Deadline

by L. T. Ryan

  “I’m not finding a whole lot,” Sasha said, looking up at Bear. The soft light from the laptop screen bathed her face in light blue.

  “Try searching for her sister, Birgit. Hell, while you’re at it, let’s see what Awad is up to today.”

  Sasha nodded and shifted her gaze back to her work.

  Bear heard his phone ringing from the other room. He walked over to it and snatched it up before it would have diverted to a voicemail box that he had no plans on ever accessing. The number on the screen didn’t register, and he didn’t think it belonged to Frank. Only a few people had access to the line. Perhaps Jack had fallen into trouble and was calling from a different phone.

  “Yeah?” Bear said.

  “Riley?” The man’s voice was distorted by static.

  “Who is this?”

  “Riley, if you can hear me, get the hell out of there now.”

  CHAPTER 41

  The black luxury sedan raced toward me. Sunlight reflected off the windshield, making it impossible for me to get a look at the driver and whether there were passengers. I took a deep breath in an effort to calm myself. There were more than a dozen possible reasons for someone to haul ass down a narrow back alley in a hundred thousand dollar Mercedes.

  I couldn’t think of one at that moment, though.

  I slammed my door shut and started the BMW, threw the shifter into reverse and spun the wheel so I would wind up face-to-face with the S550. Never made it that far, though. The driver of the other vehicle slammed on his brakes. The sound of his tires grating against the asphalt penetrated the cabin of the BMW. I glanced through the passenger window and saw the Mercedes’ front doors whip open.

  I never saw or heard the vehicle that crashed into the back of mine. The impact shoved me toward the center console where my hip and side took the brunt of the impact. A moment later I was slingshotted in the other direction. My head cracked against the driver’s window. The shattered glass sprinkled the pavement outside. The cooled steering wheel made a good resting spot for my forehead as I grimaced against the throbbing pain that stretched from my temple to the base of my skull.

  Outside there were at least two men yelling at each other from either side of the BMW. They weren’t shouts of anger. One was giving directions, the other confirming.

  The driver’s side door groaned as someone tried to pull it open. When they hit the BMW I assumed the intent was to spin the vehicle, leaving me disoriented while they flooded me with chaos. Instead the driver had hit too close to the center, leaving the frame bent and the door stuck.

  The guy reached in and grabbed hold of me. I worked my hand to the seat belt release and pushed the button. The metal buckle made a decent weapon. Whipped my arm and flung the buckle in this direction. It wouldn’t have done much if it hit him, but his instincts took over anyway and he flinched back. During the reprieve I managed to pull my pistol free. He saw the weapon come over the door ledge and dove to the ground.

  Glass imploded from the passenger side of the vehicle and bounced off me. I ducked forward, brought my face around to catch a glimpse of what had happened. Someone had shot the window at an angle. Not only was the side window shattered, a chunk of the windshield was as well, and the area surrounding it fractured in a spider web pattern.

  I aimed in the direction of the shot, but could not pinpoint the location of the shooter.

  “We’ve got you surrounded,” the guy outside my door said. I tried to place his accent. It made my head hurt worse.

  I grabbed the handle, pulled, and drove my shoulder against the door. It didn’t budge.

  The rear window exploded. The bullet whizzed past close enough I swear I saw it spinning. It buried in the dash. These bastards were crazy. They had to know that once the bullet hit the first surface anything could happen. After the first impact, the trajectory of the bullet would be unknown.

  “The next one might split your skull,” the guy said. Where the hell was he from? It wasn’t German or Dutch. “Throw your weapon out the window. We just want to talk to you.”

  Yeah, that was likely. I’d used that line and then shot a man in the back of the head before.

  The rear window made a sound like dull wind chimes as someone quickly broke away the remaining glass. I angled my arm backward and shot full well knowing by looking at the rearview there wasn’t a target in sight.

  “That’s going to get you killed,” the man yelled.

  I stuck the pistol out of the window and pointed it down and fired.

  The man scurried to his feet. The soles of his shoes dug in and scattered the gravel as he sprinted away. Shots rang out like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Each tire was shot out, as were the remaining windows. Bullets slammed into the side of the car, each one slapping it with a sickening thud. I covered my head and waited for the burn, but was never hit.

  At least not by a round.

  The fist that slammed into the side of my head was gloved. The loose, rough stitching cut into my cheek. Warm blood seeped out of the wound. The assailant took another swing, hitting me in roughly the same spot as where I’d slammed into the glass that used to adorn the driver’s side window.

  For a moment everything went black and I felt my body slumping. Then I was rising. Tiny shards of glass cut my back, buttocks, and thighs as they dragged me out of the BMW. They could’ve used the passenger door since the driver’s didn’t work. Guess that would’ve been too easy. And less painful. Considering the volley of fire they sent my way, I figured I must have managed to piss them off.

  But I was still alive.

  There had to be a reason for that.

  By the time they dropped me on the ground, I had recovered enough that only the edges of my vision were dimmed. I groaned for their benefit as I pulled my elbows tight. There were four boots. Two black, two brown. They would’ve been better off using them against my head than planting them flatfooted on the ground.

  Summoning every ounce of fight I had in me, I launched myself headfirst like a reckless defensive tackle into the guy directly in front of me. The top of my skull slammed into his groin. He half-screamed, half-cried a second after impact. I figured by that time his nuts were considerably closer to his throat than they had been since birth. I pushed through until I was on my feet and he was on the ground. His handgun fell and skated across the asphalt out of reach.

  I moved for the weapon.

  The other guy jumped on my back and we both went down. I managed to get my right arm under my face before it hit the street. The ground shredded my new shirt. And my wrist. The man flung his arm around me and tried to wrap it around my throat. I tucked my chin to my chest, rose up, then pitched forward quickly while reaching back and grabbing hold of anything I could grasp. The man flew over my shoulder, headfirst into the street. I crawled on top of him. He flung his elbows back but only managed to connect with my upper arms. I worked my right arm under his chin and around his head. He started to buck against me. I flattened out and secured the chokehold with my left arm, pushing against the back of his head.

  Perhaps it was the repeated blows to my head, but I found myself locked in tunnel vision. I only cared about this guy, forgetting that there were others out there. I forced myself to focus on the surrounding area, heard the voices of a man and a woman. Footsteps pounded the ground. Gravel skated along the asphalt. I let go of my man and hopped off his back.

  When they struck it wasn’t violent or even all that hard of a blow. It didn’t have to be if the assailant knew what he or she was doing.

  The man came up behind me and delivered a strike to my kidney. I bent to the side with plans to roll through and deliver an upper cut to his chin. All I did was play right into his plan. One which required no counterstrike. He had his hand around my head in no time and I sucked in the chemical-laden white cloth.

  Fire ripped through my mouth, nostrils and throat. The world turned into a fishbowl. My eyes focused and unfocused as things grew nearer and then fled away from me.
>
  The guy let me go. No surprise. It wasn’t like I was going to get far.

  Run, I commanded my legs. They defied me.

  I thought I heard sirens, but my assailants made no mention of them. The men I’d beaten rose. I tried to walk away from them. In reality, I stumbled forward then sideways a couple steps and dropped to a knee. My other knee hit the ground. I managed a few more inches on my knees before I fell forward.

  At one time I was practically immune to the drug and others like it. We drilled regularly, seeing how long we could go before the effects would take us down. In the end we all went down, but the longer it took for the chemicals to work their magic, the more damage we could do. In simulation and real life practice I had managed to defeat my would-be-captors every time.

  But that was a long time ago. Now I was closer to mortal than I’d ever been. Partly age. Partly my desire to leave a life that refused to release me.

  If I made it through this, I decided, I would flip the leaf back over and return to my old ways.

  Someone grabbed hold of me, hoisted me up and dropped me on my back. I stared up at a slender pair of long legs clad in a skirt. Peeking out of the bottom of the blue fabric was half of a tattoo that I instantly recognized. Before my vision failed me, I glanced up and saw her dark mane tussling about in the breeze.

  “Ahlberg,” I mouthed.

  “Sleep well, Mr. Noble,” she said.

  CHAPTER 42

  “Now, Riley,” Brandon yelled into the phone. “Get out of there now!”

  There was no answer from the man on the other end of the line. He thought he heard Bear say something at one point, but the connection sounded like it was dead from the moment he pressed send.

  Brandon’s entire office was offline. The manufacturer names bounced across the screens of the monitors and televisions.

  The footsteps upstairs came and went. It was impossible to tell how many there were, but so far the access door had not been breached.

  Brandon cursed himself for acting in such a sloppy manner. Why have a state of the art security system installed if he wasn’t even going to bother monitoring the feeds? At least he would have had warning that the men had arrived. It might not have spared him, but he could have triggered the systems to back up all data and then destroy themselves. The list of those who would benefit from access to his files was sizable. From terrorist cells to foreign governments to corporations, analysts would have a field day with all the data Brandon had collected over the years.

  But it wasn’t a terrorist or secret agent from China or North Korea in his house. This threat was homegrown.

  Who was leading it?

  The stomps simmered to a shuffle directly overhead. Brandon closed his eyes and honed in on the sounds around him. Without the whirring of the computer fans he was able to hear the muffled voices. The floor was too thick to decipher their words, though.

  He grabbed his cell phone and dialed Jack’s number again. “Come on, man,” he whispered into the mouthpiece. The line rang repeatedly but Noble never answered. Brandon hung up and dialed Bear. The result was same.

  What else could he do?

  Brandon backed his chair up, spun, and went to the bookcase positioned underneath the television on the rear wall. He pulled out a thick volume with a barely-legible title on a worn red spine. He flipped the book upside down and placed his thumb on the biometric scanner. The lock clicked, allowing Brandon to open it and retrieve the Springfield Armory XD-S pistol. His hand shook as he practiced taking aim at his reflection in the plasma. Beads of sweat coated his forehead. He brushed aside his nervousness, telling himself that it didn’t matter how steady his shot was. If they made it through the door, he’d unload all but one bullet from the nine-round magazine.

  All the intelligence in the world did them no good if they couldn’t decipher it. That last bullet would protect the information by destroying the cipher.

  Brandon turned the pistol on himself and imagined what it would be like in the moment he pulled the trigger.

  A thought occurred to him at that second. He had provided Jack with a dial around number to reach Frank Skinner.

  What the hell was the number?

  Brandon spun one hundred eighty degrees in his chair and faced the rounded entryway into his office. A pair of boots pounded against the floor above, walking four or five feet in one direction, then going back the other way. Each step was deliberate. The person paced non-stop. There was no talking now. At least not loud enough for Brandon to hear.

  He held the phone in front of him and tried recalling the sequence of digits he had provided to Jack. Two deep breaths steadied his rapid heart rate. One at a time he punched in the numbers. He placed the phone to his ear and heard the distinct international ring tone.

  The footsteps above him stopped. The call was answered. The voice above spoke, muffled.

  But Brandon heard it clear in his ear.

  “Jack?” the man said. “Where the hell are you?”

  Brandon ended the call amid a flurry of activity in the room above him. He had a hunch that the men at his house were from the Agency, but he sure as hell didn’t expect it to be Frank Skinner and his SOG guys who had hacked into his system.

  What if it wasn’t Frank who had done it, though?

  Scenarios raced through his mind. Perhaps Skinner got wind of what was going down and managed to arrive at Brandon’s house first to protect him. After all, a talented enough hacker could have performed all the computer tasks from a shack in rural China. They didn’t have to be outside his northern Virginia home for the takedown.

  Brandon was an asset to the Agency. There was no way anyone had green-lighted his termination.

  Of course, Frank Skinner never worked within the framework of the rules.

  Brandon rubbed his eyes and thought of Kimberlee. When she brought up the idea of them getting together, her idea was for them to travel to the Virgin Islands. The trip would have been this week. But he had insisted that they wait another month. It’d be easier to travel then, considering they were both wheelchair bound. The fewer tourists, the better. And the height of hurricane season was best for island travel. At least he’d read online that was the case.

  Brandon punched in her number and stared at the ten digits. The hell would he tell her? He brought the phone up to his mouth and whispered I love you to the contact picture that had popped up. Then he hit the home key, clearing her number off his screen.

  He could only imagine what had made the scraping sound outside his office. Possibly a battering ram. The door banged and crunched and bent and bowed. It was ten inches thick and they were dismantling it like it was made of construction paper. The hinges busted off and skated across the floor. The door pushed in six inches or so. He saw black-gloved hands sticking through the crevice. The room went dark. Red emergency lighting clicked on followed by soft whites along the edge of the floor and under his desk.

  A head clad in a ski-mask and goggles poked through. Looked like an old G.I. Joe figure. The hell was his name?

  Snakeeyes.

  Fucking Snakeeyes is gonna take me out.

  Brandon’s lungs spasmed. He was beyond controlling his breath at this point. Air rushed in through his mouth and nose and was lost. He managed to spit some out. Drew a little more in. It was pointless. Snakeeyes shouted and the door fell forward, clipping his desk and sending his three main monitors crashing over, screens shattered. They were over a thousand dollars each.

  Assholes.

  Brandon lifted his arm and took aim at the door, unleashing a volley of 9mm ammunition at the men standing there. Two fell back into the arms of the others. The men repositioned out of sight. Brandon continued shooting until all that happened when he squeezed the trigger was an audible click.

  Shit.

  He’d forgotten to save one bullet for himself.

  Three men entered the room with their HK-7s in the ready position. One took aim at Brandon while the other two rounded his desk and calle
d out in turn that the room was clear. The guy in the middle stepped aside and Brandon saw a man he never thought he’d meet in person.

  “Skinner.”

  CHAPTER 43

  The line went dead and Bear set the phone down and glanced around the room. The static on the line had made it difficult to determine who had been on the other end, but if he had to put money on it, it was Brandon. And that was enough reason to send him into a hyper-alert state.

  “Where are you going?” Sasha asked.

  Bear said nothing in return as he left the room and headed down the corridor that led to the front entryway. He took up next to a window and scanned the driveway leading to the house. There was no one out front. The surrounding yard was green and lush and deserted except for a few birds and rabbits feasting on the grass.

  “I think I’ve found something on Ahlberg,” Sasha called out.

  He turned from the door to make his way back to the kitchen. A burst of light in his peripheral beyond the front gate gave him reason to pause. Had he really seen it? The doctors had said he might encounter such things as a result of his headaches. Then again, it could have been a chrome side mirror on an approaching vehicle. Another glance through the window revealed nothing new.

  “Riley, you have to come see this,” she said. “Apparently Awad has been moving a lot of money around and selling off some of his assets.”

  Bear lingered at the window for a few seconds more, allowing his unfocused gaze to stretch out over the yard. The edges of his vision wavered. He’d been told that wasn’t a good thing and it, too, was related. But his vision had been like that for years, so he paid no attention to it.

  “Bloody hell,” Sasha said. “Birgit Ahlberg liquidated all of her assets three weeks ago. Everything.” And a few seconds later. “Where the hell are you?”

  He returned to the kitchen and flipped his phone over and glanced at the cracked screen. No new calls.

  “Did you hear me?” she said.