PRECIPICE (13 page)

Moore nodded and stared into his glass as the door closed.

After climbing into his Audi A5 and leaving the parking garage, Ortiz opened the glove box and removed a prepaid cell phone that he had bought with cash. The last thing he wanted was any connection between himself and his cousin’s satellite phone number. Héctor had the number to Ortiz’ Blackberry, but it was only for use in the most dire of emergencies. Otherwise, Ortiz would always call Héctor using the prepaid phone, which he replaced every two weeks. He entered the international number from memory as he crept through the busy streets, winding his way toward the interstate and the George Mason Bridge. The phone rang three times before Héctor picked up.

“Hola.”

“Se ha aprobado,” Ortiz said calmly.
It’s been approved.

“Bueno,” Héctor answered. “I will transfer the money. What about the next part?”

“As long as he votes for it, there will be enough votes to pass the bill. You are certain there will be no problems in the House?”

“It has been taken care of. You worry about your boss, we will worry about the rest.”

Ortiz reserved the right to worry about any part of this until it was finished and the money was in his account, but he wasn’t about to bring that up with his cousin.

“Call me tomorrow to confirm that the money is available. Then we should not talk again until just before the final vote.”

“OK,” Ortiz said and then disconnected the phone. He dropped the car into neutral and revved the engine until it redlined, frustrated with the stopped up traffic. So much waiting…but soon, it would all be worth it.

*

Sam awoke, sat up on the dingy couch and looked around. Small slivers of light streamed down through the sunken windows. She was in Stuart’s basement in San Fran, she suddenly remembered. She looked at her phone to see the time and was startled to see that it was 2:17 PM…on Friday. How in the hell was it Friday? She was still dressed for the club on Tuesday night, and the short skirt and blouse clung to her from days of sweating in them.

Shit! Her dad. She’d missed the call. She had to get out of here. She needed a bump to get her home in the worst fucking way. She turned on the lamp with a shaking hand and rummaged through the dresser where she knew Stuart kept it. Where was Brett? Had he even been at the club? She couldn’t remember.

Finally! She found a vial with a little bit left in it. She tapped the powder out onto the top of the dresser then scraped it into a thin ribbon using the edge of her Stanford ID. There were several rolled bills handy. She picked one up and knocked all of the coke back. Then she pocketed the twenty for Caltrain fare back to campus. Stuart wouldn’t miss the vial or the bill. God knew he had plenty of both.

She headed up the stairs and surreptitiously stepped from the landing out the back door without going into the apartment at all. She left through the side yard and got around the corner and a couple of blocks away before she relaxed into a steady stride. She’d call her dad from the train. By then she would hopefully come up with a good story for why she was so late with the call. He would probably already be drunk anyway. She hoped he had worked out first. She racked her brain for a new excuse to have him send her some more money.

8

Thursday, November 3rd

CHIP PULLED THE extended stock of the Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun firmly against his shoulder and nestled his cheek against the back corner of the gun. He lined up the tritium on the front sight post over his target through the circular rear sight. The gun had been fitted with a suppressor and a three-round-burst trigger group, although it was set on semi-automatic right now. He pulled the trigger and the gun jumped, popping a hole in the upper left arm of a human silhouette target facing him twenty-five yards downrange. He still found himself flinching from the expected noise and surprised when the gun only made a quiet cough.

“You’re jerking the trigger too much,” Harris advised him again. Chip knew. He was getting it right sometimes but still rushing things occasionally. It was frustrating. “Just squeeze gently,” Harris continued for the hundredth time.

Chip squeezed the trigger again slowly and was rewarded with the appearance of a point of light shining through a hole in the center of his target’s chest.

“That’s it,” Harris encouraged, nodding with approval.

The shooting range was part of a facility that the guys simply called “The Woods.” It primarily consisted of a cabin nestled in a small, wooded mountain valley about two and a half hours west of DC in West Virginia. The land and cabin had recently been acquired by Export Logistics—steep land in rural West Virginia could still be had for next to nothing. The men had spent several weeks there in the summer, fixing up the cabin and constructing the shooting range and other training facilities.

Chip had lived there with the team since Monday. His training with the MP7 and the Sig Sauer P229 9mm pistol he’d been issued was accompanied by physical training, communications training, and detailed study of every aspect of their mission from the time they would leave this facility in eight days until they crossed the border back into the United States. They also practiced rock climbing, setting ropes, lowering boats, and rappelling on a small band of sandstone cliffs that ran along one rim of the small mountain valley.

Although Chip had shot guns many times before, he’d never had any formal training. When he was about ten years old, his father had taught him to work a handgun, a rifle, and a shotgun and had given him a list of basic rules.
Never point a gun at anything you don’t want to shoot
.
Never put your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to fire.
He remembered having to memorize the rules and recite them back to his dad.
Make sure of your target before you shoot. Never point a loaded gun at anybody.
That last rule was giving him trouble now. Practicing on human silhouette targets made it clear that the training was for the expressed purpose of violating that rule.

The firearms practice was definitely the coolest part so far—aside from their whitewater training in West Virginia and the Northwest, of course. He’d been practicing with the MP7 twice daily in both single shot and three-round-burst modes. It was unlike any gun he’d shot before. He’d fired rifles and shotguns many times and had even shot a deer on a hunting trip with his dad when he was fourteen. Instead of the feeling of history and perhaps even artistry conveyed by the carved wooden stocks and decorative trigger guards on the guns he’d previously hunted with, the MP7 had the cold, businesslike manner of a human-killing machine. Where the other guns had felt like tools, this one was definitely a weapon. He was starting to know his weapon inside and out—he’d been required to disassemble, clean, and reassemble it twice each day. The intimate knowledge of its inner workings hadn’t brought him any closer to reconciliation with its designed purpose of taking human lives. Though he had no intentions of going on this mission without it, questions haunted the back of his mind.

Could he do it? Could he frame a man in his sights, squeeze the trigger and get the job done? Could he take a human life? And would he do it? Or would he freeze up? Or turn tail and run? He still vividly remembered the deer from half his lifetime ago. He could still see it in his mind’s eye, standing in the crosshairs of his rifle scope. It hadn’t been easy. As he’d watched it magnified through the circle of glass, he’d thought about the life he was about to take. It wasn’t like the squirrels or rabbits, quail or doves he’d shot before and since. It was a big, living, breathing mammal, just like him. He remembered trying to calm his racing heart, trying to stop the deer from bobbing spastically up and down in the picture through his scope.

When he’d finally pulled the trigger, he’d been startled to see the deer flip into the air and land squirming on its back. His shot hadn’t killed it, and he’d watched it for only a few confused seconds before firing another shot to end the wounded buck’s suffering.

Chip steadily squeezed the trigger of the MP7 and sent another round into the center of his target. Duval looked up from the station next to him and gave him a wink of approval. “Give that fucker hell!” he said quietly but fervently.

Chip couldn’t help but grin at his friend’s antics, but he was also in awe of the other man’s skills with a gun. Duval could fire a whole magazine and leave a single hole no bigger than a quarter in the center of his target’s chest or head. Although the other three men weren’t quite the virtuoso that Duval was, they were close. It was an integral part of their job, which they did better than anyone in the world. They had the same sort of mental fortitude that allowed Chip to shut out distractions and fear in order to completely focus as he sat in his kayak above a sixty-foot falls. Except that they faced other men with weapons. They pulled triggers, and they took lives. Just like Chip sitting above a waterfall, they wouldn’t be paralyzed with doubts or swayed by emotion. They were driven by duty, steadied by experience, and they would do their jobs. That sense of purpose and duty was a motivation that Chip was still struggling to understand.

He knew if it came down to it, he could fire on another human in self-defense. He trusted himself to react well under pressure; he always had. If it was him or the other guy, let it be the other guy every time—there would be no hesitation or moral quandary. But he was also well aware of the difference between
action
and
reaction
. When he thought of what the other men were planning to do—aiming their weapons and firing on a sleeping man—he had no idea if he possessed that kind of willpower.

Chip popped a fresh magazine of subsonic ammo into his MP7, turned to the next target and chambered a round. He switched modes with the selector near his thumb to the three round burst setting and squeezed the trigger again. The first one hit dead center, and the next two walked off the target to his right. There was still a lot of work to do before he would be ready for this trip.

*

Chip shoveled pasta and meat sauce into his mouth. He was even hungrier after a day of training at The Woods than he was after a full day of guiding rafts at his regular job. It was Harris’ night to cook, which usually meant pretty good eating. On Duval’s night it was hard to choke anything down. He was the type to pick one—and only one—seasoning each night and then smother the food with far more than the recommended amount. Then he would smirk at the looks on the other guys’ faces as they tried to finish their meals. He seemed to be unfazed by his own culinary train wrecks, just like he was unfazed by every other discomfort they had experienced over the last month. It was hard to get very mad at a guy who was always willing to pull twice his weight without complaint. However, that didn’t mean they wanted to keep eating his cooking. Despite multiple attempts by the others to trade nights or take Duval’s turn, he refused to be seen as shirking his duties by not cooking when his time came up in the rotation.

Tonight, Duval and Roberts were jawing back and forth as they played video games on a Playstation while they ate.
Call of Duty
was a habit they had picked up in long hours of waiting to deploy on missions with the SEALs. They outperformed Chip at the game just as readily as they did at everything else at The Woods except for maybe the rock climbing, which Chip was already familiar with. Unlike all of the other tasks that they executed with silent, machine-like precision,
Call of Duty
got them fired up and shouting. They were playing Black Ops, although they were giddy as nerdy school kids in anticipation of the release of a new version of the game next week. Chip had taken to giving them shit about it. High tech entertainment at rafting outposts still primarily consisted of scratchy old VHS kayaking videos and porn. Chip got a kick out of the idea that these elite warriors were addicted to a kids’ video game system, and he jokingly told them so every night. It was the least he could do after they razzed him twice a day when he lagged behind—far behind—on their runs. Chip wasn’t usually much of a runner—in fact, he believed the only appropriate time to run was when you were being chased. The men had pointed out that if he were chased for any distance on this mission, he’d be glad that he’d practiced running beforehand. There was no arguing with logic like that. He also remembered how out of breath he had been during his sprint to rescue Daniel. That was even more motivation. Chip had begun running with the team daily only a couple of days into their training in the Northwest.

They finished the meal, and Chip stepped over to the sink. It was his night to wash the dishes. They had a rotation going that mostly consisted of the new guy doing the bulk of the grunt work. Chip took it with humility and no complaints—he’d gone through the same thing in his early years at a rafting outpost and knew that protesting would only make things worse. As he finished up, they were clearing off the table and spreading out diagrams and materials to go over, and switching the TV from the Playstation input to a feed from Harris’ laptop. Chip walked over to join them as they began the evening’s session.

He was amazed at the detail they went to in their planning. Every movement, every communication, seemingly every eventuality was carefully mapped out. Chip had prepared daily schedules for river expeditions in the past, but nothing he had ever done compared to this. They took their time to explain most of it, and it was only now on the fourth day that it was beginning to make sense. Teamwork was of the essence. Every man had to be covered at all times during the approach, the attack, and the exit, or at least covered to the maximum that the situation allowed. They practiced every evening on a crude mock-up they had constructed from two-by-fours and plywood. The open-topped structure was surrounded by scaffolding so that two of the team members could critique the movements of the other two as they practiced clearing the building. Chip had learned a lot by observing these sessions through his night-vision goggles from the scaffolding, and the men had even allowed him to try the exercise a few times himself without live ammunition.