you love me.”
“I do.”
“You’ll just have to be your best with me dragging on your back.”
“No.”
Her eyes flash. “What is this ‘no’?”
“No, I won’t drag you on my back. You’re going to have to step up and be the tiger I know you have inside you.”
She sets her jaw, and when she looks up, her eyes fill with resolve. “I can be a tiger.”
“You’re going to have to kill more than a squirrel.”
“I will pull the trigger when I have to.”
“Then let’s find Lieutenant Decker.”
CHAPTER TEN
We backtracked through the four files we had on Spilatro, the four hits Archie assigned. And there it was. The connections between all those jobs that Risina and I and Archie himself had failed to catch. The first hit, the rich female English professor at Ohio State, had helped finance a PAC set up to block government land use for military training in Ohio. For the second, the TV reporter had been working on a story about bribes involving the top senator from Illinois. The unlucky bookkeeper in the third file had more than a few Washington clients on his ledgers. And the final file? The police detective in Boston? The one Carla helped knock over? He would’ve testified against two NSA officials who were caught with hookers and cocaine at the Intercontinental in downtown Boston if he hadn’t slipped on the ice and had such an untimely accident. All Spilatro kills… all with government ties. And the fact that all those deaths looked like accidents was the icing on the cake. If they had looked like actual hits, actual assassinations, there would have been inquiries, scandal, attention paid. The dark men wanted these issues to disappear, not become headlines. Spilatro’s killing style was perfect for these kinds of jobs.
I wonder if Archie knew he was a patsy for the government, and to what degree he was playing ball. I wonder if he slipped and accidentally gave Spilatro my name, or Spilatro discovered it and then sought out Archie, worked his way inside. Used Kirschenbaum to make himself available to Archie, then worked a few government jobs for him to gain trust. I wonder how extensive the Agency is involved in the private killing business and how many of my assignments over the years were actually financed by taxpayers.
Finally, I look up the light rail accident in Cleveland, the one Carla claims to have discovered in her basement, the one where a section of the rail collapsed, killing the 14 passengers on board. Sure enough, three of the passengers worked for a top Defense contractor, McKnight International. Why the government wanted them dead, and what contract that helped to close, I have no idea.
But Spilatro works for Uncle Sam and has been all along, I’m now sure of it.
It takes her a week in DC. I remain uncertain on whether or not she’s capable of shooting a man in the head, but as a researcher, she’s extraordinary. This is an Ivy League-educated woman who built an impressive rare book collection by carefully researching titles, cross-referencing sources, compiling lists of potential dealers, wooing and cajoling and nudging reluctant sellers while she gathered the best information first, so she could swoop in and procure a title before her competition knew there was a deal to be made. My mistake, I’m beginning to realize, was grooming Risina to do what I do, to be a contract killer. I’ve been working with a natural fence the whole time.
She won’t need to blend in, to hide in plain sight; in fact, she can use her beauty to secure what she needs, to make men want to help her. She can use an arrow I don’t have in my quiver: she can be wholly unthreatening.
She made an appointment with the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs at the Pentagon, posing as a freelance journalist. With the Presidential initiative for a more transparent government coupled with the Freedom of Information Act and countless journalistic precedents, it wasn’t difficult for Risina to gain access to enlistment records. She charmed the ASOD as she explained she was writing a heartwarming article on Desert Storm veterans who had parlayed their time in the service into high-end jobs. So much of what is reported in the mainstream media focuses on the negative, she told him-the combat fatigue, the stress disorders, the disabilities- she was hoping to chronicle the positive effects on veterans who served their country well and made something of their lives after their tour of duty, using the skills they learned in the military to achieve civilian success. The assistant secretary damn near threw his spine out of alignment bending over backward to help her.
Roland Deckman, aka “Decker,” and Aaron Spittrow, aka “Spilatro,” both joined the army in 1988. Like I said, most hit men aren’t too imaginative when they come up with their killing names, and Risina made short work of spotting two similar names in the same unit. They entered the 24th ID out of Fort Stewart, Georgia, one of the first units deployed to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 1990. When the Gulf War began, the 24th faced some of the fiercest resistance in the entire campaign, running up against the 6th Mechanized Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. They still managed to capture the airfields at Jabbah and Tallil. Deckman and Spittrow worked as infantry grunts, nothing unusual in their service records.
The ASOD apologized to Risina profusely, but contact information on Deckman and Spittrow was sketchy following their military service. They both were honorably discharged in 1992, and where most soldiers would at least have a few files of contact and discharge information, those files seemed to be missing for Deckman and Spittrow. Risina asked if there was contact information from before they joined the army.
The ASOD smiled. That, he had. At least for one of them.
Northville, Michigan is a quiet slice of suburbia outside of Detroit, with modest homes peppered around mansions. Although many neighborhoods in Detroit look as though they’ve been abandoned and forgotten, Northville could just as easily be situated outside Kansas City, Chicago, or Dayton. It is filled with regular folks making livings and raising families. Roland Deckman grew up here before he joined the army.
We drove straight to Michigan, taking shifts behind the wheel. Risina spent enough time driving in the States when she was in college that she isn’t intimidated by the width of our highways. In fact, she handled our sedan like it was primed for the Indy 500.
“Do you know what the fastest car in the world is?” she asked as we blasted through Ohio.
“What?”
“A rental car.”
Well, at least her jokes have gotten better.
It’s warm and rainy when we arrive, the kind of summer shower unique to Michigan that blows down like hell for fifteen minutes before it exhausts itself and retreats out to the lake.
We sit outside Deckman’s parents’ house. He’s now a government assassin, I’m sure of it, a breed of animal I’ve been fortunate to avoid until recently. He’s had training I’ve never had, supplies I can only dream of, access to targets that must be facilitated by entire teams of personnel and equipment, and a get-out-of-jail-free card that removes half the worry of making a kill.
But does he secretly despise his job? Does he question the political motivations behind his assignments? Does he rely too heavily on the system? Do his fortunes change with each new administration? And does this cement his loyalty to his friend Spilatro over his loyalty to his employers?
The real question, the only question that matters: is he a tiger?
No, I haven’t had to worry about government hitters until now, until they sought me out, forced me back in when I was content enough to ride out my days in obscurity.
We sip coffee and wait for the rain to die.
“Decker’s our key. He’s who we’re going to trade for Archie and how we’re going to get them off me.”
“What makes you think Spilatro or Spittrow, or whatever his name is, will be more willing to deal for Decker than Carla?”
“Because these cover stories people tell are mostly lies but always have moments of truth. I think Decker has been Spilatro’s friend and fellow soldier for twenty-plus years. I think they were already working jobs together when they were in the service. I think Decker went to the CIA first and rescued Spilatro from a dead-end life of middle- management and that formed a bond that is unbreakable.
“I could be wrong. He could mean nothing to Spilatro. But he helped him pull off that fake hit to fool his wife.
