Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (15 page)

It was a couple hours drive from Chicago to Milwaukee.  Even though I told Howard I wouldn’t pay a call on Michael Winters until tomorrow, I wanted to get the bulk of the driving out of the way today. I wasn’t going to pay for the privilege of another experience in the Experience Suite anyway, so I figured I might as well change cities while I was changing hotels.

Heading north on the I-94, I committed the unpardonable modern sin of answering a call on my cell phone while I was driving - luckily, I managed to avoid swerving into any nearby billboards. It was Howard. He was calling because he dug out a hard copy of an old CIA one-sheet biography of Andrew Wright, King of the Spooks. There was a throwaway line in the middle of the bio saying Wright had injured his right leg during “contingency operations towards the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.” Whatever the hell that meant. It also meant General Davidson’s pal “Andy” was definitely Andrew Wright - the same lovely gent who asked Howard if I was “expendable.”

I thought about Michael Winters and wondered if he was still alive. A man died in the act of handing his name to me, so I hoped Winters was still a secret to everybody else but me. If he was holding on to something important about Robert Davidson though, he might be more than a little reluctant to share it with me, since he didn’t know me from Adam. That was not the worst problem I could face – after all, Not-Quite Connors and his SUV crew might be waiting for me at his place, who knew? But at least it would be me and only me in danger - PMA was on his way back to Washington D.C.

Except now I felt so bad about the poor kid getting dragged back home by his mother that I suddenly felt guilty about constantly calling him PMA. Yeah, I could be a sarcastic douche at the drop of a hat, or even without any headwear being involved. If I ever saw the kid again, I would call him by his real name. He was only eighteen and I knew just how stupid you could be at that age, because I was also anxious to join up with the Agency.

My father assumed all three of his sons would follow in his footsteps at the CIA. But my two older brothers bolted, leaving only me left to fulfill the old man’s ambitions for his progeny. At first, I thought that was a good idea. My dad had started with the Agency at the very beginning, when it still seemed like a small and sexy cloak-and-dagger operation with clear-cut missions, and he still talked about it as though it had a moral imperative. But after we licked the Nazis and the Japanese, America became the primary world power and the responsibility rattled the country to the core. We grew over-the-top paranoid, primed to destroy a threat even when there wasn’t one – and that’s when the CIA was expected to utilize secretive, elaborate and occasionally insane covert operations to do all the dirty work.

One typical early Agency effort occurred in 1954, two years before I was born, when the CIA pulled off one of its first coups in Guatemala. What was the justification?

Fruit.

Jacobo Arbenz, democratically elected leader of the country, had decided to make the nation more self-sufficient and less dependent on U.S companies. Arbenz made plans to give some government land back to its citizens, and that’s where the trouble started. Some of that prime property was filled with fruit farms that were run by the huge multinational corporation, the United Fruit Company, which had such close ties to the Eisenhower administration that it was the only business that had a code name within the CIA. That meant it had more than enough clout to be taken seriously when it ran to the government in horror and claimed Guatemala was falling to the Commies.

Next thing everybody knew, Jacobo Arbenz was out of time and out of power, and Guatemalan military strongman Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas was in charge. It all went so well that the U.S. suddenly saw just how much a coup could do. So our government made it the default solution to whatever was going on that it didn’t like. As everyone looked away, the Agency tried to topple regimes in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Tibet, Indonesia, Cuba, Chile, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and on and on and on. Not all the efforts were successful, but enough got results that the U.S. never lost the will to try, try again.

The higher I rose in the ranks, the more I rejected the patriotic bullshit getting thrown around when these operations were being planned. We weren’t the good guys, we were just a runaway arm of what Dwight Eisenhower (and, to be fair, A.J. Longetti) had pegged as the military-industrial complex. I saw everyone around me just following directives without giving a thought to morality or respect for other populations. It didn’t matter what other countries wanted. It only mattered what America wanted and it didn’t have much to do with freedom or democracy. It had to do with money and power.

That’s when I started to want out. That’s when I really began to feel trapped.

My old man, however, was not going to take it lying down if I left the CIA to become…well, anything else. That was my other problem. I didn’t have a Plan B as far as a career went. Besides – I had a family to support.  

Allison had worked at the CIA too. After we started seeing each other, she wound up pregnant, even though she told me she was on the pill. She pointed out the statistics that said the pill didn’t always work. Okay. Even though it was already 1980, I observed the ancient protocol I was brought up with and married her, despite the fact that I didn’t really know her all that well - I had spent most of the relationship up until then stationed in Europe and only saw her for a couple days every few months. We didn’t spend any consistent time together until I requested a reassignment back at Langley a few months before the baby was due, and we moved in together.

A week in, I remember standing in the shower with the steam swirling around me, realizing how I had fucked up the rest of my life. About the only thing we had in common was the baby growing inside her. But, like the CIA, I saw myself as the good guy. I wouldn’t walk on a wife and a baby. I was making a habit of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, or vice-versa, I couldn’t quite sort it out.

The baby came, it was a girl and we named her Grace. Three years went by and there was another girl, Lorie. I loved the kids, but hated the atmosphere. I was screwed up in the head about everything, but I made the best of it - but, in this case, the best didn’t represent anything all that good. That was a pill my father had been willing to swallow, but I had seen what it had done to his disposition.

By the time eight more years had passed, by the time I had lived with Allison for eleven years, I knew I was done and I knew she knew. That’s when she turned up pregnant again. I was in the room when it happened, so it wasn’t as if I was blameless. But I knew if that kid was brought into this world, it wouldn’t be good for anybody, including the baby. I told her to have an abortion. In the end, because she knew I would be going one way or the other, Allison did what I asked to keep the peace. It had been a boy, she insisted on telling me.

When we finally split up, that was when my father really turned on me, just as he had turned on my second-oldest brother when his marriage blew up. According to his belief system, you didn’t leave your family, you just didn’t do that. My father had spent his life in a loveless marriage, never straying, and that was what was everyone was supposed to do. It was how my brothers and I were raised, which is why our first marriages were all disasters. My oldest brother was lucky – his wife cheated on him, so my dad turned on her and not him, even though he was a complete asshole to her.

As for me, after the divorce, Allison and my father became engaged in a contest to see who could make my life the most miserable. I had my freedom, but it had a huge price tag attached - my sanity. I wasn’t able to totally break with their judgments about me and I went a more than a little crazy.

And then there was Lorie.

I didn’t want to think about that.

Besides, I was close to Milwaukee, the home of Harley-Davidson, Miller (the King of Beers), and Laverne and Shirley.  I had other things to think about, the biggest of them being Black Sun. I checked into another hotel room that belied my real economic status, cheap and anonymous, and started scouring my Chromebook for any meaning that might be attached to the name of the Dark Sky facility in Montana. And it wasn’t hard to find.

The Black Sun was the name of a symbol popular with today’s crème de la crème of hate groups, German Neo-Nazis, who used it as a replacement for the notorious - and outlawed in Germany - swastika. There was some bizarre mythology attached to it that claimed that two suns duked it out over three hundred thousand years ago and, apparently, the black one had taken the title. Heinrich Himmler had commissioned this particular emblem too close to the end of World War II, so it apparently never really got its day in the (black) sun. However, no good Nazi relic ever really goes out of fashion, so here was the Black Sun, back and blacker than ever before, perhaps.

Of course, maybe the fine Dark Sky organization was unaware of this connection. Maybe they just thought Black Sun was a cool name. Yeah, that was it.

Monday morning.

I was heading for Metcalfe Park, where Winters lived on North 37
th
Street. Metcalfe Park was one of the poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city of Milwaukee and as I drove through it, I could see the urban decay at work. I passed by many older homes with peeling paint, placed along cracked sidewalks which bordered pothole-ridden streets. I also saw that I was one of the few white faces in the area, if not the only one. That didn’t bother me and I hoped it didn’t bother anybody else.

I parked in front of what I thought was Winters’ house and stared out the car window at the front door for a few minutes, hoping the place wouldn’t blow up or Not-Quite Connors wouldn’t jump out of the bushes. Yeah, I was shaking. My other house calls hadn’t gone very well so far and this one felt like the most significant one of all.

So I waited. And nothing happened. No explosions, no gunshots, no 6’5” faux TV cowboy. So I went ahead and got out of the car, walked up the rotting boards of the stairs leading up to the front porch, and when I reached the top, rang the doorbell. Somebody yelled, “JUST A MINUTE,” and a few minutes later, a black woman in her mid-thirties opened the door. She was big, wearing a giant red t-shirt and shorts, and she didn’t look like she took any shit.

“Is this where Michael Winters lives?”

She tilted her head a little and looked me over.

“You from the government?”

“Not exactly. Can I talk to him?”

“What about?”

“I just wanted to ask him a few questions about his service overseas. He served in Afghanistan, right?”

She didn’t like that question.

“Oh yeah, and he was in Iraq too, and both of them fucked him up GOOD. He don’t like to talk about it and I don’t like him to talk about it, okay?”

“You his wife?”

“His sister. Don’t think there’s a woman out there that would deal with this shit if they wasn’t related to him.”

“My name’s Max…”

“And I’m Beyoncé, and Jay Z and I have agreed that you still ain’t talking to him.”

“I’m really a nice person.”

“Sir, I don’t care if you was the Pope, you got to go…”

She stopped, looked over my right shoulder and down the street. I turned to see what she was looking at.

It was a skinny black guy in his mid-thirties, slowly walking towards the house, wearing a battered Brewers baseball cap, a black sleeveless t-shirt and old jeans that were too big for him, like maybe they used to fit but then he stopped eating. As he approached, he was staring at the sidewalk, fidgeting and muttering to himself. I had the distinct impression that this was Michael Winters. If so, his sister hadn’t misrepresented him – he seemed like something had definitely fucked him up good.

Suddenly, he looked up and saw me on the porch. And he also saw Beyoncé looking back at him and shaking her head, as if warning him off.

Then he turned and took off like a bat out of hell.

I hurried after him. But me hurrying was a lot different than him hurrying. I probably looked younger than I was, but I definitely ran older. So it wasn’t a few seconds before the person I assumed was Michael Winters was already a block or so ahead of me.

But then somebody flew past me and after Winters - and he was faster than both of us.

It was PMA – and, holy shit, the kid had wheels!

Up ahead of me, PMA was closing the gap between him and Winters – when both men approached a porch where a bald man whose body was shaped like a cannonball was sitting and enjoying his morning coffee. When he saw Winters fly by – and then PMA in pursuit - he rushed down from his front porch.

“HEY!” Angry Cannonball boomed at the kid. “What you doin’ with Michael?”

The kid kept running after Michael. And Angry Cannonball went running after him, yelling at all the houses he passed, “HEY! SOME WHITE BOY IS AFTER MICHAEL!”

They started pouring out of their houses, in pursuit of the kid, forming an irate posse protecting one of their own. It looked like a photo negative of the usual lynch mob scene.

Finally, near the end of a block, the kid caught up to Michael and grabbed him by the arm. As those two stopped, the neighbors caught up to them. I huffed and puffed my way up to the gathering as quickly as I could because shit was about to happen.