Silent Threat

by Jeff Gunhus

  “Asshole,” Al-Saib mumbled. “Give me some water.”

  Scott walked over to the room service tray. It was still covered with a half-eaten meal on fine China and silverware. Only the best at the Four Seasons. He looked over the remains. “Surf and turf,” he said, nodding. “Not a bad call. I would have gone for the crab cakes myself. You are in DC, after all.” He picked up a bottle of water, twisted the cap off to break the seal, then put it on loosely. He tossed it in the air. Al-Saib’s reflexes weren’t quite fast enough, and the bottle hit his stomach where he’d been shot. He cried out in pain.

  “Oh shit, sorry,” Scott said, not meaning it. “My bad.”

  Al-Saib pushed with his feet until his head was up against the wall behind him. With some effort, he worked his way up into a half-sitting position. Then he groped the floor next to him until he found the bottle. Clumsily, he managed to get the top off, raise it to his lips, and slurp the water down.

  Scott snapped a couple of photos with his phone of the room and meal.

  “I wonder what your buddies living back in their desert huts, living on old Russian MREs are going to think about this meal,” he said.

  “Like I give a shit,” Al-Saib said in perfect English. Well, the traces of his New Jersey accent were still there, so it was hardly perfect.

  “There you go,” Scott said, picking a french fry off the room service plate. “This’ll be much easier in English.”

  “This isn’t going to be anything,” Al-Saib said. “I want my lawyer.”

  Scott laughed so hard that bits of the french fry went flying. “Sorry, but damn, that was a good one. What do you think’s going to happen here? That you’re going to end up in Gitmo or some country club prison in Virginia? You ought to know better than that.”

  Al-Saib stared at him, the hate burning in his eyes. “A CIA operation right in DC. How many laws are you breaking right now?”

  “Just the right number to put you in the ground,” Scott said. “But let’s just keep that between the two of us. My boss thinks I’m on vacation in the Bahamas.”

  A fleeting look of fear passed behind the man’s eyes, a rare moment of weakness.

  “You’re unsanctioned.” It wasn’t a question, just a resigned understanding.

  Scott pulled up a chair, a fancy Louis XIV number with carved legs and arms. He sat in it, face-to-face with Al-Saib, his Sig Sauer 226 with the SRD 9 suppressor resting across his lap. “Some guys like to fish or golf on their time off. I enjoy tracking assholes like you and putting them out of commission. It makes me happy. Maybe I could have you mounted and put on the wall in my den.”

  “I know a guy who can do the work for you.”

  “I bet you do,” Scott said. He leaned forward. “This is more than a social call. There are a few questions I’d like answered.”

  “Like why I let you track me here?” Scott’s face must have registered his surprise because Al-Saib shook his head. “You think the errors I made weren’t on purpose? Who’s to say who was the hunter and who was the hunted?”

  “Where I come from down in Georgia, the animal shot in the gut, bleeding out all over the place, is usually considered the one who got hunted.”

  Al-Saib laughed, but it turned into a coughing fit, blood spraying from his mouth. Scott figured he might have less time than he originally thought.

  “Let’s get down to business,” he said. “You know what I want.”

  “You want to know about Omega.”

  “Yes.”

  “And if I tell you what you want?” Al-Saib asked. “I get medical attention? I go free? What?”

  “ID the leaders. Tell me the names of the men in my government who are part of this,” Scott said, “and I’ll shoot you square between the eyes.”

  Al-Saib leaned back and closed his eyes. “You can do better than that.”

  “I could promise you medical care, asylum, all that, but we’re both professionals. We know none of that’s going to happen. All I can offer you is a quick death over slowly dying from that gut shot. We both know how that goes. The bullet ruptured the intestine, probably the colon, too, by the smell of it. It could be days until you die, but you will die.”

  Al-Saib took another drink of water. Scott noticed the man check his watch as he did it. It was a minute movement, probably one most people would have missed. The simple act sent a burst of adrenaline through his system. He regripped the Sig Sauer and looked to the door.

  “Expecting someone?”

  “I wasn’t hunting you to kill you,” Al-Saib said. “If I had been, you’d have been dead months ago. I drew you here because I was instructed to make you a proposal,” Al-Saib said.

  “Oh yeah? How’s that working out for you?”

  “It could be going better,” he said.

  Scott stood and walked quickly across the room to the door. It was a large suite, not the Presidential, but the next level down. Still, it was the kind of room used by the rich, famous, and paranoid. For security, there was a video panel by the door with a view of the private foyer outside the door, as well as the hallway. The video feed for the hallway was black. The foyer-cam showed one second of image before it, too, went blank.

  But the one second was enough to show a man reaching toward the camera and spraying it with paint. Right before he did, Scott spotted at least two additional men in suits crouched near the ground, both with suppressed MP5s.

  “Damn it,” Scott said. He hated when a mission went to shit.

  “Where I come from,” Al-Saib said, “the one caught in the trap at the end of the chase is the hunted.”

  Scott ignored the comment. The roles had changed and he was in real trouble. He looked around the room for options, finding it funny as he did so.

  With all the terrible places he’d been in the world, from equatorial jungles and arid deserts to third world capitals and deep in enemy territory during wartime, he was amazed that he might die only a few blocks from the White House in a luxury five-star hotel.

  And if there was one thing he hated to do, it was dying. He’d tried it before and hadn’t liked it. As Al-Saib’s guards knocked on the door more insistently, he tried to figure out a way to avoid repeating the experience.

  * * *

  Scott pointed the gun at Al-Saib’s head. “Call them off or you’re dead.”

  “You said I was dead no matter what,” Al-Saib replied. “All you offered me for my cooperation was a fast death. Now you’re offering that for free.”

  There was another knock on the door. That was a good sign. The men in the hall must not have been sure there was a problem inside. Otherwise they would have knocked the door down and come in blazing. Scott already knew the two other ways out of the room; checking for egress was a habit no matter what room he walked into. There was a second door at the other end of the suite. Probably covered by Al-Saib’s men, too. Then there was the outdoor terrace. Three stories up. It was an option. Just not a very damn good one.

  “I said I sought you out for a reason. Aren’t you curious about my proposal?” Al-Saib asked. “Or who’s making it?”

  Scott crossed to the French door that opened to the terrace. He’d cleared it and the rest of the suite after shooting Al-Saib twenty minutes earlier, but he was happy to see there were not men repelling down from the floor above. That would have been a real problem.

  “You want to know where the billions of dollars came from,” Al-Saib said. “You want to know what the money is being used for. And you want to know who in your government is part of the project.” Another knock from outside. More insistent. A man’s voice called out, muffled through the heavy door.

  “You want to tell me all that?” Roberts said. “That’d be great.”

  Al-Saib laughed, wincing from the pain. “A cowboy, even now. No, the men I work for want you to join the project. You’re getting older, a little slower, it happens to all of us.”

  Scott crossed over to the terrace and checked it again. That was looking like the
best option. Only he’d have to leave Al-Saib behind.

  “You’re about to get a lot slower,” Scott said. “Like permanently slower.”

  “Think of your wife and daughters,” Al-Saib said. “Don’t you want to provide for them? Be able to protect them?” He grinned. “Wendy, Mara, and Lucy, isn’t it? They looked beautiful in the photographs, but so much better in person.”

  Scott froze. Two emotions struck him simultaneously on hearing him say their names. First was cold fear like ice water poured over him. Al-Saib was a pro. If he knew the names, he might just have taken them to get leverage. Scott could endure any threat to himself, any injury, any risk of death. But danger to his family was unacceptable.

  This led to the second simultaneous emotion that collided with the first. Pure, unbridled anger. A rage that he always carried with him, usually in check, dormant but just under the surface, masked by his tough-guy, glib demeanor. Al-Saib had found the exact right words to wake it up and make it come alive.

  Al-Saib saw the change take place on Scott’s face because he held his hands up as he approached. “They’re not harmed . . . they’re not—”

  Scott grabbed one of the man’s arms and roughly dragged his body along the floor. Al-Saib screamed, a trail of blood extending behind him. Scott kicked open the terrace door, pushing aside the refined patio furniture in his way to the low wall on the edge.

  In one smooth movement, lifting Al-Saib like he was weightless, Scott hefted him over the edge of the wall, grabbed the cuff of his shirt, and leaned him backward. Twenty-ninth Street below had a few pedestrians on it, unaware of what was going on directly over their heads.

  “Has my family been targeted?” Scott demanded.

  Al-Saib groaned, looking down at the three-story drop beneath him.

  Scott reached with his other hand and dug his fingers into the bullet hole he’d put into the man’s stomach earlier. Al-Saib screamed.

  “I said, has my family been targeted?”

  “You’re a fool,” Al-Saib spat. “You have no idea what you’re up against. How far Omega goes into your own government. Into every government. Men you know and call you friend betray you and you have no idea.”

  A smashing sound came from behind him. They were breaking down the door to the suite.

  “Is my family a target?” Scott snarled.

  Al-Saib had a look of peace come over him. He craned his neck to look into Scott’s eyes. “The entire world is a target. Your family is no exception.” He closed his eyes. “I told Hawthorn you’d never join.”

  Scott registered the name but refused to believe it. He gripped the man tighter around the collar. “You’re full of shit. Disinformation right up to the end.”

  With a snap of wood, the door frame inside cracked. They were almost through.

  Al-Said opened his eyes, a smug satisfaction in them. “It’s your end we’re about to see. I told them this was how it would go, but they wouldn’t listen. And now look at what has to happen. What a waste.”

  “A waste? Nah, the world’s not losing much. Safe travels, Khalil. You piece of shit.”

  Scott heaved the man over the side, ripping his hands away when Al-Said tried to grab on to him. A couple of seconds later, Scott heard the wet thud of a body hitting concrete. He looked over the edge and saw the man’s broken body facedown, a halo of blood spreading around him. For being a botched plan, the result still felt strangely satisfying.

  A burst of gunfire exploded behind him and a loud crash told him the men were through the door. He knew they would shoot first and ask questions later. It was time to go.

  He leaned over and looked for a path down. At only three stories, he could risk the jump, using the couple of trees nearby to break his fall. But there were already people moving toward Al-Saib’s body. And with the new phones, everyone had a camera on them. He’d like to avoid a video of himself on the nightly news if it was possible.

  The terrace was the only one in this part of the hotel, so the wall immediately below had windows to regular rooms. Closed with no chance to somehow swing down into one. There was only one other option, and that was to go up.

  Once the decision was made, he lost no time executing. He shoved the metal table toward the windows of the suite, then leapt on top of it. There was movement and shouting inside. A bloody smear across the floor probably had something to do with it.

  The roof above the suite was flat until it got to the six-story tower in the back of the property. He jumped up, grabbing the roofline. But it was mossy and slick and he slipped backward, crashing onto the table.

  He scrambled up to his knees, his breath knocked out of him. When he looked up, he was looking through the wall of windows into the suite’s living room. Right in front of him were two men with machine guns staring back at him in shock.

  They raised their guns in unison and opened fire.

  The window right in front of his face peppered with impacts from the gunfire. Scott flinched, expecting to feel the searing pain of hot metal ripping through his flesh. But nothing came.

  The gunfire stopped and he realized what’d happened. The suite’s many windows were all bullet-resistant glass, although the designers had likely never imagined the gunfire would come from inside the building. A man shouted orders in Arabic, and one gun reopened fire on the glass. Bullet-resistant didn’t mean bulletproof. Scott didn’t intend to wait around to see how long the window would last. Not only that, but the movement he could see through the spider-webbed glass told him he wouldn’t be alone on the terrace for long.

  He made another attempt at the roof, this time knowing what to expect for his handhold. It was hard, but he was able to scramble up before anyone shot him in the ass. It was only a matter of seconds before he heard men’s voices below. He took off running across the black tar roof, ducking behind the air-conditioning units bolted to the surface. Anything to take away the line of sight between himself and the guys with the guns.

  Speaking of guns, he still had his. He considered doing a doubling-back maneuver, grabbing an ambush spot and letting the new arrivals walk into his field of fire. But as much as he loved his Sig Sauer, he didn’t like the idea of going up against an unknown number of opponents equipped with MP5s. All it would take was one misstep and it’d be a showdown with him on the wrong end of the firepower calculation. No thank you.

  Instead, he intended to go with the time-honored tradition of just running like hell.

  But even that plan had its issues. The roof ended abruptly with a thirty-foot drop into a central courtyard in the middle of the hotel complex. He spotted a door in the side of the attached tower that housed extra floors of the hotel, but that was a hundred feet away across open space with no cover. He was sure the gunmen behind him would be on the roof and after him any second.

  As if on cue, bullets zinged off the air-conditioning unit next to him, sparking against the sheet metal.

  With only a two-step run, he leapt from the roof, arms and legs frantically moving to get every last inch of horizontal distance. He hit the small branches of the tree first, crushing them like twigs. But these gave way to thicker branches that slowed his fall, then abruptly to a main branch that stopped him with a jolt to the side of his rib cage. There was a loud crack and he wasn’t sure if it was the branch or his ribs. From the way it felt, he guessed it was both.

  The primitive part of his brain, the instinctual part that somehow sensed danger before it even happened, told him to move. He pushed off the branch and fell the last eight feet to the brick sidewalk just as the tree above him was peppered with machine gunfire.

  He rolled on his shoulder and came up running, his ribs screaming in pain. The bricks around him came alive with chips flying up in the air as the gunman tracked his movements. Scott zigzagged his way through the courtyard toward an opening to the street. Just as he made the entrance, white-hot pain exploded in his calf and sent him tumbling forward. Having been shot over a dozen times in his career, he knew exactly what
it was. Not that knowing made it any less painful.

  He pulled himself up using the brick wall and staggered out of the hotel property. He tasted blood in his mouth, a sign that one of his broken ribs might have punctured a lung. His leg was a bloody mess and pretty much useless. There was a narrow sidewalk in front of him, then a strip of well-tended grass followed by a wall of trees along the C&O Canal. He knew what he had to do. Plans B and C were long gone. He wasn’t sure what variation of his mission plan he was on now. Maybe P or Q. But as the old saying went, every plan became worthless after first contact with the enemy. Damn if that wasn’t true.

  He hopped on his good foot down to the water’s edge and waded in. The C&O Canal ran through Georgetown, a relic from a time when barges were pulled up and down the waterway for trade. The water was flat, dark, and stale. Bits of floating trash dotted the surface, and it smelled like a sewer. Scott could only imagine the zoological wonders crawling into the open wound on his leg.

  Sirens erupted in the distance. This was the nation’s capital, after all. Machine gunfire at an establishment with Pennsylvania Avenue in its address drew an immediate and what would surely be a massive response. He knew they’d be too late to save his sorry ass, though. He was on his own.

  He hugged the edge of the waterway and lowered himself until he was completely submerged except for his head. Seconds later, faster than he’d expected, he heard Arabic voices coming his way. He took a deep breath and went underwater.

  Grabbing handfuls of the slimy mud on the bottom, he pulled himself downstream, moving methodically so as not to leave a wake on the surface above him. This was a high-risk, high-reward move. If he made it around the bend in the waterway into Rock Creek, then he was in good shape. If they spotted him before that, he was a fish to be shot in a barrel.

  God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

  The Serenity Prayer, commonly used in twelve-step meetings like Alcoholics Anonymous, served him well on missions. He recited it again, pulling his way hand over hand through muck, fighting to keep his legs from floating up to the surface behind him. He couldn’t change the fact that he was in the water with gunmen on the prowl on the shore looking for him. All he could do was disguise his movements to the best of his ability and keep underwater for as long as possible.