by Chad Zunker
He pulled the cab back onto the road and hit the gas.
He checked the rearview mirror, thought he could see the shadow of a runner in the distance. Sam quickly disappeared when the dirt road made another twist to the left. He exhaled, stared at his muddy face in the mirror. When he felt safe enough, he stopped the car on the side of the road, took off his jacket, and examined his bloody arm. It looked like the bullet had gone straight through the edge of his triceps. It hurt like hell and was bleeding profusely. He managed to tear a sleeve off his jacket and carefully wrapped it around his arm, right above the bloody hole. He used his teeth and did his best to tie it into the tightest knot possible, hopefully cutting off the flow of blood. First chance he got, he would clean it up and doctor himself, but not before getting as far away from there as possible.
As he drove on, Sam said a prayer for the cab driver.
FIFTY-FOUR
Grabbing a quick lunch at a table inside Muriel’s Jackson Square, Lloyd and Epps reviewed a stack of eyewitness testimonies from the sniper shooting earlier that day. Most accounts were from people who recalled only chaos—although there were two who did mention seeing a young man in his midtwenties who seemed to have a head start on everyone else. Lloyd assumed it was Callahan, who still eluded them in spite of the FBI upping the velocity of its search. Dozens more FBI agents had been summoned from satellite offices in Alexandria, Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and Monroe. They were basically going door-to-door within a ten-block radius, flashing Callahan’s photo at everyone, and searching every security video they could find. Callahan was hiding out somewhere. They would find him.
Simultaneously, they were hunting the Gray Wolf. They’d found another security video right outside the Pontalba buildings that showed a brief glimpse of the same man that had been identified earlier by the apartment neighbor—beard, knit cap, carrying a large black bag. They knew he walked north of Jackson Square, but that’s where the trail went cold. The assassin was still loose in the city, and everyone within his vicinity was at serious risk. Lloyd knew that Gerlach was prone to kill randomly while completing a job. That concerned him the most. All of New Orleans was in harm’s way, so they decided that local police had to be notified. So far, they’d managed to keep this away from the media. However, it was just a matter of time. No cop was going to keep word of a famous assassin being on the streets private. Someone would eventually tell a brother or a cousin or a drinking buddy. It would blow up from there.
Lloyd scooped up a bite of his blackened Mississippi catfish, stuffed it in his mouth. “Still nothing back from Krieger on the woman in the video?”
Epps shook his head. “Not yet.”
The video they had of Callahan running in Jackson Square showed him sitting down for several minutes with an unidentified black-haired woman who wore thick sunglasses and a gray trench coat. It looked to Lloyd like she had initiated the meeting, and at first, Callahan was resistant to speak with her. Who was she? Had she been used in the assassination effort? They couldn’t be sure. When the shooting happened, she bolted away as quickly as Callahan, although she was clearly not the target. Still, she did not have the look of a person who expected the sniper to start shooting. She seemed genuinely alarmed and just as panicked as the others. They did not spot her anywhere in the other security videos they’d secured over the past couple of hours. Krieger was running her image through their facial-recognition program.
Epps was eating shrimp Creole and kept smacking his lips, while saying, “Damn, this is good, Chief.” When his cell phone rang, Epps wiped his mouth on a cloth napkin, pressed the phone to his ear. He had a quick conversation with someone on the other end, then said, “Send us everything you got ASAP.” Epps hung up.
“What?” Lloyd asked.
“Natalie Foster has been found. And lost again.”
“Where?”
“She showed up at a police station in Boonsboro, Maryland, a few hours ago. She claimed to have been abducted by several men in a white van last night and then held captive in a warehouse nearby. Somehow, she escaped this morning, ran straight to the police.”
“You said lost again?”
Epps nodded. “According to the officer, she was waiting in a conference room while they reviewed her case. Then two men claiming to be CIA agents showed up to get her.”
Lloyd nearly spit out a bite of his roasted new potatoes. “What? CIA?”
“That’s what the officer said. Claimed they showed him official ID.”
“So the CIA has Natalie Foster?”
Epps shook his head. “She took off out the back, stole a car belonging to the office administrator there, and fled town. The officer said the agents also took off after her.”
“He get names of the CIA agents?”
“No, sir. He didn’t write anything down.”
Lloyd sighed. “What the hell is going on? Nothing adds up.”
“Agreed.”
“I’m going to call Markson over at the CIA. See if I can get anything.”
“You trust him?”
“I don’t trust any of those guys. But if there’s a chance they can shed some light on this, it’s worth a try. And Markson owes me.”
Lloyd finished off his catfish, stared out the front window, putting the pieces of the puzzle together in his mind. A random rookie attorney. An infamous German assassin. A political reporter. And now the CIA? What was the thread that tied it all together? Again, something didn’t sit right. It hadn’t from the very first moment he’d heard the Gray Wolf was paying a visit. Lloyd was beginning to fear it would be too late for Callahan or Foster before they finally discovered the connecting thread.
Hell, it might be too late already.
FIFTY-FIVE
On his way back to New Orleans, Sam pulled into a Walgreens parking lot in the small town of Slidell, just on the edge of Saint Tammany Parish. He parked off to the side, away from the front doors, did his best to wipe at least some of the mud from his face with his mud-covered jacket. It didn’t do too much good. At least the mud all over his body helped to mask some of the sticky blood that had run down his arm and onto his hand.
The rain had stopped. The humidity was stifling.
He entered the doors of Walgreens, smiled at the young guy behind the counter, as if it was no big deal that he looked absolutely filthy. The clerk didn’t seem to mind—maybe with all the fishing and swamps nearby, plenty of folks came in looking like a fresh mud pit and smelling like dead crawfish. Sam circled the rows and found the section for medical supplies in the back. He grabbed a handful of items, including a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and headed back up to the front. After paying the clerk, he asked about the restroom. The clerk pointed to the opposite corner of the store.
Sam locked himself inside the men’s restroom. He took a few minutes to wash his face and hands clean in the sink with hot, soapy water. He very slowly untied the jacket sleeve he’d used to cut off the blood flow to his arm. The jacket material stuck to his skin and stung as he tore it away from the bullet hole. He was no longer bleeding badly. The jacket sleeve had at least helped with that. Sam unscrewed the cap from the bottle of rubbing alcohol. He leaned over the sink, poured the entire contents of the bottle over the bullet hole in his arm. He yelped quietly, wanting to scream, but he bit down on his bottom lip instead. When the bottle was empty, he used a stack of paper towels to clean it all up. Because he couldn’t go to a hospital right then, he had to do whatever he could to avoid infection.
Placing a thick pad of gauze on top of the wound, which he could now see was on both sides of his triceps, he stuck two large bandages on top of the gauze and capped it all off by wrapping his arm in white medical tape to secure everything in place. He needed this bandage to go the distance. He’d prefer not to lose use of his arm in the process—although if something happened to Natalie, he couldn’t care less about his arm.
He left Walgreens and found a Walmart farther up the road. He was less insecure about how he looked now
that he’d cleaned himself. He still had the muddy clothes to deal with. He ducked inside the store and quickly picked out a new pair of jeans, new running shoes, new gray T-shirt, and a black Saints cap. He paid for the items, along with some granola bars and Gatorade at the counter. He returned to the cab, which he’d parked at the far end of the parking lot, dropped back inside, and quickly changed into the new clothes.
He took a moment to again log in to Leia’s Lounge. He sighed, frowned. Still no sign of Tommy. With each passing failed attempt to reconnect, Sam was growing more fearful that something had happened to his friend. He was also having more and more trouble suppressing his growing angst about Natalie. Getting shot had toyed with his emotions. Every few seconds, he allowed panic to creep into his mind, and it would damn near suck the air right out of his chest.
He started the cab, pulled out of the parking lot.
He eased into traffic on I-10 and made his way back across Lake Pontchartrain.
It was time to go back to DC.
Time to end this already.
FIFTY-SIX
Ethan Edwards booked a last-second flight to DC.
Sam’s newest alias would allow him to board an American Airlines nonstop flight in thirty minutes. Then a quick two and a half hours to DC. He’d be on the ground by seven this evening. Which meant he’d have just over two hours to find Rich Hebbard and deliver him—assuming the original conditions still applied. He had no choice but to proceed as if they did. He’d find Hebbard, somehow turn him over, and once again be reunited with Natalie. That was the plan, although nothing so far had gone according to plan. Would they let him walk away at that point? He highly doubted it. He’d have to sort that out when he got there.
Using the alias again made Sam worry about Tommy. He knew he would’ve been dead already if Tommy had not repeatedly worked his magic on Sam’s behalf. The guy owed him nothing but always came through for him in the clutch. He could only hope that Tommy had saved some magic for himself, since he’d gone completely AWOL. Sam again tried to contact Tommy, to no avail.
Sam tucked away in an airport bar near his gate, ordered a beer. Three flat screens were above the bar, two of them showing sports. The other showed CNN and Wolf Blitzer. Sam was sipping his beer and casually monitoring the TVs when something came across CNN that grabbed his attention. Footage of Jackson Square in New Orleans. A male reporter was holding a microphone and standing right next to yellow police tape. Sam could see the statue of Andrew Jackson in the distance behind the reporter. The TV was muted, but he could see the words popping up on a closed-caption ticker at the bottom. The reporter was talking about a sniper shooting in New Orleans earlier in the day. Two people were in the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The FBI was involved.
Then the story took a sudden dramatic turn. Wolf Blitzer said CNN sources had identified the FBI’s primary suspect in the shooting: Alger Gerlach, known as the legendary Gray Wolf, a German assassin wanted around the globe. There were more than a dozen prominent kills attached to his name, although no one was certain how many were legitimate and how many were myth. Blitzer went on to read about some of the noteworthy kills. An Italian prime minister. A French minister of foreign affairs. The Greek finance minister. And so forth. CNN cut away to archived news footage during the times of the deaths. All tied to Gerlach. According to CNN sources, the FBI strongly believed he’d pulled the trigger in Jackson Square. They also believed he could still be in the city, armed and extremely dangerous. Four pictures of Gerlach popped up on the screen, splitting it into squares. He looked different in each picture. Some with dark hair, some with light, some with facial hair, some without.
Sam stared wide-eyed at the TV screen. The fourth picture snagged his full attention, the one with Gerlach clean shaven and bald. Sam was certain it was the same man who had been hunting him through the swamp just an hour and a half ago. Why in the world was an international assassin coming after him? Wolf Blitzer was talking about how the Gray Wolf was known to command up to $5 million per job. Who would do that? Francisco Zapata? Zapata had likely sent other guys after Sam in Mexico City. But would Zapata put up that kind of money to come after him? Was it Lex Hester, the crazy millionaire oilman? Hester certainly had the necessary cash. Sam had been speculating that Hester was the man behind luring him into this sinister hunt for Natalie. So while the money made sense, nothing else about it did. If Lex Hester was behind Rich Hebbard’s disappearance, he could have had Sam killed way back at El Ángel when Sam was first meeting with the black-haired woman in Mexico City. What perplexed Sam the most was the thought that it would likely take a lot of advance coordination to hire someone like Gerlach. He was not likely a guy who could be rounded up in twenty-four hours. Whoever hired the Gray Wolf must have been planning it for weeks. How was that even possible?
Sam shook his head, quickly finished his beer.
He noticed people starting to board at his gate. He dropped cash down on the bar top, pulled the Saints cap even lower on his head, and hustled over to the boarding line. He could not get out of this city fast enough. Two encounters with a famous assassin were plenty for him. He did not want the third time to be the charm.
FIFTY-SEVEN
The cab dropped Natalie in front of the Avalon Theatre.
She’d already been by Tommy’s apartment, the address of which she’d found through a police source. The door had been jimmied open, and she found it completely ransacked. No sign of Tommy. That left a bad taste in her mouth. Could Tommy already be involved? Sam had mentioned a couple of times that Tommy liked to meet him at the historic theater—a movie house that was the oldest in the city and regularly showed classic films, including some of his favorite old Westerns. Natalie knew she was grasping at straws, but she had to keep searching for him. With what looked like powerful players at every turn, including government agencies, she needed to go outside her own network for help—the kind of help that only a guy like Tommy could provide. Assuming he was still alive.
The theater was situated in a classic old brick building in the middle of a commercial strip along Connecticut Avenue. Natalie had been there once a few years ago for a showing of My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn. She quickly pushed through the doors, stepping inside a small café in the front of the theater. Several people were sitting at small tables, eating, some working on laptops or reading their tablets. None of them were Tommy. She approached a man with a mustache who was working the café counter.
“Have you seen a young man of maybe twenty?” she asked quietly. “Could have spiky hair of various colors. Lots of earrings, maybe even a nose ring. Lots of tattoos. Goes by Tommy?”
The mustache man shook his head. “Sorry.”
Natalie sighed, turned around, and examined the faces in the café again. She stepped back out in the lobby, wondered if she should go check inside the actual theaters. That seemed like a stretch since Tommy would’ve had to purchase a ticket at the café counter to go to a movie. Frustrated, she headed back toward the front door, wondering where she would look next. Before she got there, a young guy wearing a theater uniform and carrying a broom and a dustpan stopped her. He had long brown hair in a ponytail and looked to be in his early twenties.
“Hey, lady,” he said. “I know Tommy.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, he comes in here all the time. Cool guy. He in trouble?”
“Not with me. But he’ll be in big trouble if I can’t find him ASAP.”
“Who are you?”
She studied him. He knew something. “A friend, I swear.”
“Tommy doesn’t have many friends. I’m certain he would’ve mentioned you. Can I get a name?”
“Natalie. Why?”
“Wait here.”
Natalie watched as the guy walked around a corner and disappeared. She wondered if he had a way to contact Tommy. Two minutes later, he returned.
“Upstairs theater, inside the projector room.”
She felt her adrenaline spike
as she hustled up the stairs, down a hallway, and then found a door marked PROJECTOR ROOM. Natalie walked into a dark room where a projector was shooting its bright beam through an opening into the upstairs theater. Turning the corner, she came face-to-face with Tommy, his black hoodie pulled up over his head.
“Natalie!” Tommy exclaimed.
They exchanged a brief hug.
“I thought you were dead,” Tommy said, shaking his head.
“Why?”
“We knew about your kidnapping. Earlier today, I intercepted a recording of a phone call about you, where one of the men on the recording implied that you were already dead.”
“You said we? Who is we?”
“Me and Sam.”
“Is Sam okay?”
“I don’t know. My apartment got raided a few hours ago. Several guys came looking for me. I’m just now getting to a place where I can get back online securely.” She noticed an open laptop sitting on the carpet in the corner of the room.
“Where is Sam?” she asked.
“The last time we talked, several hours ago, he was in New Orleans.”
This confirmed information that Natalie already knew from speaking with Michelle, her FBI friend. “Why is he in New Orleans? What’s going on?”
Tommy had her sit next to him on the carpet, brought his laptop up for both of them to see the screen. He gave her a quick rundown about what had happened to Sam during his client meeting with Tom Hawkins upon arriving in Mexico City yesterday. The assassins, the car chase, the federal police building, the mysterious black-haired woman, Rich Hebbard, Francisco Zapata, Lex Hester, and Senator Mark Liddell. He told her about Sam’s trip through the drug tunnel and across the US border. He showed her photos of several of the key players and all the information he’d been able to transfer out before putting a stick of dynamite to his old system.
It was a hell of a lot for Natalie to take in all at once.
Tommy said, “Sam has been playing their game, trying desperately to find this Hebbard guy, so he can save you.”
