Goldie walked out with a wooden spoon that was nearly two feet long, the spindle as thick as Rob’s thumb.
“She takes her spoons seriously,” Gorman noted.
“You have no idea, Senor,” Luis said so dryly that, when everybody cracked up, he just sat there confused.
Steven leaned over and explained it quietly. Luis turned red in the face, then he too was laughing so hard tears were running down his cheeks.
“You should go play Xbox little man,” Rob told Harry. “I’ll be in with your mother soon.”
“Yes sir,” Harry said, grabbing his coke. Rob nodded in approval, so Harry took off as fast as he could without spilling it.
“The fuck is everybody looking at? You slack jawed asswipes? You all let that fucking dog eat my spoon! Wait, where is Anna?”
“I think she went to check the front gate,” Luis lied smoothly.
Goldie started swearing so inventively that Korey actually got out a notebook and started making notes. Neither agent had ever had a dinner like this one in their entire lives and one way or another, it was a night that neither would forget. Korey also made a note at the bottom of the sheet to check out the details of Winters’ death, and if she had made any phone calls they could trace and see if the NSA had any details of who she had talked with, or any recordings of the conversation.
He circled that last bit, then put his notebook back in his pocket. The ribs were good, the beer was cold, and the company was amusing. The blonde woman with the wild curls caught his eye and she tilted her beer bottle his way in cheers. He clinked his with hers. He thought it was Rob’s big sister, or maybe aunt? He couldn’t remember. The day was turning into night and he, for the first time in the last few years, was having fun.
Thirty-Five
Doc Khamenei was not amused. The riot that him and his team were not able to do anything about, did not help the situation. In fact, they’d gotten hurt worse. Khamenei, not that it was his real name, had gotten burned by a molotov. The NSA should have been listening to the chatter on social media, but he suspected that what had started out on one platform had moved to an encrypted messaging service like Signal.
In all, half the camp had escaped and the majority of the staff there, conscripted or not, were injured in some manner. The lid was off, and the genie was out of the bottle. Hundreds of protestors from the outside had shown up with cell phones and GoPros, and had live streamed it. Unknown to Khamenei and the group at the farm, the public was starting to wise up to the media suppression.
His work in the area was almost done. He’d been sent into a problem area to fix a sticky situation and things had spiraled out of control completely. He didn’t have proof that the farm was involved in the mass escape and riot, but he suspected. For one, that little spitfire Angelica had escaped without a trace, and had showed up days later back at the farm. It was way too far for her to have walked, and although he knew somebody could have picked her up, or she had hitchhiked, he doubted it.
The depression in the earth and the discarded camo netting had all but proven it to him. Somebody, probably Robert Little, had laid in waiting. He’d timed everybody’s comings and goings, and taken advantage of the protest to get Angelica out. It made him seethe. He’d botched jobs, but this one now had the eyeballs of Washington looking right at him. He’d been put on loan to the USDA for a couple of specific outcomes, and none of them had happened.
The agents in the county where the Langtry farm operated were afraid to lose their jobs, and the redistribution of supplies and people had slowed or stopped altogether. The tar and feathering of agents had sent a chilling message. Khamenei had wished they had been sworn to silence and the failure was one of the reasons he'd killed Kendricks. For his failure, for embarrassing them, and because he’d been ordered to.
His new orders weren’t a surprise. They were an extension of his old orders: fix the situation. There wasn’t an ‘or else’ specified, but his contact had mentioned him getting a little long in the tooth and perhaps being retired. Khamenei knew that being retired didn’t mean he’d be able to get fruity drinks with umbrellas in them in a tropical paradise, it meant one day he’d wake up with a gun in his face when he was least expecting it.
He briefly thought about flying to Washington and retiring his handler, but only for a second. That’d be stupid. The military industrial complex and the shadow government that the president called ‘The Deep State’ had more reach than the United States Government, and far fewer scruples. So, he’d scrapped that idea, and had returned to the west side of the state to the mobile center where some of the agents who could be trusted were talking to drone controllers and getting up to date intel.
Rob had to go, but he really needed to wipe out the entire group. The two large dogs weren’t a concern, some poisoned meat or a suppressed .22 usually did the job. It was all about shot placement. The part that worried Khamenei was that the group had been putting up more and more sensors. The other large worry was that Governor Tom Christian had made his escape. He was supposed to have been dead, but the powers that be had wanted him alive to be used as leverage against his aide.
His assistant had ended up winning the day after all. She was good with computers the way Jordan
