by Ty Patterson
Zeb follows, and teacher and student fill themselves with rhythm.
Chapter 8
He meets Bear and his partner the next day and outlines the circumstances to them. They agree about the need for close protection; they’ve been doing this for several years and can read a situation well.
Cassandra is furious when she learns about Zeb’s plans for Bear and his partner to protect her, shadow her, for an indefinite length of time. Zeb is vague about the reasons for their presence.
‘What is the worst that will happen to me?’ she shouts. ‘Someone will come and do me harm? So what? I am not prepared to be followed by a gorilla and his mate and have them cramp my life.’
Zeb ignores her.
‘Zeb, don’t stonewall me. I will not have them around. After living in a bloodthirsty city like D.C., do you think your enemies scare me?’
Zeb doesn’t doubt that bit. Cassandra has faced down muggers, survived bar fights, and talked down a gun-wielding hostage-taker, all courtesy of living in D.C. But all that cannot be compared to the ruthlessness that Holt brings to the table. Zeb isn’t taking any chances. He continues to ignore her, and she finally stomps out and slams her bedroom door behind her.
Bear coughs politely. ‘Gee, that went well. Do you think she’s gonna be difficult?’
‘Nope, she’ll be fine by tomorrow. By the way, she doesn’t know that you’ve already been shadowing her for weeks…so it might be best if you kept that to yourselves.’
He shows them around the apartment and his arms cache. He’d built a hidden compartment by knocking out a section of the wall, covering the inside of it with soft velvet and rebuilding a hinged door on it that looks exactly like the wall. It can be opened only by specific pressure on three pressure points in a particular sequence. Cassandra doesn’t know it’s there. Zeb has several of these scattered around the city, complete with new identities and bundles of cash.
Bear whistles when he sees the Glock 19, Smith and Wesson .357 SIG, a Steyr S40-A1, a Heckler and Koch HK416, CS Gas, stacks of ammunition, hunting knives and even some flashbangs and sting grenades.
‘Enough to start a war,’ he grunts.
‘Or survive one,’ Chloe replies.
‘We have our own kit, but it’s good to know that this is around,’ Bear continues. ‘We’ve cased the building and the neighborhood in the last few weeks, and we’re good to go from tonight.’
Zeb briefs them on the neighbors, the doorman, and various routines in the building, and works out call codes with them.
As he prepares to leave, Rory rushes in. He comes to an abrupt halt and gapes at Bear. Bear is huge, towers over Zeb by a foot, is built like a fortress, and sports a full beard; Chloe is just the opposite, petite and svelte.
Bear returns his stare and then winks slowly at Rory. He holds out a hand and introduces himself, ‘You must be Rory. For some strange reason I’ve never been able to understand, all my friends call me Bear.’ A twitch of a smile. ‘This is my partner, Chloe. We’ll be staying at your Aunt Cassandra’s place for a few weeks.’
Rory giggles in spite of himself and looks at Zeb.
‘Cass needs some help, and Bear and Chloe pitched in. They’re good friends of mine. Bear is a better pitcher than I am, by the way, and knows more about baseball than anyone else I know.’
That swings it for Rory, and he rushes out to tell his mother. Zeb looks at Bear and Chloe. ‘Let me introduce you to the rest of them.’
He brings them next door and introduces them to Lauren. Lauren’s eyes are full of questions, but Zeb says he’ll explain later when Connor is home. He leaves Bear and Chloe to sort things out with Lauren, and then later, with Cassandra.
He walks back to the subway; flowing through the anonymous passengers calms him and helps him think. He knows what he’s doing: using himself as bait to draw in and apply pressure to Holt. He knows Holt is in the city. He doesn’t know how he knows, but the knowledge is there. He has always had that tingling awareness when his prey is nearby. He tried explaining this to psychologists when he was in the Special Forces, but they didn’t get it. Since then, he hasn’t told anyone else about it, though he thinks Broker and Bear might have sensed it in him. They are two with whom he has come closest to lowering his guard.
He checks his phone and sees a message from Broker.
‘Jackpot,’ he shouts when Zeb calls him. ‘I got the mother of the fucker! Her name is Pamela Whitlock; her address is in Williamstown – about an hour and a half away from Jackson. She married again and changed her name to Whitlock. No kids and she willed the family home in Jackson to Holt. That’s how I got her.’ All coming in a rush from Broker as he enjoys his high.
‘Her second husband passed away a few years back. No known income right now, except a state pension. I guess her husband left her a decent pile to live off.
‘You want to check her house out? I know you want to, and this time I’m coming along with you,’ Broker says.
‘Don’t get involved. This has nothing to do with you.’
‘Bubba, we’ve had this discussion before. I got involved the day I met you. It’s not as if I haven’t been in the field ever since I started dealing in information.’
Zeb is aware of this.
Broker has been on a few missions with other military contractors, though he picks and chooses his missions. If he has to choose a partner, Broker will be his first choice, rock steady under fire, cool head, and a first-rate sniper. For an analyst, Broker has a knack for using a long gun.
He could do with a second pair of eyes, but doesn’t want to involve anyone else in this. As it is, there are too many non-principals involved.
‘Bubba, I know what you’re thinking, but there’s no way you’re going to Williamstown alone. I am coming along with you.’
Silence on the line, then Broker continues, ‘I’ll outfit a vehicle tomorrow, and we can go. Right now all we want to do is check the place out and see if we can pick up any sign of Holt there.’
Zeb looks out the window. If Holt is staying with his mother, then that could be a complication. Zeb has never strayed from his rule of not involving non-principals.
He also wonders if Mendes and Jones are with Holt. He thinks it’s a strong possibility. The six of them were working together a long time, and the events in the DRC would only bind them closer together. Holt still remains his priority, since he was the ringleader, and once he finds Holt, he can turn his attention to the others.
Broker drives up in an anonymous Honda Civic with New Jersey plates the next day. Zeb inspects the car and sees that he has kitted it out with a parabolic mike, infrared binoculars, a fiber-optic camera and recorder, and a thermal imager.
‘I love technology,’ he says defensively when Zeb looks across at him. ‘Besides, these will be useful.’
‘Is this your car?’ Zeb asks.
‘One of them. You know I have a car rental agency, which is a front for my cars. It’s easier and offers anonymity as well as control.’
Zeb thinks for a moment. ‘Let’s go back to the rental agency and change the rental name to mine. I also want your agent to have a good look at me.’
Broker looks at Zeb as if he just sang ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ while wearing a pink tutu and Spock ears.
Zeb looks back at him.
Broker snaps his fingers. ‘Gotcha. If Holt trails back, you want him to know it’s you.’
Zeb nods. ‘That’s why I don’t want you involved. This has nothing to do with you.’
Broker snorts. ‘Let’s get going. Enough wasting time on this. And don’t bring this up again.’
They drive to the rental agency, where Zeb walks in and changes the rental name and hangs around aimlessly, checking out the flyers on the walls, making sure he is visible to the CCTV cameras mounted inside the agency.
They drive off once they’re done, with Broker at the wheel. ‘So how do you want to play this?’ he asks. ‘We can just do a few passes by the house, we can stay till d
ark and break in, or we can mount long-term surveillance with a few others…there are many ways.
‘And what will you do once you find Holt?’ he pushes on before Zeb can reply. ‘For all your badass rep, you were never the cold-blooded execution type.’
‘Are you done?’
‘Just.’
‘We are not going to do anything you’ve suggested. We’re parking right opposite her house to sit for a few hours.’
‘I figured you were going to say something like that. Do you know what a spoilsport you are, Zeb? All these gadgets…when am I going to get to use them?
‘And what will you do once you find him? What if you come across him in the subway? You can’t take him to the Feds because they told you to back off. They might, in fact, go after you. If the cops get him, they’ll just hand him over to them. Other than the execution option, I don’t see a Plan B or a Plan C.’
‘I’ll be handing him over to the DRC’s Embassy.’
Broker sits in stunned silence for a beat, then laughs long and loud – right into New Jersey.
Chapter 9
They reach Williamstown close to noon. A small town with barely twenty thousand people, a town that can be driven through in an hour and forgotten in less than that. A town for retirees and those who want to escape the rapidity of large cities.
They find Pamela Whitlock’s home without much difficulty and make a few passes in front of it. The house is set back from the street and is surrounded by foliage. Broker has the house blueprints, so they look them over – it’s a six bedroom with front and back gardens. The gardens are surrounded by tall trees and have an exit to the side. Broker has activated the body-heat detector in his Civic, and it comes up empty. No one in the house…or nothing the machine can detect.
A B&E in a residential area such as this is always high risk. Neighbors know each other, strangers stand out, and residents gossip – not to mention the Block or Neighborhood Watches. Whitlock’s house has the saving graces of being set back a distance and surrounded by dense foliage. The streetlights are covered with grime, their illumination poor. Though Zeb has no intention of breaking in, force of habit makes him automatically seek out entry and exit points.
They park on the street, just to the left, still visible to anyone inside the house. Zeb makes himself conspicuous by getting out of the car, staring long and hard at the house, then walking past the place a few times, making a show of taking notes and photos as he observes the structure.
‘The house looks empty, feels empty, and the machine says it’s empty. You’re just hoping that the neighbors spot you and get the word to his mother and from her lips to Holt’s ear. All this dicking around…Zeb, I thought you were a man of action,’ grumbles Broker as he settles in the car and prepares to snooze.
Zeb spends a couple of hours on the street. In that time a neighbor comes back from shopping, the kids piling into the house with the parents following, staring curiously at Zeb. A patrol car passes him, slowly, once and then twice, but does not stop. A few other cars pass by, all with New Jersey plates.
They leave in the late afternoon, Broker driving, all the while grumbling about the waste of time.
‘Happy? Now that you’ve made yourself a target, painted yourself bright orange?’ asks Broker as they reenter New York.
‘There isn’t any other way,’ says Zeb, ‘if I want him to come to me.’
Broker throws up his hands in frustration. ‘I’ll keep plugging away at my databases, on my network, and also keep at it on Hardinger. If anything turns up, I’ll let you know. Do you want me to check into Mendes and Jones?’
Zeb shakes his head.
Broker leaves Zeb at Jackson Heights, a few blocks away from his apartment. Zeb uses the walk to run through what he has so far and to plan his next move.
He has two choices at this stage – keep hunting for Holt’s whereabouts, which might be a long, drawn-out process during which Holt could escape from the country, or draw Holt out by being provocative. Zeb being Zeb, has taken the provocative option by hanging around his mother’s house, without being directly aggressive, below the cops’ and the FBI’s radar. There is no guarantee that his actions will work nor that Broker’s digging might find Holt, but Zeb has to run with what he has, and his hunting instincts tell him that Holt will come after him.
It’s what he would have done, had he been in Holt’s position.
He goes to his apartment and takes out his carryall, which has all his weapons – a Glock 17, a Beretta 92A1, a HK416 as well as a Heckler and Koch G28, a Benchmade spring-loaded Entourage knife, some flashbangs, his cable camera – and makes a lightweight pack of his clothes. He will be living in rundown seedy hotels, where there’s no one to note his comings and goings, till this blows over. He takes out a map and works out a grid of blocks between 58th and 25th Street. Broker had hired the Civic within that grid, and it will give Holt a starting point for locating Zeb.
He walks into a hotel near 58th Street on the West Side and checks in. The porter does not look up from the football game playing on his TV as he wordlessly takes Zeb’s money and hands over a key. The room is surprisingly clean and well organized, with a small, well-maintained bathroom and a tiny window overlooking the street. He freshens up and explores the hotel thoroughly, noting the fire escape next to his window, the rear exit, the lighting along the corridors, and the single camera facing the entrance.
He walks around the block and familiarizes himself with its layout.
He then walks to that perennially populous place in New York City, Times Square, and hangs out, watching the ebb and flow of people, the pulse of the city throbbing.
The next day he hires the same Civic from the same agency, drives out to Williamstown, and repeats his observation of Holt’s mother’s home.
He notices the neighbor’s curtain twitching when he has spent an hour there, but the thermal imager is quiet.
He leaves after another hour. On returning to the city, he checks out of the hotel and finds another anonymous one a few streets south.
He walks the streets of the city the next few days, and it is on the fourth day that violence finds him.
* * *
He’s walking along East 36th Street late at night, not many pedestrians around, barring the lone cab cruising the street and the occasional insomniac dog walker. He hears a scuffle ahead and slows down further, checking out the street ahead and behind him. Nothing. Empty.
He moves cautiously to the mouth of the alley from which the sounds come.
Sniffen Court is one of the few alleys in lower Manhattan. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century for stables, which were later converted to housing. The far end of the alley is a dead end, with a brick wall punctuating it like a period. Adorning the brick wall are plaques of Greek horsemen. The alley is lined with genteel townhouses, where time moves just a little slower than the rest of the city.
Normally the alley is fenced off by a metal gate, but tonight the gate is wide open, and Zeb can see three black men holding a black man and white woman at gun and knife point.
All five of them are in the shadow of a house lower down the alley, and the houses either seem to be empty, or the inhabitants are unable to hear the scuffling. Zeb is wearing dark clothes and is a shadow amongst the many shadows on East 36th. He watches the scuffling a long time and also the alley behind them for signs of a trap. He doesn’t detect any. One of the attackers is holding the black man at knife point, the knife pricking his neck; the other two are grappling with the woman, covering her face so she can’t make any sound. A mugging seems to have turned into attempted rape.
Zeb steps inside the alley with his back to a wall and moves within visible sighting distance of the five. The woman sees him, and her eyes go wide, and her struggling draws the attention of the attackers.
‘Beat it, nigga,’ one of them mutters. ‘This is a private party.’
Zeb steps forward. Three to one, not the best odds, but usually if the ringleader is
taken out, the others run. Been proven since the days of kings.
One of the black men swings away from the woman and advances towards Zeb, his gun glinting in the shadowed light. ‘Last chance, asshole, mind your own business and you get to live.’
Not the leader, a minion; still, taking the minion out would whittle them down to two.
He takes a step back, closer to the wall, to put distance between him and the rest, and the attacker follows, his finger on the trigger, slack. Zeb can see the black bore swing toward him and takes another step back toward the wall. If the gun fires, it will either hit him or the wall. Acceptable.
The black man steps forward, grinning at seeing Zeb cornered against the wall.
The hand of a good martial arts practitioner can move at about forty-six feet per second. Martial artists have to be slowed down or the movie camera speeded up to capture their action sequence for a movie and played back at twenty-four frames a second, or else all that the audience will see is a blur.
At forty-six feet per second, the martial artist delivers nearly forty-six joules of energy in an overhand strike. The energy needed to break the ribs of an average person is thirty joules. Much less is needed to break a wrist.
The black man doesn’t see Zeb’s left hand move. All he feels is a massive block of concrete striking his wrist, and the gun falls and skitters away. His brain takes a few seconds to process that his wrist has been broken, and then intense pain strikes him. A strike to the ribs and he collapses.
The black man holding the woman looks at them for a moment; she sees her chance and screams loudly for help. Despite her terror, her eyes are riveted on Zeb. She thinks he’ll be shot, but the next moment the black man has fallen to the ground, Zeb standing tall over him, his eyes dark, empty, staring into hers.
He glides to the one holding her boyfriend; a strike to the neck and a wrist lock and he is on the ground.
