October skies

Julian decided enough was enough. The first thing he and Rose were going to discuss in the car on the way back to Blue Valley was whether there was something more between them, and whether they wanted that, or not.

‘Hey!’

Julian felt a tap on his arm and turned round to see a man holding something out to him.

‘What?’

‘You left this on the seat.’

Julian looked down to see the man was holding his BlackBerry.

‘Oh bugger! That was stupid,’ he admitted and smiled dumbly as he grabbed it. ‘Hey, thanks for-’

The man had already turned away, in a hurry to get where he was going. Julian wanted to thank him for not running off with it. He watched the man push his way out of the scrum; just another executive drone in a dark suit, nothing visible but the back of his head, and his raised hand holding a boarding pass. His eyes picked out an incongruous detail — a faint and blurred tattoo across the back of his hand. It looked very much like a fox’s head.

Odd tattoo, he thought, and then his mind was back again on Rose.

He had an ideal seat, across the aisle and two rows back from Cooke. It allowed him to keep an eye on him, but remain outside Cooke’s field of vision for the duration of the flight. Important fact: on an eight-hour flight, one can get very familiar with the few faces visible between the headrests; familiar enough to recognise that face for quite some time afterwards, even in an entirely different context — a crowded street, a shopping mall, on a bus, or a train.

He studied the man.

Cooke. He preferred never to use the Christian name of a target, just the surname; it preserved a formal distance. It made a great deal of sense to maintain that distance for a target he would be required, at some point, to finish off.

He allowed himself to relax. Cooke was tagged now. The discreet little pin he’d inserted beneath the BlackBerry’s fascia had a minute lithium battery that kept the thing quietly chirping a signal for months. It was good only for a short range of a few miles, depending on line-of-sight intrusions, but good enough for the job, and perhaps not even necessary in the circumstances. Cooke was behaving as planned and heading where he was wanted — a discreet meeting with Mr Shepherd in some middle-of-nowhere, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it place called Blue Valley.

He wondered whether Mr Shepherd was taking an exceptional risk agreeing to meet Cooke like this. Even under the pseudonym and a little disguise, Shepherd’s face was becoming too recognisable.

He closed his eyes.

Mr Shepherd knows best.

The man had a keen tactical mind, one of the many things Carl respected about him; that and the courage to say the things most of the other parasites running for office this time around were too frightened to say. Even if this wasn’t a paid job, he’d happily consider doing this one for free to ensure a smooth ride for his man into the White House.

Shepherd was exactly what this ailing, fucked-up country needed. Someone driven solely by the crackling energy of belief, instead of flip-flopping over the latest, fickle, issue-of-the-day poll results. In many ways, thought Carl, Shepherd reminded him of Kennedy: a conviction politician, a man ready to jump up, grab the steering wheel and pull this lumbering juggernaut back on track before it was too late.

As far as Carl was concerned, the Clintons and the Bushes had, between them, fucked over his country good and proper. Someone fresh, someone new, was needed to break the back-and-forth grasp the two main parties had over the reins of power.

Two different flavours of go-fuck-you.

He smiled. That was one of the favourite trash-talk sayings of his squad. Now, who the hell had first come up with it? He racked his mind, side-stepping fleeting memories — images he’d rather not call to mind — and finally it came to him.

Steve. Technical Sergeant S.T. Petray. It was his cracked-arse version of between a rock and a hard place. Another time, another life. He’d left too many of those strong, patriotic young men of his squad dead or dying in the shit-smelling back streets of a fucking Iraqi town, the name of which nobody on FOX, CNN or MSNBC had ever needed to learn how to pronounce.

Carl absent-mindedly caressed the fading tattoo on the back of his hand. The personal motif of their team — a desert fox.

He watched Cooke tucking into his in-flight meal, and saw in the willowy, bespectacled, dark-haired man across the aisle the personification of everything that was fucking well strangling his country; goddamned liberal media more concerned with the rights of terrorists than the families of fallen servicemen, more concerned with Nielsen viewer ratings than a moral message.