The Cain Conspiracy (Harvey Bennett Thrillers Book 8), page 2
He watched Briggs’ face for a sign of any emotion. Is he nervous? Scared? Ignorant? Instead, Briggs just nodded. “Show him.”
Derrick, wide-eyed, got out of the truck and hopped to the hot asphalt road. The officer was short, about four inches shorter than Derrick, and he looked up at the soldier with a suspicious eye.
“American?” the officer asked. Of course, there was nothing overtly ‘American’ about Derrick’s uniform — all-black said nothing but soldier — but the officer obviously suspected something.
Derrick nodded.
The officer asked something else. He caught “donde” — where — and “porque” — why. Something else about military something or other. Derrick shrugged.
“Su troca,” the officer said. More words. He wants to see what’s in the truck.
Derrick couldn’t see Briggs from this angle. He hoped he wasn’t about to let him get arrested. Derrick motioned with a dipped neck toward the back of the truck. The officer put a hand out and Derrick led the way.
There was a canvas drape covering the back of the truck. It looked like a modernized wagon, the kind used in the old west. This one, however, was dirty green and about three times the size.
The officer stepped up to the back of the truck and Derrick could see Spanish insignia and the man’s city of origin on a badge on his shoulder. He didn’t recognize the name of the town, but he assumed it was one of the smaller cities they’d passed by on the way out here.
And ’here,’ to Derrick, seemed like ‘nowhere.’ Born and raised in Detroit, Derrick was used to sprawling city blocks, industrial complexes, and suburban houses as far as he could see. He was used to people.
Being out here in the rainforest, crawling over pothole-studded roads that hadn’t been maintained since they’d been laid down thirty years ago, was like driving through a whole different world.
He took a sharp breath, watching the officer. The man still had his hand on his weapon, but it was holstered. Derrick did the mental calculus. One-half second to get it unclipped, another to get it out, then between one and three to actually flick the safety off and aim it.
Derrick’s sidearm was under the seat in the truck’s cab, but he knew he still had the upper hand. The cop wouldn’t expect the young man to be so fast, so quick to the draw. Derrick knew he could have the officer completely subdued in under two seconds flat, as long as he kept the distance between them under four feet.
The officer went for the back of the truck. Derrick closed the distance. The officer lifted a hand up and began pulling back the drape.
Briggs appeared from the other side of the vehicle. He hadn’t heard him get out; perhaps his door was still open.
The drape was pulled to the side fully now, and the officer tossed it up and over the edge of the truck’s frame, where it stayed. He looked into the trailer.
Seconds passed. The officer didn’t move, both Briggs and Derrick now standing behind him. The policeman still had his hand on his pistol, but he didn’t try to unholster it.
He took a slow step back. Derrick watched him carefully. He was no doubt surprised, to say the least. Confused? Appalled?
The officer finally turned, also slowly and methodically, and faced Derrick. He saw Briggs had joined them. He swallowed, then lifted the pistol out of its holster.
Briggs was there, fast — too fast to be real — and he had his hand lifted already. Derrick would have missed it if he’d blinked. The older soldier didn’t hesitate. He fired.
The officer went down, a crumpled heap on the side of the road. Blood, pooling out around his head. His mouth, moving but not talking. His eyes, wide and surprised and still trying to comprehend.
Briggs watched the man die, then looked up at Derrick. “Let’s go.”
He turned and walked back toward the front seat.
Derrick nodded to no one in particular, his eyes moving from the police officer to the back of the truck.
Eyes met his. Twenty pairs of them. Men, women, and children. All tied, all gagged. Their brown, sun-beaten faces were silent, their bodies unmoving.
They watched him as he watched them. Waiting for something. They didn’t know what, and, to be honest, he didn’t either.
So there was nothing to say. He was doing his job, that was it.
He pulled the canvas flap back down over the rear-end of the transport truck and walked back to the driver’s seat. He pulled himself up and in, put the truck in drive, then pulled away from the dead policeman and his squad car.
Briggs was looking out the front window, silent and stoic.
2
Ben
“Jules!” Ben yelled. Then he laughed. I’m yelling for someone inside a log cabin.
The space they were in was small, just a living room and kitchen and attached bedroom. But it was the other section, the new section, that he was yelling through. The Civilian Special Operations had contracted a new wing to the cabin, attached through the kitchen, where Ben was standing. The wing had bedrooms that could sleep 10, a full-sized commercial kitchen, and an office complex on the second floor. There was even a makeshift lounge, which was really just another bedroom they’d added a television, couch, and a few board games to.
A woman appeared in the hallway, but it wasn’t Julie.
“You know,” she said. “We used to call her ‘Jelly.’ She ever tell you that?
Ben’s mouth was a hard line. “No. No, she didn’t.”
“Well, anyway,” the woman said. “‘Jules’ never seemed… right. Just didn’t fit, you know?” Alexis Richardson stepped up to Ben and reached up to fix his bowtie. “Don’t worry, Harvey,” she said. “I’ll fix this. No reason to bother Julie with it.”
Ben sidestepped and ducked out of her reach. “No, I can tie my own tie. I wasn’t… that’s not what I needed.”
“Well, what is it you need, dear?” Alexis asked. “I’m sure I can help with it.”
You’re not a professionally trained psychologist, Ben thought. And I highly doubt you’ve had experience with trauma-induced anxiety.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll just wait.”
Alexis huffed and shrugged, but thankfully turned to leave. He saw her dart back into her bedroom, no doubt looking for another place to insert herself.
Their time here had been strained, to say the least. To Ben, his cabin was his place of solitude. It was a retreat. Somewhere he could hide. The past week had been a blur — getting the wedding planned, the logistics taken care of, and the invites out to the small group of attendees.
Ben’s parents were dead, but Julie’s had immediately flown out to Anchorage and driven to the cabin when they’d heard the wedding was happening. Both retired, Alexis a high-school teacher and Warren a regional pilot, they’d dropped everything to be there for their daughter and her soon-to-be-husband.
They were nice enough, too. Warren was placid and docile, easy to be around, and he enjoyed sampling Ben’s growing whiskey and rum collection. Alexis was pleasant, but Ben wasn’t sure she knew how to relax. She was either cleaning, folding clothes — he was amazed at how many outfits one woman needed for a week-long trip — or cooking. The cooking part he liked, but altogether it made him feel like he wasn’t working hard enough. He and Julie couldn’t sit down in the evening to talk without Alexis butting in and asking about something or other.
But Julie was happy. She had a great relationship with her parents, and no matter how strange it was to be in the close presence of another couple like this, he wanted a relationship with them as well. They were nice, kind people, and Ben felt like he’d been given another chance to have an adult relationship with his parents through them.
He walked back through the kitchen and dining room into the bedroom. There were clothes everywhere, Julie’s of course. What she would wear before the wedding, what she would wear during the wedding — she hated the idea of a huge, flowing white dress — and what she would wear after. Still, Ben didn’t understand why he was seeing at least seven different dresses on the bed.
He flopped onto the chair and opened the laptop on the desk. Mindlessly clicking through websites and news updates, finding nothing of intrigue, he was about to close it again when he heard a knock on the door.
“Hey, brother,” Reggie’s voice said. “How you doing?”
Ben smiled. “Which hand did you use to knock?”
Reggie looked confused for a brief moment then laughed. “It hurts a bit, but not in the way you’d expect.” He held up his prosthetic arm for examination. The wound had nearly healed, but there was still some serious physical therapy and training he was undergoing to get used the new prosthetic.
He’d lost his arm in Peru, just over a month ago. Thanks to a full-time doctor and nurse paid for by the CSO, his recovery had been quick and mostly worry-free, and Ben knew he was excited to start working with the more advanced prosthetics.
He walked to the bed and roughly slid the dresses to the side, then sat on the edge of the bed and turned to Ben.
“Anyway,” Ben said, “I’m fine. It’s… hard.”
“Yeah, Alexis can be a handful, huh? Last night she cornered me and Sarah and asked us about when we were going to have kids. Kids. Who asks that?”
Ben laughed. “No, that’s fine. I mean, you’re right. That’s hard. But I’m talking about Julie. How do I know she’s ready?”
Reggie grinned. “I think you mean, how do you know you’re ready.”
“I’m ready,” Ben said. “Never been more ready.”
“Than what’s the problem? You can only know yourself. Can’t worry about her, my man.”
“But… I do worry about her.”
Reggie paused, then stepped into the room. “Ah, I see. Well, I guess you just have to trust that she’s telling you the truth.”
“Of course I trust her.”
“Than you have to trust yourself to know there’s nothing more you can do. Ben — look. I’ve been there. I know how you’re feeling right now. It’s… weird. Trying to balance it all and make a good impression and juggle your feelings with what you think she’s feeling… let me just give you some advice: you will never truly know what she’s feeling.”
Ben cocked an eyebrow.
“I’m serious. I mean, you’ll know her better than anyone — better than her parents. But you’ll never really know exactly what she’s feeling at any given time.”
“Why?”
“Well, because. Women are…” he stopped. “Ben, how many emotions can you name? Off the top fo your head?”
“Uh, anger. Happiness. Joy — is that happiness? Yeah. Okay, confusion? Is that an emotion?”
“Sure.”
“What’s the point?”
“So you named like three-and-a-half emotions. Julie might be angry about something, but chances are she’s actually ambivalent, or pissed, or perturbed, or annoyed, or —”
“Got it.”
“So you’re wondering if she’s confused, or scared, or trying to figure herself out with this… memory stuff.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Yeah, she is. One-hundred percent, man. Of course she’s trying to figure it out. But that doesn’t at all mean she’s not ready. You’re talking about getting married, man. You’ve been talking about it, for like years now. You know she’s ready. But that doesn’t mean she’s not feeling all sorts of weird stuff.”
“Gotcha. So you’re saying that she’s ready, but she’s just feeling all those things women feel, and that’s normal?”
“Ben,” Reggie said. “You’re a smart guy. Real sharp. But sometimes you can be a bit one-speed, you know?”
“Uh…”
“No, I’m not saying those are things ‘women’ feel. I’m saying they’re things all of us feel. We — dudes — just aren’t used to processing them all. So we make it their problem instead.”
Reggie stood up before Ben could answer, walked to Ben’s chair, and started fixing his tie. “Come on, man, don’t you know how to tie one of these? You’re such a barbarian.”
3
Julie
Julie was frantic. She’d long ago taken off the smartwatch, after the third time it told her that her heart rate was elevated and that it would ‘be helpful to take a minute to breathe.’
Take a minute to breathe, my —
“Jelly!”
She whipped her head around, even more frantic, until she remembered that her mother and father were here, too. It was weird, having them stay in the same house — a house she shared with the man she was about to marry.
“Jelly, you in here?” Her mom’s head popped around the corner, looking into the lounge. “Why are you hiding in here?” she asked.
“I’m not hiding, Mom,” Julie said. “This is the only room that has a full-length mirror.
“Oh,” her mother said, not even trying to hide her concern. “Are — are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Mom. Doing my hair. Want to help?”
Alexis Richardson’s eyes lit up like Julie had just told her she was her most favorite person on the planet. “I would do anything, Jelly. What do you need?”
“Wine. Lots of it. Just… grab whatever you can carry, and a glass — two glasses, sorry — and bring it here.”
“Oh,” Alexis said again, this time downtrodden. She sulked away, and Julie heard her flats smacking against the floor of the add-on wing’s hallway.
She shook her head. Why does she have to be so there all the time? Julie knew she was overreacting, but her mother always seemed to have everything together — everything figured out, in its place, ready. She never stopped. She wondered how her father put up with it.
And where’s Ben?
She had less than an hour, and she hadn’t even put on her dress. She wanted to get her hair just right — it was the only characteristic of herself she felt any vanity toward, and it was important that it looked exactly the way she’d pictured it. The trouble was, she hadn’t really pictured anything more than “perfect.” What was perfect? What does that even mean?
She felt scared suddenly, as if she needed someone to just tell her to sit down and relax, and that they — whoever they were — would just start messing with her hair until they thought it was perfect.
But she had no one, at least not in that way. Her maid of honor would be Dr. Sarah Lindgren, the woman whom she had come to know very well over the last months, and a woman she now trusted with her life. But trusting someone with her life was far different from spending that life together.
Her grade school friends and college acquaintances were all gone, spread around the world as they’d moved into their adult lives. None of them had been particularly close with her, but it was as much her fault as theirs. She’d spent her school years focused on mathematics and computer science, turning her brilliance and intelligence into experience with programming and data systems. That had turned into a career working for the Biological Threat Research division of the CDC, then into a new career at the newly formed CSO.
Her job was… vague. She was part of a team that worked to solve mysteries, find hidden treasures, and generally work between the gaps in the system. Things that were too off-limits for their own government yet too large to tackle by local law enforcement were the sort of missions the CSO took on.
Julie fumbled with a quiff of hair near the back of her head before deciding it was pointless. I’ll just watch a YouTube video later or something, she thought. She stood up, turned to leave, and was met at the door by her mother, holding two bottles of wine — a red and a white — and two glasses.
Julie started to cry. Her mother walked into the room, took her hand, and sat her down again in front of the mirror. She poured two glasses of red wine, tall enough that the glasses nearly spilled as she carried them, and handed one to Julie. She then put hers down, turned Julie’s head to face the mirror, and began working on her hair.
“Thanks, Mom,” Julie whispered.
Her mother smiled, a sweet, knowing thing. “Did you know that I almost didn’t marry your father?”
Julie’s eyes grew and she took a long, deep sip of wine.
“It’s true.”
“I thought — I thought he was the ‘only one.’ You always said that.”
“Oh, he was — and is — the only one for me. That’s never changed. But when I was getting ready for my wedding, months out, he was constantly asking if I was okay. So sweet, so kind. Just… always making sure I was okay.”
“That’s… why you almost called it off?”
“Well, I don’t think I ever would have called it off, but I struggled with it, sure. I mean, how was I supposed to know that he was the right one for me?”
“Yeah, but you just knew, right?”
“I knew, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any doubts.”
“I’m not doubting anything about Ben, Mom.”
“I am not saying you are,” Alexis said. “What I am saying is that I see so much of myself in you.”
“And so much of Dad in Ben?”
“No, not at all. I’m saying that I know you — I know how you are, and how stubborn you can be.”
Julie rolled her eyes. Not a great pep talk, Mom.
“But that’s a good thing. And you’ve found a man who respects that, and understands that. He knows that you want to make your own decisions. He knows that you need a voice, and he gives you that.”
“He… yeah, he does,” Julie said. “That’s exactly how he is.”
“Well, then there’s no reason to doubt anything. You two will be fine.”
She smiled again, and Julie took another sip. She caught a glance at her hair in the mirror as she did. A French braid fell from one side on the top of her head to the other, a diagonal design that fell just behind her left shoulder.
She swallowed, choking up. She reached up and grabbed Alexis’ hand. “Mom, it’s perfect.”
4
Cisco
