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  And then?

  And then more men, each as equally corrupt and sinister as the ones they’d replaced, would be put into power. And the cycle would continue ad infinitum.

  The Old Man knew these things because he was one of them.

  He picked up his secure cell and punched in a code for the encrypted line.

  Waited.

  “Yes?” a voice said, almost casually. “May I help you?”

  “Core Seven,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” the voice snapped. “Whom can I connect you with?”

  “VanderMissen.”

  A moment passed. Two. There were a series of beeps and clicks as the call was forwarded through a mazelike network.

  Finally: “VanderMissen.” The voice was tired, defeated.

  “It’s me,” the Old Man said. “I’ve just come from Bethesda.”

  “And?”

  “As we thought, it’s begun.”

  AUGUST 17

  BROOKLYN, NY: RED HOOK

  1:10 P.M.

  In the dim confines of the Foursquare Saloon on Conover Street and Beard, Bernie Shivel calmly washed another beer mug. The lunch crowd was gone and it was just him and Lance Makowski. Sometimes Lance was quiet—good—and sometimes he just wouldn’t shut up—not so good.

  “Take it easy, Lance. I just asked a question is all,” Bernie said.

  Lance sighed. “Yeah, okay, okay. I’m upset. Can you blame me?”

  “Nobody blames you, Lance.”

  “Sure.” He pulled off his beer, wiped foam from his mustache. “Anyway, to answer your question, yes, I went to the fucking VA. You know what they told me? They told me I’d have to fill out all these goddamn forms. The forms would be processed. An appointment would be made for me. Is that bullshit or what?”

  “Sounds like bullshit to me.”

  “Yeah, you know it. So I fill out the forms. That was three weeks ago. They haven’t called, sent a letter. Nothing. It’s a conspiracy. A cover-up. See, this is how it works for those Washington fuckwigs. The media is screaming and causing trouble, so the fatcat fuckwigs they smell bad publicity. So they come right out and say, yeah, Gulf War Syndrome, it happened the first time, maybe it’s happening again. Maybe. We’ll look into it. They don’t give a shit, Bernie. They’re only acting like they do to save their own careers. To save voters. Hell, you know what it’s like, am I right? You were in Vietnam.”

  Bernie leaned on the bar. “It’s only just starting for you Iraqi vets. Trust me. I’ve been there. You know how long it took Uncle Sam to admit to the Agent Orange mess?”

  “Yeah, I was a kid. I remember. My Uncle Dick died of leukemia from that shit they were spraying. Just a grunt doing his bit for the good old US while those flyboys dumped poison on his head.”

  “We lost a lot of vets,” Bernie said.

  “By the time they do something about this…whatever in the hell it is, I’ll be a dead man.”

  Bernie popped himself a Coke. “Maybe what you ought to do is get a lawyer.”

  “Wouldn’t do no good.”

  “Oh, it might. There’s a lot of publicity about shit you guys might have gotten exposed to. You might get some action.”

  Lance scowled, pressing his fingers to his belly. “Jesus, the pain’s coming again. Feels like somebody’s twisting a knife in there.”

  “Want an aspirin?”

  Lance clenched his teeth. “No. No. I’ll be okay.” He grimaced. “When this first started, I was going through a bottle of Advil a day. Didn’t do shit.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t drink.”

  “Helluva thing for a bartender to say.”

  “I’m serious. The juice is hard on your guts, take my word for it. I’ve got the ulcers to prove it.”

  Lance shook his head. “Fuck it. I’m a dead man.”

  The door opened with a jingle and three men wearing rubber trench coats bustled in. Bernie just stared at them. He was glad to have more customers, but what was with the rain gear? It wasn’t raining outside.

  “What can I get you, gentlemen?”

  None of them spoke for a moment. The two younger ones—Bernie guessed them to be in their mid-twenties—had cold eyes and thick necks. They looked like they could be real trouble. They reminded him of mob enforcers, sort of guys Bernie had seen on the streets when he was a kid over in Bensonhurst. They looked around the bar as if they were sizing it up for a hit. The older one seemed to be in charge. He gave them both a curious sort of look and they sat down.

  “What do you have on tap?” he asked.

  He was a cruel-looking character with watery gray eyes and a short, bristly military-style haircut. He had a nasty-looking scar that circled his throat as if maybe he’d been hanged once. He looked very much like a drill sergeant, which was really funny given what Bernie and Lance were talking about when they came in.

  Bernie cleared his throat. “We got Bud, Pabst, Miller, Miller Lite, Sam Adams—”

  “Three Buds sound good,” Crewcut said.

  The two younger ones stared into space, saying nothing.

  Like his associates, Crewcut seemed intent on sizing the place up. His eyes scanned the doors, behind the bar, the booths along the wall, the pool tables in the back. When the beers came, he smiled and handed Bernie a twenty-dollar bill. “Keep the change, buddy,” he said.

  The real crazy thing about these guys, beyond their raincoats and staring eyes, was the fact that they all wore black leather racing gloves. And what was even crazier, was that they didn’t take them off as they sipped their beers. It all made Bernie real nervous. But ever since the old lady walked out on him a year before, he knew he’d been watching too much TV.

  So he didn’t think too much of it…or tried not to.

  These guys are a little whacked, he told himself, what of it? If they want to walk around on a dry, warm summer day with raincoats and hold their beers with fucking gloves on, why not? It’s a free country.

  “That feels better,” Crewcut said, holding up his glass and inspecting it. He looked over at Lance and then at his friends, then at Lance again. “You a vet?”

  Lance was wearing a desert camouflage field jacket. It was kind of hard to miss. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “Iraq?”

  Lance nodded.

  “We were in the Gulf, weren’t we, boys?”

  The young toughs nodded, but nothing more.

  “Good for you,” Lance said, scowling. He returned to his beer. The last thing in the world he wanted was to re-live the war with a bunch of flag-waving yahoos. Their memories of the Iraq War might have been good, but his were shit. The kind of shit that just kept coming back again and again.

  “Maybe you guys served together,” Bernie suggested, trying to break the ice a little bit. Lance could be a little touchy on the subject of the war and with good reason, but Bernie had always thought it might do him some good to talk to other vets.

  “No, I don’t think we served together,” Crewcut said. “We didn’t serve together, did we, Lance?”

  Lance swung his head around. His eyes were wide, angry. “How the hell did you know my name?” He kept staring at Crewcut, hoping maybe he’d recognize him, but he drew a blank. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Maybe you guys met over there,” Bernie suggested. The flesh at the back of his neck was crawling and he honestly didn’t know why.

  Lance eyeballed Crewcut. “I asked you who you were,” he said.

  The two younger guys got up and went over to the jukebox by the door. They made a big show of studying the selections there. Neither of them had yet spoken.

  “Name’s Cave,” Crewcut said. “I was with the Army Medical Corps. I patched up a lot of you guys. I never forget a face.”

  Lance just kept looking at him, mentally running every face he’d seen in the war. It was obvious that Cave just didn’t click. “I don’t remember you.”

  “How you been since Saudi?” Cave asked.

  “Sick. Sick as fucking
dog.”

  “Lot of us have been that way.”

  Lance brightened. “You too?”

  Cave finished his beer. “No, not me. But others. I think I know what you have, though. Deep pain,” he said, patting his stomach, “right here in the belly?”

  “Yeah! Yeah, that’s it!”

  “And not right away either, eh? Just in the last few months?”

  Lance nodded frantically. “Yeah! Shit, I got back I felt fine... and now, five goddamn years later, I’m getting sick.”

  Cave nodded like he’d heard it all before.

  Bernie wanted to be relieved that finally Lance had found someone who could help him, get him some treatment, but the fact was he wasn’t relieved at all. He had a nasty, gnawing feeling that Cave was toying with Lance. That he was handing him a line of bullshit and that where all this was going was somewhere bad, somewhere ugly. He didn’t like these men. They smelled wrong, felt wrong. He started thinking about the shotgun under the bar.

  “Yeah, you’ve got it bad, Lance, I can see it. Problem is, there’s no cure for what you’ve got.”

  “What do you mean there’s no fucking cure?”

  Cave sighed. “That’s the sad fact of the matter, my friend. No cure. It gets worse and worse. First the pain, then the hunger…”

  The younger guys moved very quickly about that time. One of them slid the deadbolt on the door. Then they stepped forward, reaching into their raincoats. They came out with twin nine-millimeter handguns, noise suppressors screwed onto the barrels.

  “What the fuck is this?” Bernie asked.

  He went for the shotgun under the bar and heard, from some faraway place, two muted popping sounds. The first bullet caught him in the throat, the second put a hole about the size of a quarter in his forehead. He slammed into the cash register, spilled a pyramid of beer glasses, and went down spraying blood in wild loops. He was dead before he hit the floor.

  Lance just sat there, shocked, frozen, his beer glass still in his fist. It slid from his fingers and shattered at his feet. He bolted from his stool and made for the back door.

  Cave shook his head and there were two more muted pops. The first bullet caught Lance in the ribs, the second hit him between the shoulder blades, directly in the spine, shattering his vertebrae into shrapnel. He collapsed like he was made of rubber, everything giving out at once. He hung onto the edge of a pool table, gasping and whimpering and shitting his pants. There was another pop and the top of his head exploded. Blood, brains, and bone chips soiled the green felt of the table. He slid down in a heap.

  “All right,” Cave said, “let’s get to work.”

  1:43 P.M.

  The bar was a hive of activity.

  Through the back way, three other men came in. They were part of a Biological Containment Team, a BCT. They wore white biohazard suits with matching hoods. The dim overhead lights glared off the Plexiglas shields over their faces. They looked, if anything, like Apollo astronauts. They carried zippered body bags with them.

  Cave watched them with little interest. He flipped the CLOSED sign over in the window and lit a cigarette. He did not take his gloves off. He turned to his two associates. “Okay, you guys,” he said. “Make this place look lived in. Do the till.”

  They nodded and went about business.

  Their names were McKenna and Stein. But, like Cave, these were not their real names. Just cover names. Operational names. Next week, next month, in another city, another country, they’d burn another target and would have different names. But for the time being this was who they were.

  While Cave stood there smoking, the others went to work. McKenna and Stein emptied out the till, stuffed the money in a brown paper bag. They let a few bills fall to the floor. It had to look like this robbery came down in a hurry. Just another quick, drug-related crime. That’s what the cops would figure, and this was encouraged. McKenna took a few bottles of booze and shattered them on the floor.

  Cave nodded that it was enough.

  Another man came in. He wore a black overcoat and shiny black shoes. He looked very much like a Midtown executive. His hair was neat and powder-white with a matching closely-trimmed beard. His eyes were ice blue and had about as much life in them as barrels of toxic waste. McKenna and Stein fidgeted nervously in his presence. He eyed them and everything else with the same lack of compassion, the same barely-concealed contempt.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Piece of cake,” Cave told him. “Went perfectly.”

  “Did Makowski say anything? Anything interesting?”

  Cave knew what he wanted. “Yes, sir. Said he had the pains.”

  The Old Man lifted an eyebrow, nothing more.

  The white-suited technicians very carefully slid Makowski’s corpse into a body bag and zipped it shut. They carried it outside and put it in a berth in the back of a refrigerated truck parked in the alley. The truck had CARPET KING DISCOUNT RUGS neatly stenciled on the side.

  The Old Man toured the crime scene. He did not like what he saw. “This is sloppy,” he said. “You’ve compromised our situation with your stupidity.”

  Cave knew it was true.

  It was supposed to look like a simple murder/robbery, not a hit. Like some coked-up freak sauntered in and killed the bartender for the contents of the till. And it did look like that... except for the blood and brains spattered onto the pool table. And this would have been fine had they been able to leave Lance’s body behind. As it was, they had a dead bartender, fine, and the blood of a second man who apparently had walked away, not so fine.

  “This scene was to be sterile when we left,” the Old Man growled.

  “We’ll fix it.”

  The Old Man did not look relieved. He glared at Cave like a bug under a scope. “See that you do and—” he touched a finger to his nose, tapping it gently “—don’t screw it up this time.”

  Pomposity and arrogance in tow, the Old Man left.

  Asshole.

  “All right,” Cave snapped at McKenna and Stein. “Let’s do it and let’s do it fast.”

  He didn’t need to tell them what had to be done; they were old hands at black bag jobs like this. Experience guided them. They pulled the felt off the table and quickly rolled it up, being very careful not to get any blood or matter on the floor. Then they washed down the table, took the legs off and parked it out in the alley with the garbage, after giving it a nice used look. They washed the floor and dragged another pool table forward. This way it didn’t look so bare.

  It took twenty minutes.

  “Next time,” Cave said as they left, “we bag the guy’s head, then we pop him.”

  BROOKLYN: RED HOOK

  5:03 P.M.

  Alight rain was beginning to fall when Gloria Makowski finished her shift at Jacklyn Machine Products. The sky was gray and the day had turned cold, wind coming in off the bay. She could feel the teeth of winter in its gust. Dressed in grubby jeans and a frayed denim shirt with too many holes in it, she felt the wind biting at her. It had been warm that morning when she’d left the apartment. She hadn’t worn her coat. Now she was paying for it.

  “Come on, come on,” she grumbled under her breath, shivering.

  She was sitting behind the wheel of her Taurus, locked in a slowly moving line with forty other cars, waiting for her chance to get out of Jacklyn’s gate which was bottlenecked because of some sort of celebration going on over in Coffey Park. Traffic was thick as molasses from Verona to Sullivan, the spillover jamming up Walcott Street and Van Brunt.

  Chilled as she was by the unseasonable shift in temperature, she had to crack the windows so she didn’t asphyxiate. The Taurus had holes in the floorboards and the muffler was patched in too many places. The stink of exhaust was enough to make you gag if the car wasn’t in motion. And how long it would be in motion was another question. The tires were nearly bald. The engine burned an easy quart of oil a week. The timing was bad. The windshield wipers didn’t work. The radio was fried. And i
f all that wasn’t bad enough, the heater did nothing but blow cold air. Except in the summer, when it blew hot air. The thermostat was gone, she knew, but there was no money to fix it.

  That’s what you call living the American dream, she thought with more than a little bitterness.

  Finally, she got her chance and drove through the gate. By then she was little more than an icicle, her head pounding from the carbon monoxide she’d been inhaling.

  Life was great.

  It was hard enough to put food on the table let alone deal with extravagant things like getting cars fixed and buying new clothes. With Lance not working (and drinking every goddamn penny we have, she reminded herself), it was impossible getting by on just her pay. The Teamsters had organized Jacklyn, but you wouldn’t know it from the paychecks she got.

  God bless America and the working class.

  The rich get richer, the fat get fatter. And all on the backs of working people. There was something very wrong about that (or so the union said as they collected their dues every month).

  The rich get richer...

  Everyone at the plant thought it would change when the Teamsters came in. They promised solidarity, union brothers and sisters. Better hours. Better pay. More days off. More benefits.

  But did any of that happen?

  Yeah, right.

  The only difference was that it was nearly impossible for the company to fire anyone now. You had to be a total fuck up to lose your job. Which only meant that those who worked hard had to carry those who didn’t. That’s all it meant.

  Everyone at the plant had their theories, of course. The execs at Jacklyn paid off the union. The union collected its dues every month and paid off the company. Conspiracies abounded. What the Teamsters local hadn’t taken into consideration were the workers themselves. Solidarity was an exotic term to a pack of crawling weasels, company ass-suckers, and whining backstabbers. Not even Jesus and the Saints could bring them together.