John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

Jonathan turned the vehicle around in the driveway and backed into the garage where Niles Decker was waiting for him. Even through high school, the guy had been a clotheshorse. Now that his business required a certain formality, he was never seen without an expensive suit. Today it was navy blue, with a crisp white shirt and a wildly patterned tie. Short and stocky, he didn’t fit the Ichabod Crane archetype of an undertaker, but his bloodline had evolved itself out of a sense of humor.

“Hello, Niles,” Jonathan said as he climbed out of his vehicle. The roll-up door was already on its way down.

“Good morning, Jon.” The Digger nickname was a product of Jonathan’s Army years, but even though most of the people he knew had taken it on, Niles’s sense of propriety would never allow it. He stood aside as Jonathan opened the trunk and displayed his cargo. “The plastic lining is a nice touch,” he said. “Good of you to be prepared.”

Jonathan didn’t bother to explain that the preparations were not his. It wasn’t the undertaker’s business, and he undoubtedly wouldn’t care.

“Dare I ask what these gentlemen did to deserve their fate?”

“They tried to shoot me,” Jonathan said.

“When will people learn?” Niles unbuttoned his suit coat and placed it on a hanger that dangled from a hook next to a closet near the door to the inside. From the closet itself he withdrew two rubberized long-sleeved aprons. He offered one to Jonathan. “Would you mind helping with the transfer?”

Jonathan took the apron and pulled the collar over his head. “Not at all.” He slipped his arms into the sleeves.

Niles next pulled open a cabinet that sat next to the closet, revealing a stack of disaster pouches-the civilized term for body bags. He removed two, then took a minute to spread them open just so on the concrete floor. Finally, the cabinet produced two pairs of rubber gloves, the kind you’d use to wash dishes in very hot water.

“Do we have names?” Niles asked as they hefted the one whose mangled head sprouted blond hair.

“Not yet,” Jonathan said. “I didn’t realize that would be important to you.”

Niles shot him a disapproving look. “Some of us are disturbed by the things we occasionally must do.”

Jonathan held the body’s head and shoulders, and as they closed to within inches of the floor, he let go, allowing the corpse to fall. “So long as you’re disturbed, Niles. That’s important. Just not disturbed enough to stop doing it.”

Niles found the zipper tab near the corpse’s feet, and he pulled it closed. “If I could, I would.”

Jonathan let it go and turned his attention to the second body. Again, he had the heavy half. Niles no more had the balls to stop disposing of bodies than Jonathan had an inclination to deal with the undertaker’s other illicit customers.

The mechanism of disposal could not have been simpler or more reliable. When dead people are on display in a funeral home, that thin mattress they lie on is suspended by nylon webbing, not unlike the webbing used in folding lawn furniture. By adjusting the height of the webbing, the mortician can position skinny corpses and fat corpses at just the right height relative to the edges of the casket. The dirty little secret that Niles Decker’s father had discovered and passed along to his son was that the void created by the webbing was the perfect place to stash an additional body. Inside a sealed body bag, there’d be no stink, and with all the bedding in place, the hitchhiking corpse would be invisible. As for the extra weight, everybody just wrote that off to a heavy casket.

Thanks to the Deckers, more than a few graves in Westmoreland County were double occupied.

“How long before these two are in the ground?” Jonathan asked.

“By tonight,” Niles said. “We have two events this afternoon, and I’ll see to it that they’re a part of it.”

“I appreciate that,” Jonathan said. He waited as Niles disappeared back into the building and returned with first one gurney and then another. He helped lift the bodies onto the carts. “You need more help than that?” he asked.

“I can take it from here,” Niles said.

Jonathan could see that the emotional burden of being a mob cleanup man was beginning to crush him. “Hey, Niles?”

The man turned.

“These are the guys who shot up Resurrection House yesterday.” It was close enough to the truth not to be a lie. If they weren’t the ones who did the shooting, then they were close associates. “Don’t shed any tears for them.”

The food court in Pentagon City Mall was like every other food court in every city in the world. The same pizza, the same Chinese food, the same burgers. One thing that set it apart, Brandy thought, was its location on the bottom floor. Weren’t most such places on the top floor of major malls? It made sense here, though, because the Pentagon City Metro Station was only a couple hundred footsteps away. Located between the stops for the Pentagon and Crystal City, it was the perfect spot for meeting like this.

For 10:30 on a weekday morning, Brandy thought the food court was unusually busy-not that she had any current frame of reference. SecDef had his own personal chef, and as special assistant, those perks extended to Brandy as well, free of charge. When five-star food was available for free, why would she ever dine outside the E-Ring if she didn’t have to?

In order not to draw attention as she waited, Brandy sipped a Starbucks latte and nibbled on a cinnamon scone that tasted like sugared sawdust. Every bite needed to be chased with a sip of coffee to keep it from turning to concrete in her mouth. As a security hedge, she’d chosen a seat in the middle of the sea of identical white tables, figuring it would be far harder to sneak up on her. You don’t make your living tying up these kinds of loose ends without developing a healthy paranoia.

The personal meetings were a necessary evil. Every phone call into and out of the Pentagon was a matter of public record-if not the what, then certainly the who. It had been that way for as long as there’d been phones, she supposed, but previous administrations had never learned the lesson that was first etched in marble during Nixon years: Every electronic trail will trace directly back to the thing that you want most to keep secret. She could have handed over her cell phone number, she supposed, but she didn’t relish the likes of Jerry Sjogren knowing more about her life than he already did.

That left face-to-face meetings like this one. If nothing else, the shopping mall felt like familiar ground.

She spotted Sjogren when he was still on the escalator heading down, but she didn’t make eye contact. She dared just a brief glance, during which she noted that he was likewise avoiding any sign of recognition. This was the way the game always was played, though she didn’t understand why. Since they were going to be sitting together anyway, she thought it might make more sense to smile and wave like they were lovers.

Actually, no one would believe that. Jerry was easily fifty years old, and he was built like a bear. Thick gray hair covered his head, his ears, and his upper lip, and when he spoke he sounded like someone doing a disrespectful parody of a New England accent, complete with the nasal “ah” sound where there should have been an “are.” Although he was quick to laugh and grandfatherly in his demeanor, there was no doubting after two minutes of conversation that Jerry Sjogren was capable of all the things he was hired to do.

Brandy waited till his shadow loomed before she looked up from her scone. “You don’t look like a man bringing good news,” she said.

Sjogren helped himself to the opposite seat and leaned his forearms on the table heavily enough to make it shift. “There’s rarely ‘good’ news in this line of work,” he said. “If you know what I mean.” This was his grandfatherly side, patronizing at its roots. He somehow pulled it off without insulting her. “But in this case, it’s worse than it otherwise might be.”