Last Man Standing (47 page)

“Hey, Web, we’re blood brothers in a way. Branded traitors for something we didn’t do, and some people just don’t want to
hear it.”

“Is that why you’re not coming in?”

“See, the bottom line is, I got taken, snookered, suckered, whatever you want to call it. I’m no traitor, but I messed up,
that’s almost as bad as jumping sides in my line of work.”

“We are blood brothers, then, because I did the same damn thing.”

“Well, maybe we’ll both be standing at the end of this dance, what do you say?”

“I say I’ll give it my best shot.”

“Keep your head down, London, these mothers shoot low.”

“Hey, Cove?”

“Yeah?”

“Apology accepted.”

W
eb drove to DuPont Circle. He grabbed a spare mag for his pistol from the trunk and put the gun Cove had given him in the
rear of his waistband and then took a cab to the WFO. Bates had long since gone home and Web decided he would wait until morning
to contact him. The guy could probably use a good night’s sleep and those tunnels weren’t going anywhere. Instead of checking
out another set of Bucar wheels, Web decided to do something really crazy. He was going to go get his very own car.

The press army wasn’t parked outside his house anymore, yet Web still did not take any chances. He entered the house from
the rear, slipped inside the Mach, opened the garage doors and eased the car out, its lights off. He waited until he was down
the street before he turned on the lights, then he stepped on the gas, all the while looking in his rearview mirror. Nothing.
He headed back to East Winds.

W
hen Web got back to the carriage house, Romano wasn’t there; Web even checked the antique cars downstairs in case his partner
had crawled into one to admire it and had fallen asleep. It was almost four o’clock in the morning and his partner was probably
prowling around outside. As a sniper, Romano had been restless with too much natural energy despite all their training to
take things slow and methodically unless drastic circumstances dictated otherwise. Yet when it was time for action, just about
everybody took a backseat to Paul Romano. Since Web’s cell phone was out of operation, he used the phone in the house to call
Romano and breathed a sigh of relief when the man answered.

“So how’d your appointment go?” asked Romano.

“Boring. I’ll fill you in later. Where are you?”

“Everything was secure, so I’ve been poking around the place. There’s an old watchtower on the west side. See for miles in
every direction.”

“I know; I’ve been there.”

“Well, I’m there right now. Felt like a little jog.”

“That’s a bit of a hike, Paulie.”

“Walk in the park. You might want to come out here and bring out a pair of NVs.”

“What are you spying on?”

“You’ll see.”

Web left the carriage house from the rear, slipped on his headgear, attached his ambient light source night-vision binoculars
to it, powered up and fixed the relief to his eyes. The world instantly became an ethereal, fluid green. You couldn’t use
the contraption for very long because the goggles were heavy enough that you would get a piercing pain in your neck, followed
by a headache that would make you forget the neck ache. Web always kept one eye closed when scanning through the goggles even
though this distorted your depth perception even more; if you didn’t keep one eye closed, when you stopped looking through
the goggles all you’d see would be a brilliant orange ball in each eye. And at that point a ninety-year-old in a wheelchair
could get the drop on you.

As a sniper, one had to use various pieces of equipment to get the job done, from high-tech to the lowest tech of all: camouflage.
Web coveted his Ghillie suit, a concoction of burlap and cordura material that he had patiently covered with animal excrement
and other foul substances to allow it to blend into a rugged forest or jungle environment. Each HRT sniper gave his Ghillie
his own personal stamp and Web had spent years improving on his by defiling it even more. The Ghillie had been originally
designed by the Scots over four hundred years ago in the course of waging countless guerrilla wars against those seeking to
conquer them. It worked just as well now as it had then. Web had lain under his Ghillie in the middle of a jungle in Central
America with dope dealers toting submachine guns walking all around him, and they never knew Web was there until he stuck
his gun in their backs and read them their rights.

He moved forward again and pushed and then clicked the NV to IR status, which caused an internal light source to come on and
vastly intensified the field of vision. Web wanted to make sure the equipment worked, for NV goggles batteries were notorious
for failing right when you needed them to work. He didn’t like to use the IR for very long, because it had one major drawback.
For anyone watching
him
with night-vision goggles, the IR magnifier gave off a light beacon, like a large flashlight in one’s face. Web would be
a sitting duck. He clicked off the IR and put the headgear away in his backpack. He would rely on merely his eyes from now
on, something he had done with every shot he had ever taken. Sometimes you couldn’t improve on nature.

The air was crisp and the sounds of the farm and surrounding woods many and varied. Web set a good pace and he covered the
ground to the watchtower in enviable time. It was good to know he was still in decent shape. After eight years of relentless
training you didn’t lose it all in a short period of time, he reasoned. He liked the forest in the darkness; it felt as comfortable
to him as a La-ZBoy and a big-screen TV would to the average American male.

He sighted the watchtower and stopped. Since he didn’t have a cell phone, Web put his hands up to his face, formed a rude
bugle of sorts and let out a call, the same signal he and Romano had used when they were sniping. It could either be a gust
of wind or a bird commonly found just about anywhere. Web was sure Romano would remember, and a few seconds later he heard
the answering message. All clear.

Web broke from the tree line and hustled to the watchtower, gripped the wooden rungs and climbed silently up. Romano greeted
him at the little hinged door in the floor of the observation space. Web knew Romano couldn’t see Web’s fresh injuries courtesy
of Toona and Big F, and that was just as well, because he didn’t want to waste breath right now explaining them. And of course
Romano would give him a hard time about it. He could just hear the words
Shit, you let them do that to you?
passing through the man’s lips.

Web looked at Romano as he pulled out a ten-power Litton scope that was normally attached to a .308 sniper rifle.

“Anything good on?” asked Web.

“Check this out, right through that break in the trees to the northwest.”

Web looked through the scope. “I take it I’m looking at the Southern Belle.”

“Interesting stuff going on, for a horse farm.”

Web adjusted the scope to his eye and sighted through it. There was indeed a nice break in the trees, which revealed a fine
view of the neighboring spread.

There were two sizable buildings that looked relatively new. Large trucks were parked next to them and Web watched as men
with walkie-talkies raced in different directions. A door opened on the side of one of the buildings and Web saw that whatever
was going on inside required a lot of light. A tractor-trailer was backed up to a warehouse-type roll-up door and men were
bringing large boxes out on hand trucks and rolling them up inside the truck’s trailer.

“Something big is going on,” said Web. “Auto chop shop, drugs, stolen aviation parts, spies, technology pirates or lots of
other things. Damn.”

“Fascinating neighborhood. And here I was, thinking Virginia horse country was just a bunch of old duffers riding around drunk
chasing little foxes while the little women had tea in the afternoon. Boy, have I got a lot to learn.” He looked at Web. “So
what do you think?”

“I think with all we got going on, the Southern Belle will have to keep. But if something pops at least we’ll be right here
to do something about it.”

Romano grinned, obviously happy with the thought of coming action and possible mayhem. “Now you’re talking my language.”

K
evin Westbrook had filled up all his sketchbooks and was now sitting and staring at the walls. He wondered if he would ever
stand under sunlight again. He had grown used to the sounds of the machinery and the water running. It no longer affected
his sleep, though he regretted growing used to this condition of his imprisonment, as though it were an omen that those conditions
would become permanent.

The footsteps reached his ears over the other sounds and he retreated to his bed like an animal in a zoo cage as visitors
approached.

The door opened and the same man who’d visited him earlier came in. Kevin didn’t know who he was and the man had never bothered
to tell Kevin his name.

“How you doing, Kevin?”

“Got a headache.”

The man reached in his pocket and pulled out a bottle of Tylenol. “In my line of work, I always got some of this handy.” He
gave two pills to the boy and poured him out a glass of water from the bottle on the table.

“Probably lack of sunlight,” added Kevin.

The man smiled at this. “Well, we’ll see if we can do something about that soon.”

“That mean I be getting out of here soon?”

“It might mean just that. Things are rolling along.”

“So you won’t be needing me no more.” As soon as Kevin said this he regretted it. That statement could certainly cut both
ways.

The man stared at him. “You did a pretty good job, Kev. Real good, considering you’re just a kid. We’ll remember that.”

“Can I go home soon?”

“Not up to me, actually.”

“I ain’t say nothing to nobody.”

“Nobody like Francis?”

“Nobody means nobody.”

“Well, it won’t matter, really.”

Kevin instantly looked suspicious. “You ain’t hurting my brother.”

The man held up his hands in mock surrender. “I didn’t say we were. In fact, if things go okay, only people who need to get
hurt are going to get hurt, okay?”

“You hurt all them men in that courtyard. You hurt them dead.”

The fellow perched on the table and crossed his arms over his chest. Though the man’s movements weren’t threatening, Kevin
drew back a bit.

“Like I said, the people who deserve to be hurt are the ones who get hurt. It’s not always that way, you know that, lots of
innocent people get hurt all the time. I had me enough lessons on that, and looks like you have too.” He eyed the wounds on
the boy’s face.

Kevin had nothing to say to this. The man opened one of the sketchbooks and looked at some of the drawings.

“This the Last Supper?” he asked.

“Yep. Jesus. Before they crucified him. He’s the one in the middle,” said Kevin.

“I went to Sunday school,” the man said with another big smile. “I know all about Jesus, son.”

Kevin had drawn the painting from memory. He had done it for two reasons: to pass the time and for the sheer comfort of having
the Son of God close right now. Maybe the Lord would get the message and send some guardian angels down to help one Kevin
Westbrook, who desperately needed some type of intervention, divine or otherwise.

“This is good stuff, Kevin. You’re real talented.”

He looked at another picture and held it up. “What’s this of?”

“My brother reading to me.”

His pistol on the nightstand, his men outside the room with their own guns, his brother Francis would put a big arm around
Kevin and draw him close to his massive chest and they would sit and read far into the night, until Kevin would fall asleep.
He would awake in the morning and all the men would be gone and so would his brother. But the place they had stopped in the
book would be marked; it was a sure sign that his brother intended to come back and finish reading it to him.

The man looked surprised. “He’d read to you?”

Kevin nodded. “Yeah, why not? Ain’t nobody ever read to you when you was little?”

“No,” he replied. He put the sketchbook back on the table. “How old are you, Kevin?”

“Ten.”

“That’s a good age, your whole life ahead of you. Wish I had me that.”

“You ever gonna let me go?” asked Kevin.

The man’s look managed to cut Kevin’s hopes right to nothing. “I like you, Kevin. You kind of remind me of me when I was little.
I didn’t really have any family to speak of neither.”

“I got my brother!”

“I know you do. But I’m talking about a normal life, you know, Mommy and Daddy and sisters and brothers living in the same
place.”

“What’s normal for some folks ain’t normal for everybody.”

The man grinned and shook his head. “You got a lot of wisdom in that little head. I guess nothing about life is normal when
you get down to it.”

“You know my brother. He ain’t somebody you fool around with.”