Operation Sheba
Page 19
Susan stood indignant, but Michael saw the quick glance she gave to the balcony’s edge. Below them, Raines’s men were spread out, watching, he supposed, for Abigail—Julia—to return. Yeah, like that would happen in a million years. A more likely reason they were spread out along the perimeter of his yard was to make sure he didn’t take off with her.
His head was spinning from it all. Flynn was alive. The ramifications of that alone made his head pound with anger. He didn’t know what the hell was going on, but he did know Susan and her officers had invaded his most personal space and, warrant or not, had attacked Julia. That was unacceptable in his book.
“Raines will track her down,” Susan said, more to herself than him as she scanned the tree line. “He’ll find her before she gets too far.”
Michael threw the warrant down on the patio’s table, covering the papers Julia had given him. She was being accused of treason, along with Flynn and Smith. Her face swam in front of him, and he took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, wishing she hadn’t run off like a guilty criminal.
But she had. “Tell Raines he is not to shoot her under any circumstances.”
“I won’t,” Susan responded. “She’s resisting arrest and she’s armed. Raines’s life could be in danger.”
Michael balled his hands into fists. He would go after Julia himself, but Raines had a good head start on him and was by far a better tracker. The only way he could insure Julia’s safety at this point was to give the order not to harm her. “Julia would never hurt anyone unless she was threatened. Now call Raines on your portable radio”—he pointed at the one Susan was holding—“and tell him I order him not to shoot.”
Susan studied him with a critical eye. “Your judgment is clouded, Director. I’ll give no such order.”
It was a standoff and Michael called on all his willpower not to follow through with his threat and throw Susan off the balcony. Julia had said her name had been on the list of candidates to take out. If Susan was the CIA’s mole, then she was still looking for a way to eliminate Julia Torrison, especially if Julia, Flynn and Smitty had uncovered her secret dealings.
Michael fingered the disc stuck in the pocket of his sweatshirt. Then he looked Susan in the eye. He’d always found directness to be an efficient tool. “Are you setting me up, Susan? Are you the insider undermining everything I do?”
She started, but checked herself. He saw the lie pass through her mind before her dark eyes returned his stare as blank as steel. “You’ve been sleeping with a traitor, Director Stone. I believe you’re the one now under the microscope.”
“Does the name Cari ring a bell?” He saw Susan blanch and lifted his eyebrows. “I suggest you radio Raines and call the search off. It seems you and I have some talking to do.”
Susan skirted past him and walked through his bedroom as if she would run away. Michael grabbed the papers off the table and followed her. “Julia gave me a message to pass on to you,” he said, trying to stop her.
It worked.
Susan, her back to him, stopped on the stairs.
“She said to tell you she knows who Cari’s father is.” He moved up behind her. “And she’s going to him next.”
The enraged look Susan turned on him was startling. Michael could see Julia’s words had hit their mark, and he wondered who the man Susan was hiding was. But Susan said nothing, only turned her back on him and continued down the stairs and out the front door which she left open.
Following behind her, Michael closed the door and rested his hand on it.
“She’s either extremely gutsy or extremely stupid,” Brad said from behind him.
Michael had forgotten his security officer was even still in the house. “Who is? Susan?”
The young ex-Marine pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “No, Abigail, or Julia. Whatever her name is. I can’t believe she just did that.”
Me either, Michael thought and went into his office where his desk phone was ringing. As he answered it, he set the papers on his desk and pulled the disc out of his pocket. “Stone.”
“Hello, Director.” The voice was quite familiar. It was Ryan Smith. “I need to talk to you immediately.”
Michael drew a deep breath and willed his voice to sound unemotional, unconfused. “This better be damn good, Smith. You are two breaths away from finding my foot buried up your ass so far you’ll never be able to sit down again. Start talking.”
The rain had stopped but the clouds were still threatening. Julia sat quietly, wrapping her arms around her knees and trying to conserve heat. She’d buried her bag under leaves and brush beneath a bush across from her, taking only her guns, her phone and the picture of Paris, hidden in Michael’s sweatshirt, up to her hiding place.
She saw Ben Raines before she heard his footsteps and mentally swore. He was a good tracker and she knew he would eventually look up and see her crouched in the branches of the hundred-year-old oak tree, but she held her breath and prayed something would distract him.
The tree was next to the gravel road and Conrad was only minutes from picking her up. She glanced at the distant hill and willed him to come charging over it. He did not.
Her fingers gripped the SIG Sauer tightly. She’d had to switch to the lighter gun because her hand and wrist were exhausted from carrying the Beretta. Now she wished she had the more familiar gun back in her hand, but didn’t want to risk digging for it. Movement of any kind would attract Raines’s attention.
He moved to the left and stood almost directly under her. Her teeth started to chatter and she carefully pulled the sleeve of Michael’s sweatshirt over the heel of her left hand and shoved it in her mouth, keeping her right hand with the gun trained on Raines’s head.
Again she glanced at the distant hill and willed Conrad to come. All she saw was an empty dirt road and layers of dark clouds.
Below she heard Raines snap the safety off his gun. She looked down and found herself staring at the dark hole of a .40 caliber Glock. Forty-caliber weapons offered more takedown punch and better penetration than the popular 9-mms, and Julia had no doubt the Glock had already sent a bullet her direction earlier. She shivered thinking about the damage it could have done, could still do.
“Drop your weapon.” Raines backed out from under her. “And come down slowly. One wrong move and I have orders to shoot.”
Julia swallowed hard and released the SiG. Raines retrieved it, emptied it of bullets and motioned at her to come down. She gripped the tree branch she was sitting on and swung down, dropping the last few feet to the ground.
Her feet and legs cried out in pain. It was easy to let her body fall to the ground and roll down the ditch. As she did, she grabbed the Beretta hidden in Michael’s sweatshirt pocket. Coming to her feet, she raised the gun with both hands and pointed it at the black Glock.
Raines smiled.
“You’re not really going to shoot them, are you, Con?” Ace asked over the roar of the wind. He cast a nervous glance at Flynn’s drawn Heckler & Koch as he brought the Jeep up over yet another rolling Virginia hill.
Conrad shoved a full clip into the gun. “If necessary.” He raised his head to look up the road. “There she is.”
Ace’s focus followed his, locking on Julia only a hundred yards ahead of them. Her gun was drawn on a man—a decent-sized brother who had one hell of a big gun pointed at her head. A Mexican standoff.
“I think I changed my mind about wanting to be your wheel guy,” Ace said, even as he continued to press the accelerator.
“Too late.” Flynn grinned at him before fastening his attention on the scene in front of him again. “Think of it as a rite of passage, brother. You do good on this one”—he patted Ace on the shoulder—“and I’ll hire you to be my full-time wheelman.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Ace muttered.
The only thing Raines had moved since finding a gun pointed at his head was his mouth, which was still quirked in a smile at her. Julia knew that smile. She’d seen it before. It
said, yeah, right. The man didn’t believe for one minute she was going to shoot him.
“Drop. The. Gun. Or. I. Will. Shoot. You.” Each word received equal stress in a voice that said she meant business. And she did.
But he didn’t drop the gun.
Julia sensed more than heard one of Raines’s men a few feet away. If he were smart, he’d come at her and distract her. Working as a team to divide and conquer. That’s what good partners did. It had been an early lesson in Conrad’s school of spy survival.
Julia backed up a step toward the road. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Jeep, like a rock hurling itself in her direction. Finally. Good partner to the rescue.
Taking another step back, Julia returned Raines’s smile.
As thunder boomed in the distance, he moved toward the edge of the ravine, towering over her. The smile on his face faded as his eyes took on the look of a hunter. In the echo of the thunder, she heard the muffled sound of footsteps in the rustling grass off to the left. She saw a shadow move.
Fight dirty, Julia.
Raines cleared the tree line and registered the Jeep, his focus flickering to the road and back to her so fast she might have missed it. But she was expecting it. With a sudden but accurate shift of the Beretta, Julia dropped to her knees and pulled the trigger without hesitation.
The heavy black gun Raines had been holding thudded on the ground and he cried out, falling to his own knees in pain and holding what was left of his right hand with his left. As he fell, Julia fired a second round at the trees where Raines’s man was moving and saw him duck for cover. He fired his gun, but the shot went over her head.
Back on her feet, Julia jumped out of the ditch and ran for her life. She continued to send bullets at the woods as she ran to meet the Jeep.
Chapter Thirty
Ace couldn’t believe his eyes. She’d actually pulled the trigger. Julia Torrison had never been real to him until she showed up at the mortuary. Even then—even after the last few days of helping her and Flynn and Smitty—she was simply the Queen of Sheba to Flynn’s Solomon. He was playing a fun, silly spy game with them, he, himself, tucked safely away in obscurity.
Watching her shoot the brother, roll, come to her feet and shoot some more as she ran toward him changed his mind. O-kay, he thought, not a game.
So much for obscurity. So much for safety. Now he was smack-ass in the middle of something big. It scared the bejesus out of him, but was intoxicating all the same.
Julia was running all out now, looking every bit like a movie star in an action scene. But even twenty yards away, Ace could see the fear in her face, and he felt a surge of protectiveness in his gut. She wasn’t just a player in a silly spy game. She was a real, live person. Not just any person, either. A person Conrad Flynn was willing to risk his life for.
Conrad Flynn: invincible, unstoppable and damn near God-like. What Flynn wanted, Flynn got. In this case, he wanted Julia Torrison and the world be damned if Ace wasn’t going to help him.
Because in his book, Conrad Flynn walked on water.
“That’s my girl.” Conrad stood up and brought his gun to bear on the targets ahead. “Let’s roadhouse!”
Add Army of One to that list, Ace thought as he jammed his foot into the brake pedal and jerked the steering wheel left. Conrad’s baseball cap flew off into the air as the Jeep spun in a donut, its back end coming to rest three feet from Julia.
As the Jeep swung around in front of his partner, Conrad held on to the roll bar with his right hand and fired three shots at the tree line.
One bullet punched a tree and the others rained down around the security officer Julia had shot. Not bad considering he was standing up in a moving vehicle and firing with his left hand. After that rain of bullets, a smart man would think twice before leaving the protection of the woods, and that would buy him and Ace a few more seconds to get Julia out.
She bounded toward the Jeep as it stopped, throwing up her left arm. Flynn reached out and grabbed her. Swinging her up into the backseat, he yelled, “Go!” to his wheelman.
As Ace pressed the accelerator and shifted on the fly, Conrad caught sight of not one, but three Agency officers hauling out of the tree line to shoot at them.
Ballsy bastards.
He pushed Julia’s head down and fired off another dozen of the 9-mm parabellum rounds near the ditch and the man still writhing on the ground. The bullets ricocheted off the ground, sending the others back into hiding.
Conrad ejected the spent clip and jammed a fresh one back in while continuing to balance himself as the Jeep jerked in acceleration. “Come on, Ace,” he shouted, thinking he could run faster than the CJ was moving. His wheelman definitely needed a different car. A speedy getaway this was not.
Lightning struck in the distance and Conrad could see rain begin falling in sheets as the storm moved in and they moved out. He switched the HK to his right hand and kept it trained in the direction of the woods for another half-mile before he glanced down at Julia. She was lying on her back, errant drops of rain hitting her in the face as she shoved the closed Toshiba under a too-big sweatshirt.
Ignoring the faded Marines emblem emblazed on the sweatshirt and raising his head to sky, Conrad let out a whoop at the stormy heavens that echoed over the hills like thunder. He hadn’t felt this alive in months.
Goddamn, even Smitty’s precious computer was safe.
Michael listened as Smith walked him through the disc’s contents. Listened while Smith explained from beginning to end Susan Richmond’s manipulation and calculated career moves. He listened as Smith laid everything out in a succinct and efficient time line.
And then he asked the question burning in his mind. “Why didn’t you come to me in the beginning, Smith?”
Ryan Smith was silent for a moment on the other end. “With all due respect, sir, Conrad and I thought you were the mole.”
Michael sat back in his chair, disgusted. “Flynn wanted me to be the mole.”
“Susan led us to believe you were.” Smith let out a tired breath. “She was the one who set this in motion and pointed us continually in your direction. It was nothing personal, Director.”
“The hell it wasn’t,” Michael said, more to himself than to Smith. He dropped his hand to the arm of his chair. “And you never doubted her.”
“No, sir. We’ve always believed her intentions were true.”
That was certainly believable, but Michael’s ego was still smarting from Smith’s confession. “Explain Julia’s part in this.”
“We purposely left her out of the loop for as long as possible. She knew nothing about any of this until three days ago.”
Three days. Three nights. Flynn and Julia together. “But she has been helping you and Flynn.”
“Because of you,” Smith said in defense. “She knew you weren’t the mole, and she was determined to prove your innocence.”
“And how did she do that?”
Smith was silent, as if gauging his answer. Michael shifted in his chair. “What did she do? Bug my house? Read my mail? Listen to my phone calls? Tell me, Smith. What did Julia do to prove to you and Flynn that I wasn’t the mole?”
“Cari Von Motz shifted our attention to Susan. She came to Julia with her journal and that’s what convinced us.”
Michael knew Smith was holding something back, but he let it drop. “Titus Allen is on his way here, to my house, at this very moment. I expect you and Flynn on my doorstep within the hour with every scrap of evidence you have to present to the Director. Got it?”
Smith’s answer came one beat too slow. “I will be there.”
“Flynn too,” Michael insisted.
“He’s a little tied up right now, sir.”
“You tell him to get his perfidious ass over here or I swear I’ll come after him myself.”
Smith assumed a soothing tone. “Director, Conrad is picking up Julia to remove her from harm’s way. Susan and her Agency officers are a real threat to her at t
his moment.”
Michael closed his eyes and rubbed them again with his fingers. Flynn to the rescue. Goddamn son of a bitch. “I’ll call Director Kipfer in security and ask him to find Susan and put a tail on her.”
“Aren’t you going to seek a warrant for her arrest?”
“We’re talking about the chief officer of the Counterterrorism Center, Smith. An employee who’s dedicated her life to the CIA without so much as a reprimand in her file. Absolutely every duck you have has to be in a row, and if it is, Titus and I will take the necessary steps and have Susan arrested. We need absolute proof, do you understand?”
“Of course. What about Senator King? He’s involved too.”
“We’ll deal with King in time. We have to tread lightly with him too. You have damning evidence from a black bag job, illegally entering and bugging Susan’s office. Neither Susan nor King knew they were being recorded. The law in this area must be interpreted carefully by carefully selected judges on our side if you know what I mean.”
“Susan got him to sign off on the operation. She has his signature.”
“She may have already destroyed it.”
“Right.” Smith sighed.
“King is not much of a threat to us or Julia right now. Let’s concentrate on Susan.”
“Cari too. If we have her, we have the star witness.”
“Any idea where she is?”
“No, but she said she would contact Julia to see if you’d agreed to her proposition.”
“Okay, get your butt over here and make your case. We’ll go from there.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Alexandria Plan A had gone straight to hell. Susan sat in her home office in her desk chair and rocked it slowly, rubbing the glass globe between her fingertips. Cari was a first-class turncoat. Julia had escaped and disappeared with Flynn, alerting Michael before Susan could stop her. Ben Raines was in the hospital, and Susan was keenly aware of the security team watching her house from the street. Daniel had called to tell her Titus Allen was requesting a meeting with him at Michael’s house. She warned him of Julia’s threat.