Clawback (17 page)

“I got a match.”

“A match?”

“Yeah. I’m the CSI
king,
motherfucker. Ralph Waldo
Emerson.
”

My ribcage hurt. My head hurt. I took the radio and dialed it down to inaudible. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing escapes the giant eyeball.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Fuck you. Want the name or not?”

“What name?”

“Your friend with the baton, and I don’t mean the fucking drum major, you know?”

“Baton—hey, that was fast.”

“No shit.” Goldfinger coughed. “Truth is, it wasn’t that hard. Clean print, and the guy was in the service, so his records are in good order. IAFIS kicked it out straightaway.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You picked a hardcase to fuck with, I’ll tell you that. His 201 was mostly redacted, and you know what that means—black fucking ops.”

“Name?”

“And he spent ten years in. Hey, what’s MOS stand for again?”

“Military Occupational Specialty. His job in the army. Come on, Gol—I mean, Ernie. Tell me what you know.”

“What’s an 18B?”

I paused. There are hundreds of MOS codes, but I happened to know that one: Special Forces Weapons Sergeant.

The guy who’s so good with every kind of firearm, he teaches and maintains them for his teammates.

“I’m dying here, Ernie. Give me the
name,
already.”

“Joe Saxon. Ring any bells?”

None, but I hadn’t recognized him in person, so no surprise.

“I’ll email you the sheets,” Ernie said. “No printer here. The last current address is Kentucky.”

“Is it an APO box?”

“Yeah, at Fort Campbell. Does that mean anything?”

“No, not much.” I gave him one of my disposable email addresses, and he sent it while I watched.

“Thanks, Ernie. That was nice work.”

“Give me a challenge next time.”

I didn’t hang around long. “I came over to get my car,” I said on the way out. “Anybody been by asking about it? Or me?”

“No.” He looked at me, sharp. “Why? Should I be expecting something?”

I didn’t figure the police to have backtracked me this far. My arrangement with Goldfinger was unofficial and cash-based. The car itself was registered to a corporation that had no existence outside a PO box in White Plains.

“If authority shows up,” I said, “you don’t have to cover for me. Tell them what they want to know.”

Which he’d do anyway, of course. Goldfinger was no dummy. But this way he’d feel better about it.

“What are you involved in?”

“Righting wrongs. Making the world a better place. What I’m always doing.”

He laughed with that deep rasp you get from a lifetime of abusing your metabolism. “You and me,” he said. “You and me both.”

I drove back downtown—it was downright pleasant on the avenues, light traffic, no delays. Too bad it can’t be Sunday morning all week. Even parking wasn’t too bad. It only took about five minutes to find an on-street spot a few blocks from the hotel, and I could leave it there until Wednesday, the next street-cleaning day.

Back in the room with takeout coffee and muffins, I crawled back into bed, like a wounded animal going to ground. I really had taken a beating the day before, and time was the only cure. Staring at the wall, I thought about what Goldfinger had dug up.

Fort Campbell was, among other things, the headquarters for the 160th SOAR—the Night Stalkers. The Army’s special forces aviation unit.

No wonder Saxon could steal a helicopter like he was hot-wiring a Chevy.

Which suggested another point. If Saxon had a decade of SOF experience, he’d be drawing six figures easy on the private market. Even more if he was hiring out for gray-area assignments, like terrorizing young women bloggers.

I was starting to see big money in the mist. Johnny’s theory seemed to be gaining ground—anarchists and guerrilla-theater impresarios generally don’t have bankrolls like that. Ganderson’s nemesis might be just one more capitalist enterprise.

The room’s single window had only a torn shade, but the glass
was dirty enough to serve. The dim airshaft, eight stories deep, meant a permanent, murky twilight.

One of the phones I was carrying around had more than basic functionality—not quite a smartphone, but I could do basic web surfing. The proprietary browser was awful, and the rates extortionate, but that didn’t matter. I logged on and picked up Ernie’s email. It was buried amid twenty Viagra pitches. How do the spammers do that?—the address had been active for only a week, and I’d never used it for
anything.

Good thing building botnets pays more than, say, designing microprocessors, or those Russian hackers would eat America’s high-tech lunch.

Anyway, Ernie was right, Saxon’s 201 was as heavily redacted as every other Bush-era intelligence document. One solid block of black overprint. But the basics were there: dates of service, unit information for Saxon’s first few years and a discharge summary. It looked like a typical climb up the spec-ops ranks: infantryman, airborne certification, a tour with the Rangers, specialized aviation training—and then nothing. Blankness, all the way to the end, followed by the separation date and a list of badges and combat decorations.

Three separate Purple Hearts. Expert Marksmanship Badge, with six component bars. Two Silver Stars. Blah, blah.

And a Distinguished Service Cross.

The motherfucker was a
hero
.

I could have gone after him on the internet. As Clara proved by demolishing my own careful walls, it’s really hard not to scatter electronic bread crumbs—not if you live a halfway normal life. But
she was the researcher par excellence, not me. I didn’t have the patience for all that time online, especially on a three-inch screen

Instead, I started calling around.

Even though the SOF numbers have skyrocketed in the last decade—even Gates loved us—we’re still a small community. Especially the guys who’ve actually been outside the wire. Small-unit activity in hostile territory creates bonds stronger than anything on earth. We don’t exactly have conventions, but we keep up.

Among other reasons, you never know when you might need a favor.

“Joe Saxon? That prick? If you find him, first thing—before
anything
else—shoot his balls off.”

That was call number six, when I started to close in.

“Had a problem with the guy, did you?”

“Only when he breathed, moved or opened his mouth.” This was serious criticism, coming from a sergeant who’d spent months with Saxon in Afghanistan. “Political as all hell, and useless with the hajis. He’d have done ISAF twice as much good working directly for the Taliban.” The man paused. “Good shooter, though.”

“Sniper?”

“Some. He didn’t really have the patience for that. But in close-quarter combat…Saxon’s a total raving asshole, but there’s no one I’d rather go through a breached wall with.”

“Because he—”

“Completely cool under fire. In the worst firefights—you know, three-sixty incoming, nothing visible, just mud and rubble and your guys dying around you—Saxon never lost it. He’d just keep on doing his job, putting every round where it counted.”

“So why didn’t you love him?”

“He cheated, lied, stole, gobbled go pills, backstabbed us with headquarters and sucked the major’s dick.”

“Literally?”

The sergeant laughed. “All but that last one, and he might as well have. The major wrote him up for about fifteen citations.”

“I saw the medal count.”

“Yeah.” He hesitated. “I’ll say this, though—Saxon deserved at least half of them. Absolutely.”

More than one call went like that. Saxon seemed to have had a genius for alienating his comrades. Which bolstered his reputation for exceptional competence—you have to be twice as good to survive if even your
friends
hate you.

No one had kept up with Saxon after he left the service. Unsurprising, but not helpful to my search—until the very last call, going on evening, when I talked with a lifer who happened to have been injured, and on desk duty, the day Saxon filed his discharge papers.

“Yeah, I remember,” the man said. I’d reached him in Hawaii, at Fort Shafter, where it was still the middle of the day. “Saxon couldn’t wait to leave.”

“Where was he going?”

“Private security, of course. No one else would be crazy enough to hire him.”

“DynCorp, Blackwater, like that?”

“No. Stateside. Joe boasted how he was making a perfect soft landing—no more shooting it out with the hajis for him.”

“Kind of ironic, if that’s all he was good at.”

“You’re telling me. I was just glad he was gone.”

“So what was the company, do you remember?”

“Sure,” the man said. “A-Team Tactical Dynamics.”

I had to laugh. “They weren’t bidding for DOD contracts, were they?” Only civilians would take a name like that with a straight face.

“State Department, maybe.”

After I hung up, I checked online. A-Team’s website was defunct, but enough PR Wire puff clips, press releases and brief news stories in the trade press were out there to assemble a picture. A-Team had lasted five years, then faded away. Saxon’s name wasn’t mentioned anywhere, which wasn’t a surprise—he wouldn’t want the publicity, and A-Team would minimize the sort of information that could make things easier for the lawyers they’d inevitably attract.

Before I shut down, I remembered how easily Clara had found me. A quick search for “Joe Saxon” turned up ten thousand hits—the name was too generic.

But “Joe Saxon A-Team” immediately struck pay dirt: “…three years with A-Team Tactical Dynamics, where he specialized in executive protection and counterterrorist operational consulting. Joe Saxon served ten years in the U.S. Army Special Forces, earning commendations including a Distinguished Service Cross for actions in combat zones around the world. As Blacktail Capital’s new Director of Security, Saxon will be responsible…”

Aha.

And what was Blacktail Capital? Their website was pleasantly designed but minimal, the interesting content probably all behind
the client login. “We achieve consistently market-positive returns,” read the mission statement, “through advanced technological implementation of complex and proprietary mathematical structures.”

A hedge fund, that is, almost certainly focused on high-frequency, high-velocity trading—the kind where powerful computers, programmed by the best MIT and Stanford PhDs available, might buy and sell thousands of instruments every
second.
Sure, Blacktail and similar operations had almost crashed the market multiple times. “Complex mathematical structures” also meant uncontrolled volatility and liquidity flight beyond the capacity of human brains to comprehend, still less to keep up with. But so what? They practically minted money—for themselves.

A little odd that they’d hire someone like Saxon, perhaps. Blacktail was probably no more than a few dozen employees, and “security” at an organization like that usually meant IT—keeping competitors and viruses out of the computers. It’s not like they needed an armed perimeter and active-measure counterintelligence.

Unless they were dabbling in their own form of direct action, of course.

In which case it all made sense. Saxon’s personality would fit right in at a firm like Blacktail. The partners, raking in hundreds of millions for themselves every year, would have long ago left behind law, morality and the social compact generally. I should know, because men like that—always men, of course—were nine-tenths of my client base. It was no stretch at all to imagine them realizing how a few convenient deaths could ramp up returns even further. I wondered how cheaply Saxon’s overtime services had been bought—a percent or two of the net?

I erased, emptied, deleted and cleared the phone’s browser memory, then shut it down. No need for records—Saxon’s and Blacktail’s details were burned into my brain.

Maybe the vast wrecking of the entire world’s economy, by plutocrat financiers as venal and greedy as Blacktail’s, had finally caught up with me. Maybe it was the utterly amoral calculus of their strategy. Maybe it was the direct nature of the killings—for all the suffering they caused, bankers usually didn’t contract actual hits themselves. Or maybe the tattered shreds of my conscience had finally had enough. Whatever, I was surprised to find myself 
angry.
What Blacktail had done was evil, plain and simple.

And here I was—hired to make them stop. Again: I was getting
paid
to do the right thing.

The situation was so novel that I dozed off still grinning.

O
ne end of City Hall Park had been taken over by the farmers’ market, parallel rows of sawhorse tables under white tented awnings. At one-thirty, lunch-hour office workers still flocked around, picking over heaps of greens and fall raspberries and the season’s last corn. The bakery was busiest; a line stretched out past the Laotian co-op’s table with its bitter melon and tatsoi. Sunlight streamed through the trees, their leaves golden and red.

The location was Ganderson’s suggestion when I’d called him at dawn. I’ve yet to meet a hard-driving Wall Streeter who doesn’t boast of rising at five a.m. to run ten miles and catch up on the European markets, and lazy
Toda
y-show-watching slugabeds would never admit otherwise. Sure enough, Ganderson had rather groggily said he was “just getting out of the pool,” and suggested he might slot me in midday.

But I had to join him for an errand.

“He’s so damned picky,” Ganderson said now, at the stand of an upstate organic co-op. “Has to be exactly the right
kind
of burdock.”

“They all look the same to me.” Who’d
want
to distinguish one long, dirt-encrusted root from another—let alone eat them?

“I got the wrong eggplant once.” Ganderson shook his head.

“Why not just have your driver stop at Whole Foods on the way home?”

“Brandon would know. Somehow. Not worth chancing it.”

It was a side of Ganderson I hadn’t expected. The guy probably hadn’t been inside a grocery store for twenty years, but here he was, hands dirty, sorting through organic vegetables in wooden bins.