Dan Fesperman - Unmanned

“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!”