Primary Command

by Jack Mars

  The storefront was an inferno, flames pouring out and licking the side of the building. The front door to the stairwell was kicked in.

  Murphy tossed the ammo belts into the fire and went up the stairs.

  * * *

  Luke crept to the bedroom door, staying low.

  He stayed behind the wall and pushed the door open a crack.

  It squeaked. The door squeaked.

  Dammit, Keller! Oil your hinges!

  Three men stood in the bedroom, just on the window side of Keller’s wide bed. They were big guys, almost identical in bearing. They were in a tight circle, whispering together. One man, the one in the center, seemed to be in charge. He was diagramming the play. They all looked up when the door opened.

  All three men raised guns.

  Luke swung his gun around and fired it before the men got off a shot. One shot—he put a bullet right between the eyes of the boss. A red dot of blood appeared on the guy’s forehead. He stood still for one second, then dropped bonelessly to the floor, dead before he hit the carpet.

  All of a sudden, another man came flying through the window. He crashed through what remained of the glass and landed in a heap on the floor.

  Luke didn’t even question it. He fired at the other guys, BANG, BANG, BANG, but they had already dived for cover. He missed all three shots. He ducked back into the living room.

  A second later, a volley of return fire splintered the walls at the threshold. Luke backed away, waited a beat, then wrapped his gun hand around the doorway. He fired three more times, then dropped back.

  A new volley of shots came, ripping up the doorway again. Luke rolled up on one knee, ten feet away from the door. The shooting went on for a long time. Finally, it stopped.

  A man darted through the doorway, gun out.

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

  Luke put three bullets in him, all in the center body mass. The guy fell over, holding his guts.

  By Luke’s count, one more guy was in there.

  He kept his gun trained on the door.

  “Come on! Come on!”

  Behind him, at the other end of the small apartment, the front door blew apart. It came flying inward, ripped to pieces. Luke hit the ground and covered up.

  He rolled over just in time to see a big man burst through the doorway. The man had a sawed-off shotgun for close quarters fighting.

  Guns fired from the floor, coming from two directions. Ed was shooting from the kitchen floor, Keller from the living room.

  The man with the shotgun did a crazy dance, hit from two sides.

  Two more men were right behind him. The second man also had a shotgun. He fired, hitting the first man through the door in the back, cutting him to ribbons.

  Bullets from the floor hit the second man.

  He tossed something silver in the air.

  “Grenade!” Keller screamed.

  “No.”

  The third guy wasn’t hit. He ducked back into the hallway and threw in another grenade. Luke watched it bounce into the living room and roll on the hardwood floor.

  For a second, Keller seemed like he would crawl toward it.

  “Keller!”

  BOOOM! Luke got hit with a wave of light and sound.

  * * *

  He opened his eyes.

  For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know how much time had passed. There was darkness, but there was also sound, and flickering light.

  He sat up. His head was pounding. The room was on fire. All around him, flames were licking up through the floor. The place was starting to fill with smoke.

  He touched the wooden floor with his left hand. The floorboards were hot. He looked at his right hand. It was holding a gun.

  He was Luke Stone, and he was in Montreal.

  “Flashbangs,” he said. “They were just flashbangs.”

  The men had thrown stun grenades into the room. They were designed to disorient your targets and put them in a state of shock. It worked.

  Luke climbed to his feet. He glanced at the windows. Forgot about that. There was a man out there with a machine gun. Well, if he had still been there, Luke would be dead now. Luke was alive, so…

  A man came running in through the front door.

  Luke raised his gun to shoot him.

  The man raised his hands.

  “Stone! Don’t shoot.”

  In the orange gloom, the man resolved into a familiar shape. Tall, thin, with short blond hair. A narrow, arrogant face.

  “Murphy. There was a guy out in the hall.”

  Murphy nodded. “Yeah. I saw him. I killed him.”

  Luke looked down at the floor. “We need to get out of here.”

  “I know. This place is gonna go any second.”

  Ed was on the kitchen floor, sitting with his big arms wrapped around one knee, his wounded leg extended out.

  “You alive, Ed?” Luke said.

  “Yeah. I’m alive.”

  “You hurt?”

  Ed shook his head slowly, like a man with a migraine.

  “Only my feelings.”

  Bald-headed Keller was curled in a ball on the living room floor.

  “Keller, you alive?”

  Keller didn’t move. “Barely.”

  “Do you have the recording?”

  “I have two copies on disk in my pocket. There’s also one on my laptop. We should bring it just in case.”

  Luke nodded. The motion made him dizzy. “Okay. That should be good enough.”

  Murphy moved further into the apartment. “It’s lovely chatting, but we have to go. The stairs are toast, so we need to take the fire escape. Where is it in here?”

  He passed Luke headed for the bedroom.

  “Murph, there’s another guy in there. Murph!”

  Murphy’s gun was out. He didn’t hesitate. He went right through the door. For a second, he was just gone. Luke turned, moving in slow motion like he was underwater, the residue of the stun grenade. He expected to hear a gunshot.

  Murphy’s head poked back out.

  “The guy’s gone. He must have made a run for it.”

  * * *

  The narrow street outside was a mob scene.

  In the background, the building burned out of control. Teams of firemen hosed it down, and hosed the neighboring buildings down, trying to half the spread. Half-asleep people were being evacuated by policemen.

  Bodies littered the ground, now covered by sheets. Halfway down the block, the Mercedes was on the sidewalk, a small white car sandwiched between it and a brick building.

  Crowds of people loitered on the other side of the yellow police cordon. Luke walked slowly up the street toward the cordon, one hand on Lawrence Keller’s arm. He had this strange idea that after all of that, Keller might try to run. Murphy walked in front of them. Ed brought up the rear.

  They were protecting him with their bodies now.

  A French language newscast was at the edge of the police line—a cameraman with shaggy black hair and a young woman. They were the first news team on the scene. Suddenly Keller made a beeline for them.

  “Keller!”

  Luke let him go.

  “Parlez vous Anglais ?” he said to the woman.

  She nodded. “Oui . Of course.”

  And just like that, the frightened rabbit of earlier tonight, bloody-faced, ripped-clothes Lawrence Keller, was authoritative and in command.

  “My name is Lawrence Keller. I’m the former chief of staff of the American President David Barrett. You’re going to want to interview me. This will be the biggest scoop of your career. Shoot it now, and confirm my identity later. If you do this, I promise the segment will go around the world. I have evidence that the president was murdered by American intelligence operatives.”

  The young woman stared at him. She glanced at the cameraman. He was older than she was, and probably in charge. He shrugged and nodded.

  Luke stood and watched, the flames crackling behind him. A moment later,
they were filming.

  CHAPTER FORTY TWO

  4:05 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  Newington

  Fairfax County, Virginia

  He couldn’t do it.

  Wallace Speck had seen a lot of death, and he had brought much of it about. He had become rather nonchalant about it over the years. But when push came to shove, it was harder than it looked.

  “How did it come to this?” he whispered to no one.

  He was standing in the big country kitchen of his house on a suburban cul-de-sac. In the daytime, the view out the back was of woodland, but now it was dark as pitch. He lived here alone. His kids were grown and didn’t speak to him. His wife had left him years ago.

  The gun was on the granite countertop.

  He knew what he had to do. But he couldn’t even pick the damn thing up.

  They were coming for him. He knew that. The game was over. When they arrested him, they were going to pressure him to talk.

  They might offer him a deal—three hundred years in prison instead of the death penalty. They might even offer him something better than that. Whatever they offered him, there were people in this world who would prefer if he didn’t talk. They would do what they could to see to it that he didn’t get that chance.

  The honorable thing would be to end it now. Because he was going to talk. He knew that about himself. He even knew exactly how it was going to go. They were going to give him a guy, an interrogator, who was going to be his friend. His buddy. His pal. That guy was going to get him little breaks. His own cell, maybe. In a quiet POD away from the maniacs. With some outside time.

  These things could be his, if only he would tell them what they wanted to hear. And if he didn’t? Other things could be his, too. Supermax could be his. Solitary confinement could be his. Arbitrary restrictions on books, pens and pencils, paper, contact with the outside world—they could all be his.

  But he was going to talk, wasn’t he? Yes, he was. He wanted to talk. He’d been very clever, and there were many, many things he knew about, not just David Barrett. He could blow people’s minds, the things he might talk about. It could be very entertaining.

  Which was why he shouldn’t do it. You couldn’t expect to give away the Agency’s secrets and come to a happy ending.

  Without thinking about it, he reached and picked up the gun. It was loaded, he needn’t bother to look. He put the barrel to his head. One quick pull, and he could slip the noose, escape responsibility for his actions once again.

  One quick pull.

  Suddenly, there was a commotion at the front of the house. He couldn’t see it back here in the kitchen, but he could hear. The front door exploded inward. Someone had hit it with a battering ram. One hit had done it.

  Now heavy footsteps ran through the house.

  “DOWN! Get DOWN!”

  They were here. They were in. It was now or never.

  He closed his eyes.

  His finger caressed the trigger.

  Behind him, the glass windows lining the back deck crashed inward. Speck didn’t look. He didn’t even flinch. He could imagine the big bodies tumbling through the windows well enough.

  Do it! Do it now!

  He grimaced, skating on the edge between life and death.

  “Freeze!” someone screamed. “Drop that gun!”

  Pull it. Pull the trigger.

  A heavy body hit him chest high. He opened his eyes, flying through space. The gun was out of his hand. He wanted to scream. “No!”

  Then he was on the kitchen’s stone tile floor. Two men in black jumpsuits were on top of him, wrestling, undulating over him like snakes. They turned him over onto his face. A second later, they had his arms pinned behind his back. He could hear the cuffs clicking on. An instant later, he could feel the metal biting his wrists.

  Rough hands roamed his body, searching for weapons.

  “Wallace Speck? You have the right to remain silent…”

  He tuned out the words that he knew by heart. The men pulled him to his feet. Now he was standing again in the kitchen, helpless, in their custody. He couldn’t kill himself, and now he belonged to them. For the rest of his life, he would belong to them, or people just like them.

  A group of these cop types milled around him, all wearing identical black uniforms. One of them turned around to go into the living room. There were three large white letters stenciled on the back of the man’s black jumpsuit: SRT.

  CHAPTER FORTY THREE

  7:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  Special Activities Center, Directorate of Operations

  Central Intelligence Agency

  Langley, Virginia

  The end had come.

  The old man reflected that it didn’t bother him much. He was eighty-three years old. He had lived a long time, and he had done many things. There was no shame in endings.

  His body had betrayed him years ago. Although his mind was still sharp, he lived with physical indignities now that he would never have dreamed of as a young man. Indeed, if someone had told him of the things to come in his last years, he would have answered them with two words:

  “Shoot me.”

  He laughed at the thought. And his eyes fell upon the carved wooden box sitting on the wide expanse of his desk. He liked to keep the desk clear as a general rule, but today he was making an exception. The box was there, as were two small sheets of paper.

  He lit a cigarette from the embers of the dying one. He inhaled deeply, exhaled, and watched the blue smoke rise toward the ceiling of this strangely cavernous office to which he’d been exiled. He smiled. He wished he’d be around to see the looks on the faces of the young lions who ran the Agency these days.

  Well, middle-aged lions. They tended to treat the old man as something quaint, a pet or a mascot, or maybe one of those Norman Rockwell paintings of a soda jerk leaning across the counter to accept a nickel from a young girl. Would these men be surprised to learn of his actions, of the things he’d still been capable of?

  It was impossible to know. He didn’t understand the thinking of modern men.

  He gave a brief thought to Wallace Speck. The name alone could strike fear into the hearts of certain people. And yet, in the end Speck was a coward. Yes, the old man already knew that Speck had been captured. He even knew the circumstances of his capture, with Speck sitting on the fence, perched perfectly between honor on the one side, and disgrace on the other. And Speck had chosen disgrace.

  Somehow, the old man was not surprised. Speck had gone about things with a sort of grim determination, an almost mechanical efficiency. He didn’t seem to like his work. He brought no joy to it.

  He was trying to get somewhere, to prove something, to realize some ambition that he quietly harbored. And that was his undoing. You did this work for the passion of it, the awe of it, the sheer spectacle.

  “Try to enjoy prison instead,” the old man said to Wallace Speck.

  With the Keller man providing evidence, the Baylor government brought low, and Speck in custody and probably already talking a mile a minute, the next stop on the whistle stop tour was likely to be right in this office.

  And that meant it was time to go.

  He reached and opened the box. For a second, he allowed his ancient hands to caress the carved and polished wood. It was really a beautiful box. He’d had it custom made. Nestled inside was a Walther P38 pistol. This one was manufactured in 1942. The gun was even more beautiful than the box. The Germans really did make wonderful things.

  The old man picked up the gun and got the feel of it in his hand. There was already a round in the chamber.

  He had taken the gun from a Wehrmacht colonel. The old man had been a young man in those days, and he’d been a spy for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which later became his beloved Agency.

  The old man arrived in Paris two weeks before Patton’s Third Army. German morale was disintegrating. On August nineteenth, the night of the French uprising—God, he remembered
it like it was yesterday—he’d been in a bar where this German colonel was drunk, loud, obnoxious, and clearly terrified.

  The big, balding, frightened German had slapped a young French woman in the face and knocked her to the ground. Then he threatened to execute her family.

  A few moments later, the old man (who was still a young man) had followed him into the bathroom and shot him in the head while he was urinating. He remembered how the colonel swayed unsteadily, bracing himself with one hand on the wall.

  Then: BANG.

  Afterward, he looted the body and took the man’s gun.

  This lovely gun.

  The old man took one last drag from his cigarette, then placed it on the ashtray. He didn’t stub it out. Might as well let it enjoy its last few moments.

  Slowly, he placed the barrel of the Walther in his mouth. He pointed it directly upward, against the top of his mouth, toward his brain. This was the most certain way to do it. Many people did it incorrectly, pointing the gun at the side of their head from the outside. Sometimes that resulted in unpleasant accidents, like a certain ex-Marine he once knew who ended up still alive with half his face missing.

  None of that for this old man.

  He took a deep breath. He didn’t feel afraid in the least. He wondered if perhaps he should count to a certain number. Five, maybe. Or even three.

  He eyes fell upon the two pieces of paper on his desk. On each piece, he had scrawled a message using a ballpoint pen. He thought they were clever enough to serve as his epitaphs.

  Never get old, read one message.

  He gently pulled the trigger of the P38. The gun used double-action operation, so the first pull cocked the hammer. Now he was ready.

  Should he count? He still couldn’t decide.

  He glanced at the other paper, his second and last message to posterity.

  Messy, isn’t it?

  Nah, forget the counting.

  He pulled the trigger again.