Frank needed to hit something and hit it hard.
The fine wood paneling smelled faintly of a recent lemon-oiling. The Sec-Gen’s secretaries sat in a row of neatly aligned desks. Several elegant comfortable chairs were clustered in front of the thirty-eighth floor window, with its spectacular view of the Manhattan shoreline, to accommodate waiting dignitaries. Not a single Senegalese or Guinea-Bissau office worker to punch anywhere. Not even a padded wall in a sparring gym to pound on.
“Twenty-four hours?” was all he could grind out of his tight throat. They’d been missing for twenty-four hours before word had gotten back.
“No, Guinea-Bissau is ahead of us. In local time they are thirty hours overdue now.”
“Someone just kill me now.”
“You wouldn’t like it.” Hank’s sense of humor never lurked far beneath the surface and gave Frank a tempting new target. “If I killed you, you wouldn’t have a chance to pummel whoever screwed this up.”
“Great. You’re a big help.” He paced to the Sec-Gen’s office door and back. He allowed himself up to a max of twenty feet away before he considered himself off post. Typically a nation’s guards waited in the comfortable chairs over fifty feet away, and watched the view of the Manhattan skyline. He was the United States Secret Service, Frank stayed close and watched the area around the door.
“We’re having a hard time getting any communication in or out. We think they may be having another coup. It has been over a year since the last one, and we did just capture that rear admiral of theirs in the drug-and-arms-trafficking ring.”
Frank couldn’t shake the need to do something, anything, and he had only one option on that score.
“Keep me posted.” Then he turned until he once again stood two steps to the right of the office door, behind which the President of the United States was in a meeting, and shifted into parade rest.
He scanned the room, everything and everyone where it had been two minutes before. Everything in place.
Except his world, which had now been turned upside down.
Chapter 9
Beatrice: 1988
Beatrice sat in the dark of the Georgia night, a hundred yards from the battered Ford Fairlane and the bleeding Frank Adams. She hadn’t meant to bloody him, but that happened during training. Still, she hadn’t meant to.
The heat scorching the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center had been at the front of her mind while she’d waited hidden in the back of the car.
Now she had a different heat to consider. And it wasn’t one she liked. She didn’t want to feel this way about anyone. Especially not some piece of crap off the street who had tried to carjack her. Except Frank Adams wasn’t that. She knew more about him than she was supposed to, had managed to talk her way onto the background investigation team.
He lived with three other guys in a third-floor walk up. A Morningside Heights project at the far upper-west end of Manhattan. One so bad that it should never have been built to begin with, never mind torn down. When the investigating team went in, she was glad there were four agents together, the neighborhood was that rough.
They’d done round-robin interviews of all three of his roommates, each team member conducting their own individual interview. That way the Secret Service team could compare stories and answers afterward.
Big guy named Hale might have been the one to sit on her car hood. The build was right, but she’d only seen him from the back, and only briefly at that before Frank had blinded her windshield with his window-cleaning spray. She’d bet that the three roommates had all been around her car that night.
She didn’t worry about that. Without Frank, they weren’t likely to be more than petty criminals. What was interesting was that none of them would give up the least thing about Frank despite, she knew, Frank telling them it was okay. Their various stories about him were somewhat inconsistent, just as always happened in real life unless you practiced the stories, but they were totally loyal to him. She’d pushed hard on the carjacking, without mentioning that to the other agents or in her reports.
She hit a stone wall, even after saying she’d been the woman in the car and recognized each of them. These guys would lie their way right into jail to protect Frank. He’d earned absolute loyalty in a world that didn’t trade in it.
Only child of a coke whore who’d been dead half a decade. Apparently she’d tried to be a good mother despite that. Father, no one had a clue. Even Frank had simply put a question mark on his background form. Hospital records had no other information. No one in his Morningside Heights project recalled a steady boyfriend for her, especially not from twenty years ago. Memories were short in the projects. But they’d remembered his mother as a lost soul, though pleasant and seriously pretty, right up to the overdose. Those were never pretty.
School teachers were deeply frustrated by him. Intelligent. Good grades. Didn’t talk much, but had shown up consistently, a rarity in itself, and was never found without a thoughtful answer when questioned. The only telling remark she found was from a junior year science teacher. “Boy has no real focus on what to do with himself.”
Beatrice sat with her back against one of the concrete barriers of the Georgia training grounds. Despite the night’s heat, she pulled a dark hood over her head until it hung just above her eyes, masked to near invisibility like a Jawa. She wondered if Frank had ever seen Star Wars.
She wondered entirely too much about Frank for her own comfort. She’d discovered and shepherded him through application and recruiting, then dumped him into the training system. It should have ended there.
But her world hadn’t returned to center. If it had, then what was she doing squatting in the cicada-throbbing darkness of FLETC with a knot on her head where she’d been shoved against the car door? Who knew the guy was so damn strong that he could stop a two-footed kick against the door with the palm of his hand. Her thigh still twinged where he’d dug his fingers into the nerve cluster to break a perfectly good headlock. And her lips still burned with the heat of his kiss.
She needed to put some real distance been them.
Then why are you sitting in the dark watching Frank Adams continue the exercise, Beatrice? You are so not going to be caught mooning over some man. You got away. You’ve got a role to play. Move your ass.
That the last order to herself sounded more like something Frank would say than herself, well, that only added to the problem. She kept an eye on his dark silhouette against the white Fairlane as she started moving sideways into the night.
Frank prowled the perimeter, his empty weapon drawn, aimed low, and swinging slowly before him exactly per training so that it was already in motion if he had to aim. It was faster to change direction of an active motion, than break muscle lock of a position held still for too long.
He hadn’t sprinted after her.
Again, team player. It was a two-man exercise, and he didn’t leave his partner with the unknown variable of the driver in the car. Any trainee that did was marked instantly dead by the trainers.
Actually, he wasn’t moving quite per training. He was spending the bulk of his time on the side of the test zone that she’d exited from. Still looking for her.
He froze, his massive frame silhouetted by the flashlight his partner was using to inspect the vehicle. Frank was looking straight at her, or at least it felt like that. There was no way he could see her. No way he could know she’d begun to circle around and hadn’t simply kept going.
But still he stood facing her, as if he could sense her even if he couldn’t see where she stood a hundred feet into the brush.
Then he put one hand to his lips and ran it across his mouth. As if his lips also burned.
# # #
“Frank.”
“Yo,” he didn’t turn at Jake Hellman’s call. He could feel her out there. Over by the concrete barriers, that’s where he’d bet B
eat would go. At least to start, but then she’d move… that way… left. She’d be nothing but a shadow of a shadow, but he knew she was there. That kiss wouldn’t have let her just run. There’d been more than heat, more than his need… or hers. It was as if they understood each other.
“Frank. She’s gone.”
“Right, sorry.” He turned and blinked against the ghoulish brightness of Jake’s red-lensed flashlight. They said that red didn’t mess with your night vision. It did, just not as much. He’d felt, against all reason, that another thirty seconds and he’d have been able to see Beat, nickname definitely worked, out there in the darkness.
The Ford Fairlane sat on the empty dirt road. All of the doors wide open, and the dome light now definitely shot his night vision all to hell.
He ran the scenario through his head again. They’d stopped the car with a log dragged across the road, improvised road block. Driver had pretended to not understand what was going on, only speaking in something that might have been Czech or maybe just gibberish. The person-of-interest role played by Agent Belfour hiding on the floor of the back seat.
But she hadn’t acted like a victim. No, she’d acted like a bodyguard. The hidden asset.
“Jake, where’s the driver?”
“I’ve got him tied up on the other side. All nerves.”
“It’s a switch-out. He’s the target, she’s the guard.”
“You sure?” But even as Jake asked, he raced around the hood of the car while Frank circled behind the trunk.
The driver was gone.
No. He wasn’t. He’d rolled into a roadside ditch, hidden himself. Given away by his white shirt and light-colored khakis.
Wait. Not hidden. He’d gotten himself low.
Frank dove at Jake and tackled him down into the ditch on top of the driver just as a flashbang went off under the car, simulating an explosion that would have blinded them for several minutes as well as labeling them both as severely wounded if they were outside a fifteen foot radius, dead if they were inside it.
Simulated car bomb.
The Fairlane still rested in the middle of the lane instead of being blown into a thousand bits of shrapnel.
Before the light of the flashbang had fully faded, Frank had the driver up on his knees beside the ditch, and placed the barrel of his empty sidearm up against the man’s temple. He held the man around the chest, pulling him close like a shield.
He put his back to the car to ensure he made the smallest target possible.
“You okay, Jake?”
“Mostly.” Jake’s head and sidearm popped up out of the ditch for a second, then ducked back. “You ever play football?”
“Nose tackle.”
“Uh, I can tell.” Jake’s head popped up where he’d crawled fifteen feet farther down the ditch and he scanned the trees.
Closest Frank had ever gotten to football was the big screen at Slade’s Bar. But the Hispanic gangs of the Upper East Side were nasty in a street fight and Frank had learned that the best defense was indeed a good offense. Hammer them to the ground before they could respond.
But he’d more recently learned to keep that part of his past hidden. People didn’t want to know about his street background. Most agents in the various training scenarios wanted to think their partners could’ve gone All-American, rather than gone lifetime sentence for manslaughter.
The driver, still wrapped in Frank’s grip, flinched hard and looked down at his chest. Then he spoke his first clear words of the evening, “Oh shit!”
Three splotches of red oozed down his chest. He’d been shot from somewhere in the dark woods on the far side of the ditch. Three shots so fast, that he’d never stood a chance.
“Hate it when I’m sacrificed.”
“Shut up, you’re dead.” The smell of fresh paint stung Frank’s nose, almost making him sneeze.
“Don’t I just know it.” The paintball pellets must have stung through the driver-agent’s light cotton shirt. Frank could feel the man shrug, then fall limp in his arms.
That’s when Frank made the mistake of letting him slide to the ground.
Knowing instantly that he’d screwed up, Frank dove to the right, but was too late.
A line of paintball shots stitched across his own chest.
He lay on the ground, technically bleeding out, as Agent Beatrice Ann Belfour slid out of the trees.
“Bang! You’re dead.”
Chapter 10
Frank: Now
Can we at least confirm if she’s dead or not?” Frank trusted to his instincts to watch the Secretary-General’s outer office and yet allow his mind concentrate on the information coming in.
“Maybe the ambassador too?” He knew Hank was teasing him over the encrypted two-way radio link, but he couldn’t organize his thoughts enough to care about Ambassador Sam Green at the moment.
“Sure,” Frank conceded begrudgingly. “But I can guarantee that if Beat is alive, then so is the ambassador.” No question that she’d be down before whoever she was protecting.
Hank had radioed on a private frequency that went straight to Frank rather than the open channel to the whole PPD team. Hank was in the U.S. security office down in the U.N. basement.
“Only thing I can confirm is that another coup is going on. The French Embassy has told us that everyone is shut down and waiting for the next government to be installed.”
“There’s a joke for you.”
“Yeah,” Hank agreed. No trace of humor in him this time.
There’d been no need to explain the joke. “Government” was not something Guinea-Bissau had experienced much of lately. For a decade, G-B had been a narco-state. Coups were frequent and bloody. In 2009, the on-again, off-again President, the only one considered even close to decent, was gunned down in revenge for assassinating the head of his joint chiefs of staff. Of course, he’d had the supreme military commander killed for attempting a coup. And so it went on. In 2012, the latest military ruler had disbanded parliament as a “cost savings measure.” The country had the lowest standard of living in the world, which was really saying something. Something awful.
Now it sounded as if the Acting President would be next under the gun, after having his two opponents arrested when he’d lost an election against them. Cocaine shifted across the G-B borders in multi-ton quantities, enroute to Europe or the U.S. Just a few months ago, the former head of their navy had been caught transshipping eleven hundred kilograms of cocaine and enough surface-to-air missiles to make a real mess of the DEA helicopters flying in Colombia.
“Any idea who is ousting who?”
“No. The last three coups have all been military factions in-fighting for control of the drug trade, so your guess is as good as mine. They always kill off a few top politicians along the way.”
“When can the French Embassy get someone on the ground?”
“Their best estimate is five to seven days based on prior upheavals, though they said the worst coup required two weeks. Until then, they’re keeping their people locked down. Russia was able to evacuate their people last night, along with Belgium and Germany. Assets in the country are real thin.”
“Shit!” Frank let go of the frequency and glared at the secretaries who had turned to look at him. They saw his hot glare and abruptly found work to do on their desks.
The door beside Frank opened and the President strode out of the Secretary-General’s office.
“Everything okay here, Frank?”
“Yes sir, Mr. President.” There’d be a briefing ready within the hour, but there was no point in distracting the President with incomplete information before that time.
Chapter 11
Beatrice: 1988
The key, people,” Beat stood at the front of the training center lecture room. “The key is learning to act accurately and quickly on incomple
te information.” Two dozen agent-wannabes slumped in their seats, well past exhaustion. The room was a double-wide trailer, shabby from a hundred training classes and thousands of post-action analyses. The Georgia heat was so concentrated in here that she was surprised the plastic carpet didn’t melt.
“Most of you pre-judged the roles. Make no assumptions. Ever!” She put a slide up on the screen. “Lynette Alice ‘Squeaky’ Fromme assassination attempt on President Ford during which no shots were fired.” Click-clack of the advancing slide. “Sarah Jane Moore repeated the attempt seventeen days later, actually firing her weapon and wounding a nearby taxi driver.” Click-clack. “Mark David Chapman who had John Lennon sign an album, then gunned him down six hours later.” Click-clack. “Two months after that John Hinckley, Jr. succeeded in seriously wounding President Reagan in an effort to impress Jodi Foster who he was stalking. She was eighteen at the time.”
Beatrice click-clacked through another dozen slides, all types of would-be and successful assassins operating on U.S. soil, and not a one looked demented or stereotypically terrorist. The slide projector clicking and the hum of the air conditioner that failed to fight back the heat or the body odor of the twenty men and four women struggling to stay awake in their chairs, were the only other sounds in the room.
“Only one of you recognized the driver was the target of the scenario.” There was no need to point out who, the three paintball stains across Frank’s chest had dried dark red on his shirt and were there for all to see.
“However,” Beatrice pointed out before he could start to be too pleased with himself. “He made the false assumption that the companions of the person-of-interest would think him important enough to keep alive. Instead, they decided to sacrifice him to keep him from being questioned, which was the stated top criteria of the exercise. Most of you were killed by the simulated car bomb, he was killed by three bullets to the chest, and critical information on a terrorist plot was lost with the driver’s death in all cases. Never assume.”
Frank's Independence Day Page 4
