In a way, Nick had killed Anne. And no other thought occupied his mind as the guy struggled, the weight heavy across Nick’s right shoulder. Nick remembered the argument. The faint gunshots across the steep ridge. His race back to his house. And Anne’s body lying dead in the grass.
Yes, Nick had killed her. And he would never forgive himself for not having been there on the night she needed him most. Had he been there, she wouldn’t have been so scared that she had resorted to grabbing a gun.
Yes, Nick had killed her. And as a tear rolled down his cheek, he realized the man was no longer moving.
Nick let go of the rope and the body slid to the floor. He rushed to check the man’s pulse, but it was too late.
Damn it. What now?
For a second, he thought about making the whole mess look like a drug deal gone wrong or something similar.
No, he thought. Just run. Keep it simple, stupid. The classic KISS principle.
He stuffed the rope back into his pack, snatched the envelope full of cash from beneath the top of the drawer, and closed the pack. He grabbed the rifle, slid the bolt back far enough to see brass, and closed it. Hoisting his pack, he reached for the door and stopped.
Shit, his pistol wasn’t topped off. He had fired what, once, twice? Fuck it, no time. He opened the door and scanned the parking lot. A woman was watching from an open door about thirty feet away. He half-directed the rifle toward her, and she screamed as she ducked inside and slammed the door.
The cops were probably on their way, but he didn’t need her to see what he was driving. He unlocked the green Caprice, threw the pack across the seat, and laid his rifle, stock down, in the floorboard of the passenger seat.
He turned the key, and the engine roared to life -- thank God for small favors. He backed up quickly, slammed it into drive, and sped out of the parking lot. A police siren was barely audible in the distance, and he quickly headed for the busy turnpike of Oak Ridge.
Would they have his vehicle description? Probably not, though the lady he’d pointed his rifle at may have seen it and could now be calling it in. Would dispatch have those details distributed yet? Not likely.
It didn’t matter. He had to run. He’d either get lucky or not.
As he drove down a neighborhood street, he crossed his fingers and hoped for the best.
Chapter 30
Whitaker heard about the shooting approximately twenty-five minutes after it happened, the best he could figure.
An aide told him the Oak Ridge Police Department had responded to a “possible shooting/armed white male menacing residents” call at 11:32 a.m. The police had arrived and quickly discovered the bloody mess in the parking lot.
An officer had noticed the drag marks toward the room and had run back to his car, calling for back-up as he raced to the cruiser. He had immediately opened the driver’s door, unlocked the shotgun, and hefted it out of its console mount. When the next cruiser arrived two minutes later, he was still kneeling in the space created from the cruiser’s open door, his shotgun aimed at the hotel room.
By then, dispatch had notified the two officers that a white male had been seen leaving the parking lot in a boxy, large green car. Make and model unknown. An all-points bulletin immediately went out. The two officers had finally approached the door and tactically entered it, their guns and flashlights scanning the room.
They discovered the two bodies, one female and well dressed and the other fat and unkempt, passed over them to clear the bathroom, and then called for ambulances. Seconds after calling the ambulances, the officers changed the call to a non-emergency code for the ambulances. These two were dead, no doubt about it, and there was no need for an ambulance to kill anyone in their rush to the motel.
The two officers then left the room, careful not to disturb anything. It was now a crime scene, and every piece of evidence needed to be preserved. The first Oak Ridge detective who arrived found the FBI badge and quickly called the FBI office in Knoxville to tell them they had lost one of their own.
This came as quite a surprise to the FBI Special Agent in Charge, since every member from his Knoxville office was sitting in a full command briefing with him.
He immediately canceled the briefing and they scrambled, some working the phones and some heading for Oak Ridge. The FBI leader made his first call about the situation to his boss in D.C., who immediately called Whitaker's boss -- Sen. Gooden. Whitaker's boss denied at first that any operations were ongoing in Oak Ridge but then asked why the FBI leader was asking, suddenly interested.
The FBI Director had said, “Sen. Gooden, so help me, if you are doing something down there using real FBI badges, I’ll have two hundred Washington agents flown in, and you won’t be able to pass gas without us knowing it.”
“Now, now,” Gooden said. “I’ve got nothing going on.”
“You better hope not,” the FBI leader admonished before slamming the phone down.
Sen. Gooden had immediately contacted Whitaker, and as Whitaker ended the call, he calculated what to do. No doubt he had lost someone. He really had two options. He could flood the area in search of Nick Woods or call back the troops. Disperse them so things didn’t get more complicated.
He knew he had to go with the latter option. The exposure was already too great. Shit, he thought. Now he would have to go on the defensive against Nick Woods.
Of course, Nick could get caught by the locals or feds, but he doubted it. Nick had avoided hundreds of Soviet troops and native Afghans after having his location passed to them. And that was in a country where he couldn’t even speak the language.
Yes, he would have to go on the defensive and wait for Nick’s first move. He could try to role-play what Nick would do, but where would that even begin? Even he didn’t know what he would do if the roles were reversed. Nick wouldn’t know who the enemy was, so what could he do?
Irritated, Whitaker dialed the number for one of his team leaders. He would release the retired ones and send his regulars on vacation or something. Just as long as they got as far from East Tennessee as possible. And fast.
Whitaker cursed himself for not memorizing who was in the Oak Ridge area. A good commander would know that. He thought it was Nancy Dickerson. She was a pretty good agent.
And women made great operatives because men never suspected a woman to be tailing them. Or to put a pistol in their face. They were a great tool. Or usually were. But Nancy hadn’t proved a threat to Nick. That was for sure.
The exposure wasn’t much of a threat. She, like everyone else, would have legitimate paperwork to prove she was a bounty hunter. Furthermore, she had three printed fact sheets for real east Tennessee fugitives. So, the locals and feds would assume that some crazy bounty hunter was out searching for some con while impersonating an agent.
Not that rare of an occurrence actually. The chances the FBI would connect much larger dots were small. Small, that is, if all of his agents got out of the area without getting caught.
One more armed “bounty hunter” carrying an FBI badge would make the situation something more than a coincidence. It would spell disaster. The thought made Whitaker’s stomach churn.
Chapter 31
Nick Woods drove south down the Pellissippi Parkway, away from Oak Ridge.
He kept his speed right at sixty miles per hour, and his eyes darted from the rear view mirror to as far forward as he could see, looking for police cruisers coming up behind him or roadblocks that might be set up ahead.
Would there be roadblocks? He wasn’t sure. Perhaps.
Killing the woman was bad enough, but that was self-defense. Or at least self-preservation. Killing the manager bugged him.
Why had he done that? Had it been truly necessary? Was he starting to lose it? Nick tried to shake it off and not think too much on it. He couldn’t right now, after all. The man had brought up Anne, attacked him, and he’d lost it.
He couldn’t change what had happened, so he focused on his current predicament. On his
speed limit. On looking for roadblocks.
There weren’t many vehicles on the road going south, the direction he was going. That worried him. Worse, none of the vehicles he saw were green. Shit, he had picked a bad color in his zest to find a cheap, heavy car.
Unfortunately, even without a roadblock, he might get spotted by some alert cop driving the opposite direction and responding to an all-points bulletin out of Oak Ridge.
Nick needed to get to Knoxville. Fast. With its horrible traffic and immense size, it would provide him some safety.
Chapter 32
A boxy, green Chevy Caprice moved north along interstate I-81, near Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Rain and a slick pavement kept most drivers from pushing the speed limit or passing except when absolutely necessary, yet nearly all passed the Caprice.
The Chevy Caprice was one of those harsh cornered cars that looked like it had been designed by engineers who’d only had Legos at their disposal. It hadn’t been a head turner when it was designed, and this one had seen about five lifetimes since it came off the assembly line.
The back window was cracked, while the underside of the rear panels bore bubbled paint and spreading rust. The entire paintjob on the car was horribly faded, and the car’s interior head liner sagged from the ceiling.
In a word, the car was ugly. And well past its deserved retirement.
Nick Woods sat on the cigarette-burned, front seat of his $2,500 Caprice. He didn’t notice the traffic that rode his ass before swerving over and angrily passing. His mind was on Anne.
It amazed him he hadn’t thought of her more in the past few days. But then again, when had he had time? Ever since he’d grabbed his pack out of that cave, he had either been running, or hiding, or buying necessities, or doing research, or working out.
And now he had nothing but time. Hours and hours of it. About thirteen or fourteen, he guessed. He had already decided what he would do once he got to New York. He had initially thought he would look the guy’s address up and just call or stop by, but that seemed suicidal once he thought about it. Hadn’t he himself said they would be watching Allen Green?
His second thought had been to recon outward in. Once he figured out where this guy lived, he could work his way in looking for patterns. Eat at a deli for a couple of hours “working” to solve a crossword puzzle, in which he wrote out the descriptions of possible agents in the margins. He could sit at a park bench, walk by the home randomly, ride by it in cabs, and find out who “they” were. But, he realized this plan had two major shortcomings.
One, it would take too long. It would take days and days, and maybe a couple of weeks, to find out the opposition and their observation posts.
The second major problem was they would likely discover who he was during that time. Surely, they had pictures of him and knew to be looking for him, just in case he came looking for Allen Green. After giving up on plan two, he had racked his brain for more than an hour and a half before a simple plan emerged: he would hang a note on Allen Green’s door.
Well, it was a little more complicated than that. He would go print a shitload of door advertisements and would put these on doors throughout the neighborhood, except on Allen’s door, he would pull from the bottom of the pile and put a contact note in light pencil in the margin; top left corner to be precise. It’d be light enough so agents watching with binoculars from across the street couldn’t make it out.
Nick figured that if he started five blocks away and went five or six more blocks past Allen’s house, they wouldn’t be suspicious. The plan became more etched in Nick’s mind.
His confidence in its success had put him at ease, allowing his mind to drift and relax.
It quickly drifted to Anne. Shit, he missed her. He’d give anything to be sitting on the couch with her watching some dumb-ass reality show on TV -- even if it included some odd-looking singer with crazy hair.
He remembered how soft her lips had been the first time they had kissed and how it had felt the first time they had gotten carried away. And while she had been so lustful in bed, she had been so sensitive most of the time. She always loved for him to hold her as she went to sleep each night, especially after sex.
It would grow old in a hurry, his arm quickly going numb beneath her, her curves turning him on again, the closeness making it too hot under the sheets.
Damn though, what he would give to be able to hold her now.
He remembered their final moments on that last terrible night: a bad fight. Their fiercest. He had hurt her with his words and anger. In the end, he’d left her crying and desperate. Devastated. Worried about him.
He gripped the steering wheel with all his strength. He then realized he didn’t even know if, or where, she had been buried. Those motherfuckers, he thought. And that was the real question. Who were those motherfuckers?
Actual FBI agents had raided his home. That didn’t make sense. He was hardly a criminal. So was someone high up in the FBI behind this? That didn’t seem likely. It seemed more likely that someone with real power had used that power to get the FBI to assist in some quick damage control.
Not that Nick thought very many FBI agents would purposely kill an innocent person, but they would apprehend and turn over people. They did it all the time. To U.S. Marshals, to local and state police, to the Justice Department, to the Department of Defense.
Nick didn’t know who was behind it, but he was damn sure going to find out or die trying.
Chapter 33
Whitaker was now in Los Angeles, having called off the search for Nick Woods following the death of Nancy Dickerson. After all, how did you catch a ghost?
With luck, a local police force would get lucky and cross paths with him. There was still the “wanted” child predator alert on Nick distributed throughout the country.
Besides, there was more Whitaker had to worry about than just Nick. His first and foremost mission was fighting the war on terror, which was the real work of Whitaker’s group these days.
In fact, two of his eight-man strike teams were inside Pakistan searching for Osama Bin Laden right this very minute. His three other eight-man strike teams were in the states.
Whitaker’s teams could enter countries clandestinely and operate invisibly. If they were caught or killed, no problem. They had no way of being tied back to the U.S. since they used non-U.S. weapons and carried various French, Italian, and German papers.
Politically and legally, American troops couldn’t operate in Pakistan, an ally supposedly assisting in the war on terror. But the pressure from Pakistan was too small on al Qaeda, so two of Whitaker’s teams had been called in on one hot and one cold lead regarding bin Laden’s location.
Whitaker’s teams were more covert than most military Special Forces, such as the SEALs and other units. His teams appeared to be a group of mercenaries from a European country.
The real beauty was the fact that not one cent of funding for Whitaker’s unit was found anywhere -- not even from the CIA’s undesignated fund. No reporter could ever blow their cover. No Congressman could ever find out through an audit or Inspector General’s report about them.
That was because Whitaker’s unit was entirely funded from its own efforts, which resulted mainly from illegal drug running. Which, of course, was why Whitaker was in L.A.
A local competitor, some gang offshoot of the Crips called the Hands of Death, had been growing and somehow bringing in enough cocaine to cut into Whitaker’s profits by 36 percent in the L.A. area. Of course, that was unacceptable.
Whitaker was here to investigate the situation and check out the competition. And what that mostly meant was he was out driving around in the most dangerous parts of town.
He had lots of options to deal with this problem. The easiest option would be to give a tip to the cops and let them clean house on the Hands of Death. However, the competition had corrupted a few police officers to work for them, just as Whitaker had. So that option could fail if they received enough
of an early warning.
Another option was to call The Los Angeles Times and provide a tip about some of the collaboration between the cops and the Hands of Death. But this could create hysteria from elected officials once the press finished its vendetta, and such an uproar would likely cost him some of his informants on the police force, as well. Strike two.
That left only one option, as Whitaker saw it. It was also why he had brought one of his U.S.-based, eight-man strike teams to L.A. with him.
His boys were going to spill some major blood in L.A. Really shake the place up, while also getting in some great and very realistic training.
And Whitaker being Whitaker, he wanted to take part in it.
Chapter 34
Nick Woods hesitated before stepping out of the elevator.
He was nervous, like a useless, gun-shy hound, but he had to find Allen Green. So he focused again on the task at hand.
Nick took a deep breath and stepped from the elevator. He was in New York now, a city he intensely disliked. There were too many buildings, too many people, and both were too cold for his comfort. He couldn’t wait to get back to the South, where folks met your eye and said hello.
Nick saw a receptionist sitting behind a desk, and he considered turning around. But, what other option did he have?
He had discovered the apartment listed as Allen Green’s address was burned, but not before designing, buying, and distributing a couple hundred damn flyers. Now, he really hated the fact he had raced out of the library in Oak Ridge like a stupid, boot recruit.
No doubt he could have found a side story in the newspaper mentioning the suspicious fire of the esteemed-turned-infamous reporter’s apartment.
With the apartment a dead end, Nick was left with one option: hoping he could convince a coworker to give him Allen’s phone number.
Sold Out (Nick Woods Book 1) Page 10
