The Alex Troutt Thrillers: Books 1-3 (Alex Troutt Thrillers Box Set)

by John W. Mefford

  “They think Ahmed is a terrorist? This has got to be a joke, right?”

  “The intel sounds very convincing, Jerry. He was caught speaking with a man and woman who were connected to the ISIS bombings in Paris.”

  His shoulders slumped, and then his hands dropped to the table with a decent thud. “I don’t know how or where they’re getting their intel, but Ahmed Shaheen is the last guy on earth who would be involved in anything that would harm people.”

  I pursed my lips.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  I reached out and patted his thick hand. “I think you believe you’re telling me the truth.”

  “So you think I’m turning into one of...them?”

  I smiled. “Right.”

  We both knew that was code for a naïve person who thought they knew the suspect in question, but in reality had a false understanding of who that suspect—usually their friend—really was.

  He picked up his cup. “I wonder if they have any whiskey here.”

  My phone buzzed, and I saw another text from Gretchen.

  “Am I a part of the team again?” He nodded toward the phone.

  “Sure you are, Jerry. Gretchen is giving us an update on what she learned about Patrick.”

  “And that is?”

  I paused for a moment, then said, “After his accident—”

  “While working construction on the Deer Island project.”

  “Right. Well, he apparently suffered a heart attack. The on-call doctor who happened to see him?”

  “Sean Maguire,” Jerry said while nodding. “That must have been how they met.”

  I let my purse rest on my lap, my hand still clasping my phone. Now that Jerry was officially one of the good guys, there had to be something he’d overheard that could help us. “Think for a moment, Jerry. Isn’t there something you might have picked up from Maguire or Patrick that would tell you more about what they’re planning, or even what their cause is?”

  He pinched between his eyes and bowed his head.

  “Are you praying?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Anything at all coming to you?”

  “Well, I now recall overhearing a side conversation between Patrick and Sean. They were walking in from the kitchen, and Sean said, ‘This one isn’t made from scratch. Sophisticated targets require sophisticated solutions.’”

  His gaze met mine, and we both tapped our chins.

  “I’ll have to let that marinate a bit,” I said.

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, they repeated this thing that Patrick told me at the bar, the same one on the flyer you found. If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.”

  “Right, it’s a phrase used by the IRA years ago. So we’ve learned that former members of the IRA have consulted with certain terrorist groups in Iraq to help them construct IEDs. That’s another reason why Shaheen is under scrutiny. He visited hotspots all across the Middle East several times.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Somehow, all of this Irish, IRA crap must have something to do with the bombings. I know that Sean is very proud of his Irish heritage.”

  “The former IRA guy, the postal worker, Gavin O’Hara...I put him under protection.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  I bit into my lip. “I know. I had to ask a favor of the Boston PD.”

  “Trust.”

  “I’m sorry, Jerry. I just felt like I couldn’t take the risk.”

  He puffed out a breath. “No sweat. I would do the same thing over again. I just wish I could have stopped the previous bombings.”

  “But, Jerry, they’re still out there. Sophisticated targets, remember? We can stop this thing. We have to stop it.”

  My phone buzzed again. “It’s a text from Nick.”

  “And?”

  “He says a waitress at Finnegan’s recognized a picture of Leo.”

  “The kid who died in his car by the Ted Williams Tunnel? Ever since we left Paulie’s empty-handed, I’ve been racking my brain to figure out how that kid was mixed up in this.”

  I lifted my eyes from the screen and told him about Gretchen finding the online connection between Leo and Arnold Lyons, the meth lab guy who was somehow prepping for the end of the world.

  “Wacko,” Jerry said, tipping his cup to try to drain a couple more drops from his empty cup.

  “Nick goes on to say that the waitress says she recalls seeing Leo having a few beers with Patrick.”

  “Patrick? So you think Leo actually knew there was a bomb in that box in his front seat?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Who knows?”

  Another buzz.

  “Damn, you guys text a lot,” Jerry said.

  “We’re doing group texting. How do you think we get through every investigation? It’s not by sitting around and waiting for the suspect to wave a flag telling us what he’s about to pull off.”

  “I know, it’s been a while since I’ve been in the field. It’s different on this side, that’s for sure. So what does it say?”

  “It’s Gretchen. She followed up Nick’s point by saying she’s learned that Leo’s dad, Oscar Pescatore, died in that construction accident on Deer Island.”

  “So it’s very possible that Patrick and Leo’s dad knew each other,” Jerry said.

  I punched in a text back to the group, then pushed my seat away from the table.

  “Where are you going?” Jerry said. “We’ve got to figure this shit out. Their next target could be soon. In fact, I know it’s soon.”

  “I’m going home to kiss my kids good night, and then I’ll meet you at Brad’s place.”

  “Why Brad’s place?”

  “That’s where the brains of this operation are at the moment. We’ll work all night to figure out who they’re targeting.”

  15

  It was mind-boggling to him what people would do for money. Incomprehensible.

  The man with the weathered good looks of a veteran Hollywood A-list actor stood motionless, peering through a small window of a door near the end of the fifth-floor hallway at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston’s West End. Chaos had just erupted following five or six gunshots and screams of absolute terror. Emergency sirens sounded as everyone either ran for cover or bolted to help end the rampage on the east side of the building.

  That included the uniformed officer standing outside of room 524. Not that he’d been busy doing anything special. The man had been watching him for five minutes prior to the shots and the alarms, and wasn’t surprised to see his head nodding every few seconds.

  It must have been a killer shift, the man had thought.

  Behind a pair of silver-framed glasses, his hazel eyes surveyed the hallway, which was almost completely clear. One last nurse waddled down the hall as fast as her walrus legs could carry her, waving her hands in the air and screaming. She finally disappeared beyond the nurse’s station and then around the corner. She looked vaguely familiar. At least her dimpled ass did. Now that he thought about it, he was no more acquainted with her than he was with each of the trees on his two-hundred-acre rolling hills estate.

  He opened the door and stepped into the hallway, his eyes focused on the opposite end, where he could now hear yelling and the clatter of furniture and hospital equipment crashing to the ground.

  Perhaps the gunman had already been captured. If all went according to plan, he’d continue this act of terror until one of the so-called good guys put a bullet between his eyes.

  Again...what people would do for money was truly extraordinary. Money. Not even for a real cause that made a fucking difference in the world. He used to sit on the sidelines and watch events take place, wondering, hoping that someone would accept the challenge to take a stand. No one ever did. He could only take so much. Watching such disloyalty and outright treachery had slowly created a level of internal fury that could no longer be restrained. The money, the prestige he’d accumulated over so many
years in the medical profession now seemed inconsequential. And he was willing to put it all on the line to once again put the spotlight on the cause and to those who had betrayed it.

  His white medical coat fluttered from the breeze of his quick movement. One hand clutched the stethoscope around his neck as he flipped back around and continued his march to room 524. A closet door opened, and two people stumbled into the hallway, a young man in scrubs falling at the man’s feet. The man tripped and threw a hand toward the door, hoping to break his fall. He cut his hand on the doorjamb and tumbled to the floor, his knees and elbows taking the brunt of the fall. He moved to all fours and paused for a second just to make sure nothing was broken or dislocated. He could hear a cackling giggle over his panting breaths.

  “Oh my God, Joey, look what we did.” A busty woman rushed to the man’s side, the first four buttons on her shirt unfastened. “Are you okay, doc?”

  He turned and saw the young man in scrubs hurriedly trying to pull his pants over his package.

  “I’m fine,” the doctor shot back. His head began to ache. He must have rattled his teeth then he fell to the floor. Pushing himself up as best he could, he felt a twinge of pain in the shoulder socket. He glanced at the webbing in his hand and saw blood pooling. Then he noticed a smear of red on his white coat.

  “You’re bleeding. I can help you with that.” She grabbed his wrist and stuck her beak of nose about an inch away from his hand. “That’s just a flesh wound. I’m a nursing assistant and fully capable of administering bacitracin and a large bandage.”

  She leaped to her feet, creating an ocean wave of milky-white cleavage.

  “Lulu, you’re, uh, about to fall out of your shirt,” the man in scrubs chuckled, still horizontal on the floor as he tied up his pants.

  She squeezed her boobs together. “Oh, there’s plenty of that to go around.” She turned her head and winked at the doctor. “But Joey, you’re my man. At least my man of the week.” She bent over and gave him a sloppy kiss.

  As she un-suctioned her mouth, the doctor could see red lipstick smeared all over the young man’s face and neck.

  In mere seconds, the perfect plan had been obliterated by these two hormonal idiots.

  “Let me see, I think I have some supplies I can get right out of this closet,” she said, craning her neck inside. “What do you know, Joey? We were doing it right in the middle of the supplies. Who woulda thunk it?” She giggled and snorted in an annoying cadence.

  “Stop!” the doctor ordered.

  She ceased movement. “Am I not allowed to move? Sheesh!”

  “I don’t need any bandages.” He wiped his brow with the back of his wrist and struggled to get to his feet, scooping up his stethoscope along the way. Once standing, he could see the back half of the woman sticking out of the closet and the young man staring at him from the ground. Neither had moved an inch.

  “I didn’t mean to be cross with you. You just startled me. It must be nice to be young and carefree.”

  Joey leaped to his feet as Lulu crushed her voluptuous chest into his shoulder, laying another smooch on his cheek.

  “This one here, he’s an absolute stud. He doesn’t need any blue pills, that’s for sure.”

  She had a provocative fire in her eyes and looked like she was ready for round two.

  The doctor glanced at the red flashing light on the side of the opposite wall—the alarm was still pulsating. “You two do know there’s been a shooting?”

  The man in the scrubs scratched his head. “I knew something was going on, but—”

  “He was distracted. I think we heard the big boom at the exact same time as our own boom-boom.” She did her cackle-snort routine again.

  “Well, the whole place is going on shutdown. I’m not sure they’ve caught the guy yet either.”

  The man in scrubs pried Lulu’s arm from around his neck and stepped closer to the doctor. “For real? This isn’t some type of drill or hoax?”

  “Far from it, son. The gunshots were very real. So were the screams. It’s not safe in this hospital.”

  “Holy shit, Lulu.” He turned and grabbed her upper arms. “Did you hear that? This is no joke.”

  Slowly, the edges of her lips dropped, her face pinching into a ball of stress. “Dear God, what could I have been thinking?” She turned back to the silver-haired man in the white coat. “Hey, what are you doing down here if it’s so dangerous?”

  The doctor flipped a thumb over his shoulder. “There’s one patient they couldn’t move, and I volunteered to come check on him.”

  The man in scrubs ran fingers through his hair and turned back to the doctor. “You look like someone important here. I’m just a first-year intern. If my manager finds out about this, I could be dead.”

  “We might both be dead if we don’t get out of here.” Lulu started to pace back and forth across the hall.

  “But I don’t want to be caught walking into the lobby with some floozy on my arm.”

  “What did you call me?” She pointed a fake fingernail an inch from his eye.

  “No offense, but I have a career to think about.”

  She crossed her arms and boosted her chest another notch. “You weren’t too worried about your career when you were pounding your chest like Tarzan in that closet.”

  The doctor flipped around to glance at room 524, wondering if he’d ever get there.

  “Look, can you help me, you know, without being seen?” The young man in scrubs stood within two feet.

  “Okay, just down the hall here, take the stairs down to the basement. Instead of turning left, go right down a long corridor. When it dead-ends, go left. It spills into the alley by the loading dock out back.”

  “Awesome. Thank you.”

  Lulu was already halfway to the stairway door when the man backpedaled a few steps and addressed the doctor again. “Remember, you never saw me.”

  The doctor held up his hand while smiling. “No problem. You never saw me either.”

  The kid gave a thumbs-up just before he ducked through the door. At the same time, the beeping alarm ceased.

  Knowing he didn’t have much time before the guard returned to his post, the doctor turned on a dime and rushed down the hall. His head swiveled left and right, ensuring the rooms he passed were empty. He reached room 524 and let the door shut gently behind him. Gavin O’Hara lay in his bed, his eyes closed, with a nasal cannula providing free oxygen through his nostrils. The noise of him entering didn’t disturb Gavin. The doctor guessed he was probably on heavy morphine.

  The doctor circled the bed and spotted three bundles of colorful Get Well balloons and two vases of flowers strategically placed on counters and chairs, even one on the windowsill. A splinter of late afternoon sun momentarily blinded him, and he smacked his knee against the metal bedpost.

  “Grrr,” he grimaced, grabbing his already-sore knee.

  “Doc, you okay?”

  Breath caught in the back of the doctor’s throat as he lifted his eyes to the head of the bed. Gavin’s eyes opened with a quick blink, then they shut as he raised an arm and let it plop back to the mattress.

  A few seconds ticked by, and the doctor could hear the man’s breath pushing out air through his cracked lips. He’d fallen back asleep.

  Moving quickly, the doctor went to the side of the bed, removed a Velcro strap from his coat pocket, and carefully secured Gavin’s wrist to the bed railing. The patient jostled for a second, moving his head to the side and then began to snore again.

  The doctor circled back to the other side of the bed and performed the same task. He looked down at Gavin and shook his head. “Your life had purpose when you were young. You joined many others to stand up for the rights of our homeland. And then what? You ran away like a frightened little child. You turned your back on your countrymen and let the parasites rule our land. Our homeland.”

  Gavin’s eyes remained closed, but his lips moved. Was he mumbling something? The doctor leaned toward the i
njured man. “I...I need to pee, doc. Can you help me?” He slurred his words.

  “That will be the day,” the doctor said.

  With his eyes still pressed shut, the semi-conscious man smacked his lips and then tried to move his arms. The restraints allowed about two inches of movement, but nothing more. A trench formed between his eyes as he struggled to get his arms free.

  “What’s going on?” he grumbled.

  “Dear Gavin, you’re going to take a deep sleep, sir. And nothing will ever wake you up.”

  “Oh, cool. You’re going to give me some of that good shit. I need it. My chest wound is killing me, man. I could get hooked on this shit. Wow...” His jaw dropped open, and he started breathing in a rhythmic cadence again. More sleep.

  The doctor pulled the syringe from his coat pocket, slid off the cap, and held it vertically in front of him. Out of habit, he tapped the side of syringe, and a squirt of chemical popped out, eliminating any air bubbles.

  The combined chemicals—potassium chloride and calcium gluconate—were a deadly combination, manifesting in a heart attack. A natural form of death that was virtually undetectable.

  Frankly, Gavin O’Hara deserved much worse for being a traitor. If plans hadn’t gone awry, seeing his shredded body parts all over the post office parking lot would have been far more suitable for his actions. Death by a firing squad would have even been acceptable.

  The doctor turned to the IV machine and moved the needle near the bag that dripped the morphine. For some strange reason, at that moment he thought about all of his achievements in the world of medicine, and how it all started when he recited the Hippocratic Oath many moons ago. He’d recounted many of those phrases over the years, usually during speeches and forums on various medical topics and to graduating medical students.

  One phrase stood above the others, and it was one he sometimes recited to himself, usually while staring into his bathroom mirror. “Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.”