out at the harbor with eyes unpolluted by unnatural light.
He puts his spittoon in the appropriate place by the card table and is about to help himself to a little something at the bar when he jumps about a foot in the air.
“Where the hell did you come from!”
“Oh, sorry, our bad.”
Bart and Bert, better known as the B brothers, the fraternal twins who work on the domestic drone program. Couple of local woodchucks, like to put on their countrified Down East accents. Ayuh, bubba, flannel shirts and logger boots, the whole bit. Normally Gatling finds the brothers amusing company, but this is beyond the pale, walking into the boss’s private club, his personal refuge, it just isn’t done. He’s about to say so, striking the right tone of executive aggrievement, when he recalls locking and bolting the door to the boathouse. Of course he did, so his pals, his posse, wouldn’t be tempted to drop by, despite his admonition not to. Which means the brothers must have jimmied the lock somehow, and that means-
Gatling feels the tip of a blade against his sternum and looks down to see the glint of a deer-gutting knife. “Bart? What’s going on?”
“Nothing to worry about, boss. By the way, it’s Bert.”
“Fine. Bert. What’s that your brother’s got?”
The other brother has a bulky black velvet sack slung from his shoulder. It’s not so dark that he can’t see they’re both smiling at his predicament, the damned ignorant woodchucks. Gatling has a small but distinct sense of what might have brought them here, and he’s confident he can work things to his advantage, given his powers of persuasion and his unlimited checkbook.
“Sorry about the interruption,” Bert says. “Me and Bart, we’re here to give you notice.”
“Give me notice?”
“We got signed by another club, just like ballplayers,” Bart says proudly, speaking up for the first time. He shifts the sack on his shoulder, at ease with himself and whatever it is he’s doing.
“Supposed to be a secret,” Bert confides. “But it can’t hurt to tell a guy like you, with all your connections. The DIA, and they gave us a signing bonus, too.”
“Defense Intelligence? What unit?”
“One you never heard of, because it’s like ultra-ultra secret and brand-new.”
“Oh, I seriously doubt that. Not that you’ve been offered jobs, no, no, that makes sense, a couple of talented boys like you, but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts I know the unit.”
“He’s betting us donuts, Bert.”
“Ayuh. We like donuts.”
The lightness of the exchange convinces Gatling that he can turn them, and he’s deciding what, exactly, to offer the brothers when Bert bumps a chair into the back of his knees, forcing him to sit down.
“Sorry, Mr. Gatling, you’re a cool guy and everything, but you messed up wicked, that’s what they told us.”
Gatling’s spit has dried up but he manages to ask, “How so?”
“We don’t know exactly. Above our pay grade. But something Kidder did. Some files he sent to this certain web address at the Pentagon? Got a lot of very powerful folks all agitated. Decisions got made. And the result is, we got signed by the new unit.”
“Boys, I’ve got more money than God. You can have it all. Most of it.”
Bert grins. “Keep back just a tiny little for yourself, huh?”
His brother Bart unslings the sack from his shoulder, loosens the drawstring and removes a shotgun. Even in the dark Gatling recognizes the weapon and knows what it means. A little squirt of urine wets his underpants and he clenches, telling himself he’s better than this, he won’t soil himself.
“This is the exact same Purdey your dad used,” Bart says. “Kind of sad.”
“You really expect me to shoot myself?”
“No,” says Bart. “But we can make it look that way.”
They do.
Chapter Sixty-One
Okay, here’s how I feel about what went down. If only I’d pulled the trigger a heartbeat sooner and a little more to the right. Jack says I shouldn’t let myself think that way, but I can’t help it. Just because Kathy Mancero died doing a great good thing doesn’t make it right that she’s no longer in the world. I mean, it’s a miracle that she managed to save both Joey and Shane, and maybe me, too, because it turns out that Robert James Killdeer had been trained as a sniper, and was notably adept with a pistol, and as you know, I’m not and probably never will be.
That was Kidder’s real name, Robert James Killdeer, and there’s ample indication that he was employed by Gatling Security Group, although no direct evidence, none that we can find, proving that Taylor Gatling, Jr., personally knew what Killdeer was up to within the company. Before he took his own life, apparently out of shame for what he’d allowed to happen, Gatling claimed that both the kidnapping of Joey Keener and the execution of Jonny Bing were parts of a rogue operation directed by Killdeer alone. Everything in the records points that way. That’s the maddening thing. Gatling may be gone, but the company lives on, doing pretty much what they’ve been doing all along. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about that. The Pentagon is the Pentagon and money is money, and Naomi says I just have to accept the fact that some things can’t be fixed, because justice, like humanity itself, is never perfect.
All we can do, she says, is the best we can. Which brings me back to me missing my shot and Kathy sacrificing herself. Shane thinks it means something that she died with a smile on her lips, secure in the knowledge that Joey was safe, but I’m not convinced. Dead is dead. I wish I believed in heaven the way Kathy Mancero obviously did, but I don’t. If God wants to pay me a visit, explain how all the bad and terrible things in the world are part of the cosmic plan, the door is always open, and I’m willing to listen. Until then, I’ll stick with believing the greatest miracle of all is life itself, and hope that will be enough to sustain me.
Just so you know, Kathy had made her wishes known to an estate lawyer in Olathe, Kansas, and her ashes are to be scattered over a playground in Kansas City, where she and little Stacy had happy times. Shane has promised to make it happen, even though there’s some ordinance about remains being dispensed in public places. We all figure any kid that comes in contact with a molecule of Kathy Mancero will be the better for it, no matter what the rules say.
As to the Randall Shane legal situation, that gets a little more complicated every day. He’s been released, no longer an active suspect in Professor Keener’s murder, but may eventually face charges for escaping from custody, should D.A. Tommy Costello be willing to endure the bad publicity for punishing a genuine American hero. For the moment, the million-dollar bond remains in effect, which, as Dane Porter says, tends to concentrate the mind, meaning we have to tie up the loose ends.
It’s great-fabulous-that Joey has been reunited with Ming-Mei-believe me, there wasn’t a dry eye when that little scene unfolded, but the question of who killed who, and why, is still up for grabs. Naomi has strong views on the matter, but the D.A. has yet to sign off on the theory that the man who ordered the hit on Professor Joseph Keener was, in all probability, the late Jonny Bing himself. Turns out-and this was well hidden, so deep that even Teddy had trouble finding it-Mr. Bing’s entire fortune was in peril. On paper he was still a billionaire twice over, but it turns out Jonny was obsessed with chasing higher-than-normal interest rates and had invested hundreds of millions in offshore certificates of deposit with Sir Allen Stanford, the Texas swindler and cricketer, and when all the phony dust settled, Jonny Bing came up close to empty. For the last year or so the lucrative development contracts for QuantaGate had been his only source of revenue, and the prospect of the company admitting defeat and closing up shop may have been more than he could face. Maybe he was desperate enough to kill a man he undoubtedly had once called a friend. Or maybe his fellow travelers in the Chinese espionage business, who had helped him snare Keener in the first place, decided to end his involvement in single-gated photon communication, the impossible-to-
