by Chad Zunker
He wanted to be in DC, searching for her. Rescuing her.
Especially with how things currently stood between them. This brought another rush of unwanted emotions, his mind flooded with scenes from the past few difficult months.
It had not been easy between them since last November.
March 4
Four months ago
The national fallout from Natalie’s investigative story on the McCallister-Redrock scandal on the eve of Election Day last fall had created a political tsunami that rolled through DC and caused serious havoc. Politicians who had once backed Redrock as a viable global private-security alternative were now running for the hills. Natalie had material for months, with story after story to be written. With the best investigative reporters from all over the country pounding the same pavement in search of even more dynamic angles to cover—and there were many—Natalie refused to leave the center of the storm. Although she had agreed to give Sam another opportunity to make things right with her, the reentry into their dating relationship was difficult because of her demanding work schedule. Even though Sam was incredibly patient, he often told her he felt like he was working the corner of a prizefighter who had already thrown a knockout punch in round one but who was still insisting on going the full fifteen.
Natalie was a machine and rarely left her PowerPlay office. Many nights she even slept on the cheap sofa in the break room so she wouldn’t miss a single second. She called it her World Series moment, her time to really shine under the bright lights on the biggest stage, and she begged Sam to try to understand—which, of course, he did. All in all, he was just grateful to get another chance with a woman he’d thought he’d lost forever. He’d screwed up their relationship so badly two years ago that it felt like a miracle that Natalie had even let her guard down just a little. Not to mention, he certainly had his own bumpy road ahead of him if he was going to put his life back together and somehow finish law school. So they agreed to play it slow, seeing each other mostly for lunch in her office a couple of times a week, a few quick dates here and there. Sam often wondered if Natalie was using her work as an excuse to keep some distance between them, subconsciously afraid that he’d run away again. If that was the case, he couldn’t blame her.
The heartbreak of their first breakup had cut her very deep.
After four exhausting months, it finally took Natalie’s boss finding her sleeping in her cubicle early one Sunday morning to force her to take some much-needed time off. He insisted she leave her laptop and phone, locked them in his desk drawer, then told her to get lost for at least a week.
Natalie chose the island of Saint Martin. She and Sam unplugged and jumped on a plane. She was grateful for his patience and excited to escape with him and let her hair down for a few days. Sam was in dreamland. Seven days on an island. No assassins. No helicopters. No FBI agents. Just Natalie in a bikini, unbelievable food, and an endless supply of daiquiris. It was a heck of a way to reignite their relationship. He knew they needed quality time together to heal old wounds and move forward in their relationship. Sam soaked up every moment with her, dreading the return home to the real world.
The voice mail that awaited him upon his arrival back in the States slammed him back to reality. Sam knew it wasn’t good the moment he turned his cell phone back on. The voice mail was from Dr. Wilson, the head doctor at Angel Cancer Care, his mother’s facility. He could not remember a time in the past year when Dr. Wilson had called to give him positive news. He called Sam only when it was bad.
He could tell by the tone in Dr. Wilson’s voice that bad was an understatement.
His mom looked terrible. He’d been gone only a week, but she looked like she’d all but withered away during that time. Leukemia sucked. He hated cancer with so much passion. Dr. Wilson said it had come back in full force and was very aggressive. They were in desperate times. She needed a bone-marrow transplant. Fortunately Sam was a match. With no other family around, he was her only real hope. They would schedule the procedure ASAP. After having no relationship at all with his mother for the first twenty-four years of his life, and then finally tracking her down two years ago and wading through so much emotional pain to reestablish some semblance of a mother-son relationship, he refused to let her die on him now. Standing there in her doorway, looking in on her while she was sleeping, Sam could feel the anger bubbling up inside of him. He just didn’t understand it. How could God let this happen? She was doing so well and responding to normal treatment. Then it all just spiraled in on them within a week, like a tidal wave crushing their whole lives. He grit his teeth. If God wasn’t going to heal her, then he would do it himself. He’d give her his own flesh and blood. Whatever it took.
As he was standing there, still stewing, she opened her eyes and spotted him.
She looked frail, but the smile was as wide as ever. “Samuel! How was your trip? You got so much sun!”
He stepped into the room, moved close to her bed, gave her a quick hug and kiss on the forehead. She felt like skin and bones under the blanket.
“Where’s Natalie?” she asked. Her eyes always sparkled when she asked about Natalie.
“She’ll be here in a few minutes. She’s grabbing food for us.”
“Well, how was it? Beautiful? The online pictures looked spectacular.”
Natalie had gotten his mom set up with her own Facebook account. So she’d been monitoring pictures that Natalie had posted while they were in Saint Martin.
“Mom . . . ?” Sam said, his voice heavy.
“I bet the water was as blue as your beautiful eyes.”
“Mom . . . ?” he said again.
She ignored him. “And the sunsets, tell me about the sunsets there.”
“Mom!”
Her brow furrowed. “Dammit, Samuel, don’t walk in here and treat me like I’m already dead. Okay? I know what Dr. Wilson said. Just let me enjoy my only son and the beauty of his life. That’s all I’ve got right now. You understand me? So stop your damn frowning and sulking. I won’t have any of it. Not now. You don’t need to feel sorry for me or angry at the world. Either way, God has got this, do you hear me? No more pity parties. Not for me.”
He sighed. “You sound like Pastor Isaiah.”
She smiled. “Well, there’s a reason he’s one of my favorite people on this planet. We can talk all about this damn cancer until we’re blue in the face later; right now I want you to start telling me all about Saint Martin and the wonderful time you had with Natalie. Leave out no details.”
Sam grinned. “You’d love it, Mom.”
“Well, hell, get me out of this place, and let’s go!” She laughed.
“That’s my plan. I promise.”
FOURTEEN
Agent Lloyd fiddled with a report in his fingers, rubbed his throbbing shoulder. He’d popped a handful of painkillers earlier, but they were barely taking the edge off. Special Agent Epps insisted that he see a real medic, but Lloyd continued to refuse. They were like an old married couple, always nagging each other. Epps was usually right. But Lloyd was the boss.
Lloyd stood in a room with a wall of digital screens on the sixth floor of DC’s FBI Building, just a few blocks east of the White House. Several agents were pecking away at computer stations, different information popping up on the screens in front of him. Lloyd’s cell phone vibrated in his front pocket. He reached for it, stared at the screen, frowned. Pop. He let out a deep sigh, shook his head. His father was calling. Pop called him at least three times a day, mostly at the worst possible moments. Pop was eighty-nine, half-senile, and lived with Lloyd in his cramped two-bedroom condo. He’d moved his father in with him two years ago when his father’s health rapidly declined. His father had spent everything he had on medical care for Lloyd’s mother, who’d lost a battle with dementia five years ago. Lloyd was also struggling financially because of a promising real-estate investment going bad. There was no extra money at the moment for a decent assisted-living facility for Pop. Now they were awkwa
rd roommates.
Lloyd felt guilty most of the time. He could go days without seeing his father, oftentimes getting home well after midnight if the job required it. It felt like having a dog at home but never taking it out for walks. Just cruel. His father was stuck in a dumpy recliner in front of the TV most days, watching old Westerns and war flicks, just waiting to die. The old man deserved better. He adored his pop, and it pained him to see a once-great man wither away into what he’d become. Edward Lloyd had been a faithful street cop for forty years, one of the best. He was the younger Lloyd’s hero and the reason he’d gone into law enforcement in the first place. Now he did nothing but nap and eat candy bars all day.
Lloyd reluctantly pressed a button, lifting his cell phone to his ear.
Five years ago, when his beloved mother had passed, Lloyd had pressed Ignore to repeated calls from her paid caretaker. Lloyd was in the middle of an intense investigation and didn’t have the time to be bothered. Which meant he didn’t find out about his own mother’s death until nearly eighteen hours later. That had haunted him for five years. Her body was ice-cold before he ever even knew about it. As painful as it was to sometimes answer these calls, Lloyd swore he would never let that happen again.
“Pop? What is it? You okay?”
He sighed again as his father began rambling off a grocery list. Mostly junk food and cheap beer. Lloyd got this same call at least twice a week. It was like having a teenager in the house. He tried not to sound too agitated.
“Sure, Pop. I’ll go by the store soon. I’ve got to go now, okay?”
His father ignored Lloyd’s urgency, as usual, continued to ramble on about a noisy neighbor. They lived in a sparse condo in a cheap building with thin walls.
“Okay, I hear you,” Lloyd insisted, interrupting. “I’ll talk to them. I’ve got to go.”
He hung up with his father still spewing, which was normal. At least he was okay.
Agent Epps returned to the conference room with a folder in his hands. Epps was a tall black man of fifty who had starred as a shooting guard at Villanova back in the 1980s, before tearing up his right knee his senior year. He’d been a cop in Philadelphia, like his own dad and granddad, before joining the Bureau twenty years ago. He’d been on Lloyd’s team for nearly fifteen years now. Lloyd trusted no one more than Epps. In fact, Epps was perhaps Lloyd’s only real friend.
“Anything more on the Wolf?” Lloyd asked.
“Maybe,” Epps began. “I’m not sure just yet.”
Epps grabbed a remote, pointed it at the digital screens on the wall. An airport-security video appeared on the screen in the middle. It was a shot from behind an airline counter at Roissy Airport in Paris, pointing down over an airline agent’s head at a nondescript-looking man of medium stature wearing glasses, a beard, a gray jacket, and a black bag over his shoulder. There was nothing that stood out about him. The profile of Alger Gerlach, the Gray Wolf, appeared on the screen to the left, along with a list of his most prominent kills across Europe. The Italian prime minister in ’06. A member of the British Parliament in ’09. The French minister of foreign affairs in ’10. The Greek finance minister in ’12. And the list went on from there. It was an impressive résumé for an already-legendary assassin. The picture on the profile looked nothing like the man in the video, which was not surprising. The Gray Wolf was known to blend in and regularly change his appearance. MI5 had once found a rogue plastic surgeon who claimed to have done a half dozen facial procedures in a five-year span on the great Alger Gerlach.
“That him?” Lloyd asked, pointing at the security video.
“In theory,” Epps confirmed.
“I don’t like theories, Mike. You know that.”
“I’m not sure what we’re dealing with here just yet.” Epps walked over to the third screen on the right, where they both looked at a still shot of a computer screen. “This is what popped up on Krieger’s radar, the alert I mentioned in our system, and why I called you in the first place. You see the name Gildas Vaughn with the red alert. BND tagged Vaughn to Gerlach just three days ago using facial-recognition software. However, as you’ll see, only ten seconds later, the alert goes from red to green. And the guy is cleared to travel in the system.”
BND was German foreign intelligence. Lloyd stepped closer. “What does that mean?”
“Krieger thinks it means someone was waiting online to make sure this guy got a free travel pass. Someone with the highest level of access. Or a brilliant hacker. Either way, someone manipulated the system and got Gerlach cleared into the United States.”
“You talk to Germany?”
Epps nodded. “BND called it an orange-level tag based off security footage in Munich from last week, which is only a moderate alert requiring more investigation.”
Lloyd stared at the man in the security video at the airport counter. He looked pretty relaxed. Was that because he already knew he’d have no trouble clearing the system? Or maybe an assassin like the Gray Wolf never sweats? Either way, he didn’t like it.
“Why does Krieger think this is the same guy?” Lloyd asked.
Epps pressed another button, pulling up another security video next to the one from Paris on the oversize screens.
“This was taken seven years ago at a bus station in Cairo,” Epps explained. “Egyptian intelligence tagged this to Gerlach, right before he assassinated a ranking member of the Shura Council.”
Lloyd’s eyes narrowed. Although the security videos had been taken years apart, the two men looked incredibly similar. Matching garb. Same eyeglasses. Beard. It was the same man, or they were twin brothers. He felt his heartbeat quicken.
“So this is legit,” Lloyd stated.
“I think so, Chief. The Gray Wolf is here in DC.”
Lloyd cursed. “Now the question is . . . why is he here?”
FIFTEEN
Sam stood twenty feet north of the Mexican flag inside the Zócalo.
The main square was still thick with people. Thousands of men and women, young and old, were out dancing and singing, marching and drinking, and the enormous crowd was steadily growing as the sun set over Mexico City. Sam wasn’t sure what they were celebrating, but the Zócalo was apparently the place to be tonight—which was probably why Uncle Jerry wanted to meet there. It was easy to blend into the sea of people and the celebratory chaos. Sam checked the phone again, as he did every sixty seconds. It had now been more than two hours since he’d received the video with Natalie, and still no one had replied to his numerous text messages.
Had they hurt her?
Had something terrible already happened to her?
Was that why no one was replying?
The pit in his stomach kept growing deeper with each passing minute.
He stood with his hands in his pockets, his head on a swivel, his eyes alert, the massive waves of people shifting about all around him. He searched the faces. He watched for eyes that might engage his in a certain way. He was looking for a fifty-year-old white American with a potential ponytail and mustache. Where are you, Uncle Jerry? He felt exposed and vulnerable standing there in the middle of so many people, especially with Mexican policemen stationed all around the square. He’d counted twenty officers already, a pair of them standing at attention on every corner, monitoring the crowd. He again checked the time on the cell phone. Uncle Jerry was two minutes late. Sam decided if he was more than five minutes late, he would bolt. He would not take any extra risk for this guy, no matter what David thought of him.
Sam felt an unexpected tap on his shoulder, which startled him.
He spun around, stared at the guy. The man had somehow carved through the big crowd and managed to sneak up on him completely unnoticed. Sam didn’t like that—it meant his survival instincts had dulled. David said the man was a former military specialist, so maybe Uncle Jerry was a trained and skilled professional. Either way, Sam felt uneasy about being approached in such a manner. The man was almost exactly as Sam had pictured in his mind. He still
had the braided ponytail, a thin graying mustache, and aviator shades. He was skinny, with pale skin, and he wore a camo jacket, black jeans, and black army boots. Sort of a hippie-military look, like a product of the seventies.
Sam immediately got a weird feeling about the guy.
“You Callahan?” he said, leaning in close. Sam could smell marijuana on his breath.
Sam nodded. “Uncle Jerry?”
The man smiled, showing two tobacco-stained front teeth. “Right. A mutual friend said you could use my help.”
“He said you know the city, know people around here.”
“He’s right. Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Away from this nonsense,” Uncle Jerry explained, nodding right and left toward the crowd. “A secure place to chat. Figure out how to get you out of your mess.”
“Then why’d we have to meet out here in the first place?”
“So I could make sure you were clean.”
Sam studied him a moment. “Am I?”
Uncle Jerry nodded. Sam’s eyes went to all the surrounding buildings. He wondered from where the man had been watching him. It could have been anywhere. Uncle Jerry stepped forward, and Sam followed him. They began pushing through the people, working their way back to the edge of the square. The crowd suddenly parted ahead of them to let a marching band through. A parade of some sort was beginning. It was loud as hell and getting rowdier by the moment. Sam trailed Uncle Jerry closely as they circled around the marching band and the parade and headed across the square, making sure to avoid passing directly in front of any police officers. Across the street, Sam gazed up at the Metropolitan Cathedral—the massive old church structure that covered an entire block. He’d quizzed the café waitress earlier about the buildings surrounding the Zócalo, just to get a better lay of the land. The Metropolitan had dozens of ornate columns and several sky-reaching bell towers. The main doors of the church were open, and a lot of people were coming and going from the cathedral.
