“It’s not going to be easy,” Blackwood said, “but I think it’s something we can get through with a thoughtful plan.”
“As long as we don’t have to start a war,” Young said.
Blackwood sighed. “I’m afraid we’re past that point, that is if you want to retain the White House in November. Cowering to the Iranians and not responding with force is not going to play well in your debates with Radcliffe.”
“And if I start something, Radcliffe will seize on that, blaming me for pushing America into another quagmire in the Middle East. I can’t win.”
“You can’t pander for those votes,” Blackwood said. “At the end of the day, you need to do what’s best for the security of this country. If you present the plan for addressing this situation and stick with it, voters will appreciate your honesty and straight-forward approach. You’ll get rewarded for it more than you might think.”
“Then maybe I can win if I don’t take action,” Young said. “I’d prefer to run on a platform of peace than war mongering.”
“The platform you run on is irrelevant if it’s going to ensure that you won’t get re-elected. You can kiss that label of two-term president goodbye if you don’t put boots on the ground over there as soon as possible.”
“I’ll be a three-term president,” Young corrected.
Blackwood shook his head and pursed his lips. “Finishing out a dead man’s term doesn’t count. Besides, Michaels was a lame duck anyway. And you will be too if you don’t listen to me on this.”
Young threw his hands in the air. “Okay, okay. Let me think about this.”
Blackwood ambled over toward the door and paused after putting his hand on the knob. “You know, Mr. President, this isn’t nearly as tough of a decision as you’re making it out to be. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how everyone reacts to you showing the world what kind of cajones you have.”
Young sighed. “Send in Pembroke, will you?”
“Of course, sir.”
Blackwood exited, closing the door behind him. Moments later, John Pembroke entered the room.
“What was that all about?” Pembroke asked. “Clive looked like he was setting out to murder someone.”
“He’s mad that I won’t start a war in Iran like he’s asking me to do.”
“Well, forget about putting your focus anywhere else but your own country for a few days,” Pembroke said. “You’ve got much bigger problems here at home.”
Young cocked his head to one side. “Domestic problems?”
“Here,” Pembroke said as he scooped up the remote, “let me show you.” He turned on the television and landed on a channel that was showing the tragedy unfolding in New Orleans.
“Is this happening right now?” Young asked before his jaw fell agape.
“Yes, sir. Right this very minute.”
Young watched as one woman holding her child’s hand staggered in the street before falling to her knees. She crawled along for a few more meters before collapsing face down. The little boy fell on top of her and shook her, trying to wake her. She didn’t move.
“Dammit,” Young said. “We’ve gotta do something about this.”
The president clutched his stomach, afraid that he might throw up.
CHAPTER 31
Sydney, Australia
SHIELDS CHECKED HER COMS to make sure they were working before looking over the schematics for Falcon Sinclair’s home. They were parked a block away in a white utility services van, the blue-and-green magnetic logo of Ausgrid plastered on the side door. Shields had lifted the magnet from another van she saw making residential repairs just an hour before, hoping that it would keep down suspicion. She stuffed a couple clips into her pocket and tucked her gun into the back of her pants.
As dusk fell, Shields gawked at the four-story home towered high atop Point Piper and overlooking Port Jackson. She couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to live in such a majestic place. Lush vegetation bloomed from nearly every spot of dirt within the tightly-drawn property lines where nearly every square inch was consumed by the sprawling house. Aside from an automated garage gate, the only way in or out was through a small door just off the sidewalk. An armed guard patrolled the grounds, drifting from one side to another, pausing only to stare vacantly out at the water every few minutes. But she couldn’t yearn for such a place, at least not in the moment. She had a job to do, and it wasn’t going to be easy.
Shields and Mia went over the protocol for installing the device on Sinclair’s computer one final time before the two women parted ways. Darkness had now fallen, giving them the opportunity they needed to initiate the operation. With Mia hunkered down in the van, Shields eased up to the house. They had collected plenty of damning information, but there was still one piece they were missing: the definitive link between Sinclair and the Drisi Enterprises bank account.
Shields paused to watch the rhythmic pacing of the lone guard. He patrolled the place from the veranda on the second floor, which wrapped around the entire building. For the first ten minutes, he circled around without stopping. But after that, he slowed his pace before stopping altogether for a smoke.
Just as she was about to scale the wall, she noticed another guard on the roof.
Where’d he come from?
She waited, using a nearby car for cover as she observed the guards’ walking pattern in tandem.
“What’s taking so long out there?” Mia asked over the coms.
“There’s another guard out here,” Shields said. “There was only one before, but now there are two. I’m waiting to see if there’s a third.”
“Roger that,” Mia said. “I’m here if you need me.”
“Not sure what you can do at this point. I’m just extending my recon on this place until l’m confident I can get in and out without any trouble.”
Satisfied that there were only two men outside, Shields eased up to the house once the second-story guard was on the opposite side. She shimmied up the drain pipe affixed to the outer wall in order to reach the second story. Once there, she hid around the corner and listened for the guard. Not much time passed before she heard his heavy footfalls approaching.
It’s time to rumble.
When the man came around the corner, she punched him in the throat. Instinctively, he reached for his neck before doubling over while trying to catch his breath. Shields put him down with a swift dose of carbon fiber and titanium from her prosthetic leg. His body went limp, but she caught him before he hit the ground, easing him down gently. She dragged his body into a nearby room and shut the door before preparing to move to the fourth floor.
Swinging herself up, she moved from the second floor to the third floor, then the third to the fourth before ascending to the roof. Shields gripped the balcony tightly before whipping her legs over the side of a waist-high glass fence. After rolling to a stealthy landing, she crouched behind an outdoor couch and waited for the guard to walk past her. The moment he did, she sprang from her position, surprising him. She jammed a needle loaded with a sedative into his thigh, resulting in him staggering backward before passing out.
“Good boy,” she said as she tousled his hair.
She stood and drank in the view, finding it nearly intoxicating. A large yacht lit by decorative lights churned through the water below. Other boats zipped past the big ship, all hustling in from the ocean for the evening.
What a life.
“The guards are down,” Shields said into her coms. “Ready to enter the house.”
“Perfect,” Mia said. “I’m ready.”
The sliding glass door had been left open, and Shields took full advantage. Once inside, she affixed the device to the computer in Sinclair’s office. Shields sat in Sinclair’s chair while she waited for the signal from Mia that she was in the system. Amidst the ambient light from outside, Shields stared at two of the walls plastered with personal photographs of Sinclair with famous people. There was one of him with software magnate Bill
Gates, next to one with global soccer star Lionel Messi. The largest photograph was in the center where Sinclair posed with three former U.S. presidents.
“Would you look at that,” Shields said to herself. “That’s from Madeline Young’s funeral.”
After perusing the room, Mia announced that she was in and downloading all that she could. However, their subdued celebration was cut short when Mia let out a string of expletives.
“They’re shutting me down,” Mia said. “I think they know we’re there. Get out now.”
“Roger that.”
Shields snatched the device from Sinclair’s hard drive and raced down to the second floor. However, as she round the corner of the wrap-around porch, she tripped over the leg of the first guard, who’d apparently regained consciousness. She skidded to a stop and looked up to see a man hustling in her direction with his weapon trained on her. Scrambling to her right, she rolled around the corner, away from the street. A bullet pinged off the wall, a suppressor keeping the gunfire almost inaudible.
Shields considered her options quickly. Picking a side and making a run for it was a fifty-fifty proposition. She decided that the best option was up.
Shields pulled herself up and waited until the guard was directly below her. As he approached her position, she dropped down on him, crushing him with her leg. He yelped in pain before she kicked him in the head, knocking him out for a second time.
Confident that he wasn’t going to wake up for a few minutes, she sprinted toward the front gate and entered the street.
“Come and get me,” Shields said over the coms. “And hurry.”
A few seconds later, Mia roared around the corner. As she came to a stop, she pushed open the passenger side door. Shields climbed inside before Mia sped away.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
“I had a zombie I had to put down again,” Shields said. “He was hard-headed, so I had to teach him a painful lesson twice. So, did you get anything?”
“Not what I was looking for. I must’ve triggered something in their system for them to react so quickly. But I was able to erase all the security footage.”
Shields slammed her fist on the dashboard.
“Don’t worry,” Mia said. “We’ll get what we came for.”
“And how do you suppose we’re going to do that?”
“Well, I did a little spying while I was waiting for you to get inside,” Mia said. “And guess what I found?”
“Surprise me.”
“I found a picture on social media of Sinclair taken not fifteen minutes before I saw it. Someone posted it publicly before turning the image private. But it was on Sinclair’s yacht.”
“Do you know where it is?” Shields asked.
Mia nodded.
“Then forget the computer,” Shields said. “Let’s go pay Mr. Sinclair a visit and get the information straight from the horse’s mouth.”
CHAPTER 32
HAWK DROVE WHILE ALEX rode in the front seat with her laptop. Black rested in the back, checking all his weapons and complaining about the choice of radio station.
“We need some good rock ’n roll to get us amped up,” Black said.
Alex sighed. “You don’t seriously think we’re going to shoot our way out of an off-the-grid prison site, do you?”
Black shrugged. “If we must.”
Hawk adjusted the rearview mirror and tried to suppress a grin.
“You two are made for each other,” Alex said.
“How’s Led Zeppelin sound?” Hawk asked with a hint of a smile.
“Kashmir?” Black asked.
“You got it,” Hawk said as he selected the song from his phone and then cranked it through the SUV’s sound system.
Alex rolled her eyes as the two men bobbed their heads to the beat.
When the song finished, Alex cleared her throat. “I hate to break up your little jam session, but we do have some interesting things to discuss that Mia sent us.”
“Okay,” Black said. “Let’s hear it.”
“You remember our good friend, Lance Drisi?” Alex asked.
Hawk nodded. “Uh huh. The anagram for Falcon Sinclair’s given name.”
“Right,” Alex said. “So, it turns out several shell companies that we found connected back to Drisi Enterprises have paid out millions of dollars to some of the most powerful people in the world over the past three years.”
“Like who?” Black asked.
“I’m hard pressed not to find a world president or prime leader from a major country on this list,” Alex said as she scanned the names. “It’s unbelievable. He’s bought just about every person on this list.”
“What about President Young?” Hawk asked.
“Now that is one name that’s missing, so maybe he’s resisted so far.”
“I’m not so sure,” Black said. “Sinclair might be using other means to manipulate Young.”
“You mean like the election?” she asked.
“Exactly. See if Clive Blackwood’s name is on any of those lists.”
“Yep, here it is,” she said, shaking her head.
Hawk stroked his chin. “So, Sinclair pays off Quinn with a sweetheart deal on a house in the Caymans and then has Young replace him with Clive Blackwood? That doesn’t seem like a smart move.”
“Maybe Quinn got greedy, threatened to expose Sinclair’s plan,” Alex suggested.
“But Quinn’s still alive,” Hawk said.
“For now,” Black said. “And Quinn would be exposing himself too if he tried to pull a stunt like that on Sinclair, not to mention the number of people on the list that Quinn would have to go through to make that information public. He’d run into brick wall after brick wall.”
“Never underestimate a scorned bureaucrat,” Hawk said.
Alex shut her laptop. “Well, this list makes it clear there are plenty of powerful officials with ties to Sinclair. That would explain how he’s been able to make Obsidian a nearly unstoppable force.”
“But to what end?” Hawk asked. “We still don’t know what his ultimate plan is.”
“We know enough to know it won’t be good, whatever it is,” Black said.
“That’s right,” Alex said. “And once we get Blunt out of this CIA black site, we only have one mission.”
Hawk mulled the revelation over as the trio rode in silence. He then turned to Alex. “I just remembered something.”
“What?” she asked.
“Do you still have all those names from all the people we connected to The Chamber?”
She nodded and opened her computer up again. “I haven’t looked at those files in a while, but I have them on here.”
“Cross-reference those with the Obsidian payoffs,” Hawk said.
Alex typed on her keyboard before responding. “Whoa. This is crazy.”
“What?” Black asked, leaning up from the backseat.
“I’d say at least forty percent of the people from our list that we suspected had ties to The Chamber are getting paid off by Sinclair,” Alex announced.
“That shouldn’t be a surprise,” Black said. “It’s not like those crooks straightened up overnight.”
“Of course, but it makes me wonder if The Chamber was bigger than we thought and they just reorganized,” Alex said.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Hawk said. “And we know their end game was to bring all nations under a singular world order, controlling every financial market and every government from one central place.”
“That’d be the death of this nation as we know it if that happened,” Black said.
“And that’s why we can’t let this happen,” Hawk said.
Alex sifted through the names on her spreadsheet and then gasped. “Would you look at this?”
“What now?” Hawk asked.
“Guess who was on The Chamber list?” Alex asked, but she continued without waiting for a guess. “Clive Blackwood.”
“What about Quinn?” Black a
sked.
“Nope,” she said. “Quinn isn’t on there.”
Hawk sighed. “Sinclair is aggressively getting all his most loyal people in place.”
Black started checking his guns again. “I’m getting angrier by the second.”
“Take it easy,” Hawk said. “We still have time to take them down, but we’d better be quick about it.”
Hawk turned on the radio, hoping to squelch the conversation and subsequently Black’s ire. But that was a failed effort when the DJ came on and started talking about the situation in New Orleans.
“Thanks for spending your evening with us on 100.3-FM, Washington’s home for classic rock,” the DJ said. “But tonight I also want us to remember all the victims from the tragedy in New Orleans where so far one hundred and thirty-seven people are dead from the toxic gas leak from Zeus Chemical. We’re partnering with the Red Cross, and if you’d like to donate, you can go to our app and—”
Hawk turned the station, but the next one was a news channel.
“Officials are still searching for answers as to the cause of the Zeus Chemical leak that’s claimed the lives of one hundred and thirty-seven people so far. However, there were a handful of people who survived. And all of them lived in the new Freedom Homes built by Falcon Enterprises and billionaire magnate Falcon Sinclair.”
Hawk powered off the radio.
“Anyone think that’s a coincidence?” Black asked.
Hawk shook his head. He’d been around long enough to know that it wasn’t.
“I can’t wait to nail the bastard,” Black said.
“We’ll get to that soon enough,” Hawk said. “How about a little Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones.”
“I love the Stones. Crank it up.”
* * *
HAWK ANNOUNCED THAT they were within a mile of the facility, according to the coordinates Big Earv had given them.
“Make sure all those guns are hidden,” Hawk said.
Black chuckled. “For how long?”
“This is a simple snatch and grab,” Alex said.
“Simple?” Hawk asked.
“Just go get ‘em, counselor,” she said.
Hawk adjusted his tie and put on a pair of costume glasses as he pulled up to the guardhouse. He flashed his credentials, and the man raised the gate and then waved them inside. Once parked, Hawk and Black got out, leaving Alex to man the operation from the SUV.
Final Strike (A Brady Hawk Novel Book 21) Page 15
