“Who and where is he?”
“The intern’s name is Marcus Aurelio,” Rainman said. “His location is unknown.”
Spoke considered the response. “If he has disappeared, then he understands the significance of his evidence. He’ll be in hiding and there are precious few places a person like him can hide. He’ll be wanting to reach out to someone, but he won’t know who to trust.” Spoke paused for a moment, thinking.
“He’ll need to reach someone of rank and status, someone in the government with real power. An underling won’t be able to act on his information, so I’ll put the most likely power players who are not aligned with you under surveillance. He might even reach out to you.”
“Find him, Agent Spoke. If that information gets out, we’re sunk before our operation begins.”
“I can deal with the intern. But just so you know, if he has already passed the information, there may be little I can do.”
“Find out where he has been and who he has talked to.”
“Very well. I’ll have my assets ping his passport, driver’s license, credit cards, and bank accounts. This is DC and it’s expensive here, so he’ll need several days’ cash to live on until he meets whoever to deliver his evidence.”
“There are a million hotels in DC.”
It was not a statement, even though it was stated as such. Spoke knew his controller was really asking how he hoped to find a needle in the proverbial haystack.
“Every hotel, except maybe the flea-bags, requires a credit card to register. If he’s paying cash, they’ll require his passport or some form of picture ID. If he checks into any reputable hotel, I’ll find him. If he rents a car or gets on a bus or a train or a plane, I’ll find him. Within an hour, I’ll have all of his family and friends and other known associates or romantic interests under scrutiny or surveillance. And I’ll have my network of informants canvassing the flea-bags in the district.”
“So you intend to use your Secret Service assets.”
“It’s why you hired me. This man now represents a credible threat against the president of the United States.”
“Very well, then. Do not fail me, Agent Spoke.”
“Have I ever?”
A beep signified the comm link was severed on the other end. Spoke did his personal business, flushed, and washed his hands in the still-running water. He turned off the faucet and dried on a hand towel, then wiped everything he’d touched. He went back into the bedroom where Cynthia was just rolling out of bed.
Last night she said she was going to call in sick today so she could spend more time with him. He had the day off, so they planned to get to know each other better. She was a mid-thirties marketing executive and he was a mid-thirties Secret Service agent. At least, that’s what he told her.
He was and he wasn’t.
He could just see an outline of her lithe body in the darkened room as she stood and stretched. Obviously comfortable moving about in the darkness, she approached him. She was just reaching out her arms to wrap him up in a hug when he steeled the fingers of his right hand and jabbed her hard in the belly just below her sternum.
She expelled her breath with a pained gasp and folded to the floor in the fetal position, struggling to breathe. August Spoke stepped over her writhing form and turned on a table lamp. He dressed quickly and retrieved a suppressor from his pocket. He screwed it onto his service gun after pulling it from its shoulder holster, turned, and looked at his girlfriend of one week.
He’d never dated a black woman before. In fact, last night had been the first time she’d felt comfortable enough to take him home with her. The sex had been wonderful, he recalled with a smile. No first-time jitters. Their bodies fit together like they were made for each other. They’d explored and played and loved and laughed and slept. Then, they did it all over again. Twice more.
This morning, though, he saw her differently. She was now a witness, a loose end. With the stakes of the operation now heightened, Cynthia Manford was now evidence.
Without a thought or feeling to the contrary, August Spoke shot her in the head, collected the expended shell, and unscrewed the suppressor. By habit of both his careers—Secret Service agent and covert assassin—he wiped everything he’d touched in the room, using the same hand towel from the bathroom. When the police arrived, they would find no clue to his identity. He’d taken precautions during sex so there would be no DNA on or in Cynthia’s body.
With one final visual canvas of the room, Spoke searched again for any evidence the police might find. There was none. He grabbed her purse and emptied the contents on the bed. He grabbed her cash—a couple hundred dollars—and left the rest. He took one more glance around, appreciating her expensive art. It consisted mostly of African figurines, sculptures, and paintings. He wiped everything again, stepped over her body, and left her apartment. When he closed the door behind him, he quietly forced it open again to make the scene look like a robbery. He left the building discretely through the stairwell, careful to avoid looking into any security cameras.
Chapter 3
0800 hours MST Thursday
The Mexico-New Mexico Border (Columbus, NM)
Carl stood facing Aaron McGrath—Director of the Terror Event Response agency—in the barren desert, and a mixture of raw-edged feelings tore through his gut. He wanted to kill the government agent for what the man had done to his son, and he had no doubt McGrath felt the same way about him because of what he’d done to his daughter. Neither acted on those feelings, for they shared a more important mission. They both wanted to know what Melissa Mallory’s captors had done to her, and why. They both wanted to punish those people on behalf of the teen girl and her mother, President Shirley Mallory.
For Carl, punishing the girl’s kidnappers was the only way he could justify, in his own mind, all the carnage and destruction he’d caused over the past week. He suspected McGrath felt the same. They’d both hurt a lot of people. They both had a lot of pain and suffering to answer for.
An hour earlier, Carl had been shot, and a painful bruise throbbed across the high middle part of his back. He still wore all his tactical gear from the rescue, including his armored vest, so he couldn’t get his fingers onto the area to try massaging some of the soreness away. They said getting shot in the vest felt like a mule kick. Carl disagreed, even though he’d never been kicked by a mule. When the drug lord’s thug stitched him across the back with his Uzi, the vest stopped the bullets, but it felt like armor-piercing projectiles were punching through the vest and into his body. He took the bullets meant for the girl, though, and she lived. That was all that mattered.
He didn’t much feel like a hero, but that’s what heroes did, at least in the movies—take bullets and save teenage girls.
Carl had survived his thirty-day stint as a terrorist-turned-hero. He’d gone into combat for the first time in his life at the age of fifty-three. He’d had a gunfight with a drug cartel and lived to talk about it. Overall, his terrorist body count now stood at nearly forty, including FBI agents, cops and other covert government agents, and drug thugs, and he wasn’t done with the killing yet.
Carl was exhausted. He wanted a long nap after a long shower after a long, full-body massage, but he wasn’t going to get any of that. The one thing he was not going to do was complain—not in front of Aaron McGrath.
He looked nothing like Carl had imagined. He was tall and slender with close-cut, stately, salt-and-pepper hair and fashionable wire-rim, round glasses. He wore a black turtleneck shirt over blue jeans and his black flight jacket was unzipped midway to his belt. Despite his advanced age—Carl guessed he was in his mid-sixties—McGrath’s eyes held the same intensity he’d seen in other covert agents he’d battled over the past month.
He took a deep breath, set his mind to the mission, and faced his former nemesis and now mission-critical partner. Carl looked Aaron McGrath in the eyes and said, “The general that flew us up here, El Patron, didn’t just happen by the exchange zone
. He wanted his money back. Reyes was just a tool, a pawn who got out of control. Maybe he had his own agenda, I don’t know.”
Aaron McGrath squinted at Carl and lifted an eyebrow. “El Patron was on US soil?”
Carl nodded. “He all but confessed to funding the kidnapping through people he called his investors. He knew about the Delta recovery team you had on standby. He knew exactly where they were located, what their response time was, and what their rules of engagement were. And, he said he knows for a fact that the president’s people don’t know his identity.” Carl paused to let McGrath digest his information.
“That’s why you wanted to be off comm.”
Carl nodded. “You thought I wanted to have a man-to-man fist fight to settle our differences?”
McGrath said nothing. Both men had removed their miniature comm devices from their ears. Aside from McGrath’s transport chopper idling five hundred feet away—its engine droning, blades swishing the air—there wasn’t a human within a mile of them. The president’s Marine One helicopter and its armada of army escort choppers had left after retrieving Melissa Mallory. Now Carl Johnson and McGrath had the empty desert two miles north of the Columbus border crossing all to themselves. It was the border crossing Carl and his mercenaries had used for the mission to retrieve the president’s daughter.
Carl said, “I had trouble understanding how a bunch of drug thugs could have pulled off the kidnapping against even a tiny contingent of Secret Service agents.”
The senior covert agent nodded and pulled a smartphone from his pants pocket. He dialed a number and touched the tab for the speaker.
“Palmer,” came a voice Carl recognized from the government’s covert op station in Virginia.
“Code Alpha-Six.”
“Stand by.”
The line was silent for a while and Carl got the feeling the code was an instruction for her to clear her command center of nonessential people. While he waited, he watched McGrath’s square jaw muscles work. All the death and destruction they had caused over the past few days of fighting each other had now brought them to the brink of an alliance. They had both been pawns in a larger conflict choreographed by an unknown, common adversary.
Agent Palmer’s voice returned. For some reason, her voice filled Carl with calmness. Despite the fact he had been at odds with the government for a month, he still trusted Palmer. She was the only one he trusted.
“COMSEC level Alpha-Six is active, Director McGrath. This channel is restricted to the two of us. It is not being recorded on the mission records.”
McGrath said, “Johnson has confirmed an executive-level leak in the US government.”
Carl added, “And El Patron’s investors are very highly placed in the Mexican government.”
Palmer said, “Continue.”
Carl summarized his encounter with the general during his rescue of Melissa. “I think Melissa’s kidnapping wasn’t about money. That was just the cover. They did something to her. Drugged her up or something. I think they intended to release her all along, but she’s not the endgame. We need to know what they did to her and why.” His mind raced ahead, planning a path forward. “And we need to know who they are.”
“Agreed,” McGrath said.
Agent Palmer said, “Carl, what is your interest in this going forward?”
Carl took a deep breath and kicked at a tuft of grass. It was true he had almost half a billion US dollars and a presidential pardon. He could retire and disappear anywhere in the world now.
“These people who financed the general led us down this path.” Carl paused. “They hurt that girl. And me. And a lot of other people. I’d like to see them pay.”
“As would I,” McGrath said. “If you can ID El Patron, I can put the full might of the US intel apparatus on finding all his known associates.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” Carl looked south, envisioning another operation on Mexican soil. “That would certainly be the efficient government way to handle it.”
“You have something else in mind?” McGrath said.
Carl nodded. “These people have eyes and ears in your camp at a high level, and they use the same playbook that you use.” He turned to face McGrath again and looked him straight in the eye. “I use a different playbook.”
“We’ve noticed.” McGrath studied him for a moment with gray, emotionless eyes. “What would you do, Mr. Johnson?”
“I’d do something a bit more…public.” McGrath notched an eyebrow in question and Carl said, “If I had a missile right now, I’d smoke that El Patron mu’fucker’s helicopter and see what prominent people on both sides of the border go into hiding. Then your intel apparatus can locate them, so I can go have a chat with them.” He shrugged. “He can’t be more than a couple hundred miles away yet.”
Apparently, the government man approved of his strategy. Carl listened to a lot of tactical jargon as Aaron McGrath authorized one of the fighter jets that flew the president’s CAP—Combat Air Patrol—to break formation. A moment later, an explosive sound blasted over the desert as the fighter slammed through the sound barrier. Carl looked up. He couldn’t see the plane, but he saw its white contrail far above. A few seconds later, he saw a bright flash as two more smoke trails sped away from the first.
McGrath said, “Consider El Patron smoked, along with his escort chopper. What do you need for this next phase of the mission?”
Though he was still following the twin contrails into the distance, Carl was considering the near future in terms of logistics, weapons, and manpower.
“I need Agent Palmer on my team out here. I have a feeling the people we’re going after will make Alfonso Reyes and his crew look like rookies. We better do it right this time.”
“Agreed.”
“Can you conference Mr. Garcia on this call?”
McGrath nodded and Carl gave him the number.
“Go for Garcia,” the young man answered. Carl couldn’t help but smile. The kid had his mission jargon solid.
“Sitrep,” Carl demanded.
“Boss! I thought we lost you!”
“Almost did.” Carl gave Garcia a quick mission summary. “Our mission is not over yet. Have Mercs Three and Four go back to the trade site and get Alfonso Reyes.”
“He shot your son, Boss. You didn’t kill him?”
“I want something worse than death for that man.” Carl paused and looked McGrath in the eye. To Garcia, he said, “I’m going to let our new allies interrogate him the way they interrogated me.”
Garcia said, “Whoa. Remind me never to make you angry, Boss.”
“He knows some of El Patron’s people,” Carl said. “It might be helpful if we knew them too.”
The TER director nodded.
Garcia said, “I’ll take care of it.”
“Then have Mercs Three and Four stay in-country to provide security for Luisa and Julia Reyes. If El Patron contacted his network, those two ladies are in imminent danger.” Carl had basically traded those two ladies for Melissa Mallory. He hadn’t liked it, but it was what he’d had to do to get the president’s daughter to safety. Now he had to do right by those ladies.
“Copy that.”
“Set up another op center A-S-A-P. New equipment, new phones, everything. I’ll contact you when I arrive in Albuquerque this afternoon.” Carl nodded and McGrath cut the connection to Garcia.
McGrath regarded Carl. “I continue to wonder how an untrained civilian like yourself has been so successful in this arena.”
“I am trained, Aaron.” He gazed at his nemesis. “I was trained by the best in the business—you and your government killers.” Carl took a deep breath, then looked away and changed the subject. “How are Special Agent Cummings and her daughter?”
“Their injuries were…psychological.” McGrath looked into the distance, but Carl could tell he was reviewing the carnage Carl had left in his path. “With treatment, they should recover in time.” Then the man cast those empty eyes on Carl again.
; Carl nodded. He knew he’d never be able to forgive himself for what he did to them.
“Anita?”
McGrath paused for a long time, and Carl knew the man was fighting the same internal emotional battle he was. Anita was McGrath’s daughter and Carl had almost killed her to get to him.
“She’s alive.” McGrath paused, then seemed to switch mental gears. “Proceed with the new mission when you are ready, Mr. Johnson.”
“I’m ready now.”
“Good hunting.” With that, the government agent simply pivoted and walked off toward the army helicopter idling in the distance. He didn’t offer Carl a ride and Carl wouldn’t have accepted if he had.
Carl simply turned and began his 200-mile hike toward Albuquerque, still fully decked out in black tactical body armor and weaponry.
A half hour later, a different army chopper landed nearby and ferried him north to the Albuquerque airport. The crew chief gave him a duffle bag for his tactical gear and weapons, and he shook the man’s hand in thanks. He made the hour-long hike to reach downtown and grabbed one of several old SUVs his team of mercenaries had hidden in various parking structures. Carl checked into a run-down motel on Central Avenue, the kind he’d become comfortable with in his new life of nonexistence. He’d been off the grid for just over a month.
The hotel room smelled of stale cigarettes and the shower was barely hot enough to be called warm. The showerhead was clogged with years of mineral deposits and sprayed water practically everywhere except on him. He lay on the bed for several hours, but sleep was fitful. It seemed every time he closed his eyes he saw either his son’s bleeding body or the faces of the men and women he had victimized during his war of vengeance. Finally realizing he would get no sleep, he dressed in clothes he’d bought at a dollar store and prepared to drive over to Old Town for dinner at the High Noon Saloon and Restaurant.
American Terrorist Trilogy Page 34
