by Ty Patterson
His son left the room and went outside their house. It was a small single family home in Arlington; his father lived alone and once his wife had passed away, he’d moved to a smaller home.
The son stood on the front lawn, closed his eyes, and felt the sunlight beat down on him.
Decision reached, he opened his eyes and nodded at the next door neighbor.
He knew how important Lester had been to his father.
Bwana Kayembe, deep black, ex-special forces operative, thumbed his phone.
His father had asked him not to get involved.
He wouldn’t.
He called his friend in New York, his friend who was also his boss.
Zeb Carter.
Chapter 2
Zeb didn’t take the call.
Zeb was in Turkey, sitting two feet away from Pasha Alekseevich, the biggest illegal arms dealer in Russia.
Pasha dealt in large and exotic weaponry, like submarines, drones, tanks, aircraft, anything that a dictator would need, or for that matter, a terrorist organization.
Pasha wasn’t particular who he did business with, so long as they paid.
The terrorism trade had been a recent move for Pasha and he’d found that he earned much more trading with them than with his regular customers. Pasha had expanded his offering – he kept up with the lingo – to include nuclear and chemical weapons.
This was why Zeb was meeting him.
Zeb Carter, ex-Special Forces operative, worked for a U.S. government agency that didn’t exist. He undertook missions that never came to light.
Clare, his boss, had set up the agency to take on exothermic missions – their term for extremely high risk, high threat, and deniable missions – ones that no other Special Ops or deep black agencies in the country’s defense and intelligence arena could or would undertake.
Clare was the first female director of the agency and held the nebulous title of Director of Strategy. She reported only to the President.
When she’d taken on the role, she’d overhauled the agency to make it smaller, with the smallest possible administration footprint. It was completely deniable and had the best operatives available.
The agency worked with handpicked private military contractors whose first allegiance was to the agency. They could take on other assignments when they weren’t on agency business, so long as those assignments didn’t conflict with the national interest or jeopardize any agency mission.
This structure was conceived one evening when she’d gone for a drink with her closest friend, Cassandra, in downtown Washington. D.C.
Cassandra and Clare had studied together at Bryn Mawr and both had ended up working in the political jungle that was Washington D.C.
Cassandra had started her career as a Foreign Service specialist in the State Department and had ended up being the aide to the Secretary of State, before retiring from politics and pursuing a career in academics. Clare had started her career at the Agency as an analyst.
During the evening, Clare saw a man waiting outside their bar, a man who seemed to become part of the street, around whom pedestrian traffic bent itself and flowed. Cassandra saw Clare’s glance, and laughed. ‘That’s my superhero brother, Zeb, waiting for me.’
She explained when she saw Clare’s raised eyebrows. ‘Zeb was Special Forces. He’s now a private military contractor, does security consulting, and he wouldn’t like me mentioning anything more.’ She laughed again, when she realized how ridiculous that sounded. Clare had the highest security clearances in the country.
An intrigued Clare pulled Zeb’s file, whistled at the clearances required, and sobered when she read the contents of the file. She asked around discreetly and heard that he worked by his own rules. He had a tight moral code that meant he did not wage war on women or children and did not accept any assignments that went against the country’s interests.
She asked him to join the agency the next day.
Zeb refused and counter proposed that he form a team of elite operatives that the agency could call on. This gave the agency the near-zero footprint and deniability that Clare wanted. She mulled over it only for a few moments, before green lighting it, trusting in Zeb’s judgment to pick operatives who had a similar code to his.
The agency was born.
The other members in Zeb’s team, in addition to Bwana and Broker, were Roger, Chloe, and Bear. All of them were New York based. All of them former Special Forces, except Broker who had been a Ranger, and Chloe who had served in the 82nd Airborne. Broker was their intelligence analyst and their logistics man. He ran a successful private intelligence business that catered to multinational corporations. All of them were in their mid- thirties, except Broker, who was the oldest. He was in his early forties, but with his shaggy blond hair grown to shoulder length, his fitness level and his immaculate style, he often passed for a decade younger.
On one of the agency’s missions they had rescued the daughter of high-ranking Middle Eastern royal. A grateful father had presented a check to Clare, a check that had many zeros on it. She had handed the check back to him with a smile. The agency didn’t take rewards.
The royal added two more zeros and pushed the check back at her.
‘My daughter is my life.’ He said simply.
Clare handed the check to Zeb and Broker, shrugged when they stared blankly at her.
‘It’s yours. Do with it what you wish.’
The five of them became enormously wealthy, but they’d never worked for the agency for the money.
Zeb was their team leader and Broker was the second in command. They didn’t have ranks. They were all equals, a tight knit team that was more a family.
The President had once, in jest, referred to their team as Clare’s Warriors.
The name stuck.
Zeb was meeting the Russian arms dealer as a buyer for a terrorist organization.
He had perfected the cover for more than a year. He had danced an elaborate tango with the Russian to build authenticity and credibility and then had finally agreed to the meeting. The Russian was suspicious of any new customers and went through a security protocol that included meeting his buyers.
Zeb was a shade over six feet, brown eyed, brown hair cut short; he was lean and lithe. For the cover he had dyed his hair black, grown it an inch longer and sported a thin moustache. He wore a light shirt over dark slacks, carried an attaché and looked like a million other Middle Eastern businessmen.
The meeting was in a crowded café on Istiklal Caddesi, the busiest avenue in Istanbul; Pasha had changed locations three times at the last minute and Zeb had changed it once. He didn’t want to seem eager to meet the Russian.
The café was flanked by Ottoman era buildings and any other time, Zeb would have soaked in the history.
Pasha’s men were easy to spot in the café. They were hulking in chairs not big enough to take their size, looked balefully around the café, and sported bulges under their coats. One of them patted Zeb down and another ran a scanner on him. Zeb looked at the other patrons in the café; none of them batted an eyelid.
Pasha himself was slim and neatly dressed in a Western suit of a dark color. His hair was dark with lighter streaks and his grey eyes regarded Zeb coldly. He had done extensive checks on Zeb, his henchmen had made reference calls, and everything pointed to Zeb being the real deal.
But he was suspicious. It paid to be so in his job.
‘Why did you meet me?’ He asked in fluent Arabic.
Something inside Zeb stilled.
Dossiers on the arms dealer were as thick as telephone directories, but not one of them had mentioned the Russian’s knowledge of Arabic.
‘You requested this meeting, not I.’ Zeb replied in the same tongue. He had spent more years undercover in the Middle East than he cared to remember, the language came back to him easily.
Pasha regarded him with hooded eyes. ‘The drones I can get. The other stuff will take time.’
Zeb tapped his fingers impat
iently. ‘My masters want things done tomorrow. When I first approached you, you said everything could be supplied in a month. It’s three months now and I still haven’t got anything that I wanted.’
Pasha was smooth. ‘This is not like a market where you order at a counter. These things take time. The other items on your shopping list have to be handled delicately.’
To their knowledge, Pasha hadn’t sold nuclear and chemical weapons before. When Zeb’s agency learned that he was in the market to sell those, they had acted swiftly.
Zeb looked around the café. It was crowded at lunch hour and this drowned out their voices.
‘The other items – we aren’t paying for anything that’s more than five years old.’
A think smile spread across the Russian’s face. ‘They’re new. You’ll not get them anywhere else. You would not be here if you could.’
Zeb signaled the waiter and Pasha tensed. His henchmen surged forward in their seats.
Zeb looked at the man contemptuously.
‘You jerk me around all over town just so that you can find a café which is secure. And when you come here, you order nothing? That won’t be remembered? I expected better tradecraft from you. Maybe you’re just a big mouth.’
Pasha’s face darkened but held back his retort as the waiter arrived. He ordered tea for both of them without asking Zeb’s preference.
He glared at Zeb and when the waiter arrived, reached out a hand to grab his cup.
He grabbed air.
Zeb switched around the cups, pushed his toward Pasha.
‘You selected this place. You might own it. You drink from that cup and I’ll drink from yours.’
Pasha’s henchmen looked on shocked.
Pasha’s face reddened and suddenly he relaxed and laughed. ‘You’ve got nerve haven’t you? No wonder your organization sent you to do the dealing.’
He sipped noisily and regarded the buyer opposite him in silence.
Curiosity laced his voice when he broke it. ‘My men could capture you, torture you and get the codes for the money. You thought about that?’
Zeb held out his hand, raised a finger. ‘I don’t have all the codes. Even if you captured me, you wouldn’t get the money. You’ve been in business long enough. You should know that.’
A second finger went up, his eyes became hard. ‘If you even touched me, you would be hunted by my organization, beheaded, and we would make the video public. You are not safe, just because you are in Moscow.’
Zeb stood up suddenly before Pasha could react. ‘Let me know when you have my shopping list. I want to see proof that they’re actually with you.’
He gripped the man’s hand briefly and walked out without a backward glance.
He walked swiftly for fifteen minutes, made random turns and finally flagged a passing cab. He changed three more cabs before he headed to Istanbul Hezarfen airport, a private airport, where he boarded a Cessna Citation X.
Three hours later he was in a private airfield outside London and five hours later he was in their Learjet, crossing the Atlantic.
The Russian’s move into nuclear and chemical weapons had sprung several U.S. and international agencies into action. They had tried to track him and take him out several times, but all the attempts had failed the security blanket Pasha had around him.
In desperation they had turned to Clare who had pushed Pasha’s file to Zeb.
Zeb came up with the idea of going undercover as an arms buyer and Broker came up with the missing piece.
‘Slow acting poison in his drink or food; something that kills over a few days. That will give us enough time to track his movements and find out who and where his source is. Pasha will be dead after that.’
Zeb looked at him doubtfully. ‘We can place a man on Moon; send drones out to kill remotely. Poison is what you come up with for Pasha?’
‘You got a better idea?’
Zeb didn’t.
Broker said he was going away for a few days to talk to his friends at the NSA and when Zeb made to accompany him, looked at him pityingly. ‘You can’t even use a smart phone. This would be beyond you.’
He came back with a pouch of clear liquid. ‘This is odorless and tasteless and results in a natural-looking death.’
‘What is it?’
‘Some extract from a rare plant in South America that has been refined by our friends.’
Will have to be sleight of hand.
He couldn’t resist asking Broker. ‘So the plan is for me to sit in front of Pasha, stick this in whatever he’s having and come away alive?
‘Yeah.’ He gave an innocent look to Zeb. ‘But you can do it. You have enough time to figure out how. After all, you’ve come back from the dead. This’s a piece of cake.’
In an earlier mission, Zeb and Broker had rescued the wife and son of a prominent national journalist from a rogue mercenary in New York. In the rescue, Zeb had been critically injured. He’d been declared dead by Clare at his insistence. A dead Zeb would no longer be a magnet for trouble and endanger those in his orbit. Even his team believed he was dead.
He’d continued to work with Clare under a new identity, but a new mission which threatened his friends had changed that. He’d come back to life to rescue them when they’d taken on a ruthless criminal gang in New York.
They never let him forget his duplicity.
Zeb went to the lavatory, stripped and scrubbed himself thoroughly using a wash Broker had given him. When he’d finished, his brown eyes and dark hair once again looked back at him.
He picked up his satellite phone and saw several missed calls from Broker.
‘This is no longer our baby,’ Broker shouted. He rarely spoke in a normal voice over phones. ‘Clare will hand this over to other agencies. When are you wheels-down?’
Zeb told him and glanced at the phone when there wasn’t a response from Broker.
Broker finally spoke. ‘Bwana called you? He said he’d been trying to get to you.’
Zeb looked at the messages on his phone. ‘Yeah, but I couldn’t take them. What’s he saying?’
Broker told him.
Several years back, he had been in Broker’s Columbus Avenue office, doing the stuff he hated the most, writing reports. The team was new, the office was new, and working with Clare was new. Zeb hadn’t realized the paperwork that came with ops, even for a deep black agency such as theirs.
He looked up as a man entered the room.
The African American was tall, broad and had a bearing to him that attracted attention. He walked slowly, favoring one leg over the other, his silver hair caught the sun and sparked to life.
Zeb rose from his desk, walked around it, and watched him. He didn’t get any vibe from the man, nothing pinged his radar, he kept silent. Let him make the move.
The man glanced briefly at Zeb, stood in the center of the room and surveyed the office. His gaze settled on the one photograph adorning the wall. Zeb’s team. All of them were smiling, Broker had pulled a silly face. All of them smiling, but for Zeb.
The man went closer to the photograph and looked at it. He turned around and walked to the wall-to-ceiling windows, looked down at the distant bustle on Columbus Avenue. He closed his eyes and bathed momentarily in the sunlight.
He finally swung around, leaned against a desk and regarded Zeb with piercing eyes. Zeb looked back at him, felt the weight of his gaze opening him up, reading him.
He’s gone through a lot. Maybe more than me.
The man finally stirred, but his eyes didn’t leave Zeb’s.
‘My son.’ He said, pointing at the photograph.
Bwana’s dad.
Zeb straightened and halted when the man held a hand up.
‘I came to this country when Bwana was young. I wanted him to enjoy freedom.’
He stopped for a moment and breathed deeply.
Zeb looked at the water fountain. He caught Zeb’s glance and shook his head.
He was a man who understood sil
ences.
‘He grew up, joined the army, and defended freedom. I was proud of him.’
‘He quit the army, came home, I was happy. Sunlight returned to my home. My son would be with me as I grew old.’
‘One year later, he said he was going back, joining some agency, a different kind. I asked him if he was sure about this. Whether this was what he wanted?’
‘Bwana was sure.’
Zeb felt the man’s gaze shine a torch at him, looking at all that he’d hidden.
‘I wanted to see what kind of man would draw my son like that.’
The silence seemed to go on forever.
His eyes changed, became a deep warm brown; there was warmth that raced through the molecules in the air, setting them alight and reaching Zeb.
‘Now I know.’
Zeb spent the rest of the day with Robert Kayembe, took him to lunch, and listened as he told stories of Africa, of living in the Congo.
He never told Bwana about his father’s visit. He told Broker.
Zeb looked out of the window as the Lear pierced the night sky. Starlight caught one of its wings and it flashed silver momentarily.
Some things were immutable. They just were. The sun rose in the east. It set in the west. Bwana was family. His family was Zeb’s family. Zeb would die for family.
‘Tell him we’ll look into it.’
‘I did.’ There was a smile in Broker’s voice.
‘Can you—’
‘Meeting with Commissioner Rolando? I’ve set it up.’ Broker interrupted him.
Broker, New York’s Police Commissioner Bruce Rolando, and Zeb went a long way back. Broker and Rolando had served together while in the Rangers and when on deployment to Mogadishu, had come under heavy attack by insurgents. They had been saved by a Special Forces sniper.
Zeb Carter.
More recently they had worked closely with Rolando in the mission for which Zeb had returned to the land of the living.
‘Haul your ass to my apartment as soon as you touch down. Don’t go to that Zen place you call your apartment. We’ll go meet Bruce in the morning.’
Broker cut short Zeb’s retort.
‘I’m sure this will be a routine investigation.’
