Patrick Quinlan - The Hit

‘Yeah.’

‘All right. Keep on it. I’ll be home in a few hours.’

‘I’m on it.’

Gant rang off and trotted up the steps into the plane. He took his seat as the flight attendant pulled the door closed and locked it airtight. He cinched his seat belt as the woman took her fold out seat near the door of the cockpit. The engines roared into life, and without further ado, the plane taxied into position for takeoff. These guys were in a hurry to get out of here. Gant settled back, closed his eyes and relaxed himself as the plane accelerated down the bumpy runway and then left the ground. He took several deep breaths as they went into a steep ascent. Later, when they leveled off, he opened his eyes. Out the window he saw huge, white puffy clouds. Only then did he begin thinking again.

Jesus, that Foerster thing was bad news. This business was about knowing people. It was about relationships, and he was beginning to think the relationship with Foerster was not a good one to have. It wasn’t the first time he’d had these thoughts. In fact, he had it on good authority that his relationship with Foerster should have ended after just a brief fling.

Gant had once known a man named Monty. Monty was restless, a mover, and an adventurer. He had his fingers in a lot of different pies. He was the only man Gant had ever met who wore a handlebar mustache – it gave him the effect of being a man out of time, a museum piece catapulted from the 1800s into the present day. Gant half-expected Monty to pull up on a bicycle with an enormous front tire, instead of the vintage Corvette he normally drove.

Monty was gone now, turned up dead in the Amazon more than a year ago, in the nearly lawless border region where Colombia, Peru and Brazil all met. They found his body in an alley behind a bar in Leticia, Colombia. What he was doing there was never explained by anybody. In fact, the only reason Gant knew he was dead was because one morning when he slid behind the wheel of his car, a small newspaper clipping to that effect from The Toledo Blade was taped to his dashboard. It turned out Montgomery Blaine was born and raised just outside Toledo, and still had parents there. A small handwritten note was taped to the dash along with the clipping.

He would have wanted you to know.

It gave Gant the creeps sometimes, to think of the people who must be watching him. Whoever they were, they must approve of, or at least not care about, Gant’s more unsavory activities. Still, it wasn’t a good feeling to have those eyes following his moves.

In any case, Monty was the one who had given him Foerster. It was during the lead up to the anthrax job, more than two years ago now. Certain people were feeling Gant out about it. Could it be done, take out two Illinois state senators at the same time, in a government office building in Chicago? The key here was that the two good liberal senators, a man and a woman, both very powerful in state politics, shouldn’t look like they were specifically targeted. And whoever took them out either had to escape completely, or know nothing of the reason or the people behind the attack.

Taken as an intellectual exercise, Gant said yes, he thought maybe it could be done. There’d have to be collateral damage to cover up the purpose of the attack, and that meant innocent people would have to die. Also, a bomb wouldn’t work because you’d never get it past security and into the building. But an airborne biological agent in the ventilation system – highly concentrated, highly virulent anthrax, for instance – that might do the trick.

OK, his audience said, but could he, Gant, pull it off?

He wasn’t sure, even then, if the job was for real. Maybe it was just some people blowing off steam by fantasizing about something they wanted to see done, or might want to see done. Maybe it was a set-up, a sting, someone somewhere had been turned by the government, and the FBI was listening to every word. Gant didn’t know. In fact, even now, he still wasn’t sure. But at the time, despite the uncertainties, he decided to treat it as if it were real. If it were a sting, then he was looking at a lot of time, possibly the rest of his life, in prison. But he took the gamble anyway. Fortune favors the bold.

‘I need a microbiologist,’ he said to Monty one evening. They were walking, as they often did, among the Friday night crowds in downtown Charleston. They moved along streets lined with multimillion-dollar pre-Civil War homes into Battery Park, where the breeze off the harbor and the chatter from the gawkers would surely thwart any attempt to listen to their conversation.

‘A microbiologist?’ Monty said. ‘I didn’t suspect Tyler Gant even possessed a word that long in his vocabulary. That’s a six syllable word. What, pray tell, do you need one of those for?’

‘That’s classified. But I need a good one. And I need him or her to have a certain, shall we say, moral flexibility.’

Monty became serious, as he always did when he realized that Gant wasn’t kidding around, or that an opportunity had presented itself. ‘It could cost you some money, finding a person like that.’

‘I’m prepared to pay money.’

Monty nodded. ‘Let me see what I can do.’

The next conversation took place a month later in the parking lot of a closed rest area off the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway in West Virginia. It seemed like a long way to go to have a chat, but Monty insisted on it. They parked their cars about fifty yards apart. Gant walked across the asphalt to the rental sedan Monty leaned against. The pavement was cracked and broken. The rest area itself was high up in the mountains. The view of the valley far below and to the west was wide open. You could forget to breathe while looking at it. The view south along the ridgeline was probably the purple mountain’s majesty the children used to sing about. The wind howled incessantly, and immediately Gant knew why Monty had picked this place to talk.

Gant glanced only once at the rest area building – in some distant past it had been home to bathrooms and maybe a restaurant or gift shop. It was boarded up now. One of the wooden boards that covered the front doorway had been pried open a crack. Gant peered at the darkness between the board and wall – it wasn’t out of the question that people were living in there. It wasn’t out of the question that vampires lived in there. It looked like a place where they would hide out in the daytime.

Monty had a single sheet of paper in a manila folder. Neatly typed on the page was a name, an address and a telephone number. That was all.

‘Davis Foerster,’ Monty said, his voice just barely audible above the wind. ‘The CIA has been watching him from the time he was fourteen. He won a prize from the National Science Foundation that year, for a project that demonstrated ways of accelerating the growth of cancer cells. The following year he jumped to computer science and won another national contest, this time for a paper arguing that in our lifetimes, artificial intelligence would become smarter than man, and would bind all the networked computers in the world together into a single, hyper-intelligent entity that would quickly make humanity obsolete. This entity would then go on to use the available computing capacity on earth to unlock the secrets of the universe.’

‘The CIA?’ Gant said. ‘You work for the CIA?’

‘I work with all kinds of people.’

‘For the job I’m thinking of, I’m not sure a CIA man will do.’

Monty shook his head. ‘As far as I know, the CIA has never touched Foerster. They were interested in him and that’s all. They did a psychological assessment on him. What you have to understand is this guy is eight different kinds of bad news. He’s unstable, from an abusive upbringing. He’s considered deeply neurotic and possibly delusional. He’s consumed by rage and feelings of powerlessness and persecution. He’s been in and out of various facilities, juvenile detention and mental hospitals, for the past seven or eight years. His first stay in juvie came when he was sixteen – a group of ten-year-olds were outside his window taunting him, so he went outside and sliced one of them up with a razor blade.