She ignored him. “Okay, that’s the ones in the blasts. We have no other deaths accounted yet? No missing reported?”
There was a round of nos, and Eleri was supremely glad. “How are we doing rounding up other known cell members?”
She listened to that for a while, a detailed rundown of who was in custody, who was still being tailed, and who was in the wind. What intel did they have on the missing? At least for the Calabasas group, not-so-favorite son Jake Salling was happy to help with anything he knew. He’d revealed a hidey hole in one house that gave up three members and a slew of guns. No one had been hurt.
“Where does the militia raid stand?” Eleri asked next to the room at large.
As she took stock, she realized it had only been that morning that she and Donovan had met with the two agents who were angry at Walter and Cooper for following the yellow coupe and ultimately cracking the case.
“It’s ongoing. There’s gunfire. We have wounded. They have dead. But they’re hunkered down. It’s not going anywhere for a while.” The report there was somber. “Injured” often turned into “deceased” as the night went on. She took a deep breath and tried to take it all in.
“So where are we with Ken Kellen’s papers?”
That was where shit got interesting.
The words came at her rapid fire. “He started moving the guns in Fallujah as a matter of course. Thought it was all up-and-up. Later found out that it wasn’t. Then was coerced into continuing because he was already up to his neck in it. He still seemed to think they were selling to the right people, though.”
“There’s a whole piece on the last mission. Basically, they were sent out to kill the guys who didn’t know. Rollins among them.” The agent, holding a composition book, gestured to the man in cuffs as though she was talking about his shirt color and not that his teammates had been ordered to murder him. “The handful that were moving guns were in deep enough that turning seemed legit to some. Not to others. Not to Kellen—according to these writings—so he took out Freeman and another.”
In the background Eleri saw Cooper almost getting sick. He should be.
Another agent spoke up. “Kellen was tracking all of it. He has papers with the signatures and ID from Vivian Dawson. He has shipments of IED’s designed by . . . Um. . .” He flipped pages and it was Donovan who filled in.
“Let me guess, Colonel William Ratz?”
“Yes!”
“Shit,” Eleri muttered, even as she heard the sound coming in stereo from Donovan. “And Sullivan? Loreen Sullivan?”
This time, it was Rollins that spoke up. “She was like a spare mother to Ken. The Sullivans took us in for Christmas a few years. Kellen’s family was shit, but the Sullivans were good to him.” His voice pled with them to keep the Sullivans clean. To make the death meaningless in that scheme of things, at least.
The reporting agent didn’t pick up on that. “Says here that the two of them recommended Rollins to the group, along with Ratz, thinking he would go along. They were in it deep. The Sullivans were covering tracks.”
Eleri had never seen Rollins so close to breaking, but he was close. “Dr. Gardiner?” His voice was flat, not matching the near tears as his eyes fought to stay clear.
“Ken Kellen didn’t order Dr. Gardiner’s murder.”
“Then why?” Rollins tried to gesture at the futility of it, forgetting his hands were cuffed, and he just made them clink.
Sighing and deciding it didn’t make much difference anyway, Eleri marched over and pulled her handcuff key, then watched as Rollins flinched.
“Jesus, Rollins, I cuffed you because you deserved it.” She muttered even as she unlocked the handcuffs. She’d put him in, she could take him out.
He leaned back as though staying away, then he leaned in and whispered, “I saw what you are.”
“What?” She frowned at him. What the hell was he talking about? She had no clue, so she said it out loud.
He looked at her like she was crazy, then he stared her down and said, “I saw your eyes go black. Full black. Like a demon. You were crazy strong, and you were something else. I know.” He whispered the last two words like threat, even as her stomach turned.
What the hell were people seeing? What was happening when she got mad?
Her hand flew to her chest—the grisgris. Had Grandmere done something to it? She could easily have enchanted Eleri’s and not the others, or not the same way. She was going to throw the thing in the trash first chance she could discretely do it.
“You’d just taken a concussive blast to the back of the head and been out cold for several minutes. Plus, I nailed you in the balls. Hard. I don’t think you saw what you think you saw.” She pocketed the cuffs and walked away, trying to hide the disturbing voices nagging the back of her brain.
At least he could move his hands. Maybe it wasn’t so bad that the big, bad soldier was scared of her.
As she turned back to the table, she saw an agent holding up some loose pages Kellen must have been keeping at one point. “So, once Kellen saw Cooper in L.A. he tried to get Cooper into the cell. But he couldn’t risk telling you. The two women in the cell murdered Gardiner on their own. They wouldn’t take you if you had a confidential place to tell what they were doing. The doctor would have been obligated to report any kind of terrorist activity you discussed.”
“Great.” Cooper slapped his thighs in disgust. “So you all don’t just think I’m a terrorist, you think I’m a dumb one, too.”
“Nah.” The agent grinned. “Ken Kellen pretty much lays out what happened today. He was going to send you out with the bomb—prove that you were a worthy member, that you’d just shot at the girls in Fallujah because you didn’t know which side people were on. Then he was going to swap with you, give you the way to find all these notes and push you out. Leaving you alive to tell the tale. He did not plan on the FBI, you wearing a tracker, Walter following him—I don’t think he even knew that. Did anyone have that? I just have general paranoia developing round about the time she started.”
“That’s fantastic.” Walter replied, low key, and Eleri couldn’t agree more. There wasn’t a much better recommendation one could earn in surveillance.
Eleri turned again. She would read all fifteen notebooks, all seven years Kellen had been in on this. Eventually. But for now there was one more step. “If Kellen was the fifth fracture, does he know who he took orders from?”
“Not much.” It came from several different agents at the same time.
“Shit.” She spat it out even as she paced at the windows. “What do we have?”
“The person was originally involved in the gun sales. I.e. a rebel getting the guns on the other side. That’s how Kellen started talking to him. He was recruited in a purely military sense before realizing he’d become the other side without even knowing it. Those are his words.”
“Any names? Any?” she asked the room at large.
“Hadad.”
“That’s it? It’s so common. That’s like having ‘Ben’ here in America.” She was so frustrated.
“Yes, but it’s better than nothing.”
Donovan piped up with forced cheer that he managed despite being in obvious pain. He’d refused anything but Advil, wanting to be an alert part of the team. “Where’s the tech? It doesn’t matter what his name is if we can call him.”
“Holy shit.” Donovan was right. If they had Ken Kellen’s equipment, they might be able to trace it back. “Where’s the tech?”
“We have what he was wearing when he died. There’s an earpiece and a comm. They don’t work anymore, but we cracked them. They seem to be a closed loop with the other cell members. So that’s a bust.”
“Tech from the warrant executed at his place is on its way.”
“How far?” she asked just as she considered eating something. It was full dark outside—or as full dark as L.A. seemed to get. She’d had no food all day and was running on fumes and stale adrenaline.
&nb
sp; A knock came at the door and she saw it was opened and a bag delivered. She prayed it was food. She prayed it was Ken Kellen’s cell phone and computer and more.
It wasn’t food.
And she didn’t get any of the pieces of equipment. Hacking wasn’t her specialty.
A bowl of fruit sat on a side table along with water and she downed a paper cup-full then a second before thinking to take one to Donovan. She nudged him to drink it, unsure how much he was paying attention given the pain his ankle had to be causing. But the fact was he’d contributed twice and he’d been useful, despite not being truly fully in the conversation.
Eleri went back and grabbed two bananas, handing one to her partner before filling her water again and sitting for just a moment of nothing. The food hit the spot. She pulled up her own cell phone and started looking up info as she ate the last bite. It wasn’t two minutes later that she heard, “I think I’ve got something.”
“What do you have?”
“Number. A cell phone number.”
Eleri was about to ask why this number amongst the handful at least that must have been found, but the agent was already on it. “It’s been dialed regularly from this phone—and there are only three numbers on this phone. So it’s minimal use. Two of the three numbers go to cell phones in Iraq. And I can trace the origin of purchase on one to Iraq as well. Do you need more?”
What more could she ask. “Does it belong to someone named Hadad?”
He shrugged. “It’s a burner, so who knows? But I think this number is the one because it was bought less than twenty-four hours before the mission where Ken Kellen shot his fellow teammates and went rogue.”
“Holy fucking bingo.” Eleri blurted her excitement. “Then she turned to the room at large. So how do we use the phone to trace him?”
It was Cooper Rollins who answered. “That’s exactly the kind of thing you’d use my team for. We’d get the trace, infiltrate, and take out.”
She turned to him. “That’s the problem. You guys are exactly who we need, and your team is all either dead or in the wind. You’re half made up of traitors. I can’t call any Army team, I can’t even alert the Army to what we have, because right now I don’t know who to trust.”
47
Cooper Rollins stood up. “You don’t have to trust me.”
He could see from their faces that they didn’t. Some of them were okay with him. He looked at the papers in front of each of the agents. The ones who’d read Kellen’s manifesto—for lack of a better term—knew Cooper wasn’t a terrorist.
He hoped they couldn’t see how ashamed he was.
He’d joined the army full of hope and forward momentum, and look where he’d wound up. With severe PTSD that kept him from being with his family and now barely out of cuffs for being suspected of treason.
When he’d started, Colonel Ratz had been a mentor, and it turned out he’d been sending IEDs into enemy hands. Cooper wanted to hate the old man. At the same time, he wondered if Ratz had been taken in the same way they all had. Someone was at the top pulling strings, and each person below that was pulling strings. Just like Kellen had done here. He’d blown them all up, turned them on each other.
Had he learned that from their superiors’ orders that last mission in Fallujah?
Cooper probably wouldn’t ever know. Ken Kellen had inserted himself into a terrorist plot. Probably, it was more that he’d been like Cooper at the beginning. He’d had no plans to run guns. He’d been making legal army deliveries, he’d thought. His hands were dirty before he even knew he was playing.
Kellen may have been in the fracture just by virtue of keeping himself alive despite the team imploding. Cooper had some guesses about how that had worked. Ken Kellen had probably had a place to go in Fallujah, had a friendly rebel family that took him in. He may have joined some form of the resistance. He was a good soldier, took orders, and spoke all the languages.
Cooper wasn’t as good at that, but he volunteered. “I speak their tongue. Not like a native. Not like Kellen. But if you get me on, I can talk and maybe get some intel before they realize it’s not him.”
“Would they recognize your voice?” Agent Eames asked him. She gave him the squirrels since he saw her eyes go wild. That was not from a blast to the head, but no one else was giving it credence. He was trying to talk himself down from what must have been another episode. She still gave him the squirrels.
He tried to act like he wasn’t bothered. “In the past, when the connection is bad, people can confuse me with Kellen. Don’t know if that’s enough. But unless someone has a closer voice, and a grasp of the tongue, I’m what you have.”
Eames nodded at him. As did her partner. He’d been in obvious pain since his return from the ER, but Cooper respected his need to stay in the game and stay sober.
Agent Heath looked at him. “It’s nice that you can speak the native language and might be able to talk to them. But you can’t get a team in there! So what good is it? Plus, I’m not sure I trust you.”
The room went dead silent at that, and Cooper’s heart stilled. It was possibly the worst thing a dedicated special teams member could hear. Everything he’d done had been based on trust. Until he’d had to trust no one. Until he’d followed Kellen and decided that he might get pulled under, but he’d get to the bottom of things.
Well, he was sure at the bottom of things now.
Then a voice spoke up. “Sir,” a younger agent addressed Heath. “I’ve been reading this. He’s not implicated. In fact, Kellen pulled him in to give him these papers. To exonerate Rollins and give Kellen back some of the . . . dignity, I guess, that he’d lost in the job.”
It was Heath at the bit now, and Cooper felt every pull. At least he wasn’t a freak like his partner. Then again, he shouldn’t think that. He did have a tendency to hallucinate. Heath held out. “How do we know Rollins didn’t write this shit and bury it?”
Another moment of silence. Another voice popping up. “I don’t think Rollins is a problem either. There’s even some stuff in the early pages about how obnoxiously goody-two-shoes Rollins was. It was why he wasn’t brought in on the deal in the first place. This is all hand written. A good handwriting sample should do it.”
Great, now he was obnoxiously good. But if a handwriting sample would get them what they needed, that was easy enough.
Without being asked, he picked up a cheap pen, one of many scattered on the table, and began writing on a paper tablet he grabbed. He sat at one of the few empty chairs and wrote out “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.” Next he wrote the Lord’s prayer, then started on the creed he recited when a soldier fell. Maybe he was writing his own.
Agent Eames was looking over his shoulder, her big freaky eyes on everything. He didn’t get much further.
“I was with the Behavioral Analysis Unit. I’m a good enough graphologist to say he didn’t write Kellen’s notes.” Then she turned to him. “Even if we could connect you, how would we trust the team to follow through? I mean, if they don’t, if we get through to our guy, and then they bury him deeper, we’ve got a worse problem.”
She turned to the room at large. “We have an advantage. Fallujah is eleven hours ahead of us. We just took down their guy and their people a few hours ago. It’s very early morning there. So there’s a possibility that they don’t know about Ken Kellen. But that window is getting very small to put Rollins in as Kellen and check this shit out. How do we make it work?”
Cooper stood back up. “You don’t use an Army team. I don’t know who to trust there, but I do know who to trust here.”
He looked at Walter Reed, standing opposite him where she’d planted herself at the table a while ago. “Walter—Fisher—is MARSOC. She’s a Marine. Use a Marine Special Forces team. I bet Walter knows exactly who she can call.”
Cooper stared at her, praying he was right.
It took two hours, and Eleri held her breath for every single minute of it. She was running on fumes, stale
adrenaline, and one banana now.
With every moment that passed, the cell waiting to hear something in Fallujah might realize their link was dead. The faster she and her team did this, the more likely it was that the man on the other end of the phone would think it was Ken Kellen on the line.
They’d put Walter through to a forward operating base, and she’d woken an officer she once worked under. He’d been excited to hear from her and glad she was doing well. For a moment Eleri had enjoyed hearing the pride that rode along with the urgency as Walter explained the situation.
He started naming a team, told Walter he wished she was on it, and Eleri watched her grin. This was not the same woman who was sleeping in the square a few weeks ago. She probably would never be that woman again.
Eleri counted the positives before she opened her mouth to identify herself, Donovan, and even Vasquez and Rollins. They were the core team here.
Walter’s contact would be boots on the ground half the world away.
The home base team had caught short naps, read Kellen’s disturbing quantity of papers, ate snacks, and waited. Occasionally they jumped up, tense, only to ease back down for another round of waiting.
They did this when the team first reported they were boarding the chopper. But the ride was longer than Eleri expected, and she’d almost fallen asleep, then jerked awake suddenly with word that the team had hit ground. But they weren’t there yet.
Each milestone was helpful. Each report that they weren’t there yet was another stretch of time in which it could all go wrong. So when they reported that they were, in fact, in place, Eleri found herself on a yo-yo string.
She forced out the words. “We’ll get our guy in contact. I’ll give you go/no-go as soon as possible.”
There was every likelihood that they hadn’t found the right person, or the phone might have changed hands or it might be pizza delivery. Or it could just be that he wouldn’t say anything that Cooper could distinguish as sufficient evidence to storm the place.
The NightShade Forensic Files: Fracture Five (Book 2) Page 41
