Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

I could fire the weapon safely, because I knew to eject the first round before pulling the trigger. For anyone else it would be a nasty and perhaps fatal surprise.

I scrolled the map down and left and enlarged it. She looked over and held her finger over a small town, Carlinville, not tapping it. I nodded and we studied it for a second, and then turned off the map, and resumed talking about Steven Spielberg.

Interstate 55 had the cruise lane, so we took less than half an hour to get down to the Carlinville exit. Meanwhile I fiddled with her iPak and found out that Carlinville once had more houses ordered from the Sears catalog than anyplace else in the country, and was once the home of the woman H. G. Wells called “the most intelligent woman in America.” I passed that morsel on to Kit, and she said, “We just have to stop there and pay our respects.”

We passed by a small park in the middle of town; she looked at me and I nodded. Parked a block away and walked back, picking up a couple of ice cream cones on the way. We could watch the car from the park, in case somebody tried to put a dead body or an H-bomb in the trunk.

There was a bench in the shade of a tree next to a playground area. The kids were raising all kinds of hell. I spoke quietly.

“None of this makes any difference if they have a microphone up my ass.”

“I would have felt it.” She smiled. “Here’s my logic: I think they do have a device in or on your body, which they can track for location. But not listening.”

“Which ‘they’ are we talking about?”

“Does it make any difference now? Them versus us. But I don’t think it’s a listening device or a video bug, if we’re talking about Agent Blackstone and his gang. If they’d been listening to us, they’d know you’re innocent.”

I nodded. “Unless they think we think we’re being listened to all the time. Saying things to avert suspicion.”

“Yeah, but how far down that rabbit hole do you want to go? Blackstone being manipulated to feed us lines?”

I took his card out of my shirt pocket. Nothing fancy: plain picture, not a holo; James “Pepper” Blackstone, Analyst, Domestic Terrorism, Department of Homeland Security.

I held it up to my mouth. “Hello? Jimmy boy?”

“He probably likes to be called ‘Pepper.’”

I studied the card. “You know, you’re right. This has to stop somewhere. Blackstone didn’t know where the gun had come from. They didn’t have time to set up some damned phony scene in a gun shop in Des Moines.”

“Okay.”

“So that means someone who wasn’t working for them set me up. Nobody who buys a weapon in a gun shop doesn’t know he’s on Candid Camera . They got somebody who looks kind of like me.”

“What about the driver’s license?”

“That is a problem. The feds can’t get past that because they lack one crucial piece of evidence that I have: I do know I wasn’t there. Nobody did some voodoo crap and made me drive to Des Moines and buy a fucking gun!

“It’s simple. Someone hacked the god-damned system. If someone can program it, someone else can program around it. The ID dot on your license really boils down to a string of ones and zeros. Somebody got ahold of my string and put it in the system.”

“How?”

I had to laugh. “ I don’t know! I’m not a fucking criminal!”

She put a finger on my arm. A woman on the other side of the play area was staring at me with a cross expression. No doubt a prissy G-man in drag.

I lowered my voice again. “Let’s just assume as a starting point that Blackstone is what he says he is. Tonight when we stop, we’ll write him a long e-mail with chapter and verse, everything that’s happened. ‘Here it is, take it or leave it.’ Even if they think I’m lying, at least it’ll go into my dossier. In case.”

“In case you die, you mean.”

“Well, yeah.” I started to frame something sarcastic to say but it evaporated on my lips. In that dappled noisy playground she was trembling, and looked like she was about to burst into tears.

“Sometimes I forget,” she said. “People trying to kill you is not a new thing.”

“Yeah. Me, too. I forget.”

But not really. Not ever.

James “Pepper” Blackstone, M.S.

Analyst

Domestic Terrorism Working Group

Department of Homeland Security

800 East Monroe Street

Springfield, IL 62701-1099

Dear Agent Blackstone:

This is just to put down on paper some of the things we said, and perhaps forgot to say, when we spoke with you at your office May 18th, this afternoon.

For the record, I, Christian “Jack” Daley, have no active connection with the U.S. (or any other) government, except for monthly disability checks from the Veterans Administration, and occasional medical examinations there. I have never been employed by the government in any way other than the straightforward, if unwilling, relationship I had with the Selective Service Commission and the U.S. Army: I was drafted and then chose to “volunteer for the draft,” as the official language has it: I was told that I could get a better assignment that way, and still serve only two years, after training.

Whether my eventual assignment as a sniper was actually “better” than whatever would have happened to me, if it had been left up to chance, is not relevant anymore. I served out my time as a sniper in Operation Desert Freeze, and was wounded and given the usual handful of medals, and came home.

I was subsequently diagnosed with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and have gone to the Iowa City VA Hospital off and on for medication and talk therapy.

(I don’t dispute the diagnosis, but would like to repeat my opinion here, that anyone who has had the experience of being a soldier, killing people, and being wounded, and does not suffer a “stress disorder” from the experience, would have to be ipso facto mentally ill.)

I think the record will confirm that PTSD has not greatly affected my behavior since I separated from the Army.

You surely have access to my military records, but I would be surprised if you found anything there of interest beyond the simple fact of my sniper training. I was moderately skilled as a marksman but had no enthusiasm for killing strangers.

It’s a mystery to me why anyone would select me for this cryptic and surely criminal enterprise. I was not that great a sniper—I did get the sniper cluster on my rifleman’s badge, but that really means that I managed to hit some of the enemy and didn’t shoot anyone on our own side. My politics lean toward the left, but I’m far from being anyone’s candidate for an instrument of violence against the government. I mainly want to be left alone.

Of course, politics didn’t really come up with whoever gave me that rifle. They threatened my lover’s life, and my own, if I didn’t kill a “bad man” for good pay. They haven’t yet said why he was so bad.

You were confident that Homeland Security, with the help of the FBI and police, can put a quick end to this matter. I would like to share your confidence, but Kit and I are both very scared, and have to act with exaggerated caution.

If you have any message for me and Kit, please leave it on my home phone recorder. We will be travelling.

I printed out a copy on the library’s printer and Kit proofread it. “Looks okay.”

“Good.” I folded the paper up and put it in my back pocket. “Go get the car. When I see you pull up in front, I’ll click on SEND and come get in the car, and we’re off for the highway.”

She breathed out heavily. “Whatever you say, boss.” She wasn’t 100 percent with me on this, but couldn’t come up with a better plan. I wanted Homeland Security to feel we were cooperating, but we couldn’t know whether the bad guys might intercept a message, or might even be hiding there, safe in some corner of the bureaucratic web.