by Heskett, Jim
Eyes around the room tracked the gun as he brought it up. A few jaws dropped.
He stood and extended his arm, pointing the gun toward the opposite end of the table. "As President of the DAC, with the full authority granted from our bylaws, I am sentencing you to death."
“David, no!” Jules said.
Wellner’s arm tensed.
He pulled the trigger. The bullet roared across the table and punched a hole in the middle of Conner’s forehead. The blast of the gun forced Wellner to shut his eyes. He hadn’t pulled a trigger in a long time. Felt like years.
When his eyes opened, he noted the two security guards standing behind Conner had not even flinched. Their guns still pointed down.
Conner’s head snapped back and then forward. He slumped against the duct tape restraints. Face hanging down, blood dribbling onto the gold token in front of him. Conner’s shoulders sank as the last breath escaped from between his lips.
Some around the room scowled, some were in a state of shock, and some seemed not to react at all. Wellner looked over at Conner’s Branchmate Fagan, who only gave a subtle shake of the head in a parental display of disappointment.
“What the hell has gotten into you?” Jules said, both hands clutched to her chest.
Wellner set the pistol down on the table. He tried to speak, but his jaw had clenched. He took a beat, cleared his throat, and then said, "The investigation into Branch corruption will continue as I have ordered. I want reps from all six Branches to set up meetings via my secretary before the end of the week. I will interview each of them personally."
A spot of Conner’s blood had crossed the table and landed on Wellner’s white shirt, and he dragged his thumb across it, turning the dot into a comma. Across the table, stoic heads watched Conner’s blood continue to drip. Jules stared at him in horror. Kunjal scribbled notes on his yellow legal pad.
“That’s all for today,” he said. “Everyone, please see yourselves out.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
EMBER
The sun had set. Ember watched the baseball diamond from the backyard of a house on the edge of the park. She’d made sure no one was home before using their yard as a staging area. A wooden fence and a line of trees in front of that fence afforded her plenty of cover to observe the park.
The park consisted of wide-open green space, with a baseball diamond, a gazebo, and a jungle gym next to portable bathrooms. Ember had expected Quinn's next potential victim to be trussed up in some mechanical contraption out in the middle of the field. Instead, there was only a tent somewhere around the pitcher's mound.
About fifteen by fifteen, heavy canvas with a dome point in the middle, like a miniature version of a circus thing. Light spilled out from a slim gap underneath, and there appeared to be a single entrance, held closed with a loose rope knot.
Ember moved her binoculars left and right over the surface of the tent, looking for information. She could see the lights underneath it, but no shadows of movement. The canvas was too thick to get any sense of what was going on in there. She had to assume Quinn and “Alpha” were inside it, though. Ember had scanned every tree, every other backyard in the area, and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
Just a quiet evening in a quiet park in the middle of a quiet neighborhood. With the cold and breezy air, no one was in their backyards grilling or throwing footballs.
She was virtually alone out here. A road did pass by the park, but Ember had only seen one car drive by here in the last ten minutes.
She also didn’t see Gabe in position. He was supposed to have met her in this yard so he could sneak over to the tall tree across from the baseball diamond, with a sniper scope trained. But, so far, he hadn’t shown.
Nothing at all about why he wasn’t late, either. Ember looked at her phone again. No calls, no texts. She’d left him three messages already since the sun had disappeared ten minutes ago, but he seemed occupied with something else.
“Damn it,” she whispered.
There was no way she could abort. Quinn was here, within her grasp. Or, his next hostage would be. Or, at the very least, some clue leading Ember toward him. Every second she waited was another second Quinn could kill Alpha just like he did Gamma.
One thing Ember hadn’t seen so far tonight was her neighbor Layne Parrish. Since his action Superman moment at the shipping facility the other day to rescue Beta, he’d been a ghost. His condo had been empty, still no sign of his car.
That didn’t matter at the moment. He wasn’t here, and Ember wasn’t counting on anyone else to intervene to save the day. If Gabe was stuck in traffic and also somehow in a cell phone dead zone, could she wait around for another twenty minutes to take action?
Ember glanced at her phone again. “Where are you, Gabe?”
There wasn’t time to wait around for him any longer. Quinn had said sunset.
The sun had already done that, and Ember had a feeling he would take it as a sleight if she was late.
“New plan,” she said, and she checked the mags in each of her Custom Nighthawk Enforcer pistols. She made sure the safeties were off, and the noise suppressors were firmly in place. The guns were ready. Also, itching to go, since she hadn’t pulled their triggers in weeks.
Ember hopped the fence and kept low as she skulked across the crunchy grass. The tent over the mound had been anchored to the ground with four cables and four corresponding tent stakes. One of those tent stakes was only hammered halfway into the hard-packed dirt of the baseball field.
If she could quietly work that one out of the ground, she could flip the tent up and take him by surprise.
Then, a bullet to his head, and all this would be over. If he was in the tent. She couldn’t assume he was. But he clearly wasn’t anywhere else around here. No one was. This neighborhood seemed like a ghost town.
She had a flashback of how this had all begun, of how at another campsite, creeping up to another man she was supposed to assassinate, everything had gone sideways. She’d been caught off-guard then, forced to defend herself against another trained killer, and it had led to his death.
All of it avoidable, preventable. All of it an accident.
Ember crouched at the tent stake, only five feet from the tent, at the edge of the grass leading to the baseball diamond. No cameras above, no drones nearby. She heard nothing coming from the inside. There were static shadows underneath the tent bottom, so there was something in there. She just couldn’t tell what it was. Knowing Quinn, she had expected creepy circus music to pump out from interior speakers, but there was nothing. Only silence.
Ember stuck her pistols in the back of her waistband and fiddled with the tent stake, working it back and forth. Back and forth, pulling on it as she wiggled it left and right to dislodge it from the ground. It started to give way and she worked it up, now almost all the way out.
A moment of panic hit her. The outside world had gone almost totally quiet. It didn’t feel right. Her senses told her to let go of the stake and grab her guns, but there was nothing but stillness in every direction. No obvious reason to react. No target in sight.
Then, something in the darkness moved to her right.
In rapid-fire, a series of events played out in a fraction of a second: Ember turned to see a patch of grass shifting. A strange bubble formed up from the grass as if someone were blowing air underneath the sod layer to make it rise. It swelled up to a full twelve inches above the surrounding grass, then it tented in the middle. The bubble was almost six feet from one end to the other. The grass was in the shape of a person. Three feet away. Then Ember realized she was looking at a figure in all-black clothing, wearing green sod as a cape to cover its back and blend in with the grass. A human-shaped hole about a foot deep had been dug in the ground to make him appear flat against the rest of the field. An elaborate, damn-near psychopathic ploy, but it had worked.
The terrifying wraith that had appeared in the field had gotten the jump on her.
She
reached back for her guns, but it was too late. The figure pointed something at her and she felt a pinch in her back. Sharp waves of electricity passed through her.
A Taser.
Her limbs seized up and all her muscles clenched. She tried to push a hand back toward one of the pistols, but her stubborn limbs wouldn’t cooperate. Ember’s fingers turned into claws as she listened to the ticking of the weapon. Her arm clenched against her side. Jaw tight, her eyes rolled back into her head.
As her taut body collapsed, she looked up to see a smiling Quinn wearing a helmet made of sod. He chuckled as he leaned over and inserted a syringe into her neck.
Then, darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Four
GABE
Thirty minutes before, Gabe was loading his backpack with the materials he needed. He set it next to the sniper rifle case by the front door of his apartment. He was already almost running late, but he could still meet Ember by sunset if he walked out the door in the next two minutes.
His heart raced a million miles per minute. Tasked with providing sniper rifle backup to Ember, this was the biggest day of his life. Ember’s safety was in his hands. All of his training as a DAC recruit for the Boulder Branch had led up to this moment.
He tried to open his front door, but the sweat on his palms made it impossible. He wiped them and then gave it another try. When the door opened, Gabe saw three men standing in a triangle in the hallway outside his apartment door. Staring at him.
The lead man was about thirty-five or forty, square-jawed and with rough stubble covering his face. He looked like a business-wear catalog model. The two behind him were considerably larger, and each held a subcompact pistol, pointed at the hallway floor. All three men were in suits.
“Hello, Gabriel,” said the lead man, blasting a shark smile of brilliant white teeth. “Can we come in?”
Gabe made a quick inventory. He had a gun back in his bedroom, but no way could he make a break for it before either of the two armed men could shoot.
“Silence sounds like consent to me,” the lead man said. “Come on, boys.”
The three of them invited themselves in, motioning for Gabe to sit on the couch. The two armed men took up a position on the opposite side of the room, standing in front of Gabe's TV. The lead man disappeared into Gabe's kitchen, then came back with one of his dining chairs. He dragged it across the carpet, his eyes locked on Gabe the whole way.
“What I don’t get,” the guy said as he positioned the chair opposite the couch and sat, “is why your apartment is so small. I know you have money. Or, access to money, is what I should say.”
“Who are you?” Gabe said, his eyes darting back and forth between the three men. The two in the back stood still, chins up, like statues.
The lead guy jabbed a thumb toward his two guys. “Their names aren’t important. But me? I’m the swinging dick you need to worry about. My name is Marcus Lonsdale. Don’t bother searching your memory banks. You don’t know who I am. After we’re done here, feel free to look me up and find out more about me.” He held out a hand. “I need your phone.”
“What?” Gabe said.
“Your phone. Give it to me.”
Gabe eyed the men’s pistols as he pulled his phone out of his pocket and handed it over. Marcus smiled and stuck it inside his suit pocket, and next pulled out a black leather pocketbook. He opened it to show a badge on one side and an ID on the other. The badge read FBI.
Gabe’s already-thumping heart kicked into overdrive. “I don’t have anything to say to you, Agent Lonsdale.”
“Supervisory Special Agent Lonsdale.”
“I still don’t have anything to say.”
“That’s fine,” Marcus said, and then he sucked on his teeth for a few seconds. “This works just as well if you listen. See, I know who you are, Gabriel Jackson. I know what your grandfather did for a living, and I know what your father does for a living. I know why you refused your family fortune and you’re sitting on your trust fund, not drawing a dime from it. I know about the dirty deals your dad pulled in the oil industry to land himself where he is today. And I know that’s why you refused to go to work for him.”
Gabe set his jaw and tried to breathe through his nose, but it whistled too much, so he pushed air via his mouth instead. He kept his eyes down, focused on those pistols. If they raised them, he could dart to his right and hide behind the recliner off to the side of the couch. It might not stop a bullet, but it might give him time to get back to his bedroom and grab the gun.
Of course, he didn’t want to do any of that. Assuming Marcus was also armed, Gabe had no desire to take on three people.
“But,” Marcus said, “what I don’t understand is why, if you’re too principled to work for your sleazy oil baron dad, why you would choose your current line of work. I mean, it doesn’t seem any higher up on the moral ladder.” Marcus turned up his palms and smirked. “Right? Am I right, Gabe?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gabe said. His voice had come out like a whisper, although he had tried to push the words out with conviction.
Marcus pointed at the laptop on the coffee table. “Is that your primary computer?”
Gabe said nothing, and Marcus tilted his head at one of the two grunts in the back. One of them snatched the laptop and slid it inside his suit coat.
“What’s she calling herself? Ember? Your boss?”
Gabe kept his eyes on the floor, although he couldn’t stop the flush from spreading on his cheeks. He didn’t know if they could see it, but he tried his hardest to breathe slower to calm himself.
Marcus nodded. “Yeah, Ember. You know that’s not her real name, right?”
When Gabe couldn’t help but look up, Marcus grinned. “You didn’t know, did you? Well, maybe you should have a conversation with her about coming clean. Ask her how she got into your little assassins’ guild so easily. I think you might find her answers incredibly enlightening.”
“What do you want?”
“Just to talk, Gabe. Let’s have a conversation about your future.”
“You want me to work for the FBI?”
Marcus laughed. “No, son, I’m not offering you a job. More like an opportunity to cooperate to keep yourself out of jail.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, Gabe had tired of Marcus’ snide attitude and his circular questions. He tried to say as little as possible. In classes at the Boulder Branch, they’d taught Gabe about police interrogations. He learned that cops—and in this case, FBI—want you to think they already know all the answers to the questions they’re asking. The best strategy is to keep your mouth shut.
When Marcus sat back with pursed lips for almost a full minute, staring, Gabe decided he’d had enough. He worked to swallow the lump in his throat, then he pointed at the door. “I think you should leave. I’m not going to answer your questions, and if you were here to arrest me, we wouldn’t be chatting in my living room. So, you can go now. I still have rights.”
“Sure, sure,” Marcus said, nodding, pushing out his lip and wrinkling his brow as if Gabe had said something profound. After a sigh, he said, “Did you know your downstairs neighbor is big-time drug dealer? The DEA is all over him. You should move.”
He then reached back into his pocket and pulled out a business card, which he dropped on the coffee table. “Loyalty to that woman is going to get you killed. Loyalty to me could save your life. There is no in-between. That’s the one thing I want you to take away from our conversation.”
Marcus craned his neck around to motion to his two henchmen, then he flicked his head toward the door. He stood, and all three of them started walking toward the door.
“I’ll give you a few days to think it over,” Marcus said. “Next time we talk, I’m going to need an answer. Ember, or me and the FBI. Those are your choices. And, if I don’t like your choice, or if I find out you’ve said my name to her, I’m going to pass that unhappiness on to you. Believe me.”
He reached into his pocket before realizing Marcus had walked out with his phone. He didn’t worry about them hacking his phone and laptop, because no way could those FBI yokels break his phone’s encryption. But, he had a more immediate problem: no way to contact Ember.
Gabe ran back into his bedroom to grab his backup laptop, because there were websites he could use to send text messages. But when he opened it, he had no internet. The wifi icon was dimmed. He checked the router, sitting atop a mass of cables on his desk. The ethernet light wasn’t blinking.
They’d probably cut his internet connection for the same reason they’d taken his phone and computer: so he couldn’t react impulsively and contact Ember right away to inform her about this FBI visit. But now, he had no way to tell her he was going to be late to meet her at the park in Broomfield.
He could maybe ask to borrow a neighbor’s phone or leach onto someone else’s wifi, but doing that might take too long. Every second he wasn’t on the road was another second Ember could be in danger.
“Damn it,” Gabe said as he sprinted back to the living room, grabbed his backpack and sniper rifle, and then hurried out his front door. He had to hope he wasn’t too late to help her.
Chapter Thirty-Five
QUINN
Quinn left the van running as he packed up the tent. He kept looking around for pedestrians, but no people had wandered this way since he’d started breaking down the scene. Late October, cold, remnants of snow on the ground, no dogs out with their owners. A couple of cars had driven by, but to the casual eye, nothing appeared wrong out here. He would still change the van’s plates on the way home, just to be sure.