Mad Dogs (34 page)

“Fuck!” whispered Cari as we drew closer to that building. I held her warmth close, her lilac shampoo perfuming my every inhale. “Fuck, fuck,
fuck
!

“Cross the street.” Cari led us to the side street running past the target building, to the sidewalk opposite those doors.

“Fuck me,” she whispered as we walked up the side street.

I refused to think about that. Kept my eyes on the target building as we walked past it, past its this-side entrance, past a chain link/locked gate parking lot where four cars and two unmarked vans waited. Past the next building, a squat three story yellow brick affair with a sign for a law firm and a medical insurance company, past the last store on that side street, a huge retail outlet called AWAKE where long faced teak statues from Tahiti shared window space with stone Buddhas and two kimonos.

“We are so fucked.” She led us back to the white Caddy. “Get us out of here.”

Russell drove, Hailey and Eric rode up front.

“That's one of our places,” said Cari from the back seat between Zane and me. “An accommodation address, an off-the-books set of offices.”

“Who's ‘
our'
?” said Zane, though we all knew the heart of the answer.

“I'm not Office of Security, or even Operations. I'm in a street crew, part of the Special Activities Division, the Agency's paramilitary guys who—”

“Aren't they using Special Forces anymore?” asked Zane, who'd been one.

“Sure, but now the Agency has its own military capabilities. Me, a few other women, never get dropped into Afghanistan ahead of the Black Ops military units, but in a western city, we rock. We work with the Army's Deltas. We're the modern Hotshots. Three person hawk teams, cyber war units, chem-bio gunners, solos—”

“Wait a minute,” said Russell. “The acronym is SAD? You're a ‘SAD' chick?”

“I'm a Hotshot,” she said. “Doesn't matter what bureaucratic label I've got. The organization chart is a blur since 9/11. With our overseas wars, peacekeeping operations, anti-terrorism Red Light crashes, U.N. blue helmet details, joint Black Ops with allies, budget battles and turf wars over the new Homeland Security Department, every federal shop scrambling to get its own counter-terrorism unit so they can still be a player… It's all so fluid and multi-level classified, I doubt anybody knows who everybody is or what they're doing.”

Zane said: “But you know that building back there.”

“It's ours,” she said. “SAD. We rent a few offices on the fifth floor. A field base where we can run an Op away from prying eyes but not far from CIA headquarters. Do our bureaucratic stuff without showing up on any office site listings. I've only been in it once. There are different covers: a therapist office and a ‘consultant' suite to account for foot traffic if any civilian asks questions, but nobody out here does. They live in their own world, think Washington never crosses the border.

“So this means,” she said, “your Nurse Death…
Cross-cover
. I should have realized when you showed me the address, but…

“Her corporate shell's verifiable land address is on the Eastern Avenue—D.C. side of the building. The
cross-cover
is that the SAD site uses the Adele Avenue—Maryland address on the same building's side street entrance. It would be a huge coincidence for them to both be there and not be connected.”

“
Cross-cover
is one of the mistakes they teach you to avoid,” said Hailey.

“Then either somebody didn't pay attention in spy school,” said Russell, “or somebody didn't care.”

“Except,” Cari said, “that makes no sense. Say this whole mess is one of your
can-only-be-two
scenarios, some kind of… renegade Op, some spy group hiding in our group of spies. Why send Nurse Death to kill your shrink in Maine? This is Washington. You don't kill your problems, you promote them. Give them a high profile job that will drag them into failure. Zero their budget. Smear them in a scandal.

“OK, say you do whack somebody, say some creep from your team who's gone double but you can't legally prove it and can't double him back against the opposition. You sanction him where you're in full control. A federal garbage truck hits a car on the G.W. parkway. A mugging in the Post Office parking lot. A heart attack when nobody else is home. A suicide on your guy's sailboat in Chesapeake Bay and you cremate the body before the locals do an autopsy.”

“Maybe hitting a target inside a secret Nowhere, Maine mental hospital was somebody's idea of control,” I said. “And now we're definitely not talking some bad boy group like al Qaeda or the cartels or North Korea or Cuba or anybody but us.”

“But who us?” Cari shook her head as we drove through the deserted D.C. streets. “Your Dr. Friedman was on his way from superstar to big shot. Even if the Agency went in for an illegal stateside wet job—which they don't, that's too… politically naïve and dangerous. The guys who run our government aren't stupid.”

“That's a relief!” said Russell.

“Even if this was a way-off-the-shelf Op like Iran-Contra,” said Cari, “you couldn't get enough bureaucrats to sanction a hit on someone like Dr. Friedman because you couldn't convince them that their asses would be covered. And there's no reason to kill a super-star like him.”

“That we know of,” said Hailey.

“He's a shrink, for God's sake,” said Cari. “The only people he'd worry are…”

“Crazies like us,” I said. “So we keep looking guiltier.”

Eric said: “What difference does that make now?”

“He's right,” said Zane as we drove down 16
th
Street, aimlessly headed straight towards the three-miles-away White House where none of us had ever been, where Dr. F would now never shine. “Doesn't matter. We are where we are, and that keeps looking more and more like we got wrapped up in a sanctioned Op.”

“Sanctioned by who?” argued Cari.

“If 9/11 has proven anything,” I said, “it's that the left hand of our secret warriors doesn't always know what the right hand is doing. And sometimes they fight.”

“I still can't buy your renegade Op crap,” said Cari. “Doesn't happen.”

“Has,” I said.

“Times are different now,” she said.

“Oh.”

We topped a rise and the lights of downtown D.C. twinkled in our windshield. Twenty blocks away glowed the white marble institution where the President slept.

“Nothing's changed,” I said. “We can't run forever and we can't go in—we're whacko escapees wanted for murder of our shrink, plus now kidnapping and assault.”

“Burglary,” said Russell, “with trashing.”

“No fingerprints,” said Eric. “Wore gloves.”

“We need more intell to sell our story to somebody who'll care,” I said.

Cari said: “What are you talking about?”

51

The next day. Tuesday. Day Eight of our renegade Op. High noon.

Russell's black trenchcoat flapped as he walked three paces behind me on the sidewalk of the main road past the SAD gray blockhouse. When he'd Reconned that mostly innocent building at 9:15 a.m, he carried a mailing tube, wore his deliveryman uniform. But he changed clothes for our noon hit.

Said: “I am not dying in brown.”

We marched toward the front door.

On the far side of the building, Eric paced towards the side door. His glasses and pudgy shuffle pegged him as a nerd. The gizmo he made from a battery-powered jigsaw hung strapped under his nerd jacket that also held Nurse Death's Walther PPK. Loaded.

Ten feet behind Eric strolled what looked like a father and daughter. The daughter had just-dyed brown hair. The eagle-like father wore a black knit cap.

Eric and I were Clockers, our watches synchronizing our pace and thus the pace of those behind us walking Drag, their eyes covering our backs and scanning the street.

My hand pulled open the front door to let the trenchcoated man behind me swing inside the building with
hands empty
as at that exact same
tick
, a nerd opened the side door for a father and daughter to swoop inside,
‘Dad'
sweeping the entryway corridors with his gaze, ‘
Daughter'
zeroing the stairwell.

Inside
looked like Russell's Recon photos developed at the one-hour.

Russell and I entered our stairwell, slowly climbed.
Don't arrive out of breath.
Smelled like concrete cinder blocks and carpet cleaner, ghosts of sneaked cigarettes.

Fourth floor. I swung open the stairwell exit: Office corridors…
clear
.

Eric's team surfed around the corner on radio waves from an easy music station torturing unseen officer workers. Somewhere a phone rang. Stopped.

Our teams met at a solid brown office door on a sunlit corridor of office doors.

But this door bore the number 402 and the corridor's only government-issue lock.

A Campbell 21/25 high security lock, Eric's guess confirmed by Recon pictures. Doors on offices one flight up held identical locks. The Campbell 21/25 is one grade down in quality from the Q Clearance locks on Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Dyed-brown haired Cari slid a hardware store plexiglass shimmy out of her left sleeve. A loaded Glock from her old crew rode her right hip.

Eric swung his motel room engineered gizmo out from his jacket.

Zane held his pistol pointed at-the-ready toward the white ceiling.

I drew the tranquilizer dart gun from the weapons vest. Whispered into the cell phone: “Set!” to Hailey who grudgingly agreed to function as Double-E (Evac/Evade) because Cari had to be on the hit: “
What good is your witness, your spy, if she can't see?”
From the white Caddy idling beside a nearby church, Hailey transmitted: “Clear.”

Life can come down to one door. A brown slab to
no going back
.

This brown slab. This door. With its lock that said were up against our stronger selves, the sentinels in the shadows who'd created us. We were up against Uncle Sam.

And he had it all. Night vision goggles. Satellites streaming video surveillance from outer space. Infra-red scanners to ‘see' through walls. Caves of computers calculating faster than a speeding bullet. Stealth warplanes with smart bombs for surgical air strikes. Body armor and flamethrowers. A billion dollars in secret bank accounts. SAD shadow warriors and Trouble Boys & Hotshots carrying silenced machineguns. Black helicopters. The atomic fucking bomb.

All on the other side of that door.

We had a few stolen weapons, a dead man's white Caddy, a lot of crazy.

My left hand circled the safety spring handle on one of the vest's flash/bang grenades. Eric pulled the pin so I wouldn't need to put down the tranquilizer gun. He optimistically tucked the pin in my shirt pocket so we could disarm the grenade
when
.

We all looked at Russell.

Standing tall. Sunglasses on. Black leather trenchcoat belted shut. Arms stretched down along his sides. His right hand held Cari's pistol fitted with its silencer: that weapon looked like an ebony samurai sword.

Pride flashed in me was that this was a good day to not commit suicide.

Snick
went the cocking hammer on Russell's gun.

Eric penetrated the lock hole with the gizmo's re-smithed hacksaw blade.

Cari slid the shimmy into the door crack, wiggled the dead bolt.

Eric's saw vibrated the lock. Her shimmy tricked the steel dead bolt into the void he made of the tumblers. Eric pulled out his gizmo—turned the doorknob. Pushed.

Cari spun away from the door, drawing her gun to face one hallway corner.

The door swung inward as Eric zeroed the other hallway corner with his Walther.

Russell leapt into the office, his silenced gun scanning like the ultimate third eye.

Zane, in behind Russell on the right, pistol swinging to cover that flank.

Me, on Penetrater Russell's left with my tranquilizer gun as Preferred Shooter.

Ticks froze.

Until Russell whispered: “Oh, fuck.”

“What?” hissed Cari from the hall.

“All in!” I whispered.

Eric stumbled against a door jam, but made it in ahead of Cari, her gun swinging a safe arc to not put any of us in her line of fire as her eyes widened with what she saw.

What we all saw.

An empty office. Bare white walls. Bare ivory tile floor. Bare ceiling except for standard fluorescent light fixtures. A storage closet standing open and empty.

“Close the door,” I said.

Zane did and its latch click echoed through this bare room.

No prisoners. No interrogations. No evidence. No tracks.

“Gotta be the right place!” Russell's pistol sought a reality beyond what he saw.

“'Xactly.”

Ever cautious, Eric replaced the pin in my flash/bang grenade.

The telephone filled my left hand. “Stand by.”

Hailey transmitted the OK that let us know she was still out there, still safe.

Zane shone a flashlight over the empty closet walls. Jerked open the only other door and flinched from the blinding white glare of sparkling toilet fixtures.

Cari ran her finger over the windowsill. “No dust.”

“Smell that?” I said and everyone sniffed. “Pine ammonia. Look at the walls: absolutely clean white. I bet there isn't a fingerprint or DNA drop in this place.”

“Give me somebody to shoot!” Russell whirled from blank wall to blank wall.

“Can't,” I said. “
Here
isn't
there
anymore.”

“
Um
,” said Zane as the sunshine streamed in to us through the landlord's blinds over the windows: “Does it occur to anybody else that the only thing in here now is us?”

“Fuck!” Russell zeroed his pistol at the shut exit door.

“Shhh,” I said. “Shhh.”

Closed my eyes. Heard the rushing void of this empty room. Heard no radio through the thick door. No clatter of a city street beyond these bare walls. No ring of bells from the nearby schoolyard. No laughter of children as they dashed back to class. No whirl of dust particles dancing in golden shafts of sunlight breaking through the windows and sliding past the blinds.

My eyes opened.

Spotted magic marker red letters on the ivory tile floor.

Three letters. One word.

run