Allegiance: A Jackson Quick Adventure Read online

  “See?” he said, drawing an invisible circle around the fifteen holes in the thin paper. “A tight pattern there above the bullseye. No matter where you hit, you want a tight pattern. That means all the holes are close together.”

  He rubbed my head with his left hand. “Now it’s your turn.”

  I walked as fast as I could back to the firing position. My dad attached a new target and followed me. I could barely contain myself.

  He held the gun while I unscrewed the magazine tube and loaded fifteen bullets. My little hands trembled from the excitement of it. I had trouble forcing the spring-loaded tube back into position, so my dad helped me turn it and lock it.

  He handed me the weapon much as a drill sergeant returns a rifle to a soldier during inspection. He smiled and winked, proud of me before I ever fired a shot.

  I took the rifle and, in one motion, slipped my left hand under the forestock while raising the butt to my shoulder. With my trigger finger extended, I grabbed the lever. The metal was cold.

  Pull forward. Click. Pull back. Click.

  I bent my finger to the trigger and tilted my head to aim through the site.

  Pow!

  My dad stood silently watching as I slowly repeated the motion again.

  Pow!

  With each successive shot, I moved more quickly to the next until I was out of ammunition. My dad was still smiling.

  I started to run to check my target.

  “Ah-Ah!” Dad stopped me. “No running. You need to lock the trigger.”

  I pulled the hammer, the trigger, and released the hammer again.

  “Good,” he said, reaching for the weapon. “Now go check it.”

  I walked like a kid rushing to the high board at the community pool. My dad was right behind me. Neither of us expected what we found on the recycled paper target.

  “Holy crap!” my dad said. “Can that be right?” He pulled the target from the hay bale and looked at it more closely.

  I’d seen the target, but didn’t know why he was confused.

  “This pattern is tighter than mine. I mean, you’ve got all fifteen shots left of center. Unbelievable!”

  “I didn’t hit the bullseye,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re within an inch of it. Your consistency is uncanny. I told you pattern is what matters. Your aim was true every time.”

  “It’s good?”

  “It’s better than good, Jackson! You’re a natural.”

  ***

  “Ripley’s ours,” Charlie mumbles. Her head is resting on my legs after I’ve managed to pull her through the broken passenger window of the car. Her right arm is broken. That’s clear from the bone sticking through the skin. Her left foot is probably broken too. It’s twisted at an odd angle. Her color is fading. Not good.

  “He was ours,” she says, her voice strained. I take her head in my hands and try to get her to focus on my face. “He was working for us.”

  “What do you mean?” Charlie! What do you mean?”

  Her eyes float past mine and return. Her lips are purple, blue almost. She licks them and sighs. A raspy sigh.

  “He worked for us,” she coughs. “He was helping us. He…flaked. He was a risk.”

  “Who is us?”

  I thumb away a tear from her left cheek. Her skin is cold.

  “You weren’t what they said,” she smiles. “You’re tougher than they said.” Her voice is almost inaudible. I lean over, closer to her broken body as she whispered. “They thought you were weak.”

  “Who is they?”

  “The plan won’t work will it?” she says, looking past me and into the sky. Is she delirious? “The plan is bad, sir. Ripley won’t play along. Framing his dad won’t help. Shooting you didn’t help. Quick isn’t what we thought he was. It’s all bad. I didn’t do this right. Both sides went bad...”

  She mumbles something unintelligible and giggles. Blood leaks from the corner of her mouth and trails down her cheek onto my leg. She coughs and more blood bubbles up. Charlie is dying.

  “Is that your girlfriend?” George is standing behind me, shooting video right over my shoulder.

  I nod.

  She says something else about Buell, me, my boss. I can’t understand any of it. Her body shudders against mine and relaxes. There’s a final nauseating gurgle before her eyes widen.

  Charlie is gone. Limp. Lifeless. Dead.

  I take my fingers and close her eyes before sliding her torso off of my legs.

  “Did you roll on all of that?” I ask George.

  “Yes, but I don’t know how much of what she said was audible.”

  I slide myself back from her body and lean over to look inside the car. The driver is still lying there. On his right hand is a tattoo of the emblem for the U.S. Marine Corps.

  It’s Crockett, the fake detective.

  He’s dead too.

  Crockett and Charlie? Together?

  There was that look they gave each other at the hospital. Crockett fit the description of the “douche Jean Claude Van Damme” with whom Bobby said she left the bar on the night I got drugged. To my left, there’s the long rifle on the road.

  They were a team. A sniper team.

  On the ceiling of the back seat is what looks like a large duffle bag. I reach through the broken window and pull it over the headrest. It’s heavy, but I manage to sling it out of the car.

  I push myself to my feet, grab the bag, and trudge back to the Crown Victoria and pop the trunk. I toss in the bag and walk over to the rifle. It looks like it’s okay, the safety’s on. It finds a home in the trunk too.

  “Let’s go,” I motion to George as I get into the driver’s seat and drop my handgun into the center console. He’s videotaping the scene. The wreck. The blood. My dead ex-girlfriend.

  We’re halfway to the highway before either of us says anything.

  “Did you know she was a…”

  “Sniper?” I ask. “No.”

  “She kept saying us and they.”

  “I know.” I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand. I’m sweating.

  “She was talking about Nanergetix,” George says. “And Buell.”

  “Where do you get that from?”

  “She said it.”

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  “Right before I asked you if she was your girlfriend,” he says. “She was mumbling, but I heard her say Buell. She said Naner-something. Had to be Nanergetix. I’ll know for sure, hopefully when I listen to the tape back in the newsroom. If it turned out, I mean. Buell’s company, that’s who she was working for. That’s who Ripley was working for.”

  “You think?”

  “Dude,” he says, his voice elevated, “it’s clear. Ripley wasn’t really working for the Governor. Neither was your girlfriend. They were both double-agents.”

  “Double agents?” I laugh at him. Ridiculous.

  “Not real double agents,” he corrects himself, “you know what I mean. Ripley wasn’t really trying to imitate the nano-marker as he claimed. He was faking it. Somebody caught on to him, and Buell couldn’t take the chance of being connected to him, so he had him killed.”

  “And Charlie?”

  “She was spying on you,” he said. “She was working for Buell all along. You were her, I dunno, mark? “

  I laugh and look over at George. He’s not laughing.

  I slam on the brakes and the Crown Victoria screams to a stop in the middle of the road.

  “I’m not thinking clearly,” I say. I step out of the car to open the rear driver’s side door. “Not clearly at all.”

  I yank Ripley’s heavy body from the back seat and drop it to the pavement. His head slams to the ground with a sickening crack.

  George is turned around, looking over the front seat. “What are you doing?” He looks terrified.

  “I made a mistake,” I say to him. “I put the weapon that killed Ripley in our car with his body. Not smart. Gotta get rid of both.”

  �
��Aren’t we going to be worse off by dumping a body and a gun in the middle of the road?” George has gotten out of the car and is standing along the passenger’s side now.

  “We can’t be worse off. I don’t want a dead body or Charlie’s rifle in the car. We don’t have time to drag her off of the road.”

  “Look,” George moves toward me at the rear of the car, “you’re a little stressed right now. Your girlfriend—”

  “Ex,” I correct him. “Ex-girlfriend.”

  “Okay, ex-girlfriend,” he says. “She’s dead. She probably isn’t who you thought she was. Our lives are still in danger, and we’re only now beginning to piece together all of this cloak and dagger stuff. It’s a lot to absorb. Let me drive.”

  I don’t know how George is keeping it together, when he’s been the nervous, ill-equipped one all along. He’s right. I need a second to think.

  I slide into the passenger’s seat and pull out my phone. There’s a good signal.

  George straps his seatbelt, starts the car and puts it in gear. We’ve got some time before we hit the highway. Maybe twenty minutes.

  I type Charlie’s name into the browser on the phone. There are a few hundred results. Her Facebook page and Twitter account pop up. There’s a web article about her being hired by the Governor to work on his staff. Not much else.

  “What are you doing?” George asks.

  “Looking for Charlie on the internet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I scroll down the list of links including her name. “You said she’s not who I thought she was. I’m looking to see if there’s something about her I missed.”

  “You typed in her name?”

  “Yes. Nothing unusual.”

  “What name did you enter?”

  “Charlie Corday.”

  “Is that her full name?” George checks the rearview mirror. “Have you entered her full name?”

  “Charlotte Corday?” I tell him. “No.”

  I type in Charlotte Corday and up pops more than four hundred thousand links. There’s a Wikipedia article and images of a woman named Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont. I scroll through the list of links: Charlotte Corday, assassin; Charlotte Corday, killer and royalist sympathizer; Charlotte Corday, executed for killing French revolutionary leader. I click one of the pages:

  Charlotte Corday stabbed to death Jean Paul Marat, an outspoken leader of the French revolutionary movement. She assassinated him in his bath and calmly waited for the authorities to arrest her. She was executed four days later.

  “This is too much of a coincidence…”

  “What?” George leans over, trying to look at my phone.

  “Charlotte Corday was an eighteenth century assassin. She was an assassin like Charlie.”

  “That’s not her real name,” George says, half asking a question, half stating what is likely fact.

  “Probably not,” I tell him. “How did I not see this?”

  I click on another link and my screen fills with Jacques Louis-David’s apparently famous painting of Corday killing Marat. She’s tall and slender, beautiful and deadly. Just like Charlie.

  Marat never saw it coming. Corday led him to believe she was switching sides and would give him valuable information. Instead, she stabbed him in the chest. How appropriate “Charlie” should choose her name.

  “Who was she?”

  “Good question.” I turn off the phone. “We need to go to Austin to find out.”

  “We need to get to the newsroom,” George protests, “not Austin.”

  “Before we go to Houston we need to find out who Charlie is. Or was. I bet the answers are in her apartment. I’ve got a key.”

  “Why does it matter who she was? We’ve got to get to a place where we’re safe, where we have time to finish piecing this together.”

  “Let’s split up,” I suggest. “You go to Houston. Get to the newsroom and start using your resources there. I’ll get to Austin and figure out what I can learn there. How does that work? We can’t put this together without knowing everything.”

  George says nothing. He glances at the rearview mirror and accelerates.

  “I still don’t know how the energy companies, Buell, and those iPods all fit together.” I tilt the air vent toward me. It’s warm in the car. “Why is everyone getting killed? Why didn’t Charlie kill me? Where do the Pickle guys fit into this?”

  “You can ask them,” George says, glancing in the rearview mirror again and gripping the steering wheel more tightly.

  “What?”

  “They’re behind us.”

  Following us, not even a car length back, is a large black SUV. Two men are in the front seat. One of them, the passenger, is armed.

  PART III: DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS

  “All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men.”

  ---GENERAL SAM HOUSTON,

  FIRST PRESIDENT AND GOVERNOR OF TEXAS

  Chapter 10

  My life has devolved into a Jason Bourne movie, but the bullets are real. There aren’t stunt men or actors chasing me. They’re Pickle people bent on killing me and George.

  “This is bad. These are the guys who were following you yesterday aren’t they?”

  “Yep,” he says. “Yellow and blue plates.” George steers out of a curve and accelerates. The black SUV is within inches of our rear bumper. We’ve got to do something to shake it.

  “Keep it steady,” I advise, grabbing the 9 mm from the center console and climbing into the back seat. I slip on the bloody leather and tumble onto the floor, still holding the gun.

  “Be careful!” George yells. “You could have shot me.”

  I inch my way into the passenger’s back seat and stay low. “Let me know when you’re about to make a sharp right turn.”

  Still crouched in the seat, I find the rectangular button on the left side of the gun behind the trigger. A light thumb press drops the clip into my left hand. There are two rounds left.

  “Left curve!” George yells.

  I slide the clip back into the gun and push it up with my palm. It clicks into place as the car lurches to the left and my weight pulls me to the right against the door.

  I grab a seat belt shoulder strap and yank it until it locks, hen wrap it around my right ankle. A tug tells me it should hold.

  “Right coming up!”

  I turn to the rear of the car and, completely twisted in the seatbelt, reach to my left and pull on the door handle. The door opens wildly and almost slams shut, but I jam my shoulder into it and lean out of the car. My face is maybe six inches from the blacktop. I grip the gun with both hands and extend myself as far as I can, the door beating against my arm and shoulder.

  We haven’t hit the turn yet, so I can’t see anything but the back of the Ford and the tire spinning against the road.

  My body slides away from the open door, but the seatbelt holds me in place. The front of the black SUV slides into view. I extend my arms and pull the trigger. Nothing.

  The safety’s on!

  I thumb the safety off and quickly aim again at the car trailing us.

  Pow! I hit the lower edge of the front passenger’s side door. A miss.

  The SUV slides back to the right and out of view.

  “Another right!” George yells. The SUV moves back into position. I aim again. I’ve got one bullet. My right finger presses the trigger and pulls.

  Pow!

  Almost immediately the SUV swerves when its right front tire explodes and disintegrates in a series of loud thumps.

  Hit.

  I pull myself back into the Ford and yank the door shut. Still caught in the seatbelt, I pull myself up to look out of the rear windshield. The SUV wobbles and the driver overcorrects to the left. He drives up the edge of an embankment and the engine whines as the SUV flips onto its side and slides, still following us, for a good f
ifty yards.

  “You got ‘em!” George is watching in the rear view mirror. He sounds giddy. “Should we stop?”

  “Hell no,” I tell him, untangling myself from the belt and climbing into the front seat. I’m covered in Ripley’s blood. “We need to keep going.”

  “Don’t we need to know more about those guys?”

  “We are out of ammunition. The gun is empty, and they’re armed. We don’t need to know more about them. You already know who they are.”

  “Maybe they have documents or information that’ll help.”

  I pull the front belt across my lap and snap it. “We’re good. What we need is to connect the dots we haven’t drawn together yet. That’s Charlie, the Governor, Buell. The oil companies themselves. Those guys are working for the oil companies.”

  “You said we needed to piece together ‘Pickle guys’. Remember?” George stops the car, pulling onto a narrow shoulder.

  “Yeah, I did say that.” He’s right. They may know something.

  George looks at me like he’s waiting for me to change my mind.

  “Fine. Let me check the back for a weapon.”

  “I’ve got Ripley’s gun.” George pulls it out from underneath the driver’s seat. I hadn’t seen him put it there. “It’s got six rounds in it, that shotshell stuff he was talking about.”

  “It’s good from close range,” I tell him, taking the revolver from him. “But we need more.” I unlatch the seatbelt and get out of the car. The air is warmer, thicker. There’s more green along the side of the road. We must be close to the highway. The sound of the trunk popping open scares a pair of birds from their perch on a mesquite tree.

  The bag from Charlie’s car opens with a loud zip and reveals a treasure of life-ending equipment; a couple of Sig Sauer 9MM pistols, five loaded clips, some boxes of what looks like rifle ammunition, and a large knife. There’s also a pair of binoculars, some MREs, a small laptop, an iPad with a flash drive attachment, a small black iPod, and a United States passport.