by S L Shelton
“Thank God,” Black said exhaling. “Getting these printouts was a nightmare. They track every output device.”
“Like I said,” Mark reiterated. “Get this on the system and your job is done.”
Black nodded and then closed his door. He watched Mark out of the corner of his eye as he pulled out of his parking space. As soon as he turned a corner and couldn’t see him any longer, Black sighed in relief.
When he was clear of the garage and had turned right onto Glebe Road, he pulled out his phone and dialed. The person at the other end answered on the first ring.
“The package has been delivered,” Black reported nervously.
“Good,” came a thick German accent at the other end. “We’ve got tracking. It would be best if you caught the first flight back to Charlotte. You don’t want to be around when this goes down.”
“Understood,” Black replied, ending the call.
He had just betrayed his company and the Justice Department. But more dangerous for him, he had also just betrayed Heinrich Braun, head of security for Spryte Enterprises. The data he had handed over was real account information—he had replaced the data Braun had given him in an effort to hedge his bets.
If Justice made their connections, he would get immunity—and if Braun succeeded in shutting down the investigation, then he’d have the trust of Braun and Combine for planting the tracker—unless Braun or his bosses found out he’d accessed the real payout data.
A cold weight filled his gut as a sudden realization hit him.
What if Braun gets the folder and audits the data sheets? He thought. He’ll know I swapped out real data.
“Shit!” he muttered as he drove toward Reagan National Airport. “How the hell did they get me over a barrel like this?”
**
MARK GAINES climbed into his SUV after watching Quinn Black’s vehicle exit the garage below.
“How’d it go?” the woman in the passenger seat asked as he closed the door.
Deidre “Dee” Faulks looked at him with anticipation. Mark knew she was out on a limb investigating this on her own. She had gotten only mild support from her bosses at the Justice Department but a promise of full support if she could tie the phantom payments through the Cayman shell accounts to any agencies or the list of media outlets Mark had discovered for her. He was being as supportive of her as he could without revealing his involvement.
“He’s skittish,” Gaines replied. “And I think he’s holding something back.”
“Do you think Baynebridge got to him?” she asked as they drove down the ramp of the garage.
Gaines shook his head. “Look for yourself,” he replied, handing her the envelope. “The data is real. There’s no way Baynebridge would let him walk out the door with that if they suspected him.”
Dee flipped through the pages and then whistled.
“I know, right?” Gaines said as they merged into traffic on Glebe Road. “And that’s just one set of payments.”
“Do they match the media list you have?” she asked.
“I just glanced at it, but I saw about a half dozen names from my list on there,” he replied. “I saw Buck Grimwall on there.”
She laughed. “Well, we should have known that bloated blowhard was on someone’s payroll. Look at all the political weight he carries.”
“That’s not political weight,” Mark joked. “It’s pasta.”
Dee laughed again.
“Who’s financing it?” she mused, though it was clearly a rhetorical question.
Gaines shook his head. “Someone with a lot of money,” he replied. “That’s only about two weeks’ worth of payments in that package.”
“Maybe we should shake the tree,” she suggested as an SUV pulled up beside them in traffic and then dropped back again.
Gaines smiled.
“What?” she asked.
“I was just thinking how easy it would be to spot the rest of them if we made a few of the recipients disappear,” he retorted with an ironic tone.
“Hey! This is a Justice Department investigation. We don’t ‘disappear’ people.”
Gaines just smiled.
“You spent too much time with the CIA,” she said—it wasn’t a compliment.
Gaines laughed. “Don’t I know it,” he muttered before leaning over to steal a kiss. “It’s a good thing I have you to keep me on the straight and narrow.”
A tremendous crash interrupted their tender moment as a dump truck rammed them from behind.
“What the fu—” Mark grunted.
It began pushing them down the street like snow in front of a plow. Dee screamed as their vehicle tipped sideways, both of them realizing it was no accident.
Mark pressed down on the accelerator and straightened out, avoiding being flipped over by the diesel monster behind them.
The SUV that had pulled up beside them before he accelerated was suddenly speeding back to Dee’s side as the dump truck began shoving them toward the intersection of Columbia Pike.
Gaines knew what was coming next.
“DOWN!” he yelled at Dee as he pulled his weapon from under his jacket and stepped down harder on the accelerator.
The windows on the passenger side erupted in splinters of glass as the automatic weapons in the SUV began spitting bullets at them.
Sound suppressors, Gaines thought as he fired back through the broken window. That means professionals.
He pulled away from the dump truck just as they reached the intersection and turned hard onto the other road, wheels squealing through the maneuver. The assault team in the SUV tried to make the turn to follow, but the dump truck got in their way, forcing them to wait to go around. Gaines sped south on Columbia Pike, his SUV dragging its bumper on the street.
“Dee, are you hit?” he asked intensely, his voice all business.
She shook her head.
“Fucking Black!” he exclaimed. “He rolled on us.”
“This is elaborate,” Dee gasped as they sped down the road, barely masking her terror as she pulled out her phone. “I’m calling for backup.”
She began to dial before abruptly holding her phone out in front of her.
“Shit!” she exclaimed. “No signal.”
Gaines dropped his Glock in his lap and then reached for his own phone.
“Me too,” he added, looking at the signal. “They’ve got us jammed. We have to get clear or we’re toast. I’ve only got this and two spare mags.”
“How’d they find us so fast?” she asked, turning to look for the other SUV.
Gaines thought for a second before realization struck him. He grabbed the envelope Black had given him and dropped it in Dee’s lap.
“Look in there,” he ordered as he returned his attention to the road.
She ripped it open, revealing an adhesive-backed metallic strip on the inside of the envelope.
“Shit,” she exclaimed again.
“Toss it,” he commanded, but it was already on its way out the window.
“I wish I had taken your advice on the gun,” she said as she looked in the side mirror and saw the other SUV closing on them again from her side.
“Me too,” he muttered, cutting hard to turn off Columbia Pike, the tires on their SUV squealing all the way through the intersection.
“Damn it, Mark. I'm a forensic accountant,” she said as her panic began to rise. “There's not much call for tactical training when bankers go rogue.”
As they straightened from the turn, a fresh round of automatic fire began peppering the back of the vehicle. The back window exploded inward, and Mark heard two thuds beside him.
Dee grunted. Gaines looked and saw her arching her back in pain.
“DEE!” he yelled as she began to fall forward against her seatbelt.
As he reached over to her, he lost focus on the road for a split second and hit a car that pulled through the intersection. His SUV spun sideways before skidding to a halt, half on the sidewalk on the other sid
e of the street.
The attacker’s SUV skidded to a stop next to his. Through the trickle of blood in his eyes he saw Dee slouched forward in her seat, her eyes open. He struggled against the darkness that was closing in on him as the assault team approached them on foot.
Gaines heard men talking next to Dee’s side of the vehicle.
“That’s her,” he heard a man say with a thick German accent. “Search her, make sure she’s dead, and then let’s get out of here.”
Gaines opened one eye to a slit, searching for his Glock without moving his head or giving any indication of consciousness. He saw it, but it was on the floor in front of Dee. He looked to the side and in his peripheral vision saw a shock of white hair disappear toward the rear of the crashed vehicle.
“What about him,” another asked from Gaines’s side.
“Make sure he’s dead, and get his ID,” the German ordered from somewhere behind him.
As the door on his side of the vehicle opened, Gaines lashed out with his fist while simultaneously unlatching his seatbelt. In a flash, the punch to his assailant’s throat had loosened his grip on his weapon. Gaines grabbed for it as he unwound himself from the seat belt and fell to the street.
He had the attacker’s weapon hand in his grasp as he hit the pavement with a thud. Bending the man’s wrist sharply, he pointed the 9mm Beretta up at its owner’s head. Fear flashed through the man’s eyes as Gaines hooked his finger over the trigger before firing a silenced round up through the man’s chin and out the top of his head. He swiftly stripped the weapon free of the falling dead man’s hand.
On the passenger side of the SUV, another attacker fired his weapon at the seat on Gaines’s side. From the ground, Gaines had a clear shot at the man’s ankles from under the vehicle. Two shots spat from the barrel of the stolen weapon, sending the man falling to the asphalt. The attacker didn’t have time to react before Mark fired, punching nine millimeters of hot lead through the man’s skull.
Behind him, he heard suppressed shots being fired again, thwacking against the metal of Gaines’s wrecked vehicle. He lunged back into the SUV and began firing through the blown out rear window.
He struck one man in the chest, sending him sprawling to the pavement. In the instant of calm he created, Gaines reached out urgently with his fingers to touch Dee’s neck, checking for a pulse.
There was none.
“Shit! I’m sorry, Dee,” he muttered through gritted teeth before grabbing the documents tucked between her seat and the center console.
He fired three more rounds before the slide locked back on his borrowed weapon. Stretching over Dee’s lap, he reached across the floorboard to retrieve his own Glock. Once in hand, he emptied the magazine through the back window. Unlike the sound-suppressed Beretta, his weapon was loud and certain to draw more attention.
He carelessly dropped the empty magazine and slapped in one of two spares before dropping back down onto the asphalt.
Seeing the downed man crawling backward for cover, Mark got up and ran, keeping the SUV between him and the assault team’s vehicle. As he ran, he stuffed the documents Black had given him into his waistband.
He was three blocks from the crash site before he slowed down to look behind him—no one appeared to be following. He changed direction again, running through the backyards of a row of townhouses.
For more than twenty minutes he repeated that course of action; running, changing direction, and then running some more. When he was certain there was no way anyone had followed him, he turned one last time, into a backyard with a high hedge before pushing his way into a tool shed.
He stood, peering through the crack in the door, his breaths rasping heavily in his throat and chest. After his breathing calmed, he sank to the floor in front of the rakes and shovels before trying to plan his next steps.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he muttered, holding his head in his hands.
When he pulled them away, there was blood on his fingers. He touched the throbbing spot on his forehead and felt the sting of a deep laceration. He reached over to a small workbench and grabbed a mostly clean rag, pressing it to his forehead.
After a few moments of deep breathing, he pulled his phone out and began dialing the office of Dee’s boss at the Department of Justice. Just before pressing send, he had a sudden thought.
He reached into his waistband and extracted the transaction documents Black had delivered to him. Running his finger down the lists, he was through ten pages before it came to rest on a name he recognized at the Justice Department—Rubin Paul.
Paul. He thought to himself. Isn’t that the communications director at Justice?
Instead of dialing, he pulled up the web browser on his phone and searched for the name. His suspicion had been correct.
“Fuck,” he muttered as anger and panic threatened to seize him again.
They don’t know who I am, he thought, trying to calm himself. They didn’t know I was helping Dee.
But he also knew that anonymity wouldn’t last long under scrutiny.
All they had to do was cross-reference her phone records and they’d find his cell phone. From there, it would only be a hop, skip, and a jump to his cover ID. He shook his head as he dropped his phone to the ground.
“Don’t worry, Dee,” he said dropping his phone to the floor. “I’ll find them.” He stomped on it, shattering it under the heel of his boot.
All they’ll find is a cover ID, he thought. That gives me a few days to get ahead of them—unless they have access to CIA cover data.
That thought drove him off of the floor of the shed, out the door and down the street on foot.
As soon as he found a suitable vehicle, he broke the radio antenna off and used it to gain entry, bending the end before slipping it into the driver’s side window.
If I were still with the Agency, I could call in a hot extraction, he thought as he climbed in and began to hotwire the old Chevy sedan.
“What did you get me mixed up in, Dee?” he muttered.
He paused momentarily at the thought of Dee slouched over against her seatbelt. A wave of guilt washed over him for thinking of himself while she was lying dead several blocks back. It suddenly occurred to him that this was not the first time he had survived an attack and a love interest had not. A brief feeling of déjà vu swept over him, and he noted the lack of deep regret. That upset him.
“I’m sorry, Dee,” he muttered again sadly.
With that, he started the vehicle, sat up, and drove away.
Years ago, he had worried that his time with the CIA had turned him into a robot. One of the Agency shrinks had encouraged him to find something that did upset him and then use it as a gauge of his emotional detachment. As long as his “reality check” thought was still upsetting, he was still “human”. The reality check he had come up with was his sister. Picturing her in trouble was the only thing that consistently caused him emotional distress.
He took a moment to visit his “reality check” thought. Tension instantly filled his gut and a pinch formed in his chest.
Still human after all, he thought.
On the way down the street, his earlier conversation with Dee came back to him as he looked over at the empty seat next to him. “Maybe it is time to ‘disappear’ some people,” he said, his lip curling in unconscious reflex.
“Huntsville,” he muttered, thinking of his stash of IDs and cash. “But first I need a better vehicle.”
two
Wednesday, July 14th
7:30 a.m.—Fairfax, Virginia
BARB WHITNEY tried her hardest not to think about how things “could be” with Scott as she readied herself for class. She had almost gotten used to the idea of being woken at night, and early on she’d learned to handle listening to him grunt and groan while trying to accomplish the simplest of physical tasks—such as trying to carry the laundry to the other end of the house.
What she was having a problem with was his seeming inability to accept her h
elp, her affection, or even her concern. Deep down, she was afraid he blamed her for his injuries—and she didn’t know if she could live with that.
She looked at the time and saw it was just after 7:30 a.m. She wouldn’t dare call him—he had been getting more irritated each time she called to check on him. Instead, she scrolled through her contacts until she reached Bonbon.
Scott had only been tying up loose ends at work, doing it all from home—but he had been to see Storc and Bonbon a couple of times since coming home. Maybe he had said something to one of them.
She dialed Bonbon, knowing she would be up and getting ready for work.
“Hello, doll,” Bonbon answered. “How’s it goin’ at AA?” she asked—her joke about Scott being in “Agents Anonymous” rehab.
“Hi, Bon,” Barb replied. “Things are about the same.”
“Oh,” Bonbon said with a sad tone. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“I was wondering if he might've mentioned anything to you or Storc the other day when he visited,” Barb asked, knowing it was a long shot.
“No. I’m sorry, sweetie. He didn’t talk much at all,” she replied. “He seemed much more interested in how things were going with us and work. To be honest, I had a hard time not telling him about all the changes at TravTech, so it was mostly just dishing on work gossip.”
“I’m having second thoughts about him doing the contract thing,” Barb said. “Anything outside of his normal routine seems to be agitating the living shit out of him, excuse my French.”
“I know management is excited about it. The new money from the Agency has got all the big muckity mucks dancing around like they struck oil or something,” Bonny replied. “The only one who doesn't seem happy is Habib. I think he’s a little upset he's losing Scott from his division.”
“I honestly don't care how Habib feels about it,” Barb said crossly. “I'm only worried about how Scott will handle the change. I'm almost sorry I gave Daddy my blessing when he suggested it.”
“I don't know,” Bonbon replied optimistically. “I think once he's back, he'll hop right into it. He's the hard charger, remember? It took him all of ten seconds to decide to come and save your little hiney.”
