In part one, Time to Run, the first chapter of Friendly
Fire was previewed. As a special treat for readers of
the Nick of Time series, the preview that follows picks
up where that excerpt ended . . .
Chapter Two
The Sleeping Genie Motel seemed to get its own joke. Nestled behind a strip mall in an unincorporated stretch of Route 1 between Woodbridge and Quantico, Virginia, the seedy low-rise 1960s-vintage motor court had a reputation. Let’s just say that precious few of the genies in residence did much sleeping, and that the rooms turned over two or three times on a good night.
Jonathan Grave had seen places like this in every military town. The twenty-dollars per night marquee was a dead giveaway. He’d fail a lie detector if he swore he’d never frequented such a place, but it had been a long, long time—back when most of the promiscuity-related diseases could be cured with penicillin.
“Hey, look, Dig,” Boxers said, pointing through the windshield as they cruised into the crumbling parking lot. “The genie wants you. She’s winking at you.”
Indeed, the circle of neon that made up the gaudy sign’s left eye had started to wear out, and it looked for all the world like she was winking. The genie was a busty young thing. “I’m saving myself for that special genie,” Jonathan said.
“Looking like that, no genie will have you,” Boxers said. In deference to the daylight hours, Jonathan had done what he could to change his appearance. His nose was slightly larger than normal, and he sported teeth that gave him an overbite. A specially-designed T-shirt gave him a paunch that wasn’t real, and he wore a pair of taped-up glasses over his normally blue eyes that were now brown. In general, people overestimated the capabilities of face-recognition software, and nine times out of ten, if police interviewed the people with whom he and Boxers interacted, all they’d remember was the tape on the glasses and sheer size of Boxers, who’d similarly altered his features. In general, Jonathan hated disguises, but sometimes, they were the smart move.
Jonathan waved his hand to the right—at the edge of the lot closest to the highway. “Pull over here while we work things out.” He lifted his portable radio from where he’d placed it on the center console and pressed the transmit button. “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” he said.
He knew that Venice Alexander would be monitoring everything from the office in Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia, about fifty miles to the south and east of here. She pronounced her name Ven-EE-chay, and she was the person every NSA recruiter would sell his left arm to add to his staff.
“Go ahead.”
“Do we have any stronger confirmation on the room number?” Islamist nutjobs had snatched nine-year-old Mindy Johnson, a congressman’s daughter, from the parking lot of a shopping mall north of here in Montgomery County, Maryland, and had declared that any attempts to contact the police would result in her execution. The bad guys wanted $1.3 million in cash to get her back. Her father—Congressman William H. Johnson of Massachusetts—had opted to invest in Jonathan’s services instead. Mindy had been visiting her father for the weekend, and had been on her way home from hanging at a theater in Rockville, where she’d seen a movie with friends.
Apparently Congressman Dad knew neither that she had gone to a movie nor that she hadn’t come home. The first he knew of it was when the kidnapper contacted him at work.
Reaching out to Jonathan was a difficult thing to do, what with all the blind e-mails and cutouts that made him nearly impossible to find. The fact that the congressman had been able to do so within the first eight hours of his daughter’s kidnapping told Jonathan that the guy had leveraged some inside information. This was not the first time Jonathan had done work for very important people in Washington.
That initial contact with Jonathan had been nearly eighteen hours ago, and in the interim, Jonathan and his team had been working all angles to find the kid. As often was the case, the big break had lain buried in the electronic metadata that piloted e-mails through cyberspace. With that head start, followed by a lot of phone calls and shoe leather, they’d narrowed the options down to this motel. They had everything but the room number.
“Nothing much has changed since we last spoke,” Venice said. “I’m ninety percent sure that this is the right place. And if that’s the case, then I am eighty percent sure that they’re in room one twenty-four.”
Jonathan looked to Boxers for an opinion. At six-foot-huge, Boxers, who was born Brian Van de Muelebroeke, was hands-down the largest, most intelligent and most lethal person Jonathan had ever known. “What say you, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked.
Boxers rumbled out a laugh. “Eighty percent stacked against ninety percent. I can’t do that math in my head, but it sounds an awful lot like a guess.”
Jonathan agreed. Given the stakes, if only from the firepower they were about to bring to bear, they needed better than that.
“Okay, I copy,” Jonathan said into the microphone.
“Does that mean you’re about to go hot?” Venice asked.
“I’ll let you know when I do,” he replied. He looked across the console. “We need more, don’t we?”
“You’re the boss,” Boxers said. “But if I were the boss, I’d want more.” Big Guy had a special way with nondeferential deference.
Hostage rescue was a delicate balance of finesse and violence. Methodical research and stunning speed. It left no room for mistakes. Cops could get away with raiding the wrong house and killing the wrong people because they had friendly prosecutors in their corner. Jonathan had friends, but not in those spaces. Besides, he didn’t know if he could live with himself if he killed an innocent.
“We need eyes on,” Jonathan said.
Boxers eyed him. “We need world peace, too. And let’s throw in eternal sunshine. The devil is in the details of getting it.”
Jonathan had an idea. “Find me a liquor store.”
Boxers laughed again. “Are we going to throw a party?”
“Sort of,” Jonathan said. Sometimes it was more fun to be cryptic than to be forthcoming. “This is a military town. How far can the nearest booze vendor be?”
“You forget that you’re still in the Commonwealth of Virginia.” The state ran all of the liquor stores—and had just raised the tax to be paid on top of the sales over which they had a monopoly. Without the worry of competition, the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Board could put liquor stores however far apart they wanted, and charged whatever they pleased.
Boxer cruised their recently purchased old and smelly SUV back out of the parking lot, and back down Route 1 in search of the familiar red-white-and-blue sign of an ABC store. This POS vehicle would be dumped when the mission was done, and they would drive back to Fisherman’s Cove in the Batmobile—Boxers’ name for the heavily customized and armored Hummer that was their real transportation. It never made sense to let security cameras see your getaway car.
The liquor store resided in a strip mall that looked just like every other strip mall on that stretch of highway. “You’re really not going to tell me what you’re up to, are you?” Boxers asked as he nosed into the space.
“I’m going to make myself stink,” Jonathan said, and he let himself out. Inside the store, he chose a pint of cheap bourbon, and paid in cash. Back in the vehicle with Boxers, he said, “Okay, let’s go back and see the genie.”
“Not until you tell me what you’re doing.”
Jonathan winked at him. He stripped the cap off of the bottle, pulled his shirt away from his body, and poured about half the contents down the front of his chest.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I need to smell like a drunk,” Jonathan said.
Big Guy winced and raised a hand to his nose. “Well, that’ll do it. Jesus. Why?”
Jonathan explained while they drove back to the Sleeping Genie.
* * *
Ethan went through the motions as if in a dream. A nightmare. His bruises had all congealed into a sin
gle body ache. Once they had shoved him into the back of the police cruiser there in the parking lot, right in front of Raven and so many of his coworkers who had all filed out to see what the commotion was about, they shut the door and left him there for what felt like an hour. He wondered if maybe that was all about setting the humiliation hook as deeply as possible.
He tried to ignore reporters’ camera lenses as they were pressed against the window. But he couldn’t miss the look that Raven had in her eyes when they locked glances. Her gaze had cut him like diamond on glass. It was a look of utter disappointment, of betrayal. She broke the look off after just an instant, but for Ethan the damage was done.
So many faces stared at him. The clerks and customers from so many different stores pointed and said things, but he couldn’t hear and he told himself that he didn’t care. They didn’t know him and he didn’t know them, so what did they matter? They were no different than the kids that gathered around his schoolyard fights back in the day, just hungry to see the blood of the guy who lost and to cheer the winner. A few regular citizens tried to come in closer for a better look at him, but the police kept them all at bay.
Among the crowd of cops that mingled between Ethan and the onlookers, Ethan could see the monster’s feet sticking out between parked cars. No attempt was made to resuscitate him or to take him off to the hospital. Ethan figured that that meant the Earth was finally free of one more child molester. He hoped that that meant his night terrors might go away.
Detective Hastings opened the door of the police cruiser and leaned in. A smear of blood marked her arm. “Your name is Ethan Falk, is that right?”
He nodded.
“Where do you live?”
He told her, and as he watched her read along from his confiscated driver’s license, he figured that she was verifying what it said.
“Do you live there alone?”
“No, ma’am. There’s a whole other family there. I just rent a room. That’s all I can afford.”
“Are there weapons in the house?”
“I have no idea. None in my room. Am I really under arrest?”
The question seemed to confuse the detective. “You killed a man,” she said. “That’s a surefire way to get arrested.”
“But it was self-defense. I already told you that.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t. But that’s not for me to decide. That’s for the judge and jury.”
“So, I’m going to jail?” The realization that should have been so obvious barreled at him.
Hastings smiled, might have even chuckled a little. “I can’t exactly let you just walk away, can I? You already told me that you killed that man. Do you expect me to just look the other way?”
Ethan’s heart slammed itself against his chest. “You’re arresting me for murder?”
Hastings cocked her head. Her eyes showed kindness that he hadn’t been expecting. “You know, Ethan, I’m just a cop. I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a priest. That means I’m not in the business of giving advice that people listen to. Having said that, I do have a word of advice in case you’re interested.”
Ethan felt his shields come up. This was her opportunity to tell him to go to hell. He waited for it.
“If I were you,” she said, “I wouldn’t say anything to anyone on any subject until I was sitting across the table from my attorney.”
“But I don’t have an attorney.”
“You will,” Hastings said.
* * *
Oh-three-hundred missions—hostage rescues—presented infinite variations on thousands of variables, all of which posed their own unique dangers. Each of these were directly linked to the fact that people were unpredictable even in the best of times. Once they felt threatened, their unpredictability often rose to the level of frenzy, and frenzied people often did stupid things such as shooting at hostage rescuers in spite of superior firepower and skills.
As a hedge, Jonathan and his team stacked the odds in their favor through the use of advanced weaponry, body armor, high-tech surveillance techniques, and flawless marksmanship. One of their most effective force multipliers was their ability to function in the night as effectively as if it were midday, thanks to night vision technologies. The darkness more often than not disoriented their opposing forces—OpFor—making even talented fighters less effective.
In an operation such as the one that was unfolding at the Sleeping Genie, darkness posed an even greater advantage—that of being invisible to the surrounding general public. While Jonathan’s team was working at the request of a member of Congress, they had no legal authority to perform any of the operations they undertook. By statute, it was illegal to discharge a firearm in this part of Prince William County, and if those shots killed or injured someone, then Jonathan would have committed a homicide, and it would be left to a jury to decide whether or not the crime was justified. But first the police would have to catch him.
His team always wore gloves on an operation, but as a practical matter it was virtually impossible to eliminate all traces of fingerprints, and with DNA technology being what it was, he couldn’t rule out leaving behind a drop of blood or sweat. The good news was that a trace of such typical forensic indicators would lead nowhere. Neither Jonathan nor Boxers existed anywhere in the real world, thanks to efforts by high-placed friends in the government for whom he occasionally did work that for a number of reasons could not afford to be traced back to the officials who’d ordered it.
Long-term survival in Jonathan’s world was all about managing the tiny details.
Today, those details were all working against him. While a nine-year-old girl is in the grasp of kidnappers, every second of captivity was an opportunity for serious harm, but the smart call remained to await darkness and the advantages it brought. First, they needed to verify that they had the right place. Once that was done, they could set up surveillance—even deploy a small camera to watch what was going on—and from that develop a scoop-and-swoop plan that would mean the smallest amount of harm to the fewest number of people.
As Boxers drove the rattletrap Ford back toward the Sleeping Genie, he said, “I don’t believe I’m about to say this, but if you can verify that she’s there, maybe this is one we need to report to the cops and let them handle it.”
Jonathan swiveled his head to look at his friend across the center console. “And what would we tell them?”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Boxers said. “I know the drill. They’ll ask questions we can’t answer, but we don’t have to fill in all the blanks. We can just make an anonymous report and step away.”
“That’s not what we’ve been hired to do. If we tell the local cops about this, they’re going to check with the FBI. Congressman Johnson seems to think that the bad guys have a source inside the FBI. If the jihadists get word, they’ll kill the kid. This is why we get the big bucks.”
Boxers drove past the motel, presumably because he wanted to continue talking. “Don’t make it sound like I’m trying to pussy out of this,” he said. “If the PC is in there, how the hell can we wait till dark to pull her out? But if we try it during the day, the entire world will see what we’re up to. That’s just too dangerous for us.”
Big Guy’s point was a valid one, but the job was the job. “Tell you what,” Jonathan said. “After I scope it out, if I can confirm that Mindy Johnson is inside, then we’ll talk. Maybe we can contact the congressman and let him make the call. Tell him the stakes and our limitations, and he can decide.”
“What do you think he’s going to say? He’s going to want us to go in and grab her now.”
“We’ll just have to tell him that’s not how we do things. We’ll tell him we have to wait till dark.”
Boxers weighed the idea. “You know he won’t go for that,” he said.
“And that’s why we don’t ask others for their opinions, and we don’t invite LEOs into our operations.” LEO stood for law enforcement officer. Jonathan had never intended to call them
in, but sometimes it was easier to let Big Guy arrive at his own answers in his own way.
Boxers pulled a legal U-turn at the next light and drove the Ford back toward the Sleeping Genie. “How do you want to handle it?” he asked as they pulled into the lot.
“I’m going to be the drunk looking for his missing girlfriend. When they open the door, I’ll see what I can see.”
“What if they don’t open the door?”
Jonathan flashed a knowing smile. “I really don’t think that will be an issue.”
LYRICAL UNDERGROUND BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2016 John Gilstrap, Inc.
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First electronic edition: April 2016
ISBN: 978-1-6018-3699-1
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