Spies Lie Series Box Set

by D S Kane

  “So be it. Give me wire transfer instructions and I’ll get you the money tomorrow morning at beginning of the day, London time.” Kiril took notes in longhand while he thought about calling Cassie at the hotel.

  He hoped she was still alive. Over a week. Can she survive that long?

  The room was pitch black. Cassie knew where each of her bodyguards was located since she could hear their breathing. One of their attackers got close enough to silently toss an old hand grenade through the holes in the door, and she flinched but couldn’t move. It blew most of what remained of the door away in chunky pieces and sent shrapnel flying into the room.

  “Fuck!” said Ari. “I got hit.”

  Cassie checked her own body for shrapnel punctures. There were several BB sized holes in her left arm, but none went deep enough to cause much pain and there was almost no bleeding. She said, “Nothing much on me. How about the rest of you?”

  Everyone answered except Shimon. Lester turned on a flashlight and looked toward where he was last seen. Shimon’s body was still. Lester said, “Shimon’s hit. I can see a hole in his leg, but there’s a lot of blood, so maybe that’s not all. He isn’t conscious. I’m gonna try to staunch the blood.” He crawled toward the couch that had given Shimon cover. From the dim light of Lester’s pocket torch, Cassie could see the stuffing on the couch showing holes from the Rorschach of the incoming shrapnel and bullets.

  Lester crept as fast as he could to Shimon, but before he could get behind the couch adjacent the wounded man, a grenade slipped in through the gaping hold in the door. Right into the center of the room. They all ducked. Lester screamed, “It’s a flash-bang.” This one was a concussive grenade, meant to cause unconsciousness and disorientation, but without the heavy rain of shrapnel. Ari had time to shield his eyes, cover his ears, and duck before it exploded. Right after the explosion, several men burst into the room, but Ari took aim. The invaders fired several shots before he took them down. He looked around the room. Everyone lay still. He pushed the dead bodies into the doorway and peeked outside. “Three more coming.” He aimed and shot. Lester struggled to where Ari had been crouching and set up there as well. “Lester, you take the right side. I’ll take the left.”

  As the two bodyguards set up for battle, Cassie’s cell buzzed. It was her parents’ number. “Yes?”

  “It’s your father. I’ve arranged two submarines to pick you up in one week. Call your General Shimmel and tell him the boats will be delivered off the coast at Lahaina.”

  Cassie heard more gunfire and missed a sentence from Kiril. She said, “Daddy, say that again. Pretty noisy here.”

  “Cassie, it will take a week for the subs to arrive. When they do, have Shimmel steal a boat from Lahaina to take you from the hotel to the subs. None of your men need come with you off the island, but they’ll have to provide cover for your escape. Okay?”

  The sound of gunfire made it impossible for her to reply. She waited for a break in the noise. “Okay, speak now.”

  “First I need you to wire money to Misha to pay for subs. Then I’ll give you some information he provided. Finally, I want to ask you some questions about how all this happened so I can help you more. Cassie, I called your office, just in case you haven’t told Lee yet. We’ll need to plan a place where you will all be safe until this is over. You and Lee and your daughter. And we’ll have to figure out a way to end it. Until you can retrieve them, we’ll have to find a way to protect Ann and Lee. First, wire the money to Misha.” Kiril gave her the SWIFT number for the bank and the account number with the transaction details. She wasn’t aware of much else, but seemed to have answered all his questions without having to think about them. When Kiril terminated the conversation, she felt some relief.

  They had to survive another week here to make it work. There’d be no way to leave and no place else that was safer.

  Cassie looked behind the couch to where Shimon lay bleeding. She wished she’d brought along some Dermabond to seal his wounds and keep him from bleeding out, but this had been a vacation and she’d not thought to bring battle supplies.

  She crawled there and tied a tourniquet around his thigh, then found the hole in his back and applied a compress made from the couch’s stuffing to that injury. As she used one hand to hold down the stuffing, she used her other hand to key the funds transfer instructions into her cell phone. Kiril called back with another question and she was about to answer when another flash-bang rolled into the room. She lost the connection when it exploded.

  Shimmel got off the plane and trotted through the parking lot in Kahului Airport. He found the old yellow school bus he’d hired for the sixty-four men and himself. The man standing outside the bus had a sign that read, “Plumbers Union AFL Unit Local 64 WELCOME.” Shimmel shook the driver’s hand and said, “Thanks for arranging the bus so fast. The hotel we’d originally booked our annual convention is on the Big Island, and they somehow lost sixty-three of our sixty-five reservations.” He wiped the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. “It was almost impossible to move a small venue from one island to another, and it cost a great deal of money, but the only hotel we could find that could handle our business was the Wailea. Way too expensive, but we have little choice.” Shimmel pointed to his mercs. “Uh, we have lots of luggage. Is there space under the bus for the bags?”

  The man shook his head. “Sorry, no. But the bus seats seventy-eight, so we’ll just have to put all your suitcases overhead and on the empty seats.”

  Shimmel nodded silently and began mustering the mercs into the bus. Each merc had a large black canvass satchel. Each was just wearing a specially treated Hawaiian shirt bearing a picture of Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival. As they passed him, Shimmel held his finger to his lips, signaling silence. It was nearly midnight when the bus pulled out of the airport.

  Phillip Watson still wore his business suit when he got off the plane in Dubai. The temperature was one hundred fourteen degrees Fahrenheit. He walked onto the tarmac and headed toward the terminal, feeling the suffocating dry heat through his clothing. Within minutes he felt he’d been basted in his own perspiration and was cooking like a tented turkey.

  The flight from Munich had taken him ten hours, mostly because of airport delays. He wanted to stay in Dubai for as short a time as possible.

  The passport he’d had a cobbler make for him in Munich declared him to be Henry Guthrie. It had cost most of the cash he’d brought. He’d called the cobbler from the plane and had the man meet him at the airport. He’d bought a suitcase at the airport in Munich, and there was some fresh, new clothing in it. The forged passport had wiped out all but forty-seven dollars. He hadn’t yet had time or a place to clean himself or change clothes. He felt filthy, smelling his own foul odor whenever he stopped and stood in one place for more than a few seconds.

  He needed a place to stay while he transferred some money from one of his bank accounts into a debit card in his new name. Preferably into the Deutsche Bank current account he’d set up for Henry Guthrie. Watson knew that he’d not been trained to think like either an operative or a hacker. He hadn’t any idea how to arrange the instant appearance of a new debit card. He didn’t have a card imprinter so he’d need to have a bank branch do the work. He looked for an Internet café where he could use one of their rent-a-computers to find branches of Deutsche Bank in Dubai. It took him over an hour in the small airport. He sat with a cup of Starbucks Coffee and read his email. Watson cursed himself for not even having a notebook computer with him when he fled New York.

  There was one email, from someone named William Wing, one of his minor stockholders, asking where Watson was and if he’d kindly call or email back because Wing had a small problem with the stock he’d purchased.

  Watson laughed out loud. There’d be a large problem soon. Then he had a bright idea. He had no records of any stockholder contact info with him. All the stockholder records were stored in the stockholder register file in the de
sktop computer at his office. But maybe, since there was this one stockholder kind enough to offer a reply email address, he could squeeze a bit of cash from the man. Watson didn’t want to use his limited funds for an international phone call, and his cell phone wasn’t set up for calls outside the United States.

  There was no Deutsche Bank branch in the airport. Damn! But he found a Citibank branch and walked inside.

  “I’d like to know what documentation you need to accept a third party wire transfer.”

  The bank branch clerk called over a bank officer who could speak English. Watson repeated his request. Fifteen minutes later, he had all the information he needed.

  He walked back to the Starbucks and waited on line again to use the computer terminal. Watson keyed a reply to the email message:

  Dear Mr. Wing,

  It is so kind of you to contact me. I’m currently traveling abroad on business for Predictive Markets and GrayNet.com. I’ll be moving from one place to another and cell phone reception is dicey, so my phone number won’t help you. Hence, this Gmail.

  I will attend to your request concerning the stock shares you own just as soon as I return home to the United States.

  However, I am about to announce that revenues for Predictive Markets have exceeded break-even this quarter, for the first time. We’re getting close to an Initial Public Offering on a major stock exchange. If you’d like to increase your share holdings of Predictive Markets before the IPO, this is the time to do so. While the price per share at IPO time might easily exceed $20 per share, I am pleased to offer you shares now at only $12 per share.

  If this interests you, please wire funds directly to me. The minimum investment is $24,000. Contact information for my bank account follows under my signature line. Reply via Gmail to alert me to your interest.

  Best regards,

  Phillip Watson, CEO, Predictive Markets

  Cassie’s cell phone buzzed and vibrated against her pants pocket. She saw Wing’s name flash across its screen.

  “Cassie, we know where he is.” She struggled to hear him with gunfire and explosions all around her.

  “William? Please repeat that. Can’t hear you. You know where who is?” The smell of cordite was heavy in the humid night air. Cassie heard a bullet pass so close to her head that she felt the air move. She was sure Wing could hear that one as well.

  “Phillip Watson. He’s in the airport in Dubai, at a Starbucks using one of their computer rentals. He doesn’t even have a notebook computer. He must have seen your bet on GrayNet and fled as fast as he could. He probably doesn’t have any cash remaining since my guess is he had less than a thousand USD after he raided his checking account at the airport. And I’d bet that he doesn’t even know it was me that bankrupted him. Nothing at all left in his bank accounts. The only one that had any real money was his merchant account at Citibank. I removed all his cash via a FedWire drawdown and sent it to one that belongs to a government agency. Tomorrow, I’ll begin migrating those funds into various hidden corporate accounts to bury the trail. Then I’ll hack each bank and wipe out the trail. Meanwhile, Watson won’t have the cash to travel. And I’ll keep looking at the bank account number he gave me in his email so if any cash arrives, I can get that for us as well.”

  “Well done, William. What about Achmed Houmaz?”

  “That one is more difficult. I raided all his personal accounts and got over eighty million USD. I’m developing a plan to close him down forever. But that isn’t ready and will take time. How are you, Cassie”

  “Not well. We’re all injured and this is just another lull before they come at us again. We’ve stacked almost twenty bodies from hitters in and around our doorway to provide cover for us. Sooner or later though, they will get through. I’m hoping Avram and the mercs arrive before that happens.”

  But, with our hotel room mostly destroyed and broken, how long can my bodyguards and I last?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  October 28, 12:21 a.m.

  The road between Kahului and Kihei, Maui, Hawaii

  Shimmel wasn’t aware of how much time had passed. So immersed was he with re-running alternative plans for the attack and imagining contingencies. As the bus pulled past an upscale shopping mall, he looked out into the darkness and saw the massive hotel looming closer.

  The bus pulled to a stop. The driver opened the door and sixty-three mercs debarked into the circular driveway of the hotel. Shimmel folded his copy of the floor plans to the hotel which Wing had hacked for him. He’d scribbled notes on timing and movement of his soldiers in battle onto the map’s margins.

  He descended to the sidewalk, smiled, and gave the driver cash for the trip.

  “Thank you, sir. That’s very generous.”

  Shimmel nodded and turned toward the hotel’s entrance. He followed the men into the building. They took the elevators to the tenth floor. It took nine trips and over twenty minutes for all to arrive. They walked through the shattered security gate and all put on their night-vision goggles. At just before 1 a.m., Shimmel called Cassie’s cell phone. “We’re down the hall, behind about five hundred of your hitters. I can see your room. It’s the one with its door shredded and bodies spread over the entryway. Right? Give me your status.”

  “Oh, Avram, I’m so glad you’re here. We have serious injuries. We’ve all been hit at least once and Shimon has a hole in his leg and a big one in his lower chest. Ari has some shrapnel in his left arm. So do I”

  Shimmel shook his head. “Understood. Let me clear out the hitters from this floor, then we’ll send you a medic with supplies.” He pointed to Major LeFleur. “Jacques, have the men take out the trash.”

  LeFleur signaled and thirteen men and women began assembling silenced sniper rifles with infrared night scopes.

  From within the room, Lester watched through the make-shift periscope as nearly silent pops began to rain on the hitters. A few turned and aimed, but no one lived to take shots at the snipers. It was all over in less than two minutes. Several hundred bodies lay still along the floor of the outdoor hallway. “One of ours is coming,” said Lester, and a huge man pushed through the doorway, carrying a satchel and a stretcher.

  Captain Karl Jamison nodded as he removed objects from his black satchel. “Where’s Shimon?”

  Cassie pointed and Jamison moved to him. A bullet flew through the window from outside the hotel and Jamison dived for cover. “Shit. You guys have unfriendlies outside the hotel as well.” He took an infrared night-scope from the satchel and peeked outside, toward the beach. “There’s got to be at least a thousand more there, all aiming rifles.” He called Shimmel and told him. Jamison crawled to where Shimon lay and shook his head. “Those wounds are close to a major artery. He’ll need a hospital ASAP.” Jamison injected something into Shimon’s arm. “I’ll carry him out then come back and see to the rest of you. Mr. Dushov, can you help me with the stretcher?”

  After Shimmel’s mercs terminated the shooters on the lawn outside, the medic examined Cassie and her injured bodyguards. Her left arm was bandaged and in a sling. Ari and Shimon were headed to the hospital.

  Now, hours later as dawn emerged purple through the shattered windows, Lester, JD, and Cassie sat on the floor in one of the suite’s bedrooms with only the bathroom light on.

  Avram Shimmel entered the room and sat next to Cassie. He said, “I’ve told Lee about this. As I expected, he’s in not in control of his emotions.”

  Cassie shook her head. “I wish you hadn’t.”

  Shimmel stared back at her. “William sent me an email specifying your request to protect the family. I hired several new bodyguards to assist with covering Lee and Ann. You, Sashakovich aren’t thinking rationally. Houmaz wants vengeance, pure and simple. It always continues until everyone on the other side that could someday cause trouble is dead. Did you think Lee wouldn’t notice? Did you think that he and Ann would remain safe if they weren’t aware of your trouble?”

  She just shook her head in res
ignation. “Okay. Bodyguards were a good idea, but telling him, well it’s like igniting a drought-stricken forest.”

  “He needs to know, and anyway, he’d have noticed the new bodyguards following him. Now, we have to plan our exit and relocation.” Shimmel looked at the group. “And, it won’t be simple. The island is covered with hitters. We’d never be able to get you to the airport. Your picture is on the website with the contract on your death. Even if we did get you there, the hitters would swarm you.”

  She nodded. “A submarine. I bought two. But they’ll take about a week to arrive. My uncle Misha is an arms dealer for the Russian mafiya. Former KGB.” Cassie tried to smile.

  Shimmel’s brows shot up at this unexpected answer. “Your pedigree is more interesting than I’d guessed.”

  She stared at the rubble of the room. “We’ll need some way to survive here until the subs arrive. One week. While we were waiting for you to arrive I wired the money to Misha and he’ll pay for the subs tomorrow when the banks open.”

  Shimmel shook his head. “Much can happen in a week. I’ll have the mercs shop for about ten days of food for you and the men and women I’m leaving with you.”

  She nodded and frowned. “Yes, and I have a mission for you, one that I hope will end this problem. But, I made a mistake in a fit of anger, and this will make your mission more difficult. I sent your quarry into flight.”

  “Quarry? What do you want?” He frowned.

  Her face steeled into a mask of decisiveness. “Meet William in Dubai and locate Phillip Watson. He’s the CEO of Predictive Markets. I need you to get him to remove the inverse bet on my life. If he won’t, then give him truth drugs and torture him until he does. Get the website passwords and server location info. Since this, as you say, is a vendetta, whether or not he cooperates, kill him. But he may suspect you’ll be coming, so take care. I’ll call William and get him on his way.”