Myrmidon

CHAPTER FIVE

His feeling turned out to be correct.

About six minutes after he kicked the cable, he saw a couple of people pile out of one of the nearer houses and jump into a shiny, new pickup truck. The truck came rolling up toward the fence at speed, as if it were going to bust right through the gate and keep going. At the last minute, the driver slewed the vehicle around to one side, so it stopped broadside to the gate, rocking on its tires.

The pickup had tinted windows, so he couldn’t see who was inside. He figured there would be at least one person with a rifle in there, the barrel trained on him. The driver’s side door opened, and he heard boots hit the dirt, but the driver was shielded from him by the bulk of the vehicle.

“What do you want?” the driver demanded without showing himself. “You lost?”

“Which question do you want answered first?” Chapel asked.

Angel tsked in his ear. “Careful, honey.”

The driver, who still hadn’t shown himself, seemed to take a second to decide what to say next. “This is private property,” he called out. “Unless you have a warrant signed by a judge, we retain the right to refuse entry.”

Chapel smiled. “That would be true if I were with the police. I’m not.”

“Then read the sign, asshole! No trespassing.”

Chapel didn’t let his smile waver. Belcher had trained his people well and told them how to stay on the right side of the law. Apparently, that didn’t include basic hospitality. “I need to talk to Terry Belcher,” he announced. “I’m with the federal government.” Which was strictly true, since Military Intelligence was overseen by the executive branch.

“Terry doesn’t want to talk to nobody from the government,” the driver shouted back. “You’d best head back the way you came.”

“I have a message for him,” Chapel said.

“Then write him a goddamned letter!”

It took all of Chapel’s strength not to sigh just then. “He’s going to want to hear this in person. Tell him Ygor Favorov is dead.”

“He don’t want to talk to no Commies, neither!”

“Well, that’s really not the problem here. Since Ygor Favorov. Is. Dead,” he repeated. “Believe me, Belcher very much wants to know about that. And I can give him all the details if he’ll let me in so we can talk.”

The conversation seemed to end there. The driver didn’t say anything more, and Chapel wasn’t about to give up any more details until he was talking to Belcher directly. He guessed they had a radio in the truck and were passing along his message, but for all he knew, they were waiting for him to reach for a gun, so they could shoot him and claim they’d been standing their ground.

For a long while, Chapel just stood there, waiting. Sweating. Wishing he could get back in his rental, which had air-conditioning and a case of bottled water in the trunk. Wishing something would happen.

Nothing did. The sun made the landscape shimmer. The sky burned blue, unblemished by clouds.

When the driver spoke again, Chapel nearly jumped he was so startled.

“Are you claiming that you killed this Favorov?”

Chapel’s eyes went wide. “No,” he called back. “He died in prison.”

“Are you then claiming you are not a government assassin sent here to kill Terry?”

Chapel bit his tongue before responding. “No, I am not a government assassin,” he said.

“Put your hands on the hood of your vehicle and keep them there.” The driver came out from behind the pickup. He had a rifle—a hunting rifle, not an AK-47—slung over one shoulder and a pistol in a holster at his hip. Neither weapon was pointed at Chapel, which was nice. The driver was just a kid, he saw next. Maybe nineteen, probably younger, with thin, almost rodentine features. He had crew-cut hair, and he wore an oxford-cloth shirt buttoned up to his neck and down to his wrists, even in the desert heat. Chapel figured that was to cover up identifying tattoos.

There wasn’t much he could do about hiding the tattoo on his face, though. A patch of skin above his upper lip and under his nose had been tattooed solid black. It took Chapel a second to realize that it was supposed to look like Hitler’s mustache.

“You couldn’t grow one of your own?” Chapel asked, pointing at his own upper lip, which was cleanly shaven.

The boy’s eyes narrowed. “I can, and I did. Up in Bozeman, Montana, I had it just about perfect. Then government spies came and accused me of all kinds of things. They held me down and shaved me, directly violating my constitutional rights to free speech under the First Amendment and violating the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth. After that, I had this done so nobody could take it away from me again.”

“They could zap it with a laser,” Chapel pointed out. He figured if he kept talking, the kid might not realize that Chapel had refused to put his hands on the hood of his vehicle. “Vaporizes the metallic ink, then your body absorbs it. Supposed to hurt like hell, though.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the boy said. “When I put ink on this body, I keep it there for life.” The boy kept glancing at the pickup, presumably looking toward someone who was still inside.

“Are they calling down to the compound, finding out if I can come in?” Chapel asked.

The boy’s face twisted with suspicion. “Don’t you worry about what we’re doing. Worry about whether you’re going to get out of here alive, friend.”

“That’s one thing I don’t need to worry about right now,” Chapel told him. It was a lie, but he felt this kid might respond to a little bravado. “I haven’t done anything to warrant being killed.”

“You come sniffing around our business, right up to our gate, you think we don’t have a reason to doubt your motives?” the boy asked. “By the sound of your voice, you’re no Westerner. Maybe back on the East Coast, people go barging in on each other’s business as a daily habit. Maybe you don’t realize how sacrosanct we hold private property out here. Out here, we shoot intruders. That’s our daily habit.”

Chapel smiled. The boy’s speech patterns were interesting. He didn’t look like a well-educated kid, but clearly he was a reader—or he’d listened to enough speeches to pick up a few turns of phrase.

“Where I’m standing, right here,” he said, “is public property. If you shoot me here, that’s homicide. I know enough about Terry Belcher to know he would never allow that. Is there some kind of holdup? Belcher should have agreed to meet me by now.”

In his ear, Angel’s voice cooed, “Over the horizon in thirty seconds.”

“Either let me in or call somebody who can let me in,” Chapel told the boy. “I’ve got work to do.”

The boy’s hand moved toward the pistol at his belt. His eyes were cold and empty, like a shark’s. Maybe he was trying to scare Chapel into drawing his own weapon. A lot could depend on who drew first.

Or at least, who the court believed had drawn first. “You’re armed,” the boy said, nodding at the holster on Chapel’s own hip. “Maybe after I kill you, I put that gun in your dead hand. Nobody out here to say it didn’t happen that way.” Moving a fraction of an inch at a time, the boy’s hand crept closer and closer to the pistol.

Chapel really didn’t want to have to shoot this boy.

“Ten seconds,” Angel said.

Chapel held his hands up in front of him, palms outward.

“Maybe I just say I caught you trying to climb our fence,” the boy tried.

“Maybe,” Chapel said. “If, as you say, there was nobody to say otherwise.”

In the desert stillness, he heard the whir of the propeller clearly, much louder than he’d expected.

“I’ve got you on visual,” Angel told him. “Nice butt.”

The boy ducked as an unmanned aerial vehicle—a Predator drone—came buzzing by overhead, not a hundred feet up. Chapel glanced upward and saw its straight wings, the bump of the camera housing on its nose. It seemed to hang in the air for a second, then veered to the side and started cutting a very wide arc over the compound, tilting up on one wing, as graceful and as weightless-looking as a paper airplane.

“What the hell is that?” the boy shouted.

“My insurance policy,” Chapel told him.

The boy’s eyes went wide. He started reaching for his pistol again, in earnest this time, but then he stopped at a sudden sound. Someone had rapped on one of the tinted windows of the pickup, knocking a ring against the glass.

“I think that’s for you,” Chapel told the boy.