by Jack Rogan
The only thing that allowed her to breathe was the knowledge that Shelby was rich and powerful and had probably been one of the people who wrote Black Pine’s protocol, and she didn’t think he would have instituted rules that would allow anyone to throw his life away.
“Cait, what have you done?” Monteforte asked. “You didn’t say … you told me you knew how to get through their security.”
“We did get through,” Cait said, as if it meant nothing. But Monteforte could see the truth in her eyes. “We got through the only way we knew how. And now we’re here, Detective.”
Monteforte swore. She looked at Shelby, who seemed smug and amused. She had agreed to this insanity because her partner had been murdered and people in power were trying to protect the identity of his killers. She had known when she signed on to Cait’s plan that she would probably be razing her career, not to mention risking her life, but she believed that Cait and Leyla would be killed if she didn’t step in somehow, and she couldn’t let Jarman’s killers go without consequence. He deserved more.
Now she ran it through her mind, trying to figure out what Cait could have done differently, how she could have saved herself and her daughter from people whose reach seemed unlimited. She could think of no other option, but somehow that didn’t make her feel any better.
She wiped at a bead of sweat on her brow, though the room felt cool.
“Cait,” she began quietly, “Shelby’s right. There’s no way his people will let us out of this building alive. You told me you just wanted the truth, wanted someone else to know, so they would leave you alone.”
Emotion contorted Cait’s features and then she nodded toward Shelby, keeping her gun trained on him. “You really think these people would ever leave me alone? Ever leave Leyla alone? They murder children. I know it, and they know it.”
“So what are you—” Monteforte began.
“Going to do? I’m going to kill him,” Cait said, almost wistfully.
“You’re going to make me an accomplice to murder?”
“I’m going to do to him what he did to my brother, and to who knows how many babies and children!” Cait snapped. “What he did to your partner, Detective. These people have got to be stopped, starting with Shelby. And when this all hits the media, the truth will come out.”
Shelby sighed as though bored and clapped his hands in mocking applause.
“Really, Sergeant McCandless, the passion is admirable,” he said, “but the truth is what we make it. When the smoke has cleared, it’s quite likely that all of us in this room will be dead—or, at least, all of you—and Black Pine will still control the message. Tell me, though, who is your accomplice out there? When I received reports about him, he intrigued me.”
Cait ignored the question. “I called the police and texted the TV and print media people just before we got here.”
Shelby shook his head. “You’re not listening.”
“You wanted my baby dead!” Cait screamed, leaning over his desk to point the gun at his face. “You and your goddamn Collective.”
“We did,” Shelby agreed.
“You admit it?” Cait said, staring at him in shock.
Shelby sighed. “It was regrettable, but necessary. Actually, it should have happened much sooner. All of this might have been avoided if we had acted when you and your daughter first came to our attention. But when our people performed the requisite background check on you, and we learned about your brother—”
Cait flinched. “I knew it. You killed Sean, too.”
“It took time to arrange,” Shelby said. “A man like Sean … only subterfuge would work. We had to find the place where he would be most at ease. It was our only chance of getting him while his guard was down. And we considered it inadvisable to eliminate your daughter while he was alive.
“Of course, even then, you forced us to move our agenda forward more quickly than we wanted. When your encounter with that football player put you on the news, it seemed inevitable that the media would turn you, at least briefly, into a celebrity. We couldn’t risk the possibility that they would begin to focus on your personal story, on your life as a single mother/soldier with a half-Iraqi baby. That sort of thing always leads to fluffy news pieces where gentle-voiced narrators ask us all why we can’t follow the example of the American soldier and the Iraqi taxi driver who fell in love.” Shelby actually laughed in derision.
“We couldn’t have that,” he added, “so we had to speed things along. Fortunately, the plan to remove your brother was already in place.”
Cait leaned against the wall, using it to prop her up. “That video with A-Train? That’s what started it all?”
“That’s overstating it,” Shelby said, almost admonishing her. “Granted, the Arabs who came after Leyla probably had no idea she existed until they saw the news reports about you, but you were on our list. Another few weeks, and we would have been paying you a visit anyway.”
“How can you be so fucking cavalier about this?” Monteforte asked. “What kind of monster are you?”
“The practical kind,” Shelby said. “You seem to think my friends and I take some pleasure in what we’ve had to do over the years. Trust me, we don’t. Neither have any of the Herods before us.”
“Herods?” Monteforte asked.
“Baby-killers,” Cait whispered, shaking with rage.
“It’s all necessary,” Shelby said. “Don’t you see? We can’t allow the war between Western culture and radical Islam to succumb to exhaustion or to the cowardly nature of the tenderhearted who cannot stand the body count. We’ve got to see it through, to obliterate our enemy, or we might as well surrender.”
Cait sneered at him. “You kill mixed-race children because you believe that, just by existing, they might make people want peace instead of war. And you’re trying to justify that?”
Shelby froze, staring at her. “There is no ‘might’ here, Sergeant. War’s Children have a real and measurable influence on international and even tribal conflicts. We have a century’s worth of statistics tracking the drop-off of public support for war in direct correlation with a rise in the number of War Child births.”
“My God, you really believe all this?” Monteforte demanded.
“Of course I do. Could I bear the weight of it on my soul if I didn’t?”
“Make him stop talking, Cait. Please?”
Cait shot Monteforte a dark look. “No. I came for the truth. And for blood.”
“The fucker is gloating,” the detective replied. “There’s only one reason he’d ever admit to any of this stuff. He knows we’re not getting out of here alive.”
Cait gave her an apologetic look. “I’ll do what I can. I swear to God I will. But he might be right.”
Josh pulled up at the curb and got out, standing and staring at the marble and glass of the Black Pine building. But his focus was less on the architecture and more on the quiet tension growing on the street in front of the building. Half a dozen Hoboken police vehicles had already parked there, and others were creating a cordon on either end of the short block on which the building sat. People were being evacuated from neighboring buildings.
But the most peculiar and disturbing element of the growing chaos was the line of Black Pine operatives and security spread along the sidewalk in front of the building, blocking every entrance. The ones on the sidewalk, guns held across their bodies, were not concerning themselves with the situation inside their headquarters.
“You getting the same read off this that I am?” Chang asked him over the roof of the car as she got out.
“If you’re thinking those guys aren’t out here to keep the trouble from escalating, but to keep the police from interfering with Black Pine business, then yeah.”
Chang slammed her door. “They certainly don’t look like they’re in the mood for company.”
Josh started across the street. His and Chang’s federal ID had gotten them past the cops who were setting up a roadblock, but still he w
anted to be careful not to get them shot. He held his ID up and Chang did the same as they jogged toward a cluster of cops standing in the V between two patrol cars. There were several higher-ups there and, though he couldn’t make out their ranks immediately, it was obvious the others were deferring to a heavyset man with Asian features. Josh approached him without hesitation and held up his ID.
“Excuse me, sir. Agent Joshua Hart, InterAgency Cooperation Division. This is FBI Special Agent Nala Chang—”
“Captain Albert Koh,” the man replied, brow furrowing deeply. “What’s ICD want with this? Better yet, how the hell did you get here so fast?”
“We were already on the way,” Chang said.
Koh looked at her. “Meaning you could have called ahead and warned us some shit was about to blow up in our city, but didn’t bother?”
“We didn’t know the nature of the shit, Captain,” Chang replied.
Any other day, Josh would have smiled. Instead, he changed the subject. “Can you give us the rundown?”
“We got a call that people were going to die here today,” Koh said, hooking a thumb toward the building. “We arrived to find the place locked up tight. The asshole militia over there are denying anything’s going on inside, and say they won’t let us in without a warrant.”
“Oh, there’s definitely something going on,” Josh said. “I just wish I knew exactly what it is.”
“What about the call we got about people dying?”
Josh glanced at Chang, then back at the police captain. “That wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”
“Then maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” Koh said.
Josh stared at the Black Pine operatives in their uniforms and thought about Cait McCandless and her baby, and wondered how far a woman would go to protect her child. But he didn’t really need to wonder. He knew Cait would do whatever it took.
“If you don’t mind, Captain, Agent Chang will catch you up on the details. I’m going to go over there and figure out who’s in charge of the ‘asshole militia.’ ”
“You taking charge of this situation?”
Josh frowned and turned to the captain. “I am. I hope that doesn’t ruffle your feathers too much.”
Koh shot a look of disdain at the Black Pine hard cases lining the sidewalk. “You kidding? You’re welcome to it. Just tell us how we can help.”
Gunshots rang out in the executive suite. Cait kept the Sig Sauer aimed at Shelby’s face but glanced over her shoulder to see Lynch withdrawing from the foyer. The old man pressed himself against a wall, gun clutched in both hands, ready to fire again.
“Lynch, sitrep!” she called.
“Someone snaked a camera under the door, so I put a few bullets through it.”
“Camera still there?”
“What do you think?” Lynch called, but she noticed he darted his head around the corner to check the door into the suite, just in case.
The man might not be entirely sane, but she could not help admiring him. At his age, most people were either retired or planning for it. Instead, Lynch had spent the past twenty-four hours running a dangerous gauntlet.
“Hang on a minute,” Cait called to him.
The phones had been ringing constantly since she and Lynch had arrived. She’d been so focused on the task at hand that they had been only a mild irritation.
“Keep him covered, Detective,” Cait said.
Monteforte didn’t like it. Cait could see the panic in her eyes. But it was obvious that the detective hadn’t come up with a way out of the situation as yet. For the moment, they were allies. She felt awful having dragged Monteforte into this, but Monteforte had wanted answers and vengeance almost as much as Cait had.
Cait snatched up the phone on Shelby’s desk. Others out in the suite kept ringing, but for the moment, this phone went still.
“Hello?” she said.
“Caitlin McCandless?” a clipped, grim male voice asked.
“Stupid question. Try anything like that stunt with the camera again, and this will end immediately—and not in Mr. Shelby’s favor.”
“What is it you want?” the voice asked. “What do you hope to gain?”
“I want an ending,” she said.
The voice began to talk, trying to reason with her, to negotiate how it would all end, and she hung up the phone. Shelby’s grin had settled into a supercilious smile, eyes lidded with disdain as he watched her. She almost shot him right then.
“They’ll probably try gas next!” Lynch called from out in the suite.
“Cait,” Monteforte began, but Cait gave a shake of her head that silenced the detective.
Monteforte went to the window, glancing around warily.
“Be careful,” Cait said.
Cait hoped she would, but also figured she would be all right. Thus far they had stayed clear of the windows. There were thin curtains, but she did not bother to draw them. The buildings across the street were all a couple of stories shorter than Black Pine, so it would be difficult to get an effective sniper shot on anyone who wasn’t right up close to the glass. And even if they did, she was sure the glass was reinforced. Nothing was bulletproof if you had a big enough bullet, but they hadn’t reached that point yet. They weren’t going to be firing anti-tank weapons into the CEO’s office with Shelby still in there.
“There are tons of cars down there now,” Monteforte said. “Not just police, either.”
“That’ll be the FBI. I suspect we’ll get plenty of them.”
Shelby laughed at the tough-girl tone of her voice. “I really am curious about your next move, Sergeant. Truly. The FBI aren’t going to help you. They’re not even going to get a chance. The last minutes of your life are ticking down, and you’re going to leave your daughter an orphan. But don’t worry. We’ll take good care of her when you’re gone.”
Cait steadied her breath, forcing herself not to pull the trigger. “You’ll never find her.”
He shook his head, giving her a look of profound pity. “Of course we will. You really don’t understand any of this, do you? Even if I let the FBI into this building, I only have to give the order and they would execute you themselves. We have Herods everywhere. Everywhere that matters.”
“One guy.” Cait scowled. “Dwight fucking Hollenbach. And the FBI aren’t going to kill babies on his say-so.”
“Hollenbach only needs his people to find Leyla. Black Pine will do the rest.”
“And if she’s no longer in the country, what then?” Cait asked, feigning a confidence she didn’t feel.
Shelby’s eyebrows went up. “Don’t you know who we are? Black Pine is everywhere. And the Herods … the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is one of us, Cait. The combatant commander of SOCOM—”
“Bullshit!” Monteforte said. “I can’t … That’s bullshit.”
Shelby stared at Cait. “I tell you this because I want you to know there is nowhere she will be able to hide. And I want you to know what is going to happen to your little girl once you’re dead.”
Monteforte pressed her gun to Shelby’s head. “Motherfucker.”
Cait watched it all, Shelby’s words filling her with icy hatred.
“I’m here now,” Voss said into her cell phone, putting the car in Park. She pulled out the keys and opened the door, standing up to look around. “Where are you?”
“In the middle of the shit,” Josh said. “Where else?”
Voss slammed the door, pocketed the keys, and transferred the phone to her right hand, maneuvering her left arm back into the sling. Her shoulder throbbed, and she could barely imagine how much worse it would have been without the painkillers, which gave her a pleasantly detached feeling. She had called in to the office and arranged to pick some up on the road, a brief diversion to a CVS just off the highway that was more than worth the trouble of stopping. The pain hadn’t gone away, but it seemed separated from her consciousness by a layer of cotton.
She wanted more drugs,
but for now she would have to turn the pain into adrenaline. No more blunting of edges; she needed to be sharp.
“I’ll meet you at the front door,” Voss said, hanging up and clipping her phone to her belt. She looked past the vehicles that were arranged in a kind of semi-circle in front of the building. There were many more farther along the street in both directions, police and FBI—not to mention ambulances waiting like vultures for the inevitable.
As Voss walked toward them, a pair of cops standing behind their cruiser turned to confront her, their gazes fixed on the gun at her hip. It took her a second to realize she didn’t have her ID out. A cute blond with a gun was a fantasy for a lot of guys, but never for cops in the middle of a standoff.
She identified herself, pulling out her ID. The officers let her pass but she kept the ID out, making her way through a maze of vehicles and personnel. She spotted Josh and Nala Chang with a cluster of cops and FBI agents, and made a beeline for them. Something about the way Chang stood so close to Josh made her take notice. The corners of her mouth tweaked upward, but even to herself the smile felt brittle and false.
Josh glanced around expectantly, saw her coming, then broke away from the others. As she walked up, he shook his head at the sight of the sling.
“I leave you alone for twelve hours, and you go and get yourself shot.”
Voss laughed, forcing herself not to reply with a quip about what happened when she left him alone for twelve hours. She might be jumping to conclusions anyway. And all the assholes with guns in front of the Black Pine building were slightly more of an issue at the moment.
“I’ll try to avoid it in the future,” she said, then nodded toward the uniformed operatives lining the sidewalk. “Who’s speaking for them?”
“You’ll never guess,” Josh replied, the words dripping with sarcasm.
“Don’t tell me.”
He nodded.
“Where is he?” Voss asked.
Even as she spoke, they heard the staccato chop of a helicopter and looked up to see it appear over the top of the Black Pine building, the wind and noise battering the street as it descended. Police and FBI took cover, tracking the chopper’s arrival with dozens of guns, but the Black Pine logo on its door made clear that whoever was inside the machine had not come for a fight.
