Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  His bosses in Langley had the power to stop him, but instead chose to promote him. Soon he would be the third-highest-ranking spook in the CIA, with a bloated paycheck that was financed by honest Americans. It wasn’t right.

  Jonathan had never done well at managing anger. Some injustices were so out of proportion that he couldn’t live with the imbalance.

  Over the years, Jonathan had seen too many of his Special Ops pals slide the slippery moral slope toward hired killer, and he’d vowed to himself and to God and to everything holy that he would never become an assassin. It would just be too easy a line to cross, and once crossed, there could be no return.

  These thoughts—this rage—tormented him as he sat in Trevor Munro’s rigorously neat living room with its clean lines and right angles, awaiting the man’s arrival home from work. He told himself that justice and assassination were two different things.

  Tonight would be all about justice, meted out by the subsonic rounds he’d loaded into the suppressed .22-caliber pistol in his lap.

  The living room wall hummed as the garage door opened.

  Jonathan waited until the overhead door rumbled closed again, and then he stood. He didn’t make his move, though, until he heard the interior garage door open and close and the sound of mail slapping down on the table.

  Jonathan stepped into the foyer, and from there straight into the kitchen.

  Munro actually made a yipping sound as he sensed Jonathan’s presence, and he whirled to face his attacker.

  The man Munro saw was dressed all in black, and his face was covered by a black mask.

  “I hear you’ve been looking for me,” Jonathan said. He smiled at the sight of the spreading stain in Munro’s trousers. “Well, here I am.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Family is always first. Thank you, Joy, for always being there, and always understanding. I love you.

  Chris, you rock. I’m so proud of you.

  I owe special thanks to a couple of genuine war heroes who invited me into the world of U.S. Navy SEALs for a couple of days and let me see stuff and play with toys that I would otherwise never have had access to. Steve “Dutch” Van Horn is a terrific tour guide for the SEALs compound in Virginia Beach, and the hour or two I spent on the shooting range with Stephen “Turbo” Toboz as my instructor was truly special. I shot the HK416 (Jonathan Grave’s M27), the HK417, the sweet little MP7, and the granddaddy of the day, a .300 WinMag sniper rifle. Great day. Thanks, guys.

  Jackie Mitchell gave a generous donation to the American Heart Association for her name to be included in this book. Having just had dinner with the real Jackie Mitchell for the first time, I can assure you that in reality she’s a very nice lady—far nicer than her fictional namesake. Thank heaven she has a sense of humor. Thanks to her for giving to such a good cause.

  Trevor Munro made a donation to the Recycling Research Foundation in return for having a character named after him. I assure the world that I borrowed only his name. The fictional Trevor Munro bears no resemblance to anything but my imagination.

  Many people touch my life on a regular basis, and all of them make the journey more valuable. I can’t possibly name everyone, but I’d like to call out a few in particular: Jeffery Deaver, Pat Barney and Sam Shockley, Bob and Bert Garino (I miss you guys!), Ellen Crosby, Donna Andrews, Alan Orloff, and Art Taylor.

  The folks at Kensington Publishing continue to amaze me. Michaela Hamilton is simply the best of the best when it comes to editors, and I’m sure it helps a lot to be surrounded by a terrific team. Adeola Saul is a terrific publicist whose heart and mind are always aligned on the books she manages, and Alexandra Nicolajsen is wonderfully persuasive in dragging analog writers into the digital world. None of that would work, though, without the passion of publisher Laurie Parkin, who is empowered by the great guy in the big corner office, Steve Zacharius. Thank you all for everything.

  Last but Lord knows not least, thanks to my agent and great friend, Anne Hawkins of John Hawkins and Associates. She’s been there through all of it.

  Turn the page for an exciting preview of John Gilstrap’s next exciting thriller starring Jonathan Grave

  HIGH TREASON

  Coming from Pinnacle in 2013

  In all his seventeen years with the United States Secret Service, Special Agent Jason Knapp had never felt this out of place, this exposed. The January chill combined with his jumpy nerves to create a sense of dread that rendered every noise too loud, every odor too intense.

  Rendered the night far too dark.

  With his SIG Sauer P229 on his hip, and an MP5 submachine gun slung under his arm—not to mention his five teammates on Cowgirl’s protection detail—he couldn’t imagine a scenario that might get away from them, but sometimes you get that niggling voice in the back of your head that tells you that things aren’t right. Years of experience had taught Knapp to listen to that voice when it spoke.

  Oh, that Mrs. Darmond would learn to listen to her protection detail. Oh, that she would listen to anyone.

  While he himself rarely visited the White House residence, stories abounded among his colleagues that Cowgirl and Champion fought like banshees once the doors were closed. She never seemed to get the fact that image mattered to presidents, and that first ladies had a responsibility to show a certain decorum.

  Clearly, she didn’t care.

  These late-night party jaunts were becoming more and more routine, and Knapp was getting sick of them. He understood that she rejected the traditional role of first lady, and he got that despite her renown she wanted to have some semblance of a normal life, but the steadily increasing risks she took were flat-out irresponsible.

  Tonight was the worst of the lot.

  It was one thing to dash out to a bar on the spur of the moment with a reduced protection detail—first spouses and first children had done that for decades—but to insist on a place like the Wild Times bar in Southeast D.C. was a step too far. It was five steps too far.

  Great disguise notwithstanding, Cowgirl was a white lady in a very dark part of town. And it was nearly one in the morning.

  Knapp stood outside the main entrance to the club, shifting from foot to foot to ward away the cold. Charlie Robinson flanked the other side of the door, and together they looked like the plainclothes version of the toy soldiers that welcomed children to the FAO Schwartz toy store in Manhattan. He felt at least that conspicuous.

  Twenty feet away, Cowgirl’s chariot, an armored Suburban, idled in the handicapped space at the curb, its tailpipe adding a cloud of condensation to the night. Inside, Gene Tomkin sat behind the wheel, no doubt reveling in the warmth of the cab. Bill Lansing enjoyed similar bragging rights in the follow car that idled in the alley behind the bar.

  Typical of OTR movements—off the record—the detail had chosen silver Suburbans instead of the black ones that were so ubiquitous to official Washington, specifically to call less attention to themselves. They’d driven here just like any other traffic, obeying stoplights and using turn signals the whole way. On paper that meant that you remained unnoticed.

  But a Suburban was a Suburban, and if you looked hard enough you could see the emergency lights behind the windows and the grille. Throw in the well-dressed white guys standing like toy soldiers, and they might as well have been holding flashing signs.

  In these days of Twitter and Facebook, when rumors traveled at the speed of light, all it would take for this calm night to turn to shit would be for somebody to connect some very obvious dots. While the good citizens of the District of Columbia had more or less unanimously cast their votes to sweep Champion into office, they’d since turned against him. It didn’t stretch Knapp’s imagination even a little to envision a spontaneous protest.

  Then again, Cowgirl was such a media magnet, he could just as easily envision a spontaneous TMZ feeding frenzy. Neither option was more attractive than the other in this neighborhood.

  The Wild Times was doing a hell of a business. The main ac
t on the stage was a rapper of considerable local fame—or maybe he was a hip-hopper (how do you tell the difference?)—and he was drawing hundreds of twentysomething kids. Within the last twenty minutes, the pace of arrivals had picked up—and almost nobody was leaving.

  From a tactical perspective, the two agents inside with Cowgirl—Peter Campbell and Dusty Binks, the detail supervisor—must be enduring the tortures of the damned. In an alternate world where the first lady might have given a shit, no one would have been allowed to touch the protectee, but in a nightclub situation, where fans paid good money to press closer to the stage, preventing personal contact became nearly impossible.

  For the most part, the arriving revelers projected a pretty benign aura. It was the nature of young men to swagger in the presence of their girlfriends, and with that came a certain tough-guy gait, but over the years Knapp had learned to trust his ability to read the real thing from the imitation. Over the course of the past hour, his warning bells hadn’t rung even once.

  Until right now.

  A clutch of four guys approached from the north, and everything about them screamed malevolence. It wasn’t just the gangsta gait and the gangsta clothes. In the case of the leader in particular, it was the eyes. Knapp could see the glare from twenty feet away. This guy wanted people to be afraid of him.

  “Do you see this?” he asked Robinson without moving his eyes from the threat.

  Robinson took up a position on Knapp’s right. “Handle it carefully,” he warned. More than a few careers had been wrecked by YouTube videos of white cops challenging black citizens.

  As the kids closed to within a dozen feet, Knapp stepped forward. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “You know, it’s pretty crowded inside.”

  “The fuck outta my way,” the leader said. He started to push past, but Knapp body blocked him. No hands, no violence. He just physically blocked their path.

  “Look at the vehicle,” Knapp said, pointing to the Suburban. “Take a real close look.”

  Their heads turned in unison, and they seemed to get it at the same instant.

  “If any of you are armed, this club is exactly the last place you want to be right now. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “What?” the leader said. “Is it like the president or something?”

  Knapp ignored the question. “Here are your choices, gentlemen. You can go someplace else, or you can submit to a search right here on the street. If I find a firearm on any of you, I’ll arrest you all, and your mamas won’t see their boys for about fifteen years. Which way do you want to go?”

  Simple, respectful, and face saving.

  “Come on, Antoine,” one of them said. “This place sucks anyway.”

  Antoine held Knapp’s gaze for just long enough to communicate his lack of fear. Then he walked away, taking his friends with him.

  “Nicely done, Agent Knapp,” Robinson said.

  They returned to their posts. “Every time we do one of these late-night OTRs, I’m amazed by the number of people who keep vampire hours. Don’t these kids have jobs to wake up for?”

  Robinson chuckled. “I figure they all drive buses or hazmat trucks.”

  With the Antoine non-confrontation behind them, Knapp told himself to relax, but in the world of gang-bangers, you always had to be on your toes for the retaliatory strike. He couldn’t imagine that Antoine and his crew would be in the mood to take on federal agents, but you never knew.

  He just wanted to get the hell out of here.

  “Look left,” Robinson said.

  Half a block away, a scrawny, filthy little man was doing his best to navigate a shopping cart around the corner to join their little slice of the world. The cart overflowed with blankets and assorted stuff—the totality of his worldly possessions, Knapp imagined. Aged somewhere between thirty and eighty, this guy had the look of a man who’d been homeless for decades. There was a hunched movement to the chronically homeless that spoke of a departure of all hope. It would be heartbreaking if they didn’t smell so bad.

  “If Cowgirl sees him, you know she’ll offer him a ride,” Robinson quipped.

  Knapp laughed. “And Champion will give him a job. Couldn’t do worse than some of his other appointments.” Knapp didn’t share the first family’s attraction to the downtrodden, but he admired it. It was the one passion of the president’s that seemed to come from an honest place.

  Knapp didn’t want to take action against this wretched guy, but if he got too close, he’d have to do something. Though heroic to socialists and poets, the preponderance of homeless folks were, in Knapp’s experience, nut jobs, harmless at the surface, but inherently unstable. They posed a hazard that needed to be managed.

  He felt genuine relief when the guy parked himself on a sidewalk grate and started to set up camp.

  Knapp’s earpiece popped as somebody broke squelch on the radio. “Lansing, Binks. Bring the follow car to the front. Cowgirl’s moving in about three.”

  “Thank God,” Knapp said aloud but off the air. Finally.

  He and Robinson shifted from their positions flanking the doors of the Wild Times to new positions flanking the doors to Cowgirl’s chariot. He double-checked to make sure that his coat was open and his weapon available. A scan of the sidewalk showed more of what they’d been seeing all night.

  When the follow car appeared from the end of the block and pulled in behind the chariot, Knapp brought his left hand to his mouth and pressed the button on his wrist mike. “Binks, Knapp,” he said. “We’re set outside.”

  “Cowgirl is moving now.”

  This was it, the moment of greatest vulnerability. Ask Squeaky Fromme, Sara Jane Moore, or John Hinckley. These few seconds when the protectee is exposed are the moments of opportunity for suicidal bad guys to take their best shot.

  Robinson pulled open the Suburban’s door and cheated his body forward to scan for threats from that end of the street, and Knapp cheated to the rear to scan the direction of the homeless guy and the real estate beyond him. He noted with some unease that the guy was paying attention in a way that he hadn’t before. His eyes seemed somehow sharper.

  Knapp’s inner alarm clanged.

  Ahead and to his left, the double doors swung out, revealing a unmistakably unhappy Cowgirl, who seemed to be resisting her departure. She wasn’t quite yelling yet, but assuming that past was precedent, the yelling would come soon.

  Movement to his right brought Knapp’s attention back around to the homeless man, who suddenly looked less homeless as he shot to his feet and hurled something at the chariot.

  Knapp fought the urge to intercept the throw, and instead drew his sidearm as he shouted “Grenade!”

  He’d just leveled his sights on the attacker when an explosion ripped the chariot apart from the inside, the pressure wave rattling his brain and shoving him face first onto the concrete. He didn’t know if he’d fired a shot, but if he had, it missed, because the homeless guy was still standing.

  He’d produced a submachine gun from somewhere—a P90, Knapp thought, but he wasn’t sure—and he was going to town, blasting the night on full-auto.

  Behind him, he knew that Campbell and Binks would be shielding Cowgirl with their bodies as they hustled her toward the follow car. In his ear, he heard Lansing shouting, “Shots fired! Shots fired! Agents down!”

  Once Knapp found his balance, he rolled to a knee and fired three bullets at the attacker’s center of mass. The man remained unfazed and focused, shooting steadily at the First Lady.

  Body armor, Knapp thought. He took aim at the attacker’s head and fired three more times. The attacker collapsed.

  But the shooting continued, seemingly from every compass point. Had passersby joined the fight? What the hell—

  Binks and Campbell were still ten feet from the follow car when head shots killed them both within a second of each other. They collapsed to the street, bringing Cowgirl with them. She curled into a fetal ball and started to scream.

 
; Past her, and over her head, bullets raked the doors of the follow car. Going that way was no longer an option.

  Keeping low, Knapp let his SIG drop to the pavement as he reached for his slung MP5. This wasn’t time for aimed shots; it was time for covering fire. At this moment, the First Lady of the United States was far more important than any other innocents in this crowd. He held the weapon as a pistol in his left hand as he raked the direction he thought the new shots were coming from.

  With his right hand, he grabbed Cowgirl by the neck of her blouse and pulled. “Back into the club!” he commanded as he draped his body over hers.

  To others it might have looked as though she was carrying him on her back as he hustled her toward the front doors of the club, past the burning chariot and around the body of Charlie Robinson, who’d been torn apart by the blast.

  Knapp was still five steps away when searing heat tore through his midsection, driving the breath from his lungs and making him stagger.

  He’d taken that bullet for Cowgirl. He’d done his job. Now he just had to finish it.

  He had to get her inside.

  The next two bullets took him in the hip and the elbow.

  He was done, and he knew it.

  “Inside!” he yelled and he pushed the first lady as hard as he could.

  He saw her step through the doors the instant before a bullet sheared his throat.

  John Gilstrap is the acclaimed author of eight thrillers: Threat Warning, Hostage Zero, No Mercy, Six Minutes to Freedom, Scott Free, Even Steven, At All Costs, and Nathan’s Run. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A safety and environmental expert and former firefighter, he holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. John has also adapted four books for the big screen: Red Dragon (uncredited) from the Thomas Harris novel, Word of Honor from the Nelson DeMille novel, and Young Men and Fire, from the Norman Maclean book. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia (near Washington, D.C.). Please visit www.johngilstrap.com.