Hard Vengeance (A Jon Reznick Thriller)

by J. B. Turner

  The process was fascinating. He’d watched like a hawk. The body was photographed. Then the clothes before they were removed. Then any residue—say, flakes of paint—on the skin was sampled for separate testing. Then came the Y-shaped incision. The removal of the vital organs. And most fascinating of all, the brain. Ford had always been fascinated by the brain. Everyone’s brain was the same size, more or less. But while some, like him, were high-functioning, top-grade intellectuals, the vast majority of people didn’t even have the brainpower to try and figure out a better life for themselves. It was pitiful.

  Ford’s gaze lingered on his reflection for a few moments longer. He was staring back at a monster. A twenty-first-century monster. It was wild. He took a deep breath and strode down the hallway. He took the elevator to the subbasement, three stories underground. The doors opened, and his breathing quickened even further.

  The music was strident. Forceful. Crazed.

  Ford stepped out of the elevator and turned right. The room was illuminated by blue recessed lighting, giving a strange ethereal glow to the Italian marble. A set of metal lockers stood at one end. He opened the last one and pulled out the bone saw and his black forensic bag.

  And still that fucking organ music filled his head.

  Ford sniffed hard. He shut the locker door and paused, gathering his thoughts. The music was soaring, his pulse was racing. He needed to calm down. A job needed to be done. A job he’d imagined from the early days of planning Meyerstein’s assassination.

  Ford took off the goggles for a second and pressed his face against the biometric eye reader. Another set of doors opened. He put his goggles back on. Then he took a deep breath and headed into the darkened room. The lighting was low; cameras filmed his every move for posterity.

  He stared at the figure strapped down on the gurney. Just a kid, really. A brilliant Moroccan swimmer he had headhunted for the job of planting the explosive device on the yacht. The poor fuck was crying. His muffled screams could be heard even through Ford’s headphones, through the Bach swirling around his mind.

  Ford stood over the boy and smiled. The terror in the boy’s eyes was a sight to behold. It was lovely how fear worked. The physiological reactions. The dilated pupils. Blood pressure going through the roof. The sweating. The heightened senses. The flooding of epinephrine and adrenaline through a person’s body when they feared for their life. It was almost sensual.

  “Don’t be afraid, little one,” he shouted, barely able to hear himself with the music blaring. “I’m a doctor. A very, very good doctor. I know what I’m doing.”

  The kid’s screams blended perfectly with the staccato music.

  “Don’t you like Bach? That’s ridiculous!” Ford howled at the macabre fun he was having. “I understand he’s not to everyone’s taste. Me? I love the guy.”

  The boy wet himself.

  “Never mind. It’ll all be over very soon. And trust me, you don’t want to be awake when I get going. Don’t get me wrong, you did great.”

  The boy was screaming for his mom. Reciting lines from the Koran.

  “Beautiful words,” Ford shouted. “Beautiful, beautiful words. I dig it. But here’s the thing: God is dead. Night, night, little one.”

  Ford took an anesthetic spray from the pocket of his lab coat and sprayed it into the boy’s right ear. Then up the right nostril as the boy struggled, eyes wide, chest trying to burst through the leather straps.

  Ford watched for a few sad moments. Then he closed his eyes and counted to ten.

  When he opened his eyes, the boy was unconscious, his central nervous system suitably suppressed. Bach was in full flow.

  Ford picked up the saw, grabbed the boy’s hair, and began sawing his neck, blood spurting over Ford’s white lab coat.

  Twelve

  Shards of golden sunlight pierced the blinds in his hotel room and roused Reznick from a troubled sleep. He had only managed a couple of hours after he got back from meeting with Catherine. The revelation of the Arabic writing on the metal fragment her brother had found was stunning. His mind had been racing since he’d heard the news. Unable to sleep half the night, he had lain awake, staring at the ceiling, until 5:00 a.m. He wondered if this was the killer piece of evidence pointing to Islamist terrorism. And if it did, Reznick could see why intelligence agencies would want to conceal such information. If the public knew, all hell would break loose.

  Reznick got out of bed and went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He checked his reflection in the mirror. Dark shadows under his bloodshot eyes. Not enough sleep. But he wasn’t interested in that. He was interested in what had happened to Mac and if there had been any news of his whereabouts.

  He picked up his cell phone and called Catherine.

  “Morning, Jon.”

  “Sorry to bother you,” he said. “Any word on your brother?”

  “Not a thing. I was just about to contact you to find out if you had heard anything. I’m worried. I don’t like it. He’s been gone too long.”

  “I’d report it to the British consulate,” he said. “They’ll have a place in Palma.”

  “Already done that.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Very sorry to hear that. That kind of thing. They took a note of his name. I asked what they were going to do about it. The consul, who was very posh, said they would try everything possible. But we know what that means, right?”

  “Diplomatic niceties. Means they’ll ignore it, or at best ask a few discreet questions. That sort of shit.”

  Catherine sighed. “I’m so worried, Jon. It will end my mother if something happens to David. He made it back from Iraq and God-knows-where. To lose him now, it would be too much to bear.”

  Reznick opened the blinds, pushed open the French doors, and stepped outside onto his balcony. He stared out over the beautiful blue waters. At the families enjoying an early-morning dip in the sea. The peace and calm of it all. To think that in those same waters, not far from shore, Martha had perished.

  “Jon?”

  He wondered, not for the first time, what the hell he was doing chasing ghosts of the past. Shadows. Was he in Mallorca only out of obligation to Jerry Meyerstein?

  He knew there was more to it than that. Far, far more than that. He had felt a connection to Martha. A real connection to her. And that connection, to something good—true and unyielding and kind—was gone. He felt her loss deep within him. Gnawing away at him. And he knew that it would all catch up with him, further on down the road. It would floor him. He would hit a wall.

  And when it had finally sunk in that he would never see or touch her again, he feared a descent into a darkness of his own making. That was what awaited him.

  “Are you still there, Jon?” Catherine’s voice snapped him back to reality.

  “Yeah, I’m still here. Listen, Catherine, I know a few people. Let me make a call. I don’t want to promise anything.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “Just let me handle it.”

  “I’d really appreciate that. We need to try every avenue.”

  “How about I call you back later today?”

  “Thanks, Jon.”

  Reznick ended the call. He had a direct number for the FBI’s SIOC—Strategic Information and Operations Center—on the highly secure fifth floor of the HQ in Washington, DC. A number Martha had given him to be used in emergency situations. He pulled up the number on his cell phone.

  “Identify yourself,” a woman’s voice said.

  “Jon Reznick.” He knew they would be doing voice analysis to ensure they were speaking to the right person.

  “I’m sorry, Jon, but you are not on the authorized list anymore. I can’t help you.”

  “I just need one minute of your time. I want you to be aware of a situation.”

  “I’ll repeat that, Jon. You are not authorized. Do you copy?”

  “I copy. Listen to me. This is a critical situation. It concerns the disappearanc
e of David McCafferty, known as Mac, a British citizen, believed to be ex-SAS.”

  The line went quiet for a few moments. “Go on.”

  Reznick gave a summary of events since he’d arrived in Mallorca, including a description of the fragment allegedly found by Mac after the explosion of the yacht Martha Meyerstein was traveling on. “Do you copy that?”

  “Yes, copy that.”

  “David McCafferty’s whereabouts are unknown. It’s possible he has been taken to a secure location by Americans, perhaps State Department or the Agency. Now I don’t know what the hell is going on or what fucking games are being played, but I want to talk to O’Donoghue.”

  A silence stretched on for what seemed like minutes but was in all likelihood ten or fifteen seconds. “You are no longer authorized. I believe you have already had a discussion with the Director about this?”

  “Get him to call me as soon as he’s able. It’s critical.”

  But the line went dead.

  Thirteen

  Reznick was becoming preoccupied, perhaps sidetracked, thinking of Mac’s whereabouts. It wasn’t a blind alley, though—he was convinced pursuing it would open up his investigation into Martha’s death and perhaps lead to understanding the motivation behind the attack.

  His stomach rumbled. He hadn’t eaten in more than twelve hours. He ordered room service and ate it on his balcony, feeling the heat of the morning sun on his face and arms. Waves crashed onto the rocky coastline. His gaze was drawn farther along the coast. Kids were already tombstoning from the cliffs. The same cliffs he had visited when he had arrived. The same place with the perfect line of sight. The police boat was still there in the distance. The buoys marking where the yacht had been.

  Reznick’s mind flashed back to his meeting with Jerry Meyerstein. As far as he knew, the bodies of Martha and her friend still hadn’t been found. But then again, with the secrecy surrounding the events, perhaps the bodies had washed up and been taken, at the behest of the State Department, to a military hospital in Madrid. Perhaps even flown to a US air base in Spain.

  He thought of Jerry Meyerstein back at home in the Chicago suburbs, grieving, his wife, Martha’s mother, struggling to cope with the enormity of the loss. He wondered if Jerry had heard anything further. Maybe he should call Jerry later and give him an update. But he didn’t have much of an update to give. He didn’t know who’d caused the explosion. He had scraps of information. A piece or two of the jigsaw. But nothing more.

  Who was behind this? And why? Was it an Islamist plot? Had it all been hushed up?

  Reznick needed to clear his head from all the jumbled-up thoughts rushing through his mind. He changed into his workout gear and put on his old sneakers. He headed out of the cool and calm of the hotel and into the broiling Mediterranean sunshine.

  He walked over to the beachside bar and got himself another coffee, just enjoying space to think. He realized he’d been sitting in the exact chair and at the same table when he first met Mac. He feared the worst for Mac. But he didn’t want to tell Catherine that. She was smart, though, and she knew that her brother had become inadvertently wrapped up in the fallout after Martha’s death. Whatever that fallout was going to turn out to be.

  A bomb planted on the yacht of an FBI assistant director by a terrorist group would be worldwide news. Her murder would send shock waves around the globe. It would send out the message that no member of the American intelligence services was safe. No one. Not a soul. And that would unnerve and scare many Americans. And rightly so. But it would also invariably enrage America, with some calling for revenge. Demanding revenge.

  An eye for an eye.

  It was the American way. Had been since the Founding Fathers. Retribution. Vengeance. It was in the DNA of America, for better or worse. The very fabric of its being. All the way back. The war against the Native Americans. The settlers being massacred. And settlers avenging in blood. On and on.

  His thoughts turned again to what Catherine had said. The crucial fragment that Mac had handed over to the Spanish police and a Fed frogman. The Arabic writing pointed to one thing: an Islamist cell had planted the bomb. How could it be anything else? They had taken out Martha Meyerstein. The fact that she was an American and Jewish would make it all the sweeter for them.

  Reznick felt the stirrings of anger. His blood was up. He gulped some coffee. He wondered if Mac had been taken to a secure place to keep him from talking. If it leaked out that a fragment of the bomb contained Arabic writing, there would be a media firestorm the likes of which no one had seen since 9/11. Recriminations. A thirst for blood. The road to war. Nothing would be off the table.

  But something was nagging at Reznick, deep within him. Something didn’t sit right with him. He couldn’t figure it out. He began to game-plan different scenarios.

  If Mac had been disappeared to ensure his silence, he could have been taken to a facility controlled by the CIA. A black site. Maybe on Spanish soil. Reznick knew they existed in several European countries. Poland. Romania. But maybe the Americans who’d picked him up from the police station had handed him over to the British. Mac was a British citizen, after all. And the UK and America were part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance for sharing classified information, along with Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The Brits might have taken him to nearby Gibraltar in the south of Spain, where they had a significant base.

  Reznick gazed off into the distance. The shimmering haze on the water was beguiling. He lingered as if in a trance. He thought again of Martha. Images raced through his head. Haunting images. Her cold dead body. He thought his heart would burst. It was aching with the emptiness. He could only imagine the heartache her family was enduring. The endless nights. The gaping hole in their lives.

  Reznick could only do his part. He had made a solemn promise to Jerry. He would find out who killed Martha. Because someone had killed her. Of that, Reznick was certain. But an Islamist cell in the Med? They would have had to know about her trip ahead of time. Or had someone spotted her here and decided to act on the fly?

  Probably the first thing on the mind of anyone local would be the 2004 Madrid train bombings, a near-simultaneous coordinated attack on four trains by an Islamist cell. The atrocity had killed 193 and injured nearly two thousand people, the deadliest terrorist attack in Spain.

  In light of that, had Martha’s assassination been carried out by a similar fundamentalist Islamist cell? Or was this a highly focused attack by a new generation of fundamentalists who wanted to terrorize and force the West into submission?

  The more he ran the scenarios around his head, the less he thought it likely. Ordinarily, one-on-one assassinations weren’t their modus operandi. Their game was mass terror. Mass casualties. The more the better, as far as they were concerned. Probably the biggest red flag, as far as Reznick could ascertain, was that the Islamists hadn’t sent out a message on social media claiming credit. If there’d been anything—a video proclaiming jihad and victory over the infidels—it would be all over the media by now. These terrorists were masters of high-production-value propaganda videos. They saw them as tools to recruit the next generation of Islamists.

  Nothing made sense. Except he understood now why the Feds had gone to such lengths to insist, even to Martha’s own father, that the explosion had been an accident. If it was known that an assistant director of the FBI had been assassinated on the other side of the Atlantic during a sailing vacation—by anyone, Islamists or not—it would shake the Federal Bureau of Investigation to its very foundations. It would call into question whether the FBI was fit for its purpose. More than anything the credibility of the FBI would be torn to shreds. And it might undermine the confidence of the American people in their domestic security and intelligence service.

  He finished his coffee, left a ten-euro bill, and headed across the street. He walked up the dusty sidewalk adjacent to the road that led out of town.

  Reznick stopped when he got to the line-of-sight spot on the rocky overloo
k and surveyed the scene for the umpteenth time. Kids were again jumping off the high cliffs into the water, egged on by their friends.

  He spotted the young guy he’d spoken to before.

  The kid caught his eye and waved, motioning him down to join them. “Señor!”

  Reznick acknowledged the kid and clambered down the rocks, careful not to lose his footing.

  “Señor,” the kid said, “my friend who was there that night?”

  “Sure, is he here?”

  The kid turned and pointed to a brawny boy with shoulder-length blond hair. “My friend Loreno, he was there. You said you wanted to talk to him, señor?”

  “Sure.”

  The brawny kid was tapped on the shoulder by his friend and turned around. The two exchanged brief words before Loreno stepped forward.

  Loreno shielded his eyes from the sun. “Hey, señor, what do you want? You American?”

  Reznick took the kid aside for a moment. “I was told you were here the night the boat exploded.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Tell me about that night.”

  “Are you FBI? You an American cop, señor?”

  Reznick shook his head. “My friend died on the yacht. I’m just trying to find out if anyone saw anything on the night it happened.”

  “Well, it was early evening. I had started jumping late afternoon off these cliffs, right here, about an hour, maybe fifty minutes before the explosion. I had finished my job.”

  “What job is that?”

  “Cleaning pools. But I went home before it exploded, thank God.”

  Reznick looked out at the buoys, wanting to be crystal clear in his head about what had happened. “I need you to think back, Loreno,” he said.

  The kid looked serious. “I can do that.”

  “Good.” Reznick pointed to the buoys in the distance. “Is that where the yacht was? Really think about what I’m saying.”

  “Exactly where it was, señor. I know the waters around here. And I remember its position. It didn’t move. It was anchored offshore as it was getting dark.”