Rogue (An American Ghost Thriller Book 1)

by J. B. Turner

  He covered up the body with the tarp, then pressed the ignition switch. The electric cart lurched forward.

  Stone turned it around and headed toward the faint lights in the distance. The facility was no more than a mile away.

  Seventy-Three

  Brigadier Jack Sands stared at the real-time images from the facility’s cameras scanning the perimeter of the three-mile-square site and over various points across the ten-square-mile island. He watched the images from the night-vision cameras of the security patrols. Also images from the chopper’s thermal imaging cameras scouring the island, the facility on high alert for any intrusion.

  He sensed something wasn’t right. He turned and stared across at Major Frank Drenge. “He’s on his way.”

  “Jack, there is no evidence of that.”

  “Trust me. I know Nathan Stone. The whole operation is being turned inside out. By him. He’s calling the shots. Except we haven’t fully realized it yet.”

  “I don’t know Nathan Stone, Jack, that’s true. But I do know what guys like him are capable of. And he sure as hell cannot penetrate us here.”

  “You’re not listening, Frank. Stone is not only disturbed. He’s smart. Analytical. And very dangerous.”

  “I’m not buying it. I say his destination will be the States. He’ll be on his way to see his sister. Remember the call. I’m telling you, Nathan Stone will be trying to get the hell out of Scotland if he isn’t out already.”

  Sands sat down in his seat and stared up at the images. “I feel it.” He pressed his fist against his heart. “I feel it in here.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You need to read his psychiatric evaluations. I’ve studied them all. Retribution. Revenge. Bloodlust. Rage. This is what propels him. This is what drives him. And believe me, he’s coming here, if I know him at all. Just got a bad fucking feeling about this.”

  “Trust me. We’ll pick him up at a port.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  The ringing of Sands’s phone interrupted the conversation. He reached over and picked it up. “Yeah?”

  “Sir, we have a problem.” It was the voice of IT systems expert Frederick Parsons, an ex-NSA contractor, who monitored the operation’s systems.

  “Freddy, I’m kinda busy just now. Besides, Major Drenge is in charge.”

  “Sir, I’m monitoring cell phone traffic into US servers, and the name Nathan Stone has popped up twice in conversations.”

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “Sir, we’ve done voice analysis. The voice was that of Nathan Stone calling the New York Times.”

  “Now you are fucking kidding me.”

  “Sadly not. And someone uploaded documents to WikiLeaks using the same cell phone.”

  “Where was it sent from?”

  “The port just eight miles from here in mainland Scotland.”

  Sands ended the call and stared at the screens showing no movement from any of the twenty-four cameras around the floodlit facility.

  A sense of foreboding like he’d never felt before was washing over him.

  Seventy-Four

  Nathan Stone adjusted his night-vision goggles as he drove the golf cart toward a barrier at the facility’s east gate. He spotted a hooded man sporting a semiautomatic rifle and slowed down. But he was waved through immediately.

  The barrier rose and Stone drove on through, giving a thumbs-up to the guy. He pulled up in an outer parking lot. He jumped off the cart and threw on the backpack.

  Still wearing the goggles, he went up to a scanner beside a huge steel door. He ran the bar code on the lanyard through the scanner. A green light, and the steel door clicked open.

  Stone pushed it wider, and suddenly he was inside a cavernous concrete space. He saw what looked like a security checkpoint with an airport-style scanner. He walked forward and smiled.

  “Josh,” one of the two guards shouted toward him, “where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you. The boss wants updates!”

  Stone walked toward them and stopped. He pulled out the 9mm silenced handgun, then double-tapped both guards in the forehead before they had time to understand what was happening.

  He picked up one of their radios and headed for an elevator. He was getting his bearings. He felt crazy. Euphoric. Out of control.

  Stone took off the backpack and pulled out the gas mask and two gas canisters. He took off his night-vision goggles and put on the mask. Then he punched Level 2 on the elevator. The doors opened and he dropped in the containers just before the doors slammed shut.

  Stone’s mind was racing. He headed to the stairwell and bounded up to the next level two steps at a time. He passed a fire alarm buzzer and smashed the glass with his handgun. Then he pressed the red button.

  Deafening alarms began to blare and the noise echoed around the concrete and stone walls of the building.

  Stone was on Level 1. He swiped his ID card through the security reader. The door clicked open as the alarms grew louder. A burly guard stood nearby on a cell phone, one finger in his ear. “Make your way to the exit, people!” Stone shouted through the mask’s voicemitter. His voice sounded amplified and distorted through the device.

  “On whose orders?”

  “Brigadier Sands. This is not a drill, soldier. We have smoke and fire reported on the upper levels.”

  The man ended the call. Stone walked up to him.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Stone pressed the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Blood and brain splattered onto the whitewashed wall and floor. He stepped over the mess and swiped the card as he went through to a large, empty gymnasium. He shut the door and took the stairs to the second level.

  The alarms were nearly deafening.

  Stone was heading up as people were going down, choking, vomiting, and gasping for breath, eyes streaming. He brushed past them. Headed through the open doors to the empty security station, monitors unattended. He switched on a microphone and spoke. “Please evacuate the facility. I repeat, please evacuate the facility immediately.”

  Stone pushed a red button to cut the power. Lights flickered as the backup generators kicked in. But the monitors stayed off.

  He headed through some more doors and down a long corridor. He knew where he was. He pulled out the radio. “Is anyone there?” he said. “Copy, I have Nathan Stone. I repeat, I have Nathan Stone.”

  A brief pause before a familiar voice was heard. “This is Brigadier Jack Sands, soldier. What’s your location?”

  “I have him, sir. Where do you want him?”

  There was a long silence before Sands spoke. “Good man. Safe Room 2, Level 2. Got it?”

  “On my way, sir.”

  Stone dropped the radio as the sirens got louder and red lights flashed on and off. He saw a door marked “Off-Limits.” He shot off the lock and pushed the door open. Inside was a huge storeroom. He headed down a row. A man came into view, arms outstretched as if wondering what was going on.

  Stone gunned him down. The man dropped to the ground face-first. Blood spilled across the aisle. He stepped over the man and saw pallets of uniforms and boots. Pallets of radios and boxes of cell phones. Rows of 40mm riot guns. Then he saw pallets of tin containers with hundreds of CS gas canisters. His gaze was drawn to another adjacent pallet with “Danger” emblazoned in red across the front. Underneath was stenciled “Anesthetic Grenades.”

  Weaponized fentanyl.

  Stone picked up a riot gun and loaded it with the fentanyl grenades. He picked up a pair of size 10 boots and a black uniform with a matching cap that read “Security” and pushed them into his backpack. Then he left the storeroom. His mind was racing as fast as his hard-pounding heart. He headed along a deserted corridor, the alarms still blaring, lights still flashing.

  He knew the safe room was at the end of the building, directly above the psychologist’s interview room.

  Stone spotted a guard on a radio approaching and shot h
im once in the head. The man dropped like a stone as the blood gushed from his wound, pooling on the ceramic floor.

  Stone lay down on the floor and stared through the sights of the riot gun. He aimed it at the far end of the corridor, where the safe room was. He fired twice, and the grenades landed eighty or ninety yards away, exploding gas and smoke everywhere.

  The gas filled the corridor rapidly. It dispersed under doors and through the air-conditioning system.

  He put down the riot gun and took out the scoped night-vision rifle. The seconds passed. Then the sound of screaming and choking.

  Doors were flung open as operatives ran for their lives.

  Stone mowed them down. One at a time. Tap. Tap. Tap. They dropped. Blood flowed. The gas cloud was coming toward him.

  Then he saw Brigadier Jack Sands emerging from the cloud of gas, eyes bulging, handgun pointed toward Stone. “Nathan!”

  Stone held his breath. He squeezed the trigger. And Sands collapsed, blood oozing out of a shoulder wound as the gas continued to envelop the space.

  Stone moved toward him and stared down at his face. He saw the fear in Sands’s eyes. The man who’d trained him. Mouth open, bug-eyed, white foam coming out of his mouth, blood dripping onto the floor. Seconds from death. “You betrayed me!” The voice was distorted and harsh. His breathing was fast. “You betrayed me! Why?”

  “I didn’t want to,” he gasped.

  “I trusted you! I always trusted you!”

  “I had no choice.”

  “We always have a choice. Wasn’t that what you told me? But you chose to betray me. Me! I have always been loyal. I would’ve gone to the ends of the earth for you.”

  Sands’s eyes were streaming from the gas. “I didn’t have a choice! Please don’t do this. I have a family. They need me.”

  “I needed you! I don’t have a family! My sister. That’s my family. She thinks I’m dead. I trusted you. Like a father.”

  “They made the choice.”

  “Who?”

  “The Commission. Trust me, it was them.”

  “You sacrificed me. You wanted to sacrifice me. I would’ve laid down my life for you.”

  Sands’s arms were outstretched, trying to reach Stone. His eyes rolled back in his head. “Please forgive me. Nathan, please forgive me. Spare me. As God is my witness, I didn’t want to hurt you. Ever.”

  Stone stared down and down. The seconds passed as the gas did its work. He waited until Sands ceased moving. He felt nothing for his mentor. A man he had trusted with his own life for years. But that was then. Now the rules had changed. His job was done.

  Stone turned and headed down the nearest stairwell for the basement. He pushed through a door to another stairwell and down into a subbasement below.

  Stone ripped off his clothes and changed into the black security uniform and put on the cap, pulling it low. He put on a pair of dark glasses. He kept a 9mm on him and left via a fire exit.

  The alarms were still blaring as he saw the helicopter’s rotor blades start up on the helipad.

  Stone strode toward it and tapped on the pilot’s window. “Open up!”

  The pilot opened the cockpit door. “Waiting for evacuation signal.”

  Stone pressed the gun to his head, slid into the seat, and slammed the door shut. “Mainland! Now!”

  The pilot nodded slowly. “Anything you want, sir. I don’t want no trouble.” He pushed a few buttons and pulled back the joystick. The helicopter took off into the suffocating darkness, lights sweeping the facility.

  Gathering height.

  Then a sudden climb and a turn and they were heading back to the mainland.

  Stone looked down and saw the bodies of operatives lying at the far end of the facility, overcome by the chemical agent. Some of them were crawling, some were retching, on all fours.

  The yellow sulfurous lights faded into the distance.

  Stone was free.

  Seventy-Five

  The days that followed were like a crazy dream for Nathan Stone. He knew that every major port, airport, and train station would be on high alert, the CIA or some such body having leaked the details that he was wanted for a fictitious crime in the US. And that was why Stone, after being dropped off, hitched a lift in a truck to the small fishing town of Fraserburgh on the northeast coast of Scotland.

  He paid cash for a basement room for a month. He disguised his appearance, growing out his hair and a beard, and wearing a tattered old beanie hat. Then one night, over a few drinks in a bar, he was hired by the skipper of a fishing trawler. Cash in hand for the job. The way he liked it. No papers needed. Just hard work pulling in the fish, mending nets, cooking for the fishermen.

  It was tough. Three weeks on the North Sea was like three years anywhere else. Crazy, rough, mountainous seas, storms blowing in out of nowhere. When he was finished, he got dropped off in the small port of Dunbar, further down the east coast.

  The skipper contacted a trucking firm he knew. And with money in his pocket, Stone caught a ride in a freezer truck across the border, down to Manchester. Then another lift from a white stoner in a pickup truck, all the way down the M6 freeway to southern England. The outskirts of London.

  Stone knew it was easy to disappear in London. He met up with some Roma criminals at a Soho nightclub. Seventy-two hours later, he had a brand-new Polish passport for £1,000. Pretty steep. But they delivered.

  He caught a ride with a Polish plumber who wanted to share the cost of the long journey back to Warsaw. Stone gladly obliged. They drove down to the South Coast, to Folkestone, and onto Le Shuttle train, which took them across to Calais. It was a breeze.

  Forty-eight hours later, Stone was in Poland. He was even driven to the international airport, and caught a flight from Warsaw to Málaga. Then to JFK.

  Stone flashed his Polish passport and was ushered through. He could barely keep the smile off his face. Just over two months after he disappeared on the trawler, he was back in the States. He caught a Greyhound down to Florida. And then he got a room in a crummy motel close to a psychiatric facility on the edge of the Everglades.

  Stone did the same thing every night. Opened a bottle of cold beer, sat down on his upper-level balcony, just over a mile from where his sister exercised in the yard, as the evening sun went down.

  The sky was bloodred. Then he would take out the military-grade binoculars and watch his sister from afar.

  During the day, she would invariably sit on the same bench and sketch. Occasionally, a nurse would fill her glass with orange juice. She sat, smoked, and stared up at the perfect blue sky, not realizing her younger brother had kept the promise he’d made all those years ago.

  He would never leave her. She had received the call from him. She recognized his voice. The voice of the brother she had saved all those years back in the Bowery. It echoed in her head over the weeks and months. For him, it felt good to be so close to her.

  “God bless you,” he said.

  Stone put down the binoculars, picked up his cold beer, and closed his eyes.

  Epilogue

  Three weeks after Stone arrived in Florida, at a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Retired Major Frank Drenge gave evidence.

  “Was there an official element to this program?” the chair asked.

  Drenge leaned forward in his seat, hands clasped. “This was no program. This was a wholly privately funded exercise.”

  “Tell me about the Pentagon involvement, Major. You do work for the Department of Defense, I believe.”

  “It’s complicated, sir. I have worked for the Pentagon in the past.”

  “Was this an officially sanctioned facility? A black site, if you like?”

  “No.”

  “Are you saying this was an unacknowledged program then, on Scottish soil? Was the UK government aware of this facility?”

  “I don’t believe so, sir. This was a private research facility.”

  “Backed by the Pentagon?”

 
Drenge shifted in his seat as his gaze wandered, examining the stern faces of the politicians he despised. “We were aware of the research that was under way.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “Research into psychological pressures on soldiers. Alienation. Psychological tests. Evaluations.”

  “Major Drenge, was the use of this facility connected in any way to the death of Senator Brad Crichton or his assistant?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Do you currently work for the CIA, Major?”

  Drenge sighed long and hard. “Mostly on a consultancy basis since I retired, sir.”

  “Does the name Nathan Stone mean anything to you?”

  Drenge leaned back in his seat for a moment as his legal counsel whispered in his ear, “Say nothing.”

  “No, can’t say it does.”

  The chair picked up black-and-white photos. “These surveillance photographs taken inside the facility were only discovered by chance by a computer forensics expert we hired. Said it was on a private cloud server. This is Nathan Stone, isn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t tell you, sir. I’ve never met him, whoever that man is.”

  “What if I told you that this operative died and then was officially disappeared before he was resurrected again for one final mission? Then he went rogue. Isn’t this what this is all about, Major? That’s what some people are saying.”

  Drenge stared at the chairman and sighed. “I have no knowledge of this man, sir.”

  The chair stared back at Drenge before glancing at his notes. “Were you ever stationed within this facility?”

  “I visited it once, I believe.”

  “A man who identified himself as Nathan Stone sent highly classified documents via WikiLeaks and to a New York Times reporter relating to a so-called assassination list.” The chairman lifted up a stapled set of papers. “Have you ever seen this list?”

  Drenge sighed. “What in God’s name is this? Am I on trial?”

  “No, Major Drenge, you are not on trial. Please answer the question. On this list is the name of Senator Brad Crichton. This list was compiled by a group of individuals—military and business—with the aim of eliminating anyone they viewed as off message with regards to government military spending or foreign intervention or foreign wars, am I right?”