The Last Rainmaker (Jack Widow Book 9)

by Scott Blade

  He shot Jahns in the center of the forehead, like his friend. Only this time, the blood that exploded out the back of Jahns’ head sprayed all over the van’s cabin.

  The Rainmaker looked around the street, looked through the dreary, pouring rain. No one was there, except the girl. She walked back toward the van.

  She stopped on the driver’s side of the nose and looked up at him.

  “Who are they?”

  The Rainmaker stepped forward, his hands gloved this time with his lucky shooting gloves.

  He grabbed the passenger door handle and popped it open, stepped back, reached in, grabbed a gun off the dead guy’s lap. He stepped back out and showed it to his protégé.

  She asked, “Cops?”

  Then she looked at the gun. It balanced in the Rainmaker’s open palm. It was strange.

  The Rainmaker holstered his USP and gripped a small bolt action on the strange gun. He ejected the round, which turned out to be a dart, a tranquilizer gun.

  He said, “Not cops. Someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Americans.”

  CHAPTER 28

  THE WOMAN FROM BEIJING sat in the passenger seat of a rental Lexus SUV, next to Lu. They were stopped on a dirt road, just close enough to see the rundown cottage with the blue door, just close enough to see the local police cruiser out front.

  They stayed far enough back to not look suspicious to the cop standing in the driveway.

  “What do you think? Was it the Rainmaker?” Lu asked her in Chinese.

  “Yep. Got here before us.”

  “How we going to find him now?”

  She was quiet for a long beat.

  “We gotta assume this guy, Malcolm, must’ve told them about Cathery.”

  Lu nodded.

  “If he killed Malcolm for seeing his face. It must be he’s worried someone will track him down by the weapon used. Then we gotta go back there and sit on Cathery. Eventually, the Rainmaker will show his face there.”

  Lu took his foot off the brake and started to back up and K-turn back the way they came in, but the road was too narrow.

  The woman from Beijing said, “Just drive straight. We can turn around down that way.”

  Lu nodded and they drove straight, past the lone cop standing in the driveway.

  His police cruiser was a compact, old white car. He had the blue lights on. He stood up straight with his cell phone in hand. He was calling the station, she figured.

  He looked at them for a brief, suspicious moment, and then he watched them pass.

  CHAPTER 29

  THE RAINMMAKER MADE IT BACK to the bed-and-breakfast. He walked in, this time with a ball cap that belonged to the dead guy in the room, pulled down, chin tucked in, to not draw attention to his face from the owners.

  One of them, the wife he supposed, said a cheery good morning to him. She used the dead guy’s name. She probably figured he was the dead guy simply by process of elimination. The bed-and-breakfast only had so many rooms and she had only so many guests checked in. She knew each and every one of them. And she had been serving breakfast to each of them in the dining room, right there near the foyer. He had seen them when he entered. Just a quick glance, he quickly turned his back to them, and went up the stairs.

  He heard the good morning behind him and waved back to her over his shoulder without saying a word.

  Back in the dead guy’s room, the Rainmaker had left the Valkyrie sniper rifle on the dining table, pulled up to the open window. He had covered it with a sheet off the bed, which seemed stupid up close, but if someone happened to look into the window, they would see nothing more than a dining table with something covered on it. Maybe it was a model of some kind. Someone’s hard work. And the watcher would move on.

  The Rainmaker saw himself in a small mirror hung up on the wall near the entrance. He saw his familiar foreign face. Only it wasn’t what he always thought of when he saw himself in his own mind.

  In his mind, he still saw the great, young Korean sniper that he had been. He had been among the elite of the Supreme Leader’s Royal Guard.

  After an event that had happened to him, twelve years ago, after he was deemed a failure by the Supreme Leader, instead of being executed, he had been imprisoned, sentenced to hard labor. And then one day, the new Supreme Leader let him out. An act of kindness, he was told.

  The Rainmaker saw his whited-out eye, saw the gray in his hair from under the bill of the hat. He took off the hat, threw it onto an empty armchair, and returned to the dining room table. He pulled the sheet off the gun like a magician at a fancy dinner party with a tablecloth.

  He slipped off his boots, returned to the rifle, to the prone position, and stared out the scope.

  He looked back at Cathery’s Pub and waited.

  CHAPTER 30

  WIDOW AND CASSIDY RETURNED to the Range Rover. They separated on the way back. Widow gave her the umbrella, said he didn’t need it.

  She took it and thanked him and walked close, but couldn’t provide him shelter from the pouring rain.

  They reached the Range Rover and saw that Tiller had moved to the passenger side, front, and strapped on his seatbelt like he was expecting for them to drive away any moment. Gregor had moved over to the driver’s seat.

  Without hesitation, Cassidy sat in the backseat. Widow joined her.

  “How was your breakfast?” Tiller asked.

  Cassidy shot Widow a side glance and said, “It was better than we thought it would be.”

  Widow nodded.

  “Anything happen?” Cassidy asked.

  “Not so far.”

  “Church let out. We should be seeing him any minute.”

  They sat around, waiting.

  After a long minute, Widow noticed that Tiller kept looking at his phone. He watched him several times. Tiller kept his phone in hand. He looked down at the home screen, tapped on it, and had an expression of disappointment when he saw nothing there. No notifications. No incoming calls. No voicemails. No unread messages.

  “What are you waiting on?” Widow asked.

  Tiller looked back at him.

  “What?”

  “You keep looking down at your phone. What are you waiting on?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Widow stayed quiet. He looked over at Cassidy. She returned the look and then she looked straight at Gregor.

  Gregor said, “You’ve looked at that phone several times since they left.”

  “What? Come on? So what?” Tiller said and shrugged

  Cassidy reached forward and grabbed the seat behind Tiller.

  She said, “What’s going on?”

  Tiller turned flush. He stared down at his phone one more time, instinct.

  “You’re hiding something,” Cassidy said.

  Widow said, “Tiller’s always hiding something.”

  “Who you waiting to message you?” Gregor asked.

  “No one.”

  A long moment of silence came over them.

  Widow said, “Where are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?”

  “What? Who?”

  Cassidy said, “It’s from Shakespeare. Hamlet.”

  She reached forward and snagged a handful of Tiller’s seatbelt. Then she ripped it backward, locked him in place.

  She said, “He’s asking where your other guys are.”

  Widow saw what she was doing and he reached forward in a fast movement and ripped the phone right out of his hand while he knew the password was already put in and already unlocked.

  “Hey!” Tiller shouted. “What the hell?”

  “Shut up!” Gregor said. He reached over and pinned Tiller down from the shoulders.

  Tiller struggled and repeated, “What the hell?”

  “He told you to shut up,” Widow said.

  He went through the phone. Skipped the recent calls; that’d be useless. He went straight for the messages.

  Widow knew how to use a smartphone. Like eve
ry other SEAL, he had to be familiar with modern technology. The world was a technological planet now, and there was no going back.

  But he wasn’t a fan of cellphones. They were GPS trackers that people carry voluntarily.

  He opened the messages and ran through the ones from that day.

  “What’s it say?” Cassidy asked.

  He ignored her and kept reading.

  After he was done, he looked up and let the screen on the phone go black.

  “What?” Cassidy asked.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  Tiller said, “It’s not what you think, Widow.”

  “What’s it say?” Cassidy repeated.

  “Widow?” Gregor said.

  Widow felt his head starting to pound again, like a little man with a hammer lived in his skull. It seemed that his concussion headache was triggered by stress.

  He said, “We didn’t come here to help you solve this case.”

  Cassidy said, “No shit. We knew that.”

  “It’s worse than that. We came here to catch this sniper. And Tiller brought his guys to do just that.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?” Gregor asked.

  “No, I mean they’re not with us now because they’re out here somewhere waiting to black-bag him.”

  “Black-bag him?” Cassidy asked.

  “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are out here someplace, close by, waiting for the chance to grab him and throw him into a van. They’ve been ordered to take him alive. They’re not turning him over to you. They’re taking him out of the country. Probably to a CIA black site, I’d guess.”

  They were quiet.

  Widow said, “What the hell do you want with him?”

  Tiller fought back and Gregor let go of his shoulder. Cassidy released his seatbelt.

  “It’s classified. None of you should know any of this.”

  Widow said, “That’s not good enough. What do you want him for?”

  Tiller said nothing.

  Widow said, “Why haven’t your boys messaged you back? It’s been what?”

  He looked at the times of the last messages.

  “Twenty-seven minutes? That’s a lot of time to pass in the middle of an op with radio silence.”

  Tiller said nothing.

  Gregor said, “Does this mean that our sniper is here?”

  Widow nodded, said, “He’s here somewhere. Tiller’s using Cathery as bait. The guy probably wants to kill him to cover his tracks about the rifle. Because it’s a specialty weapon, he might be afraid that Cathery will talk about it.”

  Cassidy said, “Why would that matter?”

  Gregor said, “Why not kill him after he got it?”

  “He probably didn’t know the point of origin. There was probably another salesman between the transactions. Plus, the sniper would want to kill his target first. Can’t let anyone get wind of him before he strikes. That’s how snipers work. He wouldn’t tie up loose ends until the last minute.”

  Just then, Cassidy looked out the windshield, past Tiller. She pointed and spoke.

  “Look.”

  All four of them looked in that direction.

  They saw a man underneath a dark green umbrella coming up the street, from Pope Quay’s direction. He used the same sidewalk that Widow and Cassidy had used.

  They saw his face.

  Gregor said, “That’s him. That’s Cathery.”

  “Let’s take him now.”

  Cassidy let go of Tiller and looked at Widow, then at Tiller.

  “Mr. Tiller you’re the worst part of agencies like your CIA. You no longer have the support of the Gardaí.”

  “You can’t do that. My support comes from way above your pay grade.”

  “You know what? I can do that. I’m sure that when my director learns about what you were planning to do, you’ll be lucky if we don’t detain you.”

  “For what?”

  Widow said, “You’ve violated about a dozen UK laws, surely.”

  Cassidy said, “Obstruction of justice and interference with a police matter will be the first things we charge you with.”

  Tiller said nothing to that.

  “Now, both of you, stay here.”

  Widow nodded.

  “We’ll let you know what he says.”

  Cassidy got out, followed Gregor in the rain.

  Widow stayed behind with Tiller.

  Tiller said, “You work for us. Whose side are you on?”

  Widow looked ahead, out the windshield, saw Cassidy and Gregor approach Cathery in the rain, saw them show him their badges. They stood around him in a circle. Gregor paced around the back of him, ready to leap in and grab him in case he drew a weapon.

  Widow watched for a moment; then he looked at Tiller.

  He said, “Benico?”

  Tiller turned and faced Widow, waiting for the rest of the sentence, which never came. At least, it didn’t come in the form of words.

  Widow plunged his forearm, his elbow, and his fist back and jackhammered it forward like a bolt gun. He slammed his fist straight into the good cheek, the good eye, the different side of his face as ten hours earlier. This time, he crushed Tiller’s cheek.

  Tiller’s face flung forward and to the left like a violent foul ball in Yankee stadium.

  The Range Rover’s factory seatbelt comes with a five-star rating. It’s truly among the industry’s best. This seatbelt was put to the test.

  The belt’s slack went forward with Tiller and locked up and jolted him back. Even though it wasn’t designed for in-cabin impacts, it did save his life, maybe.

  The seatbelt plus the fact that Widow had long arms and couldn’t rear his fist back far enough to throw a punch at over fifty-five percent capabilities. Maybe sixty.

  If he had asked Tiller to step out of the car, he probably would’ve killed him. Maybe. He hadn’t intended to kill him, but if he had died from a punch from Widow, it wouldn’t have broken anyone’s heart.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE RAIN PUMMELED the cobblestones around them. The cracks between the stones filled with running rainwater, pooling together in heavy flowing streams. They ran down a hill at the middle of the street, about forty yards from Cathery’s Pub.

  Cathery was walking to his pub. He was getting closer when he first noticed the Range Rover, parked in the alley next to his pub. He wondered who the guys were inside. Then he saw the two come toward him, a man and a woman. He wondered who they were too.

  He wasn’t armed. He had been under suspicion in the past and the last thing he needed was to get arrested with an illegal firearm in his pocket. Plus, it was Sunday. He never carried on Sunday, unwritten Irish Catholic rule.

  You don’t bring your gun to church. He had never done that before. He knew younger, more naïve IRA members who had been caught doing that before. If a chief found out, he made sure that they were never able to carry a gun into a Catholic church again. Not murder, nothing that dramatic. The standard operating procedure usually called for a simple hand breaking. Break a few fingers and some bones in the good hand and you would find that the mentioned IRA members wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

  Cathery neared the two people. They were definitely headed to talk to him. The woman had a bad poker face. He could see she intended to talk to him. She didn’t have an umbrella for one thing. A good Irish lady doesn’t get caught in the rain.

  As they neared, he figured they were cops.

  He was right.

  They stopped five feet in front of him. The man started to circle behind.

  The woman said, “John Cathery?”

  “Aye. That’s me, lass.”

  The woman reached into an inner pocket of a leather jacket and pulled out a black wallet. Made for men, Cathery made a note of. And she flipped it open to show off a Gardaí badge.

  He squinted his eyes to try and draw it into focus from the distance.

  Special Investigations Unit was what he read.

  “What do you want?�
��

  “Sir, I’m Nora-Jane Cassidy and this is my partner, Gregor.”

  Cathery nodded, didn’t care.

  Cassidy said, “Questions, Mr. Cathery. we got questions.”

  The man circled behind him, staying five feet back. Cathery did not like that. Usually if one cop circles behind you it meant they planned to put you in handcuffs, like they expected him to resist.

  “You can come with us on your own volition or we can talk about the alternative,” Cassidy said.

  Cathery glanced over his shoulder at Gregor.

  “No reason for any violence here. Why the hell would I resist? Where am I gonna go?”

  He took his free hand out and shoved it under the pouring rain, out of the dryness of the umbrella, all to illustrate the point.

  Cassidy nodded, but said, “Still, if it’s all the same, we’re going to place handcuffs on you.”

  Cathery said nothing to that.

  Gregor stepped forward. He grabbed one of Cathery’s arms, the one holding the umbrella, and took out handcuffs, cuffed Cathery’s wrist.

  Cassidy took possession of the umbrella. Gregor cuffed the other hand and held them down behind Cathery’s back. He pushed him off the sidewalk, onto the street and escorted him toward the Range Rover.

  Cassidy followed behind them, underneath the umbrella.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE RAINMAKER STARED through the scope. He saw a woman and a man talking to another man. He couldn’t identify one of the men because the guy was under an umbrella, held down low to cover his face from the rain. The other two just approached him from the Range Rover.

  At first, he thought they were the couple he had seen earlier, because one of them was a woman, about the same height as the other one. And she appeared to be wearing a leather jacket, like the one from the couple, but the man wasn’t the same guy he had seen earlier. This guy was tall, but not as tall as the last guy. This guy was maybe six-foot-nothing. The other one was much taller.

  Then he realized his mistake. His first instincts were right. Earlier he had thought that the Range Rover’s occupants were cops. These were definitely cops. The woman took out a badge and showed it to the man under the umbrella. The other man arrested him.