Fortunately, he had enough money from their family business back in Spain, and also the wealth he’d accumulated working for the United States. He’d never been on the books with the Americans, not officially, but they were the ones buttering his bread, and the butter they used was very expensive.
He’d been in hiding in Ecuador for many years now and had set up a comfortable life there, albeit an incognito one. Diego, however, wasn’t a man of luxurious tastes. He was able to live modestly without drawing attention to himself with lavish things or extravagant spending.
That fact alone had probably saved his life.
He’d risked making the journey to the States when Adriana married Sean earlier in the year. He was one of only a handful of people who even knew about the wedding since they’d chosen to elope. That and the fact neither Sean nor Adriana had many friends were the major contributors to their decision to have a small wedding.
Diego didn’t care if it put him on the map of the cartels, of terrorists, or of anyone else. Nothing could keep him from his daughter’s wedding day.
“To what do I owe this…unexpected call, my darling?” His voice was smooth, the accent smoother than the flat side of a knife. She’d seen the sharp edge on more than one occasion growing up, but it was that edge that had made her sharper, as well.
“I need a favor.”
She sat there for a moment and let the words sink in.
“A favor?” He let out a soft laugh. “That doesn’t happen often, you asking me for help. Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“I assume you saw what is being said about Sean and the abduction of John Dawkins, the former president.”
“I have.”
“I need to know who did this, Papa. Sean didn’t kidnap the president.”
There was a long sigh on the other end of the line. Adriana pictured her father rubbing his temples with a thumb and index finger.
“That, my dear, will be difficult.”
“You excel at difficult.”
He laughed softly. “My sweet girl, even I have limitations.”
Adriana felt her heart sink into her gut.
“But I may be able to help.” He stopped to consider the problem. “I know a man. This man is very difficult to find.”
“Difficult to find is right up my alley.”
“I thought you might say that. I’m glad I raised a girl who is ready for a challenge.”
She imagined him smiling with pride in some dark room in his little apartment, probably sitting in a worn leather chair in the corner.
“His name is Tyler Lawson. He works with the CIA.”
Adriana noted the way he phrased the man’s employment status. “You said works with. Not for?”
“You think I’m the only one who does side jobs for them?” There was mischief sprinkled in his voice.
She’d often wondered how many people were out there in the world, doing the same kinds of things her father had done for the Americans. That always brought up more questions, questions that probably didn’t need to be answered. What other countries paid for those kinds of skills? And were any of the contractors working for both sides—playing the middle as it were? It would be easy for a person with information from one side to sell it to the other, especially if the paying party was behind the times. There were many Middle Eastern groups who were happy to pay for out-of-date information simply because they were unaware it wasn’t current. Her father had told her about that once, and Adriana had wondered if he’d done it himself, but only for a second.
Diego was a good man, not given to the persistent temptations of material wealth. He would never betray his morals and his loyalties for something as trivial as money, or anything else for that matter.
If Tyler Lawson was a contractor like Diego, he’d be lying low; if he was smart. There were any number of foreign entities that were always hunting down intelligence contractors. And those were just the state actors. There could be dozens of other groups, such as terrorists, cartels, and organized crime syndicates on the hunt, as well.
“No, Father. I know you’re not the only one. How do I find this Tyler Lawson?”
“Oh, you can find him…with some effort. He’s one of the more brash contractors I’ve ever come across. Flaunts his money like a banner flapping over him at all times. My guess is he believes his false identities and highly paid security teams will keep him safe, but those things will only work for so long. All it takes is one good hound to figure out what he does, and his name and face will be plastered all over the dark web. Once that happens…” His voice trailed off.
Adriana could fill in the gap after that.
The dark web was a seething place of unholiness, the likes of which most mortals didn’t dare investigate. There were things there that should never be seen, much less done. It was the darkest pit on the face of the earth, which made it the perfect location to find a hit man or hire a squad to take out a target.
If Tyler Lawson was careless, sooner or later his face would end up there right next to his address—a big payday for the first one to pull the trigger.
“I’m sending his details to you now,” Diego said. “They’ll appear in your inbox shortly.”
The two of them shared an encrypted email service that allowed them to send direct messages back and forth. These messages and accounts were impossible to access by anyone else, using the most powerful technology available at the time, though now and then they would upgrade the security measures just to be extra safe. Diego once told her that it would take a dozen of the world’s best AI-driven computers, along with a dozen of the best hackers, to even get close to cracking their software.
“Be careful when you find him,” Diego warned. “You can use my name. He knows me. I’m pretty sure he trusts me, too, though that is difficult to do in my line of work. Tell him you are Diego’s daughter, and he might let you in.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
There was a snicker in the earpiece. “Well then, you’ll have to do what you do best.”
14
Annapolis, Maryland
Admiral Forrest Winters sat behind his desk and watched the news on the flatscreen hanging in the corner near the door. The anchors had been talking about the disappearance of former president John Dawkins for the entire morning. Speculation was running rampant, and apparently, the authorities had no leads. Nor would they.
Winters had taken the greatest of care in orchestrating this campaign. He knew he’d have to be careful—after all, he had everything to lose.
He’d been in the navy most of his adult life, joining when he turned nineteen the summer after finishing high school. He’d gone back to college after his initial enlistment, earned a degree, and then returned to the service, rising through the officer ranks quickly—due in no small part to that college degree.
As the years went by, Winters grew to love the navy. When he’d first signed up, it was a matter of trying to avoid being deployed to Vietnam with the rest of the ground forces. Joining the navy had been his way of ensuring he’d be in what he believed to be the safest place during the conflict.
Now, it was his passion, his true love. He believed strongly in the United States Navy and knew that it was much more than just boats, big guns, submarines, missiles, and planes. It was about the men and women who served both on land and sea and about the standards they upheld in the world, standards that had fallen off sharply over the years as the world plunged further into disarray.
Then there were the threats. They’d always been there, lurking in the shadows. First, it had been the communists. The Cold War was in full swing when Winters joined up. It churned and boiled until 1989 when communism began to collapse. When Russia was no longer a threat, at least not directly, the military’s efforts turned to North Korea and China. Cuba was close by but not a real concern. Castro was broke, as was the tiny island nation. While they may have had access to weapons that could threaten the American mainland, Cuba was small enough to ma
nage.
North Korea and China, however, were another story.
Winters wasn’t stupid. He knew that, for all the chatter and all the huff and puff, China and the United States needed each other from an economics standpoint. One couldn’t attack the other because doing so would destroy the economic infrastructure each nation had in place. It was a symbiotic, albeit begrudging relationship.
North Korea had only been a concern to him due to the radical nature of their “Dear Leader.” For all the man’s bravado and his blatant show of nuclear testing and outrageous threats against all of America’s allies and even the United States itself, Dear Leader could barely feed his citizens, power his cities, and support his nation in any First World capacity, much less wage a nuclear war on someone.
Then the accident in their testing facility happened.
Deep within a mountain, one of North Korea’s nuclear testing sites collapsed, killing hundreds of scientists in the process, forever buried under thousands of tons of rock.
Of course, Dear Leader tried to spin it as some kind of a success. The fact they’d been able to detonate a nuke was his main focus. The deaths of his people didn’t matter. They had a weapon they could use, or so he thought. The delivery method was still decades away, and by then North Korea would be so much further behind the current tech that it wouldn’t be much of a threat.
Winters had seen it all during his time.
He’d served through Operation Desert Storm, been stationed in the Persian Gulf, then again sent overseas during the Iraqi War and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. By the time he was put behind a desk and given more power than he ever imagined, the Russians were beginning to become a threat once more.
Their leader, stubborn and indignant to the point of being cocky, had pushed the bounds of peace that had hung tentatively in the balance for over twenty years. Some kind of conflict, it seemed, was inevitable.
Winters knew this all too well. The Russians were a proud people and their leader the proudest of all. Winters had spent time in Moscow and grown to love the citizens, but now those times were all but forgotten as the threats poured out of the Kremlin.
Admiral Winters knew that it was only a matter of time until Russia made its move.
It wouldn’t come as a land assault, and most likely not from the air. They would come via the ocean and could attack both coasts if they wanted to. While the United States Navy was strong and equipped to handle that sort of thing to defend the nation, Winters also knew the cost of such an attack.
He’d only voiced it to a few of his peers during the last few months as intel continued to land on his desk. No one listened. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia had ceased to be a real threat, in many minds, and was only a peripheral annoyance.
Winters knew better. They were coming, and while it was probably going to be a stalemate, hundreds of thousands would die, maybe more.
Unless there was a way to stop it.
The top brass had become soft.
It wasn’t his fellow military leaders that had lost their edge. It was the bureaucrats in Washington. They’d been overrun by a new breed of politician, the kind that thought everyone in the world was to be trusted, kind, and good. This new blanket message of tolerance wasn’t inherently evil. There was nothing wrong with trying to see the good in people, but not at the expense of ignoring the bad.
Nuclear war would solve nothing. Winters was well aware of that fact. He’d gone through every thermonuclear war training available in the military, run through the scenarios, all with the same results. The world would effectively come to an end, the planet made uninhabitable by the wars of men.
Russia still had nukes. During the heavy disarmament effort in the 1990s, there were dozens of nuclear warheads that were unaccounted for. Some were still being seized. Others had vanished off the map. But Moscow still controlled the lion’s share of the thousands of nuclear warheads still floating around the former Soviet Union.
Winters knew that a more powerful, non-nuclear option was going to be necessary to fend off the Russians should they try to attack United States soil. But that was only the beginning of his desires.
Such a weapon could make the United States the unquestioned, unchallengeable power across the world’s oceans. Once that happened, there would be no more oppression, no more deaths of the innocent at the hands of warlords or tyrants. World leaders would fall in line knowing that if they didn’t, the United States Navy would force their hand, bending their nations to submission.
Winters believed America was a point of light to the rest of the world. It was one of the last bastions, along with a few allies, of capitalism and the power of the individual to rise above life’s challenges. That message would be carried further than ever—if he just had the weapon.
For the longest time, it had been nothing more than fanciful imaginings. A weapon that could grant someone power over the sea was something from a fairytale, a fictional notion beyond ludicrous.
As he’d grown older, however, Winters had taken up studying ancient myths. He learned about the religions and cultures from thousands of years ago, paying particular attention to those revolving around nautical traditions. He’d scoured religious texts, even searched the Bible relentlessly for a clue as to what might have caused the Great Flood, aside from the command of God. That search had proved fruitless, but he endeavored onward, powering through the challenges until he’d discovered something interesting.
Throughout all of his studies, reading, and research, one theme continued to be a powerful beacon to what he hoped might actually exist. There were gods of the sea in nearly every culture, even ones that were landlocked. Some of these deities possessed great weapons that could control the tides, the waves, the life itself in the oceans.
The most famous of all, perhaps, were the tridents of Neptune and Poseidon.
Both deities were well known throughout the world, even in modern times. Stories had been written, movies produced, and even a few followings created to pay tribute to the magical possibilities these gods presented to the world.
While Winters wasn’t a very religious person—only attending church once every few months, at most—he did find that in life, wherever there was smoke, there was fire. Sure, it was cliché, but that’s how he thought, how he worked, how he had to believe.
All of these ancient weapons and deities possessed powers. Whether the stories were true or not didn’t matter. He’d learned that there was usually at least an ounce of truth behind every proverbial pound of fiction.
One such story that had always fascinated him was the fall of Atlantis. The academic community seemed divided on the topic. Was Atlantis a real place or simply some piece of a philosopher’s imagination?
He didn’t fancy himself a person given to foolish pursuits. On the other hand, Winters knew for a fact that there were sections of the government, secret branches, that worked specifically on discovering lost ancient technologies exactly like the one he was trying to find.
Most of those people didn’t have the vision he had.
Winters understood all too well what it could mean to have something powerful enough to command the seas.
In the last six months, he’d slowed his search, reeling in some of the aggressive studying he’d done for so long. After coming up empty with every single prospective myth, legend, or rumor, he was growing tired of looking. Perhaps there really wasn’t anything like the weapon he sought. All the stories he’d read were just figments of someone’s imagination.
He’d resigned himself to that fact and merely continued his studies out of sheer interest and curiosity. He gave up on the pipe dream of some powerful relic or artifact that could command the oceans and resorted to looking to history purely for entertainment.
It was funny. Despite his age, he was always learning new things about life. Now nearly seventy, he’d long ago learned that it was typically when you were close to giving up that the solution you so desperately wanted fell in your la
p.
He’d forgotten that rule, until it had happened again.
He was sifting through some stuff he’d found on the Lewis and Clark expedition and decided to do a little further digging. One thing led to another until he realized he was in a rabbit hole he’d never imagined. It began innocently enough with the discovery of Lewis’s death. Winters had learned about Lewis and Clark when he was in grade school, some fifty-plus years ago. He was shocked to learn that historians were still in a debate over what really happened the night Capt. Meriwether Lewis died. No one seemed to know for sure if the man committed suicide or if he was murdered.
There was certainly evidence for both theories, but the events of the evening had caused a spark to ignite in the admiral’s head. What if he was murdered? And if he was, why?
He was far from a specialist when it came to investigations. The most he’d ever had to do was root out contraband on his vessels. Winters knew, however, that with every crime, especially murder, there had to be some kind of motive.
If Meriwether Lewis was murdered, what possible reason could someone have had to carry it out?
The man was a hero, a legend at the young age of thirty-five. Winters suspected he would have been treated like the first astronauts to walk on the moon: with parades, fanfare, and feasting.
Yet there he had been, according to some accounts Winters had read, dying on the floor of some Podunk tavern in the middle of southern Tennessee.
Witness testimony was inconsistent, which made Winters’s suspicions soar. His immediate thoughts were that someone had wanted Lewis’s money, but despite being a governor and the owner of a considerable amount of land, Lewis supposedly didn’t have a ton, much less a valuable stash on hand.
That meant it wasn’t a robbery.
Then there was the rush job on his funeral that only added to the conspiracy forming in Winters’s mind. More research relayed that John Grinder, the owner of the tavern and inn where Lewis perished, was brought before a grand jury under the charge of murder.
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