the Second Horseman (2006)

by Kyle Mills

  men who would devote their lives to creating death and chaos -- gone in a matter of seconds. And when he then put the gun to his own head, twelve.

  But what good would it do? There were hundreds of other cells just like this one. And when the male relatives of these men got news of their martyrdom, they would join the cause. The mythical Hydra was alive and well in the Middle East.

  "We have our money!" Yusef shouted.

  He was immediately drowned out by the shouts of his men as they rushed forward, hugging him, kissing his cheeks, clasping his hands. After a few seconds, he managed to pull away, stepping back to examine the unbridled joy and religious ecstasy in their eyes. All except Muhammad. There was something else in those eyes. Jealousy. The thirst for power. And, of course, hate. But for whom exactly?

  "God willing, we will soon have nuclear weapons and the enemies of Islam will tremble. America will fall to its knees and beg us for mercy! God be praised!"

  Another cheer erupted, but he raised his hand, silencing it. "Secrecy is the most critical thing now. The Americans and the Jews have ears everywhere. We must maintain complete silence until our plan has been carried out."

  The men all nodded eagerly, though Yusef knew it was more from excitement than agreement. Silence, like military formations, took discipline that terrorists, almost by definition, lacked. In fact, he was counting on that particular failing to cause the news to leak to compatriots, families, and sympathizers across the globe. It wouldn't be specific enough to cause them any serious problems -- just another shout in the never-ending chorus of hate monitored by the CIA and Mossad. As usual, the source wouldn't be investigated until the attack had already occurred. And that investigation would lead right where it was supposed to -- to an isolated band of Islamic fanatics.

  "Our prayers have been answered," he said, turning his back on his men and starting toward his tent again.

  Contacting the Ukrainians was never quick or simple. If he was going to stay on Hamdi's schedule, he'd have to start the process now.

  Chapter SEVENTEEN

  There was only one potential escape route that Brandon could see: back through the stone and steel lobby, past the unusually vigilant guard, beneath five surveillance cameras, and through the thick glass doors that led to the street where Daniel was parked. Less than ideal.

  Catherine moved aside and he stepped into the empty elevator, turning to watch her slip through the closing doors and press the button for the fifteenth floor. The camera above them looked on silently.

  "Nice building. Lived here long?"

  She didn't answer, instead stepping aside again as the doors glided open.

  "Ladies first," he said.

  Clearly she wasn't anxious to give him even the slightest opportunity to get away again. "No. After you."

  The hall was sparsely decorated and overly wide -- a configuration obviously intended to send a message that the people there were wealthy enough to waste expensive square footage with reckless abandon. No doubt the paperboy was suitably impressed.

  "This is us," Catherine said, missing the lock with her key a few times because she was unwilling to take her slightly bloodshot eyes completely off him. He reached out and steadied her hand, sliding the key in and pushing through the door.

  There was a keypad on the wall -- set too high for her to obscure with her body and she stood there impatiently until he took the hint and wandered deeper into the expansive condo. It was kind of a replay of the lobby, but with the addition of a few carefully placed pieces of leather furniture and a wall tapestry or two. Basically, a professionally decorated stopover for someone who liked to lose a few bucks in Vegas a couple of times a year.

  He walked by an industrial kitchen that no one seemed to have ever cooked in and passed through a set of sliding glass doors onto a generous balcony. Despite the hour, it was still over ninety degrees, and he immediately started to sweat as he leaned over the railing and looked around.

  There were balconies above, below, and on both sides, but none were close enough to get to without specialized equipment. He could go with the time-tested method of tying sheets together, but that tended to work better when the motivation was a late night rendezvous with your high school sweetheart and the worst-case scenario was falling ten feet onto your lawn. If he was going, he wasn't going via the balcony route.

  But what if it had been possible? What if he just happened to have two hundred feet of rope in his pocket? Richard Scanlon was many things, but he wasn't a crook. Not in the classic sense, anyway. To take this kind of risk, he must be pretty certain of his information.

  "Long way down," he said as Catherine stepped out onto the balcony.

  "All doors and windows are alarmed and there are motion detectors in the living areas. The halls and elevator all have cameras," she said.

  "So, I'm back in prison, huh."

  "Don't say that. Look, I'm sorry about what we've done to you, but what choice did we have?"

  He shrugged.

  "You don't get off that easy. It wasn't a rhetorical question. I want to know. What choice do you think we had? Twelve nuclear weapons, Brandon. Twelve."

  "Fine. I understand why you did what you did. If you're asking for absolution, though, you're not going to get it. You don't get off that easy, either."

  "This is where we're going to be staying for a while," she said, changing the subject. "There are two bedrooms. I gave you the master. You'll find --"

  "So you evaded my question yesterday."

  "What question?"

  "Why did you become a criminal?"

  She squinted at him, obviously trying to get across that it wasn't exactly the time for a philosophical conversation, but in his mind it was the perfect time. Talking tired was a little like talking drunk as far as the tendency for little bits of truth to slip out unbidden. And even more importantly, now he had a baseline he could use to interpret her. She'd been tough to figure out when he thought she was just an extremely gifted crook. But now it was clear. All that seething sincerity and discomfort were genuine.

  "The opposite of you, I guess. My father, not my mother. He worked for Richard at the FBI before he died. I was only ten at the time. Richard lived right down the street and he did a lot for me and my mom. I suppose it sounds a little cliched but he really was -- is -- like a father to me. He helped me get into college and, after that, helped me get a job at the NSA."

  "So that's the reason you're a spy? To follow in your dad's footsteps?"

  "I'm not a spy, I was an analyst at the NSA. This is my first field work."

  "Really? I would have never known."

  "Don't make fun, please."

  Brandon couldn't help smiling. "Let me guess. Scanlon figured that some former Green Beret following me around would put me off, and you were the only smart, beautiful woman he had access to."

  She seemed a little embarrassed by his statement, but he wasn't sure if it was the backhanded compliment or the realization that "temptress" was at least a part of her job description. Probably best to move on a bit.

  "So then Scanlon starts his own company and hires you away from the NSA . . ."

  She nodded. "A few years ago."

  "To do what? What exactly is American Security Holdings?"

  She didn't answer.

  "Come on. Richard said that you'd tell me the story."

  Not finding the answers she was looking for in the carpet of lights below, she finally just shrugged. "Part of the reason we got bogged down in Iraq was because the intelligence community was too politicized. It really wasn't their fault -- it was just the way the system worked. If you wanted to do well and move up, you spun the facts to agree with what the president wanted to hear. Hardly anyone ever got fired for getting it wrong -- only for telling him hard truths that didn't mesh with his worldview. With all the problems this caused and all the publicity it got, everyone expected things to get fixed, but honestly it got worse."

  "Huge egos create their own truth," Brand
on said.

  "Tell me about it. Anyway, the Senate Intelligence Committee had a rare good idea. They approved a prototype program that would create a different kind of defense contractor -- one that dealt solely in intelligence. ASHI was the first, and it did so well that there are now something like ten other companies doing similar work."

  "What am I paying taxes for if you're doing the CIA's job?"

  "You've never paid taxes," she reminded him.

  "I was speaking figuratively."

  "We don't do their job for them, we duplicate it. For instance, if we'd existed before the Iraq war, we'd have been sent all the raw data pointing to Iraq's WMD program, and we'd have done our own analysis and then distributed it to all the agencies that could use it. It's essentially a check and balance. We're not part of the political system." She pointed to the city below them. "We're not even in Washington. And we can't be fired for saying inconvenient things."

  "But if you were being a pain in the ass, wouldn't the government just cut off your funding?"

  "At the end of our contract, and the contracts of our competitors, our reports are examined by a nonpartisan group and the decision of whether or not to renew is based on an objective measure of the accuracy of our analysis. Well, as objective as anything can be that has to do with the government."

  Brandon leaned against the railing, thinking about what she'd said. "So the CIA looked at these Ukrainians and decided it was a hoax or whatever. You guys said it was a real threat. The politicians sided with the CIA, so you decided to go it on your own."

  "Basically. It was never our goal to run an illegal operation, and most of the organization doesn't know anything about it. But we felt like we couldn't just turn our backs on this."

  "And now I can't either."

  She seemed to be concentrating on not looking at him.

  "He really likes you, Brandon. I can tell. I think he even admires you in a way. You might not believe me, but I'll bet Richard was genuinely hurt when he found out you were there just to use him. To betray him. Did you ever wonder if what happened to you wasn't as much that as his not wanting you to succeed in what you were planning?"

  Brandon felt his stomach tighten. He was about to grab her by the arm and force her to look at him, to listen to him tell her about what it was like to be framed and watch your youth drain away in a prison cell. About the fact that if he was caught now, his life would be completely over. About how he didn't give a shit about Richard Scanlon's feelings. What about his feelings?

  But he didn't.

  "You're playing a pretty dangerous game here, Catherine."

  "Don't you think we know that?"

  "I wonder. I get the impression you think this is going to be a lot easier than it is.

  "Even if we were to figure out a way to get our hands on Vegas's money -- a very big if -- the FBI and the cops are going to go nuts. There are only about eight guys and one woman in the world who would even think about attempting something like this. With my history, I'm going to be the odds-on favorite. No big deal for me at this point. I'm a convicted felon who beat up a guard and escaped from prison."

  "Brandon, we --"

  "Let me finish. This is a big deal for you. There are a lot of little circumstantial lines that can be drawn to Scanlon on this thing, and there aren't a lot of degrees of separation between you two. I imagine his plan is to hand the nukes over to the CIA and say, 'Yeah, I stole a little money, but if you guys had been doing your job I wouldn't have had to.' But you can't imagine how many things can go wrong between now and then. Are you sure this is your fight? Would your dad really want you involved in this?"

  "Would yours?"

  Brandon couldn't help laughing. "Yeah, I guess he would. Let me tell you how disappointed he is to have me for a son. Drives him nuts. He tried so hard to raise an upstanding citizen, but I guess I just couldn't fight my mom's genes."

  Catherine didn't speak for a long time. Finally she turned toward him.

  "There's a woman?"

  "Huh?"

  "You said there were eight men and one woman who would try something like this."

  Brandon grinned. "Yeah. There's a woman."

  "Do you know her?" Catherine sounded a little overly disinterested and Brandon's smile broadened. It was weird to be around a woman who just didn't have much lying in her.

  "Yeah, I know her."

  "What's she like?"

  "Nothing like you."

  Catherine's face fell a bit.

  "Believe me, I mean that as a compliment. She's in her early fifties and looks like the evil warden from one of those low-budget women's prison movies. And she'll steal from anyone. Seriously, she'd hijack a food shipment to an orphanage if the money was good enough. Complete bitch."

  That seemed to cheer her up a bit, but he didn't allow himself to consciously speculate as to why. Too dangerous.

  Suddenly she pushed herself off the railing and turned toward the door. "I'm going to bed. I assume you could figure out a way to beat our security if you really tried. Are you going to be here when I get up?"

  He thought about it for a moment. "I'm not really sure."

  Brandon adjusted himself into a slightly more comfortable position on the bed and tossed an expensive-looking vase in the air, making a precarious one-hand catch to keep it from shattering on the wood floor. He was dead tired, but knew there was no way he would be able to sleep. There was just too much swirling around in his head right now -- most of it completely pointless.

  Despite his best efforts, what Catherine said about Richard had managed to get some traction in his mind. There was no denying that they'd formed a pretty strong relationship during the time they'd worked together. Scanlon had never married and didn't have children, creating a deep-seated loneliness that Brandon had exploited every way he could. Not that he really did that sort of thing on purpose. It was more of a reflex. A highly evolved survival instinct.

  But did that really absolve him? The truth was that Richard had been nothing but great to him until he found out he was being set up. Brandon had convinced himself over the past few years that it was just business, that it hadn't been Scanlon's money or even his company that would have gotten hit.

  But he had stolen from Richard. Not some insured bauble, either. He'd stolen his credibility and the respect he'd earned from a life devoted to nothing but career. What did Richard have that was more important or irreplaceable?

  Brandon had spent a lot of time sitting in his cell imagining elaborate ends to Richard Scanlon: Shark attacks. Quicksand. Falling safes. But that was all just bullshit. Neither of them had played by the rules and in situations like that, the better man tended to win. It was just that, until then, Brandon had always been the better man.

  And then there was Catherine. Smart, beautiful, not a sociopathic kleptomaniac, and not sitting on the other side of a wall of shatterproof glass. What was she about? Maybe . . .

  He shook his head violently, clearing her from his mind. Safer not to go there.

  Finally, there was the job itself. While perhaps the facts of his life suggested to most people that he was kind of a scumbag, he wasn't so bad that he could just shrug off the thought of a million people disintegrating into a mushroom cloud. What if he managed to make a successful run for it and set up house in Central America? Would he one day walk out of his little grass bungalow to find out that Chicago was gone? That everyone -- every single living thing -- was dead? What would it be like to live the rest of his life wondering if he could have stopped it?

  The most pathetic thing in all this, though -- even worse than allowing himself to fall for the carefully proffered illusion of Catherine -- was that he wanted to steal that money. He didn't even care if he got to keep any of it. He just wanted to pull it off. Oh, and then disappear into thin air before Scanlon could put a bullet in him. How sweet would that be?

  Chapter EIGHTEEN

  "Cocktail?" Brandon said, reaching into the backseat and pulling a beer from the cool
er.

  "Shouldn't you be concentrating?"

  He pulled the tab on the can, holding it to his ear to hear the hiss of carbonation. "I am concentrating. Pork rind?"

  She crinkled her face in disgust.

  "You're one of those health nuts, aren't you? I knew it."

  "I am not a hea--," she started and then caught herself. "Seriously . . . Shouldn't we be looking for something?"

  "Probably."

  Catherine sighed quietly and squinted through the windshield at the strip of asphalt bisecting the empty Nevada desert. The speedometer read seventy but it felt to her like they weren't moving at all. The road was dead straight until it finally disappeared into a horizon of broken rock, dead plants, and burned-out mountains. According to the digital readout in the rearview mirror, the outside temperature was a pleasant hundred and two degrees.

  "Slow down!"

  Catherine jammed a foot on the brake and Brandon steadied himself with one hand while using the other to retrieve a digital camera from the glove box. He rolled down the window and snapped a shot of the Highway 95 sign.

  "What was that?" Catherine said, accelerating hard enough to slam him back into his seat. "Was it important?"

  "Souvenir," he answered, examining the photo in the screen on the back of the camera.

  "I wouldn't think a guy in your line of work would be the photo album type," she said, staring into the side mirror. Nothing but empty road and heat distortion. For some reason, though, that just made her more nervous. Instead of accepting the obvious -- that no one was out there -- it made her paranoid that the people tracking them were more sophisticated than that. High-altitude surveillance planes? Satellites? Maybe they had access to those new --

  "Can I give you some advice, Cath?"

  "Huh?"

  "Advice. Can I give you some?"

  "Yeah. I guess."

  "You really need to try to relax a little. This is going to be kind of a long process and if you wind yourself this tight now you're gonna explode before we even do anything illegal."