“Alright, Nineteen, move out.” He turned to his second-in-command. “Three, I have a special assignment for you. Take seven men and head west. The director and I will give you your instructions en route. After that, you will be completely radio silent until your objective is achieved. I want tight OPSEC and no one besides you, me, and McGrath will know your mission.”
Three nodded.
Carl said, “Alright, off you go.” He turned and faced his best friend. “Randal, I know this is all crazy and weird for you, but I need you.”
“CJ, I never believed for a minute all that terrorist nonsense. I’ve known you too long. Besides, I’ve been telling you for a decade how the government uses the media to spin the truth. But this…” He waved his hand around the room. “Goddamn, CJ! I always thought you were too ornery to be a commander type.”
Randal had been one of his closest friends for nearly thirty years. They’d practically raised each other’s kids together. Randal stayed married while Carl stayed a bachelor, but their friendship had endured the usually incompatible lifestyle. He walked over and hugged Carl.
“It’s good to see you again, my friend,” Carl said as they separated. “Problem is, everything they said about me is true. All these guys…” He swept an arm over the mercs. “They’re all mercenaries. They’re all disgracefully discharged special forces soldiers, except the cop”—Carl nodded at Officer Bonhardt—“and FBI Agent Cummings.”
“And Director McGrath?” Randal said. “He seems legit.”
“Yeah, he is. So, I need you to find a way to make the president invisible. We’ll never know which satellites can detect that radioactive isotope in her blood. Design some kind of mobile Faraday cage or something so the isotope won’t betray her location. If we stash her underground somewhere, they’ll eventually find her. And they’ll bring a big enough can opener to get to her. Gotta keep her on the move. Then figure out why Bonhardt is immune to this behavior control weapon. At least, I assume it’s a weapon.” He shrugged. “It’s being used as a weapon, I’ll put it that way.”
“CJ, I’ve always had your back, you know that.” Randal Cunningham laid a hand on Carl’s shoulder. “Whatever you need.” Carl nodded and turned his attention to his sharpshooter, Merc Eighteen. “Pick three men and let’s go meet a man.”
“Our mission, sir?”
“I plan to cut his throat open, then we’ll see who gets angry and comes out of hiding or who gets scared and goes into hiding.”
Chapter 28
While Randal Cunningham conferred with Wizard and the five remaining mercs, Carl pulled back the edge of the living room blackout curtain and scanned the street. The op center was located in a nondescript residential street. The driveway was now empty since Three had taken his seven mercs in the two minivans on their classified mission. OPSEC—Operations Security—was paramount. Three had no destination yet; Carl had just told him to head west. Carl organized his upcoming conversation with McGrath.
They needed a place to hide the president against detection for thirty-some hours. It had to be mobile in case Atlas found her. It had to be defendable against Atlas’s cruise missiles or assault troops. It had to be remote to minimize collateral damage. But first they had to get her out of that jet fighter undetected.
Carl tuned away from the window. With Merc Three, Wizard, and seven mercs gone on their mission, and with Cummings and her three mercs in the garage prepping civilians for departure, there were only four mercs remaining in the living room with Carl and Randal Cunningham.
“Time to wrap up,” Carl said.
Cunningham summarized. “We need a mobile Faraday cage. A SCIF on wheels.” He pronounced it skiff. “Once we get her in the cage, she’ll be safe from detection.”
The remaining mercs nodded. They all had military pedigrees involving prior work with Special Forces. All had no doubt received military classified briefings in a specially shielded Sensitive Classified Information Facility. A SCIF was designed to be impenetrable to any kind of mechanical, electrical, or laser eavesdropping.
Cunningham continued. “Except instead of shielding our SCIF against radio waves, we’ll have to make sure it’s resistant to radiation from the isotope in the president’s blood, which resonates at a much higher frequency.”
Merc Fourteen said, “Sir, just tell us how to build it. Her plane has a little over one hour of fuel remaining. It’s heading in our general direction, but we still have to get it to her in an hour. Even with a helicopter—”
“We don’t have to build anything,” Cunningham said. “We’ll just need some shielding material.” He shrugged. “And an eighteen-wheeler.” He launched into instructions on how to modify an eighteen-wheel cargo transport box, then said to Carl. “If Rainman has access to a satellite to track the president’s plane, all this is useless.”
“McGrath assures me he has control over all military satellite assets. Atlas may have access to some civilian satellites, but chances are good that none are directly overhead or even in an orbit where they can easily track her in the short-term.”
Just speaking his former nemesis’s name brought back thoughts of Agent Palmer. Carl tuned out the rest of Cunningham’s discussion. He and Palmer hadn’t been in the same location at any time during the last eight months of mission work except for a day and a half when they’d flown to Mexico together to find the cure for the Contagion and save the president and her daughter. They’d fought side by side briefly during that mission, but there was an accidental encounter that had changed the boundaries of their relationship.
During a brief downtime while awaiting mission intel, Carl had been looking for an empty room in Alfonso Reyes’s mansion to relax and do some yoga and had walked in on Nancy Palmer right out of the shower. She was dripping wet and her cream-colored skin was flushed from the hot water. They both stood there looking at each other, and she hadn’t bothered to cover up with her towel. Then there was a wild and feverish kiss that lasted all of five seconds, interrupted by the untimely availability of mission intel. Later, they both agreed the incident never happened.
She’d always been in his ear over the months, guiding him and his team on their many missions to hunt down and execute the men responsible for the multiple attempts to assassinate President Shirley Mallory. Now she was gone forever. She’d moved from alive to dead in the space of a minute, just like his son.
Carl looked out the window again, only because he needed to do something, to move. He was unprepared for the sudden loss of Agent Palmer. He felt a longing for her, not unlike the longing he felt for his son. Palmer was actually younger than his son, and he’d always promised he’d never get involved with any woman younger than Mark just to avoid the weirdness of his son potentially needing to call a younger woman stepmom. It was such a crazy thought that he chuckled aloud.
All conversation stopped, and Carl sensed everyone looking at him. “Sorry,” he said. “Please continue.”
Agent Nancy Palmer had always seemed invincible somehow. He thought she’d always be there, always in his ear, and now he missed her. He missed her tactical guidance. He missed the thought of any potential relationship they had both intentionally avoided. He’d waited a week too long to ask to see her again outside of the realm of their professional relationship. He felt a dark cloud envelope his soul. Her death was another reason to keep killing. He clenched his fists.
He heard his best friend’s voice beside him. “CJ, you okay?”
Carl turned, finding everyone was busy at tasks Randal had assigned. Carl looked at his friend and just grunted, but that wordless communication spanned three decades of emotions they had shared.
“She was special, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, but not like that.”
His friend chuckled. “We’ll just pretend the whole room didn’t hear you ask her out on a date.”
Carl sensed Randal was trying to lighten the mood, but the joke failed to penetrate his shroud of rage. Then the man stepped into Carl’s per
sonal space and hugged him. For a few seconds, Carl wasn’t sure how to respond because the gesture seemed so foreign to the kind of man he’d become. Soon, the familiarity of his long-time friend melted away the months of violence and isolation, and Carl returned the hug. They stood together for a long time before separating.
Carl said, “I’ve changed, Randal”
“I can see that. But I’ve missed you, my friend. The family misses you.”
Carl said, “To be honest, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
They gazed into each other’s eyes for a while. Randal had him by eleven years and, in his mid-sixties, he was always the wiser. Randal’s life was the footprint that Carl’s life followed. They were both only children and loners in the social world, even though Randy had always been married.
His friend nodded. “I’ve missed our political conversations over coffee.”
They both chuckled. Randal was the only friend, male or female, he’d been able to share his deepest thoughts and fears with, even his vulnerabilities, without the fear that he’d be taken advantage of. They shared that kind of bond.
Randal said, “I remember when you first told me how close you and your son were. You said if he ever died, you would probably go insane and kill anyone who took him from you.”
“That was fifteen years ago!” Carl said. “That was just nonsense talk. I certainly didn’t have the knowledge or the skills back then.”
Randal nodded. “But now you do. I can see it in your eyes. And if I’m to believe all the news reports, you’ve already done a lot of killing. Now, with the loss of this Agent Palmer, I’m worried you’re gonna go to the dark side.”
“That’s what she said, that she thought I was going too far to the dark side.” He considered the impact of the female agent on his life for a moment. “She grounded me, Randal. Throughout all the months of violence, she stabilized me and kept me sane. She was the tether that kept me from going all the way dark, and now she’s gone. I don’t know how I’m going to keep it together without her.”
“CJ, we’ve gone through a lot over the last thirty years. We’ll get through this too. I don’t know how, but we will.”
“You don’t know the irony, my friend. You know why Agent Palmer kept me sane?” Carl tried to chuckle but what boiled was more like a gasp of agony. “She did it because she owed me. She was one of the people that—” He turned away from his friend and leaned against the wall, balanced by his fists. His voice was a coarse whisper. “They killed him, Randal. She was one of those government fucks that got Mark killed. Her and McGrath and that one there.” He head-nodded at Agent Cummings, who now stood in the entrance to the living room looking at him. She looked ready to take her team and depart. She looked like she needed to talk to him but was now hesitating at the evil look that he felt was on his face.
“And now you have to work with them.”
“If I don’t, President Mallory dies.”
Randal squeezed his shoulder.
Carl grabbed his friend’s hand and held on desperately. “Shirley Mallory was in on it too, Randal. The president of the motherfucking United States. How am I supposed to navigate this for the rest of my life?”
His friend gave him a shoulder hug. “I don’t know, man. I really don’t. But you already tried killing a bunch of people and that didn’t really work, did it?”
His friend was blunt, and it hurt. Eyes closed, Carl shook his head. “I’ll never be able to kill them all.”
“Your mercenaries tell me you saved the president’s daughter. And you saved the president. And that FBI agent’s family. And that cop’s family.” He squeezed Carl’s shoulder again and stepped back. “How’d that feel?”
Carl stepped away from the wall and reached into his pocket for a hanky to dry his eyes. He knew what his friend was trying to do. He smiled and nodded at him. “It felt good, but don’t be trying to distract me from the mission with that psycho-babble bullshit.” They both chuckled, but Carl wanted to change the subject and bury his raw feelings. “How’s it coming with the plan?”
Cunningham turned immediately to business, his mission to get Carl out of his funk apparently successful. He seemed in his element, managing a technical team effort. “I think we have a good plan.” He pointed at the wall monitor. “The pilot should run out of fuel right about there.” He indicated a red triangle on the map. “We’re putting him on an altitude-conserving glide path, so he’ll drop off radar just before that.”
There was a low set of hills on the map of central Oklahoma before the ditch point. “These hills will mask his radar return, so we’ll have him execute a hard-right turn and do a full-power burn as long as possible. Basically, we’ll divert him a few miles up this valley here, where they can eject right where we’ll be waiting. We’ll lose the aircraft, but anyone searching will assume for a while that they continued straight west for another twenty miles and crashed. They’ll search west, but they’ll be looking in the wrong direction.
“We’ll get the president on the highway in an insulated cargo truck that looks like any other eighteen-wheeler. It’s a two- or three-person job, though, and I need to go to supervise the president’s transition into the container. I need him,” Randal pointed a finger at Merc Fourteen, “and if Officer Bonhardt goes with us then I’ll have plenty of time to debrief him on the road, maybe figure out this behavior technology.”
Carl nodded and said to Merc Fourteen, “Once you’re on the road, go dark. No comms at all. Dress civilian, blend in, and stay off-grid for thirty-six hours. This will all be over by then, one way or another. Off you go.”
They left and Carl stepped over to where Agent Cummings waited. They looked at each other for a few seconds, and he thought he saw a tenderness in her gaze.
He said, “Lisette doesn’t remember, does she? What I did to her. To you.”
Lenore shook her head. “The doctors say she will…someday. Maybe next week or next year or ten years from now. They think it’s good that she sees you as a savior for now, though. They think it’ll soften the impact when she does remember, but it’s anyone’s guess when that will be, unless…”
She looked at Carl and he looked at her.
He nodded. “You want me to talk to her.”
Lenore touched his arm. “The doctors think if we control how and when she remembers…”
“I will.” He looked at the floor. He could barely stand to look at the girl when she wasn’t looking at him, and to look into her mother’s eyes now was torture. “Let’s try to survive the next couple days, okay? Then I’ll talk to her.” He took a deep breath and blew it out. “That’s going to be hard.”
“Hard for you and for me,” Lenore said. “Harder for her.”
Carl nodded and glanced around the op center. The kids, under the guidance of Mrs. Bonhardt, had bagged up all the one-time-use cell phones and supplies, and then wiped all surfaces for fingerprints with disinfectant so now the whole house smelled like a hospital. He head-nodded to Mercs Eighteen, Eight, and Nine.
“Let’s move with a purpose.”
Cummings whispered to him. “Can I ask where you’re taking the president?”
“Out into the middle of the ocean.”
Chapter 29
Merc Eight pulled Carl’s armored BMW limo slowly to the curb in front of a trendy boutique café at the coordinates relayed by the civilian contractor Carl had blown to hell. He hadn’t been to Philly in decades, and the place looked drastically different. On his last visit, he’d toured the Bell, and he could see it from the limo.
“Alright, I’m going in.” Satellite imagery showed Hollis Koll had entered the café ten minutes ago, but so far, no support or protection had been detected.
Eight said, “I don’t like this, Boss. If there’s no outside support team, then they’re inside. No way this guy is in there by himself.”
Carl pulled a square high-tech grenade from his pocket. “If they’re in there, they can’t help him.”
&n
bsp; Merc Eighteen reported in from his sniper position eight blocks away. “I have clear sightlines on every major nesting point where he could have a sniper, but I see no hostiles.”
“They’re here somewhere,” Carl said. “Stay frosty.”
Nine reported in. “I’m across the street, three units west. Everything looks clear, Boss, but you have a shit-ton of civilians on the sidewalk.”
Carl noted the lunchtime rush of people on both sides of the four-lane street. He pulled his Glock and screwed on a suppressor, then shoved the weapon as far into a cargo pocket on his thigh as it would go. He left the limo and approached the café entrance. Dressed in black combat pants and boots with a black T-shirt, he held the pistol grip of the Glock pinned to his pant leg so people wouldn’t notice. He held the grenade in his left hand, ready to pull the tab.
He shouldered his way through the throng of people toward the door and found it unlocked, though the neon CLOSED sign was lit in red. A quick glance left and right showed him no one seemed to be giving him any undue attention. He entered the empty shop and took a seat in the center of the room.
Carl studied the rail-thin man across the table for a moment, then said, “No bodyguards?”
The man shrugged with his hands. “This is a negotiation, not a confrontation.”
Koll didn’t look European, though Carl had never been to Europe. In fact, he looked American. He dressed American. His voice held no detectable accent. Maybe he was American and just owned a European company.
Carl put his Glock on the table, pocketed the grenade, and matched Koll’s stance with his hands on the cherrywood tabletop, fingers clasped together.
“My condolences for the loss of your agent. That was not part of the plan.”
“I’m not here for you, Koll. I want Rainman. You can give me that information or”—he nodded at his gun—“I can force the information from you, which would actually be my preferred method of…negotiation.”
Koll seemed arrogantly nonplussed. The smug look on his face made Carl wonder why the man wasn’t more concerned for his safety. He had the feeling Koll had read a dossier on him but hadn’t really studied him in-depth.
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