by Jeff Gunhus
Good. He didn’t want to kill the man. Not yet anyway. A corpse made a terrible bargaining chip.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Harry said. “Chill out now. Hold on.”
Asset grinned. The old man obviously had affection for the man under his knife. That was helpful.
He pulled Whitey to his feet, knife at his throat. He whispered in his ear. “I know you’re trained, but nothing has prepared you to fight me. Struggle and I’ll open your throat. Understand?”
Whitey made a soft, gurgling sound that Asset took for agreement.
“That’s a good boy.” Asset forced the man to stand in front of him, a human shield between him and the now two guns pointed at him. He hadn’t even seen the old man pull the gun, but there it was, a very serious looking Model Smith & Wesson 500, a hand cannon if there ever was one. Asset had the feeling Harry Walker knew how to use it, too.
“Let’s try this again,” Asset said.
The old man showed no sign of nerves, only resolve. Ex-military for sure. “You might just be the stupidest sumbitch who ever walked in here.” He put up his hand. The door behind Asset made a hollow thunk. Locked.
A smile creased Asset’s face. The door didn’t matter. He hadn’t plan on going anywhere.
“I just wanted to make certain I had your attention,” Asset said. “Do I have it now?”
“Oh yeah, you got it.”
“Good,” Asset said. “I need information about Scott and Mara Roberts. I need to know where they’ve gone.”
The old man barked out a short laugh. “That’s what you’re here for?”
“You find it amusing?”
“Yeah, I find it amusing,” the man said, emphasizing the last word in a mocking tone. “’Cause you’re gonna die trying to get information I don’t even have.”
“Shoot this asshole,” Whitey said.
“Shut up,” the old man said.
“Yes,” Asset agreed. “Shut up, Whitey.”
Asset looked back to the old man, calculating the steps to reach him, the different cover he could use, the items on the walls of the pawnshop he could use as weapons. He needed Harry alive to interrogate him, which made the whole thing more complicated. But only barely.
Harry’s intuition was strong because he seemed to sense he was about to make a move. “Why don’t you let Whitey go and we’ll let you just get the hell out of here? Chalk this as just one big cluster of a fuck?”
“Sorry, but I don’t—”
Asset stopped. His second phone rang, vibrating in his pocket, a very particular cadence that he recognized.
He turned his knife blade so that the point was jammed under his prisoner’s throat. If the men in front of him had any training at all, they’d know taking a shot at him would end up with the knife four inches in the man’s neck.
Slowly, with his free hand, he pulled out his phone.
“What the fuck?” the old man said. “Are we keeping you from something more important?”
Asset glanced at the screen and smiled.
“Yes, you are,” he said. “Your information is no longer necessary. I’m going to leave, but maybe I’ll be back later to see you. We can finish this little standoff then.”
The old man grinned, showing a mouthful of metal teeth. “Maybe I’d like you to stay a while. Visit. Drink some sweet tea together out on my porch. Then you can tell me who you are and why you came by,” Harry said.
Asset lifted a hand to the side of his neck, feeling his quickening pulse. He took a slow breath and it immediately settled. He needed to call back the person who’d just reached out to him, but if he needed to kill these three first, he needed to make sure he didn’t miscalculate. Nothing made you later for a meeting than getting shot in the head.
“I need to leave. I can kill the three of you first, or you can unlock the door and let me walk out of here. Your choice.”
“That’s it?”
“Unless you want there to be more, Mr. Walker. The choice is yours.”
Asset half found himself hoping the old man’s pride would get the best of him. But the man must have seen something he didn’t like, because his eyes opened wider for a split second. Just a microexpression, but enough for Asset to know what was about to happen.
“Open up, Drey,” he called to the wall behind him.
“C’mon,” Whitey said. “Kill this asshat.”
“I told you to shut up, boy,” the old man said. “Open the door.” The door unlocked.
Asset backed up toward it. He pointed to the phone he’d first thrown at Whitey. “Pick that up.”
Whitey glanced at Harry, clearly unhappy, before bending down to the floor and then handing the phone over.
Asset opened the door behind him, then bowed his head to Harry.
“It’s been a pleasure.”
“Pleasure, my ass. Don’t bother coming back, all right? I don’t serve weird motherfuckers here.”
Asset grinned at the insult. If he had the time, he’d come back and pay a visit to Harry Walker and his two sidekicks, Whitey and Drey. He wouldn’t charge for it. He’d do it for fun.
Weird motherfucker? He thought as he slipped outside. You have no idea.
* * *
“What took you so long?” the Director said.
Asset pulled away from the curb, checking his mirrors for any sign of a tail. “I was meeting a new friend.”
“Hawthorn is en route to Chicago. He’s your way in to finish your original assignment. If he leads you to the Roberts, terminate them, then use Hawthorn to get to your target.”
So, Townsend was still in play this quickly after yesterday’s attempt. He was trained to follow orders. He was trained to never look at a situation as impossible. But even he knew this was new territory for him in level of difficulty. Still, his response was automatic.
“Affirmative.”
“Hawthorn’s flight details have been sent to you. He’s not aware of you. Use your discretion for when you approach him. Don’t fail us again.” Then the line went dead.
CHAPTER 18
The Director liked neither uncertainty nor surprise. While others spent their resources analyzing trends, studying personalities, and parsing historical information to tease out a prediction, she’d risen to her position by exerting her will on events. Hers was an ethos based on action, not reaction. Strength, not accommodation.
And yet she felt like she’d been on her heels since the day Scott Roberts was let out of prison.
She walked through the sleek hallway, her steps echoing against the bare walls. Her most trusted assistant stayed half a step behind her. She was a tall, muscular woman who knew better than to say anything while her boss was in one of her moods. The Director noticed the woman type quickly into a tablet, wait, and then fold the cover over it.
“They’re ready,” she said softly.
The Director slowed a step; it was all she needed to do to show her displeasure. Her assistant lowered her head and dropped back to follow behind.
Of course they were ready. They had an appointment. An appointment to which she would be precisely on time.
An appointment during which they would second-guess her judgment and her ability.
But she intended to have none of it. The whole thing had been the Council’s plan. While her underlings thought she was the ultimate leader of Omega, she was only the face of a much more powerful group of people. True, they gave her wide, nearly unlimited discretion to achieve their goals. But in this case the orders that had come rumbling down the mountain had been clear and specific.
She would have chosen a different route if she’d been left to her own devices. For one, she wouldn’t have ordered the assassination of a U.S. president. Even a despised rodent like Townsend. She knew the American people too well. They liked to throw eggs at their presidents, but they wouldn’t stand for it if one of them was killed. The effort that would be mounted to uncover the perpetrators of an assassination would be immense. And there was always the chanc
e that someone in Omega’s own ranks would break. Patriotism could hit at the strangest times and for the most peculiar reasons. A dead POTUS created all kinds of variables.
Still, she agreed that Townsend had become a problem for them. He’d tried backchannels to reach out to join them at first, searching for power and relevance after his fall from grace. Normally, the group would have welcomed an ex-president as a new recruit, but not this particular ex-president. His unquenchable desire for the limelight was a liability that they couldn’t tolerate.
They’d played him along, trying to keep him in his box. But while the man was a lot of things, stupid wasn’t one of them. He knew he was being iced out, so he let his pride get the better of him.
Once they discovered his memoir would name Omega and the few details he knew about the organization, they were forced to deal with the issue. She’d argued for subtler means—leverage, blackmail, threats to his family—but the Council wanted a more permanent solution. And that was when Roberts had been brought into the mix.
Despite its flaws, the plan had its merits. They’d been trying to track down Scott Roberts since he’d gone off the grid four years earlier, knowing that he was spending his considerable talent trying to hunt Omega. They hadn’t been able to catch him, he was too good for that, but he hadn’t been immune to the disinformation put out there that Townsend had ordered his wife’s death. The town where Roberts had been arrested had been on Townsend’s schedule the next day. It was a Podunk town in the middle of nowhere. The only reason Roberts would have been there was to take his revenge of Townsend. That fact had started the wheels in motion within Omega.
The plan had been to use Scott as the patsy to kill Townsend. Using his daughter had seemed overly complicated at first, but gaming out every other scenario ended with Roberts likely uncovering Omega’s involvement.
Surprisingly, it was Hawthorn who’d pushed for using Mara in the end. He’d balked at taking the kid as an insurance policy, but he’d done as he was told in the end.
Roberts killing Townsend did have a sense of poetry behind it. He might have even thought it a worthwhile reason to die given what had happened to his wife. And if he did die, shot by the Secret Service was the thinking, then really how far would the intelligence agencies need to look for their motive, means, and opportunity. The case would be closed and Townsend would be silenced. Not only that, but it would serve as an important reminder to other world leaders that any interaction with Omega was never to be revealed.
Only things didn’t work out that way. She’d try to tell them that with a Roberts involved, things seldom went as expected. With two of them, the plan was almost guaranteed to go off the rails. They ought to have taken Scott out in the prison when they’d had the chance and left the girl alone. The CIA had qualms about killing a man in plain sight, but Omega did not.
But the chance was gone now, and the Director had a strict personal ethos against dwelling on the past.
She entered the communications center, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or SCIF, with tech that outmatched even the rigorous NATO SDIP-27 Level A protocols. It was a circular room with a curved screen covering the walls. A podium stood in the middle with a microphone and a small video camera rising from its center. The security the room afforded gave the White House Situation Room a run for its money. But since Omega had that room bugged, the thought didn’t fill her with a lot of confidence.
The Director stepped to the podium as her aide closed the door. The room darkened, and one by one the Council members arrived to the meeting. Their faces appeared on the screen surrounding her, but each was so strongly backlit that their features were cast in shadow. The Director thought the whole thing overly theatrical, as if whoever had organized it was living their fantasy of being in a James Bond movie. Regardless, once all ten members arrived, surrounding her on all sides, it had the desired effect. A shiver ran down her spine.
“Hello, Council,” she said. “I understand you have some questions for me.”
* * *
“Based on this meeting,” she said, “am I to believe the Council has lost confidence in me?”
The questioning had gone on longer than she had expected. Most of the questions had come from one of the women on the Council. For all the cloak and dagger, the Director had uncovered the identities of eight of the ten members. It was Sweena Mehta who was coming after her the hardest, the wealthiest woman in India. Not an heiress either, but a rough-and-tumble entrepreneur who’d beaten the boys at their own game and cobbled together a near monopoly of the cell phone market in the billion-person country.
The Director admired her, but that hadn’t stopped her from acquiring compromising photos of her with more than one lover. Of both genders. She hadn’t been surprised to discover that her sexual appetites had run to the extreme. Mehta wasn’t one who did anything average. She had been surprised when that appetite included her submissive partners sometimes ending up in the hospital. And even the morgue. The Director wished she could pull her aside mid-meeting and show her some of the video in her possession to block her line of questions.
“Surely you don’t begrudge this Council’s desire to determine whether your judgment has been impeded, do you, Sheila?” Mehta said.
The Director swallowed hard, hoping her temper didn’t show. She hated that name, she hated more that it was used to show the Council’s power over her. They could unmask her at any moment. She fought down the impulse to call the woman by her first name. One didn’t survive as Director long by being impertinent. Her predecessor had taught her that lesson by getting himself killed for that very transgression. “Impeded?” she said, letting the word drag out.
The ten faces stared at her, all of them letting the silence weigh on her like a physical thing.
“I assure you that there is nothing about this mission that has impeded my judgment. My position about assassinating even an ex-president has nothing to do with leftover vestiges of patriotism, if that’s what you think.”
“And what about—”
“None of the other circumstances around this mission have given me pause,” she said. She realized she’d never cut one of them off before, but she was growing tired of this. Still, she realized this was a sign of weakness and girded herself for more questions.
“I believe our director has acquitted herself on this issue,” a man said behind her. He’d been the easiest one to unmask because he didn’t seem to care who knew he was there. Marcus Ryker was a tech billionaire who’d parlayed an Internet fortune into a conglomerate that included self-driving cars, genetically modified foods, immunotherapy cancer drugs, and the world’s more reliable transportation into space. He was easily the man on the Council with the purest vision of what Omega was trying to accomplish.
“Thank you,” she said. She looked at the others in turn, as if daring them to speak. None did. “I have a clear path forward. Townsend is more dangerous now than before. I will see him silenced and remove the loose ends.”
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” Ryker said. “But what we’re fighting for is greater than the lives of a few men. We’re fighting for the survival of humanity itself. And in that fight, sacrifices and casualties are inevitable.”
Just not people close to you, she thought to herself. These powerful people had joined for what could be considered the most altruistic cause in human history. But they were still just people. Flawed. Egocentric. When the end of the world came, they and those they loved would be safely ensconced in luxury bunkers, protected by personal armies and stocked with enough provisions that they would want for nothing. Sacrifice was what other people did.
“It’s not about like and dislike,” she said. “It’s about completing the mission. I’ve not failed you yet. And I don’t intend to now.”
CHAPTER 19
Mara drove. She didn’t ask what her dad had gone through to escape from the Tribune Tower, but whatever had gone down had sapped his strength. He slept in the pas
senger seat for the first two hours, making her wonder whether all of his partners had been glorified chauffeurs so the great Scott Roberts could catch some shut-eye between adventures. It certainly felt like it’d become her full-time job since picking him up at the prison.
She started the drive flipping between news channels on the radio. Townsend was keeping to the script and adding to it. Now he’d called for some massive climate conference, of which he would of course be happy to chair, to “refocus the nation’s attention on this important issue that the current administration has seemed to have forgotten.”
Mara imagined the new occupant of the Oval Office was going to get a kick out of that sound bite. Especially since they belonged to the same party.
But she’d turned the radio off as the city gave way first to suburbs and then to farmland. The silence of the road was what she wanted. Time to think things through and make sure she wasn’t missing something important.
As the miles ticked away, she thought mostly of Joey, allowing herself to feel her fear over what was happening to him. She knew he had to be scared out of his mind, but she also knew there was a possibility he’d been hurt. Even killed. If that turned out to be the case, Jim Hawthorn would be the first person on her list to visit.
“Where are we?” her dad mumbled from the passenger seat. “‘Is this heaven?’ ”
It was a tee-up to a line from the Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams. It was one of her dad’s favorites, and they’d done the line a thousand times together. Surprising herself, she played along. “ ‘No, it’s Iowa.’”
Her dad sat up in his seat, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “I thought I felt better. Iowa always does that.”
Her dad loved the Hawkeye State. Always had. He’d been born in Des Moines, but left when he was just a kid. Still, he’d always maintained a sentimental tie to the state, enjoying his one-liner that he was, “Iowa-bred and corn-fed,” when people asked where he was from. It didn’t surprise her that he had a safe house in the state.
“Want me to drive?” he asked.
