King Acid

17- RAYFORCE

"I...can't...believe it," he said in drowned whispers.

"We're still on it, sir," the informant went on with all the strength his voice could manage.

"If it wasn't...for all...the painkillers...in me now...you'd be in serious trouble."

"But sir, it was someone from the Secret Service. No one could've seen that coming."

Norton tried to sit up in the bed, without success. He was painfully aware of his health worsening by the hour.

"You've said...you have...good news, too."

"Yessir. Chambers has turned Clausich, and they're on their way now."

"Then tell Chambers...to redirect to Fort Meade."

"But there's no need..."

"This place isn't safe. There've been too many...things. Prepare your luggage...we're going back home...ASAP. Notify Chambers."

The informant departed as soon as Norton ordered it, evidencing the latent panic of everyone who engaged Norton face to face. It was as though in every exchange of words, in every exchange of glances, he subtly won. He himself had refined his flair to make it a lacerating art, a delicate torture that tightened his interlocutor slowly to subdue him completely. That was how he used to force his opponents in the Pentagon, the CIA, or even the White House to see eye to eye with him. For him, it was just a sport. It was not about having confidential documents on his side to blackmail his opponents. It was about showing them directly that fear had a shape and a face, a blue carnivorous gaze behind dark Ray-Bans. It was about making them feel that fear had blood on its hands, and that it would not miss a beat to wash them away with others' blood, if needed. It was about making them remember that fear would be always monitoring their most intimate movements from a comfortable swivel chair behind a burnished desk, and a spring-coiled will to take them off the world by just lifting a telephone receiver.

That was how he had pulled out the fangs of predators from countless echelons to turn them into his loyal, neutered hounds. However, he recalled no such hurdle to subdue Wallace Boyd. Conversely, he had the impression that the war veteran had let himself be held down from the very beginning, as though he had followed orders instinctively from the time he was recruited for the 101st Airborne Division up to the end of his life. Perhaps that was why Norton made Boyd one of his most trusted men, for he knew the man would never betray him, indulging himself in the calmness of the leash around his neck and the bait of felt his boss made him chase.

Imbued in that void, aqueous space in which his numbed mind found himself, Norton tried to search for a feeling of grief for losing his subordinate, but all he could find was a sober sense of commiseration at his pathetic life, accompanied by a subtle feeling of disgust.

                                             *****

"Yeah...I got him to pull up stakes...OK...well...I'll tell him. Thank you."

Chambers hung up and turned to the cockpit.

"Hey, Fletch."

Fletch removed his aviation headset.

"Yessir?"

"Change of plans. We fly to Fort Meade."

"Yessir."

Chambers went back to his seat, face to face with Clausich, who had remained abstracted to the files of Norton's medical report for the last few days, sorting through the platform of plastic between them both.

"We're changing our course. We're heading to Fort Meade."

"I already heard," answered Clausich without looking away from the report. He wouldn't avert his eyes for the rest of the conversation.