Unmanned

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

RIGGLEMAN WOVE A BRIEF but complicated tale of circuitous financial dealings that began with IntelPro and ended with a fellowship grant for $100,000 that Steve had won several months ago, right about the time he began pursuing his journalistic investigation of Wade Castle, aka Fort1. The account, which reminded Cole of the way the young officer had undressed his entire fighter squadron for its security lapses, led them deftly down a trail of sham corporations, silent partners, and finally to a seemingly beneficent organization known as the Melville Center for Reporting on Strategic and Military Affairs.

“I was told it was legit,” Steve protested. “And why the hell would IntelPro go to the trouble of setting up a whole network of bullshit companies just to give me an amount of money that to them is chump change?”

Riggleman, unruffled, was about to answer when Barb interrupted.

“Because you were a secondary recipient, an afterthought.” Everyone turned toward her. Her eyes were lit by the thrill of discovery. “Because all those damn companies he just mentioned—the Lane Corporation, the Melville Center, and every last one of their silent partners—has turned up in one way or another in the investment portfolios—the very lucrative investment portfolios—of all the officers in Captain Cole’s chain of command for Predator ops at Creech. Including your boss, Captain Riggleman—General Hagan. He’s right there in the IntelPro cesspool, too. The only link I couldn’t find was this Comstock Group you just mentioned. But that’s the one that ties everything together. And it ties in this Melville reporting foundation. Which sinks you, Steve.”

“I had no idea,” Steve said.

“Steve!” Barb admonished.

“None!”

“Steve! He has you dead to rights! And at some point they had to have told you. Otherwise it was pointless for them to do it. They wanted you to know who was paying the freight. It’s clear as can be. So give it up, okay?”

He opened his mouth to protest further, then stopped and slowly shook his head. Everyone realized without a further word that it was over. The fight went out of his eyes, and he slumped against the wall. Barb was probably the only one who was no longer watching him. Cole could tell by the distracted look on her face that she was still adding all these new pieces to the intricate edifice she’d constructed in the course of her research.

“Comstock,” she muttered again, looking at Riggleman. “That’s the keystone, the entity that binds it all. Damn good work.”

He nodded back, a bit pridefully, seeming gratified to at last be appreciated.

“Christ,” Sharpe exclaimed, the first words he’d spoken since Castle’s arrival. “You two should get married or something.”

The remark broke the ice, and the dynamic shifted. Even Castle smiled. Everyone did except Steve, who was now the outcast, the interloper. Cole’s old role. Castle went from person to person, cutting loose their plastic handcuffs. Then he turned back toward Steve.

“I’d appreciate if you’d hand over your cell phone for the duration,” he said. “And you won’t be leaving the premises until our work is done.”

This brought Steve momentarily back to life.

“What, I’m your prisoner now?”

“Let’s say it’s voluntary. But how ’bout handing over your phone all the same.”

Castle held out a hand. He didn’t brandish a gun, but everyone knew he still had one. Cole then voiced the conclusion that he figured everyone else was already thinking.

“You killed the guy in the woods the other night, didn’t you, Wade.”

“Had to. He was here to kill me.” Castle hadn’t taken his eyes off Steve. “Hand it over.”

Steve gave in. Who wouldn’t have, considering what they’d just heard?

“Smart man,” Castle said, pocketing the phone. He was about to say more when Steve made a last stand of sorts, a final argument before sentencing.

“IntelPro had a story to tell,” he said. “They thought I’d be interested. They also knew what kind of shape I was in. Financially, I mean. Rent, alimony, credit cards, everything overdue and maxed out. Three different magazines stiffing me on checks. So they told me about this new fellowship, said they’d put in a word for me at the foundation. Yeah, the foundation they’d just set up. I found out that part later. At the time it wasn’t exactly in my interest to ask too many questions. And when you don’t have a rich family, or a place like this to fall back on…” He glanced pointedly at Keira.

“This isn’t about me, Steve,” Keira said.

“I know that. And I know what I’ve done. But the only agreement I ever made was to keep them posted about what you guys were coming up with, and only in the most general terms. They just didn’t want to be blindsided. Otherwise I was fully independent to pursue any angle, and that’s what we were doing. I kept thinking, all the way up to the end, that I could find a way to make it work. For all of us.”

“Like with that worthless source of yours?”

“He wasn’t worthless. He knew shit.”

“Shit that always steered us away from IntelPro. And so did you. No wonder you fought so hard against using the drone. Mr. Ethics, supposedly. You must have felt like their last line of defense.”

“You’re wrong. If I’d wanted to stop it, all I had to do was call them.”

“How do we know you didn’t?” Sharpe asked.

“Stay the fuck out of this. It wasn’t like that at all. I still wanted—want—to get the story.”

“As long as it wasn’t a story with any angle that might make them ask you to give the grant money back,” Barb said.

Steve shook his head, but said nothing more. Barb stared him down, livid, until he lowered his head in apparent shame. Keira just looked sad. Cole felt bad for all of them.

Castle turned toward Cole, ready to move on.

“Riggleman says you got some sort of email from your old wingman the other day with archives galore. Learn anything?”

Now how the hell did he know that? Unless…

“You hacked the account?” he asked Riggleman.

The little captain allowed himself a smile. Victorious again on the cyberfront.

“It’s how he found you,” Castle said. “But that’s old news. The archives. Anything good?”

“First you owe us some answers,” Cole said. “Who’s the dead guy?”

“I’m sure you were already acquainted with him at some level. Harry Walsh.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Code name Lancer.”

That stopped him. He looked over at Sharpe, who stared back, mouth open. They shook their heads.

“Lancer?” Barb said. “The name Bickell mentioned?”

“He turned up on three of those missions on the transcripts. He was there on the ground, poking around for somebody, maybe even running the show.”

“The Tangora raid,” Castle said. “The one that blasted Engineer Haider to smithereens. He led me by the nose. His baby, start to finish.”

“Then why were you the one who showed up?” Barb said.

“Belated attempt at damage control. That’s when I started to realize that my own beacons—the whole Magic Dimes op—were being used against me. Or against competing private interests. IntelPro, sabotaging its competition. So I went on the warpath and off the reservation.”

“Couldn’t have gone too far off it. You were still in business for Sandar Khosh.”

“It’s complicated, and Bickell may have muddled some stuff in translation. You only know half the picture. I’d like to see what Lancer was up to on some of those transcripts.”

“Fine,” Cole said. “We can do that.”

“I’ve got questions, too,” Sharpe said. “About how much technology you Agency guys were sharing. I’ve been told you were giving away the store.”

“Not my doing, but, yeah, they made off with plenty. I just happened to be the most convenient person to blame. And now you’re planning to do what, go in there tomorrow with your own drone and sniff out what they’ve done with all their new toys?”

“Something like that.”

“Good. I’ve got a wish list of my own for some sites over there. But first we should compare notes.”

“Speaking of notes,” Riggleman said, “should we be letting her do that?”

He nodded toward Barb, who was scribbling at the speed of light. Cole couldn’t help but admire her. Even though she probably hadn’t yet added things up, she knew that every stray piece was important and was gathering them up while she had the chance.

“Take all the damn notes you want,” Castle said. “Those fuckers at IntelPro have been smearing my name for months, to the point where even half the Agency believes it. The truth, as the slogan says, will set me free. Scribble away.”

“Give her something decent, then,” Cole said, “starting with Lancer. Who the hell was he?”

“Not Harry Walsh. That was another code name. Kevin Wardlow. A freelance jack-of-all-trades. Ex-Agency, so he still had some friends in our shop, which he knew how to use. In Afghanistan, IntelPro was paying him to be their middleman with all the locals. He’s the guy who fixed it with Mansur to fuck up my beacons op, the whole Magic Dimes thing. Which wasn’t too damn hard for him to do. Mansur meant well, but couldn’t keep track of all the players. To him one American was just like another. So it became a matter of Lancer trying to keep Mansur out of contact with me and run him for his own uses. By any means necessary. That firefight on your recon mission near Charwala?”

“The recon that Zach and I fucked up?”

“Those were Lancer’s boys you were covering for. Your CO and your whole chain of command were in on it. U.S. air support for a gang of privateers.”

“Who’d they kill?”

“My guys. Locals, more privateers, but at least they were actually working for Uncle Sam.”

“And at the house? The one they raided?”

“Some low-value targets. IntelPro trying to make a name for itself. They’d have gone off half cocked after Osama himself, without a word to anybody official, if they’d had half a clue as to where he was hiding. Anything for a few scalps to pump up their value with the right people in Washington.”

Barb was writing so intently now that she was poking her tongue between her lips, as determined as Michael Jordan going in for a slam. Even Steve was paying attention, unable to turn off his journalistic curiosity, or perhaps his growing sense of horror as he realized what he’d been helping to hide and protect. Sharpe, too, was rapt, arms folded. Keira had a notebook out as well. So Cole kept pushing, trying to pry loose everything he could while Castle was in the mood.

“Sandar Khosh, what happened there?”

“I was trying to put an end to everything. Snuff out Mansur and the last of his beacons before he and Lancer did any more damage. I thought I had him when the truck arrived.”

“And the kids?”

“Knew they were his the second I saw them. It only confirmed for me that we had the right place. I didn’t like it that his family was there, but still…”

“Just collateral damage, huh?”

“Worth it if we stopped him. They had their own hit list, with only their own interests in mind. Mansur wasn’t evil, just an idiot. But idiots can fuck things up as much as anybody.”

“But it wasn’t even him. It was the wrong truck.”

“I saw that, but too late. I realized it as soon as we started looking through the wreckage.”

“One stripe, not two.”

“Exactly.”

“Then why did you have us keep poking around the wreckage? It was like you were obsessed.”

“I was looking for Mansur, for one thing. Still hoping against hope. But the beacon—I was looking for that, too. That was the weirdest part of the whole thing. About half an hour before the strike, I started getting a signal from the house. So afterward I was looking for it.”

“Talk about a needle in a haystack.”

“I know, but I was desperate. It was on chat, not voice, so you never would have known, but I was pulling my hair out, because the damn signal was still going, even after the strike. And, to make it weirder, it had changed locations slightly, just seconds before impact. From inside to outside. It only hit me later what must have happened.”

It hit Cole at that very moment.

“The girl,” he said. “Or one of her brothers. They must have been carrying it, or had it in their pocket.”

“She had it in her hand. The arm she lost. Later I went back again over the whole transcript, the whole damn video, and you can see it, just barely. Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but when you look closely there’s the slightest shine of something in her hand. This small piece of metal. She must have found it, thought it was some kind of coin, or trinket.”

“A toy,” Cole said, remembering now the odd words that Mansur had spoken among the jumble of his broken ramblings the other night on Pickard Street: “My children make toy. They make toy and it is ruin! Ruin!”

Keira had put a hand to her mouth, as if she’d just witnessed a terrible accident. Steve looked horrified. The only sound was the scratching of Barb’s pencil as she captured the last of Castle’s words for posterity.

Cole stepped over to a chair and sat down, letting the whole awful story settle around him like a mist. He knew he should keep asking questions, but for the moment he was stalled, unable to move forward. So Barb took over.

“So why did IntelPro move him? Mansur, I mean.”

“It was the only way to keep him away from me. After Sandar Khosh I put the word out that I wanted him alive, because I wanted to burn them. Find out everything he knew. They decided to burn me instead, by moving the evidence. Then they started pushing their cover story, to Steve, to guys like you. I was the fuckup, the bad apple, the disease that had to be exposed and then wiped out. And you bought it, all of you.”

“Why not just kill him?”

“Lancer wanted him alive. Figured his connections were too valuable, and they could use them later. So they brought him here. Trained him up for a while, right over at the facility, to make him more useful. The plan was to send him back overseas once they got me out of the way. But they couldn’t track me down, and once they got word I was stateside they must have decided to just use him as bait, lure me in, because they knew I still wanted him. It’s why they left him so out in the open in Baltimore. Then you guys blew his cover, so they brought him here and started working on Plan B.”

“Which was?”

“Bring in their freelance asset Lancer. Wait for me to come looking for you guys, then have him take me out.”

And they all knew how that had ended.

“What about you?” Cole asked. “Are you freelance now?”

“Not really. But I’m not Agency anymore. For the moment I’ve been reassigned.”

“FBI?” Barb asked. “Homeland Security?”

“An element of the national security apparatus that shall remain nameless. But it’s legal.”

“To a point that includes murder?”

“Self-defense isn’t murder. What’s important right now is that I think I know where they’re keeping Mansur in their thousand-acre wood. And with that drone of yours we can find him.” He turned to Sharpe. “Think you can squeeze me into your flight plan?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then let’s put our heads together, because in eight more hours we’re going to war.”