“Your Trust Me letter?” When Scott nodded, Kate continued, “I never read it. I don’t know what happened. I had it on a memory card. I had the password and time, but somehow lost it. But anyway, you left me clues.”
They were out of the mountains, the headlights showing only fields to either side of a long straight road. Scott seemed awkward. “I just thought… if you tried to find me, it would prove we had a future. I don’t know. It just seemed better than me turning up on your doorstep with a bunch of roses one day.”
“A girl likes flowers.”
“But anyway, you started looking too soon.”
“It was the photograph of you and Boomer.”
Scott shook his head. “That will have been Joe and Boomer. Odd though. I don’t get why Peter would have sent it.”
“Maybe he didn’t.”
“Then who?”
“Someone who wanted me to find you. I don’t know. The Arab maybe?”
Scott was quiet for a while, staring out at the road. “It can’t have been the Arab. He should have followed the lead to Stephanie Harper. If it wasn’t Peter then it was someone else who knew about your involvement.” He shook his head. “It must have been Peter, though I can’t imagine what his motive would have been.”
Kate thought about her friend Sarah and also Peter. So Peter was working for the CIA or NSA at some level, but did Sarah know? Was Sarah in on the whole thing? Did Sarah set her up with Joe/Scott?
Kate said, “Was it planned?”
“Right from the start. I was in Iraq and Woodall turned up, told me my brother was in hospital—”
“No, I mean meeting me. Was it planned? Was it somehow a set-up so that we could meet?”
“No!” Scott reached over and held her hand. “I had no idea who you were when I saw you at the party. Falling for you was definitely not part of the plan.”
Kate leaned across and kissed Scott’s cheek. “That’s good to hear.” She settled back and watched the road and must have fallen asleep because she jolted awake when the car stopped.
“Are we—?” she started to say in a groggy voice.
“Gas and coffee,” Scott said with a stretch. “Sorry to wake you, hon. Want anything?”
She asked for tea and Scott was soon back in the car with drinks and doughnuts. After a few sips of the insipid milky drink, she poured it out of the window.
“About three hours to go,” Scott said, munching on his Krispy Kreme.
Kate took a doughnut. “Tell me about the mission,” she said.
“I only know what I’ve been told, but two years ago there was a mission to capture a Saudi who was believed to be actively involved with al-Qaeda. Trouble is, it was sensitive as hell. He was a prince or the son of a prince—though there seems to be hundreds of them. Anyway, the relationship with Saudi Arabia is… well, you know how important the oil is. A six-man Delta Force team went in and would have succeeded in the extraction if it hadn’t been for Kirkpatrick finding out. He must have had a motive for preventing the prince’s son from being interrogated. We think they arranged for the team to be killed—including the prince. They succeeded, but before the prince died he told one man about the agreements between the senior American and the Saudi prince’s father. That man was my brother, code name Mirrorman.”
“Ah, Mirrorman.”
Scott said, “As kids, we called ourselves the Mirrormen. Joe kept it as a code name in the army. He tried to broadcast what he’d been told, apparently, but the comms were scrambled. A word they managed to decipher was Mustang—believed to be the traitor’s name. A unit within the CIA was investigating them—Internal Affairs. They were investigating senior people and suspected Mustang was someone high up, maybe connected to the CIA. My brother died in the hospital before I got there, but not before Woodall turned up and got confirmation of the mole—Mustang. They didn’t know who it was, but Joe’s information was enough to try and flush him out. So Woodall asked me to take Joe’s place—to pretend he hadn’t died.”
“Because you looked like him.”
“That will have helped. I’ve known Ben Hurwitz since high school, knew he was NSA, knew I could trust him, so I insisted he was involved.”
“But the CIA didn’t know where you were in the States?”
“No. After I met you—and nothing had happened for so long—I wanted out. I wanted to be with you. The deal I made with Woodall was that I’d return to the States, but I never said I’d play by their rules.”
“You didn’t trust them?”
“One of their own was bad. No, I didn’t totally trust them.”
Kate held his hand and squeezed. “But it’s over now.”
He looked over and she was surprised by what he said next.
“I don’t know, Kate. I hope it’s over. I truly do.”
SEVENTY-FOUR
Woodall came into the house smiling. “Well, it’s good to see you. Must be good to be yourself again,” he said, and shook Scott’s hand.
The property was described as being one-and-a-half storeys. North of the city, it had a mesh fence and a yard that needed some attention. The mailbox had been lying in the grass. Scott hammered it in by the gate to signal his arrival and then waited. Woodall had taken two days.
The agent glanced around. “Settled in OK?” He sat on the sofa, placed his tan briefcase beside him and leaned forward. “Where’s Kate? Upstairs?”
Scott said, “I expected you’d be cross.”
“Cross?”
“Because I went off the radar—did my own thing for a year.”
Woodall ran his hand through his sandy hair. “Hey, we were pretty pissed for a while, but it worked out—and here you are. Damn, I’d have been very pissed if you hadn’t turned up for the debrief.”
“So let’s debrief,” Scott said. “Was Spencer Kirkpatrick’s assistant one of your men?”
“Who?” Again he ran his hand through his hair, and for the first time Scott wondered if it was to buy time. Woodall sat back and shook his head. “The assistant? I don’t know who the guy was. Hey, I’m here to answer questions but mostly to hear what happened. So Kate made contact from Red Lodge. Had there been any contact prior to that? Did you know about the man following her?”
Scott told his story. He said he’d been hiding out in the Beartooth Mountains until the postal office worker had called him and described Kate and an FBI agent. Scott didn’t mention contacting Hurwitz or his involvement in the Jeep crashing at the cabin.
Scott said, “I was suspicious when I couldn’t speak to Kate. It was texting and then Ramirez. They were in a remote cabin. I created a distraction at the front before breaking in at the rear.” Again he decided to bend the truth rather than discuss Ramirez. He said, “I killed the Arab and the FBI agent. Turns out, she’d gone rogue and was working for the senator.”
“I see.” Woodall nodded slowly. “So she got Kirkpatrick to meet with you?”
“Yes.”
Woodall smiled slightly and Scott had the distinct impression he was missing something. “He’s dead, you know? Took his own life. Looks like our website managed to convince him.”
Scott said, “He thought I already knew who he was.”
“Did he? Though maybe your brother did.”
“I have two questions,” Scott said.
“Fire away.”
“Who sent Kate the photo?”
“I’m not aware of anyone sending any photograph. But if someone did, then I suspect it was Peter. He had photos of Boomer…”
Scott felt anger tighten his throat, tried to hide it and stood. “You said you didn’t know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“One second you don’t know about a photo and then you know it had Boomer in it!”
“Scott, Scott…” Woodall started, his voice maintaining perfect control, “you didn’t let me finish my sentence. I was about to say he had photos of people in the squad—like Boomer—as well as the connection to Stephanie Harper.”<
br />
Scott sat. It sounded plausible, and a couple of minutes passed with the two men looking at each other until Woodall broke the silence. “Tell me about Spencer Kirkpatrick’s assistant.”
“That’s my other question. Who was he? At first he was helping the senator and then the next thing he was encouraging me to execute him as a traitor.”
Woodall looked like he was thinking then raised his hands, palms up. “Who knows? Maybe you convinced him. Did he see the website?”
“Yes.”
“There you go.” Woodall rested his hand on his briefcase and looked around again. “Where’s Kate?”
“She’s shopping—at the mall.”
“NorthTown?”
“Yes.”
“OK.” Woodall smiled.
Scott said, “There were two snipers. Kirkpatrick delayed his arrival so snipers could get into place. Hurwitz got them both, though the second one only after I refused to kill the senator and had taken a shot to the back.”
“So you think the plan was to kill you if you didn’t agree and then take out Spencer Kirkpatrick? Then lay the blame on you?”
“Seems that way.”
Woodall said nothing for a while and Scott prompted, “So where next? I presume we aren’t staying here.”
The agent’s smile faded. “It’s not as simple as that, I’m afraid. Although the senator is dead, we’ve got new intel—he wasn’t the top man.”
“Who then?”
“A congressman who was ex-CIA. Head of Mid East.” Now Woodall opened his briefcase, removed a manila file and handed it to Scott.
There were photographs and transcripts of conversations. “Grant Hamilton?” Scott asked. “Wasn’t he also onetime a Marines Corp colonel?”
Woodall nodded.
Placing the folder beside him, Scott said, “But you have a name. You can go after him.”
“Too sensitive—and we don’t have enough hard evidence.”
“So you want me to flush him out?”
“Something like that.”
Scott picked up the folder, held it as though looking right through it then held it out to Woodall.
“No.”
Woodall cleared his throat and gave a wan smile. “You can’t say no, I’m afraid.”
“I can and I have.”
“It’s too dangerous—for you and Kate. You can’t walk away until this is over.”
Scott said, “You can leave now. If you won’t help us, we’ll find our own way from here.”
Woodall put the folder in his briefcase, but, when he stood, he had a snub-nosed gun in his hand.
“You’ll do it,” he said.
Scott shook his head.
Woodall removed a phone from his jacket and pressed a button, the whole time keeping the snub-nose trained on Scott. When the call was answered, he said, “Do it. She’s in NorthTown Mall.”
“You bastard!” Scott started to rise but Woodall prodded him with the gun, forcing him down.
Woodall sat. There was a glint in his eye and a brief smile flickered on his face. “So this is what you will do. The congressman is a traitor. Not only is he behind the funding of the so-called friendly tribes in Iraq, he’s also involved in selling them arms.”
“What about the senator?”
“He made sure the money went to the right tribes. He doesn’t care that these guys are Sunni militants and supporting an Islamic state. But the senator is just in it for the money. The congressman is ex-CIA with the connections in Iraq. They were his men who attacked the mission. They were his men who killed your brother.”
Scott shook his head. “I was suspicious.”
“What of?”
“You. I suspected something was up when I called Kirkpatrick Mustang. The first time I said it, he ignored me. He was in a helicopter so I put it down to the noise. But when he approached on the ground, he definitely heard me use the name and it made him hesitate for a second.” Scott watched Woodall’s eyes as he spoke. The senator’s assistant had tried to get Scott to execute Spencer Kirkpatrick. Woodall had known about the assistant—in fact, he gave it away when he said he didn’t know him but talked about him in the past tense. No one had told Woodall that the assistant had been killed.
Scott said, “You also gave it away that you knew about the FBI agent—Ramirez. I said I’d killed her and the Arab. She made a call for me and has since spoken to no one. The only way you know about that is if she called you.” In that moment, Scott put it together. He continued: “She called you. It was you who I spoke with on the phone. You pretended to be Mustang. You put on a Southern accent so I wouldn’t recognize you.”
Woodall said nothing.
“And that means you knew who Kirkpatrick was. So you called him. Kirkpatrick wasn’t even looking for me, was he? He wasn’t Mustang. And the Arab finding the clue and tracking me to Prague. I should have guessed it was a coincidence, happening shortly after I agreed to go back to the States. God, I bet you sent the photo to Kate to help things along. Weren’t things progressing fast enough?”
Woodall said nothing and then clapped his hands slowly.
Scott said, “This was all a set-up for me to assassinate the senator. It was about making amends for the death of the Saudi prince.”
Almost imperceptibly, Woodall inclined his head.
“But what I don’t get,” Scott said, “is who you’re working for. I would have guessed the congressman, but now you want him dead too.”
“He likes to think he’s in control.”
“So who is?”
Woodall didn’t answer. Instead he dialled on his phone again.
Scott said, “It’s the Saudi prince, isn’t it? He wants a US soldier to assassinate a senior politician with links to the Iraq conflict.”
Woodall said nothing, listened to his phone go to voicemail.
Scott scoffed. “Jesus, is this an al-Qaeda plot?”
Woodall dialled again, shaking his head in a you-can’t-begin-to-understand kind of way. “It’s much more complicated than that. You see, we are arrogant enough to think we understand the Middle East, with its thousands of years’ history, with its religions and factions and tribes, with its arbitrary borders drawn up by the Brits and the French a hundred years ago. You can’t turn a hornet’s nest into a beehive—and poking a stick in it can only make it worse. Look what’s happened to the rise of Islamic State. This isn’t as simple as al-Qaeda. It’s not IS or al-Shabaab or any other nice little enemy the West would like to label.” He shook his head, put the phone in his pocket and sat back on the sofa. An expression of superiority played across his face.
With the gun still trained on Scott, he opened the briefcase again and took out a blue folder. “These are your instructions,” he said.
Scott’s phone rang. Both men glanced at it, listened for two seconds until the ringing stopped.
Woodall waggled the gun, sounding unsure for the first time. “Are you expecting someone?”
It had been the signal Scott had been praying for. Kate wasn’t at the mall. She was in a safe place with Ben Hurwitz. The NSA were listening in and will have picked up the guy Woodall would have sent to get Kate.
But all Scott said was, “No.”
He saw something change in Woodall’s eyes then. Realization. Before the agent could pull the trigger, Scott pushed off, overturning his chair. Woodall fired into the underside as Scott rolled backwards. At the same instant he heard the door burst open and the room filled with the sound of running boots and the commands: “DOWN!
“GET DOWN!
“On the ground NOW!”
SEVENTY-FIVE
Six weeks later
Scott drove his GMC four-by-four under cover and unclipped the rear. He stamped the remaining snow from his boots and dusted off his jacket. A deer was strapped to the flat bed. He hoisted it over his shoulders and carried it into the house.
Kate met him in the kitchen. “A deer!”
“Venison for dinner.” Scott grinned d
isarmingly and dumped the carcass on a bench. “Special occasion.”
Kate pouted. “Look, I know I agreed to do this living off the land, back to nature thing out here in the wilds of Canada, but I’m not so sure about shooting deer. And I have no idea about how to cook it.”
“I’m joking about venison tonight. It’ll need to be hung for at least a week… outside.”
Kate studied his face when he returned from hanging the deer. “Were you also joking about a special occasion?”
“We have visitors this afternoon.”
“Oh? Is that safe? I thought we were supposed to be low profile. I’m not even allowed to tell my family where we are!”
He held up his hands in defeat. “You’re right, but this is different. Can’t tell you now, wait and see.”
“You are such a tease!” She handed him a cup of coffee and they sat in the lounge and looked out of the window at the snow-covered Rockies. The peaks dazzled like diamonds in the light.
Scott put some logs on the fire and put his feet up. “This is the life.”
She snuggled next to him. “I’m very happy.”
He smiled. “I couldn’t be happier.” He saw something cross her face. “What is it?”
“The money. The only thing I’m unhappy about is the million dollars you extorted from the senator.”
“I’ve a confession to make,” Scott said. “We haven’t touched a bean of that money—and never will, I’m afraid. All the money went to establish a charity for the families of soldiers killed in action.”
“I’m pleased.”
“But we’re pretty broke.”
“We have each other—that’s the main thing.”
Scott gave his best Hollywood smile. “Yes it is.”
Kate and Scott prepared dinner in the kitchen. All afternoon he’d refused to tell her who was coming. When she needed to know how many guests for dinner, he said it could be one or two.
A little before 4pm a black SUV parked outside and Hurwitz got out. Scott opened the door for him and pumped his gloved hand.
“Hi, Ben,” Kate said. She wiped her hands and gave him a kiss and hug. “Scott implied there was more than one visitor.” She looked over his shoulder with raised eyebrows. “Oh God, you haven’t brought Agent Woodall along, have you? Whenever I’ve seen you, he hasn’t been far behind!”
I Dare You: A gripping thriller that will keep you guessing (A Kate Blakemore Crime Thriller Book 1) Page 29
