Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (best adventure books to read .TXT) 📕

“No,” Rubino said, then shook his head slightly. “What are you talking about? Your dad wasn’t selling anything to anybody.”

My jaw went slack. “Huh?” I said.

Rubino’s face almost matched my own, he turned to Bremer, who said, “Is that what Schumer told you?”

I said nothing for a few seconds, then managed to echo my previous, “Huh?”

“Kid, your dad wasn’t selling anything to anybody. He realized that the work he was doing with Schumer was massively,_ massively_ illegal and he contacted us to see if the FBI could shut it down.”

I had no muscles. Nothing worked.

Rubino said, “He was in the process of filtering out enough information for us to move on when he died. He told us, at the beginning, if Schumer found out what he was doing, he’d probably kill him.” Both their faces were flat, slightly concerned.

My face felt flushed, my heart was pounding, my mind raced in a thousand directions. I wiggled my fingers, just to make sure I was still alive. I put my hand to my forehead, felt a bit dizzy.

My dad was trying to sell Schumer’s program, government black ops secrets, to a foreign country. He was killed. That’s the information I’d been working with this whole time. Where did I get it? Was it Schumer? Why the hell did I believe him? My dad was the bad guy. He was selling secrets. The FBI was investigating him for that. That was the truth, it was written on the back of my mind in permanent ink, but it never make any sense whenever I stopped and thought about it.

I tried to put everything in line, from the beginning. The FBI knew about my dad because they were investigating him for selling secrets. No, the FBI knew about him because he himself approached them to report on Schumer’s secret program. My dad was killed in a failed sting operation while he was meeting with the foreign buyer. No, my dad was killed because Schumer found out that he’d gone to the Feds. My stomach twisted, I felt like throwing up.

Schumer had my dad killed? Or he did it himself? No, he would hire the job out like everything else. It could have been Dingan, or the Irish guy. The guy who killed Comstock, who almost killed Amy, who wants to kill me, could have been the one who killed my father! Was he shot? Poisoned with more strychnine, writhing on the floor, breaking his own bones with muscular convulsions? Schumer had Comstock killed, and he wants me dead. He must be trying to shut the whole program down, clean up all the scattered pieces.

God, this is all about Schumer. Why hadn’t I just assumed that from the beginning?

“Are you all right, Chris?” Rubino asked.

I looked up at him, my face red and my teeth grinding. “Do you realize that if you’d have told me all this two weeks ago, absolutely everything would be different?”

Rubino frowned slightly. Bremer spoke up, “He told us not to tell you if you didn’t already know.”

“Who?”

“Your dad,” he said. “And he told us that if he died, to watch over you until we bring this whole thing down.”

I closed my eyes, hoping no new information could come in. “A personal favor,” I said.

“Why do you think we’ve stopped the police from tearing you apart three times now, deleted an Interpol request for your apprehension, and even got you a gun just in case?”

“Got me a gun?” I asked after opening my eyes.

“The guy at the gun store in Lorton, he’s one of ours. He called us from the range, told us how well you were shooting. We told him to make sure you got a gun.”

“You had people following me?” I asked.

“When we could,” Rubino said.

I shook my head.

“Your dad took a huge risk,” Bremer said. “He knew what Schumer was capable of, knew that if Schumer found out your dad ‘betrayed’ him, he’d probably be killed. He said he wouldn’t give us anything unless we could guarantee your safety. I told him if he was worried, he should increase his life insurance policy until it was all done with. That’s what he did, so that if he failed, you would at least have enough money to protect yourself, to get away, or move on.”

I leaned back in my chair, tipped my head back, and groaned out loud. My world was imploding into itself.

“We had no idea Schumer told you that about your dad,” Bremer said.

“Though it does explain some of the angst,” Rubino chimed in.

“Okay,” I said, still looking up at the ceiling, “I feel like I’ve asked this before, but can I go shoot Schumer now?”

“Maybe later,” Bremer said. “Your dad was killed before he could get us enough evidence to convince our superiors to bring the hammer down on a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. If you’re willing, we’d like you to help us by getting close to Schumer somehow. If we put a wire on you and you had one more meeting with him, he’d probably say enough to hang himself.”

“Meeting? He wants me dead.”

“Right. So, first things first, let’s go to DC and take a look at those pictures.”

We all got up, I left my plate and silverware on the table, and we walked to the front door of the lobby. I felt like I was walking through a fog, or there was sand in my shoes. Once again it seemed like everything I knew about everything had been wrong, and my brain had trouble processing it all again. Hopefully I’d be able to clear my head during the ride to Washington DC, and hopefully I’d learn to stop dancing around questions from now on and just get right into it. I couldn’t figure out why my dad, after working in this program for almost twenty years would only now decide to report it. Did something new happen? Did I not turn out the way they wanted?

The three of us went out the front lobby doors and I stopped to find the black, officious-looking car that Bremer and Rubino drove. I spotted it in the middle row of cars and fell in line behind Rubino toward it. Bremer stopped at the police car in front and leaned into the front driver’s side window to talk to the cop inside. Something felt weird, like it was a prisoner transport. Something else, though. Something nagging on me, which was surprising because there were a million things that should have been nagging on me, but there was just one little thing poking at my conscious like a sliver in my eye, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

I stopped for a second to look around, letting my brain filter out everything except movement. Bremer was still talking to that cop, Rubino was taking slow, steady strides toward their sedan, on the street a few cars drove past the hotel parking lot, there was nothing else. I turned to keep walking when a white streak caught my attention, the side door of a white panel van sliding open. I stopped again to focus in on what I thought I’d seen when I heard it.

A loud, resonant sound I’d heard before. It came and went in less than a second, and before I could even process the sound my right leg gave out, buckling completely, and my left leg pressed my foot against the pavement below just quickly enough so I’d fall sideways and onto my back. When I hit the ground I recognized the sound and heard it again, and again, and again. Gunshots, close, and a lot of them.

Behind me, the wall of the hotel was peppered with a line of small impacts that sent brick and mortar dust outward like little land mines. Then a series of hits rocked and shattered the glass of the row of cars I was laying behind. I turned my head to the right, Rubino was ducked behind the hood of a car, pulling the sidearm from his shoulder holster. To my left, Bremer was bent over and making his way to the front of the police car, trying to put it between him and the shooting. Another quick round of shots trailed from the rear bumper of the police car, fragmenting the tail lights, straight up the trunk, piercing compact holes through the metal, up the rear windshield, cracking then shattering the glass into a rain shower of glass particles, then cut sharply to the left to cut down the police officer as he tried to jump from inside the cruiser. The cop landed face-first on the pavement, unmoving. Bremer stared at him, wide-eyed, from where he knelt behind the car’s front end.

As I lay on the ground, feeling bits of gravel poking into my back, I remembered how much I’d needed a massage.