Killer Instincts v5 (17 page)

"Targets," Richard explained.

"I'll be shooting at apples?"

"If you can hit an apple, you can hit someone in the vital part of the brain. Also, it's easy to spot one out in the desert."

"Out in the desert..." I said, cautiously.

"Yeap. We're going on a little hiking trip tomorrow."

Richard and I ate dinner in a small roadside diner on the edge of town. Oddly enough, it reminded me of the bar and grill in Bangor where we first talked about my offer. A radio back in the kitchen played oldies country music, a ragged-looking steer head was mounted next to the bar, and a battered dart board hung from the wall near the bathroom. There were a couple of patrons, definitely locals, and although a couple sets of eyes followed us as we found a seat, no one seemed particularly interested, even with Richard's big stainless steel pistol out in plain view.

"What model of pistol is that?" I asked him. "It's pretty fancy for a .45 automatic."

"That's because it's not a .45 auto, it's a ten-millimeter automatic. Colt Delta Elite, to be exact."

"That's quite the badass name for a handgun."

"It's quite the badass handgun. Eight rounds plus one in the chamber. Ballistic profile somewhere near a .41 Magnum but in a 1911-sized frame. The gun kicks like a mule, but gives me a good mix of ammunition capacity, range, penetration, and stopping power."

"It’s scary how much you must think about these things, Richard."

"Thinking about it now keeps me alive later."

We made it to the tiny airfield twenty minutes early. Richard parked well away from the runway, killing the lights on the Suburban. By now only the slimmest edge of sunlight was still coming over the western horizon, and the temperature was already dropping. Nevertheless, we rolled down the windows, listening for the approach of the plane. Richard reached underneath the seat and produced my Glock and two spare magazines.

"Chuck is flying in, and he should be alone. But remember, I never leave anything to chance. Keep your eyes open and make sure there's one in the chamber."

I took the pistol from Richard and performed a “brass check”, then tucked the two spare magazines in my pocket.

"You live in a fucked-up world, Richard. How long have you known Chuck? Thirty years?"

"Thirty years or thirty seconds, you don't trust anyone anymore than you have to."

"And you don't trust anyone at all."

"Can't tell Jamie you haven't been paying attention, kid." 

In a moment we could hear the faint drone of an approaching prop plane, and Richard reached into the glove box, removing a single-lens night sight. Scanning the purple-black sky to the east, he finally stopped and pointed into the night.

"He's right up there, flying without lights."

"Isn't that dangerous?" I asked.

"It is, but he's running covert tonight. He wouldn’t even have flown out of an official airfield to get here."

After a minute's wait I could finally see the plane, a black shadow in the darkness. Flying with remarkable skill, the pilot touched down and taxied to a stop with room to spare.

"That was a really smooth landing," I remarked.

"He's probably using night-vision goggles, but yes, he's got a lot of night-flying hours under his belt."

The pilot's door opened up, barely visible in the dim twilight, and a man who appeared to be Chuck stepped out of the aircraft. I saw a brief red light wink twice, then three times, and then once more. Richard raised a penlight in his hand and flashed another sequence back. The pilot replied with two brief flashes.

"We should be good. Step out on your side and keep the engine block between you and the plane until I call you over."

We got out of the Suburban, and Richard walked over to the pilot. I could see Richard carried his Delta Elite behind his leg, as he had while getting off the plane back in Bangor. I kept the majority of the Suburban between me and the plane, with my Glock in hand just below the edge of the hood. After a few moments, Richard called to me and gave me a wave. I tucked the pistol into the back of my waistband and walked over.

Chuck held a fat manila envelope, which Richard took from him and handed to me.

"Take a look."

I opened up the envelope while Richard held his penlight for me, shielding the light from the highway. Inside, I found a Massachusetts driver's license, a Maine driver's license, two US passports, two bank cards, four credit cards, and two smaller envelopes containing an assortment of different papers. Looking closely at the identifications, I saw they both had my photo, but neither of the names were mine.

"Fake IDs?" I asked.

"They aren't fakes, " Richard said. "They're alternate identities."

"I don't understand."

"A fake ID is made by a forger. Even the best fakes have tells that an expert can spot. These aren't fake; they're just made using false identities."

I looked at him quizzically. "Wait...you mean these are real? Made by the government?"

Richard and Chuck both smiled at me. "The best fake ID isn't a fake at all," Richard replied.

I was incredulous. "How on earth did you manage that? These are the photos from my Rhode Island driver's license and my passport. How could you possibly get them?"

Richard laughed. "The same people who make IDs and passports are the same people we use to make our false identities. You go to the source, where the information and photo is already available. Just a matter of putting your image into a new ID and generating it as a legitimate record. Now not only is it a genuine piece of identification, but you're in the system as well."

 "So why do I need two sets of alternate ID?"

"One of them is going to be your 'White' identity. That's what your apartment will be rented under, you'll use buy your groceries, pay your utility bills, all that clean stuff. When you operate though, you work under your 'Black' ID, which means no one can trace you back to your civilian activities."

"Which should be which? The IDs I mean."

"Your Mass ID is already set up for your apartment and your utilities. The Maine ID is also set up with a residence, but since you'll be living in Boston, use the Mass identification for your White activities."

I dug through the smaller envelopes. They contained a number of receipts, utility bills, and pieces of junk mail. All of it associated with my false identities.

"I take it this is to make everything look good?"

Richard nodded. "One of the easiest tells of a false identity is lack of evidence that the identity is real. Real people have bills, they buy things with credit cards, they rent movies, they get junk mail. The more details you add to the picture, the more believable it becomes."

I turned to Chuck, who had been silent for the whole conversation. I stuck out my hand, and he gave it a hearty shake.

"Thank you for doing this. Your support means a lot to me," I said.

Chuck just smiled. "Hell kid, I'm not doing it for free. But you're welcome all the same. Always glad to help a new player find his way around the game board."

I didn't quite know what to say to that.

After shaking Richard's hand, Chuck climbed back into the cockpit of his plane. We walked back to the Suburban as Chuck taxied around, and in moments, he was roaring into the night air. We were on the road back to the cabin before Chuck climbed past a thousand feet.

"So, how much did these false identifications cost me?" I asked.

"Twenty thousand apiece."

"Holy shit, that's a lot of money. So much for buying a fake ID off of someone's older brother's best friend."

"Remember, these aren't fake. People in very sensitive positions take great risks to generate those IDs. That's the bulk of the money. Then, you've got to pay the gardeners."

"Gardeners?"

"The identity gardeners, the cultivators of the background information. They are the people who maintain and prepare false identifications once they go active. Rent the apartments, set up the utilities, go out and make the purchases, furnish the apartments, make sure the lights are turned on and such. They're like the theater technicians who prepare the costumes and set dressing for the actors."

"Also analogous to the real gardener who tends your flowers, making sure they have the proper water, sunlight, no weeds, fertilizer, all of that."

"Exactly. They help your false identity grow in a more organic fashion."

"So let me get this straight; there are people whose whole purpose is to make sure false identities seem believable?"

Richard smiled. "You'd be amazed at the size of the infrastructure running in the background that supports our operations. Organizations like the CIA, the FSB, MI6? For every field agent they deploy, you've got dozens of analysts, costumers, support technicians, computer experts, weapon-smiths; it's no different for the private sector market, we just have to keep much of it underground."

"So there are people who make a living supporting what you do?"

"For most it’s not their day job, because you've got to claim something on your taxes, but yes, for many of these people, the work is a full-time job. Some of those identity gardeners have to move around within a large city or a whole state, in order to support multiple identities. You can't just set up a cover residence and then never use it. Someone has to make sure the mail gets collected, the home hasn't been broken into, the lawn gets mowed if it's a home. Making sure there's a strong backstop on these IDs is critical if anyone takes a hard look. Who doesn't have and use a credit card these days? Who doesn't get junk mail? There needs to be a veneer of authenticity on even the simplest false identification if it's going to stand up to a cursory sweep."

"I had no idea it was all so complex. I figured some guy in the back room of a photo lab or a basement somewhere just created fake IDs and that was that."

Richard nodded. "Oh, those people exist, but they are there for expediency's sake. The sort of people you can visit with a strip of drugstore photos and leave with a driver's license that might let you buy a six pack of beer or get into a club. Nowadays, any cursory traffic stop by a police officer will unravel a backroom fake in seconds. You need a real identity behind you in order to move through the system, and for that, you have to go to the source."

Back at the cabin, we unpacked and repacked the supplies Richard and I had bought. It was clear we were going to be driving someplace.

"I thought we were going out into the desert?” I asked.

"We are. The Suburban will get us anywhere we need to go. We'll be gone a few days, and there's no easy way for us to carry the water we need. Don’t think you’re going to be too comfortable, though. You're going to eat up some serious shoe-leather."

"Gee, I can’t wait.” I said.

That night, I didn't dream at all.

ELEVEN

In the morning, we got up at our usual hour, did our stretches and exercises, and went for our run. By now, I felt like not only had I lost every ounce of fat, but I had become stronger, quicker, and more limber. I could cover the distance of our run with a lot less difficulty, and even though I was still breathing hard by the time we got back to the cabin, I was able to pick up my pistol, then load and fire at a target twenty-five feet away and keep everything in the kill-zone.

"You're picking this up a lot quicker than I had hoped," Richard said.

"If I don't, I'll have some serious problems this summer."

"Glad to see you're well motivated."

We climbed into the Suburban with five days of food and water, plus our handguns, the DeLisle, a heavy-barreled AR-15 with a detachable scope taken from the basement cache, and a small mountain of ammunition. Before leaving, Richard moved the trunk with his communications gear into the cabin's underground cache, keeping only the satellite phone. He also activated the cabin's booby traps.

The sun was well into the sky by the time we pulled off the road and started down some nameless rocky desert trail. We had driven mostly north and west, and we hadn't seen a town of any appreciable size the entire trip.

"I take it you've been here before," I said.

"Like I said the other day, I take little excursions into the wild to keep myself sharp. Texas is a great place for a man to wander into the middle of nowhere with a loaded gun and not be bothered by anyone, even if he's noticed. People around here see a white guy in a cowboy hat with a rifle, you might as well be in Boston walking down the street with a cell phone and a cup of coffee, for all anyone's going to care."

Eventually we drove into a small gulch, similar in appearance to where we parked two nights ago. One side of the small, narrow valley was sheer enough to put the Suburban into complete shadow.

"This will be our base of operations for the next couple of days,” Richard said. “Then, we'll move on to another spot."

We got out of the Suburban and dropped the tailgate. We removed our packs and our guns, along with a healthy amount of ammunition. We also changed into sets of lightweight desert camouflage and military-style desert boots. Our gear, a mix of military, paramilitary, and civilian, was intended to give us the look of militiamen or even tactical law enforcement types on a training exercise.

"If we run into any nosy locals or pestering cops, you leave things to me. Do not try anything clever, just follow my lead completely," Richard said.

"Understood."

We climbed out of our little gulch and walked into the rocky, broken ground to the north of where we parked. The terrain was an endless panorama of hardscrabble rocks, ground fissures, hills, buttes, and valleys. As we walked, Richard began to explain to me why were were here.

"You're going to be operating a lot in the city, and when you look at the modern urban landscape from a structural perspective, it has a lot in common with a rocky desert like this. The terrain is broken, the shadows are sharp and deep, and there isn't a lot of soft cover or concealment. Any target in line of sight is probably a clear shot, while if you can't see the target, the obstruction is impenetrable, most likely a building, a solid car body, or some other hard object. In addition, when it comes to sniping, you have to be aware of how cross winds coming out of alleys and intersecting streets are going to affect the bullet's flight path. The best way to simulate this behavior away from the city is out here, where there's plenty of wind moving through these valleys and gulches."