Patriot Acts (14 page)

“Having trouble recalling that name, actually.”

“So who are you working for?” I asked. “Who is it who’s pulling your strings, giving you your orders? Someone in the administration? Someone connected to it?”

He rocked back in his chair in mock surprise. “
You’ve
got questions?”

“Bushels of them. I want to know who, and I want to know where, and I might even go after the why, if I feel like it.”

“Why?”

“Cold Spring.” I looked past Bowles, to Sean, still seated on the couch. If he’d moved at all, I couldn’t tell. “Why this guy and his gun-buddies Grant and Mark tried to kill me. Why the second team went after the safe house. Questions like that. After the thing with Oxford, it was supposed to be finished, Matt. You’d pulled the plug. You said that was that.”

At the mention of the gunfight, Sean’s right hand moved slightly, started up towards his shoulder. He arrested it, dropped it back into his lap. The eyefuck that had been at an eleven stayed steady and straight, and it struck me that it was his act, his part in these proceedings. Whether or not he actually hated my guts for shooting him, I couldn’t tell, but I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did.

“Does it ache?” I asked him. “Because of the cold?”

“There was a lot of blood on the ground,” Sean remarked. “Some of it was yours.”

“Some of it was. But none of it was because of you.”

Bowles moved his right hand, waving it slightly back in Sean’s direction, keeping him from retorting. He needn’t have bothered. Sean didn’t seem at all inclined to take the bait.

“You’ve got so many questions,” Bowles told me. “I have only one: Where is she?”

I creased my brow. “Drama?”

“Yes. Where is she, Patriot?”

“Fuck if I know,” I said. “Haven’t seen her since that clusterfuck of yours three years ago.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Not really, no.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and it sounded honest because it was honest.

“We need to talk to her,” Bowles said. “You bring her in, we can do a deal for the two of you.”

“A deal?”

Bowles nodded.

“I’m trying to guess what that would be,” I said. “All I can come up with is two head shots for the price of one.”

“What happened in Cold Spring was a mistake. Let’s move past that. It was fallout from Oxford, that’s all it was. An overzealous mistake. Orders got confused, wires got crossed. It was a mistake.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “It was.”

He missed my meaning entirely, continuing. “We’re trying to correct that. We’ve been trying to correct that for the last few years, here. But you and Drama, the two of you up and vanished. How were we going to make it right when we couldn’t even find you guys to do it?”

“So you make it right by beating me, cuffing me, and then dragging me into the middle of the woods to ask some questions?”

“If I’d just come knocking on your door back in Whitefish all alone, you’d have been happy to talk? With you blaming me for what happened in Cold Spring, like you just said?”

“I put in the passport application for a reason.”

“You wanted us to find you, I get that. What you don’t seem to get is that you’re one of The Ten, Atticus. You’re one of the motherfucking
Ten,
you’re one of the most lethal, most dangerous, most skilled professional assassins working in the world today. You’re Oxford, Atticus. You’re Drama. You’ve become the person that—back when your head was on straight and you protected people for a living instead of whacking them—scared you so bad you would pee yourself.”

“Flatterer,” I said.

“So you can understand why I might be suspicious of your motives, how I might think going to meet you by myself would be a good way to end up quickly dead.”

“I put the application in for a reason,” I repeated.

“Because you have questions.”

I moved my cuffed hands up and touched my nose with an index finger.

“Back where we started,” Bowles said. “Where is Drama?”

“I told you, I don’t know. Who wants us dead? Who was it who put Sean here and his Soldier of Fortune buddies on us?”

Bowles shook his head, growing aggravated. “Not going to work like that.”

“If it’s someone in the current administration, it’s someone pretty high up but not high-profile. Someone with enough influence to shut down any media attention about what happened that morning in Cold Spring, at the least. How many dead? Two at the Citgo and another six or so at the safe house? That really should have made the news, don’t you think? Someone had to dance pretty damn quick to hush it all up.”

Bowles shook his head again. “Where is she, Atticus?”

“You want something for nothing,” I said. “You’ve got me cuffed and beaten here, you think I’m going to just give up the only bargaining chip I have?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think you will.”

Sean and his buddy on the couch got to their feet.

“You’re not going to beat it out of me,” I told Bowles.

“You are an arrogant son of a bitch,” he snapped, suddenly furious. “You’re standing on
nothing,
you realize that? You’re standing on fucking thin air, you’re the goddamn coyote in those cartoons the second before he realizes he’s off the cliff, you’re just too damn stupid or stubborn to realize that gravity’s got you by the balls. You cannot beat this thing, don’t you get it? You’re one of The Ten, now, you’ve got no friends, you’ve got nothing. I make one call, every cop in five hundred miles comes hunting for you. I make a second one, the FBI joins the chase.”

The one who wasn’t Sean moved to the hall, called out a “hey.” Almost instantly, the two he’d been speaking with when he went to fetch the water emerged from the kitchen. Like the others, they were Caucasians, mid-to-late thirties, wearing more denim and flannel. The one who wasn’t Sean motioned them to join us.

Bowles got out of his chair, closing the lid of his laptop. “You’re going to give her up. You can save yourself a lot of discomfort if you do it now.”

“Who gave the order?” I asked. “Who sent you here?”

“Take him outside,” Bowles told Sean.

“A name,” I told him. “Just give me the name, I’ll give you what you want.”

Bowles shot a glance at me, ripe with disgust.

“Even if I gave it to you, Atticus, you wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing with it,” Matthew Bowles said.

CHAPTER

THREE

When he said, “Take him outside,” what Bowles actually
meant was take him outside, strip him down, and then beat the living shit out of him, preferably by knocking him down in the snow over and over again. It meant don’t speak to him, and it meant don’t do anything that will keep him from talking when he eventually decides to, and it meant take your time, because the cold is frankly more effective than your feet or your fists will be, but all three in concert, that should do the trick quite nicely.

It meant that bringing a bucket of water from the bathroom and throwing it on him might also be a good idea, just to help things along.

When they moved to grab me, I went for Bowles’s laptop and broke the nose of the guy who’d brought me water with it. Then I tried to kill one of the others by ramming the corner of the computer into his trachea. He moved, and I missed, and hit him high on the sternum instead, and since I was having to deal with the three others at the same time, I don’t fault myself for failing. I got a kick into the side of someone’s knee, and had the gratification of hearing him cry out before Sean tackled me, and then I lost the laptop.

There followed a dog-pile, and it took all four of them to lift me up and get me out into the night and the cold and the snow, and they dropped me twice because, unlike back in Whitefish, I felt no need to be nice about it. I got a glimpse of thick trees and a clear, star-filled sky when they finally hauled me outside, and there wasn’t a hint of light pollution, and wherever we were, I knew I could make a lot of noise and no one who cared would hear it.

I hoped to God that Alena knew where I was, that she was out there, somewhere, armed and ready and waiting and with a plan that could pit her against seven and bring her out on top. It was the walking patrol she’d have to worry about first; once she targeted the house, she wouldn’t want anyone at her back.

Sean and the others pinned me in the snow, knees on my neck and back, forcing me facedown. The snow was deep, maybe three to four feet in places, and it stole the heat out of me immediately. One of the heavies had demonstrated the foresight to bring some clothing shears, and they used those to cut my shirt and pants off me. It was better than using a knife, at least, and they didn’t break any skin. They left me my underwear, that was all. Adrenaline and fear notwithstanding, I was shivering before they actually started in to work.

Then they used the bucket, and the bastards filled it with hot water before dumping it on me, which made the cold all the worse. The water in it probably hadn’t been that hot, but it didn’t need to be. It felt scalding all the same.

They worked me over one at a time. They stayed away from my face for the most part, not out of concern for my rakish good looks, but more out of desire to protect their hands, even though they all wore gloves. When I tried to stand they were quick to put me down again, on my back or my knees or my face. Mostly, they used their fists, though the one who wasn’t Sean threw a couple of kicks at the start, one of which caught me hard on the hip, almost exactly where I’d been shot. Remembered pain lanced my middle and down my legs, and the one who did it liked the reaction he got so much, he got ready to do it again, but Sean put a stop to that. I couldn’t tell if that was because Sean was playing the good cop in this routine, or because he was afraid a kick would do too much damage and might keep me from talking, or because he had less of a taste for the affair than the others.

Whatever the reason, it didn’t keep him from delivering a savage jab to my kidneys when his turn came.

What they did to me hurt.

It hurt a lot, and in many different ways.

It made me angry, and it humiliated me, and it was, of course, just plain old painful as hell.

None of that was the worst thing.

The worst thing was the doubt that began to creep in as the beating seemed to go on and on, as the time stretched and contracted all at once. As their gloved fists beat me again and again, as my skin, raw with cold, stung and split and broke.

She wasn’t coming.

Either she couldn’t or she wouldn’t, and it was the
wouldn’t
that had the hooks, that dug into my mind and my thoughts, tangling itself until I couldn’t silence it or ignore it. Nothing else had weight in its face, nothing else mattered; not everything we had between us, not all of the things we had shared and said. I was seeing the display on Bowles’s laptop, the file less than five months old, telling me all the things I’d been a fool to let myself forget.

She was a professional, she was one of The Ten, she was Drama, and couldn’t it have been an act all along? Why should she care about what happened to me? Why would she care about what had happened to a woman who was my friend, not hers?

Why would she risk her life and her liberty for these things?

She had warned me. She had tried to convince me not to do this, not to draw them out, not to give myself to them. She wasn’t coming, that was what she’d been trying to tell me. I was on my own.

She wasn’t coming.

They made me doubt her.

For that, I hated them more than anything else.

After a while, I don’t know how long, they quit, and Bowles emerged from the house with a cup of something that steamed invitingly in his hands. He’d put his overcoat and his gloves back on, as if to demonstrate all the more to me that he was warm and I was not. He crunched through the disturbed snow to where I was shivering and bleeding, dropped down to his haunches, and waited for me to meet his eyes. It took some will to do it, because mostly I was considering passing out, but also because I was having a hard time focusing. The ambient light had turned the snow a blue that seemed to rise up around where I rested. Where my blood had spilled it had turned black.

“Where is she, Atticus?”

My teeth were chattering so much it was hard to say the words.

“Who gave the order?” I asked.

He shook his head sadly, then poured out half of his hot coffee on my still-bound hands. The heat exploded through the numbness, sent sparks and shards into the bone, and I screamed, tried to lunge for him. He’d expected it, backing up, and I went down face-first, my hands still burning with the cold, with the heat.

I lifted my head from the snow, seeing him standing a foot away, seeing the four others gathered outside the front door of the cabin, the warm light spilling from within.

Bowles moved his mug so that he held it over my head, tilted it slightly, as if readying to dump the remaining contents onto my neck and back.

“In a few more minutes, we’re going to take you back inside,” he told me. “We’re going to let you warm up. We’re going to clean you up. We might even let you nod off, go unconscious.

“Then we’re going to take you back out here, and we’ll do all of this again. Except this time, I won’t bring a mug of coffee. I’ll bring a fucking kettle hot off the stove, do you understand me, you stupid piece of shit?”

My chattering teeth wouldn’t let me respond, so I nodded.

“You tell me right now, you tell me where Drama is, where I can find her, and this is over, it’s finished, we’ll be done. That’s all you have to do, Atticus, that’s all you have to tell me. Where is she?”

“Why?” I asked. It took effort just to get that much out.

He looked honestly disgusted by the question.

I shook my head, realizing he’d misunderstood me. They needed us both, yes, I’d gotten that much, I understood that much. It was why they’d hit the safe house at the same time they’d ambushed me. They were trying to kill us, that wasn’t news, not to him, not to me.

It was harder to say it the second time. “Why us?”

Bowles wavered in my vision, then shook his head, declining to answer. This time, I was sure he’d understood what I was asking, but even now, he wasn’t willing to give me the motive. Whatever crime Alena or I or we together had committed, whatever the threat was that either of us alone or together might pose, he wasn’t about to explain it.

He moved the mug, let another dribble of his coffee spatter out onto my back. I heard a scream, and I thought that it might be mine.

Then I heard it a second time, and I knew it wasn’t.

It rolled out of the trees and the darkness from somewhere behind me, awful with fear and pain. Bowles, Sean, all of them froze in place.

“Son of a bitch,” Bowles murmured.

I blinked several times, trying to convince at least one of my eyes to focus on him. I wondered if, this time, I had lost a contact.

“Okay,” I said. “You win. I’ll tell you where she is.”

Bowles threw down his mug, reaching into his overcoat with his other hand, spinning in place all at once even as he brought out his pistol. He did not look at me.

“It’s Drama, it’s fucking her, that fucking cunt is here, she’s come to get him,” he said quickly to the others. “She’s fucking out there and she’s taken the overwatch and you are going to find her and you are going to kill her.”

They started moving all at once, Sean directing them. Two ran back to the house, the third staying close by. Bowles pivoted back towards me, kicking up snow as he did so. He grabbed hold of me by the Flexi-Cuffs around my wrists, shoved the gun against my temple.

“Get up,” he told me. “Get on your knees!”

I struggled with it, and not only to buy time, but because most everything hurt, and those parts that didn’t were silent only because they’d gone numb with the cold. I’d be dealing with frostbite in another few minutes, if I wasn’t having to deal with it already. While Bowles muscled me to my knees, the two who had gone for the house reemerged, carrying three long guns and three sets of NVG between them. Everyone but Sean and Bowles got a long gun and the goggles.

Bowles rammed the pistol into the side of my neck.

“You don’t want to do that,” I told him.

“Shut up,” Bowles snapped. “Shut the fuck up, call her, call—”

A third scream, more broken than the two that had come before, the voice issuing it already threading with strain. It sounded awful and piteous. It sounded like someone not only in agony, but in terror, and all of them heard it, and none of them liked it.

“Jesus Christ,” one of them whispered. “That’s Ryan. What the fuck is she doing to Ryan?”

Sean ran his free hand in a cutting motion across his throat, angry, indicating to all that he wanted them to shut the fuck up. They gave him his silence, and in it he flashed out a sequence of hand signals, deploying the three men. They began making towards the line of trees surrounding the cabin, and I’d been right about their pedigree. They moved well, spreading out to keep from bunching up while still keeping each other in sight enough to provide backup. Hand signals flashed between them, and maybe they had a line on the screams, where their friend Ryan was, because they seemed to know where they should go.

“Drop the gun,” I told Bowles. “Listen to me.”

He glanced down at me, then dug the barrel harder into the side of my neck. I was so cold it didn’t feel like much other than pressure against my skin. “Call to her. Tell her to come out.”

If I’d been able to, I would have laughed. As it was, I coughed and snorted all at once, ejecting more blood and mucus.

To my right, just at the edge of the cabin, one of Sean’s men staggered at the same moment that the wooden wall behind him splintered, sprayed with a coat of gore and blood. The sound of the shot came at almost the exact same moment, the concussion of a Magnum round rattling the trees. The man fell to his knees, then dropped face-first into the snow.

“Seven o’clock!” one of the others shouted. “Muzzle flash, seven—”

The top of his head shredded before he could finish the sentence. The report chased after the echoes of the first.

Both Sean and the last of his men dove to the ground. Sean was smarter about it, staying clear of the cabin, using the deep snow. It was a good move; unless Alena had taken a position with elevation, and I knew that she hadn’t, the snow would keep him out of her line of sight.

The last one wasn’t as lucky, and when he went for cover, he tried to use the cabin, to get around the corner. He almost made it; if he’d been a little faster, or Alena had been a little slower, he would have.

But he didn’t.

Bowles balked, then dug his pistol deeper against my neck. The thought of taking it from him, freeing myself, flicked through my mind, but I ignored it. The condition I was in, the posture I was holding, I’d never be able to manage it.

“I’ll kill you, she doesn’t come out.” Bowles still wasn’t looking at me. “I’ll kill you.”

“Then she’s gone,” I said. “If you get the shot off, she’s gone. And you want us both, remember?”

He swore softly.

“Drop the gun,” I said again. “Please, Matthew.”

“Shut up! Sean! Sean, do you see her?”

“I need answers,” I told him. “You can give them to me. Drop the gun, don’t do this.”

The pistol left the side of my neck, and for an instant I thought he’d seen reason, that he’d let it go. He backed away from me a step.

“I know you’re there!” he shouted into the trees. “I know you’re there, I’ll kill him if you don’t come out! Give yourself up!”

“Don’t!” I shouted, as much to Alena as to Bowles, and I tried to get to my feet, tried to rise up and block the shot that I knew would come, because I knew what Bowles would do next.

He raised the pistol on me, leveling it with both hands at my head.

“You’ve got five!” Bowles shouted.

“Just put it down!”

“Four!”

“Dammit, Bowles—”

“Three!”

Then the hole opened in his chest, high on the sternum, and Matthew Bowles dropped like a marionette whose lines had been cut. Foamy blood blew out from his mouth, dripped over his lips, into the snow.

He rattled out the last of his air, and died.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” I told him. “All we wanted was an answer.”