Derek Haas - Dark men

“I think so.”

She nods. “Why him?”

“I think he went to them with my name.”

“You think Archie gave you up?”

I chew on the inside of my lower lip, and a new idea takes shape in my head.

“I don’t believe so… I think there’s a second explanation.”

“Give it to me.”

“What if these dark men work for the government? The CIA?”

“And…”

“And Spilatro was a soldier.”

“So?”

“So… what if he never left the military?”

We pull into a Hampton Inn somewhere outside the Berkshires. I switch cars at a used car lot, paying too much but not enough for the salesman to remember us. I choose a room at the inn on the first floor, in a corner with two windows and an outside door nearby in case we need to split in a hurry. I may not be all the way where I was three years ago, but I’m starting to take the smoothness off the edges.

After we make some bad coffee in the four-cup maker provided by the inn, Risina and I take a moment to sit and rest and think.

“You have that look in your eye.”

“What do you mean?”

“That same look you gave me that last day in our house before we headed to the US. You look like you want me to leave.”

“We’re entering new territory here. I’ve spent my professional life in a world I understand. A world of outlaws. Government agents are a separate entity entirely. They have resources I don’t have, access I can’t imagine. We have to work around the law… they break laws with impunity.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re in this together until the end. Spilatro knows about me. He’s probably known about me since we landed in Chicago.”

I nod. She’s right.

“If you tried to take care of this on your own, he’d find me and use me against you. There’s no sending me away. No hiding me somewhere. If you’re not watching me, then you won’t know I’m safe. And he’ll compromise you at a point when it’ll matter.”

I keep nodding.

“I love you. I’ll do whatever you tell me at this point. If you tell me to run, I’ll run. If you tell me to hide, I’ll do it. I’ll wait for you to come back to me. But it’s not the smart play, as you call it. He knows about me, and he knows 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.”

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.