Mortal Dilemma Read online

  “I already know that, Jock.”

  “I think you might change your mind when you hear it all.”

  “Tell us. Get it out in the open.”

  “I’m done with the killing. No more.”

  “You can leave the field, Jock,” I said. “Become an analyst or something that keeps you in an office.”

  “I’d still be involved in the killing, even if I wasn’t the one pulling the trigger.”

  “You only kill bad guys,” I said.

  “Right. But what if the bad guy is also a good guy?”

  “What do you mean?” J.D. asked.

  “Even the foulest murderers have mothers.”

  “That’s pretty obvious,” I said.

  “Sometimes they have wives and children and hold down day jobs,” Jock said. “They get up and go to work just like regular folks. Our own clandestine services are full of people just like that. And sometimes, mistakes are made.”

  He was right, of course, but there was a very distinct difference. “Our people don’t cut off the heads of innocents, send suicide bombers to kill children, or execute people just because they follow a different faith.”

  “That’s what separates us from them,” Jock said. “But sometimes when I kill a bad guy, I deprive his wife and children of their husband and father, maybe their livelihood. How do I square that?”

  “Maybe you can’t,” said J.D. “Any more than the soldier who kills the enemy in combat, the enemy soldier who has a family back home and is just doing his duty to his own country, can square the whole thing. You just kill the enemy to protect the lives of your own people. It took me a long time to understand what you do and why you do it, but I’ve come to terms with the necessity of it. You’re a good man, Jock Algren, maybe the second best man I ever met.” She smiled. “And there are days when I’m pretty sure you’re the first best.”

  Jock laughed. “Those are the days when Matt’s in the doghouse.”

  She pointed a cocked finger at him. “Bingo.”

  “Still,” he said. “I’m done. I’ve thought about this a lot over the last week. If somebody wants to kill me, they can do it. I probably deserve it, and there’ll be a certain kind of symmetry to being killed by someone whom I’ve brought grief to in the past.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I thought I might stay here for a week or two and then maybe find another island somewhere.”

  “Not much of a plan,” I said.

  “I really haven’t thought it out. I realized earlier today that I’ve put you two in danger, and the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.”

  “How so?”

  “If I killed somebody’s loved one, and the survivor wants to hurt me, how better to do it than to kill my loved ones? Tit for tat. Death is quick. Grief can last forever.”

  “That sounds like a bumper sticker.”

  “Maybe. But it’s true. When I was drinking in that bar this morning, it started to make sense that somebody might be after you two.”

  “Why?” J.D. asked. “What happened on this last mission to make you think like this?”

  “I can’t talk about it. Not yet. It’s too raw. But it was very bad. And it gave me reason to think about your safety. If I’d put it together before I left Longboat, I wouldn’t have left. Now we’re here, and I don’t know what to do. I’m scared.”

  That was the revelation that hit me in the gut. Jock was the toughest man I’d ever known. He always met challenges head-on. That was part of what made him a top agent. He had always seemed fearless to me, and while I knew that not to be absolutely true, I had always thought of him as the least fearful man among us. Now he was telling us that he was scared. “Scared of what?” I asked.

  “Life.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “My nerves are shot, podna. I don’t think I could even pick up a weapon, must less shoot somebody. Not even to protect you and J.D. Or myself, for that matter. I’ve got this black cloud hanging over me, surrounding me. I can’t see through it or past it. I feel like I’m already dead, an empty husk just waiting for the undertaker to show up.”

  “You packed your gun,” J.D. said.

  “I brought it just so I could throw it into the ocean. A symbolic act. I was thinking about maybe following it, saying the hell with it all. If I were gone, there’d be no reason for anybody to come after you.”

  I’d never seen him this way. I wondered if the soldiers and Marines and SEALS who developed post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraq and Afghanistan displayed the same symptoms. Maybe Jock had reached his breaking point and simply could go no further.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said, my voice pitched low. “When did you turn into such a pussy? If there’s a threat out there, we don’t kill ourselves. We face it. We kill the threat. It’s that simple.”

  “Matt,” J.D. said quietly, putting her hand on my arm.

  “No, goddamnit. He needs to hear this.” I turned to Jock. “I’ve known you most of our lives. You’ve never even understood the word ‘quit.’ Why now? What the hell happened to you? What did you do?”

  “I killed a family and created a monster.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31

  THE STORY WAS as old as the Greek tragedies, a story of duty and remorse and revenge. A man named Abdullah al Bashar, a banker who lived in Aleppo, Syria, was suspected of funding one of the most vicious terror groups operating in the Middle East. “They were cutting off heads before it became fashionable,” Jock said, wryly. “They’d video the murders and send the tapes to media outlets all over the world. Most of them never aired the execution videos, but the intelligence agencies took them apart pixel by pixel.”

  “Al Bashar had studied in London and had a good command of the English language. He was well respected internationally in his profession, and over the years, had made a number of speeches to international gatherings of bankers. The CIA had long suspected that he might be a funding source for terrorists, but didn’t have proof. About fifteen years ago, after one of the videos of a beheading was released, one that featured the murderer giving a little speech before he cut an American hostage’s head off with a knife, some bright analyst finally got around to using some speech comparison software, or something like that, and came to the conclusion that al Bashar was the killer.”

  “What about the money?” J.D. asked.

  “There was no follow-up on that. It didn’t matter. Al Bashar had very publicly and brutally murdered an American citizen. I was sent to kill him.”

  “Did you?” J.D. asked.

  “Yes. But first I went to Aleppo and spent some time setting it up. I figured out his routines, knew where he lived, decided on the best time to kill him and make my exit from the country. Al Bashar had a wife and two young sons and they lived in a house in an upper-class neighborhood. His servants were given one night a week off to visit their families. Friday. The Muslim holy day. I was surprised to find that both al Bashar and his wife were pretty secular. She didn’t wear the hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women, and the family didn’t frequent the local mosque. Al Bashar spent a lot of time with his family. The children, who were six and eight, were being taught English by a tutor who came to their house five days a week. They didn’t seem much different from an upper-middle-class family anywhere in America.”

  “Except that dad was a murderer,” J.D. said.

  “Right. The two faces of evil. One pointed toward civility and the other toward chaos and death.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I picked my time to go after him. He seldom left home at night and was surrounded by people at his bank during the day. I went in on a Friday, when the servants were gone. It was late, but I found the family gathered around a TV watching an American sitcom dubbed into Arabic. I had my pistol out and surprised them. I told the wife to take the children and leave the room. She refused, told me to get out, and when I shook
my head, she said, and I’ll never forget the words, ‘If you’re going to kill us, we’ll die together.’

  “I told her I was only going to kill her husband, and she said something to the effect that I’d have to do it in front of his family.”

  “What did al Bashar have to say?”

  “Nothing, really. He seemed resigned to his fate. It was like he’d been expecting me. He did tell his wife to take the boys and leave. She refused.”

  “Bad scene,” I said. “That must have been gut wrenching.”

  “The worst moments of my life, up until that time. It got even worse when the smaller boy said, ‘Please don’t kill my father.’ Both boys began to cry. I shot their dad though the head and left. I went straight to Longboat Key and got drunk for a week.”

  “I remember that,” I said. “I was still practicing law in Orlando. I took the week off and we just hung out. That was the first cleansing time. You never told me what had happened.”

  “In a way, that killing precipitated the next cleansing, about two years later.”

  “I remember that one, too. How were they connected?”

  “There was another public beheading that took place a few weeks after the one al Bashar took part in. There was another voice analysis done. It turns out the murderer was al Bashar. Again.”

  “You didn’t kill him,” J.D. said.

  “No. I did. He was definitely dead. I was grilled about that at some length at the time, and I think I convinced the CIA folks that it couldn’t have been al Bashar who conducted the second execution. At least my boss believed me, and I think he finally convinced the CIA folks.”

  “Who was the second killer?” J.D. asked.

  “It sure as hell wasn’t al Bashar. That was all I knew for about a year. Then word came from Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad. The second killing had been a Mossad agent, and they finally ran down the thug who’d murdered him. They interrogated the bastard and got irrefutable proof that not only had he killed their agent, but he was the one who killed the American that al Bashar was accused of murdering.”

  “You killed the wrong man,” J.D. said.

  “Yes. After the CIA found out that they’d screwed up, they went back to the money trail, trying to tie al Bashar to the funding of the terrorists. They found absolutely no evidence implicating him in any way. He was an innocent man.”

  “That’s a terrible thing for you to carry around,” J.D. said. “But it wasn’t your fault. You were just doing your job.”

  “Yeah, but I began to think about what a dirty job it was.”

  “Why didn’t you just quit?”

  “By the time I found out that al Bashar was innocent, 9/11 had happened and three thousand innocent Americans were dead. The terrorist threat had grown and was continuing to get bigger. I was in a position to help do something about that, so I stayed on, tried to put it behind me, convince myself that al Bashar was just another innocent casualty of war, not unlike the good people who died in the fire bombings of Dresden or Tokyo during World War II.”

  “Did it work?” J.D. asked.

  Jock laughed bitterly. “I still see those little boys in my dreams, the ones who begged me not to kill their dad, and then watched me do it.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said. “Why is all this coming to a head now?”

  “Because I saw the little boys a couple of weeks ago. Not in a dream. In what’s left of Aleppo. Only they’re not little boys anymore.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THREE WEEKS BEFORE

  ALEPPO. WHAT HAD once been a bustling city, the largest in Syria and perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited town in the world, was now a city of the dead, the blasted hulks of buildings the only tombstones for the fallen.

  Jock Algren picked his way carefully through the desolation that had been a city of culture and learning. Its historical buildings, many dating to the Middle Ages, lay in ruins, brought down by the relentless struggle between the many factions fighting for supremacy. The only thing for certain was that no matter who won, it would not be good for America.

  Jock’s sun-darkened skin and his fluency in Arabic allowed him to pass as a local as he searched for the terrorist he’d been sent to kill. It was ironic, he thought, that the one city in the world that generated most of his nightmares was now in ruins, devastated by the very people who lived in his angry dreams, those crazies who fought each other for the supremacy of their own brand of the same religion. He’d never understood them or their reasons for killing each other, but he appreciated the danger they posed to the Western world.

  A young man whose nom de guerre was Abu Bakr was a bomb- making genius. He’d been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people and he was getting more and more sophisticated. The people in Washington who knew about these things were afraid that he’d find the holy grail of bomb makers, the bomb that could not be detected by any means yet known. Then we’d start seeing airliners fall out of the sky and the public would panic. No one knew what this would do to the world economy, but all the assessments were bleak. Jock had been sent to find Abu Bakr and kill him.

  He’d been on the bomber’s trail for several days and was homing in on him. His latest intelligence was that he was holed up in a ruined building in a neighborhood near the center of the city. Jock had an address, but it was difficult to find his way through the rubble. There was nothing to guide him, to give him a sense of perspective. He thought this part of Aleppo must look like Berlin did in 1945.

  He had a picture of Abu Bakr that had been taken by a Mossad agent two years before. It had been taken from a long way off with a telephoto lens that could not quite compensate for the distance. The photo was a bit blurry, but it was good enough that Jock would recognize the man if he saw him.

  Jock moved farther along the street between the broken buildings. He glanced at the pre-war map he carried, trying to get some perspective, some way to determine where he was. His best guess was that he had another block or two to go. A shot rang out and the bullet ricocheted off a large piece of rubble laying in the road a couple of feet from where he stood.

  Jock dove head first, seeking the safety of a big piece of concrete next to the one hit by the bullet. Another shot rang out and another bullet hit the far side of his cover. A rifle. It had the sound of a Kalashnikov, the one known to the world as the AK-47.

  “Hey,” Jock shouted in colloquial Arabic. “Why are you shooting at me?”

  “Why are you here?” the man with the rifle shouted back.

  “I’m hungry,” Jock said. “I’m looking for food. There used to be a bakery around here. I thought there might be something left.”

  “Not around here. You need to leave.”

  “Will you shoot me if I leave?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why? I haven’t done anything to you.”

  “And if I shoot you, you never will.”

  Jock pulled his pistol from the folds of the loose Arabic robe he wore. He would try to draw the shooter out into the open and deal with him. He found a small crevice that gave him a tight view in front of the rock without having to show his head. He watched quietly for a few minutes, saw nothing. Then there was movement from the area from which Jock surmised the rifle shot had come.

  “Are you still there?” the man shouted.

  Jock stayed quiet, tried not to move. He watched. Another shout. “Hello, friend. Come on out. I mean you no harm.”

  More minutes went by. The man moved out from his cover. He was walking slowly toward the spot where Jock was hiding. He was well within pistol range, but Jock held his fire and sat quietly, watching the man walk toward him. A pistol shot would alert whoever was inside the building to the fact that an armed man was outside shooting at their guard. Jock was now convinced that the only reason a man with an assault rifle would be standing guard outside a ruined building was if someone important was inside. He pulled a large knife, a K-BAR, from the scabbard attached to the belt he wore under t
he robe. And he waited.

  The man with the rifle walked slowly in Jock’s direction. He was alert, suspicious that there might be danger lurking in the rubble. “Hey, friend,” he called. “Where are you? Come on out. We have food inside the building.”

  Jock crept to the edge of his rock hideout. He couldn’t see the man with the rifle, but he could hear him as his boots disturbed the mess that had once been a part of one of the nearby buildings. And he could smell him. The rancid odor of a body unwashed for days mixed with what could be described as terminal halitosis. He was close, coming slowly now. He stopped. Tried once more. “Friend? Don’t you trust me?”

  It was the moment Jock was waiting for. The man’s concentration would be a little less acute, not much less, but maybe just enough to give Jock the edge. He sprang from his hiding place, knife held high. He had seen that the man carried the rifle in his right hand. He saw Jock and in the nanosecond it took him to appreciate the danger, Jock was on him, his left had reaching out and grabbing the muzzle of the rifle, his right hand thrusting the knife into the man’s throat, severing his vocal chords and his jugular in the first thrust. The man could not make a sound, and he bled to death in less than a minute.

  Jock picked up the rifle, checked the magazine. It had the full complement of thirty rounds, less the two fired at him. He put his pistol back in its holster and the knife in its scabbard. He worked his way cautiously toward the opening in the building that had once been a front door. He didn’t think there were any more guards. If there had been, at least one of them would have helped his buddy ferret out the intruder. But he wasn’t sure, so he took his time working his way to the door.

  As he approached the entrance, he heard subdued voices inside. He couldn’t make out the conversation, but it sounded like two men talking. Were there only two in there? Not likely, if they had a guard. But on the other hand, they might just be two semi-important people, important enough to justify one guard, but not valuable enough to warrant more. Or it could just be that nobody really expected any danger in this devastated neighborhood.