CRIME MINISTER: REBOUND

Book 3: Crime Minister

by Ian Barclay

Genres: Crime Fiction; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

It's a mission-dollar job for Richard Dartley, the world's most select assassin-for-hire, the man with many aliases and a thousand ways to kill. For him, the fatal hit should be a simple matter of clear planning and clean execution. But amid the shifting loyalties and tangled intrigue on American's newest and hottest battleground , he knows damn well things are a lot more dangerous than they seem...

Release date: September 26, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 180

Sample

The night was hot and humid, the air heavy and lifeless. They could feel sweat trickling down their chests, even though their
shirts hung open and they were walking slowly.


“Fucking tropics, man,” one said to the other.

“I thought they were sending me to Greenland until two days before I came out here.”

“They do that to mess up your mind.”

“I still think they sent me here by mistake.”

The two men were mechanics with the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing of the 13th Air Force, and they worked on F-4s and F-5s at Clark
Air Base. This was their first assignment overseas. Neither of them even knew where the Philippines were until they came here
a month before; in fact, they were still not exactly sure. The town of Angeles was next to the base. Apart from a few old
houses in its center and an old Spanish
church, Angeles was a modern boomtown. The rest of the Philippines was going under in economic depression and corruption,
but not Angeles, where jobs depended on the base and how much the Pentagon was spending.


The two twenty-year-old servicemen were nearly broke. They had enough money for a few beers and figured they would pass the
time walking around Balibago, the entertainment section at the edge of town. They eased their way slowly through the crowds,
beneath the ceaseless frenzy of neons, pestered by men and boys who wanted to buy their U.S. dollars for pesos or sell them
drugs or their virgin sisters. They pushed their way past, moving in the throngs, looking into the Pussy Galore, the Asian
Body Shop, and other discos, bars, and massage parlors.


“I’m horny as hell,” one said to the other. “I wish I had some dough.”

“If you’d been sent to a Greenland base, you wouldn’t have nothing to be horny about, and anyway, your balls would be half
frozen all the time. Leastways, you can look here even when you can’t touch.”


That was what was driving them crazy. All the little brown-skinned girls with blue-black hair, big brown eyes, red lips, twitching
their shapely asses in come-on walks, lots of flesh left uncovered by miniskirts and see-through blouses. The heat made it
worse.


They went in a bar that was nearly empty except for a few Filipino girls sitting at tables and four Americans standing at
the bar. The girls all smiled hopefully at the two men as they entered, then dropped the smiles instantly as
the two servicemen turned to the bar and ordered bottles of beer from the scantily clad barmaid.


“He’s at the Whiteman Base, in Missouri,” one of the four Americans at the bar was saying to the others in a loud voice. “I
say to him, ‘You’re telling me they made you the trigger-man for a Minuteman missile?’ ‘Damn right,’ he says to me…”


The two mechanics immediately sized up the four men as pilots. They were definitely officers—and no other officers had that
swagger or way of throwing back drinks that pilots had. When they weren’t boozing, they were drinking black coffee. This was
just what pilots did all the time, whether the Air Force liked it or not. When a man had his wings, he perched where he liked.


The one with the loud voice was saying, “He sits in this underground launch-control center with one other officer. This two-man
team controls ten missiles in their silos, some nearby, others miles away. They’re connected to the underground capsule by
hardened underground cable. The missile silos themselves are unmanned. These two guys control all ten of them. Five of these
launch-control centers form a squadron, commanding fifty Minuteman missiles in all.”


The two mechanics could not help noticing how closely the Filipino barmaid was listening to the pilot’s talk. All four of
the fly-boys were half wrecked.


“So what’s to stop your friend from loosing off one or two of these birds if he’s in a bad mood?” one of the pilots asked.


“First of all, the Strategic Air Command has a two-officer policy, meaning it takes two to fire a missile. Second, every man
assigned to this duty had to be reviewed by the Air Force Personnel Reliability Program, and they go all the way back to ask
you how you behaved on your first day in kindergarten. You gotta be squeaky clean. With these missiles, if you drink you don’t
drive.”


“What if you go crazy and hit the other guy over the head?”

“I asked him that. He said that you actually launch the missile by turning two keys simultaneously and that the two keyholes
are too far apart for one man to do it himself.”


One of the two mechanics said in an equally loud voice, “Maybe you shouldn’t be talking in public about these things.”

This caused a sudden silence, and the four pilots turned to look at him. The pilot doing all the talking looked for a moment
as if he wanted a fight, then quickly changed his mind. “I’ve seen the two of you, haven’t I, working on an F-4 in a hangar?
We’re with the 347th.”


The 347th Tactical Airlift Wing consisted of five squadrons based at Clark. He didn’t have to say that he was a pilot, and
the man who had crossed him was a mechanic. Yet both of them knew that if the mechanic lodged a complaint about a pilot talking
about sensitive material off base, even if the pilot was found not to have broken any rules, the accusation would linger as
a black mark against him. He bought a shot of Wild Turkey and a beer chaser for everyone, including the two mechanics.



“This is all stuff,” the pilot explained, “that the Air Force wants everyone to know about so they won’t go thinking that
some guy whose wife won’t lay him can get back at the world by putting his finger on the red button. There is no red button.
When they get an order to launch—they call it an emergency-action message—it comes in code, and the two launch-control officers
have to decode it separately and validate it. The documents for doing this are kept in a double-locked safe, for which each
officer knows only one of the two combinations. This emergency-action message contains a six-digit number which they punch
into a positive enable switch. When they do this, it automatically alerts the four other launch-control centers in the squadron,
each with a two-man crew, and any one of these can use an inhibit switch to stop the other capsule’s unauthorized launching.


“And that isn’t all. Even if both the officers in one capsule were nuts and managed to get hold of the correct six-digit positive
enable switch number out of sixteen million possible combinations, and supposing they managed to persuade all eight men in
the four of the other capsules not to use the inhibit switch—it takes only one man to work that switch—and turned their two
keys simultaneously, still nothing would happen. Because a two-man crew in one of the four other capsules must also turn their
keys. So, at an absolute minimum, so long as no capsules are destroyed in an attack, it takes four individuals to launch a
single Minuteman.”


They celebrated this with another round of Wild Turkey and bottled beer. The pilots bought
a third round before they left. Unused to whiskey, the two mechanics were feeling no pain when they finished their drinks
and wandered out beneath the neon signs, looking hungrily at the girls but knowing that moneyless men got no credit here.


“Hey, quit bumping into me. Can’t you walk straight?”

“I’m smashed, man.”

They brushed aside a man who tried to talk with them. He persisted.

“We got no bread. Leave us alone.”

“I want to buy you a drink,” the Filipino said.

The two American servicemen stopped and stared at him. They had only been in the Philippines a month, but that was long enough
for them to learn that, to the inhabitants, Americans were here to be plucked, not pampered. Yet they had just been bought
drinks by officers—and that was strange enough! Why not a Filipino now? He was a little guy, twice as old as them. Whatever
he tried, they could handle him and a few others like him. They went into the nearest bar. The Filipino wasn’t trying to lure
them down a dark alley or anything. He ordered and paid for three bottles of beer.


“You say you have no money?” the Filipino inquired politely.

“You heard right.”

“You want women and you have no money?” The man shook his head in sympathy at their plight. “You want women? Yes?”

“Sure. What do we have to do?”

“Satisfy them,” the Filipino said with a
wink. “I’ll be honest with you. These are not young, pretty girls. They are mature women and they want… well, handsome foreign
soldiers—”


“We’re Air Force, man, not soldiers.”

The Filipino smiled and shrugged. “The ladies won’t be able to tell the difference.”

“You want us to fuck fat, ugly women?”

“No. These ladies are the wives of businessmen who are looking for adventure. Something different from their boring husbands.
Some of them are more beautiful than anything you will see on the streets here in Balibago. You won’t get paid. You just have
a good time, maybe once or a couple of times a week. When you are off duty.”


“What’s in it for you?”

The Filipino smiled. “I get paid. You don’t. You get to have all the fun. They don’t want me. They want foreign soldiers.
If you don’t want to do it, I’ll find someone else.”


“I want to do it.”

“Me too.”

He had a green Chevy and took them to a well-to-do suburb of Angeles. There were no hookers, bars, or servicemen out here,
only high walls around private homes. The car pulled up at a quiet crossroad of cobbled streets in the shade of big trees.
The Filipino pointed down one road lined by high walls, broken only by heavy wooden double doors and iron gates.


“That second one. The red door. Pull the bell chain.” He handed one American a piece of paper with a phone number. “You call
me tomorrow, eh? Tell me how you get on today. Ask
for Joselito. Everybody knows me. You be nice to those ladies,” he shouted after them as they got out, and then he drove away.


“How do we get back to the base?”

His friend grinned. “Who cares?”

They walked along the narrow road between the high walls, past a large wrought-iron pair of gates through which they could
see trees, lawns, and part of a large, modern-style house. The big red doors belonged to the next holding and were about a
hundred yards farther away. Obviously these ladies they were visiting had to be very rich if they lived in this neighborhood.
The two men moved to the side of the road as a car approached. It was coming at them fast, way too fast for a narrow road
in a posh residential suburb.


“Run!”

Both servicemen realized it at the same moment. This was a trap. They had been set up. There were no sidewalks. They were
caught between the high walls with nowhere to go to escape the speeding car, now bearing down on them so fast that they had
only a few seconds to flatten themselves against the wall to avoid being sideswiped. The one who had shouted for them to run
had a second’s start over the other, enough to separate them by a few yards. The car shot by, no more than a few feet from
the wall. It missed the first man and pressed against the wall. A shotgun blast from an open side window smeared him against
the stonework of the wall.


The shooter pumped the sawed-off gun, but not fast enough to catch the second man.
The car was already past him when the second shot tore the mortar from between the stones, missing him entirely. The car braked
and skidded to a halt on the cobblestones some distance down the road. The driver had to reverse and move forward three times
before he got the vehicle turned around in the narrow roadway. While he was doing this the second serviceman reached the high
wrought-iron gates. When he could not open them, he quickly climbed up the bars and curlicues. He was picking his way over
the spikes at the top when the car drew alongside again.


The shotgun blast lifted him a few inches up into the air, until the weight of his body caused him to drop heavily onto the
row of sharp iron spikes. The shot had not killed him, but two of the spikes penetrated his innards, and he bled to death
on the rich man’s entrance gate.


Richard Dartley left his motel room at four in the morning. He was close to O’Hare, but everything was quiet at this hour.
Last evening all the planes coming and going overhead made him wonder if all the air traffic controllers had gone home and
left the airport open. It was not yet light, but he knew he was not going to see any subtle predawn grays in these industrial
Chicago suburbs with harshly floodlit factory lots behind security fences. He stopped at an all-night market and bought a
container of regular coffee and a package with some doughnuts under cellophane, which turned out to be stale.
He sat awhile in the car, outside the store, sipping the coffee.


There was a fresh country smell in the air, which was kind of strange with all the concrete, asphalt, and steel fences everywhere,
The car’s rear window was covered with condensation droplets. So was the store window, with small neon beer signs making blue
and red fog on it. Occasionally cars passed on the street, their headlights on. He threw the empty coffee container and the
doughnuts in a garbage can, then set out slowly for Chalk Hill Road. After a level crossing he came to streets of small clapboard
houses, all similar but none identical. He turned into Chalk Hill Road and drove slowly. He did not turn his head as he passed
number 34. The yellow Vega was in the driveway.


Dartley drove around aimlessly for a while after this. The sky was dull gray now, and it was hard to tell whether the sun
was already up and the sky heavily overcast, or whether the sky would be clear after the sun rose into it. He pulled into
the huge parking lot of a shopping mall. A tiny Renault, empty, stood in the middle of it. He moved in a slow loop around
the lot and crept past a camper in one corner. It had New Mexico plates, and its generator was chugging away. See America
by road.


He stopped the car in an empty corner and turned off the engine. A bird glided in front of the car and landed at the base
of a light pole. He loaded a film cartridge in his Nikon and attached a telescopic lens. He adjusted the focusing for a while
out a side window. Having slipped a light meter in his pocket, he checked
out the camera again. Timing and fine focusing could be done on the scene, but Dartley made it a rule to ready his equipment—whether
it was a camera, a rifle, or a grenade—before he arrived at the place of action. The less he had to do there, the more he
could remain unnoticed. He glanced at his wristwatch. Three minutes past five A.M.

Harold Penney worked the day shift at Continental Laser, eight to four, and Dartley was betting he would make the drop on
the way to work. Continental had brought Dartley in when a Soviet defector told the FBI that Russia was still getting information
from someone inside Continental’s Chicago plant, even after another spy at the plant—Russell, an engineer—had been caught
and sentenced to thirty-five years. The company had taken a beating on the stock market because of that case, which nearly
resulted in a hostile takeover. Management knew they would never survive a second spy scandal, especially if the FBI came
in, started grilling everyone, and did not succeed in catching the second spy. The Bureau admitted that it could not rely
one hundred percent on the defector’s information, although some of the other things he had told them proved true. This could
be Soviet disinformation to try to insert a wedge between Continental Laser and the Department of Defense, with the other
tidbits of true information used as bait. The Bureau offered Continental the opportunity to do some “self-policing,” and Continental
had brought in Dartley.


Harold Penney was high on a short list of suspects. He was the third man Dartley put
under surveillance. Dartley felt immediately that he was a likely prospect. It was like looking at horses in the parade ring
before a race, except this time he was trying to pick the last horse instead of the winner. Penney struck Dartley as a loser.
Dartley had seen a few traitors, and in his opinion they came in two types. The first type is the person who has something
to hide, usually involving sex or money. Penney did not seem to fit in this mold. The second type of traitor is the loser
who is convinced that he’s smarter than everyone else and never gets the breaks because others scheme against him or because
society is unjust. Penney was unpopular with his fellow workers and liked to argue with his supervisors. He had complained
in writing about being “held back” because he was “a threat” to men less competent than himself. Penney’s personnel folder
mentioned lack of flexibility and abrasiveness as his negative qualities.


In his early thirties, Penney was unmarried and lived with his mother. Dartley broke in while she was out. He picked the lock
of a desk and found a typewritten numbered list of six drop-off locations. The first four had been methodically ticked off
in ballpoint pen. It was the only incriminating document Dartley could find, and by itself it proved nothing. He photographed
the paper, relocked the drawer, and left the house undisturbed. Next day Penney was fed fourteen phony blueprints with top-secret
classification. He did not take them home after work that day, but then he did not have to because he had easy access to a
photocopier.
The fifth drop-off location was a hollow in the trunk of a diseased tree in a remnant of an oak forest out past the factory
belt. Dartley had been watching the place from dawn to eight A.M. and from four P.M.till dark for two days now. If Penney left the drop-off until the week-end, Dartley would have to keep watch from dawn to
dusk both days. Sitting in the branches of a tree that long would just about cripple him.


It was full daylight by the time Dartley got out by the underdeveloped area where the small oak forest grew. He hid his car
among the trees a distance from the road. He walked back to the edge of the road, pulled on tight leather gloves, and climbed
one of the larger trees. Having made himself as comfortable as possible in a fork, he made the final adjustments on the camera.
Then he waited patiently. This time he was rewarded. At seven-twenty the yellow Vega arrived, and Penney climbed out, leaving
the engine running and the door open. He hurried across the ground between the road and trees, carrying a white package. Dartley
photographed him as he came. The Nikon shutter and automatic film advance was almost totally silent. Penney placed the white
package in the hollow of the trunk, about six feet above the ground. He pushed it carefully in, stood back, and looked to
make sure it could not be seen. Satisfied, he turned and hurried back toward the car. Dartley snapped one last shot, pocketed
the Nikon, and dropped out of the tree in front of Penney. The man yelped with fright as Dartley came at him.


Unarmed, Dartley moved in fast before Penney would have a chance to draw a weapon.
He spun him around, pushed him face-first against a tree trunk, and slapped him down. He was unarmed. Dartley dragged him
by a jacket sleeve back to the hollow in the tree trunk. He reached up and pulled the package out. It consisted of paper inside
doubled white plastic supermarket bags, knotted by their handles. Grabbing Penney by the sleeve again, Dartley pulled him
out of the trees toward the Vega.


“Who are you?” Penney asked in a tremulous voice as he was being hauled along.

Dartley said nothing, only threatened to drive his fist in the man’s face.

Penney cowered. “Don’t hit me, please. I can’t stand violence!”

Dartley grinned malevolently at him and pointed toward the Vega’s open door. He himself walked quickly around the car and
opened the passenger door. Penney hesitated a moment, then climbed in beneath the wheel. Dartley pointed where he wanted him
to go, and Penney drove the Vega slowly along until it was out of sight of the road, at the back of the woods, near Dartley’s
car. Dartley reached over and pushed the gear into park and turned off the ignition.


“Put you hands behind your back,” were the first and last words Dartley spoke to the frightened man.

Penney complied, half twisting in the seat while Dartley bound his forearms over his jacket sleeves with a short length of
fine rope. While Penney looked on, he untied the handles of the plastic supermarket bags, which took time because of the gloves
he was wearing. He drew out the papers inside and counted them.
Fourteen sheets. All the planted, phony, top-secret blueprints. Dartley folded them and put them in an inside jacket pocket.


He looked at Penney and smiled at him. Penney’s eyes were bugging with fear, and his upper lip was quivering uncontrollably,
but he did his best to smile back. His cowardly expression brought out the worst in Dartley. He didn’t want to look at this
fawning traitor’s face one moment longer, so he pushed the doubled plastic bags over his head and tightened them around his
throat.


Penney shouted at him from inside the bags. Although the sound was distorted, Dartley knew he was begging for mercy. He was
asking the wrong man.


Penney didn’t start panicking until he had used up the air inside the plastic bags. Dartley leaned down on his shoulders while
keeping the bags airtight around his neck, yet not strangling him. He had to kneel on him in the end to keep him in the seat,
as Penney thrashed wildly and sucked against the plastic skin of the bags. This physically weak and cowardly man was suddenly
strong and savage in his desperate gulping for air. Dartley’s eyes were cold, and his face was unmoving as he held his victim
down and let him suffocate slowly.


After the traitor had quit struggling, Dartley pulled the plastic bags off his head and pocketed them. He checked the dead
man’s neck for marks he might have made but found none. He unbound the man’s forearms and placed his hands naturally on the
steering wheel. He . . .