Carl stalked toward the students at the firing range.
"Ferguson! You, too! I'm sick of your sloppiness! Get your stuff! I'm driving you and that other asshole out of here!"
"But-"
"Now!" Carl twisted Ferguson's pistol from his hand and shoved him away. "You said you wanted out? You're out!"
"Do I keep the clothes you gave me?"
"And the money! That was the deal, wasn't it? I honor my word, even if you don't honor yours! Move! You and that other prick have five minutes!"
As Ferguson ran toward the barracks, Carl turned in a fury toward a pickup truck in front of the administration building. He pulled keys from his pocket, started the truck, and made so fast a turn that dirt flew. He sped toward the barracks, made another sharp turn, and skidded to a stop, waiting for Ferguson and Raoul.
Raoul got there first, holding his knapsack.
"Get in the back, damn it!" Carl yelled.
As Raoul climbed into the uncovered cargo space, Ferguson arrived with a duffel bag, breathing heavily.
"Inside!" Carl commanded.
Before Ferguson could shut the door behind him, Carl sped away, tearing up more dirt.
"You're sure you got all your stuff?" Carl demanded. "I want to keep my part of the bargain!"
"Quit trying to make me feel like a piece-of-shit quitter," Ferguson said.
"Isn't that what you are?"
"Who wants to put up with the bugs and the heat and the fucking humidity?"
"Obviously not you."
"And the snakes and the spiders and the damned rain most afternoons, and trying to sleep while those jerk-offs play those stupid video games. Bang, bang, bang. My ears haven't stopped ringing since I came here."
"You knew from the get-go you were being paid to learn about guns."
"I know about guns."
"Yeah, right. I've seen the way you shoot."
"And you didn't tell me I'd have to clean the damned guns after I shot them. And you didn't tell me I'd be humping heavy packs and crawling through swamps and… I might as well have joined the stupid army. Everybody telling me what to do. This is worse than when I was in the joint."
"Not hardly." Carl stared at the scars on his hands.
"And where the hell are we anyhow? How close to the nearest city? I want to get back to Chicago. Hang around with the guys. Find some action. Get laid. Man, that would be different."
"Wanting sex too much is what got you in prison," Carl said. "Maybe you should stick with guns."
"Just answer the question. How close is the nearest city?" Ferguson demanded
"An hour. And it's not a city. It's a town."
"What? Why didn't we fly out of here? That's how you brought me into this mess."
"You're not worth the price of aviation fuel, buddy. You want to know a secret? You were part of a great experiment."
"Living in a swamp? Some experiment."
"About visualization."
"Whatever that means."
"First, I show you how to do something-shoot, use a knife, whatever. Then I make you close your eyes and repeatedly imagine doing what I showed you. I reinforce it by making you watch accurate movies of what I demonstrated, Hollywood stars doing things so smoothly you want to be those stars. Finally, I tell you to do what you imagined in the movie in your mind."
The truck hit a bump. Carl heard it jostle Raoul in back.
"The military discovered that, by using visualization, a four-week course could be reduced to three days," Carl said. "It's a form of self-hypnosis, reinforced by the video games."
"Yeah? Well, I've been here three weeks. How come it didn't work on me?"
"Nobody's perfect. You want to know another secret? A long time ago, this used to be a plantation."
"What's that got to do with anything? Drive faster."
"Then the plantation went bust, and the owners tried to keep the land in the family, and finally a private foundation bought it as a nature preserve."
"Tears, man. You're boring me to-"
"Then the CIA took over the foundation and all this land."
"CIA?"
"Finally got your attention? Strictly speaking, not the CIA. It was a company that worked for a company that worked for the Company. They call it 'compartmentalizing the risk. Plausible deniability.'"
"I call it yawning, man."
"The whole point was to build a private airstrip that hardly anybody knew about. See, to fly what you'd call 'spies' into hot spots… in those days, Central America had a lot of those…"
"Yawn, man."
The truck hit another bump.
"The CIA couldn't just pop their people onto a United jet and fly them to El Salvador or Nicaragua. They'd leave what's called a 'paper trail.'"
"You know what I call it?" Ferguson made an obscene gesture.
"So this company that worked for the Company made up its own airline and flew its people out of here straight across the Gulf to where the action was."
"Gulf?"
"Of Mexico."
Ferguson looked interested. "We're near Mexico?"
"But then times changed, and the hot spots moved to other countries, and the company that worked for the Company didn't have any more use for this place. Besides, it had started to attract attention, so they sold it to some drug smugglers they'd been working with."
"Drug smugglers?" Now Ferguson was really interested.
"Sure. The spy business is based on 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours,' the same as any other business. The spies had been working with the drug smugglers, getting tactical information from them, using them for cover, giving the spies an excuse to go in and out of various countries via secret airstrips. If you're a drug smuggler, nobody questions why you're so secretive. But if people think you're a spy, you're in trouble. So when it came time to get rid of the airstrip, it made sense to sell it to the smugglers, who were already using it. But eventually, the smugglers decided to switch locations, too, and the place was rotting until we bought it."
"Yeah," Ferguson said. "Rotting. Step on it, would you?"
"Can't."
Carl drove slower.
"What are you doing?"
"Stopping to take a leak."
"Man, can't you hold it till we get to town?"
"You want me to hold it for an hour?" Carl gave him a "get real" look and steered to the side of the road. He stepped out and went down a slope to the edge of the swamp. Under deceptively attractive Spanish moss-it was always bug infested-he undid his fly and urinated into the algae-covered water.
Ferguson banged the truck door open, stepped sullenly to the spongy earth, and walked to the water, fumbling at his fly.
Carl finished relieving himself, shook lingering drops from his penis, pulled up his zipper, and asked Ferguson, "You want to make a bet?"
Three shots roared. Crimson blossomed on Ferguson's shirt. Blood erupted from his face. He dropped on his back, thrashing.
The shots echoed across the water.
Carl turned toward where Raoul, on cue, had shot from the back of the truck. Under Carl's loose shirt, he had a Colt Commander.45. If Raoul had delayed, Carl would have drawn his pistol in a continuation of zipping up his fly, shooting both of them.
Raoul looked pale. The darks of his eyes were huge. Obviously, despite all his bravado, he had never killed anyone before.
Better distract him, Carl thought. "Very good, Mr. Ramirez. Two shots to the body and one to the head. Why were you taught that pattern?"
Raoul had to switch to a different section of his thoughts. "Uh…" He looked confused. His need to seek approval became greater than the shock of his emotions. "Uh… The target might be wearing a Kevlar vest, so I also shot him in the head."
"Your instructor explained that?"
"No." Raoul continued to look confused. "I just figured that was the reason."
"It is the reason. Your intuition is excellent. Did you do what I told you and sit with your head against the back window?"
"Yes."
"You heard what I said about the CIA?"
"Yes."
"Then you understand the necessity for what I ordered you to do. There are serious issues at stake that I'm not allowed to reveal to you. Not yet. But the target's lack of discipline would have made him talk about our camp. He would have destroyed us."