Act of Vengeance

by Michael Jecks

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Stephen, will you?’ Jack said.

  The whole thing made little sense. He was doing his job fine. Sure, Starck said originally that they’d cut him off if he didn’t go on the mission, but now he was on his way back, where was the sense in getting rid of him?

  ‘You gave in my report, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. And the Ice Maiden seemed really interested. The details about the ledger grabbed her, or I’m Pinocchio.’

  ‘So why cut me off now?’

  Jack was sure that there was some kind of connection. There had to be: something would make sense of his being left adrift in America having done what he was told. He reviewed his actions in the last week: he had obeyed his orders and gone to Whittier, viewed the shack where Lewin died, assessed his death as murder, and found the ledger. Sure, it had been stolen from him, but that wasn’t his fault. The attacks on him were hardly his fault, and he had done nothing untoward since reaching Seattle. Events had forced him to react, that was all. And the responsibility for that lay with the Firm, not him.

  ‘Are you going to shoot me?’ Stephen asked.

  Jack gave a short laugh.

  ‘Here? In the middle of the lake, with how many hundreds of witnesses all around? Do you think I’m as mad as London seems to reckon?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jack. I mean, you’re here, on my boat. And since we both know our Service has tried to have you killed, that itself I find a little curious.’

  ‘I have no intention of killing you or anyone else,’ Jack said. ‘Apart from the guys who tried to shoot me.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Look, can you drop me over there?’

  Stephen looked where Jack was pointing. ‘Sure. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I wish I bloody knew,’ Jack said. ‘But I’m bleeding sure Mexico doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve nothing saved or put by.’

  ‘Things are cheap out there,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Including my life, if they track me down,’ Jack said.

  Stephen looked down at him. There was a little grin at the side of his face, and then he cleared his throat with a surprised look on his face. The front of his white Aran jumper grew a huge blotch of red and, as the boat rolled, he toppled forward to his knees.

  ‘What the…?’ Jack shouted, and then he heard the crack of the gunshot.

  Stephen was smiling still, but now he coughed and a gob of blood came up and trickled from the side of his mouth as he collapsed to lie in the floor of the boat.

  ‘Stephen, shit, man! Don’t bloody die, mate!’ Jack said desperately, staring about him wildly as he looked for the source of the shot. There was a crunching sound, and he ducked as a splinter of wood two inches long was torn from the steering wheel. Another crackle, and he saw the window on the port side of the cabin suddenly grow a hole. That was when his mind suddenly cleared.

  Stephen Orme shivered, and his eyes turned to Jack with the terror of death. He died as Jack tried to think of something soothing to say to him.

  But nothing came.

  *

  17.59 Seattle; 01 59 England

  Frank Rand was not in a good mood when he returned to the office. ‘Well?’ he snapped as he walked into Roy’s little chamber.

  Roy Sandford looked over at him and felt the strain of the last hours as he shook his head. ‘The locals found it. A yellow cab, with a happy Nigerian driver. A legal, but he’s unaware of the guy who left the phone in the back. He’s had nine or ten payers this afternoon. The one sounds most like your guy was a man he picked up near Hamilton Park over West Seattle.’

  ‘Hamilton?’ Frank said, moving to a map on the wall in the main office and staring at it. ‘This place?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve checked. It’s got a perfect line-of-sight to the ferry terminal. A way off, but still, with clear air and binoculars…’

  ‘Yeah. Makes sense. The prick!’ Frank glared at the map a while longer as though it could give him some inspiration. He was still there when Debbie entered, sipping a coffee. ‘You get one for me?’

  ‘Try any sexist bullshit on me, Frank, and you’ll be limping for a week,’ Debbie said mildly as she went to a free desk. She typed in her password. ‘Where’d the cab drop him, Roy?’

  ‘How did you hear that?’ Frank demanded.

  ‘I asked around. The guys at the coffee machine were gossiping. They said he was seen taking a metro bus downtown, and then an inspector saw a strange guy with a rucksack take a cab. Well?’

  ‘He was dropped off outside the Benaroya Hall. The Garden of Remembrance there. You know it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I wonder why?’

  Frank shook his head and added, ‘There’s a reason for everything this asshole’s doing, I reckon. And it’s not just to make us look stupid.’

  ‘Is he rational?’ Debbie asked. ‘He isn’t behaving rational.’

  ‘What isn’t rational? He sure seemed it in Anchorage and Whittier. The only thing I noticed was a dislocation. You know, like a guy who’s not all there. But I thought it was just the reaction. He’d just been shot at, after all.’

  ‘Or was he just dissociated from people. I’ve known some who are sociopaths. So ‘ve you, Frank.’

  ‘He didn’t strike me like that. He was used to action, and I guess if he was a Brit agent, that ain’t surprising, but I didn’t see him as a crazy.’

  He considered his own words for a moment. ‘I’m going to go look at the place he was dropped, just see if there was something there. You reckon it was outside the Benaroya Hall, Roy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Roy said. He was about to say more, when his phone rang. ‘Agent Sandford? Yeah. Oh – OK, sir, yes.’

  He cut the line and glanced at Frank with a worried look in his eyes.

  ‘I’ve been recalled.’

  Frank nodded, but not without a tensing of his jaw muscles.

  ‘Who by? We are in the middle of something here.’

  ‘It was Peter Amiss, sir.’

  ‘Shit!’ Frank said. ‘Debbie, get hold of HR and see if you can get someone else with Sandford’s skills, will ya? I’ll be back in an hour or so.’

  He strode out of the office and over to the lift, where he thumbed the button.

  It was infuriating the way that personnel could be pulled out halfway through a mission like this. Usually agents would be left in place until a situation was declared complete, an investigation finished. But since the cutbacks and the reorganisations post-Waco and 9/11, specialists were considered too important to be left in field offices. He was still smarting as he entered the lift and took the ride to the underground car park. It was tempting to go beyond, to the huge underground target range, but he didn’t have time and the release of firing twenty or thirty rounds could wait.

  He climbed into his car and started the engine, the tyres screeching on the surface, and took the ramp up. At the top, he looked both ways before booting the engine and pulling away, still in a fury.

  The black Ford sedan that pulled away from the kerb as he passed didn’t grab his attention, nor the two men inside.

  *

  18.03 Seattle; 02.03 England

  Jack darted to the wheel and took hold, spinning it about and taking the boat over across the middle of the lanes, earning himself an angry blast on a horn from a fast-moving motor boat that had to swerve to avoid him. Jack paid it no attention; he was still searching for the men who had fired at him. There was a fast boat over towards the northern shore, but he saw no one on it. If he could guess, the bullets were from a handgun. There was no significant noise, which made him think there was probably a silencer on the gun. He knew that the target of a silenced gun could sometimes hear the shot, because a silencer could act like a laser, focusing sound waves in the one direction, behind the bullet, while the silencer’s baffles dissipated all the other sound energy. While a revolver wasn’t efficient because of noise blowing out between chamber and barrel, and automatics threw out noise with the discarded shell case, either would
be quiet enough here on the water.

  Whoever it was, he was a good shot, Jack guessed, but thrown off by the bobbing of Stephen’s boat or the motion of his own. He must make more of the moments he had. He pulled the wheel around again, crouched behind the cabin, and searched all about him for the source of the shots, but there was nothing he could see.

  And then he caught sight of a flash and whiff of smoke, and knew he had them.

  It was a low, fast motorboat with two Yamaha engines at back that had been two or three boats behind him, further into the middle of the lake. There were two men aboard, both in dark trousers and with leisure jackets on that looked out of place, as though their trousers were from suits. One wore a pale brown hoody, the other had on a university-style jacket with pale body and darker sleeves, and both were staring at him. The university man had the look of the partner of the Hispanic in the hospital, and Jack nodded to himself. He was being chased, then.

  The other guy with the hoodie crouched, and Jack saw him stretch out his hands. A puff again, and Jack threw himself sideways as though hit. He peered back over the gunwale, but he saw that his feint had not persuaded the two. The boat edged closer to the middle of the lane, and now it was past him, it began to make a long turn to follow him. Once behind him, the two would have a clear field of fire, Jack knew.

  He pulled the map from his pocket and peered at it, steering with his left hand, and then yanked on the throttle and pulled it wide. This little boat was never going to beat two Yamahas, but he didn’t have to make it easy for them.

  To the north, he saw the bronze towers and pipes of the old gas works and, on instinct, he steered for it. There was a marina to the left of it, and he thought he could see another to the right, but he aimed the boat straight for the towers, hoping he could survive the distance.

  There was another whack and a starburst appeared in the fibreglass of the cabin. He looked down, and saw Stephen Orme was not going to get up again, and then concentrated on the beach dead ahead. He would have to pass through all the queue of boats which were heading out to sea, and he knew that he would make some enemies when he did that, but better some enraged boatmen than a bullet in the head. Another strike, but at least the engine was still working, and when he glanced back behind him at the fast boat, he saw that the men were arguing. One probably wanted to hurry and finish the job, he guessed, but he was also convinced that the other was reluctant to commit murder in full view of all the pleasure boats in the lake. They were running risks enough just firing at him. Fortunately they were only shooting when they thought that they wouldn’t be seen, and that knowledge gave him an idea. As he and his boat concealed the two men from other boats, he yanked the rudder around, and the boat rolled wildly. It made the next bullets miss the boat completely.

  And now he was in among the boats, earning himself bellowed insults, and he gave them the finger, hoping that at least one would remember him and his face, before he was through and nearer the shore. Now, when he looked back, the two in the boat were concealing their weapons below the gunwales as they passed through the line of boats, but soon they would be through, and then they could push the throttle wide, he knew, and even as he had the thought, he saw the prow of their speedboat lift suddenly. They were coming straight at him, the vessel bouncing more on the tops of the waves, jerking and splashing as it thundered on. He had a few moments, no more. As he held his course, he reached down to Stephen and felt his pockets. There was a wallet in his rear pocket, a set of keys in another. No sodding gun, though. Jack took them and stuffed them both into his pocket. They may come in useful if he escaped.

  He set his boat at the marina on the right of the steel columns, and edged nearer and nearer to the shore, casting a look over his shoulder as he heard the slap, slap, slap of the water on the speedboat‘s hull, and then, as he thought they must be about to slow to shoot him from close range, he flung his boat about. It turned sluggishly, but the pursuers hadn’t expected even such a simple manoeuvre, and they couldn’t stop in time. He carried on while the two Yamahas roared, and the speedboat took a wide turn to follow him again, but now he was within yards of the shore, and he turned in, deliberately running the craft up the mud and shingle beach. He snatched up his rucksack and ran forward to the prow, leaping down into the edge of the water and hurrying on up the grassy bank. The speedboat was thundering on towards him, and then it slowed, and he broke off to the left as he heard that, because it must mean that the men were preparing to shoot again. He heard a bullet strike soggily into the grass near him, then saw another pockmark appear in front of him and to his right, and then he was behind a tree, and he could open his stride as the ground levelled. He passed by the great gas storage tanks, pelting on as fast as he could, the breath thundering in his lungs, until he reached the farther edge of the towers.

  Chain-link fencing surrounded him; he followed around it until he saw a path ahead that led through some bushes to a car park beyond. If he could make it to that, it would be difficult for pursuit with weapons.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the two had leaped from their launch and were following him with determination. That itself was a shock. He had half expected them to give up the chase when he reached the land, but now they were running straight at him.

  He concentrated on the way ahead. There were people all over the grass here, walking about and enjoying the sun with children in pushchairs or strolling hand in hand. Jack felt the pain starting in his lungs as he ran, and it grew to be too much, and he could have fallen, sobbing. But to stop meant death. He ran on, the agony flaring like a starburst in his chest, panting with the effort. There was only a matter of yards, then feet, then he was on a flat pathway, and he threw himself forwards through trees to the car park beyond, and at last he could stop. He threw himself behind a truck, hurling his back against the rear tyre, and took a long, gasp of air, before grabbing for Stephen’s keys in his pocket. Gripping them in his fist, two keys protruding between three fingers, he felt ready.

  *

  16.11 Seattle; 02.11 England

  The first came pelting round the truck like he was never going to stop. A large, bull-necked bastard with cropped hair. Jack rose in one fluid movement: his left hand grabbed the man’s university jacket by his lapel and pulled him round, over his out-thrust leg. The man couldn’t stop himself falling: Jack used his momentum against him, blocking his legs, and the spin hurled the man headfirst into the rear panel of the truck. His head struck the vehicle on the corner where the rear of the cab bent around to form the rear bed, and there was a sickening crunch as bone broke under the force of the impact. Jack didn’t hesitate. He punched, a Karate blow, the keys puncturing the thin bone of the man’s temple. He was taking no risks.

  Jack dropped to his knees and grabbed the guy’s waistband. There was a gun there, in a holster at his hip. Jack had it in his hand, a Glock, he knew, and he racked it quickly to make sure it was loaded. A cartridge ejected, and Jack knew it was loaded and ready. He felt the comfort of the safety bar under his forefinger, his left hand supporting, and crouched, peering under the truck to see where the other man was, looking for feet, and it was that which saved him. A slug passed over his shoulder, creasing his coat, and slapping into the metal of the truck’s bed. It dented, but the bullet fragmented, and Jack swore as he ran, bent double, round to the other side of the truck. The bullets must be frangible rounds, designed to expand on hitting soft tissue. He paused a moment at the other side of the truck, gripped the Glock like a priest holding a crucifix against a demon, and then he was away again, darting quickly past the truck, then a Chrysler, then a Ford Fiesta, until he was concealed behind a Ford Taurus.

  He grasped the wing mirror and pulled. It bent back and he swore, and then he reached inside the housing and jerked hard. The glass came away, trailing some wires, and he used this as a periscope, quickly searching until he saw a low figure with a hoodie slip around the Chrysler. Jack could see where he was heading, and quickly moved to the fr
ont of the Taurus, keeping low, the mirror held under the car. He saw legs, and dropped to his belly. There were two feet visible below the Fiesta, and he fired without thinking. Two shots quickly, aiming just below the ankles, then three more; he fired until he heard the scream and saw the body fall.

  There were shrieks at the sound of the shots, a wild, panicked scream from a woman and, as Jack rose, he saw people scurrying away in every direction. He approached the fallen man cautiously. He was in his early thirties and heavily built. His Glock, fitted with a long silencer, lay a few feet from his hands. With his ankles lacerated, he must have been in agony, but still he flailed for his gun as Jack approached. While Jack watched, he pulled a small crucifix from under his shirt and kissed it.

  ‘Don’t try it,’ Jack said. ‘Come on, give up.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ the man blurted, and threw himself bodily towards the gun.

  Jack fired until the gun was empty.

  *

  18.23 Seattle; 02.23 England

  The Garden of Remembrance was a pretty little scene, Frank Rand thought. He stood, staring down at the plaque in front of him. ‘And so it’s goodnight, my darling,’ he read. ‘I send you all my love.’ All the comments were from the dead to their parents, to their women, to their loved ones. It was the sort of honest, admiring display that his countrymen did so well, Frank thought. It made him proud for their sacrifice.

  There was little here that he could imagine was relevant to the investigation, though. He sat at a bench and listened to the sound of running water from a water feature and tried to put himself in the mind of the man he hunted. The guy was a Brit, so he probably had little idea about this city. If he was still here, and hadn’t taken a rental or caught a train ride, he would be feeling pretty lonely. He must know that someone had betrayed him and, although he knew the Americans had the technology to catch him, he would be feeling pretty desperate.