Unstable Target: Six Assassins Book 3

by Heskett, Jim

  But, the two security guards who had died in this parking garage yesterday had also been perfectly capable. Only yesterday, someone had tried to kill him outside the elevators, not far from here.

  Someone obviously sent by the Club’s scheming Vice President, Jules Dunard. He had only survived thanks to the quick thinking of the young woman he had hired solely for her bedroom eyes, full lips, deep line of cleavage, and flat stomach. Also, to a lesser extent, also for her impressive typing speed. The job required basic knowledge of Word and Excel and the ability to type well.

  If Naomi the secretary had been as vacuous as he had assumed when he’d offered her the job, Wellner would be dead right now. That was one he was happy to be wrong about, in hindsight.

  But how much longer could he be wrong about other things, if he wanted to survive?

  In less than nine months, the Review Board elections would happen. It was no secret that Jules wanted Wellner’s job, and also that he had a strong bid for reelection. In his mind, if she thought she couldn’t beat him in a fair election, her next best plan might be to have him assassinated.

  In a regular political machine, Jules would have tried to find a skeleton in his past, or engaged in a smear campaign to win the vote. But in their line of work, killing your opponents happened a lot more frequently. Wellner didn’t want to take any chances.

  If he did die, the Club’s bylaws would place her immediately into authority as President until the next election, and she could easily mask her involvement in the coup.

  Wellner used to feel comfortable with a gun in his hand. He used to know what he was doing. What had changed? When exactly had he turned into a sniveling wuss?

  Wellner blew out a few uneven breaths and then pulled the door handle. His foot hesitated in the air, then when it sank to the concrete floor, it felt like a million pounds crashing down. The echo pushed off the concrete walls, as loud as gunshots to his ears.

  The security guard turned around, a Latina woman with short and curly hair. Wellner had seen her around before, but he didn't know her name. That would have to change. If he intended to rely on these people to keep him alive for the foreseeable future, he needed not only their loyalty but also their trust.

  “You’re safe with us, sir,” the woman said, extending a hand. He hated that she could read the trepidation on his face so easily. He hated that Jules had driven him to this pervasive terror.

  “Thank you,” he said as he accepted the bodyguard’s help out of the car. His stomach rumbled. His palms were sweaty. His legs felt like he’d spent an hour on the stair climber on the gym, but he hadn’t done that in years.

  Outside the car, the four guards swarmed around him, and the closeness of their suits and ties and visible weapons made him feel both safe and claustrophobic at the same time.

  The man at the front of the cluster lifted his sleeve to his mouth and whispered something into it. Wellner wondered if he had a code name the way US presidents did. He supposed he could ask, but he’d rather not hear they’d saddled him with something like Pork Loin or Chubby Duck or similar. It was probably too much to hope that his code name would be Eagle One.

  The four escorted him to the elevator without incident. Footsteps landing in unison, backs straight in perfect posture, heads swiveling in all directions.

  They stayed huddled like this until the elevator stopped on the governmental offices' floor, and Wellner now felt a little less terrified as the door opened. His eyes locked on Jules' door, a few down along the hall. His feet lashed out at the floor as he stomped toward it. The security guards trailed behind him like links of a chain.

  Fear morphed into anger. Wellner stopped outside and raised a hand to knock. He would walk into Jules’ office and demand to know where she had been and who she’d been speaking with. Assault her with questions and then let her sweat.

  The look on her face would tell him everything he needed to know. But, he didn’t need to extract the truth from her. He already knew.

  His hand hesitated in the air. If he confronted her now, then he lost any advantage of surprise, since he had no proof yet. Something else stopped him from knocking: a better idea.

  Wellner changed course and continued down the hall to his office. His security team fanned out and positioned themselves along the walls outside.

  He flung the door back, and his secretary Naomi clutched a hand to her chest as she looked up at him with wide eyes. Her chest pumped up and down, but she wore a tentative smile on her lips.

  “Morning, sir. You scared me.”

  He crossed the room and knelt down in front of her desk so he could meet her eyes. He reached out to take one of her still-clutched hands and held it inside his. "You saved my life yesterday. I will never forget what you did for me. Anything you want or need, you just let me know, and it'll be yours. You'll have that and my gratitude for the rest of my life. That's a promise."

  Her eyes misted a little as she smiled at him. “Thank you, David. None of that was planned. I just did it. I don’t even usually carry pepper spray with me, because I don’t like how it sits on my keychain. Too heavy. But, for some reason, I put it on my keychain last weekend after I got my car back from the shop. I don’t know why. Everything came together yesterday in the garage like magic.”

  “However it happened, I’m grateful now and forever.” He let go of her hand and then cleared his throat as he stood. “Take a memo.”

  Without missing a beat, her fingers jumped to her keyboard, and she nodded at him. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists.

  “To be released to all Branches and all internal administrative workers: there will be an in-depth, full-scale investigation into DAC corruption, effective immediately. All non-essential resources will be diverted, and all class 2 or below projects will be suspended until this is completed. We will excise the sickness from the Club with all due haste. We are going to restore the name of this once-great organization and all traitors will be punished swiftly and severely.”

  He paused, thinking. Naomi's hands hovered over the keyboard, and she gazed at him with expectant eyes.

  “Our founders established this Club almost sixty years ago to combat the very corruption and in-fighting we are seeing now across our Branches. We have the tools to root it out, and we will accept nothing less than full accountability for these crimes.”

  He paused again, and Naomi’s eyes flicked to him.

  “That’s all for now,” he said. “Clean it up and send it like that. I’ll announce more details when I have them. But for now, call everyone in. I want an emergency Board meeting the day after tomorrow, including all Branch reps. I’m going to force this rat out into the light.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ZACH

  Zach felt sunlight slice through the hole in his curtain. If he had thought it through, he would not have chosen the east-facing bedroom when he and Alec had divvied them up after moving in. Too late to do anything about it now.

  He stretched and swatted toward his nightstand to pick up his phone. Zach sat up in bed, scrolling along his text message history. Late last night, he'd sent Ember a text, and she had yet to respond. He wasn't surprised; a couple of days ago, she'd said she might be unavailable because of "work," which Zach was starting to find increasingly suspicious.

  She was always covered in unexplained scratches and bruises, too.

  He didn’t have any concrete reason to assume she was lying to him. But, there had been a string of minor inconsistencies and strange happenings with her, where she kept him at arm’s length any time something about her job came up. At their sushi dinner date two weeks ago, Ember had said she was some sort of “efficiency consultant” for large companies, and they hadn’t discussed it again. But, she frequently seemed busy. It often took her a long time to respond to texts and voicemails. Sometimes hours. Sometimes it was immediate and they would have a healthy back and forth, but not always.

  He didn’t want to be clingy, and when she was with him, she
usually gave him her full attention. He had a great time with her, but there was something going on.

  They were only a couple weeks into something Zach wasn’t even sure they could call dating. They hadn’t done anything beyond kissing. Usually, at this point in his college relationships, Zach was already thinking about moving on, worrying about becoming tied down to something long-term.

  Still, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was the strangest relationship he’d ever had. Maybe because she was older, he was letting her dictate the pace.

  He didn’t know, and it didn’t matter at the moment. Ember was unavailable, and Zach needed to talk to someone. After Thomas Milligan’s ceaseless attempts to recruit Zach, the planted porn, the strange things at work… Zach needed a sounding board to process ideas. This couldn’t wait another day or two for Ember to wrap up whatever project she had going on at the moment.

  He stumbled out of his bed and slid on a t-shirt, then he wandered out into the living room. His roommate Alec was there, sitting on the couch, hunkered over the coffee table. Music blared from his phone; some obscure rap Zach had never heard of before. Alec was one of those guys who liked to find whatever hip-hop artist was currently popular in Mozambique or Des Moines so he could claim to have his heart on the pulse of the real underground scene.

  Alec had his running shoes perched on the table, with his laces pulled out and sitting in a coiled pile next to them. He was holding things that looked like miniature bungee cords, trying to thread them through the shoe eyelets.

  “What’s that?” Zach asked.

  “New laces,” Alec said as he thumbed the volume down on his music. “They’re stretchy, so they don’t need to be tied. Cutting edge shit right here. You don’t even know.”

  “Wow, what are you going to do with that extra thirty seconds you save every day? Take up a new hobby? Or, maybe, give your dishes an extra thirty seconds each day to soak?”

  Alec flipped him the middle finger while he focused on the shoes. “Make fun all you want. These are nice laces. Bunch of NBA guys are using them this season.”

  Zach circled around the couch and had a seat on the floor. He put his hands on the coffee table to get Alec’s attention.

  Alec pursed his lips. “What’s up, bro? You look like shit.”

  “Yeah, I tossed and turned all last night. Can I ask you about something?”

  Alec let go of the laces and instead picked up his coffee mug. He sipped it as he sat back. “Go ahead.”

  “You know the lab I work for? I think they’re into nasty stuff. Like, they make weapons of mass destruction or something. I don’t even know. But what I do know is that it's something they'll do extreme shit to keep quiet and to keep control of it — whatever it is. Like the guy I work for is always trying to get me to move to California and take a job there, and he's started...." he trailed off. He wasn't sure he wanted to spill the beans on everything, even to his own roommate.

  “He’s offering you a job and you’re complaining about it?”

  “Are you listening to me? I think they’re shady. The company is called Firedrake, but it’s part of a bigger company called Draconis Global and Drache or something like that. You know that Netflix doc where the FBI raids the company and everyone is running around, trying to shred documents like they’re in a competition?”

  Alec frowned at him with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t think I’ve seen that one.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I just have a terrible feeling about this place. Like, if I agree to move to Cali and work there, something awful is going to happen.”

  Alec shrugged. “So, quit before it gets too intense. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  “I can’t quit, either. They’ve dropped enough hints on me that if I quit, something bad will happen, too. It’s a rock and a hard place.”

  Alec let out a grumbling sigh as he sipped his coffee, staring at Zach. “I’m not sure what to tell you. Sounds like you’re hosed. Time to bring in the experts, like the cops or something.”

  "I don't think I can call the cops, either. The other day, I went to the library, just to research them. They had a security guard remove me, and there was a cop car waiting outside. I avoided the police by sneaking out the back way, but I can't say for sure they weren't there for me."

  “Are you saying these people are powerful enough that they have the police in their back pocket?”

  Zach rubbed his temples and considered telling Alec about the child porn, but decided against it. "Yeah, they might. Everything they do and say is vague, you know? There have been… other signs, too. They want me to know they're serious. The boss, Thomas, has a driver who goes everywhere with him, and the guy is packing. He carries it in an armpit holster, and he wears suits like a bad guy from a 90s action movie."

  “That’s messed up, bro. My dad used to say, 'you keep doing what you’re doing, you keep getting what you’re getting.' I mean, he was talking about how I hated studying and so I failed a bunch of tests, but it seems like it applies here. You don’t stand up for yourself, then your boss and this action movie villain are going to keep pushing you around.”

  “I want to stand up for myself. I’m just freaked out about the consequences.”

  Alec shrugged, set down his coffee, and returned to working on his new laces project. Zach sat there, heart thumping, not knowing what to say. Alec couldn’t help him. Ember couldn’t help him. Zach was all alone here, and he had no idea what to do.

  The situation would come to a head at a certain point, and then Zach would have to make some sort of decision. Perhaps the most important one of his life.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  EMBER

  When Gabe said he wouldn’t be able to get the location of the safe house without extensive and time-consuming work, Ember decided to find it the old-fashioned way. Because of her previous time in the FBI, she happened to know that in Denver, safe houses were all arranged by a specific task force inside the local PD. A few minutes of internet searching indicated they operated that task force out of a police station in Westminster, a few miles to the south.

  She drove over by the station on 48th and sat on it.

  And she waited. For two hours, she sat in her car across the street, with an eye on the motor pool in the parking lot outside. She sipped from her water bottle and munched a pack of stale pretzels she kept in the glove box. Eating the pretzels was like chewing strips of cardboard, but she couldn't run down to the 7-11 and risk losing out.

  She promised herself she would get up early and hit the gym hard tomorrow. For now, junk food.

  The quiet time in the car gave her a chance to have a text chat with Zach, who she hadn’t seen since their stroll on Pearl Street a few days before. They made plans to walk along the Boulder Creek path this evening.

  Going on a night date was a little dangerous, and it raised two important risks: one, that she might invite him back to her place since their meetups had been trending in that direction. When their lips touched, her skin sizzled in a way she'd only experienced a few times in her life.

  The second risk was that Quinn might decide to make a proactive attack on her. Ember didn’t think he would, but there was no telling. And whether she was with Zach on a biking trail or with him in her bed, she didn’t want to put him at risk like that.

  By the time the sun began its descent across the sky, the pretzels were gone, and her stomach was growling again, but she still didn't want to miss anything. And, it turned out to be the right move. In the late afternoon, a couple of cops in plain clothes walked out of the station, headed for an unmarked car at the far end of the lot. But even more telling was that one of them had a paper bag in his hand, and the bag wore a few grease marks near the bottom. Probably the leftover bagels and doughnuts from this morning.

  They were shifty-eyed, keeping themselves small and quiet. They certainly looked like task force guys. These two would lead her straight to the safe house, straight to the woman Layne Parrish had rescued out
from underneath her nose.

  Ember stayed far back as she tailed them. Clandestine pursuit was not her strong suit. Despite her multiple years in the FBI in her twenties and a few low-speed and high-speed chases under her belt, these cops probably had more experience than she did. And, on their way to a safe house, they would be on the lookout for a tail.

  So, Ember kept back and made sure she wasn't obvious about mirroring their movements. At least one car between them, and she took care to pause before turning whenever they hit a stoplight.

  They eventually pulled into a neighborhood in Broomfield, only a couple miles from the Night Owl and the shipping facility. This was a small town, packed among the dozen other small towns that spooled together to form the sprawling Denver metro.

  Ember drove past when the cops parked in front of a white two-story house with hardly any windows. Like all safe houses she had ever seen, this was as plain and boring and uneventful as they came. But she did notice a tiny balcony with a trellis on the back. Since going in the front or back doors didn’t seem likely, the trellis would be the way to go. It looked heavy-duty enough to support her, but no way to know for sure until she started up.

  Also, with a two-story house, she would expect them to keep their asset on the second floor. That’s what Ember would have done, anyway.

  She parked after the next turn and waited until the cops went inside the house, with the paper bag. Then, she made the slow walk back along the sidewalk, keeping eyes on the house. There were no external surveillance cameras, and she couldn’t see anyone lurking in the windows. Still, she kept her head down, hands in her pockets, imagining she was headed for the convenience store on the corner.

  Ember diverted to the backyard of a sleepy house on the same side of the street. This one had only a chain-link fence, so she hopped it and skirted across the yard to hide behind a smelly compost bin full of grass and eggshells. When she was confident there was no one home in the next backyard, she hopped that fence and then two more on a path toward the target house.