Primary Command

by Jack Mars

  He didn’t think so.

  He got up and went into the living room. He avoided looking at what was left of the children. Instead, he stared into his partner’s eyes. He was right about Stevens. The man was a stone killer. He was peeling off a pair of rubber gloves and stuffing them in his pocket.

  “You ready?” Dell said.

  Stevens shrugged. “Not much more to see here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  8:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  Queen Anne’s County, Maryland

  Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay

  “Stone.”

  Luke’s eyes opened slowly. He had trouble focusing. It was daytime now. He was sideways on the couch.

  He took a deep breath. It seemed like someone had spoken his name.

  “Stone. Are you awake?”

  He pushed himself to a sitting position. He was tired. He glanced at the old grandfather clock, still ticking away, its gold-plated pendulum swinging back and forth. The arms pointed to 3:15. That couldn’t be the time, could it? He shook his head. No. That thing was never right.

  “Good morning, Stone.”

  A man sat in the flowered print chair across from him. He was dressed in a sort of business casual style, with khaki pants, a blue dress shirt with a pink collar, and brown leather shoes. His thin legs were crossed in an almost effeminate way. His fingers were long and thin, as if he had once played the piano. He was an elderly man with skin like wrinkled parchment, a rude shock of white hair, and piercing blue eyes.

  Those eyes were staring at Luke Stone.

  Luke recognized the man right away. He knew this man. He appeared to be old, and certainly he had piled up the years. But he also played at being old. Luke knew he tended to move slowly—he liked to give the impression that he was infirm, a vulnerable elder who was no threat to anyone. Sometimes he even put on a slight limp.

  “Kent Philby,” Luke said. “To what do I owe this… pleasure? Is that what someone would call it?”

  Luke glanced to his right, and then to his left. A man was standing near the wide doorway to the kitchen. He was not particularly large. He was not particularly anything. He wore a light blue windbreaker jacket and black jeans. His dark hair was slicked back away from his face. His eyes were dark and hard and deep set. His face was narrow, like a ferret’s face. His skin seemed splotchy, white and red, like the skin of an alcoholic.

  He held a matte black Glock nine-millimeter in his right hand. The gun had a long sound suppressor attached to its barrel. He pointed the gun idly at Luke, almost informally. It wasn’t that serious a thing. I’ll kill you, or maybe I won’t.

  Across the living room from him, standing near the curtained window to the front of the house, was another man. He was a similar type of man, neither big nor small. Thin but probably well-conditioned. His face was broader, and his short hair was brown with streaks of gray and white. He might have been a little older than the other one.

  He wore a uniform similar to his friend’s—gray windbreaker with blue jeans. He also held a gun, something a little more exotic. At first glance, Luke wasn’t quite sure what it was. It also had a silencer mounted on its snout. It was also pointed at Luke.

  The faces of both men were blank. They were all business.

  “I see that you’re finally waking up to your circumstances,” the old man said. “It’s interesting to me that someone like Luke Stone could be caught so easily with his pants down. Fast asleep on the couch just after returning from a top secret mission. The kitchen door wasn’t even locked. Meanwhile, the world is falling apart all around him, and while I won’t say he was the cause of this, he was certainly one of the precipitating factors.”

  Luke rubbed his head. He ignored the man’s little speech.

  “Can I help you gentlemen?”

  “Just to be clear,” the old man said, “I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen. You’re not going to like what you hear, which may give you the urge to shut me up. You will resist that urge. These men are killers. Remorselessly so. They have you in an awkward position. If you attempt anything at all, they can triangulate their…”

  “I know what triangulation of fire is, Kent. Tell me something that isn’t the first thing I noticed.”

  The man sighed deeply and then smiled. It was smile that didn’t reach his eyes. They were vastly intelligent eyes. Eyes that knew secrets. Eyes without pity.

  “Kent,” he said. “It’s a name from a long time ago. Not one I’m comfortable with anymore. So let’s try a different name, shall we?”

  “Okay,” Luke said. “What should I call you?”

  “Wesley is good,” the man said. “Wes for short.”

  That was funny. Wes, Steve, Jim, the man always went by some nondescript name. When Luke was young, the name had been Henry, or Hank. He was the man without a name, the man without a country. What could you say about someone who was a Cold War spy, who sold his own country’s secrets to the Soviets, then turned around and sold the Soviets’ secrets to the British and the Israelis? And that was the little Luke knew about. There was probably a lot more.

  One thing you might say is the guy was lucky to be alive. Another thing is that it was amazing he could choose to live in the United States now, right under the very noses of people who would be happy to kill him or put him away forever. But perhaps betrayal had an expiration date. After a certain amount of time had passed, maybe no one cared anymore. Maybe all the people who once cared were retired. Or dead.

  “Quite a little trip you went on,” Wesley said.

  Luke shrugged. “What do you know about it?”

  A long sigh came from the old man. It sounded like the air going slowly out of a tire, all the way, until there was nothing left. He gestured to the gray-haired gunman by the window.

  “We know everything,” the man said. It was the first time he spoke, and Luke noticed his Russian accent immediately. Somehow it didn’t even surprise him that Kent Philby had turned up here with a Russian agent. It was unexpected, like your kind aunt showing up at your door with a home-baked fruitcake. But it wasn’t surprising.

  Luke looked at Kent, or Wesley, or whoever. “Still working for the Russians, huh?”

  Wesley shrugged.

  “Do you think we do not see you?” the Russian said. “An atrocity is made on Russian soil by Americans, with help from the Islamist terrorists the Americans love so well. Then an airplane leaves Georgia, flies across Europe, and lands near Washington, DC. Are we blind? Do you think this?”

  As the Russian spoke, the old man, Wesley, stared at Luke. There was a wild sort of light in the man’s eyes. To Luke, he looked like a carnival barker, or a conman with the traveling medicine show. He smiled again, but this time he seemed delighted.

  “You’ve been a very bad boy, Luke. But I do enjoy watching your career unfold. As you well know, I had you pegged as a major talent from an early age.”

  For a moment, Luke had been concerned about these men, and their presence here. That worry was beginning to fade. He had considered denying any role in the rescue operation, but why bother? These men already knew what he did. They had followed him home.

  “Well, if you were going to kill me in retaliation, I doubt you would have gone to all the trouble of waking me up.”

  Wesley squinted just a touch. “You have no idea what’s going on, do you?”

  Luke shrugged. “I got in late last night and fell asleep as soon as I got here. I just woke up a minute ago. I have no idea what the right time is. It feels pretty early to me, but I’m not sure. Also, yes, I have no idea what you’re doing here. That doesn’t mean I don’t like to see you. But it would be nice if you called ahead next time.”

  Wesley stared at Luke another moment, then looked at the other men. For a split second, Luke thought they all might just walk out the door.

  “There was an attack on the White House early this morning. Two men were killed, seemingly after blowing a hole in the fence and trying to enter
the grounds. Both were Russians, and both were associated with Russian mafias, here and abroad.”

  Luke looked back and forth between the men.

  “It was false, of course,” the man by the window said.

  “The attack was staged,” Wesley said. “I happen to know that the more senior of the two men involved has been in American custody, moving among CIA black sites, for more than a year.”

  None of it made any sense. Luke knew Wesley as an aggravating man, an irritant, like sand inside your clothes. Nothing had changed.

  “Why would someone do that?” he said.

  “They want a war,” Wesley said. “It’s that simple. Slowly, at a snail’s pace, with two steps forward and one step back, Vladimir Putin is rebuilding the Russian industrial economy. He is rebuilding Russian society. And worst of all, he is rebuilding the Russian military. They want to nip this threat in the bud before it gets out of hand. The Russians were in the dead letter office even just a few years ago. Earlier this year, in fact. But they’re trying to crawl out. So have the war now, and put them right back where they belong. That seems to be the reasoning.”

  “Have a major shooting war with the Russians?” Luke said. It went against all of his training. When he was in the Rangers, and in Delta, the unwritten (but oft spoken) rule was: Don’t engage Russians in a firefight. Until this rescue mission had arisen, he would never have dreamed of…

  “Of course,” the man by the kitchen entryway said. It was the first time he had spoken. “Nothing works. Everything is rusted. The weapon systems are old. They were devised by better minds than we have now. There are no replacement parts, and no way to make them. The people are hungry and tired, and do not want to fight. The forests catch fire, and no one is there to put them out. We do not stand a chance against the Americans. You saw that yourself.”

  Luke had to admit he had seen it. Dozens of Russian soldiers, sailors, and first responders, not to mention whoever cooked up their strategy for them, had been caught flat-footed and ill-prepared to fend off him, Ed, and a couple of suicidal lunatics they’d never met before. Four determined men had sliced through the Russian defenses like they were made of butter.

  He looked at Wesley. “So what are you doing here? You’re on some kind of mercy mission to get this called off, so the Russians won’t have to lose?”

  A ghost of a smile passed over the man’s lips. “I always enjoy our meetings.”

  “Tell me,” Luke said.

  “Putin will not allow us to lose,” the man by the window said. “He lived through the humiliations of the 1990s. He will kill everyone before he will live them again. To save face, he will launch a nuclear war.”

  “You can’t know that,” Luke said.

  The man nodded. “I can know this. I am SVR, what you once called KGB. We keep intelligence estimates on everyone, even our dear leader. We know what he says when he believes he is alone among his closest confidants. We know what he whispers to his mistresses in the night. We know what the man thinks. And I have seen the dossiers.”

  Luke shrugged. “So kill him.”

  The man grunted, laughed, and then shook his head.

  “Here’s something else we know,” Wesley said. “And you won’t see this on TV. Not yet, anyway. The president of the United States has gone missing. David Barrett is not up to the task. He does not want a major war. He lacks the intestinal fortitude, and he has consistently made that clear during his time in office. There’ve even been rumors that he’s had some sort of psychological breakdown. Either way, they’ve disappeared him in favor of someone who can stomach a war with Russia. Mark Baylor secretly took the Oath of Office early this morning.”

  Luke was still trying to digest what he was being told.

  “They … disappeared him?”

  Wesley nodded. “Yes. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the NSA, the Secret Service, all of them together, or rogue elements within each. It’s alphabet soup. I don’t really know who did it, and it doesn’t matter who.”

  “But they made it look like the Russians did it?”

  His smile broadened. “Now you’re catching on. You’re very clever, Luke. Not as quick-witted as I imagined you’d be when you were young, but…”

  “Do you know where David Barrett is?” Luke said.

  “We think we might, yes.”

  “And you want me to go get him back?”

  Wesley nodded. “Rescuing David Barrett may be the only way to stave off a conventional war between the United States and Russia. And stopping that war may be the only way to save the world from nuclear annihilation.”

  Luke had no idea how much of this was true. Wesley was a professional liar. Wesley! It wasn’t even the man’s name. And he was here with Russian intelligence agents. How was Luke supposed to believe a word they said?

  Last night, as he was drifting off, he remembered thinking how he would make himself some eggs and sausage and toast when he woke up. How he would also brew a pot of coffee, and how he would carry the whole mess out to the patio and slowly enjoy it while gazing out at Chesapeake Bay.

  Then he would call Becca and negotiate her and Gunner’s safe return here from her mom’s house. And then they would do nothing for the next month except… very pleasurable things.

  “I think you guys are barking up the wrong tree,” he said. “I’ve been suspended from my job. The powers that be think I might have overstepped during that atrocity in Russia you mentioned. I handed in my gun and my badge. I have no access to Special Response Team or FBI resources.”

  He paused. “I can’t even get into my own office.”

  At his feet, his SRT cell phone began to ring. He must have put it on the floor when he fell asleep this morning.

  The ringer itself was off, but the phone was set to vibrate. It was a dark blue flip phone with a tiny screen on the front that told you the time. It reminded him of the handheld communicator Captain Kirk used to carry on the old Star Trek show.

  With each ring, the phone bounced across the wooden floorboards a tiny amount. MMMMMMM, came the sound of the vibration. MMMMMMMM.

  Luke stared at it. It was insistent. It seemed to have a mind of its own, and right now it was bent on exposing everything he had just said as lies.

  He looked up at Wesley.

  Wesley gestured toward the phone with his head. He smiled. “Apparently, you’ve been reinstated.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  11:55 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  Headquarters of the Special Response Team

  McLean, Virginia

  “Good morning, Luke,” the receptionist said as he entered the building through the glass doors of the main entrance.

  Her name was Ginger. She was a friendly, talkative middle-aged lady with reading glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. She was also ruthlessly efficient in the way that anyone who worked for Don Morris was, or came to be.

  “How was your trip?”

  Luke smiled despite himself. He was exhausted, running on painkillers, two cups of coffee, and a Dexedrine pill. He rarely popped Dexies when he wasn’t on a mission, but today he made an exception. He couldn’t have gotten off the couch otherwise.

  “It was a whirlwind tour, I’ll give it that much.”

  She handed him a page from a small pink MEMO pad.

  “I’m glad it worked out. You got a call yesterday from a man, name of Kevin Murphy. He said call him whenever you can. Also, Don said to tell you he’s on a conference call and he doesn’t know how much longer it will last. He wants to schedule with you for about one p.m. You, Mark Swann, and Trudy Wellington.”

  Luke glanced at the clock on the lobby wall. Time was flying by as usual. They should be meeting now , not an hour from now. If what Kent Philby (or Wesley, or whatever he wanted to be called right now) had said was true, then they needed to move on it, and fast.

  Unfortunately, Luke had no way to confirm the information. The SRT had the resources, but Luke couldn’t just commandeer tho
se resources in his current predicament. He needed Don’s buy-in. And he needed it now, but Don was in a meeting.

  So Luke would do what was in front of him. He glanced down at the page in his hand. Murph had given him a Virginia phone number to call.

  “Is there any way we can get Don to move our meeting up?” he said. “I’ve got new intel that I really need to share with him.”

  Ginger nodded, but didn’t commit. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks, Ginger.”

  “Thanks for being you,” Ginger said.

  Luke moved past Ginger’s desk and into the atrium. There seemed to be swirl of activity going on that his mind had trouble making sense of. So many new employees coming on. Young guys in sports jackets and khaki pants. Women in business suits. Who were these people? They were sprouting out of the floor like mushrooms.

  He saw a face he recognized.

  “Swann.”

  Swann was talking to one of the sports jackets. He turned, saw Luke there, took his leave of the other guy, and came over. His long hair was pulled into a tight ponytail. He wore jeans, yellow-tinted wraparound sunglasses, and a vintage Herbie the Love Bug T-shirt. He looked ridiculous. Suspended or not, criminal charges pending or not, Mark Swann was going to go down swinging.

  “Luke, we need to talk.”

  “I like your shirt,” Luke said.

  Swann smiled. “This old thing? Listen, about that drone strike…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Luke said. They were moving down the hall toward Luke’s office. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry. I told Don I ordered the strike, and that we never would have made it out of there without it. Half true, half false, but that’s the story I’m going to stick with. As far as I’m concerned, you saved our necks in there.”