He wiped the blood from his neck.
“Understood?”
He nodded.
“Say it.”
“I understand.”
“Good.”
She climbed into the driver’s seat, dropped the vehicle into gear, and made for the forest road.
Chapter 40
KATHRYN MORGAN COULD see only the top of Tucker’s head on the monitor of the video teleconference. The candidate’s face was down and his hands were wrapped around his skull like he was in an air-raid drill. Three deep breaths, and then he faced the camera.
“Do you know what my deputy told me today?”
Morgan didn’t reply.
“A reporter, some nobody down in Virginia, was asking around to see if there were any terrorism connections to the lake-house shootings. Some neighbors heard explosions and were wondering why a bomb squad was there.”
He straightened his shirt and swallowed a pair of pills dry.
“The press!” he went on. “Do you hear me? And now you’re telling me that Hayes is on some kind of spree in the mountains? You said you had him under wraps.”
“I didn’t know he was going there.”
“Exactly. How many people did he kill?”
“Three.”
“Jesus Christ. This is your one job. You had him, and he walked away. And now I have three corpses, and this psychopath Claire Rhodes is on the loose. Where is Hayes?”
Morgan cleared her throat.
“Where is Hayes?”
“He gave us what we need to know to help the Feds and local law enforcement with the search and then headed out.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
Tucker ran his hand through his hair and grabbed a fistful near the back of his head.
“He’s out of pocket? He met with Rhodes right under your goddamn nose!”
“He is killing the people behind this.”
“Have you lost your mind? I can’t have an open war inside the United States. Whatever. I’m done. Option S the whole goddamn thing.”
It was an emergency plan to wrap the program.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Cold Harvest. All of it. Shut it down.”
“You know that’s probably what the people behind these killings want. And some of these operators are working covers that have taken years to set up. They’re close to stopping—”
“I don’t care. I can’t have them in the field. I can’t have more firefights in the middle of the U.S. I can’t have them running around like Hayes. We can use the diplomatic security teams to go after them and bring them in.”
“To Washington?”
“No. That’ll attract too much attention. Where else?”
Morgan thought through the options. “New York. The flights will work, and we can start putting them at the Upper East Side annex. I think that’s available.”
It was a CIA safe house in Carnegie Hill, more of an apartment building, really, used to debrief foreign diplomats and officials that the CIA had turned when they came through New York.
“But what are you going to tell them?” Morgan asked.
“Me? Nothing. I’m going to be giving a campaign speech at Rockefeller Plaza, and I should be in Ohio by the time they’re all here and you tell them. You are going to be point on this. How long will it take to bring them in?”
“A lot are in the U.S. and Europe. If we crash it and use the jets, we can have half of them here by tomorrow and almost all by Tuesday.”
“Good. I’ll be long gone then. Bring them in. Tell them it’s about the death of Gray and the others. It’s an emergency meeting about the future of Cold Harvest, something about their own safety and the safety of the other operators. That’s the only thing they’ll go for. And then once we get them here, we’re going to shut them down and keep a lid on them until after the election. We need eyes on them.”
“They won’t go for it.”
“Then they’ll go to prison. They’ve been operating illegally for years.”
“And the press?”
“If it gets out, and if the Congress and the media need a sacrifice for the killings, we’ll feed them Hayes. He’s perfect for it. Hide the rest in classifications. Claim national security is at stake. You know how this goes.”
Morgan looked down at her desk. The cheap lunch she’d swallowed down from the buffet on the corner churned in her stomach. This was capitulation, giving the enemy exactly what they wanted. It was surrender.
“What is it?” Tucker asked, seemingly concerned. It was a tactic to elicit honesty. Any protest Morgan made would be fatal. Her fingerprints were all over Cold Harvest. Hayes was her fall guy, but if she didn’t pull this off, she would be Tucker’s.
In any scandal, there comes a moment where you decide how high up to make the cut, who gets thrown away and who survives. She had damn sure better survive.
The pilot in her balked, but that pilot had died in a field hospital in Kuwait after the crash.
“Nothing. I’m on it,” Morgan said.
“Bring in Hayes. I don’t care what it takes.”
Chapter 41
THE AIR-CONDITIONING TURNED on, and a cool draft billowed into the hospital room. They had medevaced Drew Ochoa to this facility after the attack at the lake house. A woman sat in the chair beside Drew’s hospital bed under a window looking over the building’s atrium. Her eyes were red, as if she had finally exhausted herself crying.
Hayes stepped into the room and nodded to her respectfully.
Drew opened one eye.
“Hey,” he croaked. “Hayes. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good.” The shot had missed Drew’s heart by a few inches. He looked ghostly and had an oxygen cannula beneath his nose.
“Sharon,” Drew said, looking to his wife. “This is my friend who helped us out at the house. We used to work together.”
She smiled at him weakly. “Thank you.”
It entered Hayes like a knife. He’d been too late. One boy’s father had died, this woman’s husband was in the ICU, and her son had seen things no boy should ever see.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get there sooner,” Hayes said and lowered his head.
“Hon, could you see if you can get me another one of these fruit cups?” Drew asked. There were two full ones on the side of his tray.
“Sure,” she said; she squeezed his hand and walked out.
Downstairs, two FBI agents strode through the sliding glass doors. They were rushing, still panicked from Morgan’s tone when she’d given the order. They’d missed Hayes last time. They would take him now.
Drew picked up the plastic tumbler of water, took a sip from the straw, and winced.
“So what are you doing here?” he asked Hayes.
“Seeing how you’re holding up. I’m glad you made it.”
“This is a social call, with everything you have going on?”
“Can you talk? Are you up for it?”
“If that’s going to help you destroy the people who did this, I can talk all day.” Hayes could hear the strain in his voice.
“Did you get a read on the shooters?”
They had gotten nothing off the bodies at the munitions factory. The trace on the call was a dead end. But Hayes couldn’t stop thinking about those distorted words over the phone. Keep our families safe. There was an answer in there if he could just see it.
Drew was the only one who had been eye to eye with the killers, and Hayes thought he must have seen something that could help him find out who they were.
“They were very well trained, and you can’t pick up that gear at Home Depot. English was excellent. Slight accents. I figure them for El Salvador or Honduras.”
“That’s good,” Hayes said.
“Yeah. Leaves about ten thousand candidates. What happened to you?” He looked at the fresh scratches on Hayes’s cheek. “I see you’re taking a much-deserved break.”
&n
bsp; “I went to see Claire up at the Dolly Sods camp. It was an ambush. When the shooters came, she was convinced they had followed me, that I had come to kill her. The look she had. She really believed it. Is there a chance she’s a pawn in this?”
“It doesn’t sound like it. There were a lot of questions about that car fire, the one that killed her husband. Half the guys thought she did it.”
“Have you ever looked at the file?” Hayes glanced down at his laptop bag.
“I was gone. Is there any explosive stuff? Gas chromatograph?”
“I’m not going to put you on this now.”
“I’m not going to sit on my ass while the people who killed my friend and terrorized my family run free.” With his good arm he cleared a spot on the rolling table that extended over his bed, then shut his eyes against the pain. “Give.”
Hayes pulled out the computer and slid it in front of him. “This is the arson investigation. Local law didn’t find anything. Here it is, the chemical screen.”
Drew ran his finger over the display. It took him about ten minutes to go through it.
“Oh yeah. Accelerants. This is awesome stuff.”
“What is it?”
Drew pointed to two graphs.
“These are chromatograms, like fingerprints for any chemicals they could pick up at the scene. This”—he tapped the one on the left—“is decabutane. The Russians started fielding it recently. Used it to kill that journalist in Dagestan. We didn’t figure out how to detect it until the last year or so because it blends in with burned plastics.”
“After Claire’s husband was killed.”
“Yeah. Headquarters is always behind on this stuff. They use the FBI labs, and the field guys are closer to the action, ahead of them on new accelerants. A professional killed him. But everyone sort of knew that it wasn’t an accident. The burn site evidence doesn’t tell you much more.”
Hayes looked at the screen and the evidence code under the graph. “That’s not from where the car burned; that’s from a test of her house.”
Drew studied it for a moment, then looked through the window in the door toward his wife. She was standing over their son, his head slumped down on his chest, not talking.
“She killed him, man.” Drew shook his head slightly. “Unbelievable.”
“You really think we’re the first ones to put this together?”
“Could be,” Drew said. “Or maybe the bosses figured it out and kept it to themselves for whatever reason. Political fallout? But either way, Claire is dangerous. That always was her strength: believing the lies she told. That’s why she seems so innocent. I know you were close. I know you were falsely accused, but she’s part of this, Hayes. I love that girl, but you have to take her out.”
Hayes remembered raising his gun outside the trailer in West Virginia and aiming at a figure he thought was Claire. He heard that body hit the ground again.
“I tried today.”
Killing his own. A commandment he would never break. Maybe whoever was doing this knew that weakness. The evil bastards. They weren’t just using bullets. They were killing Hayes’s people, using his own decency against him.
“You better get going, Hayes. I’m seeing some unfamiliar faces around here. Morgan’s security. Are you on your own on this?”
“Partly. I’m not going back to her until I know who’s behind all this.”
“They have guards here, and I think it’s more to keep me under wraps than to keep the bad dudes out. A couple of teammates called to check on me. They’re bringing them all in, Hayes, shutting it down.”
“Bringing them in where?”
“New York. They’re getting everyone together. They said it’s about Gray’s death and the future of Cold Harvest. They won’t say exactly where everyone’s going, for obvious reasons.”
Using our decency against us.
“How did you get to Burke’s funeral? Where I saw you?”
“I drove. Why?”
Hayes shook his head. “I’m not sure, but—” He broke off as he noticed something through the window. Two men in suits were fast-walking across the atrium toward the elevators. They looked like Feds. Hayes’s mind ran through the deaths, the dossiers, the map. The pattern finally made sense.
“Do not go to New York,” Hayes said. He had to warn the others, warn as many as he could. “I’ll call you later.”
“Go.”
He crossed the room, checked the window in the door, and started down the hallway. There was no time to explain, but now Hayes understood: the threat was coming for his own home, his family.
The elevator dinged. The two men stepped out. Hayes ducked behind one of the curtained dividers in an open bay near the nurses’ station. He stopped and listened to their oxfords squeak by. He watched them from the back as they went toward Drew’s room. Then he stepped out, moving toward the elevators.
He was halfway there when he saw Michael, Drew’s son. He recognized him from the vacation house. The boy’s mouth dropped open. He was about to say something. Hayes put his finger to his lips.
The kid swallowed, then nodded and glanced around as Hayes pressed the button to the elevator.
He went to the garage and rounded the corner to his truck. He was halfway there when a man in a suit appeared between two files of cars and stood between him and his truck. Another agent.
He held his hand out. “Stop there.”
Hayes kept walking toward him.
“Don’t,” the man said.
There was no time to explain, and the man wouldn’t listen anyway. Hayes didn’t want to hurt him, but if he came between him and his family, he would do what he must. “I need to go.”
“Hold on. It’s not safe.” He moved closer.
“Don’t,” Hayes said and shook his head.
The man’s palm touched his chest. Maybe he thought this was going to be the normal blustering between soldiers.
It wasn’t.
Hayes seized his wrist and turned it hard outward so the man arched back and opened his chest. Hayes struck him with an open palm to the solar plexus.
His mouth gaped open, as if he were yelling, but no noise came. His diaphragm was in spasm, the wind knocked out of him.
He stumbled and fell to the ground, and Hayes threw open the door of his truck and took off.
Hayes was already past the gatehouse before anyone had a chance to alert the guards. He raised his phone to call his wife.
Chapter 42
LAUREN HAYES WAS standing in the open back door of the kitchen, two trash bags in her left hand, as she answered her cell.
It was John. “What’s up, hon?” she asked.
“Do you remember what I told you? What we practiced? About getting someplace safe?”
“Yes.”
“It’s time. It may be nothing, but I’m not taking any chances. I’ll call the people I have watching the house. They’ll go with you, and I’ll be there in three hours.”
“All right,” Lauren said, and she put the bags down.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. I’ve got this. Love you.”
“You too.”
She was ready. He wouldn’t have made that call if it wasn’t serious. There would be time for questions later, but right now she needed to move. She grabbed a few essentials out of her bathroom, then went to the hall closet, opened the gun safe, and took out a Mossberg shotgun. She put a Smith and Wesson pistol in a hip holster and placed the Mossberg in a duffel bag that she kept packed for moments like this.
“Maggie, let’s go!” she shouted as she zipped it shut.
Her daughter walked down the hallway with a Matchbox car in her hand.
“Where are we going?”
“On a little trip,” she said. She lifted up her daughter and threw the bag over her shoulder. She was halfway out the front door when she stopped, went back to the family room, and picked up Maggie’s stuffed monkey.
She left the house, scanned the tree line al
ong the side yard, and got in her car.
Hayes kept the truck pegged at eighty-five, going wide into each corner to keep his speed. In his mind was the map in his office, marked out with the site of each victim’s funeral. He hadn’t seen the pattern until he remembered the funerals. Each death was within driving distance of the previous burial. The killers moved across the country because Burke was killed in California but buried at Arlington.
They were staking out the funerals, looking for more Cold Harvest members. Driving distance. That was the key. You can track someone driving. Flights are too hard and require massive teams and advance notice. Every death was two to six weeks after the previous funeral. Enough time to scout and plan each. Then go to the next funeral. Rinse and repeat.
Human emotion. Understanding it was the most lethal weapon. A student had taught him that. He’d never seen anyone wield it so efficiently. Claire.
Hayes remembered Burke’s funeral. The killers had been there. That’s how they found Drew. Hayes had been there too, with his family. They had tracked Drew to his home, and now they might come to his.
Hayes always took precautions. He never drove straight home, never stopped looking for tails.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t watching.
He remembered Claire’s warning. You can’t have two lives, Hayes. Eventually they touch, and then it all burns. The people closest to you get hurt.
Or was it a threat?
Chapter 43
El Harrach, Algeria
THE ORDERS HAD come straight from the national security adviser. Two diplomatic security agents approached the steel-barred door of the workshop. It was in a suburb of Algiers, far from the main square with its old French city hall, palms, and sea breezes. This street was a tangle of alleys and one-story shops with crumbling stucco. Two scooters shot past.
The smell of solvents crept out the windows. Inside, Joshua Drake slipped a razor behind the cover of a passport and cleanly separated the backing from the photo pasted inside.
He was Cold Harvest, undercover for two years infiltrating a human-trafficking ring that, on top of all of the miseries it dealt out to migrants, stranding them and drowning them in the cold Mediterranean, had a sideline in smuggling weapons and militants into Europe.
Dead Man Switch Page 15
