War of Shadows

by Leo J. Maloney

  It had all been Jenny. He gave Alex weapons, but Jenny had given her smarts and strength. He had taught her how to hit a target at two thousand yards, but it was Jenny who had taught her that she could be, or do, anything she wanted.

  “But now what, honey?” he asked. “Where do we go now?”

  Alex loosened her grip and leaned back to look into her father’s eyes. He was gratified to see that hers were completely dry, and clear. Her smile was honest, appreciative, and loving.

  “Funny you should ask that, old man,” she said. “I think I know just the place…

  Chapter 11

  “Just the place” was the secluded, extremely private home of Scott Renard, the billionaire significant other of their fellow agent Lily Randall. Even though they had not been able to reach either Lily or Scott, both Alex and Dan were willing to bet this safe haven that they had visited on a previous mission—when Renard helped them rescue Lily from the wilds of Asia—would be so well-secured that it was entirely possible that even some super-secret anti-Zeta couldn’t blow it up in their faces.

  Only one problem. It was 3,144 miles away from Dan’s secret garage in New Hampshire.

  Dan exhaled slowly. “Nice night for a long drive, huh?” he asked his daughter.

  She nodded, and they were off. Left unspoken was the fact that, given the state of the surveillance world, it wouldn’t be wise to charter a plane, call a taxi, rent a car, or book an Uber. It would be like setting off a flare. Besides, what good would it do to spend years prepping a CR-V if they didn’t put it to use?

  At first it went like clockwork. One would drive while the other slept for eight hours, then they refueled and switch. It was a good system, an effective system, a workable system—until Dan’s brain got too busy with all sorts of sleep-stealing thoughts. How had the enemy planted all those explosives without anyone seeing them? And, worst of all for his sleep-deprived brain, why hadn’t his beloved wife spoken to him? Why hadn’t she warned him?

  Jenny had always told Dan never to ask himself questions he couldn’t answer. She advised to only ask himself questions he could answer. But that was the big problem now, wasn’t it? Jenny was no longer there. He had heard about parents who protected their children beyond anything else, and that was only right. He would have, and had, done everything he could for Alex.

  But it was her decision to become the remarkable field agent she had become, and they had been there for each other ever since. But worse, and most sleep-stealing of all, what had happened to Jenny? Had she been in the house when it blew up? Had she been in Zeta HQ when it blew up? And how had she talked to her daughter without an ear-comm or being seen?

  Even when it was his turn to sleep, Dan tormented himself with these questions. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but his wife might as well have been one from the way she was haunting him now. He cursed himself for an exhausted fool.

  He remembered that Dirty Harry had said in one of his movies, “a man’s got to know his limitations,” and Dan was proud that he knew his. He knew that he risked a wreck if he did his eight-hour shift in this enervated condition, but he also didn’t want Alex to do a double, even though he knew his daughter would be more than willing.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said once they reached the outskirts of the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma, “but I could use a shower.”

  They skirted the deepest recesses on the southwest edge of the Osage Reservation, and found a place that looked like even a slasher movie crew wouldn’t have stayed there. Dan Morgan’s rule was simple: if you could find it on Google, that meant others could too.

  They drove down a dirt road amid a forest of brush to find an unlit sign: Mimi Hotel. It stood in front of a rudimentary construction of ten connected rooms with a single door and single window each.

  “They call this a hotel? Even roach motels wouldn’t call it that.” Dan glanced at his daughter as the vehicle slowly got closer. “Think Mimi’s the owner?”

  Alex didn’t look back at him. She kept studying the place like her life depended on it. “Prob not,” she murmured. “Mi’ is the Osage word for sun. Mihoto is their word for moon.” Only then did she look at her father with a sheepish grin. “Learned it in a song we sang in kindergarten.”

  Morgan saw they were the only tenants, so he parked in front of the fifth door, then walked back to the small, dark office at the end of the structure. There, he handed two twenties over to a stoic young Osage man in t-shirt, jeans, and sandals, who went back to playing videogames as soon as he handed over the key. An actual old key—not a plastic card.

  The room was as threadbare as the rest of the joint—two thin, lumpy twin beds, a bureau, a chair, a sink, a toilet, and a shower—but at least it was clean. Dan welcomed the shower, redressed in his t-shirt and khakis, and waved an “all-clear” to his daughter, hoping he hadn’t used up all the hot water.

  Much to his surprise, he fell asleep almost as soon as his head hit the thin pillow. And he stayed that way until Alex silently shook him awake. He heard the sounds of the doorknob trying rattling and sprang out of bed as Alex moved to the door into the next room.

  Smart girl, he thought. Just like him, she had realized upon checking in that there was no back door or bathroom window to escape from in case of an attack. So, while he was showering or sleeping, she had picked the lock of the door to the next room. As Dan took up position behind the entry, Alex circled around behind the attacker, or attackers, from the next room.

  Dan didn’t worry about what Alex might do as the door opened and a ski-masked intruder appeared, gun outstretched, and all Dan’s grief, anger, frustration, and uncertainty went from his brain, down his arm, into his fist, and almost through the guy’s kidney. He hit so hard he thought his knuckles might have grazed the guy’s spine.

  As the ski-masked man in black went down, Dan surmised that maybe his added strength came from two things. One, he was freshly awoken from a log-like sleep, and two, he had a lot of rage that had been building since his house exploded.

  Dan had taken it all out on the guy, who had come into the motel room holding a forty-five automatic, and who was clearly preparing to shoot whoever was under the covers of the lumpy bed.

  Dan shoved the forty-five into his waistband. To his surprise, the attacker carried no other weapons—not a knife or a sap or a Taser—but he did have a wallet, and inside the wallet, miracle of miracles, a driver’s license.

  Dan yanked up the ski mask and compared the license to the man’s face. Ernest Burkett did not look Osage. He was a skinhead with a broken nose, narrow brown eyes, and cauliflower ears—the kind of man who had been persecuting, even murdering, the Osage tribe for centuries. That only made things more perplexing. Dan patted him down more thoroughly for any added bonuses, like a cellphone. No such luck.

  “Hey C,” he called out, while stepping over the body to get a plastic cup of water from the sink. He used her code name—C for crosshairs—which they had created for just such an occasion. “Any extras?”

  Dan turned sharply when he heard a thunk instead of an answer. He relaxed a little when he saw another skinhead—with a spider web neck tattoo, no less—cringing in the doorway, his face a mask of pain. Alex held his right arm and hand in a particularly painful judo hold. Even if he could stand the strain she was putting on his arm, the added pain she was creating in his palm and fingers precluded any attempt at movement. His free arm and hand seemed paralyzed, like a petrified tree branch growing out of his left shoulder.

  “Just one,” she said. “Found him skulking by the door, backing up his buddy.” Spider Tattoo was trying to speak, but his brain wasn’t having it. He just hunched there, struggling to breathe.

  Dan brought the water back to the fallen intruder. “Ernie,” Dan called, tapping him on the head with his boot. “Ernie, wake up.” Dan splashed water in Ernie’s face and waited, keeping his distance. Both Morgans had lea
rned the hard way that things were not always what they seemed.

  Ernest Burkett sputtered, blinked, stiffened, then groaned—and jerked his hands back toward his kidney.

  “Hey Ernie,” Dan said, pulling out the forty-five and pointing it at the man’s head. “Who sent you?”

  A few things happened nearly simultaneously in response to the question. Ernie started swearing, his friend started telling him to keep his mouth shut, and Alex used Spider Tatoo’s arm like a battering ram to slam his skinhead into the door jamb.

  Dan sighed and sat on the bed. “Don’t have time for this, Ernie,” he told him. “Last chance before it gets ugly. Who sent you?”

  They’d obviously been clued in to the Morgans’ presence, unless they hung out and attacked anyone who checked in. And Spider Tattoo was advising silence despite the pain he was in, so they must know who had hired them.

  As he expected, Ernie was too stupid to take the hint, and instead upped the profanity—suggesting that Dan have coitus with his mother and so on. That, more than anything, convinced Dan that these two were what they appeared to be, and not some brilliant, well-disguised, well-trained assassins.

  Too bad. If they had been brilliant, well-disguised, well-trained assassins, Dan might have shot one to get the other talking. But somehow he doubted they cared enough about each other to make that approach effective. So he just leaned down and quickly, precisely, expertly, broke Ernie’s eye.

  It is not easy to break someone’s eye. It’s not like an egg, where all you have to do is crack the exterior so the interior will come oozing out. The eye is a fused, two-piece unit, and to even make the brain aware of damage Dan had to strike so strongly and sharply that his finger made it through the cornea, pupil, and then, so deeply into the vitreous humor that the optic nerve was jump-started.

  There are certain kinds of pain the body is generally prepared for. They’re never pleasant, but they are, at least, on a scale of toleration. A scratch, a cut, even a broken bone—tolerable. Getting a finger in the eye down to the optic nerve—not so much. The brain does its own version of running around the room with its hair on fire, screaming “abort, abort, abort.”

  Not surprisingly, Ernie started babbling.

  * * * *

  The Morgans left the unconscious skinheads on the floor. Why not? The room was paid for.

  On the drive out, Dan looked to see if the clerk was still playing videogames. He was.

  “Maybe he fingered us,” Alex speculated as the CR-V made its way onto the dirt road toward Route Forty-Eight and the Turner Turnpike beyond.

  “You think so?” Dan retorted. Alex thought about it further, then frowned. “Like father, like daughter,” Dan concluded.

  They fell silent and thought about what Ernie had babbled. He and his partner in crime were a-holes. Well known a-holes, who hung around local dives hoping for dirty deeds to do dirt cheap.

  On this particular evening, they had gotten a text on their latest burner phone with instructions to collect a man and woman at the Mimi Hotel and bring them to a hash joint on North Twenty-Five Mile Avenue in Deaf Smith County, Texas, near the New Mexico border…some 400 miles away.

  Both Morgans wished they had the phone to double check this less-than-credible confession, but as was these yabbos’ standard operating procedure, that phone was long gone.

  “Weird,” Dan concluded.

  Alex cocked her head to the side. “But not the weirdest we’ve dealt with the last few days.”

  Dan had to agree. “Okay,” he said. “Now we know how Bert and Ernie knew where we were, but how did the people who sicced Bert and Ernie onto us know where we were?”

  “Checked the car for bugs?” Alex asked.

  “It’s as bug-proof as I know how to make it,” Dan maintained.

  Alex didn’t argue. She knew her father was an expert exterminator. Not as good as his partner, Peter “Cougar” Conley, but still good enough for them to scratch a car tracker off the list of possibilities.

  “Check us for bugs?” Alex said.

  Dan grimaced. The answer to that question was anybody’s guess. As long as they’d been working for Zeta, their boss, Diana Bloch, had been something of a chess master, who thought nothing of secreting all manner of cutting-edge tracking device on, or even in, her top operatives.

  “What’s good enough for James Bond,” she’d once remarked, “is good enough for you.” The Morgans remembered the scene in Casino Royale when 007 had a tracking device injected into his forearm. But at least Bond had been aware of it.

  After the last few missions, Dan had made it clear that he didn’t appreciate Bloch’s lack of transparency when it came to keeping tabs on them. Diana, in turn, had made it even more clear that she was not about to risk her operatives’ lives because of misplaced ego. The more ego a certain blunt instrument showed, the less transparent she would be.

  “So,” Dan said to his daughter. “If Zeta One stuck new bugs in us, that could mean Zeta One has been zeroed, and her tracking devices are now being supervised by others.”

  “Anti-Zeta?” Alex wondered, almost shuddering. “Not fun to think about, but possible I guess.”

  “Let’s not guess if we can help it,” her father suggested as he pulled onto Route Forty toward Elk City and the ominously named Dead Woman Mound. “The fact that the baddies wanted these bozos to drive us four hundred miles tells me that, just like the attack on Beacon Hill, the op was slapped together at the last minute from the only parts they had available. If they had more time, they would have set a drop-off spot a lot closer to Mimi.”

  Alex chewed on that rather than dwell on what they might have ticking away inside them. “Well, one good thing is that they seem to want us alive, at least for the moment. Wonder why? To kill us themselves?”

  Dan Morgan exhaled through his nostrils as if trying to force a fly off his nose. “I guess we’ll find out when we get to North Twenty-Five Mile Avenue,” he growled. “But before we do, I’ve got to know one thing.” He turned and looked at his daughter.

  She met his gaze. “What’s that?” she asked him.

  “I was dead to the world. And I would’ve been dead, period, if you hadn’t woken me. So tell me, hon, how did you know Bert and Ernie were outside our door?”

  It was Alex’s turn to exhale. “Easy,” she replied with a mix of resignation and wonder. “Mom told me.”

  Chapter 12

  “What?” Dan groaned. “Again?”

  “Again,” Alex maintained. “To tell you the truth, I was also dead to the world. Thought I’d sleep with one eye open, but just like you, as soon as my head hit the pillow, I was out like a light, and stayed that way until I heard Mom.”

  Dan resisted rolling his eyes as his mouth snapped open to give his daughter the third degree. She beat him to it.

  “Again,” Alex insisted, “not inside my head. Outside my head.” She thought, then continued with even more interest. “You know what it was like?” Alex didn’t wait for a reply. “It was like when she used to wake me up for Sunday soccer practice. You know, she would lean over just a little bit so her face was like two feet above me, right over my ear, and then she would speak softly and evenly so she wouldn’t surprise or scare me. Worked like a charm every time. I’d wake up as if I had been beckoned by…”

  Dan turned to his daughter, noting that her expression looked hesitant and even concerned. “Beckoned by what?” he asked.

  “By an angel,” she finished, then met his eyes. “Do you think this is just my subconscious guilt or something?”

  “Well, if it is,” he replied, “hone it to a fine point. It’s the most helpful subconscious guilt I’ve ever came across.” He looked back at the road, swallowing his own regret and resentment that he hadn’t heard from Jenny too. “What did she say?” he asked.

  “Two words,” Alex told him. “Look out.” />
  Dan was amazed. Of any two words Jenny could have chosen, those were the most effective. “Wake up” would have left the “why” question. “Watch out” was okay, but less proactive than “look out,” which also had a nice double meaning for a field operative who often served as a “lookout” during infiltration actions.

  With that out of the way, the two, no longer the least bit tired, started working out strategies for Deaf Smith County. Dan tapped into the CR-V’s new engine and took advantage of the late hour—as well as advanced speed trap tech—to keep his forward momentum at a smooth ninety miles per hour, making it to the border and across the Texas panhandle in four hours flat.

  * * * *

  Erastus “Deaf” Smith had been the first man to reach the Alamo after its fall, and thus was given the distinction of having his name used for the “Beef Capital of the World.”

  Dan thought the rendezvous would be some barbecue honky-tonk where any noise would be swallowed up by loud country-western music, but as they went down Route Three-Eighty-Five at the posted speed limit, they couldn’t contain their slight surprise.

  The Peking Panda Palace Chinese restaurant was tucked into the north end of an arid little mini-mall at the corner of Plains Avenue next to a hair salon and pizza place. It was across from a gas station, a boutique, and a food market. It was all pretty quiet at five in the morning. Even if Bert and Ernie had succeeded in their mission, their employers couldn’t have reasonably expected them to make delivery for at least another three hours, so the Morgans had plenty of time to scope out the situation.

  In this case, scoping out the situation involved driving back and forth, then up and down every street in a half-mile radius. By the time they were done, Dan had judged the place as a semi-sleepy lower-middle-class ’burb with a decent mix of national chains and independent shops, fast food, gas stations, supermarkets, and a tractor supply company.