner purchasing a ticket to one of thirteen eastern cities the day of the Rescue America Day rally.

That’s where luck came in. One of the clerks who had been working a ticket window that afternoon lived in the same Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood where John Doe had landed. When she greeted him at the ticket window he pretended not to know her, said he’d only been in town for a couple of days, looking for work. Said he hadn’t found any and was going back home. Hurt and a little offended, she sold him a ticket to Memphis, then took the next day off to stay with her sister whose husband had just up and gone. Bureau agents showed up at the clerk’s own house only to find her gone, and then she fell through the investigation’s cracks. No one bothered to follow up.

When she got back to work she was questioned by Intelligence’s operative, a middle-aged black woman with an empathetic manner and knack for eliciting information. She said she remembered John Doe from his work in the neighborhood, remembered their conversation at a neighborhood block party. Since she’d sold him the ticket she had seen the video and now understood the apparent snub, why he tried to conceal his appearance, why he was running. She was sympathetic and very sure of herself.