War of Shadows

by Leo J. Maloney

  The former cut open her jaw line and the latter gave her left temple a nice wet kiss as she wrenched herself backwards. Morgan fell to his front, but kept his head up enough to witness her astonishing retreat. She slithered away on her back like some sort of possessed serpent as sniper bullets burrowed into the alley floor all around her.

  Morgan dug for his own guns, but by the time the Ruger was in his left fist, the Serbian terrorist had managed to disappear around the corner of Cedar Lane Way and Pinckney Street. Morgan wanted to leap to his feet, but his body had its own ideas. He managed to get upright fast enough to judge that the police were mere seconds away.

  He took a quick survey of the scene. He counted seven corpses, and any helmeted assassin who wasn’t headless was long gone, along with all the cutting edge weapons.

  So much for collecting extremely helpful souvenirs, he thought. They may have been amateur hired help, but they were obviously very forcefully instructed to leave as few clues behind as possible.

  But as he was about to grab a jagged, bloody piece of sniper-shattered helmet, he heard another sound over the approaching sirens. A powerful, purring, sound. A leather-encased, helmeted figure appeared astride the black and blue two-wheeled lightning bolt that was the Yamaha R1 open-class street bike—recently declared the best on the market.

  Morgan couldn’t see the biker’s face, but there was no mistaking the shape, poise, and attitude—nor the CheyTac M200 Intervention sniper rifle strapped across the back.

  “You know,” Alexandra Morgan said as she took off her helmet, letting her short, dark copper hair free, “if you had just kept your damn head down, I could’ve nailed her.”

  They both looked back at Mount Vernon Street as red, blue, and amber lights refracted off the corner walls.

  Alex Morgan, Zeta’s top sniper, resettled on the Yamaha’s seat, and held her hand out to her father. “Now come with me if you want to live.”

  Chapter 8

  The first hour may have been pretty rough, but the first few minutes after the incident on Cedar Lane Way were really hairy.

  That’s when Dan got an up-close-and-personal tour of the back streets, alleys, courtyards, cul-de-sacs, backyards, and even hiking paths of Beacon Hill—all from the rear of a motorcycle. Every few seconds, Dan thought he’d have to kiss one or both knees goodbye. He didn’t worry about his elbows, however. His arms were tightly embracing his daughter’s waist—just to stay on the speeding street bike.

  He didn’t so much mind Alex’s quick, sudden turns as much as her narrow misses between parked cars, pathways, curbstones, street signs, street lights, parking meters, mailboxes, and fire hydrants as she expertly avoided patrol cars, uniformed officers, and even plainclothes people. Thankfully for them, as well as for career criminals throughout the greater Beantown area, it was deep in the night by then, and the police already had their hands pretty full.

  Within minutes, they were out of the immediate area. In a gut-twistingly ironic way, Dan was almost glad that he didn’t spot Amina. If he had, he doubted he could have left it at that, despite the danger that would have put him and his daughter in. But that was of little concern to the Yamaha’s driver. Taking the cops’ workload into consideration, Alex avoided the closest Charles River crossovers like Longfellow Bridge and Charles River Dam Road. She chose, instead, to mingle with the always plentiful traffic on the Tobin Memorial Bridge and Route 93 into Charlestown, which bookended Prospect Hill and Bunker Hill.

  Along the way, Dan had to admire the modifications Alex had made to the Yamaha. Normally chopper engines were seemingly made so their riders could loudly proclaim “look at me” to anyone in the surrounding square mile, but this black and blue streaker was on its best behavior thanks to some extraordinary alterations to its muffler and chassis. No matter how high Alex revved it, it sped along with only a comforting, even soothing purr.

  Also, it probably wouldn’t do to sneak around the back streets of Boston with a high-powered sniper rifle wedged between yourself and your father, so, much to that father’s appreciation, she had stowed it in a camouflaged sheath wedged along the left side of the clutch cover, which almost perfectly blended it into what other bikers called a “rice-burner.” Dan wouldn’t trade this rice burner for any crotch-rocket, flathead, or hog on the planet.

  Dan had kept tight-lipped, and not just to keep his teeth and mouth free of splattering kamikaze insects. Once they wound their way into Mystic Valley, along the winding Mystic River, he moved one hand from Alex’s waist to her shoulder. Grunting through the motorcycle helmet she had wisely given him—it wouldn’t do to survive what they had, only to be arrested for breaking the helmet law—he gave her an address. His tone made clear that it was fruitless to argue, or even question.

  Besides, if his daughter felt anything close to the mix of emotions he was feeling, she was glad that at least they had someplace definite to go. They wound their way past the Legoland Discovery Center, the Mystic River State Reservation, Hormel Stadium, Riverbend Park, and the Riverside Yacht Club until they started to creep into more eclectic neighborhoods where the Mystic River emptied into Mystic Lake.

  Dan had Alex make their way into some patches of woodland until they came upon a ramshackle garage set apart from its nearest neighbor, with a dozen cars lined up around and in front of it. Dan tapped his daughter on the shoulder, so she eased her way closer. Alex understood. Her father, after all, was a classic car dealer. Whether that was his vocation or his cover was still open for debate. In either case, it made sense that he knew every car dealer, extremely large or pitifully small, in the area.

  Sure enough, as she cut the Yamaha’s purring motor, Dan dismounted, took a second to air out his now bowed legs, then gave Alex a “quiet” signal with his forefinger before waving her to follow him. She made her way through some Chevys, Dodges, Renaults, Fiats, Peugeots, and even a Yugo as her father wedged his way through some bushes and hanging tree branches to stand before a plain door on the left side of the garage. Alex’s eyebrows rose as she noted the structure was windowless and the portal, which, on first glance, had looked worn, was actually solid and extra thick.

  Dan somehow produced a key and slid it into the door’s sole lock. He waited until Alex got close, then swung open the partition, allowing the two of them to slide quickly in as one. Then he shut and locked the door behind them as dim yellow fluorescent lights automatically went on overhead. To Alex’s surprise, it was an office, not a garage—with the prerequisite desk, files, coffee machine, and water cooler. She took off her helmet at the same time he did.

  “What are we doing here?” she wondered aloud.

  “Well, I’m not going to risk going to my office,” Dan replied, stepping up to a small cabinet on the wall that was filled with keys hanging from hooks. “Welcome to Yuri’s Used Cars, which caters to a very specific clientele. I’ll let you guess who.”

  Yuri, Alex thought. Well, maybe that explained the Yugo. “Dominicans?”

  Dan nearly did a double take as he snapped up one set of keys, while replacing it with another from his own pocket. He had been expecting her to say Eastern Europeans. “And Guatemalans,” he added, impressed with his daughter’s knowledge of Boston demographics. “Good ol’ Yuri likes serving underserved communities.”

  Alex waited until her father passed by her, heading back to the side door, before repeating herself. “Again, what are we doing here?”

  Dan stopped by the door before looking back. “Catching a new ride.”

  “Why do we need a new ride?” she asked, standing her ground.

  He waited for the second it took her to correctly interpret his sympathetic expression.

  “Oh, shit,” she said with resignation. “I really loved that bike.”

  * * * *

  “Cops are one thing,” Dan told his daughter as they eased the Yamaha, minus the sniper’s rifle, into the Mystic River basin on
the other side of the foliage covering Yuri’s establishment. “Our Serbian hellcat is another. If I know her, she probably didn’t even wait for her chin wound to be tended to before she placed, or had one of her bozos place, an anonymous call with our full description to every bear in New England.”

  Alex felt an urge to suggest that Amina had not set eyes on the bike before she had slithered out of the alley, but she resisted it. The odds weren’t good to take the chance Amina hadn’t done as Dan suggested, and they both knew it. Feeling a potent cloud of despondency settle on her, Alex trudged back up toward the car yard without a word.

  The father and daughter had kept their t-shirts, jeans and boots, but had replaced their outer wear with some khaki shirts and jackets they found in a narrow locker room by a bathroom beyond the water cooler—dark tan for Alex and olive for Dan. Both were grateful they didn’t have neon patches that read “Yuri’s Used Cars” stitched on them.

  “Yuri and I have an arrangement,” Dan explained as he came up behind her. “Something happens to me, he takes over. Something happens to him, I do the same. The keys I left on the hook are his signal.”

  Alex glanced at her father, and he was happy to note that the gaze contained some admiration and appreciation rather than just depression or growing clinical shock.

  “And the keys you took?” Alex inquired.

  Dan had reached the corner of the overgrown shack, and stood beside a dull silver 2014 Ford Focus hatchback. “It’s not a Mustang,” he admitted, “but it’ll have to do for now.”

  Now it was Dan’s turn to give his daughter a lesson in back roads and back streets. A few minutes after they left the Mystic neighborhood, Alex took her third look into the back seat to make sure her sniper rifle was still out of sight. And her father took a third glance at her, unable to keep a smidgen of worry out of his expression. He remembered how she had looked, and, more importantly, acted when he had driven her home from her first championship junior high school volleyball meet.

  It had been a heartbreaker, with her team just on the edge of victory a half-dozen times. To make matters worse, at the very last second, she’d had a chance to spike them to victory, but, in her energy and eagerness, the ball had bounced off the top of the net and gone out of bounds.

  She was inconsolable, and, wisely, Dan hadn’t tried to offer solace. He’d just stayed strong and ready for when she was ready to talk, but he had never forgotten her body language: head down, legs curled under her, hands cupped in her lap, eyes dead. She didn’t meet all those criteria now, but it was close enough. Only this time, they didn’t have time to wait.

  “How did you find me?” he asked as he drove between Mystic Lakes State Park and the Oak Grove Cemetery.

  The question didn’t perk her up, but she didn’t ignore it either. “I followed the media’s lead.” She shrugged. “I was going to go home, but the news clued me in that we didn’t have one anymore. So I did what you probably did too; reached out to the team.” She grew quiet and, for her, strangely troubled. “No answering machines worked.” Remembering her actions following that discovery, she straightened in the Ford’s seat and shook off her lethargy. “Of course, I checked out the situation from a distance using the CheyTac’s scope.”

  Dan considered that carefully. The Intervention M200 had an effective range of about one-and-a-half miles. “Hell of a shot,” he murmured.

  “Thanks,” Alex replied. “It felt …fated, you know?”

  He didn’t. “What do you mean?”

  Alex looked out the windshield, letting the darkness and dim lights of Woburn dull her eyes. “It was like…it was like they were lemmings, or shooting gallery targets, willingly jumping into my cross-hairs. All I had to do was pull the trigger…”

  Dan frowned. He didn’t like the distant tone of her voice. “How did you make the Mustang jump?” he interjected.

  Alex grinned as she looked to her father behind the steering wheel. “Knew I had to do something, and the CheyTac’s Vector laser scope showed me one of their air cannons lying under the Mustang. Seeing what it had done to the car’s hood and doors, I figured I’d give it a shot…”

  “All puns intended,” Dan commented.

  Alex’s smile was genuine. “Even I didn’t think it was that powerful.”

  Dan sighed. “Too bad we couldn’t bring any along.”

  “Just as well,” Alex retorted, looking out the passenger window as they skirted into Burlington. “My guess is that each and every piece of their ordnance was crawling with bugs.”

  Of course the young woman didn’t mean insects. Dan scowled. She was probably right that taking even a shattered piece would be like waving a beacon to their enemy. He shook off the thought when Alex spoke again.

  “You think they’re the same bunch who tried that extortion scheme on the Trans-Siberian Express?” That, after all, was where they had first met Amina.

  Dan frowned. “That bunch were Neanderthals compared to this crowd.”

  It was Alex’s turn to frown. “Maybe just on the surface, though. You know as well as I do that, other than the Serbian hellcat, the rest acted like hastily hired help. It could’ve been just Amina trying to get payback.”

  “It’s possible,” he replied, “but I doubt it. Those bozos didn’t have the pull for this thing.” Dan straightened when Alex didn’t answer. Then the hairs on the back of his neck stood up and he felt a wave of goosebumps across his shoulders. That almost never happened. As his grandma used to say: somebody just walked across my grave.

  Dan looked over to see his daughter staring back at him, something unreadable in her expression. “You weren’t at your place when you saw the news report, were you?” he asked.

  She shook her head, her expression unchanging. Although he saw her jaw clenching in indecision, she still made him ask rather than offering the necessary information up.

  “Where were you?”

  “There,” she said.

  “At the house?”

  “No,” she told him. “Zeta.”

  Dan didn’t want to give the stereotypical response, but he couldn’t help himself. “What?”

  “I was at Zeta. Practicing. I like to target shoot when the place is empty.” She grimaced. “No macho posturing or competition from the other fieldies.”

  To his growing incredulity, she tapered off.

  “When?” he demanded.

  “Just before,” she answered, “and just after it went up. That’s when I started calling everybody.”

  The car wavered in its lane on the Pinehurst Billerica side street, but just slightly. When he could get the words out, they were almost choked.

  “Did you call Mom?” When she didn’t answer, he nearly cracked the steering wheel with his grip. “You didn’t call Jenny?”

  “What good would that have done?” she asked.

  Dan pulled over, doing his absolute best not to screech the wheels as he tucked the Ford behind the office building where the Pinehurst Drive-in Theater used to be. Once he made sure the car was in park, he shifted over in his seat to face his daughter. But when he looked into her face he remembered that she was his daughter, not just the expert sniper who had saved his life. And the expression on her face could only be described as “haunted.”

  He spoke softly to her. “Come on, Alex, what are you not telling me?”

  Her expression changed into one of conflict, as if she knew she was wasting time, but, somehow, she had to.

  “You’ll think I’ve gone crazy,” he heard her whisper. Then, only slightly more loudly: “Hell, I think I’ve gone crazy.”

  “Come on, hon,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “After what we’ve been through, and not just tonight, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  That did it. Alex looked up and met his eyes.

  “I heard Mom’s voice,” she told him. “She was the one who told
me to get out of Zeta HQ and find you.”

  Chapter 9

  As Alex’s words sunk in, hope and doubt had a prize fight in Dan Morgan’s brain. It was declared a split decision at best, and a draw at worst. Even so, the full import of Alex’s words brought Dan’s mind to nearly a complete standstill.

  All he could say was, “What do you mean you heard Jenny’s voice?”

  Alex head went back, her eyes widening. “What do you mean what do I mean?” she retorted. “I heard Mom’s voice.”

  He saw a glimmer of cognitive light at the end of his dark tunnel vision. “In your ear comm?” he asked. “In your head? What?”

  Alex looked nonplussed, as if she hadn’t truly thought about it until that moment. She froze, frowned, looked away, and thought about it.

  “It wasn’t the ear comm,” she decided. “And it wasn’t in my head. Not really.”

  “Not really?” Dan echoed. And when she didn’t react immediately, he added, “What do you mean?”

  Alex’s reply had some of the same snap as before she’d admitted she heard Jenny’s voice. “Dad, I’ve spent my life differentiating between voices outside and inside my head. For what it’s worth, I could’ve sworn this was outside my head.” She took another second to try recalling it. “Just outside my head. In fact, like she was right behind me. I even turned around to ask her what she was doing at HQ, but when I did, she wasn’t there.”

  Dan exhaled, then inhaled, also looking away. He searched for any possible rational explanation, but couldn’t find one.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t the ear comm?” he re-asked.

  The look of patient impatience on her face clued him that they were back to their normal relationship. “Yes, Dad, I’m sure.”