The Hunted Read online

  “Son, what I’m about to tell you is highly classified. You know that, don’t you?” Richardson said, still scowling deeply.

  Willis knew that and confirmed that he knew it. Before the process started he had to sign disclaimers acknowledging he’d be under the threat of treason if he ever mentioned a word about this place or anything he had learned.

  Richardson nodded to himself, and leaned forward, his scowl weakening. “What I’m about to tell you will shock you,” he said with a sincere gravity. “Our country has been overrun by insurgents. These are everyday people like you and me who have been indoctrinated and are now hell-bent on destroying us. We’re at war, son, and like it or not we’re fighting for our very lives.”

  Richardson’s lips pressed tightly together, his red face turning a bit redder, his eyes glistening with anger. “The problem is that while we’ve been able to identify who they are and what their objective is, it would be a severe security breach if this were to leak to the public. Because of that Congress created a new department, Homeland Protection, of which I’m a part of.”

  Willis had never heard of a Homeland Protection department, but he didn’t doubt that what Richardson was telling him was the truth.

  “We need foot soldiers, son,” Richardson continued. “This is maybe the most important war this country will ever fight, but it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to involve great personal sacrifice and you’d be doing assignments that you might find unpleasant. But they’re necessary. Are you interested, Willis?”

  “How’s the pay?”

  Richardson smiled at that. “The pay’s good,” he said. “Better than what you were making peddling liquor. And the job security will be even better.”

  Richardson explained more about Homeland Protection and the job he was offering Willis, which was to be one of over four thousand new foot soldiers against this new hidden menace, soldiers whose existence would never be able to be acknowledged by the government. The problem was that while they were able to identify these insurgents, they didn’t have enough evidence to round them up or prosecute them, so Congress gave Richardson and Homeland Protection extraordinary powers to deal with this insidious and imminent threat to the country’s survival. Before getting Richardson’s call, Willis had been a coin flip away from either blowing his own brains out or committing crimes that could’ve resulted in innocent lives being taken. He accepted the job with little hesitation. He needed a paycheck and any kind of steady work, and the signing bonus they were offering would get him out of debt. He decided he’d be able to reconcile the job requirements with knowing that he was protecting his country.

  Over the next three months Willis went through extensive training with a squad of forty-seven other new hires. It was weird and very different than his army training. The rules were no communication among each other, so while he was part of a squad everything he did was in isolation with any sense of camaraderie banished. During those three months Willis learned efficient ways to kill, stage fake suicides, and cover up murders so they’d appear to be accidental. Firearms were his strength, as well as hand-to-hand fighting. Back when he was in the army, Willis could’ve been a sniper, he was that good with a rifle.

  Upon completion of his training, Willis was assigned to the Boston area. His only contact was going to be his immediate handler, a man whom he would know as Barry, and who he would only have a phone number for. Barry would monitor Willis’s performance and would provide support as necessary, such as intel and access to weapons and drugs. The Factory, as Willis would learn his division of Homeland Protection was called—which he surmised was short for The Death Factory, had some sway with the local authorities. While Barry couldn’t have a murder covered up, he could sometimes arrange for a lower police presence in a certain area and other such things, which could make Willis’s job easier if he planned ahead properly.

  During the time that Willis had been actively working for The Factory, he had eliminated twenty-three targets. Brian Schoefield was to be number twenty-four.

  Chapter 3

  Schoefield left his house an hour and ten minutes later. He had that same cautious look as he made his way to his car, again seeming as if he knew he was being watched. Willis didn’t believe that was the case, but even if Schoefield knew he was under surveillance, Willis didn’t much care. After Schoefield drove off, Willis used the opportunity to relieve himself and then slipped out the back entrance so he could walk to where he had left his car three blocks away. He wasn’t in any hurry. A tracking device had been planted on the undercarriage of Schoefield’s car. He’d have no problem finding where Schoefield was heading to.

  It turned out Schoefield drove to a coffee shop in the downtown area where he lived. Willis was able to spot Schoefield through the window as he sat alone engrossed in his newspaper, a large coffee on the table next to him. Willis could’ve set up surveillance to see whether Schoefield was meeting anyone, but he guessed this wasn’t the case, and instead drove back to Schoefield’s house.

  He already knew from Barry that Schoefield didn’t have an alarm system. If he did have one, the odds were Barry would’ve been able to get him the security code to disable it. The locks on the house were decent, but it still didn’t take Willis much effort to break in using his burglar picks.

  Willis was surprised at how clean and well kept up the inside of the house was, especially given the disrepair of the exterior. The house was a small two-bedroom ranch, but it had a pleasant feel inside, and while it seemed decorated by a woman’s touch, Willis saw no clear evidence that Schoefield had ever been married; at least there were no photos of children on display, or alimony or child support bills.

  Willis started in the kitchen as he searched through any mail or papers he could find, then moved to the living room, and finally Schoefield’s two bedrooms, the second of which had been set up as an office. What Willis was doing represented a breach of protocol since he wasn’t there to figure out a way to kill his target, but instead to satisfy his own curiosity. It was just hard to believe that this sad sack that he’d been observing was an insurgent, but then again he felt that way with almost all his targets. As Richardson told him, these were people who looked and acted like any of us, and in many cases, natural born citizens who had been indoctrinated into the insurgency. Still, these assignments had been nagging at Willis, and with Schoefield he wanted to see the evidence himself. After going through Schoefield’s file cabinets, he still hadn’t found anything unusual. What did stand out was that Schoefield had his computer password protected. Why would anyone password protect their computer inside their own home? Willis considered making this look like a home burglary so he could take the computer and have someone crack into it and find the evidence that Schoefield was a traitor, but he couldn’t think of how he could explain the need to steal Schoefield’s computer to Barry. It probably would only put him in deep trouble with The Factory. A beep alerted Willis that Schoefield’s car was on the move. He’d been in Schoefield’s house for almost two hours with nothing gained. He cleaned up any evidence that he’d been there and left through the back door. After that he made his way back to his surveillance post. The GPS tracking unit indicated that Schoefield was heading back home. If he ended up going someplace else instead Willis would track him down.

  Chapter 4

  After five days of surveillance Willis had Schoefield’s routine mapped out. He’d wake up between nine-thirty and nine-fifty, pick up the newspaper from his driveway, then leave his house an hour later so he could sit anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours in the coffee shop by himself reading his newspapers while lingering over a large coffee. When he’d return from the coffee shop he’d spend most of the afternoon on his computer, and some of it just puttering around his house. Schoefield would then eat dinner alone—usually either hot dogs or a cheap frozen dinner—and then around seven o’clock would head off to a local bar where he’d watch the Red Sox while stretching out two beers so they’d last most of the
evening before heading home. By all appearances a loner, although from the time he spent at the coffee shop and the local bar, he wasn’t necessarily a loner by choice.

  Of course, Schoefield could’ve been at those locations each day awaiting contact from the insurgency, but Willis couldn’t shake the thought that all Schoefield was was a sad little man and not part of any terrorist or revolutionary organization. He had dug as much as he could into Schoefield’s background, and what he found was an ordinary, middle class life. Schoefield had majored in computer science in college, and after graduation worked as a programmer for an insurance company until being laid off four months ago. No arrests, no unusual political activity, nothing to signal Schoefield as a terrorist in the making. Willis had been warned about that—that these insurgents were keeping low profiles until it was time to strike, but still, Willis had a nagging feeling that they had made a mistake with Schoefield, although there were other factors that pointed to something being wrong about him, such as his wariness each morning when leaving his house and his keeping his home computer password-protected.

  Willis could have gotten the job done in less than a week, but he kept his surveillance going and let his bonus slip away. Something felt very wrong. Almost all the jobs had felt wrong, but this one in particular. Or maybe it felt no more wrong than any of the others, but he’d finally reached a point where he couldn’t keep on doing this on blind faith: that he needed to see some evidence of this insurgence. He had two days left in his deadline when Barry called to warn him that his deadline was quickly approaching, if that was even his supervisor’s real name. If it was, Willis didn’t have a clue whether it was his first name or last. Most likely it was a code name. Whichever it was, this was the first time Barry had called him worried about whether Willis would get his job done on time, but it was also the first time Willis had let himself come this close to a deadline.

  “I wouldn’t have thought that this assignment would be as challenging as you seem to be making it,” Barry opined good-naturedly, but his voice contained a hint of sarcasm. Willis so far hadn’t been able to place the accent, but if he had to bet he’d go with upstate New York. It certainly wasn’t Boston.

  “I’m being cautious with it,” Willis said, keeping his own voice flat. “If you had marked him as a homicide, it would’ve already been done.”

  “But you will make your deadline?”

  “I’ll make it.”

  “Good. Make sure you do.”

  Willis knew that if he failed to, he’d get a reprimand, and while they had never told him this directly, he was pretty sure that The Factory only allowed their field workers one reprimand.

  Barry was about to end the call when Willis asked whether Schoefield could be a mistake.

  “We don’t make mistakes,” Barry said, coldly.

  “He doesn’t seem like he’s one of them.”

  “None of them are going to seem like they’re one of them. That’s the point. You’ve been through the training, you should know that, Willis.” There was a long pause before Barry asked whether Willis had broken protocol with his latest target, a distinctive chill now in his voice.

  “Of course not,” Willis said. He knew Barry was recording the conversation so he could run it through voice stress analysis software as a way to perform a crude lie detector test, but Willis had taken the precaution ten months earlier of loading voice stress analysis software on his laptop and training himself to lie effectively, and it turned out to be not nearly as hard as he would’ve thought.

  “See that you get this assignment done on time,” Barry said curtly, then ended the call. If Barry’s own voice stress analysis software showed that Willis was possibly lying, Willis would be receiving another phone call and there would be more questions.

  Chapter 5

  Thursday evening at eight-thirty Schoefield sat alone at the bar watching the Red Sox game while Willis watched him from across the street as he stood hidden in the shadows of an empty storefront’s doorway. Schoefield had been sitting alone in the bar for almost an hour, still nursing the same beer he bought when he first showed up. This was the last day of Willis’s deadline. He checked the time, left the doorway, headed to the bar and took a barstool so there was one empty one between him and Schoefield. There were seven other people scattered around at tables and a couple sitting at the other end of the bar, but that was it outside of Schoefield, a bored and sullen-looking waitress and the bartender. While being seen in a public place with a target was frowned upon by The Factory, it was allowed if it was deemed necessary for the job.

  Willis ordered a beer and grabbed a handful of peanuts from a bowl. When the Red Sox third baseman booted a ball he should’ve made a play on, Willis made a wisecrack and with a tight grin etched on his face shook his head with disgust, shooting Schoefield a ‘what are you gonna do’ kind of look. When Willis was a kid he was a Cleveland Indians fan, but it had been a long time since he cared about baseball, and he certainly couldn’t care less about the Red Sox, but he could play the part of a long-suffering fan. Schoefield murmured out something in agreement, but kept his focus on the TV. After some more well-timed wisecracks and banter on Willis’s part, Schoefield loosened up a bit and joined in. Willis held out his hand and introduced himself to Schoefield giving him a fake name while Schoefield gave him his real name.

  Willis moved over to the barstool next to Schoefield and bought his new buddy a beer, which was going to be the first of eight beers he was going to be buying Schoefield, and there would also be five shots of whiskey. Willis made sure to keep himself at half the number of drinks he was buying Schoefield. At first Schoefield nursed the drinks Willis bought him, but as Willis egged him into making drinking bets on the game, Schoefield was soon pouring the booze down. At first their conversation was kept superficially on the Red Sox and other Boston sports teams, which while Willis had no interest in he could fake well enough, but after an hour or so of free beers and shots of whiskey, Schoefield needed only minor prodding from Willis to recite his life story; the number of times his heart had been broken by different girls, his fifteen years working as a computer programmer, and how recently he’d been laid off when his company decided to transfer the work to an outsourcing firm in Pakistan. At that point, bitterness had crept deep into Schoefield’s voice, and his mouth contorted as if he had bit into an overly sour lemon.

  “All of us became disposable,” he said, somewhat slurring his words. “They could get the work done for thirty cents on the dollar for what they were paying us.” He muttered into his beer, “They just threw us away.”

  “Bastards,” Willis said.

  Schoefield nodded dully. “It’s the way this country’s been going. The rich just keep getting richer while the rest of us keep getting more and more fucked.” He paused for a moment before adding, “There’s going to have to be a change.” Another long pause, then barely a whisper, “If I had a rocket launcher.”

  “What?”

  “If I had a rocket launcher. Some son of a bitch would die.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Schoefield smiled broadly, the sheen glazing his eyes showing that he was drunk. “Never mind,” he said. “Just reciting from an old Bruce Cockburn song. But fuck, a lot of truth in that old song.”

  That was what Willis needed to hear. It took almost two hours of loosening Schoefield up with booze, but he finally got what he needed. He looked at Schoefield sitting hunched on his barstool feeling sorry for himself as he rolled an empty beer mug between his two chubby hands and stared blankly with eyes that held nothing but contempt.

  “You need some cheering up,” Willis offered. “Why don’t we both get laid? That should cheer me up, and I’m guessing it would sure the fuck cheer you up too. What do you say?”

  A nasty glint broke through Schoefield’s glazed eyes as he smiled thinly at Willis. “I don’t swing that way,” he said. “Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression.”

  “I don’t ei
ther, you dummy,” Willis said. “I’m talking about leaving this dump and finding us a couple of willing ladies. What do you say?”

  Schoefield thought about it, but shook his head. “I’m not exactly the type that any girl wants to have a one-night stand with,” he admitted, his smile turning glum.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Willis said with a wink. “The place I’m thinking about, we’ll have no problem finding ladies raring to go. And nice ones, too. I’ll be able to hook you up. Guaranteed. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  Willis paid up his tab, then signaled for Schoefield to follow him. Schoefield didn’t seem entirely convinced that Willis would be able to follow through as promised and find a girl willing to spend the night with him, but the prospect of it was too enticing for him not to try. He stumbled on after Willis. When they got outside, Willis told Schoefield he’d better drive. Schoefield smiling dumbly pointed out that they were standing right in front of his car, which of course was no surprise to Willis. He handed his keys to Willis who got behind the wheel while Schoefield plopped himself down into the passenger seat.

  Willis drove three towns over to a more industrial area. A darker, seedier area. Schoefield didn’t seem to notice, and instead spent the time telling Willis more stories of his failed love life and how badly he always struck out in the past at bars and nightclubs, with the obvious eagerness building in him that this night would be different. Willis didn’t bother responding, nor even listening anymore. Schoefield’s voice had become little more than a mosquito’s hum as far as he was concerned. The time for talking was done. Schoefield had nothing left to say that he cared to hear.

  When Willis pulled over, it was an area where he had busted the streetlights earlier that morning. There was barely enough light from the moon for them to see where they were going. Willis pointed out the steep cement steps they needed to go down to get to the street below them. “The club is down there,” he said. “Parking over there is impossible, but easy enough up here.”