He went by Jeff. Short for Jefferson, his middle name. After Thomas Jefferson. A philandering miscegenation-prone oligarch, if you dug too deeply. Best to admire the stern visage on the two-dollar bill and not ask too many questions.
He had never seen a two-dollar bill. He had, in fact, seen an insufficient number of bills in any denomination.
He blamed his name, at least in part. Some men got great, powerful, awe-inspiring names, which undoubtedly catapulted them to wealth and notoriety.
He got Nero Jefferson Chiligiris.
Thanks, mom.
He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1969. The city was deep in Rust Belt ruin by the time Nero came of age. Especially so on Nero’s side of the tracks. Nothing to do for money that wasn’t illegal.
He was a lifelong Browns fan, which was a perfect metaphor for the pervasive futility all around him. Even the good years weren’t very good.
There were plenty of male role models in Nero’s life, but none of them were particularly positive. He spent his youth in and out of juvie, mostly for petty crimes related to scaring up enough money to eat.
Then came his eighteenth birthday, a milestone significant in that it meant the end of juvie and the beginning of an adult criminal record. He became intimately familiar with a couple of state correctional institutions.
Then, one unlucky day, he crossed state lines during the commission of a crime. Blam. Federal offender.
Federal prisoner.
Fifteen years. Out on parole after ten.
Scared straight wasn’t quite accurate, but Nero saw the wisdom of remaining on the outside.
And strange as it might have been for a tough street kid, he didn’t like violence. He was big enough to survive relatively unmolested in prison, but his disposition was anything but outsized. He never picked fights, never intimidated people, and never joined the mutual blood-letting during the turf wars endemic to prison life.
He did his time, worked out at the prison gym, kept his nose clean, and researched opportunities to make a legitimate living on the outside.
Which amounted to jack and shit. Nobody was hiring. Qualified, college-educated workers weren’t finding jobs. What hope did a felon have?
There was one industry that embraced Nero’s ilk, however. Debt collection. It was an industry made of misfits and unemployables from all walks of life. Buffalo, New York was its capital. Browbeating deadbeat dads and down-on-their-luck homemakers into making just a single low monthly payment to set right all those thousands of dollars of debt wasn’t work that anyone else wanted, so the work fell to the ex-cons, and they flocked to Buffalo by the thousands.
And it was one hell of a booming business. All you had to do was hustle. Start dialing debtors in the morning, work your “talk-off” technique all day, and rack up the payments. There was enough cash to insulate your big new house and fill the trunk of your big new Escalade.
But it was the wild west. The criminals working the phones resorted to shockingly criminal measures to extract and extort payments on old and long-forgotten debts.
Nero never had the stomach for that sort of thing, so he was never better than an average collector. But he was thrown out on the streets just like the rest of them when the federal regulators finally woke up to the madness. He had the rug pulled out from under him three times in less than a year.
Nero took it as a sign.
He managed to make a few acquaintances during his stint in the seedy underbelly of America’s economic system. One of them was an irascible and almost unbearably arrogant gentleman of nondescript Middle Eastern descent whose real name Nero never learned, but who went by the moniker Money and paid handsomely in cash for services rendered.
They weren’t difficult services, either. Mostly courier work, based out of Denver. Locked duffel bags, locked suitcases, sealed backpacks. Always heavy.
The deal was always the same: Nero was allowed to bring no cell phone, no pager, no GPS, no computers or electronic devices, and no weapons. He was always to drive an old car without a GPS tracking system. The exchanges took place in extremely remote locations, and absolutely no words were exchanged between couriers.
Sure, Nero had the vague notion that something slightly untoward might have been afoot. But he was making good money. He had people depending on him. Kids and a girlfriend. Wife, really, but they’d never bothered with a ceremony. Oldest boy starting high school.
He made sure his ignorance was absolute. He had no clue what was in the bags, and he worked hard to keep it that way. Prison sucked, and he had no desire to return. Money’s business was no concern of Nero’s. He went out of his way to make sure the boss knew it, too. Nero knew his place.
On this day, Nero Jefferson Chiligiris’s place was several miles south of a rest stop on I-70 in Eastern Colorado, near the Kansas border. He was driving a Pontiac Grand Am, old enough to have the cheesy plastic bumpers and no On-Star on board.
The air smelled much less like Colorado and much more like Kansas. Nero hated Kansas. The bugs and the humidity got to him. And the bovine slack-mouthed look most Kansans had about them. At least, most of the ones in his tax bracket, which was admittedly less impressive than it might have been had he bothered to report all of his income.
Nero looked around. Not another car in sight. Corn fields on either side, getting on toward the harvest, Nero figured, judging by their size.
Out of habit, he looked overhead as well. Nothing but a couple of birds circling, riding thermals up from the two-lane blacktop road that ran straighter than a laser beam as far as the eye could see.
No traffic, no cops, no bug-smasher airplanes buzzing around. Perfect conditions.
The other car approached from the highway side. Another beat-up old shitbox, ready to give up the ghost if the engine’s wheezing was any indication.
Nero found the trunk button, heard a clunk as the latch released, and stared straight ahead. He had long ago mastered temptation, and was no longer even curious about who might have been on the other end of the transaction. He didn’t want to know anything about them. Not even what they looked like.
Nero felt the suspension lighten as the other courier lifted the large red duffel from the back of Nero’s Grand Am.
Then there was a thunk, the replacement bag, ostensibly the pro quo to his quid, either greenbacks or goods, Nero didn’t know which. And didn’t want to know. Not his business.
The trunk slammed shut. Nero stared straight ahead, heard the other courier’s footsteps in the gravel, started his Grand Am, and put it in drive.
And all hell broke loose.
Nero heard a low, thrumming buzz. The air vibrated. The sound grew more intense, more insistent. It became overpowering, hammering Nero’s chest, battering his car, shaking the earth around him.
The noise grew unbearably loud. It assaulted his ears, robbed him of breath, scared him witless.
A helicopter appeared, impossibly huge and deafening, pounding the air into submission, skidding to a hover just above corn height. Then another, and one more, surrounding him, angry and ominous and in his face.
One blocked the road to Nero’s south and a second blocked the north, trapping him on the narrow road.
Nero stared wide-eyed, pulse pounding, insides clenched with fear and dread, adrenaline slamming his veins.
Strapped in each chopper’s doorway was a man in a black jumpsuit wielding an assault rifle.
The third helicopter took position overhead and just to the west of the road. It was the one with the loudspeaker, Nero later realized. Get out of the car with your hands above your head. Instructions he’d heard before, but not in a very long time.
So much for the straight life.
3
Uncle Sam didn’t spring for business class — bad optics, they said — so Sam tried to get comfortable in her coach seat, an obvious impossibility for anyone over five-three. It was one of the low-grade annoyances that added up over time, contributing to the general angriness Sam sens
ed inside and around her.
She was more acutely aware of those things in her post-death incarnation, because the notion had crept into her mind that peacefulness ought to be a priority on some level, which she thought to be much more related to subtracting things from one’s life than adding.
Like airline travel. She could permanently subtract that from her existence and be forever happier.
And she would undoubtedly have to subtract work as well. Not entirely, but substantially. It was likely the only way to remedy the constant fatigue that plagued her, and the scowl on her face most mornings, and the preoccupation that had come over her.
She could tell it was taking its toll on Brock. He understood, of course. He’d been awakened in the middle of the night countless times during his own career, sent off to foreign lands to fly circles over petulant dictatorships or dodge surface-to-air missiles and drop bombs on rogue states. But she could see the tiredness in his eyes.
And her death had taken a remarkable toll on him.
How could it not? He had been forced to watch the whole thing, strapped horizontally to a wall while his shattered ankle dangled at a grotesque angle, his heart and psyche breaking just as completely and painfully, unable to turn away as a deranged killer had his way with her battered body.
And for what? For truth and justice? For good to triumph over evil? Laughable.
Existential questions welled up often from deep in her consciousness, more bitter each time. Justice was a farce. She worked for fools and charlatans.
But she couldn’t stop. Trouble had a way of finding her. New bastards presented themselves to her with frightening regularity. And once on her radar, she didn’t have it in her constitution to simply look away, to leave them for someone else to handle.
Because they would mishandle it. And the bastard would walk. And that conjured in her the image of her helpless little self, cowering under the hard glare of the biggest bastard she’d ever met, powerless to give him what he deserved and restrained from hurting him by the invisible bonds of a twisted love-hate thing.
To hell with all of them, she thought. Finding and stopping the bastards would be somebody else’s problem for a change.
She bounced her knee, restless, wrestling.
Then she decided. She was going to ask for a transfer out of field work. She’d had enough, had given enough. The costs were just too high.
She would ask for an administrative job, put up with bureaucrats and senseless meetings for a few years, then put in for early retirement.
They’d travel. She’d give Brock random and deeply satisfying head when he least expected it. She’d maybe have children with him.
Maybe.
After she exorcised a few more personal demons.
But it would all have to wait.
Mark Severn’s death deserved the department’s full attention, and she resolved to set her weariness aside and go about her business with dignity and respect.
Then take a vacation.
Then quit.
She looked at her watch. 3:45 pm DC time. Six hours to Brussels, and with the time change it would be 4:50 am by the time she got out of the noisy aluminum tube. Then a two-hour layover, followed by a two-hour flight to Budapest.
Restlessness struck. She got up and walked to the lavatory as much out of a need to move as a need to pee. She chose the far lavatory, the one in the middle of the plane, to afford more time out of her seat. She took her time strolling up the long, narrow aisle, watching with idle amusement as heads bobbed and shifted in unison with the mild turbulence.
She looked at her face in the bathroom mirror. Tired. Older than she wanted to look. Younger than she felt. Red hair and green eyes still blazed back at her. Still the spark of life, still the slightly defiant arch of her eyebrow. Time to figure out what you want to do with your life, she thought.
Business completed, she wandered back down the aisle toward row forty, still contemplating fate and future.
She was miles away when a familiar feeling brought her instantly back to the present.
An uncomfortable feeling.
Eyes.
Someone was looking at her. Studying. Evaluating. It was a sixth sense she had developed over years in the field. It had saved her life countless times. Her adrenal glands were already at work before her eyes darted to her right.
A man. Professional but not very. His eyes lingered on her, even as hers bored through him. A seasoned pro would have smiled, played it off, even come on to her. Maybe even looked down at her figure with a smile. Anything to hide the operational assessment going on behind the eyes.
This guy wasn’t that smooth, but he was definitely on the job. His cheekbones were high and Slavic, mouth slightly too small, eyes tilted slightly upwards at the outer edge, containing an operator’s interest and an American-style knowingness despite the decidedly foreign heritage.
All of this Sam gathered in an instant.
Then just as quickly she smiled, affecting a look as if she might say something, as if she might have known the man, like maybe they had met somewhere before.
Then she pretended to think better of it, turned her head, and continued onward.
She noted the man’s seat number as she walked past. 32A.
She found her seat. As she turned around, she took an extra second to survey the passengers. Tails traveled in pairs. At least, the serious ones did. Sam wondered where the other guy might be lurking.
A few more questions popped to mind, the kind that were hard to answer while trapped on an airplane, smelling-distance away from three hundred other people.
She looked again at her watch. Still six hours to go, minus three minutes. A long flight just got infinitely longer.
She tried to sleep. Nothing doing. Her body needed it badly, but the sardine-like accommodations and the compulsion to survey her surroundings kept her awake.
As was often the case during air travel, the hours passed like months. She took notes on the Severn case to stay occupied. The captain’s cool-guy voice finally announced their impending arrival in Brussels.
Four millennia later, the airplane came to a stop at the gate. The seatbelt sign went off, causing nearly everyone on the plane to stand up simultaneously.
Sam couldn’t see the guy in 32A. He was eight rows in front of her. Might as well have been eight miles.
When she walked up the ramp and onto the concourse, he was nowhere to be found. She found a quiet corner to pretend to check her messages while scanning the crowd for any hint of him.
No luck.
Maybe he was more professional than she gave him credit for.
Maybe she should figure out what the hell was going on.
She took out her government-issued Blackberry. She hardly ever saw Blackberries anymore, except in the hands of US government employees, which made Sam wonder whether the company was being propped up for political reasons.
She did the time-zone math, grimaced, then auto-dialed a number she’d called a thousand times before. It belonged to Dan Gable, the most capable deputy a girl could wish for. It was a quarter to eleven in DC, and she knew he’d be awake.
“I thought I was rid of you for a few days,” Dan said instead of hello. A squealing baby was surprisingly loud in Sam’s ear.
“I wasn’t going to call you at this hour, but then I did,” she said.
“No worries. I was just contemplating jumping out the window.”
“You make fatherhood sound so dreamy.”
“Who’s dreaming? That requires sleep.”
Sam laughed. Her relationship with her second-in-charge was easy and informal. Strictly business — no overtones or undertones — and Dan was as competent as they came. He was one of two men she trusted, and the only other human at the Department of Homeland Security with whom she’d entrust her life.
To call him a lifesaver was a gross understatement. He’d helped her through countless impossible situations.
And he had brought her back from
the dead.
Dan had arrived too late to save her from the madman, but early enough to bring her back to life. He had pumped her heart for her, and breathed life back into her lungs, while Brock watched broken and helpless. The doctors had made clear to her that she owed her continued existence to Dan Gable.
He was five-eight, two inches shorter than Sam, built a little bit like a bowling ball but with very little fat, with thick, beefy arms and stubby fingers that pecked away at a computer keyboard with the best of them.
Dan was beyond competent in the field — rock-steady aim, rock-steady disposition — but his real value was in his otherworldly mastery of espionage via computer. There were very few who could hold a candle to him, and it was those skills that Sam intended to invoke.
“Please give my apologies to Sarah for calling so late,” Sam said.
“I would, but it wouldn’t do any good.”
“Still mad?”
“Perpetually. Mostly at me.”
“This shouldn’t take too long. It should leave plenty of time to kiss and make up.”
“Lay it on me.”
“I made a new friend this evening. Bulky guy, Slavic bones, definitely watching me.”
“Sure he didn’t want to ask you on a date?”
Sam chuckled. “No. He was unmistakably on the job.”
“I thought this was supposed to be a milk run, followed by a week’s vacation.”
“Me too.”
“But you do have a long list of people pissed off at you,” Dan said helpfully.
“Thanks. I didn’t feel exposed enough already. Seat 32A, on Brussels Airlines flight 1850.”
“Got it,” Dan said. “Do you know who Brussels code-shares with? It’ll make the hacking a little easier.”
“United Airlines.”
“Great. Shouldn’t take long. Call you when I have something.”
Sam thanked him and signed off.
For the first time in a long time, she wanted a drink.
It was a strange sensation, with a few years of sobriety behind her. She fought the urge, of course. That was one genie she could never let back out of the bottle.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 56
