Target America

39

Gil took Crosswhite aside after briefing the team on a probable incursion into Canada. “This stays between us.”

“Okay.”

“Pope took an ice pick to Faisal’s face.”

Crosswhite pulled back his shoulders. “How, exactly?”

“I mean he stabbed the fucker in the face with an ice pick.”

“Jesus! I guess it worked, huh?”

“You could say that.” Gil put out his hand. “Gimme a smoke.”

“When you gonna buy your own?”

“After I smoke all yours.” Gil lit the cigarette. “Something’s up with him.”

“Pope? Or Faisal?”

“Pope. He’s on edge about something. First he snaps and stabs a guy in the face, and now he’s ordering us into Canada without consulting the president.”

“Gonna go over his head?”

“We just have to make sure we don’t get caught on the wrong side of the river, that’s all.”

A few minutes later, he was sorting his gear and decided to check his iPhone on the off-chance that Marie had called.

He listened to her voice mail and called her right back.

She answered on the first ring. “Gil?”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Where are you?”

“I’m in Nevada.”

“How fast can you get here?”

“I can’t,” he said. “What’s wrong, baby?”

She didn’t reply immediately.

“Marie, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t tell you over the phone. Why can’t you come home?”

“Because I’m — I’m working.”

“Jesus!” she said. “Can’t you tell me what the hell you’re doin’ just once? You’re not even workin’ for the goddamn navy anymore.”

He knew instantly that something was gravely wrong. “Is it Mom? Did something happen?”

“Gil, tell me what the fuck you’re doin’ that’s so important!” Her voice was shrill, and it scared him deep in the pit of his stomach.

“I’m looking for the goddamn nuke!” he blurted. “There, ya happy? I just gave out classified information over a fuckin’ cell phone! Now what’s wrong, honey? I don’t have time for this.”

She fell silent, and he could just imagine her sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hand; Oso sitting next to the chair, whining. “Marie, please tell me what’s wrong.”

She sniffled hard, and he knew she was crying.

“Baby, please tell me.”

“There was a man here,” she said finally. “Up on the ridge — with a rifle.”

Gil’s heart skipped a beat, but he remained composed. “Is he still there?”

“I shot him, Gil. I shot ’im from the bedroom window and hid his body in the stable.”

His eyes filled with tears, knowing that his wife would never again be the same woman. Now there would always be a hardness to her, a hardness where once there had been only innocence.

“I love you,” he said softly. “Tell me what happened.”

When they finished talking some twenty minutes later, Gil got off the phone and called an old friend of the family named Buck Ferguson, who owned the ranch on the other side of the valley from his own. He told Buck what was going on and asked him if he wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on Marie and his mother-in-law until he could get there himself.

“Hell, no, I don’t mind!” Buck said. “The boys and I are leaving right now.”

With that taken care of, Gil crossed the hangar to where Pope was on his satellite phone with a high muckety-muck in the DOD. “We need to talk right now.”

Pope saw the look in his eye and cut the call short. “What’s wrong?”

“I gotta get to Montana.”

“You gotta what?”

“Get to Montana.”

Pope looked around as if there might be a clue to this unexpected intrigue elsewhere in the hangar. “Gil, I don’t understand. We’re airborne for Detroit in less than an hour. I just got us clearance to land on Grosse Ile.”

Gil told Pope what had happened on the ranch and that Marie was in possession of the dead assassin’s laptop computer.

“Can she access the hard drive?”

“It’s password protected. Look, the assassin’s not an Arab. Marie says he’s a Caucasian with a German passport. So he’s probably Chechen. If he is—”

“He could be connected with the bomb,” Pope said, finishing the thought for him. “Okay, listen, there’s no way I can let you go to Montana. What I’ll do is have an Air Guard helo pick the computer up from the ranch and fly it back to the air base at Great Falls. From there an F-15 from the 186th can rendezvous with us in Detroit. That’s the fastest way for us to get our hands on it. Tell Marie to have the computer and passport ready and waiting when the helo gets there.”

Aside from her emotional well-being, Gil was also concerned for Marie in a legal sense. “What are you going to tell the president about Marie shooting the guy? She hasn’t called the police.”

“The truth,” Pope said with a shrug. “What else?”

“And if he decides to sic the attorney general after her?”

Pope adjusted his cap with a smile. “He’d never even consider such a thing. In fact, he’ll probably invite her to the White House for a Medal of Freedom ceremony. We already know how much he loves bestowing our nation’s highest honors upon members of the heroic Shannon family.”

Gil smiled dryly. “When ya get a minute, kiss my ass, will ya?”

Pope laughed. “You remind me of your father.”