When an idea finally came to him, he lurched off in the direction of a trailered boat, wearing only his shoes. With stiff, numb fingers he jerked the boat cover off, awkwardly wrapping it around his body several times in an attempt to contain his body heat. He shivered violently, his teeth chattering as he scanned his surroundings, desperately searching for shelter.
He spotted a bait shop on the far side of the marina parking lot. He didn't want to stay in the open any longer than necessary because he was afraid the explosion might draw attention. He also needed to find some way to get his core temperature up before he had a cardiac arrest. He grabbed his belongings and limped toward the bait shop.
The plate-glass windows had been broken and the doors hung open. Shards of glass ground beneath the soles of Ricardo's Italian loafers as he crept through the door. It looked like the few racks of food items—potato chips, candy bars, and beef jerky—were all that had been disturbed. For anyone desperate for the basics of survival, the bait shop wouldn't have had much to offer. Most of what remained was fishing gear and basic boat items like life jackets, paddles, spare props, and coolers.
Spotting a rack of t-shirts that said Occoquan Marina on the chest, Ricardo snatched two of them from hangers. Dry clothes would be nice but they wouldn't be enough to get his temperature up fast enough. He needed a heat source. He pushed through an interior door and entered a garage area, where boat motors in various stages of repair were clamped to sawhorses. Ricardo stumbled around, feeling as if his legs might fail him at any moment. His legs were so stiff it took all of his concentration to encourage them to move. His time was running out.
He spotted a metal drum piled high with garage trash. Blue paper towels were piled high, mixed with empty boxes and soda bottles. Ricardo looked for a way to set it ablaze, then spotted a cart with an oxy-acetylene setup. It took all of his concentration to open the valves on the tanks. When he saw the needles on the regulators move, he hoped they were set correctly because he had no idea where they needed to be. He grabbed the striker from the cart, turned on the acetylene, and lit the torch. He added more oxygen until the sooty flame grew bluer, then he stuck it to the barrel.
The fire grew quickly. Ricardo turned off the torch and looked up, glad to see that the garage had a high ceiling. Still, soot marked the spot where the smoke hit before spreading out across the ceiling. Ricardo understood he'd have to open a door or window soon but that was the least of his concerns now. As the metal trash barrel warmed, Ricardo basked in the heat.
Pacing back and forth in front of the barrel, he felt life returning to him, though it was far from a pleasurable sensation. He had pins and needles in his extremities as blood began to leave the core of his body for arms and legs. Sharp pains shot through his feet, forcing him to remove the clammy shoes and stand barefoot on the boat cover.
The fire began to subside, most of the trash quickly burning away. Ricardo searched for other combustible materials to toss inside. He threw in two hammers with wooden handles, then tossed in a stool setting near a workbench. He dumped parts from cardboard boxes and threw the empty boxes into the barrel. With each passing moment, he felt more like he was going to make it through this.
He pulled on the two t-shirts he'd found in the main store and immediately felt the warmth of his body heat being trapped by the fabric. He wrapped the boat cover back around his body and returned to the store to see if there were any more items of clothing. He found a display of foul weather gear and dug through it, finding a pair of rain pants. While the rubberized vinyl wasn't nearly as cozy as the soft t-shirts it might trap some body heat. He put them back in the stack, deciding he'd return to them if he couldn't find anything better.
A nearby door was marked "Private" and Ricardo pushed his way through it, hoping there might be some better options in the back room. He was immediately rewarded by the sight of an old parka hanging outside the walk-in beer cooler. It was one of the old 1970s-style parkas with a blaze orange interior and fake fur around the collar. Ricardo couldn't care less about what it looked like. He tugged it onto his body with a desperate hunger for any warmth it might offer. He flipped up the hood and zipped it up until he was staring out from the depths of a fur-fringed tube.
The sensation of staring out a periscope made it a little harder to search the back room but he wasn't ready to drop the hood yet. As a compromise, he unzipped it slightly and rolled back the fake fur collar. While his upper body was starting to warm, he was still bare from the waist down. He was nearly ready to go back to the stiff rain pants when he spotted a pair of mechanic's coveralls hanging on a nail by the back door. They were grimy and dirty, looking like they'd never been washed, but they were cotton. Ricardo pulled them on, reluctantly removing the parka so he could fit his upper body into the coveralls, before replacing the jacket.
He scoured the store but found no socks of any kind. In an act of desperation, he wrapped one of the marina t-shirts around each foot, then stepped into a pair of rubber rain boots he found in the back. It wouldn't be comfortable enough for walking any distance, but maybe he could wear them long enough for his feet to warm up. He returned to the barrel of burning trash, though the room had filled with enough smoke at this point to begin choking him. Ricardo reluctantly opened one of the garage doors to allow the smoke to dissipate.
While the garage area cleared, Ricardo went back into the store and stared out the front, toward the water. If anyone had come to investigate the explosion, they hadn’t come to the marina. He saw no one in the parking lot. That didn't mean he was safe from discovery but maybe it meant he had a few more minutes to get himself organized. On his way back through the store, he spotted a stack of zippered duffel bags on a shelf. That was just what he needed. He grabbed one and headed back to the garage area.
Most of the smoke had cleared so he closed the garage door, figuring he had a few warm minutes before the room began to fill again. He crouched by the fire, opened the duffel bag, and sorted his gear. The holster he normally wore on his belt wouldn't be concealable in the coveralls so he went ahead and strapped it around his waist, figuring it would be hidden by the parka. He removed the Microtech automatic knife from his soggy suit pants and stowed that in a front pocket.
He opened the aluminum briefcase. The expensive case was watertight and foam-lined, the majority of it taken up by the FN P90. The compact select-fire weapon was known for its distinctive curved handgrip as well as for its unique 5.7x28mm caliber. Bundled in one foam compartment was a single-point sling for the weapon, which Ricardo attached, then draped over his neck. He took one of the half-dozen oddly-shaped magazines from the case and twisted one onto the top of the weapon, then chambered a round. He put the rest of the mags into the zippered bag, then threaded a suppressor onto the barrel of the rifle. It was one that Conor had made for him. A Mad Mick special, he'd called it.
Another compartment in the case contained a selection of satellite phones, spare batteries, and a charger. Ricardo flipped through the phones and found the one he was looking for. He opened it and punched a contact, dialing his office manager at the Chantilly office, an older Ukrainian lady named Darja. When there was no answer, he dialed several other staff whom he'd left behind at the facility. None answered their phones.
"Shit," he mumbled, knowing this couldn't be good.
He tossed that phone into the gear bag and grabbed another, dialing Earl Banks, the former spook who ran the compound in West Virginia. Just as Ricardo was starting to get worried, someone answered the call on the other end.
"Banks," he growled.
"Earl, this is Ricardo."
"Ricardo," Earl replied, stretching the name out in his West Virginia drawl. "You heading our way? I was expecting you today."
"Actually, matters have turned into a bit of a bother," Ricardo replied coolly. "We lost a man on the op in Georgia."
Earl, a former spook, was fully aware of the operation Ricardo was conducting at the moment. As a longtime employee of an alphabet age
ncy, he knew several of the people who'd formed the Macallan Collective. In fact, he'd even worked for a few of them over the years. "That's rough."
"It only gets rougher, my friend. My chopper was just shot down by an Apache gunship over suburban Washington. Everyone onboard was killed. My own survival was a matter of luck."
"Are you okay?" Earl asked.
"For now, but I just tried reaching the Chantilly office and no one is answering their phones. I've got a bad feeling about this. I know for certain we've been compromised but I don't know the extent of it."
"What can I do?"
"For now, lay low and put every man you have on watch. I've tried to shield my relationship with your facility but some in the Macallan Collective might have known. Any number of folks could have seen me going in and out of there."
"If this was a hit, do you have any idea who might have been behind it?"
Ricardo gave a bitter laugh. "It was a hit and I have a lot of enemies, but my team in Georgia said their op was compromised. My guess is that this group being targeted by the Macallan Collective learned they were in the crosshairs and decided to launch a preemptive strike."
"Traitorous bastards," Earl growled.
"Indeed. So I'm on foot and I'm going to head for the Chantilly office. I've not checked my coordinates yet so I have no idea how far it might be. I'll give you a call when I reach the office and let you know what's going on. If for some reason you don't hear from me in the next couple of days, you can probably assume I'm toast."
"Be careful."
"Absolutely."
Ricardo returned to his aluminum briefcase, where he extracted a handheld GPS unit from one of the foam pockets. He powered it up, then dumped the last of the briefcase contents into his gear bag. There were some spare batteries for the GPS, some spare mags for his handgun, the extra phone batteries, the charger, a powerful compact flashlight, and a power bank for recharging his devices when he didn't have access to power. He left the briefcase sitting open on the garage floor. Whoever found it beside this scorched garbage can would probably be quite curious as to what it once contained. Then again, in the scheme of all that had been lost, maybe the mystery of the briefcase would be immaterial.
Ricardo threw the gear bag over his shoulder and stepped out into the blustery day. He checked the GPS and found it was roughly twenty miles to his office in Chantilly. Twenty miles in rubber boots with t-shirts for socks or twenty miles in wet Italian loafers. That wasn't much of a choice.
He'd have to be on the lookout for a bicycle. He was an excellent road cyclist and could cut a full day of walking into a few hours of riding if he could find the right bike. First, he had to get across this reservoir though. As luck would have it, he was on the wrong side from where he needed to be. Fortunately, the marina offered kayak, paddleboat, and row boat rentals. He'd have to explore those options and see which would be easiest to borrow for the short trip across the lake.
3
Northern Virginia
With all the kayaks and canoes locked away, Ricardo was forced to cross the reservoir in a heavy aluminum rowboat. It beat the hell out of swimming but was not nearly so efficient as a kayak. Rowing through a patch of buoyant debris he caught sight of Dennis' body floating just below the surface of the water, a jagged shard of the airframe embedded in his back. The man's instincts had been solid. He'd saved Ricardo but had been unable to save himself. He'd be a hard man to replace. Ricardo knew that somewhere below those dark, murky waters, the remains of his chopper had settled into the muddy bottom, three more of his employees dead in their seatbelts.
When he was across, Ricardo followed a paved road from a parking lot and found that he was in Fountainhead Regional Park. He was vaguely familiar with this neighborhood from some social gatherings he'd attended. The wooded neighborhood was an upscale community. Most of the homes had pools, tennis courts, gated entries, and wide, circular drives.
Fortunately for Ricardo, many of the homes were also empty, the wealthy residents having fled to their rural horse farms or mountain cabins at the first signs of trouble. He had to wonder if they actually made it. The fuel supply had been locked down so quickly and the highways in this area so clogged it wasn't likely the residents of the area had been able to reach any destination outside of the city. Regardless of what had become of them, their stories were no different than millions of others that played out across the nation.
Dressed in his parka, coveralls, and rubber boots like some displaced arctic fisherman, he pressed on. Ricardo peered through the hedges to check the state of things at each estate he passed. In less than a mile he was rewarded with the sight of a looted home, the detached garage open and the contents scattered in the driveway. Feeling like a vagrant in his hodgepodge outfit, Ricardo deftly climbed over the four-foot-high iron fence and set out across the lawn. Beneath the rubber boots, he could already feel hot spots that would eventually become blisters. He'd have to look for some better clothes while he was here.
The first thing Ricardo noticed in the garage was the cars, a Porsche Cayenne and a Mercedes G550. Both had been mercilessly beaten with an assortment of expensive golf clubs. There was a neat and apparently untouched red tool chest packed full of expensive hand tools. A selection of fly rods hung in a simple wooden rack. Of primary interest to Ricardo were the half-dozen bikes hanging from hooks screwed into the ceiling.
There were several sturdy mountain bikes, from a hardtail Fuji to a full-suspension Specialized. It was the yellow Cervelo road bike with its carbon frame that put a grin on Ricardo's face. He'd rented one like it in Spain last summer and could still remember the way it floated through the endless vineyards of La Rioja.
He lifted the lightweight bike from its hook and gently set it on the ground. He tested the tires and thought they felt about right. Someone must have been riding the bikes on a regular basis before the world went to crap. There was a tiny pack hanging beneath the seat. Ricardo checked the contents and found it contained a CO2 inflator, a spare tube, and a bike-specific multi-tool. The bike was everything he'd hoped for and more.
Satisfied with his good fortune, he cast a wary eye toward the house, wondering what the situation might be like inside. He desperately needed a change of clothing. He grabbed his gear bag and pushed the bike toward the side door to the house. It hung open, possibly an omen that the interior of the home had experienced the same kind of senseless vandalism that the automobiles had.
Ricardo laid the bike in the grass near the door but didn't trust to leave his gear bag behind. He unzipped his parka and raised the stubby P90 to his shoulder, then strode inside. The house had definitely been hit by someone, though it hadn't been completely trashed. Someone had gone through the kitchen and hauled off all the food. They'd done the same with the room-sized pantry and the two wet bars. An outlandishly expensive flat-screen television had been demolished when someone threw a replica Egyptian sculpture through it.
Throughout the house, there were indications of a careful search for anything useful. The searchers had made no attempt to cover their tracks, but generally they hadn’t done too much damage, outside of breaking a few token items. Ricardo managed to piece together a wardrobe between the owner's walk-in closet and another down the hall that appeared to belong to an older teenage boy.
When he was done, he checked his appearance in a full-length mirror he found in the master bath. He decided that he looked like a rapper in his warm-up suit, sneakers, and vintage parka. The thought made him smile. It was not a look he'd ever intentionally tried to emulate. A little gold, a little bling to catch the eye, was all that was missing. The clothes were at least warm and comfortable. They would do until he could reach his office.
Shouldering the awkward duffel bag again inspired him to look for a backpack, which he found in the teenage boy's room. He dumped out a few books, some pencils, a stack of wadded papers, and a tangled set of earbuds, then crammed his gear into the bag. Not wanting to waste any more time, he made his way
down the steps and back out of the house. He paused just outside the door to listen, hearing nothing different than he'd heard on his way in.
He zipped up the parka and mounted the bike, double-checking to see that his weapons were concealed but accessible, then started pedaling. At the end of the driveway he headed north. Pedaling on the relatively flat terrain was nearly effortless and Ricardo worked through the gears, reaching something near twenty miles per hour. He constantly scanned his surroundings, on the lookout for anyone who might see him as an easy target. To his relief, the upscale residential neighborhoods he passed through remained relatively quiet.
When he neared Centreville, Ricardo began to see more business and industrial properties. He stopped on a corner to examine the map on his GPS, deciding he didn't want to go through the center of a proper town. He went east, bypassing the town and staying mostly to the suburbs and tree-lined communities on the outskirts of the metro area. Since he wasn't following an established route there were several times he had to get off the bike and carry it across a fence, guardrail, or highway in order to keep to the quieter streets.
He was genuinely surprised that he ran into no trouble. In fact, he ran into relatively few people at all. This far into the disaster people were skittish and held a haunted look in their eyes. They'd all seen, done, and experienced things they never imagined happening on American soil. They would be forever changed by it, unable to return to that blissful and insulated peace they'd once had.
In a little over ninety minutes, Ricardo reached the Chantilly office park where his headquarters was located. He'd always found riding bikes to be a meditative activity and he'd spent a lot of his pedal time processing his situation while keeping one eye on his surroundings. He didn't suspect he had a traitor in his own organization but there was one somewhere and it had to be someone higher up than the man who'd killed Doc. It was one thing to compromise the operation in Georgia but quite another to send an attack helicopter after him in American airspace. This entire operation had moved from the realm of business to becoming very, very personal.
Ultraviolent: Book Six in The Mad Mick Series Page 3
