by Ben Coes
The sudden circle of red … Jessica’s eyes, in pain, communicating to him.
I’m sorry.
The events all coursed through his mind in moments and seconds. He had to relive it because it was the only way to see the look on Jessica’s face just before she was killed. The look of longing and utter and total love. Dewey had to go back in order to see the moment, even though the pain was too much, but he saw her eyes.… Dewey saw her arms reaching out to him, her beautiful frame through the white fabric … and he suddenly remembered her turning and smiling, and then the bullet hit her from behind, and in a fraction of a second they both realized what had happened, and despite her pain, Jessica’s mouth had moved and called out to him one final time, “I love you,” as she dropped to the ground and died.
A war that has no end.
As he reached the exit ramp off the Rock Creek Parkway, Dewey cooled the Hayabusa down, slowing, downshifting in a throaty, bearlike growl. He stopped thinking about it. He knew he could never get it back, not Jessica, Holly, or Robbie. All he had now were the moments, moments only accessed when he forced himself to challenge death.
He didn’t like to think about his past. He’d long ago put his past behind him. But the harder he worked to separate himself, to numb himself, the more he understood that his past was inextricably linked to his present and future. That he could never escape the ramifications of what he had done first as a Ranger, then Delta, and now as an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency. If he could forget his past, perhaps then he could come to believe that he could meet someone and fall in love and have the child he so desperately wanted. He could never replace Robbie but maybe they would have loved each other? If he could forget his past, he could make himself believe that he wouldn’t be responsible for the death of another woman, of two women.
But he could not forget the past; Dewey vowed to never again put a woman he loved in harm’s way. The guilt he felt, the shame that haunted him, was already too much to bear. So he would never love again.
Yet, he recognized Rob was right. A little social interaction might not be such a bad idea. Maybe he should go out on a date with someone once in a while? He didn’t want to be a hermit, after all. The problem was, every time he did that, he fell in love. Holly and Jessica were the only women he’d ever been with. He hated how naïve he was, and how simple. He needed to put his past behind him.
Dewey’s solution was always to keep on going without thinking too much. To put aside the past and the future and occupy the present. Forget it all for a precious few moments and enjoy the thought of something as simple as a trained, highly technical motorcycle ride on the most powerful production bike in the world. Or a good meal. He was hungry. He’d worked up an appetite. He would get a big lunch then go home and take a shower, maybe go for a run later, seven or eight miles, and he would try to keep each mile under six minutes.
Dewey cut across M Street then took a right on Thirty-fourth Street. He stopped in front of the pretty brick façade of his town house and parked the bike. He climbed off and left his helmet on the Hayabusa. He walked to the corner and opened the door to a restaurant called Alta Strada. It was his neighborhood restaurant, the place he went to for pizza and pasta, both of which were delicious. He knew most of the people by name. Sometimes he would come in at night and sit at the bar alone, drinking a Peroni or three and eating a bowl of Bolognese.
Dewey stepped inside. It was a small restaurant and normally it was filled with customers and waitstaff, bustling with activity, but Dewey could see no one, not for a moment or two. Alta Strada kept its lights low, and his eyes had to adjust. Then he saw the carnage.
Blood pooled on the linoleum floor, tables overturned.
He lurched back for the door, trying to get out, but then all he could hear was the low staccato thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack of suppressed automatic gunfire—and he pivoted, diving down to the ground just as slugs pulverized the door, barely missing above him, shattering the glass.
Two gunmen flanked the inside of the restaurant from left and right, standing a few feet from the door. They were pumping bullets at Dewey. But Dewey was on his stomach, beneath the fusillade, screened by tables and chairs.
He recognized the sound of an Uzi—that gunman was to his right. The other weapon—which Dewey was more fearful of—was an AR-15. He felt the brute thuds of slugs as they pounded the wall to his left, just a few feet away.
The gunmen, whoever they were, had him locked in. He knew he didn’t want to take a bullet from either weapon.
Dewey scrambled along the floor, shielded by tables and chairs, crawling. He swept his eyes horizontally at ground level as the assassins moved in, trapping him in a storm cloud of bullets. He registered at least a dozen corpses, lying in contorted positions, drenched in crimson, including one of the waitresses he knew by name, Jan. Dewey reached for his left ankle and removed a combat blade—Gerber eight-inch fixed steel with a serrated upper edge. With his other hand he reached to a holster beneath his left armpit. He took out a pistol: Colt M1911A1 .45 caliber, semiautomatic, chambered and ready to go.
From the floor, in between chairs and tables and corpses, he made out the legs of the killer to his right. Dewey trained the pistol on one of the terrorist’s legs as the killer to his other side kicked aside tables and chairs. Dewey fired twice, pumping two bullets across the thicket of bodies, tables, and chairs, hunting for him. The first bullet hit the killer’s right knee, the second struck his ankle, and the man fell down, crumpling, screaming in agony.
The other killer was to Dewey’s left, beyond the tables that now shielded him. The gunman continued firing at Dewey, moving concentrically closer.
Mixed in with the furious drumbeat of automatic-weapon fire was a throaty, deep groan of miserable pain, coming from the man Dewey had shot. He lay contorted on the restaurant floor, squirming like a caught fish, but still alive.
The other killer dropped to one knee, gunning beneath the tables at Dewey. Bullets twanged as they struck the metal of chairs and tables. Dewey lay dormant in a protected nook, just inches from being in range. If he tried to reposition he feared he would expose the upper part of his body as well as his head. But the killer was getting closer—and the man he’d already shot had stopped groaning and was now trying to get to the submachine gun that had fallen from his hands when Dewey’s bullets struck.
A slug hit the wall less than a foot from Dewey’s head. The killer was adjusting his angle; he knew where Dewey was hiding.
From somewhere outside, there was the high-pitched sound of sirens in the distance.
Dewey tried to count the rounds between the brief pauses when the killer with the AR-15 changed out mags. As the bullets came closer, he anticipated the end of the mag. Dewey saw a pattern in the killer and felt his best odds were his Gerber. He tucked the .45 back in the holster, and found the heart of the upper steel of the Gerber. When he heard the mag click empty, Dewey abruptly stood, throwing aside a table with his left arm as with his right he swung the blade through the air, hurling the knife in the direction of the assassin. The blade somersaulted across the dimly lit restaurant. The gunman finished changing out the mag and fired one more time, one more burst at Dewey, then pivoted, but Dewey had guessed correctly. The blade hit the killer at the nape of the neck, slicing deep. The sound of gunfire stopped as the man was kicked backward, tumbling to the floor, dropping the weapon, and reaching to his neck, his hands searching for the hilt of the knife as dark red blood spilled like oil from the gaping hole in his neck.
Dewey’s eyes shot right. The other man crawled to the abandoned Uzi despite his shattered legs and the blood now coursing like water on the restaurant floor. He was on his stomach. His hands clawed the ground as he went for the gun. Dewey watched as the killer reached the Uzi and turned the muzzle toward him. He charged at the injured terrorist … but as he started to dive at the gunman, Dewey caught a glint of silver. It came from his left, near the bar.
Another pers
on. Someone else was there.
As the wounded killer found the trigger, Dewey realized that if he went for the man with the Uzi, he would die.
Dewey lunged toward the shadow at the alcove next to the bar. He dived at the cap end of a silencer he’d seen as if in a dream, a flash of moment, an instinct. In that collection of milliseconds he was in the air, he could see nothing but the empty space at the opening to the alcove. Then he saw the suppressor moving in his direction and a killer emerged from the alcove.
Dewey’s right hand grabbed the suppressor just as the assassin acquired him in the crosshairs. The man pumped the trigger. The bullets spat from the gun, just inches from Dewey’s skull. But Dewey held tight to the silencer as he tackled the killer and took him hard to the ground, slamming the man down with all his weight.
From behind him, he heard movement and then words in a language he didn’t understand.
The sirens grew louder—there were multiple police cruisers closing in.
Dewey forced him onto his back, clutching the suppressor as the gunman continued to fire at him, barely missing. He struggled and wrestled with the killer. Each man gripped a part of the gun, pulling and yanking. The killer was big, and had strength. He was young. He kneed at Dewey, punching Dewey in the torso with his left hand. He hit him again, and a third time; he had established a weakness and Dewey felt the punches—trained and brutal. Holding the muzzle of the killer’s gun in his right hand, Dewey reared up and slammed his left fist into the assassin’s chin, snapping his head back. He punched him again, in the nose, shattering it, but the killer still fought, trying to get Dewey in the aim of the suppressed Walther. Dewey reared up and punched again, then again, splattering blood everywhere as the assassin moaned and started to drown in his own blood. He felt the man ease his grip on the gun. Dewey ripped it from his hands and stood. He fired a hollow-tipped 230-grain HST into the assassin’s shoulder, lowered the suppressor, and shot again—into the man’s ankle, shattering it—and the thug screamed in pain.
As if by instinct, Dewey pivoted and ducked, just as the killer with the Uzi acquired him from the blood-soaked floor. A burst of slugs sailed above Dewey’s head as Dewey fired the pistol. The silenced bullet spat from the gun and tore a dime-sized hole in the center of the man’s forehead.
Dewey looked the other way as his arm, clutching the gun, reflexively followed the trajectory of his eyes. There, he found the man with the knife in his throat. He’d removed the blade and was sitting up, blood spilling from his neck, his white T-shirt stained dark purple. He was trying to lift his weapon to shoot at Dewey but he couldn’t, he was too weak. He was barely moving. He would soon die. Dewey trained the pistol on him from across the restaurant and pumped the trigger. There was a metallic thwack as the bullet hit the man in the right eye, splattering the wall behind him in brains, bone, and blood.
Dewey turned the gun on the man he’d just taken it from, below him now, just feet away from him.
He knew he shouldn’t kill him. It was a highly coordinated, thought-out attack. It was obviously a designed operation. An assassination. They had come for him.
Dewey knew he had enemies, but this one had come all too close.
This was about revenge. It was a targeted hit.
That he was known by hostile intelligence agencies across the world was no secret. But the boldness of the attempted kill—near his home, on American soil—meant that someone was watching him. Nebuchar Fortuna or Chinese MSS, or perhaps VEVAK, even GRU. Dewey knew they all wanted him dead. He knew each group had active termination orders on him, and he’d exposed himself.
After returning from a mission two weeks ago, all Dewey wanted was a few weeks off, or a few months, but he was wrong. He could never let up.
He stared down at the assassin, bleeding profusely from his shoulder and ankle. He stopped screaming. He was drifting into shock and could no longer feel it, though he was still alive. Dewey knew that was important.
All three men were Middle Eastern, but that no longer mattered. China’s most talented assassin was an Egyptian. One’s nationality didn’t matter in this world, at least not as much as it used to.
A world he wished he wasn’t part of now as he trained the tip of the suppressed PPK on the lone remaining killer, even as sirens pealed in a rising decibel, coming closer and closer.…
Dewey knew he should keep the man alive.
Under a CIA pharmaceutical protocol, the badly bleeding Arab would likely spill the beans. Yes, he shouldn’t kill him, he should show restraint. But Dewey didn’t believe in restraint, especially as he noticed Gary, one of the bartenders, who’d served in the Navy, as he always told Dewey, splayed out facedown in a shiny pool of wet red behind the bar.
Dewey stood above the killer. The man was bleeding badly and suffering. His shoulder was a riot of wet, shiny red.
“May I take your order?” said Dewey politely as he trained the muzzle on the killer’s forehead. “The chicken is excellent today. Freshly killed.”
The assassin’s mouth flared for a brief moment into a grin, though he said nothing. The pain was taking over. He was drifting into shock.
Dewey knew it was a valuable time in the interrogation, a human being going into shock because of pain. In some cases, the passage into shock was instantaneous and the potential harvest of information impossible, for once in shock the individual became incoherent. But he was fighting it and Dewey recognized it.
It was a window—and Dewey had placed his bullets surgically. The pain from the bullets was intense, but neither deadly nor nerve driven. But make no mistake, the man on the ground was suffering a pain most people would never know.
Dewey also understood pain and had long ago learned its many stages. Falling into shock was the first step in a prisoner’s ability to be mined for information by the interrogator.
Dewey had the killer right where he wanted him.
“Who do you work for?” said Dewey calmly, staring into the assassin’s eyes. He kept the pistol trained on the man’s forehead.
Dewey heard a police officer yelling from the street.
The sirens were loud and incessant, and he understood the police were now just outside.
He wasn’t worried about killing the two other men. He was worried he might not get to kill the man bleeding out at his feet.
“Who sent you?” repeated Dewey, this time with a harder edge.
The man was in his late twenties. He had short-cropped black hair and was good-looking. He stared at Dewey with a detached glare, despite the pain, refusing to answer. Then he spoke.
“I’m dead already. Do you think I want my last act on earth to be that I became a coward?”
“Iran,” said Dewey. “You have the same way of talking as someone I knew.”
The man grinned and nodded, yes.
“Abu,” he said as he coughed and wheezed.
“So I was the target?” said Dewey.
The man said nothing.
Dewey looked to the shattered door. He heard shouts from police officers, barking from outside. He pumped a silenced bullet into the man’s stomach. The Iranian groaned, coughing blood.
“Fuck you,” he spat out.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Dewey, eyes casting between the killer and the door. “Your injuries are salvageable. Tell me if I was the target and I’ll let you live.”
The first SWAT officers stormed in. They kicked in the door, through the hanging shards of glass, yelling at Dewey.
The man coughed as crimson trickled from his mouth.
Behind him, Dewey heard shouting from one of the SWAT commandos. He had a deep, military voice and was slightly panicked. He was shouting at Dewey—
“Drop the gun!”
The Iranian looked at Dewey and spoke as SWAT took over the restaurant:
“If I know you, that was a lie, Dewey Andreas.”
As the killer stared up at him, Dewey pumped the trigger, blowing a dime-sized hole through his heart.
&nb
sp; Dewey turned, letting the handgun fall to the floor, then raised his arms just as muzzles—at the end of rifles held by numerous SWAT—acquired him in near perfect unison.
“Don’t shoot,” said Dewey in a commanding voice, holding his hands up and spreading his fingers as bright white halogen lights suddenly illuminated him amid the carnage. “I’m U.S. government. Don’t fucking shoot!”
6
3:04 P.M.
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
In a small glass-walled office three doors down from the director of the Central Intelligence Agency sat a young woman with eye-catching wheat-blond hair. It was one of her most distinctive features even though she rarely gave it a thought, and kept it in the simplest of styles because she didn’t care. It was straight, cut so that it just touched her shoulders, and in front were bangs in a neat, perfect line above her blue eyes. Her face was soft and chiseled, with smooth skin and reddish cheeks, and beautiful lips perhaps a size too big. Not glamorous but a rather old-fashioned, elegant, timeless beauty. She had a reserved manner and style, a bit standoffish, to most even a little cold. Her looks, demeanor, and most of all her accent were quintessentially British. Her name was Jenna Hartford.
Jenna was focused on two large LCD screens on the desk in front of her. Jenna had once been British intelligence’s top operations architect, responsible for the design of black operations across the globe, including the assassination of Fao Bhang, the head of MSS, China’s intelligence agency.
When her husband, Charles, was killed by a car bomb in London intended for her, she had attempted to quit MI6. Instead, Derek Chalmers, her mentor and the head of MI6, convinced her to move to the United States and work for Hector Calibrisi at the CIA. In the four months since arriving at Langley, Jenna had been a cipher. She worked incredibly long hours and spoke to almost no one, with the obvious exception of Calibrisi, and Bill Polk, who ran the National Clandestine Service.
