Blindsided (A Mitch Kearns Combat Tracker Novel Book 4)

by JT Sawyer

  Mitch stepped back and withdrew his pistol while keeping his blade in his other hand. Both of the men were panting hard and had sweat dripping off their chins as they encircled the motionless figure.

  “What a beast,” said Mitch, looking at the man’s fractured skull as the fountain filled with a mix of blood and cerebral fluid that was pulsating out of the jagged wound. “This guy was inhuman.”

  David wiped his soiled boot along the man’s leather jacket. “Yes, he certainly was.”

  Seeing the man was dead, Mitch reholstered his weapons. Then he peeled off his windbreaker and inspected the knife wound on the back of his arm. It was a perfectly linear laceration that had cut a quarter of an inch into his muscle. “Could’ve been worse but it looks like stitches will still be in order,” he said, wrapping his jacket firmly around the cut and moving back to David. “You OK, big fella—you really need a day when you’re not in someone’s crosshairs.”

  “That will hopefully be the case for all of us after today,” he said as Mitch leaned his aching arm on David’s shoulder and both of them supported one another as they hobbled side by side down the corridor.

  Chapter 43

  After Mitch and David left, Petra swung open the door that Cavel had just emerged from and sniped the first thug in the throat with two rounds then immediately dropped low and shot a bearded figure in the opposite corner who had leapt up from a couch.

  Eva sprung up from a kitchen chair in the corner, the faint trace of a bloody lip showing as she smiled nervously at Petra. Her eyes were filled with terror but she forced her feet forward and flung her arm around Petra’s neck in a hug. “You’re back, thank God. Is Devorah alright?”

  “Yes, everyone is OK but I have to get you out of here fast.” He held her by the arm while keeping his pistol trained on the door as they exited. Seeing some maintenance staff walking by, he quickly ducked back into the room with Eva and closed the door until they had passed.

  “We’ve got a vehicle at the other end of the facility.”

  “Take me to Devorah.”

  “My orders are to get you out of here.”

  “No, take me to her now.”

  He moved alongside her as they exited the room and trotted down the stone steps. “I’m taking you to the car and then somewhere safe.”

  She pulled her arm free of his. “The hell you are, young man.”

  He motioned for her to move under the canopy of a large willow beside the fountain as a maid walked by in the distance. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “After all you’ve been through together trying to save Gideon and your reputations, do you want Devorah to throw that all away now? You’ve seen how she’s been—I’m afraid she could kill Uri.”

  Petra was mulling over the information. “Petra, my boy, we need to get to her. I need to.” She moved closer, squeezing his arm firmly. “And if you think Devorah is the only one of us who has a destructive temper then you are mistaken.”

  Chapter 44

  “The black box in exchange for your mother. I know you couldn’t have decrypted it. James Ratner told me he and Victor were the only ones who knew how to do that and, unfortunately for you, they are no longer on our sunny shores.”

  “You don’t get it yet, do you?” Dev said, moving closer. “It’s OK, it took me a while to understand the complexity of what my father orchestrated all those months ago. The black boxes were only one small part of this.” She pulled a handful of photos from a concealed pocket in her dress, tossing them on the ground at his feet. “These were taken from a satellite feed last year and are time-stamped. Does that cave look familiar? What about all the dead bodies inside that we found? I’m pretty sure there’s no mistaking your face in that one photo—you know, the one of you directing your men to stack the bodies of the dead miners in that cave. And there are plenty of eyewitness accounts from villagers who had their family members abducted by you and your men. If the JPG files my father had had successfully uploaded a year ago then your career would’ve ended by now but sometimes things just don’t go according to plan.”

  Uri’s eyes widened and his lower lip hung down. He quickly snorted in a breath. “This changes nothing. You’re an international fugitive who’ll be seen to have doctored those photos to shift blame for your disgraced father’s shortcomings. Besides, on whose authority would anyone arrest me with my standing in Parliament?”

  “The funds from your diamond mining operations were the only way for you to reach the top, isn’t that right, Uri? Certainly your success wasn’t based on your character or loyalty to your country, which we both know evaporated long ago.”

  He stepped forward into the light, his teeth gnashing out with each word. “You’re finished, Devorah—the mining operation is buried under a mountain of rubble and the bodies of the men we kidnapped will be washed out to sea eventually. No one will miss a bunch of pathetic peasants who disappeared from their villages in the middle of the night—villages that I will make sure are soon burned to the ground and every last person hacked to bits.” He raised his fist, shaking it. “And a year from now, my majority in the Knesset will shape the future of Israeli politics for the next century. You can watch all of it unfold on the black-and-white TV in the prison cafeteria. Gideon—Anatoly’s legacy—and everyone he loved, will soon be a distant memory.”

  Dev lowered her pistol then her head. She took a deep breath as the corner of her mouth exposed a faint smile.

  “What the hell is so humorous?” he said.

  “That was the stellar performance I had hoped for—a job well done.” She used the muzzle of her pistol to point at a video device nestled between two books on a shelf against the wall. “I arrived here shortly before you did and made sure your stage was prepared.”

  Dev moved forward and raised the laptop screen on the desk. The image showed the auditorium upstairs, where thousands of patrons sat squirming in their seats after viewing Uri’s admission on the large screen where his inauguration was to take place.

  “And I’m almost certain that this same live feed was just streamed to i12 News for the rest of our countrymen to see.”

  Dev snapped down the laptop screen and powered off the cameras. “Once I discovered those photographs and the cave I knew that there was enough evidence to place you at the crime scene in Africa. But I also knew you could probably use your considerable authority after today to make any attempt at a public trial disappear. I needed your live confession and you just did a hell of a job.”

  She took a step towards him. “What—no smug reply, Uri? No glib comments?”

  The vein in his neck was throbbing and his face was glowing red. He swiped his arm across the width of the table, knocking everything to the floor. Then he leaped for the top drawer in the corner of his desk. Dev was faster and slammed the butt of her pistol onto his forehead, driving him to the ground. She kicked him in the ribs then levelled the pistol at his face.

  His lips started to move but Dev stepped forward, pressing the barrel against his forehead. “Go ahead and speak—give me one more reason to pull this trigger or better yet, please try reaching for my weapon. I know you have the disarming skills but are you faster than I am?”

  “No, Devorah,” said her mother from behind her as she entered the room. “It’s over—Uri is finished. You’ve won.”

  Dev didn’t pull her eyes away from him, her pistol grip only growing stronger. “It’s not over—you don’t just walk away after something like this.”

  “If you do this, if you kill him, you will never be the same—we will never be the same again.” She moved closer to Dev, who remained unflinching.

  “You know what he has done—the people he has killed and how he tried to smear father’s name.”

  “And he will pay; his career is over. His will be a life of shame in prison for the insolent coward he is.” She stood by Dev’s side. “But you, my daughter, you have your whole life ahead of you and it shouldn’t be filled with pain—you have suffered
enough for too long.”

  Eva took a step into the light towards her daughter. “You’ve spent so many years saving others around the world, rescuing people who would have died otherwise. You’re a damn good woman. If you do this, if you murder him in cold blood, it will destroy that woman. I’ve already seen what has happened to you this past year. The anger, the rage that has consumed you since your father died—this isn’t what he would have wanted for you—what I want for you, Devorah.”

  She moved the pistol an inch closer towards Uri’s forehead. “How can you tell me not to do this when you know it’s the right thing?”

  She exhaled, looking out the window as Mitch and David entered the room. “With each mission your father returned from, there was a part of his soul chipped away and lost forever. Over time, the man I once knew changed—his smile gone. And the remorse and anguish inside only caused him to go on more missions when he started his company, hoping that somehow the more rescue work he did the more he could atone for his past.” Eva moved closer and placed her hand on Dev’s arm. “You have to move on and get your life back and find out who you are apart from all this pain.”

  Dev’s finger rested upon the trigger, her breathing getting shallow. She stared into Uri’s eyes and knew the world would be a better place without him in it. But her mother’s words ricocheted off the steely confines of her psyche. How could she kill this man in front of her after what she’d said? Dev recalled the smiling face of Anatoly when he used to pick her up as a little girl, holding her in his strong arms after returning from a deployment. How he would sing one of his favorite Hebrew songs while dancing with her around the kitchen. And she remembered just as many times when he returned when he wouldn’t speak to anyone for days, isolating himself in his workshop and barely looking at her while a tempest raged behind his weary eyes. She knew in the deepest recesses of her heart that her mother was right, and she felt the walls of fury and loss crumbling inside her as Eva’s words broke through the carefully constructed barriers she’d spent so much time fortifying during the past year. Dev took a step back and felt her sides shudder as if a cyclone of emotion were draining out of her center, filling the room with a torrent of grief that could flood into the city itself.

  Dev looked at Uri again, his eyes revealing an emptiness, like she was looking down into a bottomless chasm. She lowered the pistol then tossed it on the couch behind her. Petra moved in and stood next to Uri as he lay moaning on the ground.

  “Go—you don’t need to be here any longer,” Petra said. “David and I will remain until the authorities arrive.”

  Eva put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and the two women walked towards Mitch, who embraced them both then ushered them out the entrance.

  ***

  When the others had left, David closed the door and stood against it, his hulking frame filling the entire entrance. Petra moved back a few feet and retrieved Uri’s pistol from the drawer, which was partially open, then stood over the crouching figure. Petra kept the weapon by his side as he stared at the weathered face of the man he’d once admired.

  Uri sat back on his heels, creaking out a smile as he glanced at the two men. “So, this is how it ends, eh boys? Are you going to do what Dev could not or just haul me off to prison?”

  David stood with his arms folded, staring at the man while Petra leaned over and spoke in a low tone. “Dev and Anatoly’s world has always been about honor and adhering to their personal code. Their unflinching morality under pressure is what I’ve most admired about them all these years. It’s the kind of person I have strived to be,” said Petra, who took another step closer to Uri. “But over the years, I have also found that civilized thinking has no place in the judgement of a criminal like yourself—for the horrors you have done to others. Life in prison will not right your wrongs—sometimes a greater debt has to be paid.”

  Petra raised the pistol, leveling the barrel at Uri’s forehead. Uri swallowed hard, the lump in his throat pushing out the sides as he spoke. “I was like you once—we are very similar. We are men who know that the cost of what you want in life is more than what it appears on the surface.”

  “You are right in a sense, we are similar,” said Petra. “Both of us are outliers and have no compunction about doing the things that more civilized people cannot.” He placed his finger on the trigger and began the slow depression back. “Sometimes we must stoop to the level of the filth we are pursuing and do what is necessary.” The discharge of the pistol rang out in the room and the spent brass pinged off the wooden floor as Uri’s body collapsed back into the wall.

  David shuffled forward a few feet. “Come, brother, we have to go. The Knesset are going to want to wash their hands clean of Uri’s filth with whatever bullshit story they can concoct but we can’t be connected to this or we’ll go down with him.”

  Petra placed the gun on the ground next to Uri’s outstretched hand then the two men quickly darted out the door and slid down the pathway leading to the parking lot.

  Chapter 45

  Three Days Later

  As Mitch drove through the bustling streets of Tel Aviv, he couldn’t escape the cackling of news reports blasting the airwaves on the local radio stations. All of the reports indicated the same thing:

  In a bizarre turn of events, Knesset candidate Uri Belkin died from a fatal gunshot wound to the head in an apparent suicide after his televised admission to crimes in West Africa. A special house committee will be investigating the other members of the Knesset affiliated with Belkin as well as allegations that he and his colleagues were behind an extortion ring in Tel Aviv.

  He flicked off the radio and shook his head, recalling who was last in the room with Uri after he left with Dev and Eva. ‘Apparent suicide’—the Knesset don’t want things investigated any further, I’m sure, so they’re going to run with the most convenient story. As he pulled up to the curb before the Shin Bet Headquarters, he saw Petra exiting the front door.

  Mitch rolled down the window and leaned out. “Hey, you all done with your debriefing, if that’s the right word?”

  Petra came up to his side and squatted down, resting his arm on the door. “Yeah, it looks like the charges have been dropped and Gideon will be re-opening its doors tomorrow.”

  “Good deal. I heard the same thing after my interview this morning.” Mitch gripped the steering wheel and averted his eyes from Petra. “Helluva thing that happened to Uri Belkin, eh.”

  Petra nodded his head then looked up the street. “Yep, helluva thing.”

  “You know, when I was about nine years old, my uncle had this magnificent old bull that he kept in a separate pasture out on the ranch. It was truly a stunning creature. As it got up in years, that bull became unpredictable and even gored a couple of cowboys—almost killed ’em. I remember my uncle trying everything he could to rehabilitate the thing.” Mitch rubbed his chin and looked back at Petra. “In the end, he knew he had to put that bull down for everyone’s sake but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Eventually at my uncle’s request, his brother took care of it.” Mitch formed his fingers into a pistol, his thumb snapping downward onto the index finger.

  “Sounds like he did the right thing.”

  “Yeah, in fact he did actually. The bottom line was that he did what was necessary to keep us all safe.” Mitch nodded to his friend then got out of the car. He patted Petra on the shoulder and began walking up the steps. “I’ll see you back at the office.”

  “Yes, you will. In the meantime, take Dev somewhere nice. She always liked that place by the ocean.”

  “Yep.”

  ***

  Dev had just finished providing her final statement to Benjamin Abadi in his office. She saw Mitch walking into the lobby and waved to him to wait for two more minutes. Dev got up and moved to the door while Abadi opened it and offered for her to go out first. He stopped at the threshold. “Hey, thanks again for coming in today—I’m sure glad things turned out the way they did this time around.
”

  “Me too,” she said with a smile, the first time in a while she didn’t have to feign the expression.

  He raised his hand up to the bruise on his right cheekbone. “You know I’ll just never get why that masked man—or whoever it was—had to butt me in the face with their rifle. What with all the tear gas in the van you would’ve thought that’d be enough punishment.”

  “Well, maybe you had it coming. I can’t say.”

  He extended his hand and they both shook. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “You take care, Ben.”

  “Be good to yourself, Dev.” He waved two fingers at her. “See you around.”

  She walked down the hallway towards Mitch, who pivoted to match her stride as she walked by while interlocking his arm with hers.

  “Everything go OK?” he said.

  “If you mean by ‘OK’ that we are back in business and all the bogus charges are dropped, then hell yes. Now, I just have to spend time boosting our public image and reassuring our existing clients.” She put her hands on her hips, pulling her shoulders back. “You know, I plan to rethink what I want to do with my company after all this—a new direction is in order.”