Dark Angel

One

In the summer of 2021, the woman flew into Miami International with nothing to declare but the clothes she stood in, a phony passport, an iPhone with a broken screen, and a ballpoint pen. The pen didn't work, but did conceal a two-inch-long razor-sharp blade that could be used to slice open a carotid artery (for example).

She looked more than tired. Exhausted, but fighting it. She had dishwater blond hair that hadn't been washed recently, a mottled tan, turquoise eyes, and a thin white scar that extended from one nostril down across her lips to her chin.

The clothes she stood in were speckled with mud and what the young Customs and Border Patrol officer thought might be dried blood; the clothes reeked of old sweat and something else, like swamp water.

Her ragged tee-shirt-the only clothing above her waist, worn paper thin, he could see her nipples pushing out against it-featured a drawing of a llama with a legend that said "Como Se Llama?" which the young officer understood as a Spanish pun. She had flown in on United, from the Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chavez in Lima, Peru. How she'd gotten on the plane, he couldn't even guess.

The CBP officer was giving her his best no-admittance stink-eye as he thumbed through her passport. He asked, "Your name is Angeles Chavez?"

The woman shook her head: "No."

"What?" Hadn't heard that before; he checked her turquoise-green eyes. "Then what is it?"

"I'm not allowed to tell you that."

He was about to call for help when the head of the CBP unit stepped up behind his booth, took the passport from his hand, and said, "Let her in."

Hadn't heard that before, either. He let her in.

A man in a plutonium suit and tie was standing a few feet behind his boss, rolling a wooden matchstick between his lips. When the woman whose name wasn't Angeles Chavez stepped past the CPB booth, the man took the matchstick out of his mouth, grinned, and asked, "How you doin', honey-bun?"

"I think I got a leech up my ass," the woman said.

***

So then Letty Davenport was sitting on a battered swivel chair in a near-empty room on the second floor of a warehouse off Statesville Road in Charlotte, North Carolina, watching a door on another warehouse across the street.

August was slipping away, but the heat was holding on with both hands, and the warehouse was only somewhat air-conditioned. When she lifted her arms to look through her binoculars, she could smell her armpits, if only faintly, and her face was... moist.

Letty was twenty-five, of average height, dancer-slender and dancer-muscled, with dark hair that fell to the nape of her neck. Crystalline blue eyes. A whiff of Tom Ford's Fucking Fabulous perfume mixed with the perspiration. She was an investigator for the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, although her real boss was a U.S. senator.

She'd suffered a spasm of fame, or notoriety, after a shoot-out in the Rio Grande town of Pershing, Texas, the year before, in which she'd killed two men. She'd shot to death a third man earlier in the same trip.

All for God and Country; Country, anyway.

Behind her, in the long, wide, near-empty room was a ping-pong table. Three youngish FBI agents were taking turns being bad at ping-pong when they weren't trying to determine her relationship status.

Nothing had come through the door across the street in the two hours that Letty had been watching it, but she wasn't bored. She had a laptop where it was supposed to be-on her lap-and she was riding on a wi-fi signal from the food wholesaler next door.

From Bing, the search app, she'd learned that South Koreans now disliked China more than they disliked Japan, that housing prices might be peaking. She'd also read in the New York Times about five fascinating things she could do this weekend, if she lived in New York City, which she didn't, and if she was easily fascinated, which she wasn't.

Without warning, a door popped open behind her.

Letty swiveled and reflexively picked up the Sig 938 from the windowsill as a woman came through the door, saw the pistol, lifted her hands and said, "Don't shoot."

"Cartwright?"

"That's me." The woman with the turquoise-green eyes had a fresh set of clothing. "I wanted to be here for this."

"I was told you had a leech up your ass."

"All taken care of," Cartwright said. She waved to the three FBI agents, but strolled over to Letty. "Tequila works wonders, when properly applied. You know. By drinking it."

Letty smiled and said, "We were supposed to get a call to say you were on the way up."

Cartwright shrugged. "I dunno. The drop-off guy just dropped me off and said to go to the second floor."

"Sounds about right for government work," Letty said. She looked back across the street. "Bogard and Holsum haven't shown up yet. Dupree walked around the truck and looked inside, an hour ago. That was the last time I saw him. The feds over there," -nodded at the FBI agents-"are all looking for dates, so you might keep that in mind."

"I will." Cartwright looked through the dirt-spotted window at the semi-trailer backed up to the loading dock across the street. Like Letty, she was average height and dancer-slender. Her blond hair was pulled back in a short efficient ponytail. Like Letty, she was wearing jeans, but with a khaki overshirt to hide her pistol. She was seven years older than Letty, but they might have been sisters.

"Got a good spot here; how long does it take to get across the street?"

"From here, standing start, eleven seconds to get across the room, down the fire stairs, to the exit, which is right below us," Letty said. "They'll see us coming."
 
"You think they could be trouble?"
 
"Don't know. I interviewed Dupree. You should have gotten a transcript."
 
"I did. Sounded fake-cooperative," Cartwright said.
 
"Exactly. But, I got him jumpy, with the urge to move. When I saw him, he wasn't carrying. On the other hand, he's an office worker in a government building. Bogard and Holsum are the reddest of necks and they're freelance. Even if they're not carrying, I'd be surprised if they didn't have a few guns around."
 
"And this will go off around six o'clock?"
 
"Yes. Most of the employees get out around 4:30. I think they'll wait until it's quiet. Give it an hour or so."

The FBI agents had given up on the ping-pong and come over to meet Cartwright. One of them said, "An hour or so if it happens at all."

"It will," Letty said. "They want to move it fast, before I have more time to dig around in there."

Letty had a CI, a confidential informant, inside the FEMA warehouse. The CI said Dupree, Bogard, and Holsum were planning to steal eight forklifts from the FEMA warehouse; the CI also wanted Dupree's job, so there was that.

The three-and-a-half-ton-capacity, rough-terrain, four-wheel-drive forklifts were valued at $12,500 each, making eight of them worth $100,000 if sold in Charlotte.

If sold in Chancay, Peru, to JuFen Industries, a Chinese company working on the construction of a spanking-new Pacific Ocean port, they'd go for twice that price, less the $1,200 apiece that it cost to ship them.

Small potatoes compared to the $1,500,000 they'd gotten for the five hundred FEMA army-style field tents they'd sold to the same Chinese company to shelter the families of its Peruvian workers. Still, two hundred grand is two hundred grand, especially when it was tax-free.

Cartwright had spotted the tents while doing research in Chancay for an Unspecified Agency of the U.S. government. Her research had included cutting serial number labels off several of the tents, which had later been identified as FEMA property. That vandalism, when discovered by a Chinese security officer, had led to a brief chase across the desert and then an unscheduled swim in the Rio Chancay, followed by a hitchhiking trip to Lima in clothing stolen off a clothesline.

After Cartwright arrived in Miami, the Unspecified Agency had dropped a note to the powers that be at the Department of Homeland Security, and Letty had been sent to Charlotte to investigate the status of the tents.

In the warehouse where they should have been, she'd found an empty space. Dupree had explained that the tents had been shipped to Africa to shelter children at a free school, that all the paperwork had been perfect, and he hoped the kids appreciated their new homes.

Nope.

***

Cartwright, as it happened, wasn’t a great ping-pong player, but she was better than any of the feds. After they’d chatted for a while, to bring her up to the minute on their plan and determine her relationship status, she held the table for six consecutive games, until Letty called, “We got Bogard and Holsum.”

The two had just arrived at the parking lot across the street in Holsum's pimped-out red Chevy Camaro, and Holsum was talking on his cell phone as he got out of the driver's side. Letty was watching them through a pair of Leica binoculars. When Bogard got out of the passenger side of the car, he did a hitch-up to his pants and Cartwright asked, "You get that?" and Letty said, "Yeah," and one of the feds asked, "What?" and Letty said, "Bogard's carrying."

Another of the feds said, "Let's gear it up," and the three agents began pulling on armor.

Dupree opened a door, and Bogard and Holsum disappeared inside. Two minutes later, the overhead door at a loading dock rolled up, and Letty said, "Let 'em load, let 'em load."

A minute after that, the first of the forklifts rolled through the loading door, across the dock, and into the semi-trailer, with Holsum driving, Dupree keeping watch, and Bogard sucking on a Tootsie Pop.

"Go," Letty said, and the three feds headed for the stairway fire door at a trot.

Fifteen seconds later, as Letty and Cartwright watched, the three agents were running across the street, guns in hand. Dupree saw them coming, apparently shouted a warning to the others, and turned and ran into the warehouse.

Bogard, who'd been watching from the other side of the semitrailer, jumped off the dock and began running to the far side of the warehouse. The feds didn't see him because their line of sight was blocked by the truck.

Letty headed for the door, her 938 in her hand.

Cartwright, following: "What?"

"Bogard can't get out that way. The chain-link fence hooks on to the next warehouse. He'll have to run down an alley at the other end of the building... He'll be coming back to us."

Eleven seconds later, they were out the door with Letty leading the way up the street, Cartwright next to her shoulder, both of them running easily. One of the feds saw them running and shouted something at the other two agents and began running after them, but fifty yards back.

The warehouse was a full block long and Bogard wasn't a runner: he was overweight with the red face of a longtime drinker and smoker; but, he was carrying.

As they came up to the alley, Letty split left and Cartwright went right, and when Bogard staggered out from behind the building, Letty screamed, "Stop! Stop or we'll kill you!" Bogard turned toward them, almost fell, saw three guns pointed at him as the fed came up, and put his hands over his head.

"I'm having a heart attack," he said, and to prove it, he toppled over, hitting the ground facedown, like two hundred and fifty pounds of uncooked beef; he half-rolled, clutching his chest and groaned.

The agent said, "Good gosh! I think he really is." He pulled back Bogard's shirt and dug a chrome revolver out of his belt.

Bogard groaned again. "Call an ambulance..."

Letty was already on her phone, calling 9-1-1.

"Another beautiful day in the American Southland," Cartwright drawled, looking down at Bogard as Letty finished the 9-1-1 call. She turned to Letty and asked, "What would you have done if he'd pulled?"

"Shot him," Letty said. "I would have tried not to kill him with the first shot."
 
"Then you're a better woman than I am," Cartwright said. "I would have shot him in the eye."

"You think you could have hit him in the eye from thirty or forty feet, when he was moving?" Letty asked.

"You're looking at the best shot in North Carolina right now," Cartwright said.

Letty slipped her 938 back in her jeans, smiled, showing some teeth, and said, "No, I don't think so."

Cartwright, cocking her head: "Really."

Letty nodded: "Yes. Really."

Bogard belched, loudly, and the fed said, "Maybe it was just gas."

Bogard moaned and cried, "Help me..."

Cartwright: "Gotta stay away from that barbeque, man."

Made Letty smile, but she turned her face away so Bogard wouldn't see it.

***

A week later, Letty was sitting in her closet-sized office behind a half-open yellow metal door, in the basement of the Senate Office Building in Washington, DC. She was struggling with the executive summary of the full report she’d just finished writing. She’d learned that if you want your report noticed by a Senate panel, keep the summary under two hundred words. Longer than that, and the senators started getting chapped lips, which they didn’t like.

"... intelligence reports indicate that all five hundred tents were being used in a tent city operated by JuFen Industries, a Chinese construction company working on the new Pacific Ocean port being built by the Chinese in Chancay, Peru. The eight forklifts had been illicitly purchased from FEMA stocks by the same company..."

***

Cartwright knocked on Letty’s door and Letty turned to look at her: “Barbara. Where’d you come from?”

"Across the river. I have an invitation for you." She thrust an ivory colored, heavy-paper envelope at Letty.

Letty took it. "An invitation? I..."

Cartwright was already walking away, turning to say only, "Come or not."

Letty looked at the outside of the envelope. "Letty Davenport" was written in a neat female hand, in blue-black ink from a fountain pen.

Beneath her name was another legend:

Washington Ladies Peace-Maker Society: You're Invited.

"You gotta be kidding me," Letty said aloud. She called her friend Billy Greet. "I got an invitation from the Ladies Peace-Maker Society."

"I thought they were... a rumor. What does it say?"

"I don’t know. I haven’t opened the envelope."

"Well, open it."

Letty opened the envelope and took out a card and read it into the phone: "You are cordially invited to a reception for Ms. Elaine Shelton at the clubhouse of the Washington Ladies Peace-Maker Society. Respondents only please."

The date of the reception was September 25, a Saturday, the location on Cemetery Lane near Mt. Pleasant, Virginia. The note specified "practical attire" and "personal equipment."

"Who’s Ms. Elaine Shelton?" Letty asked. "I never heard of her."

"Look at the medals list from the last Olympics," Greet said.

"Really? Huh. Think I should go?"

"I…dunno. There’s some odd rumors about them. I don’t know much more. Maybe…a gun club?"

"That’s what I’ve heard. Do you think when it says personal equipment…"

"I guess. What else could it be?"

***

Practical attire.

After obsessing on the phrase for two weeks, Letty went with jeans, a tee-shirt under a loose nylon long-sleeved Orvis fishing shirt and lightweight hiking boots. The drive out to the Ladies clubhouse, in her hybrid Highlander, took almost two hours from her apartment in Arlington.

Autumn was breaking out in brilliant, spangled color, making the trip into the Blue Ridge spectacular, all that red, yellow and orange against the remaining green of the forest, and a flawless robin’s-egg sky.

She drove most of the way with the driver’s side window down, so she could smell the dusty, astringent scent of the roadside wildflowers. The clubhouse, she’d imagined, would be something like a southern mansion, long broad porch, white pillars, a place where George Washington or Robert E. Lee might have stopped to take a leak.

She found Cemetery Lane on the main road out of Mt. Pleasant, a place which barely qualified as a hamlet. A few minutes north, a gravel road branched to the west, taking her past a small, unkempt cemetery guarded by a rusting barbed-wire fence strung on rotting wooden posts. The track took her up a hill, and then over a ridge and down into a heavily wooded valley.

The road narrowed as she went along, went from gravel to packed dirt, weeds growing up in the middle of the two-track, all of it spotted with fallen red and yellow maple leaves. The track passed through an open metal gate, and finally ended at what she guessed must have been the "clubhouse" – a row of three green-painted industrial-sized Quonset huts. They were neatly kept with stone steps and zinnia gardens around the foundations. But still…Quonsets. No porch with white pillars.