by Ty Patterson
He had members of his gang in the prison, who relayed commands to the outside world, using a network of corrupt officials.
His gang ran like clockwork, even though Big G was incarcerated, living in a cell smaller than a bathroom in most American homes.
His clenched fists were knotted to the size of boxing gloves at the thought that he, Big G, was reduced to pacing like an animal in a cage.
All because of that snitch.
Seven years ago, Big G was the undisputed criminal gang lord on the east coast of the United States.
Having split from the Killer Boos, a fast-growing inner city gang in Miami, Big G had built his criminal enterprise slowly, but surely, and always violently.
He bartered with those gangs he couldn’t subdue, killed the leaders of those gangs smaller than his, acquired territory and became one of the most fearsome thugs on the eastern seaboard.
His gang marking was simple; a large G tattooed on every man’s neck. Spray painted Gs on the walls of the territories they controlled.
His crew was over two hundred strong and was a major supplier of drugs from New Hampshire to Miami. His gang’s reach extended to Chicago, Tennessee, and Atlanta, where he had chapters.
Big G didn’t limit his business to narcotics alone, however. He also ran women and children in numerous cities and towns in that area. He dealt in stolen cars, laundered money and ran protection rackets.
The Feds were after him, as were numerous other law agencies, but not one could find him nor could they find anything on him.
That changed when a snitch spilled Big G’s dealings and whereabouts in return for witness protection.
Cezar, a dealer who ran the gang in Virginia, had been with Big G right from the Killer Boos days. He was part of the inner circle, trusted with everything, and spent time with Big G on a daily basis.
He had started changing when he had hooked up with a new woman. She wanted him to go straight and went about reforming him. She bombarded his ears every minute till Cezar couldn’t take it any longer and went to the Feds.
Big G got wind of it and fled to Mexico, where he had connections, but the Federales over there were quick to act on a tip-off and grabbed him when he crossed the border.
Big G was carted off to the high security prison, where he still was.
Big G uncurled his fists and breathed deeply; slow calming breaths that some crackhead had taught him.
In. Pause. Out. In. Pause. Out.
The crackhead swore by deep breathing and said it balanced inner chakras, whatever the fuck they were.
Cezar. It was bad enough that he had turned snitch. He had also stolen thirty million dollars from the gang.
My money.
Big G’s gang had started hunting him the moment the gang lord had established his supremacy and dominance in the prison. Over four years of establishing contacts and bribing people had finally paid off.
The gang got a contact in the Marshals service, which ran the witness protection program. The contact demanded a million dollars.
Big G authorized it. One mil in return for thirty? It was a no-brainer. More than the money, he wanted to lay his hands on Cezar and that bitch who had taken away his freedom.
The contact revealed that Cezar was now one Herb Parker, living in Damascus with his family and had quit the old ways.
Big G ordered his men to look into Parker and they dutifully reported that the timeline fit. Parker and his family were the right age.
They smuggled photographs into the prison and they were the clincher. Parker looked like Cezar. His wife looked like the bitch. That was enough for Big G.
He ordered the hit and, when his men reported that Cezar and his family had died, Big G closed his eyes for a moment.
They flashed open the next second when his man said they hadn’t recovered the money.
Big G’s eyes riddled the man in front of him and for a moment he was tempted to snap the criminal’s scrawny neck.
His hood must have sensed his life was in danger for he spoke rapidly. Cezar had mentioned a name. He had said that person would have the money.
That man’s name was Zebadiah Carter.
Big G tried to place the man. Nope, he hadn’t heard of him.
‘Find him. Find my money. Then kill him. Slowly.’ He ordered and exited the cell.
He walked down the prison corridor enjoying the silence that fell when he approached.
Everyone feared him. Now this man, Carter, would feel his wrath.
Chapter 2
The killing made national headlines for a day and then politicians and vacuous celebrities took over the media.
In Washington D.C., a smartly-dressed man and woman sat opposite a grim faced elderly man.
The three of them didn’t exchange words till an aide had served coffee and had departed silently. Both men had short hair, the older man’s was streaked with grey, while the younger’s black hair shone in the light. The woman had a ponytail that swung slightly whenever her body moved.
‘Tell me you have something,’ Bob Pierce, Deputy Director of the FBI glared at his agents.
Mark Kowalski looked at Sarah Burke, the senior agent of the two, whose face wore a frustrated expression. ‘We haven’t made much progress, sir. We traced the plates of the car that was seen outside their home. It was stolen in New Jersey from a drugstore parking lot. No one knows who stole it. There are no prints at the Parker residence. No trace evidence. No one saw anything, except the neighbor who noticed the out-of-state car and reported it.’
She stopped talking when Pierce looked away and trained his glare on the darkened windows that looked out on the street.
The FBI had gotten involved when the New Jersey plated car had been reported. Kowalski and Burke, part of a crack FBI team, had flown in with the rest of their crew and had taken over from the local and state police. Their investigation had hit a brick wall when they had found there was little evidence to process.
The national press might have forgotten the murders, but the state’s media hadn’t. The calls to the FBI Director came regularly from the Virginia Governor’s office, once the Feds took over the investigation.
The state’s two U.S. Senators and eleven Congressmen piled on the pressure, and three months from the killing, Pierce called in the two agents. To discuss the murder, his assistant had told the agents, but they all knew it was to let them know the heat he was feeling.
Burke and Kowalski left his office an hour later, headed to the nearest coffee shop where the male agent ordered an extra large drink and downed it rapidly. Burke smiled slightly when he put down his mug.
‘Pierce was in a good mood.’
The smile broke into a chuckle at Kowalski’s incredulous look. ‘That was just his bark. You haven’t seen him bite.’
Burke, born and grown up in the Bronx, came from a law enforcement family. Her father rode a patrol car in New York; her grandfather had been a beat cop, her mother worked at the NYPD’s call center. The NYPD had been a natural home for her, where she too had started out in a patrol car.
Her intelligence, hard work, and ambition secured her the rank of detective first grade, which was when she had applied to the FBI. She passed her training at Quantico with flying colors and came to the attention of the Deputy Director who was putting together his task force, an elite team of investigators,
Pierce monitored her career for three years and when she kept acing all her cases, invited her to head the unit. He broke protocol in doing so, rubbed several egos the wrong way, but he trusted his instincts. In the four years that Sarah Burke had headed the task force, she had never let him down.
Till The Parker Murders, as the state media had taken to calling the case.
Kowalski, a lawyer by qualification, had joined the FBI as a trainee agent and after his graduation, had joined the unit just a year back. He was bright, smart, and had serious potential; which explained why he was being mentored by Burke.
He wiped his mouth with a
napkin and glanced at her curiously. ‘Why didn’t you tell him about the murders in New Jersey?’
A lone man had been murdered in New Jersey, a couple of weeks after the Damascus killings.
The killing attracted Burke’s interest when she noticed the mutilations on the body were similar to those on the Parkers. On top of that, the man was similar in looks to Hank Parker. She had flown to New Jersey and on studying the crime scene had taken the investigation under the FBI’s fold. Burke had juice; her track record ensured that.
‘We don’t have anything on it either, at least for the Deputy Director, at this moment.’ Her eyes smiled. ‘We could go back to him right now, however, if you want to experience his bite.’ Kowalski threw his hands up in surrender and the matter was settled.
Burke paid for their drinks, threw in a hefty tip and braced herself mentally before hitting the street. She had closed many difficult investigations, but this one had a different feel to it.
This one could get messy.
A second later, a bleak thought entered her mind. It has to go somewhere to get messy. That seems a remote possibility at the moment.
Sarah Burke didn’t know it but there was another person who had taken an interest in her investigation.
Zeb Carter was in Libya, had been there for six months, when Hank was killed.
Zebadiah ‘Zeb’ Carter worked for a U.S. agency that no one knew of. The Agency was headed by a gray-eyed, icy cool woman who had risen to be its Director and who reported to only one person. The President of the United States.
The Agency took out terrorists, international war criminals, and those who trafficked in humans and drugs. It recovered missing nuclear and chemical weapons, neutralized despots and buried threats to the country’s security.
Its budget was hidden in a complex financial maze and Clare, the Director, held an insignificant position in those corridors of power that ran Washington D.C. Less than a handful of people knew of the Agency’s existence and even fewer knew Clare’s specific role.
Clare, wanting to reduce the Agency’s administrative footprint to near zero, had looked at several means and had discarded all of them. She had come across Zeb Carter while having dinner with a close friend of hers; she had initially thought the man lounging outside the restaurant was her friend’s boyfriend.
The man was clean-shaven, lean, a shade over six feet and had brown hair that was cut short. His eyes were dark; he was casually dressed in a white shirt over blue jeans and looked unremarkable to the ordinary eye.
Clare’s experienced gaze noted the stillness in him, the people on the sidewalk parted in silent acknowledgement of him, and the liquid ease in his movements.
Her friend noticed her glance, looked in the man’s direction and laughed loudly when Clare asked if the man was her boyfriend.
‘Zeb is my brother. Major Zebadiah Carter, though he isn’t in the army anymore.’
‘He’s a mercenary, a private military contractor,’ she added when Clare crooked her brow inquisitively.
The laugh bubbled out again at the look on Clare’s face. ‘It isn’t the money he’s chasing. He doesn’t need more; he’s done very well for himself. That man outside is the most principled man you will ever come across. He’s also the most dangerous.’
Clare had known her friend, Cassandra, for decades. Having started off as roommates in Bryn Mawr, the two had pursued careers in the nation’s capital, and their bond had only grown stronger as their careers progressed. Clare knew Cassandra wasn’t given to hyperbole.
She checked out Major Zebadiah Carter’s file and found that it was redacted. Her security clearance gave her access to the unedited version, and on reading it, she knew she had found the first operative for the Agency in its new avatar.
Zeb Carter had been a Special Forces operative, had been to almost every hotspot in the world where he had worked on deep black missions. Awards and honors filled his file: Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross, Medal of Honor. From other countries too. Letters of commendations were part of the file. His commanding officers had been fulsome in their praise and had tried their best to get him to remain in the Army.
There was some detail on his career after leaving the Army. He had worked as a military contractor but only on those assignments that met his strict code. No missions that threatened national security. No war on women or children.
After a few years as a mercenary, he had set up a security consulting business in New York that advised corporations, entrepreneurs and celebrities. She looked for, and found details of his family, and exhaled slowly when she read them.
Major Zebadiah Carter was a loner. He hadn’t always been so.
She called a few Pentagon generals and all of them had nothing but praise for him. She had already made her mind up to contact Zeb; however, she waited to have lunch with one last general.
General Daniel Klouse was no ordinary general; he was the National Security Advisor to the President. He knew of the Agency’s existence and supported Clare in the rare political battles she had to fight. His bushy eyebrows had come together when she asked him about Zeb.
‘Are you seeking him or is he after you?’
He smiled grimly when she paused. ‘It makes a difference. If he’s after you, nothing can save you. Nothing.’
She looked in the eyes of one of the most powerful men in the country and believed him.
She called Zeb Carter the next day and made him an offer. He heard her out politely and to her surprise, turned her down.
He then made a counter offer – he would continue working in his security consulting business, but only as a cover. In reality the Agency would be his employer, but this disguise would give her the small footprint she desired, as well as deniability. He would hire other mercenaries to form the rest of his crew; again, all of them would be his firm’s employees.
He and his crew would be free to take on other assignments on the understanding that the Agency’s missions came first and all such assignments would be vetted by Clare.
He then presented Broker to her.
Broker, an ex-Ranger, was an intelligence analyst who had worked in the Army; his smarts and lateral thinking had brought him to the notice of those who made decisions. He had risen relatively fast and high in the Army, but its rules had finally stifled him and he had left to set up his own intelligence business.
That business had flourished; it had analysts all over the world who submitted daily reports to Werner, a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence program that ran in Zeb’s office in New York.
Werner collated the analysts’ reports, overlaid them with the data it had mined from the internet, and sent out briefs to Broker’s clients the world over. The clients included global companies, national governments, politicians, several national and international police forces and government intelligence organizations.
Clare ran Broker past the NSA and the Pentagon; both organizations and several generals rated him highly. She cleared his appointment. By now she knew how Zeb worked and had begun to trust him implicitly.
Zeb came back to her with a list of names, his crew. She went through their files and hid a smile of satisfaction.
All of them had been some of the best operatives while in the Army; now they freelanced in the private sector. Bwana, Roger, Bear, and Chloe were the initial recruits, all of them ex-Special Forces except Chloe who had been with the 82nd Airborne.
Beth and Meghan Peterson, twins, had joined this initial team, later on. The twins, originally businesswomen from Boston, had been rescued by Zeb from a gang of assassins in an earlier mission. They had gravitated toward the quiet man, their savior, and had requested to join his team.
Zeb had refused point blank. The Agency was no place for the twins.
The Petersons changed tack. They badgered Broker till they broke his resistance and got him to convince Zeb; they then relocated to New York and now ran the operations for the Agency.
Broker, in his late fortie
s, was the oldest of them, but he was in good shape and with his looks, passed for a decade younger.
The twins, in their late twenties, were the youngest. The rest of them were in their late thirties.
Zeb was their leader, Broker the second in command, but they didn’t have a real hierarchy.
The eight of them worked as one, a smoothly functioning unit that the President had once jestingly called, Clare’s Warriors.
The name stuck.
Chapter 3
At the moment Hank died, Zeb had been urging his goats, fifty of them, to cross a dry wadi in northeast Libya.
The other side of the wadi had a few sparse bushes, on which the animals could feed, and a well from which they could drink.
It was midday, the sun beat down on them mercilessly, and his goats were cranky and stubborn, but he was patient.
He clicked his tongue, urged the leaders to pick up the pace and with a few flicks of the stick in his hand, the herd moved slowly, trotting across the softer bed of the wadi.
Nothing else moved in the gorge where he was, but for him and his animals.
The gorge was part of the Akhdar Mountains, also known as the Green Mountains, that rose gradually from the surrounding flat land in Libya and became part of the Jabal al Akhdar plateau that, at its highest point, was nearly three thousand feet above sea level.
The mountains received a fair amount of rainfall compared to the rest of the country and livestock herding was commonplace.
There was limited agriculture; farms that produced olives, grapes, and almonds. Such farming had received a boost from better irrigation; but it was camel, goat, and sheep herds that were most commonly seen in the mountains.
Bayda was the nearest city where the animals would be sold.
It was the capital of the mountainous district, and had all the trappings of a commercial city, but it was caught in a war between ISIS, which had a hold in parts of the country, and the various Libyan militias opposing it.
