Captive Target: Six Assassins Book 4

by Heskett, Jim

  “I’m not sure if I can wait that long. I’m on the clock here.”

  “Sis, you have to wait. Please don’t do anything until I’m there.”

  Veronica pressed her lips together as the smell of the spicy eggs wafted into her nostrils. Part of her wanted to open the basement door, press the button on her key fob to neutralize Ember, then put a bullet in her head right now. But she couldn't do that. She had promised Curtis they would both look into Zoe's killer's eyes and exact their justice together. She couldn't take that away from him.

  If he was going to make her late and ruin this opportunity, though, maybe not. She would deal with that when the time came. She still had four more days.

  “You sure this is the person?” Curtis said. “Absolutely sure?”

  “Yes, it’s her. And she’s going to pay for what she did, so get your ass to Golden as soon as you can.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  EMBER

  Ember stirred on the bed. When she opened her eyes, she could see light trickling in through the window, and that was the only way she knew it was daytime. After years of wearing a watch or having a phone to check the time, not knowing felt incredibly disorienting. Her body told her it was late in the morning, but she didn’t know how much to trust that assumption. If she had a pen, she could make marks on the wall like in old movies about prisoners. But, she had no pen.

  She sat up, threw the covers back, and headed for the porcelain toilet in the corner by the closet. She had already inspected the toilet yesterday to look for something she could utilize. The lid had been glued on, and it didn't appear to have any metal parts. None that she could see. Veronica had been meticulous and thorough in setting up this room.

  As Ember sat, she blinked several times to adjust to the morning. The cuffs on her wrists made her arms feel sore as if she'd done too many sets on a shoulder machine at the gym. They weighed a couple of pounds each, so it had been like walking around with weights on her hands for the last twenty-four hours, or however long she'd been here.

  As she stared at the concrete wall in front of her, she thought about FBI Agent Isabel Yang. Ember wondered if she had actually gone back to DC and investigated their boss Marcus, as Ember had suggested. Also, Ember didn't know why she hadn't been able to admit to Isabel that she'd had an affair with him. Guilt, possibly, over sleeping with a man who had been married at the time. Guilt over not being able to foresee what it would do to her career. Maybe guilt at knowing he was a terrible person, yet sleeping with him anyway, because he had broad shoulders and a square jaw and had a certain smirking smell that made her straighten her back any time he walked into a room. Ember liked to think she wasn't the type to fall for the "exciting macho jerk," but this episode in her history suggested otherwise.

  Also, Ember didn’t know why she had been so antagonistic toward Isabel. They hadn’t worked together long. Before her, Ember had a different handler, a civilized and kindhearted man who had passed away from a heart attack within the last year. Ember had only made a few check-ins with Isabel before she cut off contact. She didn’t remember the exact date, maybe four or five months ago.

  Everything had changed then. Ember didn’t know at the time why she’d changed. The check-ins felt like a hassle. And, she hadn’t gelled with Isabel the way she had with her previous handler.

  The relationship between field agent and handler was a tricky one. Trust was an integral component. More than two years into an ongoing deep undercover investigation on a potential link to international terrorist groups, and Ember had been asked to now report to someone who hadn’t even worked at the FBI for as long as her?

  Maybe Ember had never given Isabel a chance. Maybe Ember had seen something early on, like a hesitance in her eyes, a stumble; something to make her doubt Isabel’s capabilities to both watch Ember’s back and manage her priorities. Whatever it was, Ember couldn’t remember now, and it didn’t matter. Once Ember had decided she didn’t trust Isabel with her life, their working relationship was doomed to failure.

  But what had Ember expected? That she could have lived a double life as both FBI Agent and assassin indefinitely? All of this had to come to a head at some point. This life out here in Colorado had a baked-in expiration date from day one.

  The door at the top of the stairs opened, so Ember stood from the toilet and jerked up her sweatpants. She balled her fists, relaxed her upper body, and put one leg forward in a fighting stance. Even then, it felt like a futile gesture. She felt the metal bands around her wrists and knew it was pointless. She considered rushing at Veronica, but her body was still worn and exhausted from yesterday.

  In a fair fight, could Ember take Veronica? Absolutely. She didn't even think it would be terribly difficult. But not with the scales tipped in Veronica's favor like this. Not as long as Veronica had that magnetic controller, and Ember was still bound by the laws of physics.

  When Ember saw her captor come down the stairs, planning an attack didn’t matter, anyway. She was holding a wooden tray in her hands, with that magnet-triggering key fob dangling off her ring finger.

  "Stay there," Veronica said as she set the tray down in the middle of the floor. Glass of orange juice, a plate of eggs and bacon, plastic utensils, and a napkin. Veronica stood and cupped the device in her palm as she skipped a few steps back. "Help yourself."

  “No breakfast nook?”

  Veronica shook her head. “Afraid not. I didn’t have all the time in the world to design this place.”

  Ember approached, noting how Veronica moved her finger to above the button as Ember came near. She picked up the tray and carried it back to her bed. Veronica’s trigger finger relaxed a little, relative to the distance between them.

  Ember set the tray on the nightstand and munched on a piece of bacon. “I’m supposed to be visiting the Oracle today.”

  “I assume you’re going to miss your appointment. It ain’t gonna matter, anyway. Maybe you’re lucky to be down here. I’ve never seen the Oracle myself, but I’ve heard plenty of stories about what happens to people who offend her. Missing an appointment would qualify, I think.”

  “I’m only missing it because you took me.”

  Veronica shrugged. “Good chance she would have killed you, anyway.”

  “Why am I still alive? What is it you think I did?”

  “I’m not ready to answer either of those questions yet.”

  Ember nodded and moved on to the second piece of bacon. It had a delicious, sweet taste, hinting of maple. “Can I get your opinion on something, then? Since I can’t talk to the Oracle, maybe you can act as my sounding board.”

  Veronica tilted her head, eyeing Ember. “Why should I help you?”

  “If I’m going to be dead by the end of the week, what do you have to lose?”

  After a few seconds, Veronica nodded. “Fine.”

  “Do you know why I’m in this six-week black spot trial by combat?”

  “Yep. You killed Niles from Five Points, and Wellner gave you this as discipline. At least, that’s what my boy Yousef said. He was at the Review Board meeting when it happened.”

  "That’s the pure facts of the incident, but it's not the whole story. I did kill Niles, but I didn't do it in cold blood as some people think. I was in Rocky Mountain National Park, on a contract to execute a man who had raped a woman. Everything was going according to plan, and I was just about to take out the target. But, I looked up, and Niles was there, also after the rapist. He showed up for a contract at the same time as I did."

  “Not possible. The Club has safeguards to keep two members from taking on the same contract. That’s something they teach you in the first month as a recruit.”

  Ember gestured at Veronica with her plastic fork. “They are supposed to. But it’s not what happened. For the first couple weeks of this trial by combat, I didn’t think about it much. I just assumed it was some sort of clerical error, and I was a little too busy worrying about the people coming to kill me. But then, I had a lit
tle bit of downtime, and I got to thinking about how unusual it was. It must have happened for a reason, right? So, I did some digging. There was no clerical error. Niles was diagnosed with cancer recently, and he had only a few months left to live. So it was never about stealing my contract or about trying to kill me. He expected me to kill him.”

  Veronica put one leg out and tapped her foot on the concrete floor as her eyes searched the ceiling. "Okay. Let's say that you're right, and Niles was trying to do some DAC version of suicide-by-cop. What did he think was gonna happen by letting you kill him?”

  “Civil war. He was trying to seed chaos. I don’t know if he predicted I would get a black spot, but it’s the best outcome, by his standards. Branches against each other? There’s no better way for someone to take power than when there’s confusion everywhere. Five Points has done it before, and it wasn’t that long ago, remember?”

  “If chaos was his aim, then it’s working. A lot of people are beyond unhappy right now. Wellner’s gone bonkers, interrogating people left and right and disrupting Branch operations in the name of his investigation. A group from Parker all quit together, just the other day. Your people at Boulder got poisoned. It’s no lie to say that shit’s crazy right now.”

  “Do you think a civil war’s coming?”

  Veronica tilted her head left and right, sighing. “Could be. But, you know what? I changed my mind. I don’t feel like acting as your Oracle stand-in any longer.”

  “Um... okay.”

  “In a few more days, Club matters will no longer be your problem because you’ll be rotting in a ditch somewhere.”

  Ember’s shoulders slumped. “Right.”

  “For your information, the eggs are spicy. If you don’t like it…” Veronica finished her sentence with a shrug, then turned around and marched back up the stairs. The door slammed shut behind her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  GABE

  In the movies, hackers were always standing up at computer terminals, wearing shiny black leather jackets as they chewed gum and typed commands onto futuristic keyboards in a race against time. In real life, Gabe was sitting, hunched over in front of his laptop, wearing an unwashed hoodie. He alternated between typing and dipping his hand into a bowl of baked potato chips. It wasn't exactly sexy.

  He kept checking his phone, hoping to find a new message or voicemail from Ember, on the off-chance she hadn’t actually been kidnapped. That, as unlikely as it seemed, she had gone dark for a couple of days for some legitimate reason. Of course, no such message had arrived. Gabe’s phone sat dormant on the desk next to his laptop.

  At one point, his phone lit up, and he snatched it right away, his hopes escalating until he saw the name on the lockscreen. His father. They hadn't spoken in quite a long time, and Gabe had no intention of striking up a conversation with him now. Whatever his old man was calling about, it could wait until this was all over.

  After that call, he put his phone on silent mode and slipped it into his pocket to eliminate the distraction.

  Gabe could cross off three branches right away: Westminster, Highlands, and Parker. Those three had already sent assassins after Ember. Fagan had said Boulder did not have Ember this week, so that left two. Golden and Five Points. He hoped it wasn’t Five Points. Bunch of anarchistic assholes, according to Ember.

  Golden was another beast entirely. Whereas Highlands portrayed themselves as cultured and classy, Golden actually embodied the real version. They had a fancy Post Office smack in the middle of the town of Golden, half an hour west of Denver, at the edge of the Front Range Mountains. Contracts with Golden cost considerably more than other Branches. Gabe didn’t know how they sustained a business model where those same services could be had for cheaper at the other five Branches. Somehow, it not only worked, but thrived.

  Maybe if Gabe had answered the call from his dad, he could have asked the old man about it. He had a nose for business in a way that didn’t come naturally to Gabe. He sipped from a Nalgene water bottle as he grinned, thinking of asking his dad about the profitability of a business that made its money by pimping out contract killers.

  He had spent most of the early morning trying to hack into those Branches' message boards. Five Points had proved easy. After searching through hundreds of messages sent between members over the last two weeks, Gabe gave up and decided it wasn't them. There was nothing about a contract on Ember for this week. The only exciting tidbit he discovered in all that text regarded an upcoming Branch paintball tournament. Seemed the entire Branch would be involved next weekend.

  Hacking into Golden’s message board proved much more difficult. It took Gabe over an hour just to break into the so-called "public" message board where members chose their contracts.

  Every Branch handled communication differently. At Golden, contracts came into a general queue and then were assigned to individual assassins in a round-robin style. There was a sub-board where members could trade contracts they had been auto-assigned. Gabe didn't see anything about Ember in either of these boards.

  They had to have private message boards, though. A place where they could discuss the details they didn’t need the general Golden member community to see. So, that’s where Gabe spent the bulk of the late morning, working his way into those databases.

  After a considerable amount of carpal-tunnel-inducing work, he found a backdoor into all of Golden's message boards. Eventually, he tracked down a single pertinent message concerning Ember Clarke.

  The contract had been accepted by someone only known by the initials RHF, but whoever that was had marked the contract as traded. Who it had been traded to, Gabe could not see in the messages. It must've happened off-line. Crap.

  Or, there was another possibility why he couldn’t see who now owned the contract. It could be that some Golden databases were air-gapped and therefore only accessible at the actual Post Office building. So, Gabe knew what he had to do. Take the trip down to Golden, infiltrate their Branch, and either find this RHF person or some other way of locating Ember’s captor.

  And, he was running out of time to do it.

  * * *

  Before heading to Golden, Gabe stopped at the Valleys motel in Denver in the afternoon. As ordered by his mentor before she had disappeared, he parked in the lot and inventoried the cars. He saw the one Ember had described as belonging to her friend, Zach.

  Gabe sighed at this as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and pondered his reason for being here.

  Zach’s car hadn't been in this lot yesterday. Ember had asked Gabe to come by this motel to check on her friend, but he'd taken a couple of days to show up.

  Gabe had assumed this was a dire circumstance, but maybe not if the guy took his sweet time getting here.

  Ten minutes later, room number 108 opened, and a young man fitting the description of Zach Bennett opened the door and poked his head out. He was about Gabe's same age, and he thought the guy actually kinda looked a bit like him. But Zach seemed on edge, paranoid. He leaned his head out of the door with a painfully furtive glance, as if expecting something clandestine to happen. Eyes darting around, face looking haggard, confused, worried. This confirmed Gabe's suspicion that he was here under duress. But, as to why, Gabe could only speculate.

  Ember hadn’t said one way or the other if he was supposed to actually make contact with Zach. For the moment, it didn’t feel like the right thing to do.

  The door pulled shut, and then Gabe watched the curtain to the right of the door peel back an inch as a pair of eyes appeared there. Not only checking out the front door but also checking out the window? Whoever this guy was, he wasn't trained in any way. Ember had once shown Gabe the proper method to answer a door when you think you might be compromised, and it certainly did not involve checking through the curtains. Anyone waiting outside a door to kill you would expect that move and make short work of the job.

  Gabe had initially thought maybe this guy was another potential recruit Ember had been grooming since
Gabe was about to become a member, but it didn't seem to fit. Why would she stash someone like that at a motel and request a babysitter? And why now?

  Why not mention the guy until this week? There was never any reason to keep a recruit a secret from other members.

  Secrets.

  Gabe had a few of those. One in particular wouldn’t leave him alone.

  Thoughts about Marcus Lonsdale's deadline rolled around inside Gabe's head. The poison Marcus had put there to make Gabe question Ember and who she really was. While Gabe had tried to stash all that away so he could focus on the task at hand, he couldn’t push Marcus out of his mind entirely. Every time he looked at his new phone, he was reminded that Marcus had taken his old one last week. Sitting in his living room, wearing a shark smile while his two armed goons stood behind him. Giving vague threats and half-promises about opportunities.

  Marcus had implied that Ember Clarke wasn't her real name. He had implied she was keeping a whole host of secrets from Gabe. Was this guy one of her secrets? If so, why would she involve Gabe now, potentially putting whatever she was doing in danger?

  What, if anything, did Marcus Lonsdale have to do with this guy she was hiding out at a motel in Denver? He was a high-value person, no doubt about it. Ember wouldn't have asked Gabe to look out for him otherwise.

  He had too many questions. But none of it would matter if he couldn't find Ember alive.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THOMAS

  Thomas Milligan pulled on his chin as he surveyed the lab room from his office. In the small building Firedrake had leased at the north end of Fort Collins, a dozen scientists were out there in white coats, working on their various projects. All of them were talented. All of them had a part to play in the upcoming failsafe project.