The Alex Troutt Thrillers: Books 1-3 (Redemption Thriller Series Box Set)

by John W. Mefford

  “The cross Jeffrey was wearing the day he died. I’ve had it all these years. It’s given me strength and clarity when I needed it. I want you to have it.”

  Dermot clutched the cross in his hand, and Patrick watched a wave of emotion engulf his little brother. He knew Dermot’s passionate reaction would only solidify his commitment.

  Dermot cleared his throat. “Thank you, big brother. This means a lot to me.”

  “Just remember to say a prayer beforehand, and everything will work out the way it’s meant to be.”

  Dermot took a step onto the porch, then pulled back, turned and hugged his brother one more time. Then he whispered in his ear, “If we don’t stand for something, we will fall for anything.”

  “Indeed, little brother.”

  Patrick closed the front door feeling like he’d just run a marathon. Dealing with his brother, and all of his inhibitions and issues, always sapped his energy. But he was almost certain Dermot wouldn’t let him down—wouldn’t let down the memory of Jeffrey.

  Once the deed was done, there could be no more do-overs. He chuckled out loud, clapping his hands. “No more Mulligans.”

  9

  Circling the block for the fifth time, I finally spotted the blue Malibu with streaks of gray mud down the side. Jerry’s car. It was parked just outside of Finnegan’s Tavern in the heart of Southie, one of the roughest sections in Boston. Where Jerry had suffered and survived a dangerous childhood and finally grew up to become the man he was today—a high-ranking official with the FBI.

  Just saying FBI and Southie in the same sentence would usually draw a second look at the office. The unlikely pairing of the Bureau and the blue-collar town that had produced more than enough wise guys, goes back decades to when a little-known local thug named Whitey Bulger used the FBI like his bitch. With the FBI frothing at the mouth to harness the runaway Italian organized crime outfit, they took on Bulger as an informant, but the only thing he gave the Bureau in return was hot air. Bulger initially manipulated a couple of agents, but over time, he used influence and intimidation to secure his place as the most dangerous criminal to ever walk the streets of Boston. And this went on for years.

  With his Southie upbringing, for Jerry to ascend through the ranks into his current position showed his resilience—even though I was certain no one said anything outwardly. Boston might be strong, and all that implied, but inside the bowels of the city I knew as much as anyone that Boston had its own set of warts. Some might even call it a bad case of herpes.

  I chuckled at my description of my adopted hometown as I searched for the turn signal on my silver Ford Focus.

  “There it is,” I said, flipping the lever upward, and the car’s right blinkers flashed red.

  Trading in my Impala earlier in the day was one of several steps I’d taken to push forward the internal investigation into Jerry. But it wasn’t the boldest, by far.

  I heard loud voices pulling up behind me. I turned to look over my shoulder and found three guys strutting down the sidewalk. Just then, one in a fatigue shirt and baggie sweatpants saw me looking at him, and out of nowhere, he brought a chain out from behind his back and thrashed it against the side of the Focus.

  “You son of a…” I threw the gearshift into park and jumped out of the car.

  “Whatcha gonna do, bitch?” The man splayed his arms wide, then pointed a finger at me as he towered over the car.

  I had one hand on the grip of my gun at my waist and the other on my badge. The two other guys flipped their caps around and produced more chains.

  “The chain gang, I get it,” I said, my head on a swivel to ensure no one was sneaking up behind me.

  “What is this bitch saying?” Baggy Sweats looked like his eyes might bulge out.

  “I’m saying it’s appropriate that each one of you is carrying chains because of the long-held belief that prisoners are sometimes called the chain gang. All we really need to do is tie those chains of yours to your ankles, and we’ve got a chain gang.”

  The three of them looked at each other with a mixture of bewilderment and seething anger. They all turned back to face me, revealing their teeth while swinging their chains.

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” I said, and suddenly their chains stopped swinging. “I’m guessing you guys are used to doing something else when you grab your ankles. My bad.”

  Three growls and the hounds started to circle the car. For just a moment I considered going through the motion of arresting them, calling in a backup to haul them off to jail. But it would only detour my goal for the evening. And I knew the punks would be back on the street harassing someone within forty-eight hours.

  “Stop where you are.”

  Two of the jerks stopped, while Baggy Sweats kept running his mouth. “I ain’t listening to no bitch-ass woman. Fuck that. I’m going to knock out your teeth so you’ll shut your trap for good.”

  I pulled out my Glock and held it like a torch. “I say it’s time for you to go home and play a nice game of cards. Unless you want me to plant a bullet in yo ass,” I said, matching his attitude.

  Stepping a foot in a pothole, Baggy Sweats tripped while trying to backpedal. “Uh, whatever you say, lady.”

  With three sets of eyes on me and my .40 caliber pistol, Baggy Sweats ran right into his buddies. “Where did you come from, lady?” Baggy Sweats asked as he pushed through his friends.

  “A galaxy far, far away.”

  “Crazy bitch,” one of them said.

  With my adrenaline redlining, I took a step in their direction, eager to show them how crazy I could be.

  I forced out a breath. “Not the right time, Alex,” I muttered to myself as I watched them quickly disappear down the block.

  Three quick horn honks and I almost jumped out of my skin. Turning behind me, I saw a wrinkled-face man with little hair giving me the scowl while pointing at the light.

  “See it,” I shouted, then got into my car and drove off.

  Allowing my pulse to retreat, I took another loop around the block, then tucked the Focus in between an old Camaro and a Toyota Tercel, both of which looked like they had about four paint jobs.

  Slouching in my seat, a light drizzle coated the windows, which, along with the darkness and poor street lighting, helped conceal my presence. A flickering green light from the Finnegan’s Tavern sign half a block on the other side of the street drew my eye. A couple of guys lumbered out of the bar, and I quickly craned my neck over the steering wheel.

  Didn’t recognize either one. I pulled out my cell phone and tapped a new app I’d just downloaded earlier in the day. After typing in my password, I began to hear faint voices. I held up my phone as if it were some type of old-fashioned antenna that would magically provide me clearer reception. No such luck, but I wasn’t surprised.

  Earlier in the day, while eating a slice of pizza over lunch with Jerry, I’d slipped a listening and tracking chip under the collar of his leather jacket he’d draped over his chair when he went to the restroom. That had been my bold move. Or maybe it felt so bold just because I’d taken action at the moment he walked away without thinking what I was doing to my boss…my friend.

  “No choice,” I said out loud in the chilly car. Given the signs from Holt, if I didn’t prove that Jerry wasn’t involved in any type of terrorist plot, I’d be very wary that the FBI would find a reason to prosecute him or, at the least, leak the accusations to the public through the media. His reputation would be ruined and his career with the Bureau over.

  Jerry had come from nothing to get where he was. I couldn’t imagine why Jerry would jeopardize that success, or for what cause. It didn’t fit the Jerry I knew. Then, despite my history with the SSA, why did I also feel a seed of doubt?

  I focused on the muffled voices coming through the earbud, knowing Jerry was inside the tavern, purportedly catching up with some old buddies over a beer or two, or maybe three.

  Releasing a breath, I calmed my nerves and thought back to a conversation I
had earlier in the day.

  ***

  Whitehouse, my go-to guy for anything I needed on the Jerry investigation, had set me up on a call with my MI6 counterpart, Lee Dawson. Once the line was secured, Dawson’s British accent was unmistakable, but so was his intellect and charming wit.

  “How long have you been with MI6?”

  “Oh, this is an interview, is it?” he said.

  “Didn’t mean to offend. Just thought I’d open our conversation with something other than what the hell are you doing implicating my boss in a terrorist plot?”

  “I see what you’re saying. Twelve years and counting. I think you Americans would call me a lifer by now.”

  I offered a disarming chuckle. “You might say the same about me, although this investigation might be very career limiting if Jerry finds out I’m spying on him and he turns out to be innocent. And let me be transparent with my thoughts on this investigation…something I shared with the assistant director. I believe Jerry is innocent until proven otherwise. And ‘otherwise’ to me doesn’t involve theories and assumptions.”

  “There you go. If he finds out. Because if he’s not innocent, then you have nothing to worry about, right?”

  I knew Dawson hadn’t meant it as a dig, but it still didn’t settle well. I’d already crossed the line of trust with Jerry. Now, I was hovering near the threshold of outright betrayal.

  “Listen, Alex, I don’t envy your position one bit. If I was told that my boss had been linked to shadowy, dangerous people, I’d be absolutely gobsmacked.”

  I pulled the phone away from my ear. “Did I lose you for a second? Not sure I caught that last part.”

  He snorted out a couple of chuckles. “Sorry, it’s a British term. Gobsmacked. I’d be shocked as hell if my boss—who happens to be seven months pregnant with twins—was working as a mole for some type of terrorist group.”

  A mole. I hadn’t gone there, to label Jerry, or his possible role in whatever crazy game was being played out. That thought cranked the mental gears.

  “So, Agent Dawson, can you—”

  “Please call me Lee. I’m already calling you Alex. It makes everything less like a military operation.”

  A pause, then I heard him say, “Get along now. You can’t be eating my fake plants.”

  I spoke up. “I thought we were the only ones on the line or in our respective rooms.”

  He released a chuckling sigh. “I’ll never be rid of Prancer.”

  “As in the reindeer who flies from rooftop to rooftop pulling Santa and millions of presents?”

  “Oh, no. Sorry. I meant Prancer my little feline roommate for the last seven years. Actually, it’s more like I’m his roommate. He makes all the rules, and I try to keep up.”

  “Ah. I can identify. What kind of cat is he?”

  “Persian. Blue eyes and all.”

  A picture came to mind, actually a clip of a man with a scarred eye stroking such a cat.

  “From Russia with Love,” I said, reciting the name of the James Bond movie.

  “Spot-on, Alex. A Bond fan, I can see.”

  “Isn’t your arrangement a bit stereotypical, Lee? A British agent with a Persian blue-eyed cat. You’re too much.”

  He coughed a couple of times, then cleared his throat. “It gets even better. The character who ran SPECTRE and was seen stroking the cat was named Blofeld.”

  “Sounds like he should run for office,” I said with a giggle before I finished the words.

  “You’re quick on the trigger,” he said. “But the funny part is that the chap who played Blofeld—his name was Dawson.”

  “First name Lee?”

  “Anthony, sorry. From the sound of it, you have a cat?”

  “His name is Pumpkin because he’s round and orange, but he’s eighty percent dog.”

  “My Prancer might be all cat, but he’s a little snob, that’s what he is.”

  I sat back in my kitchen chair and sipped from a mug of hot coffee, my shoulders and neck not as tense as when I started the call. And it was all very unexpected. Mr. Dawson, the MI6 agent, had a disarming attraction about him. But I knew we couldn’t chitchat all day about our feline woes.

  “Okay, Lee. Time to get down to brass tacks.”

  “Ouch. Sounds utterly painful. American figure of speech, I take it?”

  “Yes. It means we have to discuss the difficult topic.”

  I could hear a long exhale.

  “All right, Alex. I think Prancer and I are ready for the grilling. Please, no waterboarding.”

  I released my own snort. “British sarcasm. I could probably offer you a snide reply, but I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  He laughed again. We sounded like long-lost friends who’d just reconnected. The timing, and the easy rapport, was nothing short of surreal. It had been so long since I felt this relaxed and engaged with another man—albeit over a phone where the man was a thousand miles away—I almost pinched myself to ensure I wasn’t daydreaming.

  But I knew this call wasn’t about making Alex feel alive and vibrant.

  “So, Lee, since I’m serious about clearing Jerry’s name, I need to ask you what you’ve learned about Ahmed Shaheen. If he’s the one person that somehow leads to umpteen conspiracy theories about Jerry and terrorist plots against the United States, then I need to know everything you know.”

  “Makes sense, Alex. So, we know Shaheen is a Kuwaiti national.”

  “Holt told me that much.”

  “Okay, just repeating what I know.” He paused, reading notes perhaps. “The French DGSE actually identified two additional suspects from the Paris terror attacks. Well, they actually never called them suspects, more like persons of interest.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It was a man and a woman. They’d been tracked back to a neighborhood called Molenbeek, in Belgium.”

  “A district in Brussels. We know about it all too well. Poverty, high unemployment, gangs, and a general environment ripe for radicals to recruit desperate young people.”

  “Exactly. Their connection to Molenbeek got everyone’s attention, but we had no hard evidence of their affiliation with the attacks or with ISIS. So we formed a joint task force and started tracking their movements.”

  “I’ve worked on a few so-called joint task forces. Do you find that your intelligence colleagues in other countries aren’t forthcoming with what they know? Hell, I’ve had that issue with fellow US agencies.”

  “At times, yes. But in this situation, the DGSE isn’t playing political games. They’re out for blood, and they don’t give a damn if it leads to the front door of the Saudi Arabian palace.”

  “I get it. So, how does Shaheen fit in here?”

  “The man and woman were spotted again coming out of a London hotel. We had audio surveillance on them, and the man was heard talking to a person named—”

  “Ahmed Shaheen.”

  “Now you’re following me.”

  I sipped from the mug, then said, “What were they talking about?”

  “That’s where it gets…complicated.”

  A prick at the base of my skull and I inched up in my chair. “How so?”

  Lee released a huff of breath. “The audio cut out for a few seconds. There are differing opinions within our tech team if it was a glitch in the system or someone had jammed the signal.”

  “Damn. So, do you really have anything?”

  “Nothing specific. I don’t have the transcript in front of me, but the dialogue seemed staged, as if a message was being relayed through their conversation.”

  “Does MI6 or DGSE know for what purpose?”

  “No one has been able to decipher the message yet. Which is why we’re tracking their every movement, hoping they’ll show their hand.”

  I replayed the last few seconds of our discussion. “So, Shaheen has been branded as a terrorist based on a single conversation? And with that, now Jerry has been accused of cavorting with a terrorist.”
<
br />   “There’s more.”

  Resting an elbow on the table, I rubbed my temple as a seed of discontent sprouted in my gut.

  “What? What do you think you have now?”

  He paused a second, then continued. “Once we started digging into Shaheen’s past, it only added to our suspicions of a pending terrorist attack, whether that be with the man and woman from Belgium or…”

  “You’re thinking Jerry.”

  “Possibly, yes,” he said in a subdued tone.

  “So, now we’re back to Shaheen.” I recalled the pictures Holt had shown me of Jerry standing next to the smaller Shaheen near one of the enormous support beams of the Eiffel Tower. “He’s certainly not very physically intimidating.”

  “Far from it. He’s very intelligent. Went to university here in London, and he’s quite cultured. Has traveled a great deal, including one trip across the pond to the States about three years ago.”

  “Where did he go here in the States?”

  “Flew into LaGuardia, out of Boston. Other than that, he kept a low profile while there.”

  I could feel tension returning to my neck area, and I wrapped my arm over my shoulder and tried to rub out the growing knot. It wasn’t working very well.

  “So you, Holt, everyone, is assuming Shaheen has known Jerry since at least his trip to the States three years ago.”

  “I can’t say what the FBI assistant director is thinking. We’re not Snapchat pals, or whatever you call it.”

  My fingers finally found the center of the knot, and I kneaded like a crazy woman. It just wasn’t the same as having someone else do it.

  “Anything else on Shaheen?”

  “Mainly it’s his itinerary that gets our attention. Recently, maybe the last eight to ten months, he’s been traveling, even more than usual.”

  “Do share.” My eyes scanned the kitchen, looking for something to write on. Spotting a folder on the bar, I lifted from my seat and saw that it was full of pamphlets Ezzy had brought home from her doctor’s visit, including one that highlighted the lead surgeon at the heart facility she visited. Had a full bio on him and a picture of the well-coiffed, silver-haired man leaning against a red foreign sports car. I walked over to the sink and glanced into the backyard. The trees bristled in the wind, as a few escaping rays of sun created a dancing shadow routine on the mostly dormant grass.