by Logan Ryles
“You found him,” Lucy said in a soft but steely voice.
“What?” Wolfgang scratched his arm and looked away.
“You found Reed. That’s where you went tonight.”
Wolfgang hesitated, his mind spinning as he frantically searched for a plausible denial, but it was already too late. His hesitation had lasted too long.
“We need to leave.” He turned to Banks. “Especially you.”
“Me?” She snapped. “Why me?”
“Because Reed said so,” Lucy said, her voice still calm. “Because Reed cares about you, just like I said he did. And he’s trying to distance you. Right, Wolfgang?”
Wolfgang clenched his jaw. He’d lost complete control again, and there was little he could do except walk out.
“Look, you do what you want.” He slid his feet back into his shoes. “But I’m telling you, you’re on a fool’s errand. I’m done.”
An iron grip descended on Wolfgang’s shoulder, and he looked up to see Banks standing next to him.
She pivoted around to stand in front of him and then placed her free hand on her hip. “You’re not going anywhere, Wolf. We’re going to get in that car, and we’re going back to town. We’re going to find Reed, and we’re going to find some answers. All of us.”
Thirty-Three
J. Edgar Hoover Building
Washington, D.C.
Special Agent Rufus “Turk” Turkman was one energy drink away from collapsing from a heart attack . . . or extreme exhaustion; it was difficult to tell the difference. He crushed another Red Bull can between powerful fingers and flung it into a nearby trash can, then he ran his hand through short, dirty hair. He needed a shower. He needed no less than ten hours of sleep. He needed a hot meal that wasn’t manufactured inside the FBI Headquarters’ cafeteria.
But more than anything, he needed a lead.
For three weeks, Turk and his boss, Special Agent Matthew Rollick, had chased down clues related to the murder of State Senator Mitchell Holiday. Rollick had been working a possible corruption case involving Holiday prior to the senator’s death, but once the case spilled into bloodshed, additional manpower was needed, and Turk was brought in.
Only months out of Quantico, he was a brand-new, unbroken field agent ready to prove his worth. After eight years in the Marine Corps, Turk was used to the jokes about jarheads, and he was eager to prove them wrong. He was ready to demonstrate that he could be lethal with more than just an M27 automatic rifle.
But nothing—not the Marines, not Iraq, not Quantico—could prepare him for what he was about to step into. Turk leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, his mind drifting back to only five days prior, when he stood in the midst of a steady snowfall outside Cheyenne Regional Airport in Wyoming, drew his FBI-issued Glock handgun and pointed it at his oldest friend,
Reed Montgomery.
Turk still couldn’t believe he had been there. Reed was Turk’s fireteam lead in Iraq, back when they were both Force Recon Marines running intel ops behind ISIL lines. They fought, killed, and bled together in that godforsaken sandpit for more than three years, deployment after deployment.
Reed was more than a great soldier—he was a war hound, a brutal fighter who drew energy from long missions with little food, water, or sleep. The more gunfire, the better. The steeper the odds, the harder Montgomery fought. He didn’t actually care about life, Turk thought. He just cared about winning.
Was it patriotism? A death wish? Turk didn’t know. At first, the battle-crazed look in Reed’s eyes scared the shit out of him. He almost requested a transfer.
But then there had been that mission deep behind ISIL lines, to the very outskirts of the war-shattered city of Fallujah. Everything went wrong on that op. Their cover was blown, their radios failed, they were cornered in unfamiliar territory with ISIL on four sides and the nearest American troops miles away.
They were going to die. Turk believed it. He even accepted it.
But not Reed. Corporal Montgomery didn’t accept failure, and he was completely unimpressed by the hordes of Jihad fighters that closed on their position. Reed became something that night that Turk still wasn’t sure was real—a complete, total fighting machine. As the bodies piled up and Reed switched from his exhausted M4 to a captured AK-47, he never seemed to tire. Hundreds of rounds turned into thousands, the sky filled with the roar of the gunfire, and then . . .
And then they retreated. To this day, Turk wasn’t sure what caused the ISIL fighters to fall back. They had to know only three Marines were standing in front of them.
By the time the sun rose over the empty wasteland of western Iraq, Reed Montgomery had led his fireteam out of that hellhole and pushed the three of them through a brutal eight-mile run back to friendly territory.
They made it to camp, completed their debrief, took twelve hours to rest and refit, and then that crazy SOB was ready to go again.
Turk felt something hot sliding down his cheek and brushed it away as he reached for another Red Bull.
“What happened to you, Reed?” He whispered as he stared at the spread of high-resolution photographs on his desk. They were pictures of war and chaos, right here in the heartland of the United States. From Atlanta to North Carolina to Nashville, gunfights, bodies, and burning cars—the signature of a born fighter.
Turk knew nothing had happened to Reed Montgomery. He hadn’t changed. Reed had simply come home, and intentionally or otherwise, brought the warrior with him.
He remembered the last time he saw Reed. It was in a military courtroom in Washington, D.C., where Reed was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder. It happened in Baghdad after their last mission together. A Humvee driver, some young kid from Georgia, joined the Marines to pay for college. Turk couldn’t remember her name, but he remembered the moment Reed looked into her terrified eyes and said, “Just drive. We’ll take care of the rest.”
That scared private didn’t know it at the time, but when Reed said those words, he was accepting her under his umbrella of protection—the same umbrella that covered Reed’s fireteam. The umbrella that said “I’ll get you out of here.”
So when that private was later found in a pool of her own blood, having been mugged, raped, and beaten to death by a group of five civilian contractors, Reed’s reaction was predictable. He loaded his rifle and gunned them down like a group of jihadists.
But of course, Uncle Sam wasn’t paying Reed to gun down Americans, regardless of what they had done. So Reed was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to death. The last time Turk saw his old friend was when they stripped the USMC patches off his arms and dragged him away to die.
Turk sipped the Red Bull and stared at the photographs. After that moment, he assumed he would never see Reed again, which was why he never expected to find Reed at the very heart of this investigation.
Turk wiped his tired eyes and leaned forward, studying the photographs again. There was no logic to the warpath Reed had carved through the south. Of course, there had to be a reason. Reed always had a reason. But there were far, far too many question marks over the last three years.
For instance, how the hell did Reed slip out of both the military and civilian prison systems and simply disappeared? There were no documented escape attempts and no missing person reports. He was simply a prisoner . . . and then he wasn’t.
“Where did you go, Reed?” Turk whispered.
A shoe clicked against the utilitarian floor outside of Turk’s cubicle, and he looked up to see Rollick stepping in. His boss’s face was cold and angry, with black bags under his eyes and exhaustion lines creasing his cheeks.
“Pack it up, Turk. We’re done.”
Turk blinked. “Say what?”
“Pack it up. Everything. We’ve been pulled from the case.”
Rollick started down the hall, and Turk jumped to his feet and bolted after him, a sudden surge of adrenaline bringing life back to his body.
“Wait! Pulled? What do you mean, pu
lled?”
Rollick shoved a cell phone in Turk’s face and showed him a video, preloaded and already playing. It was of a female politician standing on a podium. He didn’t recognize her, but she was clearly an executive. Everything about her demeanor said so.
Turk flinched as the bomb went off.
Smoke filled the screen, and Rollick lowered the phone.
“Your boy just set off a bomb in New Orleans. That woman is the governor of Louisiana.”
Rollick headed toward the elevator.
“Wait . . . I don’t understand. Is she dead?”
“There’s no body. We think she’s missing. But Montgomery’s face was captured by a parking lot security camera near the scene of the crime, and we’ve got a battered Louisiana state trooper who says a man matching Montgomery’s description attacked him, knocked him out, and stole his uniform.”
Rollick hit the elevator button.
“So . . .” Turk struggled for his next thought. Even with the Red Bull and the adrenaline, his mind moved in slow motion. “We have to go to New Orleans. He could be close.”
Rollick shook his head. “Nope. This has spilled far beyond a murder case. Counterterrorism is taking over. We’re done.”
“Like hell we’re done!” Turk’s deep Tennessee voice rose to a boom.
The elevator door rolled open, and Rollick stepped inside.
Turk put his boot over the threshold, blocking the door.
“Rollick, I’m not quitting. Reed is out there somewhere, and I don’t know what the hell he’s up to, but so help me God, I’m bringing him in. Do you hear me?”
Rollick met his eyes. The anger was still there, but he looked exhausted more than anything.
“Turk, take it from an old man. Follow orders. You’ve been pulled. Be happy you weren’t fired.”
Turk noticed for the first time that Rollick’s FBI pin was missing from his lapel, and there was no bulge beneath his jacket where his handgun should’ve been.
“Wait, you . . .”
Rollick shrugged. “People are dead. Somebody has to take the fall.”
He punched the button for the parking garage and nodded at Turk.
“Good luck, buddy. You’ve got the makings of a great agent.”
Turk stepped back and watched as the door rolled shut. The room around him was silent—whatever agents worked on this floor had already gone home for the night, leaving him standing alone beneath the flickering white light.
A knot twisted in his stomach, and he blinked back the exhaustion. For a moment, he stared at the elevator button, debating whether he should press it and follow Rollick to the garage.
No. Rollick was gone; there was nothing to do about that. But not Turk. He was still there, and he was still an agent.
Turk turned and fast-walked back to his cubicle, his face setting in a hard line. He scooped the photographs into a box, tossed his laptop on top, and grabbed his car keys from the desk.
Montgomery had never quit, no matter the odds. Turk would be damned if he folded now.
Thirty-Four
Metairie, Louisiana
Reed and Maggie spent the night in a rundown motel located just south of the highway. The BMW stuck out like a sore thumb at the disheveled joint, but it was still the best hiding place either of them could think of on short notice, and the front desk didn’t ask for identification.
As the sun broke through the grimy window, Maggie awoke, curled up on one of the beds with an aching back and pounding head. Reed sat in one of the dingy armchairs, staring through the window at the parking lot. His eyes were rimmed red, and he held an empty whiskey glass. She wasn’t sure if he had slept at all, but when he spoke, his voice was clear.
“Gambit called. I stalled him. They still think you’re dead.”
Maggie blinked her sleep away. “Isn’t it obvious there wasn’t a body in the debris?”
“I’m sure, but it’s only been a few hours. The cops aren’t ready to pronounce you missing yet. They’ll wait until noon, I’d guess.”
“At which point Gambit will be a problem.”
Reed nodded, then set the glass on an end table and stood up. “Let’s ride.”
They piled back into the BMW after a quick breakfast of oatmeal pies from the hotel vending machine, and Reed turned them east toward New Orleans. Maggie had washed the blast smoke from her face, then found a Saints T-shirt, an LSU ball cap, and a pair of jeans from a local thrift store. She was unsatisfied with the disguise but also wondered how many people actually knew what their governor looked like.
Hopefully not many.
As they drove, Maggie used one of Reed’s phones—he seemed to have several—to locate the address she had stolen from the DMV the night before. It was an office building located in downtown New Orleans, not far from the French Quarter in an old business district. It was the kind of place populated by law firms and accountants.
“It’s some kind of company called BANO—Business Associates of New Orleans,” she said. “I think it’s an entity representation service, which makes sense because the BMW was purchased last week by ABC Consultants, LLC, and ABC doesn’t pop up on any Google searches.”
Reed grunted. None of this surprised him. He expected the car to be owned by a company, not an individual.
“So ABC uses BANO as their registered agent,” he said, “which allows them to use BANO’s address as their own on any legal paperwork, such as a vehicle bill of sale. Another layer of anonymity for anybody wanting to remain private.”
“Or hidden,” Maggie said. She had already navigated to the Louisiana secretary of state website and looked up ABC Consultants, LLC. ABC popped up immediately as an active registration, but when she opened the file, the only address listed belonged to BANO.
“That adds up,” she said. “Gambit’s organization runs their elicit operations through the LLC but they use a registered agent to shield their exact identities. Pretty shady.”
“Not necessarily,” Reed said. “Lots of companies are run that way. The whole point of an LLC is to limit the liability that a business owner is exposed to. But yes, it definitely feels like a shell company for some type of criminal organization. I mean, who the hell names a company ABC Consultants? What does that even mean?”
“Even if ABC is a shell company, BANO must hold records of who owns ABC and what their actual address is. They’re not gonna give that sort of information away, though. It’s confidential.”
Reed grunted. “I can be very persuasive.”
Maggie rubbed her thumb against the leather-clad armrest of the BMW. In the back of her mind, a voice screamed that this was all very, very wrong. Much worse than following Coulier’s semi-criminal methods of closing the port. This was criminal. And it was dangerous. This man she sat beside was a killer by profession, and following him along this path would result in further corruption. She could leave now, return to the police, be ushered back into the Capitol, and resume her original plan of making things right.
But where would that lead her? Would she really make any progress toward finding Gambit? In the fifteen odd hours that she’d been “dead,” she had made more headway on tracking down this scum than she had in months of being governor. Sure, her new methods were shady, but they worked. She was now only hours away from wrapping her metaphorical hands around Gambit’s throat.
Wouldn’t that be better for the state? Wouldn’t it be more productive for her to finish her speech by announcing the takedown of one of the state’s largest, most sordid criminal enterprises?
Then she could explain everything—the port closure and the chaos inside the Capitol. She could exonerate Dan Sharp and get him back to work as her lieutenant governor. If she could just put her thumb on Gambit, everything could be turned around in the blink of an eye.
She wouldn’t quit now. She was too close and too determined.
Thirty-Five
New Orleans, Louisiana
Business Associates of New Orleans was housed on the s
econd floor of a French-style office suite, fully equipped with decorative metal railings and overhung by towering oak trees. Reed and Maggie found a café on the first floor of the facing building, and Reed motioned to one corner of the dining room.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
Maggie sat down, casting a wary glance around the room for anybody she recognized. It was paranoia, she knew. It was extremely unlikely that anybody would recognize her here, dressed this way, sitting alone in a dusty corner, but still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that if she were discovered, things would be much worse.
It was a dumb feeling, she decided. She was in control now more than ever.
“What are you gonna do?” she asked.
Reed started to the door. “Find out who the hell owns ABC Consultants.”
Maggie settled into a booth and watched Reed slip through the door and jog across the street. She didn’t really mean “What are you going to do?” but “How are you going to do it?” Even as she rephrased the question in her mind, she knew he wouldn’t have answered.
Who was this man from the shadows, dark and brooding, with the demeanor of a cold-blooded killer? She found it easy to believe that he was both a Marine and a professional assassin at one time or the other. She also found it easy to trust him, and that alarmed her. There was no objective, concrete reason to trust Reed. Was she playing the fool and stepping into his trap?
“Ma’am?” The voice came from her left, slow and syrupy like only New Orleanians spoke. Maggie blinked and looked up, then looked down just as quickly.
The waitress stood next to the table, a pad in her hand, one eyebrow raised.
“Just coffee, please. Black.”
“Sure thing, dahlin’.”
The waitress disappeared, and Maggie let out a strained breath. She had to chill out, she thought. This tension was pointless and highly destructive. She needed to focus and think about what she would do when they found Gambit.
