Final Target: Six Assassins Book 6

by Heskett, Jim

  Two more minutes passed. The dot blinked. No cars came or went. Her phone buzzed, and she looked down to see Layne Parrish calling. With pursed lips, she hit the button to silence the call. He could wait a bit while this current situation played out.

  Ember shoved her phone in her pocket and left her car. With one hand on the grip of an Enforcer, she rounded the back of the strip mall. Part of her wanted to put a bullet into Marcus at the sight of him. But, if she did that, no justice for Isabel. No justice for Gabe. Not until Ember could get proof tying Marcus to one or both of those murders.

  Ember peered beyond the edge of the building. There were no cars back here. Only a dumpster, with ice on the lid and frozen garbage inside. This is where the trail had led.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said as she held up the app on her phone, which indicated the tracker was about ten feet away. He’d ditched it, no more than five minutes ago. The last time she had used a tracker app to chase a target — only one week ago — the same thing had happened. She’d hoped it would turn out better this time.

  Five weeks of constant danger had left Ember tired. Tired and sloppy.

  She readied one of her pistols and walked back to the front of the parking lot, searching around for Marcus’ car. Her senses stayed alert, waiting to see if this had been a trap set for her. Her intuition told her it wasn’t.

  And now he’d had a few minutes to put some distance behind him.

  He could be anywhere. And, in four days, he was leaving Denver. With it, Ember’s chance to get justice would probably vanish along with him. Serena had said Marcus planned to “go incognito for a while,” which could actually mean he intended to disappear forever.

  Sighing, Ember took her phone from her pocket and called Layne back.

  “Afternoon,” he said.

  “Yes, it is. What’s up, big guy?”

  “It wasn’t easy, but I got you a name.”

  Ember drew in a breath, feeling hopeful for the first time in hours. Layne had somehow been able to find a name from the credit card receipt to locate the sniper who had shot Isabel.

  “You’re the best. I don’t even want to know how you did it.”

  “No big secret,” he said. “I have a tech guy back on the east coast and I offered him a case of Sawtooth Ale to work his computer magic for me. The name of your sniper is Omar White. The last name is most likely an alias. That’s my guess, at least. I don’t have anything on his current whereabouts or movements, but it seems like he’s a local, based on his most recent movements. I’ll keep working on it.”

  “Thanks, Layne. This is great stuff.”

  “You doing okay?”

  The unexpected personal question caught her off guard. Rather than blurt out an answer as instinct told her to do, Ember actually considered her reply. “I don’t know.”

  “A lot going on. I’m sorry for all this stuff you’ve had to go through. Your recruit, your FBI handler. It’s a lot.”

  “You’re sweet, Layne. I appreciate it. It’s not only those two deaths, though. My mentor in the DAC tried to kill me a couple days ago. ”

  “Sounds like she didn’t succeed.”

  “No, but only because she made a critical error. If the tea she served me hadn’t still been scalding hot, I’d be dead right now. I’d be gone, and you and Serena would be off influencing elections in Azerbaijan or whatever else it is you people do, with the Club far from your minds.”

  Layne emitted a polite chuckle. “That’s not really how I spend my time these days. I much prefer to influence tea parties and screen time with my daughter. The likelihood of getting shot is much, much lower at those tea parties.”

  “I’ll bet. Never been to Azerbaijan.”

  “I have. Impressive mountains, but the airports are a mess.” After an awkward pause, Layne said, “I hope you get him. I didn’t know Isabel well, but she deserves better than this.”

  Ember agreed, said her goodbyes, and then ended the call. And, as she looked back toward the highway, an idea struck.

  Chapter Fourteen

  EMBER

  With the bug from Marcus’ car now useless, Ember had to turn her attention elsewhere. She had a name for the sniper, a local. And she was south of Denver, already close to the Parker Post Office where the DAC archives had been kept and maintained for decades.

  This gave her an idea. Parker had a unique ripple in their operations, in that they allowed “dark members” who went by a number only, and their names were kept a secret, known only to those higher up in the Branch. This was a practice frowned on by many not in Parker, and other Branches used it as an excuse to perpetuate the belief that Parker received special treatment from the Board.

  What if Marcus had been actually been reading all those FBI reports Ember submitted, and he knew about the dark members? Could he have used someone in the DAC? Hiring an untraceable assassin to kill Isabel would have been exactly within Marcus’s style.

  She didn’t know what she would learn at Parker, but there had to be more pieces of the puzzle than the random bits of unconnected info she already had.

  So, Ember made the short trip from her current location to the Parker Post Office, an office building by a set of train tracks amidst the manicured neighborhoods in the Denver suburb of Parker. The building was billed as a mixed-use office with lots of available interior space, but with rents so outrageous that no business would dare stake a claim inside of it.

  When Ember put on her turn signal to enter the parking lot, she gazed at the building and her jaw dropped. Half the windows had been busted out. A grenade or RPG or some sort of explosive had taken out a wall on the second floor. There was now a five-foot hole in the exterior, covered in plastic. A car in the parking lot had apparently been set on fire, as it was charred black, with flat tires and missing the back window. Glass and hunks of concrete were everywhere like ground zero.

  “Holy shit,” she muttered. “What the hell happened here?”

  Ember parked and readied her pistols. Guns weren’t allowed on Post Office premises, but this seemed like a special occasion. And it didn’t seem like this was a Post Office any longer. A quick scan of the parking lot revealed no threats. Any damage to this building was old news. There were no active fires, no smoke, no bullets slicing the air. Whatever had happened here had been fast and hard, leaving little to the imagination.

  She exited the car with her weapons drawn to see the front door of the building sitting open, with snow tracked inside. Never before had she seen a Post Office in such a state of disarray, with no regard for security. Anyone in the world could walk in off the street and look around.

  Ember approached carefully, with her fingers on the slide rails of each gun, but ready to aim and fire if need be. She walked into the front door of the Parker Post Office to see the waiting room. A few chairs, a reception desk, a clock on the wall. Most of their buildings had something like this; the manicured part for the public to see, just in case any civilians should come wandering.

  A single person sat in one of those chairs. A woman Ember recognized as a Parker member, but whose name she couldn’t recall. She was lanky and angular, with with mousy brown hair and broad shoulders.

  The woman was sitting in the chair, her chin resting on the closed knuckles of one hand. She flicked her eyes to Ember, then down at the pistols. She didn’t seem disturbed at the sight of an armed person in a Post Office. Not even a raised eyebrow at this possible intruder.

  “What happened here?” Ember asked.

  “Do you have a nest egg?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A nest egg,” the blasé woman said. “Retirement accounts. 401K, IRA, real estate, gold hidden in your mattress? If not, you’re screwed. You can’t go back in time and decide to save forty percent. Because it’s not true if you think Uncle Sam has been keeping some to drizzle out to you during your old age. Nope, we’re on our own, and I hope you’ve been ready and waiting for this day, because it’s here. Whether we lik
e it or not, it’s here.”

  Ember followed the logic, but she didn’t quite understand the intent. “Why are you telling me this?”

  The woman sighed, studied Ember for a moment more, and then got up from her chair. Without a word, she moseyed across the room and exited through a door to the side. The sound of broken glass shuffling under the woman’s feet quieted, and Ember was left alone.

  “Okay,” she said. “That was weird.”

  Her eyes drifted up to a security camera attached to the corner. It appeared to be on, since a little green LED glowed atop the camera. She gave it a wave. The camera continued to stare, silent and motionless.

  Ember thought about turning around and walking out the way she had come. Clearly, she wouldn’t find the help she needed here. In addition, whoever had caused all this havoc might be planning a return trip to add more.

  As Ember pondered an exit, a different door clicked and then opened. There stood the man Ember had seen a couple weeks ago in the basement of this building, guarding the archives. The older black man who had given her a hard time about signing in and not making him late for lasagna night with his wife.

  “Hello, Historian.”

  He smiled, a meager and thin curling of the lips that also carried a lot of melancholy. “My name is Randall. You don’t need to call me that other name any longer. The sands are running out as we speak.”

  “Oh, okay. Randall, what the hell is going on here?”

  “War, Ember Clarke. That’s what’s going on. Hell. We had a run-in with Golden. If you ask them, they’ll say we attacked first. But it’s just not true. They came at us, hard. We lost quite a few in the shootout, we lost more when we sent ours to retaliate in kind, and our people never returned.”

  “There’s a burned-out car in the lot. Did that happen when Golden attacked, too?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “I’m so sorry, Randall. This is a big pile of shit. There’s no two ways about it.”

  He gave a murmur, slow and despondent. “That’s one way of putting it. Another would be something more like this: you know the story about the woman who finds the injured snake and nurses it back to health, then the snake bites her and she can’t believe it?”

  “Yes, I’m familiar with the story. Are the archives okay?”

  “For now, yes. But we don’t have the manpower to defend them if someone comes. I can’t imagine why they would, though. There’s no point in erasing history.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “I’m often surprised,” Randall said. “Some people said you killed Fagan.”

  “I did, yes.”

  “And here I thought that old crone would outlast us all. Shit, she’s owed me money since 1998, so looks like I’m going to have to let that one go.”

  “Probably so.”

  “I know it’s a strange feeling, killing another assassin. Sorta feels like fighting with your brother or sister, eh?”

  “I suppose,” Ember said, with a gnawing in her chest making her eyes water a little. She didn’t want to talk about Fagan any longer. She wanted to keep it feeling like a dream she had yet to wake from.

  Randall paused, his jaw clicking back and forth. “Why are you here, Ember?”

  “I hate to come at you with a favor to ask when you’re clearly not in a good way.”

  “It’s okay. Let’s hear about what you need.”

  Ember took the picture from her pocket and held it out. “Is this person a Parker member? His name is probably Omar White. I know you’re not supposed to divulge the identity of dark members, but I thought… with things being the way they are…”

  “It’s okay. I’m happy to help, but I have to tell you, I’ve never seen him before. Never heard the name. He’s not Parker Branch, and not DAC, as far as I know.”

  “Shit,” she muttered as she stuffed the picture back.

  Maybe the hunch had been wrong. If so, Omar must have been an outside contractor. That didn’t make finding him impossible, but it added another layer of complication.

  “What’s he to you?”

  “He killed a friend of mine, and I think I know who hired him, but I need to find out more about Omar so I can prove it.”

  Randall sighed, a frown across his face. “Good luck. I’m leaving Denver in a day or two, so if I don’t see you, safe travels.”

  “Safe travels to you too, Randall. Thanks for protecting our archives.”

  He shrugged and looked around at the room, in a state of disarray. His eyes were glassy and dim. “Fat lot of good it’s done for us.”

  Randall gave her a wave and turned back around, then disappeared into the door he had come from.

  Chapter Fifteen

  EMBER

  Omar White worked at a lawnmower repair shop in Broomfield named A1 Lawnmower Repair. As the sun set on a frigid November day, Ember Clarke sat in the parking lot across from the building and studied it. The shop was small, made with haphazardly placed red brick outside and a roof with patchwork shingles. It looked like the sort of family owned business where it seemed the family wasn’t doing so good.

  Either that, or a place designed to lose money for tax reasons, to cover up something else somewhere else.

  Ember suspected the latter option, because this lawnmower shop was owned by Tyson Darby. He was the same man who owned Pink Door, the Five Points strip club where Ember had found the first of Bam’s bombs last week. This guy was some sort of Denver criminal boss, based on everything Ember had learned about him. And, because Ember had never heard of him before last week, he was either small-time or he was skilled at flying under the radar. A low profile in the Denver criminal world was a smart idea, since everyone knew the Belcamino family were the top dogs of organized crime in this city.

  But Tyson did appear to have some tenuous ties to the Denver Assassins Club.

  Coincidence? Possibly. If so, Ember had hit nothing but dead ends trying to link Omar to Marcus Lonsdale. Ember had lost her target when he found the bug Serena had stashed in his car. If Ember wanted, she could probably find him and tail him again, but she now didn’t see the point. Marcus wasn’t dumb enough to do something self-incriminating out in the open.

  And, if Ember followed him before she had proof of Marcus’ wrongdoing, staying in close quarters might mean Ember would be too tempted to put an impulsive bullet in him. Yes, that would feel good. And no, it wasn’t the right move.

  Marcus was leaving town in a few days, according to Serena. Ember needed speed and accuracy. It had to be right. She owed as much to both Gabe and Isabel.

  Ember waited a couple minutes until she was sure the lawnmower building was empty, then she left her car. She had parked under the awning of a tattoo place named The Slinky Grape. With a name like that, there had to be more to the story. Some other time, though.

  Ember crossed the street and made a lap around the building. Behind it was a chain-link fence and a graveyard of what Ember had to assume were lawnmower parts. Not that she’d ever seen the guts of one of those machines up close, but it made sense for the location. Open space and some kind of grain silo building behind it, leading to train tracks next to the highway. This area of town was grimy and industrial enough for most civilians to turn their heads and noses as they drove past. Hiding in plain sight.

  Since the front of the building butted up to a semi-major street, Ember decided to break into the back door. A place like this wouldn’t likely have an alarm. Or maybe that was what Tyson wanted the world to think. She hopped the fence and crouched down, looking for external cameras or any sort of motion-sensing equipment. Nothing of the sort stood out to her, and she kept her eyes alert and moving as she crossed through the junked lawnmowers and other hunks of metal littering the back yard.

  Picking the back door lock was easy, and Ember pulled it back to find a giant metal shelf in front of her, blocking her entrance. Before touching it, she waited, ears turned inside to listen for a beeping or any other indicator she had triggered an al
arm. She closed her eyes to mute the car noise from the nearby street and breathed for a few seconds.

  As far as she could tell, there was no alarm. She gave the tall metal shelf in front of her a shove and it screeched along the floor. With a few inches of leeway, she slinked inside and then had to make a decision: push it back in place, covering her tracks but sealing off her best option for an exit? Or, leave it be, meaning that if anyone were to waltz in here, they would know something was wrong immediately, but giving her quick access to escape?

  She decided to push the shelf back into place.

  Ember then gave the one-room shop a once-over. It was a maze of rusted metal shelves stacked high with various coils and bolts and other doodads. Musty, smelling of oil and dust. She had to breathe through her mouth to keep from sneezing.

  She first checked out the counter with the cash register. This place didn’t even appear to have a credit card reader. Definitely the oldest of old schools. Behind the counter were a series of cardboard file boxes, and Ember dropped to her knees to sort through them. She found a couple boxes full of receipts stapled to printed pages, with notes written in the margins. But, at the third box, she found what looked like personnel records. Customer and employee files. She flipped back to the W section and found Omar’s name. Her lips moved wordlessly as she scanned what looked like a standard job application.

  She leaned against the counter and settled in to read it.

  * * *

  Two minutes later, the front door opened.

  Ember ducked down behind the counter. It was large enough to hide her body at first glance, but not if anyone stood close to it. The space underneath the desk was filled with those file folders. Ember didn’t want to risk the noise of pushing them out of the way. So, she hunkered in place and listened, with one hand snaking back toward her knife. She’d already decided against using her guns. With all the metal surfaces in this small space, each bullet would probably ricochet two or three times.