Simon Sees (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 5)

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “Simon!”

  Emily turned away from the cockpit and grabbed Simon as he made his away across the cabin. She hauled him back and pushed him against the space just behind the co-pilot’s station.

  “You can’t help her! Stay here!” She spun and brought her rifle up just as the open door fully faced the sniper’s nest, squeezing off a volley of shots until the weapon’s magazine was empty. She tossed the rifle aside and drew the pistol from her waistband, shoving its muzzle against the half cowering co-pilot. “I said close that damn door!”

  Finally, he twisted a control lever and the right-side door slid forward, closing with a satisfying, heavy click.

  “Get us out of here,” Emily ordered the man, recalling next what she had to tell him. “North for five miles. On the deck!”

  “All right, all right!”

  The Blackhawk nosed hard forward and began to speed north, hugging the contour of the hills that surrounded The Ranch as they left the facility behind.

  Twenty Seven

  “Can I call in air assets?”

  The request had been repeated three times by the team leader in the Utah desert, but Wyland was only now ready to give him an answer. An answer which didn’t matter, he knew. Failure had dictated what fate lay in his future regardless of any actions unfolding where the operation had unraveled. Simon Lynch was no longer his concern. Greater things mattered.

  “I don’t care,” Wyland said. “Do what you think is best.”

  He pulled the headset off and tossed it atop the keyboard, shutting the whole system down as he stood.

  ‘Happy birthday to little Charles…’

  His son. His wife. They were in danger, too, now. His inability to deliver on what Damian Traeger expected of him had put them in mortal jeopardy. They would suffer, perhaps worse than he would.

  That realization chilled Wyland. But only for a moment. Soon, his blood was boiling.

  You knew this might happen. You knew this day might come.

  Both statements were true, but Andrew Wyland had waddled forward through his daily existence as his master’s loyal servant. He might as well have worn a tuxedo and brought the man martinis. Except that unfortunate man would be discharged for spilling a drink.

  “He’s going to kill me,” Wyland said aloud in the solitude of the control room. “And them.”

  It was the ‘them’ that stoked the fire within now as he left the space in which he’d watched his future shatter. He left the building and walked down the block to his car, placing a call along the way to Damian Traeger’s secretary.

  “Miss Pedwill, will you tell Mr. Traeger that I need to see him?”

  “Mr. Traeger is out of the office,” his master’s stern and proper gatekeeper replied. “Would you like me to ring him and see when he will be available?”

  “Please,” Wyland said.

  He drove with the phone to his ear, steering through London traffic toward a destination he knew he would never see again.

  “Mr. Wyland…”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Traeger is meeting with architects about renovations at his home,” Miss Pedwill informed him. “He says you can see him there in two hours.”

  “Thank him,” Wyland said. “I’ll be there.”

  Wyland hung up and pulled into the underground parking of his building. The elevator sped him to the floor of his flat in no time, but still it was not quick enough. He wanted to see them. Needed to see them. Needed to hold them. Just once more.

  When he reached his flat, though, all he found was silence.

  “Cecelia,” he said. “Charles.”

  They were not there. His heart raced. He took his phone out and speed dialed his wife, waiting through three rings, then four. And then…

  “Hello my love,” Cecelia Wyland said as she answered the phone.

  “Cecelia…”

  His fears faded for that moment. The irrational thought that Traeger had somehow gotten to his family before even learning of the failure was just that—irrational. But still it had flourished for the minutes when his family’s absence was unexplained.

  “Where are you?” Wyland asked.

  “I decided to take Charles to see my mum on the train.”

  The train…

  He could hear it in the background across the cellular connection, the rhythmic rumble of steel wheels speeding along tracks. His wife and his son were heading north, already a good distance from the city. Gone.

  He would never see them again.

  “Cecelia, I want to say something to you.”

  “What is it, Andrew? Is something wrong?”

  He didn’t lie. Nor did he affirm that something was wrong. Very wrong. Instead, Andrew Wyland avoided any reply and said what he had to say.

  “I love you and Charles so very much,” he said. “So, so much. And I want you to understand that everything I do, everything I’ve done, it’s all for the both of you.”

  “Andrew, why are you saying this? You’re worrying me.”

  “Just listen, please,” he urged his wife. “I need to know that you think I’m…a good man. Regardless of what I may truly be, please tell me that, in your eyes, I’m a good man. That I’ve been a good husband, and a good father.”

  “Andrew…”

  There was emotion in her voice. And confusion. He could not prevent that, nor did he have time to try. He had only two tasks remaining that mattered, and he needed her to fulfill the first. To make it real so he could move on and secure their future, which would not include him.

  “Tell me, Cecelia. Tell me I’ve been a good man, a good husband, a good father.”

  This time, she did not hesitate, though, in her words, some alien fear was apparent. “Of course you have, Andrew. You’re the finest man I know.”

  Tears came, overwhelming him at what she’d just said. It was what he’d wanted to hear, even if he, himself, knew it to not be true. If all he was going to be was a memory, he craved that recollections of him held by his wife, and his son, would be good ones.

  “Kiss Charles for me,” Wyland said through sniffles.

  “We’re getting off the train at the next stop,” Cecelia said. “We’ll be home in—”

  “No!” He composed himself, dialing back the mix of fear and anger which had burst through the emotion suddenly weighing on him. “Do not do that. Do you understand me?”

  “Andrew, please, you’re scaring me.”

  “Everything will be all right,” Wyland said, more hope than promise in his words. “I’m going to make it all right.”

  “Andrew…”

  “I love you,” he told his wife, then he ended the call and shut his phone off.

  She might get off the train despite his warning not to. That was a fact he had to accept. But it would not matter. Nor would it matter if, in her worried state, she decided to contact his employer to report her concerns. The firm she believed he worked for was nothing more than a shadow. A number would ring there, and ring, and ring.

  Still, he could not waste time. There was a slight chance that word of what had happened in the Utah desert might leak to some news organization. Even if mentioned only obliquely as some ‘incident’ south of Salt Lake City, it might be enough to make his master aware that something had gone wrong. As it was, if he moved with care and haste, he could get to Damian Traeger before that. The man would be expecting him to deliver the good news he’d been waiting for.

  Andrew Wyland, though, would be delivering something else entirely.

  “It has to end,” Wyland said to himself as he went to the nightstand on his side of the bed and crouched down. He fiddled with the panel at the base until it slid aside, then reached in and slid a small metal box out. Four buttons protruded from the top. He pressed them in a precise sequence and an interior lock clicked, the lid popping up slightly. “You have to end.”

  Wyland lifted the lid and looked within the steel box to the Glock pistol, one full magazine resting next to it. He took th
e weapon in hand and loaded it, chambering a round before rising and tucking the pistol into his waistband on the left side. His experience with the firearm was minimal, but that did not matter at the moment. All he had to do was make one shot count.

  Just one.

  * * *

  “Lower!” Emily shouted, the handgun she’d acquired pressed hard against the co-pilot’s shoulder.

  “I’m on the deck already,” the co-pilot told her.

  Past him she could see just wispy outlines of the terrain, night shading it darker than the sky. They were still flying north, but that would change in a minute or two.

  Fly a heading of one-hundred…

  That was just the first of many directions she would have to give the co-pilot of the Blackhawk. Instructions that had been decided upon by Kirby Gant and a dead man. He and Jefferson had been far into the planning stages after the decision was made to snatch Simon, and she’d stepped almost seamlessly into that effort.

  Almost.

  It hadn’t gone as planned at The Ranch. The attack by some outside force had turned a fairly straightforward abduction into a firefight and flight from the hot zone. Where Jefferson had planned to take Simon ‘hostage’ to force a flight out, Emily hadn’t even been afforded the chance to attempt that subterfuge.

  But the remainder of the plan should still work. Could still work. If she remembered all that was supposed to happen in a choreographed sequence.

  “Go No Em,” Emily told the co-pilot, her voice raised to be heard above the racing turbines.

  He looked to her, his face seeming drained of color. The unexpected terror of almost dying had hit him hard, she suspected. She needed him to still fear that outcome.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” she said, pressing the muzzle harder still against his shoulder as she nodded toward the control panel at the front of the cockpit. “Third switch from the top, middle row, it’s red. I want to see green.”

  He hesitated.

  ‘Have the pilot throw the No Em switch. That stands for No Emissions. There won’t be a signal of any kind coming from the chopper then. You’ll be a hole in the sky.’

  Kirby Gant had explained it that simply. Art’s recollections of the type and series of Blackhawk had allowed the hacker to determine what needed to be done to turn off radios, transponders, and anything which would aid in reporting their position. As it was, the helicopter for this mission had been designed to ‘get lost’ so as to maintain secrecy on its trips to and from The Ranch. Clearly, when the assault began, the cowering co-pilot had attempted to make contact with the outside world by activating the radios and other navigation aids. That had to stop.

  “I’ve got nothing to lose!” Emily shouted, shifting her aim to the co-pilot’s helmeted head. “I’ll end you RIGHT NOW!”

  ‘Pull the trigger!’

  “STOP!”

  Emily glanced to her left where Simon had just screamed at her, his head now shaking from side to side, hands coming up to clamp over his ears as he sat curled up on the cabin floor.

  “Just stop,” he muttered now, eyes shut tight.

  Until Emily grabbed his shirt with her left hand and jerked him upward.

  “If you want to live, you keep your mouth shut right now and let me do what I’ve got to do!” she screamed at him.

  Simon stared up at the FBI agent. She appeared angry, but she wasn’t. It was a tool she was using to stop him from interfering. A behavioral tool. Though it was more blunt than those used by the people who had been ever-present in his life for so many years. Emily LaGrange hadn’t said he ‘needed’ to ‘lower his voice’. She’d been direct. Forceful. Like she would have been with anyone else, he suspected.

  She was treating him like a normal human being.

  Emily let go of Simon, letting him settle in again behind the co-pilot’s seat. She returned her attention fully to that man as he flew.

  “No Em,” she repeated, her voice raised only enough that he could not mistake what she was ordering him to do. “Now.”

  He reached quickly and threw the switch, the indicator light going from red to green.

  “Turn right heading zero two zero,” Emily instructed him.

  The co-pilot offered no more resistance. Without hesitation he banked right until the Blackhawk was on a slightly east-southeast heading.

  “Stay as low as you can,” Emily said. “If we’re found, we all die. Understood?”

  “Yes,” the co-pilot acknowledged.

  Emily considered the man’s suddenly compliant attitude. She switched the pistol into her off hand, covering him as she moved the dead pilot’s body, checking it for weapons. There were none. And if he wasn’t armed, his left-seater wouldn’t be. Her worry that he was only playing docile to then produce a weapon by surprise was put to rest.

  But something was different about the co-pilot. She didn’t want to say ‘wrong’. Not yet.

  “It’s going to be all right, Simon,” Emily said, facing the man she’d rescued from just across the cabin.

  He could barely make out the words she’d said in the awful noise that he could feel, not just hear. This wasn’t what he’d imagined when dreaming of being freed from The Ranch. Nor was his departure from the place he’d called home for so long as he’d wished. But that was a fact of his life now, this new life, still in its infancy—he could harbor wishes and experience disappointment.

  “Simon…”

  “Yes?”

  Emily slid toward him, keeping the co-pilot in sight. “What I did before. When I grabbed you.”

  “You didn’t want to,” he said. “But you had to.”

  Emily nodded, marveling at the simplest of interactions for a moment. They were conversing. More telling, he was conversing with her.

  “I mean it when I say things are going to be okay,” she assured him.

  He considered her words. He wanted to believe them. But, for someone, things would not be all right.

  “What happened to Art?” Simon asked. “You told me he passed away.”

  This wasn’t the time, nor the place, that she wanted to have this conversation. Her immediate concern was his mental state. How would his newly freed mind respond to the terrible truth she could offer?

  “How did he die?” Simon prodded her.

  Silence might be worse than the truth, Emily decided. “He took his own life, Simon.”

  He didn’t react immediately. When he did, it was a simple shift of his gaze off of her, his stare fixing on the base of a seat facing backward in the cabin.

  “Simon…”

  He didn’t respond to her. Not this time. And Emily said no more, letting the man mourn on his own terms.

  “How far are we going?”

  “What?” Emily asked, the deafening drone masking what the co-pilot had said. She looked to the back of the rear-facing seats and took a headset hanging from one, slipping it on and plugging it in. “What did you say?”

  “How far are we going?” the co-pilot repeated. “I don’t have unlimited fuel.”

  “You flew two-hundred miles from Idaho Falls,” Emily said. The particulars of the aircraft were part of the planning that Kirby Gant and Art Jefferson had carried out. They knew how far the helicopter could travel under various conditions and with different loads. “You’ve got five hundred plus miles of range left. So fly until I give you more instructions.”

  The co-pilot said no more. If she’d wanted to, Emily LaGrange could inform him that he would be flying another 430 miles to a spot just southeast of Pueblo, Colorado, where he would set down two hundred yards from a junk yard on the outskirts of town. There he would be bound so as not to interfere with the remainder of their escape, which would entail taking a 1998 Ford Taurus which would be waiting for them in the junkyard, courtesy of an old acquaintance of Art Jefferson who owned the piece of scrub land. An acquaintance through arrest, and, later, a friend through rehabilitation. The late FBI agent had several people like that in his
life, and the junkyard proprietor was just one who’d been called upon to aid in this run to freedom. None had even asked why, according to Gant. All that was needed was for Art Jefferson to ask. That said a lot about the man.

  So did the quiet grief Emily was witnessing Simon Lynch experience.

  Jefferson had done this all for him. Including taking his own life. Emily hoped that a moment would present itself when she could explain that to the man curled up across from her. He deserved to know. After all he’d been through, it was only right that all the secrets which bound and harmed him be erased from his life so he could start fresh.

  For the moment, though, she had to focus on getting him as far away from The Ranch as she could before everyone in the whole goddamn word was looking for them.

  Twenty Eight

  Andrew Wyland was buzzed through the gate at Damian Traeger’s property south of London near Warnham and followed the long, winding driveway to the main house. He’d been here only twice, meeting his master more often at his expansive flat in London, when such a rendezvous was required. The man had a dozen homes scattered about the globe, from Thailand to Toronto, but the estate in the lush green terrain between the city and the coast was his favorite. It was where he lay his head three nights out of seven, and where he savored his women any night he chose.

  Now, it would be the place his glorious, malevolent existence came to its end.

  “Mr. Traeger is with the architect,” the man’s servant informed Wyland as he was ushered into the house. “Through the butler’s pantry and the dining room to the kitchen. Mind the construction mess.”

  The servant, a stout man of maybe sixty years, extended a white-gloved hand toward a door off the grand foyer. Wyland moved toward it, passing slabs of rich wood paneling which had been stripped from the walls, the bones of the grand old house exposed beneath. Cracked plaster and chipped stone were the legacy of what the place had been. Traeger had designs on making changes, it seemed. A pity, Wyland thought briefly. The man would never see his project through to the end. Nor any project. Particularly the one involving Simon Lynch.