Gene, Doug, and Sheriff Josephson walked away toward the beach, leaving Marty glaring at his brother's back.
Marty stepped into the empty living room. He saw no sign of Jerri or Renner. The bathroom door was closed, and he heard water running.
He drew his sidearm and tapped his COM. "Jerri, where are you?"
Marty stepped past the couch to the bathroom door. "Doug, can you get in here?"
"Let me finish this up. I'll be right there," Doug said.
Marty opened his mouth to reply. His breath left him as a knife punched straight through his Kevlar vest and into his back. It hurt, but not as much as it should have. Oh fuck. I'm already in shock. His knees buckled, and Renner held him upright against the door. Paul leaned close and plucked the COM bead from his ear, then spoke softly, intimately. "Didn't want to wait until Hoover, eh?" The knife came out with a gush of hot blood. "That was a lung." The knife went in again, lower, and twisted. Marty's legs turned to ice. "That was a kidney." Marty coughed, and blood flecked the white door. He tried to turn, but his body wouldn't respond.
"You think you're such hot shit, Marty? You think you're better than me? You fucking Feds are all alike. Holier than thou, sycophantic little fucks. You're just a bunch of killers. Underpaid killers." Marty gasped as the knife went in a third time. This one hurt like hell. "Liver, Marty. Time to quit drinking."
"Here." Paul's bloody hand came around Marty's side and grabbed the doorknob. "I left you a present." He turned the knob. The door opened and Marty fell through. He clumsily broke his fall and landed face-first on the floor. "You should have told her, Marty. Life is too short."
Jerri sat on the toilet, fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling with unblinking eyes. Her throat was an angry yellow bruise, already turning purple. Paul stepped over Marty's fallen body and wiped his hands on Jerri's shirt, then took her sidearm from her holster. Marty lay on the floor, trying to scream, trying to do anything, as the killer disappeared behind him.
Dressed in a heavy winter coat stolen out of the closet, Paul Renner climbed into the back of the ambulance. Two suspects, both critically injured, lay unconscious on their gurneys. A third, shivering despite a heavy blanket, was handcuffed to the door. The EMT changing an IV on the man with the shattered leg looked startled by Paul's sudden appearance.
"Okay, let's go," Paul said, flashing Jerri's badge in the darkness.
"You're coming with us, Agent?"
"Bates. Special Agent Bates. And yes, I'm coming with you. Let's get these three to the boats, pronto."
The driver nodded in the rear-view mirror and, triggering the lights but no siren, headed off toward Aquinnah and the docks that would take the wounded into Boston.
Sherriff Josephson droned on in his ear, and a flash of red lights caught Gene's eye as the first of the ambulances pulled out. Good, he thought. He spoke into the COM.
"Marty, which prisoners just left on those ambulances?" Josephson grunted in annoyance, and Gene realized he'd just interrupted him in mid-sentence. He held up a hand for patience.
"Marty, come in please?"
Nothing.
"Hey, Sam, can you check COM status, please?"
"Sure, Gene," Sam said. "Checking your signal." There was a brief pause. "Relays are still working fine, or they seem to be from this end. Carl, can you verify?"
"It'll take me a few minutes," Carl said. "Relay's back at the lighthouse."
"Where are you now, Carl?" Gene asked.
"I'm in the Hummer. I can do diagnostics on the way over."
"Hold on a second," Gene said. "Team, check in," he said.
"Brent here."
"Goldman."
Silence.
"Doug, meet Carl at the Hummer," he said. "Marty's supposed to be with the ambulance crew. Jerri's inside with Paul. Find them, now, and go together." He ran toward the house, leaving Josephson, mouth open, standing on the beach.
Marty took three pints of blood before the helicopter arrived and airlifted him to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Jerri Bates's windpipe had been crushed. Forensics would tell them the murder weapon later, but Gene already knew. Paul Renner had killed her with his bare hands.
They found the ambulance at the Aquinnah docks. The critically injured men were still inside, unconscious. The EMT and driver were both dead, shot at close range with Jerri's sidearm, which Renner had left at the scene. They found no sign of Paul Renner or the uninjured mercenary. Gene put out an APB on the missing speedboat, and Massachusetts State Police found it forty minutes later at a small private dock in Boston Sound.
Chapter 21
February 2nd, 8:27 AM EST; J. Edgar Hoover Building, Gene Palomini's Office; Washington D.C.
Doug and Carl made the trip back to Washington in silence. Sam let them. Marty was in ICU, and Gene had stayed with him, almost unresponsive. That left only the two of them and Sam in their heads when they needed her. Missing Jerri's talents already, Sam had brought in an outside team to conduct the interrogation, leaving Doug and Carl with little to do but wait for results.
Sam, unflappable despite her grief, continued to trace down leads on Renner's whereabouts. Acting on the assumption that Renner still hunted the man who had hired Lefkowitz, she focused on the killers from Martha's Vineyard and brought the full might of the Patriot Act to bear.
Airport security cameras had captured the commandos coming off a commercial jet. They picked up another two on Amtrak camera tapes. The plane tickets were purchased by an offshore dummy corporation, the train tickets from a numbered account in the Caymans. Sam started in on the grueling process of following the money trail in the hope of finding Paul Renner's next target.
* * *
February 2nd, 3:13 PM PST; Home of Geoffrey MacUther; San Francisco, California.
Geoffrey MacUther was a large, grizzled man with a gray beard and a shaved head. Fifty-six years old, he was in better shape than most twenty-five-year-old athletes. Former Secret Air Service for Her Majesty the Queen, he was highly trained in stealth, surveillance, martial arts, modern weapons, and linguistics. A veteran of the first Gulf War and peacekeeping operations in Serbia, he was intelligent, charismatic, and had retired a highly decorated officer. He was also somewhat paranoid, but not without reason.
Geoffrey MacUther was proud to be known in the right circles for providing the best private security forces that money could buy. Private security forces weren't bodyguards or sentries. They were mercenaries, private armies hired out to the highest bidder.
He lived just north of Daly City, an affluent suburb south of San Francisco, where property values kept most of the riff-raff away. San Francisco wasn't far from Silicon Valley, and he managed much of his small empire from an office he had there. He bought goods coming up from L.A. and across the Pacific Ocean into the Port of San Francisco. He trained his men in the rugged Rockies, in the deserts of Nevada and Utah, and in boarding actions out at sea, all no more than a helicopter ride away.
For the past two years, he'd managed his business and laundered his money through a local startup called SoFiaK, named for his daughter, Sophia Karen MacUther, now Sophia Karen Brown and a proud mother of one. The brilliant thing about startups is that nobody really knew what they did, and everyone assumed that you couldn't talk about it for fear of competitors stealing your ideas. SoFiaK vans came and went from his home and his work at all times of the day or night, and people never got suspicious.
Running such an outfit required a great deal of equipment that the United States Government frowned upon, and so by necessity he had acquired a wide variety of black-market contacts. Most were basically good people who weren't interested in law and order, but some were complete scumbags, common criminals with no sense of honor or integrity. Sometimes, these common criminals would try to blackmail or rob him. Sometimes they would rat him out, and the police would come sniffing around. Once in a while, they even tried to kill him.
This made Geoffrey MacUther suspicious of last-minute meeting
s, even when set up by reliable contacts in the United States military. It was with this in mind that he stared out his front window. The Lexus pulling into the driveway had a single passenger, as per the arrangement made early that morning. House security frisked the man when he exited the newly rented car, just as the car had been searched when it reached the main gate. The man approached the front stoop, flanked by a pair of guards.
He was average height, average build, with black hair and blue eyes. MacUther opened the door. "You're Paul Renner?" The man nodded and stepped inside.
MacUther poured himself a cup of coffee. "Want some?"
"No, thanks," Paul said, admiring the decor. Classic California asshole. "I don't plan on being here that long."
"All right, Mr. Renner," MacUther said as he flipped a switch on the wall. Paul raised his eyebrows in question.
"Broad-band electromagnetic noise generator. No unshielded recording device, listening device, and so forth will work until I turn it off. No TV or radio, either. I've got random tumblers in the walls to fool laser microphones, too." He sat on the couch in the living room, and motioned for Paul to take the love seat. Two guards lurked in the doorway behind MacUther, hands inside their jackets with no pretense at subtlety. The tall guard stood behind the short one, so that they both had good fields of fire.
Suckers, Paul thought.
"I'm a very busy man, but you have some dreadfully important friends. So what do you want?"
"Well," Paul said, "it's sort of about the team you sent to Martha's Vineyard to assassinate Doctor Lefkowitz." In his peripheral vision, Paul watched as the short guard's eyes fluttered closed, then snapped back to the conversation. He suppressed a grin.
MacUther raised an eyebrow. "How exactly does this concern you?"
"Well, the concern is two-fold. First off, the whole thing was a setup to get to you, which worked. Second off, I'm pretty sure you sent a goon to kill me some time ago, and I want to know who hired you to do it."
MacUther cleared his throat, then took a sip of his coffee. "Did any of my team escape?"
Paul shrugged. "I don’t think so."
"That's a shame. I feared that was the case when no one checked in. They were good men, Mr. Renner." Behind MacUther, the tall guard yawned. The short one closed his eyes.
"Good men?" Paul scoffed. "They were ambushed and slaughtered before they even knew they were in trouble. Who paid them to kill Lefkowitz?"
"I did," MacUther said.
"And why would you want the doctor killed, Mr. MacUther?"
"I wouldn't. That is to say, I don't care one way or another, aside from a contract. They were just men doing a job."
"I see. Operating under the assumption that the same person paid you to kill me, who paid you for the Lefkowitz job?"
The big Scot shook his head. "You know I can't tell you that."
Paul sighed. "I might have to kill you if you don't." Without looking, MacUther gestured to the guards behind him. They were fast asleep on their feet. "So be it," MacUther said. "I'm not one for breaking contracts. Nobody'd trust me after that, and then where would I be?"
Paul chuckled. "Living in a foreign country on the giant piles of money you've already made?"
"But I like my work. So no, I'm not going to tell you that. Is there anything else before I have my men throw you out?"
Paul smiled. "I don't think your men are able to do any such thing."
MacUther looked back at the men behind him. One tottered, his head lolling, as the other slowly slid down the wall. He turned back to Paul, who aimed a tiny pistol at his chest. MacUther remained cool and collected. "What did you do to my men, Mr. Renner?"
"Just a little contact poison when they frisked me. Nothing they won't sleep off."
"So you're here to kill me, Mr. Renner?"
Paul rolled his eyes. "No, you weren't listening. I'm here to find out who hired you to kill me. Whether or not you die is entirely up to you. Personally, I'd rather avoid it."
MacUther sat back and folded his arms. "I'm sorry, but I'm still not going to tell you. You have nothing to hold over me but my life, and if I talk to you about contracts, someone else will kill me. We're at an impasse, Mr. Renner."
Paul smiled. "No, we're not."
MacUther raised an eyebrow. "No?"
"No, sir. I know that there's something you value, and I know where she is. Your granddaughter's a cutie, just like her mom."
"Mr. Renner, you're treading on dangerous ground. Even so, I think we can be reasonable."
"Excellent," Paul said, even as MacUther's knife cleared its sheath. MacUther was fast for his size, but Paul pulled the trigger before the knife left his hand. The .38 round hit MacUther in the stomach. Paul knew it wouldn't hurt more than a hard punch, not at first anyway, but it threw off the big man's aim. He charged off the couch, and Paul shot him four more times, center of mass.
The impact barreled Paul right off the loveseat, and the two men crashed to the floor. Paul's chest compressed, forcing the air out his lungs, and they both lay still for a moment. Paul's ribs burned.
Paul punched MacUther in the stomach, twice. He grunted, but didn't otherwise respond. Paul rolled the large man off him and struggled to draw breath. He coughed and gagged his way to his feet, then examined the body on the floor.
MacUther was breathing, but wouldn't be for long. All five shots had hit him in the abdomen and chest. It looked like two had scattered off his ribs, but the other three had punched through. A .38 won't kill much of anything right away, but he'd hit something important, and MacUther was in shock. His breath came in a mess of gurgling wheezes, and he had blood on his lips. Shit, Paul thought.
Paul knelt and patted the dying man's pockets. He found a variety of objects that he pulled out to inspect. One was a remote alarm, the red LED blinking. Who wants to bet that it works through the electric jammer? Paul dropped MacUther's keys on the floor and turned his attention to the cellular phone. Paul turned off the jammer, then flipped open the phone and scanned through the caller ID.
Two calls stood out. One was from Gabrielle's Fine Jewelry, in the San Francisco area code, at 2:28 PM on January 30th. Another was to the same place, at 1:17 AM on February 2nd. A few hours after the bait was set, and less than an hour after they sprang the trap. I don't know what kind of jewelry store takes calls at one in the morning. He cleared the memory on the phone and put it back in MacUther's pocket. He picked up the house phone from its cradle, dialed 911, and dropped it on the floor.
Bending down, he flipped MacUther onto his stomach. He spoke in a low voice as he picked up the pistol. "That should help your lungs drain until help arrives. Sorry." Speaking of help…. Paul heard gravel crunch in the driveway.
A peek out the front window revealed a white panel van next to his rented Lexus, SoFiaK emblazoned in bold red letters on the side. Great, thought Paul. He backed away from the door and stumbled up the stairs. Every step jarred his injured ribs. At the top he took a quick look outside, then popped open the window.
He swung out and grabbed the balcony railing. He tried to lower himself, but a chest spasm betrayed him. He dropped twelve feet to the ground, knees bent to absorb as much of the impact as possible. He stumbled to the wall and leaned against it, gasping.
He crept over to the dividing wall and clambered over the fence into the neighbor's yard. Within two minutes he was driving away, home-free.
* * *
February 2nd, 6:21 PM EST; Home of Emile Frank; Springfield, Virginia.
Doctor Emile Frank, his wife Nancy, and their four-year-old son Scott sat inside a 7,800-square-foot gated mansion, eating a delicious dinner of apple-glazed pork chops, Caesar salad, and fresh apple chutney. They chewed in silence while their son prattled on about preschool.
Emile's phone buzzed in his pocket, and his face flushed. This particular phone blocked all incoming calls except for a select few, and it had never rung before. He set down his silverware and wiped his hands on the napkin in his lap, the
n pulled out the phone. The caller ID said Dino's BBQ Ribs.
He stood, and placed his napkin beside his plate. "What is it, honey?" Nancy asked. She frowned at the phone. He knew she'd never quite come to fully trust him after his affair three years prior.
"Nothing," he replied. "Just work. Excuse me, I have to take this."
She pouted. "Honey, I thought we agreed no phone calls during dinner. This is family time."
He waved her off, flipped open the phone, and walked out of the room. Being in the dog house was the least of his worries. Behind him his son copied his mother's tone perfectly. "It's family time, Daddy!" Emile smiled at Scott's impersonation and put the phone to his ear. He kept walking and spoke quietly.
"This is Shelley."
The voice on the other end tried and failed to sound like a stereotypical Jersey goombah. "Hey, ah, this is Dino's calling. You got an order of steaks with us?"
"Yeah." He walked into the study and shut the door, then turned on the radio. He'd swept the room for bugs yesterday, but one couldn't be too careful.
"Um, well, they ain't coming in. Looks like trouble at the slaughterhouse. Union issues of some kind, you know?"
His heart raced. "What kind of trouble?"
"Can't say specifically. You'll have to call the foreman."
"I'll do that."
Emile Frank hung up the cell phone and put it in his pocket. He picked up the desk-phone receiver and dialed a string of numbers, activating the day's cipher. He heard a series of clicks as the encryption algorithm kicked in, then a dial tone. He dialed another number.
"How bad is it?" he asked.
"Geoff's down, shot several times, unknown assailant. We're en route to the hospital."
"Can he talk?"
"A little. Looks like a collapsed lung, but we're getting him stabilized, and he'll probably pull through."
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