Dead Drop

by Marc Cameron

  Also by Marc Cameron

  Field of Fire

  Brute Force

  Day Zero

  Time of Attack

  State of Emergency

  Act of Terror

  National Security

  Dead Drop

  A JERICHO QUINN THRILLER NOVELLA

  Marc Cameron

  PINNACLE E-BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by Marc Cameron

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Teaser chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PINNACLE E-BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 Marc Cameron

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  First electronic edition: July 2017

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4165-7

  I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me.

  —ARCHILOCHUS, 650 B.C.

  Prologue

  Virginia

  The line to nineteen-year-old Mukhtar Tahir’s concession stand grew longer with each passing minute, as if someone had leaked an awful rumor that the world was running out of shaved ice. Buccaneer Beach Thrill Park was pirate themed, and like most of the other buildings, the ice stand was built to look like the hull of a wooden ship, with cartoonish lines and white sails of carefully tattered canvas.

  Handing two drippy paper cones through the large cannon port in the side of the ship’s hull, Mukhtar used his forearm to push the stupid black tricorne hat out of his eyes for the tenth time in as many minutes and caught a glimpse of a pretty twentysomething named Fadila. She must have been on a break, because she loitered on the oak-lined path behind the funnel cake shack. Her long hair hung loose around smallish shoulders and even from half a block away he could see it shimmering blue-black in what was left of the evening sun.

  Like Mukhtar, Fadila wore the black uniform polo shirt and khaki shorts of a park employee. She was also from Iraq—from Fallujah, the scene of some of the most intense fighting. Mukhtar thought she must have been very brave to make it out of such a horrible place alive. He was sure she was a virtuous girl, despite the fact that she exposed so much of her body wearing the park uniform. But her family was poor, just like Mukhtar’s, and this was a different world. They both needed this job.

  She kept looking over her shoulder, then up the path, as if planning a secret rendezvous. Fadila was assigned to work the smallest roller coaster on the amusements side of the park, which was always much less busy than the water park side. This was lucky, because that roller coaster was a lame ride anyway, with short lines that allowed her frequent breaks and time to loiter in the shadows.

  Mukhtar barely had time to use the restroom, much less attend any clandestine meetings. A shaved ice was included in the cost of each admission to Buccaneer Beach—and the roughly fifteen thousand patrons who showed up each day seemed determined to get their money’s worth. There were three stands that sold the sickeningly sweet treats, located strategically around the park. With so many customers, there was rarely a moment when Mukhtar wasn’t refilling syrups, ripping open supplies with his box cutter, or shaving ice. Like soldiers holding a beachhead in a video game, it was all he and the two girls he worked with could do to keep from getting overrun.

  His turn on the machine, Mukhtar held a flimsy paper cone under the ice chute and shoved back his pirate hat again, wishing he could throw the stupid thing into the bushes. His two coworkers, college girls from Virginia, actually looked good in their hats. But for Mukhtar, even the purple grackle hopping along the sidewalk with a French fry in its beak seemed to mock his cockeyed pirate hat with a hateful black glare.

  Mukhtar handed off the cone and craned his head out the cannon port so he could see behind the funnel cake shack. Fadila still stood there, alone. Mukhtar continued to fill paper cones with ice and began to fantasize that she was waiting to see him when he took a break. They’d spoken before, only briefly, but she had seemed nice, if a little intense. They had much in common, and it seemed destiny that they would connect sooner or later.

  Groaning, Mukhtar looked out the gun port at the endless line and shook his head. Some laughed among themselves, some chatted on mobile phones, others stood, drenched from their latest ride, swaying to the park’s swashbuckling music that had sounded cool the first two hours Mukhtar had worked there, but wore thin soon after that. He would gladly have paid ten times the cost of a shaved ice not to have to stand with so many people in wet bathing suits. He’d been exposed to more pallid, sweaty flesh over the last two weeks than any nineteen-year-old boy should have to witness in ten lifetimes.

  One eye on Fadila, he shaved up another cone of ice and handed it to a little girl in a dripping green swimsuit, giving her his best smile. He always took the time to smile at the customers. A few smiled back, some looked as if he had just threatened to hijack their airplane. Most ignored him completely.

  A wrinkled raisin of an older woman, tan as a mud brick, stomped and cursed when she got bubble gum instead of cotton candy flavoring on her shaved ice. Mukhtar forced another smile and tried to explain that those two flavors were exactly the same; only the colors differed. The woman screamed as if she’d just lost an appendage, demanding blue syrup as well as a full refund of the shaved ice portion of her admission ticket. Mukhtar gritted his teeth and gave her a blue ice, hoping it gave her a particularly bad brain freeze.

  He peeled off the clear plastic gloves and pitched them in an empty box at his feet. “I have to use the restroom,” he said. The two college girls rolled their eyes but didn’t say anything. Each of them had already been to the bathroom three times this shift.

  Mukhtar left his hat below the counter and made his way through the milling tourists toward the restrooms—by way of the path behind the funnel cake shop.

  The sun sank rapidly toward the top of the oak trees along the western wall, beyond the towering, twenty-one-story waterslide that drew tourists like flies to the two-hundred-acre park an hour from Washington, D.C.

  Mukhtar was still fifty feet from Fadila when he saw the othe
r boy approaching her through the crowd. It was Saleem, the new guy. His cheeks were hollow and pale and sweat beaded across his high forehead. Even in the late evening, the temperatures still hung above eighty degrees, but Saleem didn’t look hot. He looked ill. Dressed in the same black shirt and khaki shorts as every other park employee, Saleem got to wear the tool vest of someone assigned to maintenance and repair. It was certainly more of a manly job than shaving ice. No wonder Fadila had chosen to meet him.

  Mukhtar ducked his head, pushing the aching thoughts of this stupid girl out of his mind and heading for the restroom. Committed with the flow of the crowd, his neck burned with shame that he’d ever considered the thought that this beautiful creature would want to talk with him. He had to pass within yards of the clandestine couple, who now chatted intensely in hushed Arabic under the shade of a broad-hipped oak. Mukhtar slowed a half step when he heard the first snippet of their words.

  “. . . if I fail?” Saleem said. “What if I hesitate when the moment arrives?”

  “. . . hinges on you . . . we depend on you,” Fadila said. “. . . infidels . . . death . . . fi sabilillah . . .”

  Mukhtar could see a series of bulges around Saleem’s waist as he walked by. They were partially hidden under the vest, but he recognized them at once for what they were. He hadn’t been able to hear much, but what he did hear was enough to fill him with a sinking dread. He broke into a sprint to find his supervisor as soon as he rounded the corner and made it out of Fadila’s sight. Infidels, death—he’d heard such talk in Iraq, but it was the mysterious belt under Saleem’s vest combined with Fadila’s last phrase that made him double his pace: fi sabilillah.

  “To fight in the cause of Allah.”

  Chapter 1

  Come now, and follow me, and no hurt shall happen to you from the lions.

  —John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

  Fifteen minutes earlier

  Jericho Quinn threw the Impala into park and took a deep breath, reminding himself that everywhere on earth was not a war zone—despite his experiences to the contrary. Still, a nagging sense that something was wrong gnawed at his gut—the Japanese called it haragei, the “art of the belly”—and Quinn had learned not to ignore it.

  Even under the best of circumstances, he was not the sort of man to leave his guns in the car, but this evening he had, in fact, gone against every ounce of his better judgment and left his Kimber 10mm and his Japanese killing dagger locked in the safe back at his apartment in Alexandria. The “baby” Glock 27 was locked in a small metal vault in the vehicle’s console—where he knew it would do him absolutely no good. The usual complement of weapons that had driven his ex-wife to divorce him had been reduced to a thin Benchmade 943 pocketknife that he’d tucked discreetly into the inside pocket of his swimsuit. The huge summer crowds at Buccaneer Beach Thrill Park and the fact that Quinn was with his eight-year-old daughter only added to the helpless angst of being unarmed.

  “What time do they close?” Mattie said, unbuckling her seat belt and leaning forward to stick her head between Quinn and his girlfriend, Veronica “Ronnie” Garcia, who sat in the passenger seat. The two wore matching canary yellow one-piece swimsuits, but, mercifully for Quinn, his little girl still had a few years before she would be able to wear it even close to the way Garcia did.

  Mattie had the park’s website memorized, and Quinn knew full well that her question was not a question at all, but a jab at him for having to work late. Even the fact that he’d been in a meeting with the president of the United States was no excuse for cutting short their promised day at the amusement park.

  “We still have four hours,” he said, eyeing the colossal waterslide that loomed in the dusky evening beyond the park gates like a skyscraper, with its looping, twisted guts hanging out. “Looks like we’ll make it in before the sun goes down.”

  “Just barely,” Mattie said, falling—no, throwing herself—backward into her seat. The words came on the heels of an exasperated sigh that reminded Quinn of his ex-wife when she was angry.

  “Don’t know if you’ve heard,” Quinn turned to look between the bucket seats at his daughter. “But they have this cool new invention called the electric light. Makes it so you can actually have fun after the sun goes down.”

  Mattie ignored him. She had the passive-aggressive thing down to level-ten expert. But she couldn’t stay mad for long. The sight of the waterslide known as Dead Drop—so named for its trapdoor beginning—made it impossible for the little girl to even sit still. Pressing her face against the window to stare, her voice fell to a reverent whisper, as if she’d just discovered the golden idol in an Indiana Jones movie. “There she is . . . Shawn Thibodaux says she has a hundred and eighty-nine steps to the top.”

  Ronnie Garcia turned to give Quinn a sultry wink, touching one of the many pale shotgun-pellet scars visible below the hem of his board shorts on his otherwise copper-colored thigh. “You didn’t tell me that freaky, ginormous slide was a she.” Thick black hair cascaded over her broad shoulders and fell across the leather upholstery. She reached out and ran the tip of her index finger across the stubble of his dark beard. Quinn had shaved for the Oval Office meeting but, as usual, grown a healthy five o’clock shadow by noon. Thankfully, Garcia didn’t seem to mind that even in a suit, he typically leaned toward the shaggy side.

  Quinn shrugged. “I didn’t know it was female, either, until just now.” He threw a glance back at Mattie, who was now up on her knees staring out the window. She had his dark hair and copper skin but, thankfully, her mother’s oval face.

  Garcia’s head lolled against the seat. Her full lips perked into a smile. “I guess it makes sense,” she said, hints of her Russian and Cuban heritage seeping out in her accent. “Mattie’s been hanging out with the Thibodaux boys over the last couple of weeks. To hear their dad talk, all the scariest things in the world are female.”

  Quinn smiled while he chewed on that for a minute but was too smart to agree out loud.

  Garcia was attached to the same working group—she from the CIA, he from Air Force Office of Special Investigations, or OSI. Both fell under the immediate supervision of the President’s National Security Advisor. She’d been present in the Oval Office meeting earlier that day. Quinn had known her long enough to be able to tell by the way she hummed softly under her breath that she was busy processing all the new information. Garcia was always more contemplative after intelligence briefings, as if she took terrorist threats personally. Quinn couldn’t blame her—not considering the things she’d been through, the way she’d been hurt.

  “Well, we got here, anyway,” Quinn said, banging the flat of his hand on the top of the Impala’s steering wheel like a judge imposing a sentence. “Now remember, we have to stay together.”

  Garcia smiled at him again and opened the door, gathering her gauzy cover-up and small handbag in her lap before climbing out into the sticky evening heat. Quinn didn’t like crowds, but as he sat and watched her exit the Impala, he couldn’t help but look forward to an evening with his buxom girlfriend and her yellow swimsuit. He wasn’t artistically or musically inclined, but if he were, she was the sort of woman who would inspire great works from him.

  Marine Gunnery Sergeant Jacques Thibodaux, Quinn’s friend and partner, wheeled the black fifteen-passenger van he called the TAV—Thibodaux Assault Vehicle—into the vacant spot beside the Impala. Quinn counted four round faces pressed against the side windows. He knew there were three more somewhere in the van. The Thibodaux boys ranged in age from twelve to one—no small feat considering the gunny had spent much of the last eight years deployed to various hot spots around the Middle East.

  Shawn, the oldest, shot a glance at the setting sun as he jumped out of the van, followed by five of his younger brothers. A frown turned down on his freckled face. All of them wore matching white T-shirts and blue board shorts like their dad, but Shawn had taken a pocketknife and cut the sleeves off his shirt.

  “Marlin Shawn Thi
bodaux!” his mother bellowed as soon as she saw him. “That was a brand-new shirt, mister!” A dark and brooding South Carolinian of Italian heritage, Camille Thibodaux seemed to get pregnant every time Jacques walked by her. Seven energetic sons had made her an expert bellower. A sheer white cover-up hung to her hips, revealing her black one-piece swimsuit that showed off her full figure. She gave one of her patented glares.

  The boy shrugged, flashing her a grin. “Sun’s out, guns out, Mama,” he said, flexing his newly discovered biceps. He’d spent much of his life in the northeastern United States, but there was a definite Cajun drawl to his voice. Five minutes around the kid and it was apparent he took after his daddy in physique and irreverent demeanor. He was only twelve, but he was already taller than his mother. Mattie thought it was a secret, but Quinn was well aware that she had a crush on the boy.

  One of the other boys, a sensitive eight-year-old named Denny, bent over the pavement beside the open door of the van.

  “I need a Band-Aid, Mama,” he said. Blood dripped from his nose.

  “You can’t bandage a bloody nose, son,” Jacques said.

  “It’s for his wart,” Camille said. “He’s been pickin’ at it.” She turned her attention to Denny and left Shawn alone to show off his “guns.”

  “Warty toes and bloody noses,” Thibodaux winked at Quinn. “See what you’re missin’ havin’ just the one kid?”

  Quinn was sure all the Thibodaux boys were just as grouchy as Mattie at having their day at the amusement park postponed while their daddy met with a bunch of men in suits. Jacques sauntered around the corner of the van and gave Quinn a high five with a hand that looked like it could palm a bowling ball. He was a mountain of a man with an iron jaw and a Marine Corps–regulation high and tight. A black eye patch, courtesy of a gunfight in Bolivia while on a mission with Quinn, made him look even more severe than the haircut did.