The Shadow Agent

by Daniel Judson

  “What surveillance?”

  “Audio and video. Right there in that hotel room.”

  “You’ve seen it.”

  Carrington nodded.

  He gave Tom a moment to process this before speaking.

  “You should know, Tom, that there’s a chance that Raveis already knows what I know and sees our meeting as a way of gauging your loyalty by what you’ll tell him and what you won’t. If you do decide to lie to him—if you choose to trust me over him—and he knows what I’m up to, then you’re screwed. He’s a fucker, Tom. It’s his nature and it’s his profession. Don’t put anything past him.”

  Tom remembered Raveis’s warning about Carrington saying and doing whatever he needed to say or do to get to Tom.

  But Raveis’s warning about Carrington’s ability to manipulate Tom could also be said about Raveis.

  He would do or say whatever was necessary to get Tom to remain in his employ.

  After all, he’d done and said a lot to get Tom to join up in the first place.

  Tom asked, “Is Raveis the one who framed you?”

  “I can’t prove that, but it’s possible. What I am certain of is that there’s a shadow agent inside the organization. High up, too. The problem with finding out who it is, is that everyone takes orders from someone, even the Colonel. The men who run him are some of the most powerful men in the world. And men in power, they tend to do whatever it takes to keep their power. Or to get more.” Carrington paused again. “Anyway, Tom, this isn’t about me. I made my deal with the devil. I deserve what I get. This is about you, and the people you care about. This is about the shitstorm you and they are in because of me.”

  “How would I find your friend?”

  “On the next floor up, to the right of the door, you’ll see a fresh hole in the wall. Reach down through it till you feel a small leather bag. Everything you need is on a flash drive inside that bag. If you are going to do this, you can’t give Raveis any reason to doubt you. You’ll need to go back, debrief him, tell him what I told you to tell him, and continue to do your job. Then find a chance to get away as soon as you can. I know it won’t be easy—Raveis has you on a tight leash—but you need to make it happen. The man you need to talk to is in New York, and the meeting shouldn’t take long, so you’re looking at an hour, tops. There is a set of instructions on the flash drive—how to contact him, what to do once you do. Follow those instructions to the letter, because they’re as much about your safety as his. And you’ll have to keep your team in the dark. You need to be very careful from now on who you trust.”

  “How do I reach you if I need to?”

  “You don’t. This is it for us, this was our one shot. I was never here, Tom. We talked, but via devices, not face-to-face. That’s what Raveis’s team needs to think when they get here. That’s the only way my people and I can make a clean getaway. Understand?”

  “The data on the tablet and phone will prove we were in the same building when we talked.”

  “Both devices are infected with a virus. I’ll activate it remotely. All the intel they contain will be scrubbed.”

  Tom thought about that. “You’ve covered everything, haven’t you?”

  “That’s the thing about living in hiding; you have a lot of time to think. But you know all about that, don’t you?”

  Tom nodded.

  “This isn’t the life I wanted for you,” Carrington said. “I’m sorry I got you involved with these people. We’ll call this my atonement, okay?”

  Before Tom could reply, a faint chiming sound came from one of Carrington’s pockets.

  It echoed in the chasm between them.

  Carrington reached in, pulled out a smartphone, and glanced at the display.

  “They’re almost here.” He returned the phone to his pocket. “There’s something else in that bag upstairs. In case you have any doubts, it should help convince you that I’m not full of shit. I want you to know that I haven’t had a drink since Vermont. And I don’t plan on having one anytime soon. It seems that my instinct for self-preservation is stronger than my tendency toward self-destruction. Imagine that, right? Worse comes to worst, at least I won’t die a drunken traitor in your eyes.”

  Tom heard the sound of a vehicle pulling up outside.

  “They made good time,” Carrington said. “They must really want me dead.”

  The vehicle rolled to a stop. Car doors opened and closed.

  “Stay safe, Tom. Be careful who you trust. And for now, everyone needs to stay where they are. Do you understand?”

  Carrington knew, of course, that Tom’s first impulse would be to find Stella and pull her out of training so he could put her somewhere safe.

  That impulse was strong in Tom right now, and it would take everything he had to fight it.

  But he nodded and said, “I understand.”

  “She’s safest where she is—for now, anyway. I know it must drive you crazy to think about what she’s being put through. Like I said, living in hiding gives you a lot of time to think.”

  A door downstairs opened, and several sets of footsteps were audible from three floors below.

  Tom turned his head toward the sound, held it there for two seconds, then looked again across the courtyard.

  Carrington was gone.

  He listened to the sound of pounding footsteps, realized right away that it was two sets of boots he was hearing—one coming from Carrington’s floor and the other from the floor directly above him.

  By the heaviness of that second set of boots, Tom concluded that Carrington’s bodyguard was a man.

  Both men now were running for their lives.

  Within seconds, both sets of footfalls had faded, and Tom broke into a sprint for the stairs.

  Nine

  He pocketed the phone as he made his way up to the fourth floor.

  Stepping through the door, Tom began a visual search of the wall to the right, just as Carrington had instructed.

  Twenty feet away, at about waist height, was a boot-size hole.

  Broken bits of plaster and white dust on the plank floor directly below it indicated that someone had kicked this opening in the wall recently.

  Tom hurried to the hole, reached in, and extended his arm down till he touched the leather bag. Grabbing it by the handle, he pulled it up and through, then dropped to one knee and laid the bag on the floor, unzipping it.

  Inside was a gallon-size Ziploc bag, the flash drive held to it by a piece of tape. Tom tore the drive free and pocketed it before picking up the Ziploc.

  The weight of it was instantly familiar, and yet what it contained was the last thing he was expecting to see.

  It was pistol—a 1911, but not just any 1911.

  This one had all the features of a World War II–era government model Colt 1911A1—Parkerite finish, short trigger, spur hammer, GI-style sights, and an arched mainspring housing with lanyard loop.

  For a moment Tom was perplexed, but all it took was one glance at the serial number located on the right side of the frame and above the trigger for him to realize the implications.

  Stella had given this very 1911 to Tom two years ago when he was in need of an untraceable weapon.

  Her father, who as a young marine had survived the horrors of the Chosin Reservoir, had brought the Colt back with him from Korea and handed it down to her as one of his most prized possessions.

  There was, then, no paperwork connecting her, or anyone, to this relic.

  Tom had used the Colt for his first kill, and several days after that, the Colonel had personally assured him that the weapon had been destroyed and therefore could never be used to link him to that operation.

  Disposing of it, per the Colonel’s orders, was just one of several steps that had been taken to keep Tom in the clear.

  The presence of this weapon, sealed in a Ziploc bag with a magazine inserted into the grip, raised the possibility that his fingerprints and residual DNA remained not only on the weapon but also on t
he mag and however many rounds it still held.

  But it was more than just that.

  There was every reason to believe that any and all trace evidence had been intentionally preserved, and there could be only one reason for that.

  Tom didn’t have time for any of the questions that rushed to mind.

  His first instinct was to destroy this weapon once and for all, but he didn’t have the means to do that now, so his only option was to find a way to dispose of it that would ensure he’d be rid of it for good.

  He considered concealing it on his person and taking it with him; any of the numerous bodies of water that surrounded New York would serve as a suitable depository.

  But the risk of the weapon being discovered on his person before he could do that was too great.

  His only choice was to stash it here and come back for it another time.

  Returning the Ziploc to the leather bag, he rose to his feet and stuffed the bag back in through the hole in the wall, lowering it till it came to rest on the crossbeam nearly three feet below.

  Then he hurried to one of the broken windows that overlooked the courtyard, reaching it just as the first of Raveis’s men appeared below, guided by the tracking device to the spot where Tom had been told to drop it.

  Raveis’s point man entered the courtyard with his carbine shouldered, his body squared behind it. He moved with a soldier’s glide, hunched forward slightly, and scanned the confined space through his sights, his finger inside the trigger guard.

  A second man appeared right behind him.

  It was Garrick, his commando-length AR also shouldered and raised. The first man stepped to the right upon entering, and Garrick moved to the left, both men skirting close to a wall as they pressed forward.

  With neither man yet aware of him lurking three floors above, Tom took this moment to check on the drop phone.

  Its display was lit but didn’t remain so for long.

  Flickering once, then again, the screen went blank as the virus-infected phone died in his hand.

  Raveis’s man and Garrick had reached the empty case on the floor. They were looking down at the tracking device when Tom spoke.

  “Up here.”

  Both men looked up.

  Raveis’s man said, “Where is he?”

  His words sounded more like a demand than a question.

  Tom understood the reason for the man’s tone—he and his teammates had raced here to kill a traitor, and even for the kind of men who Raveis handpicked for his own detail, the idea of being seconds away from a cold-blooded execution had to have an effect.

  Tom removed the tablet from his coat pocket and held it for the man to see. “He wasn’t here.”

  The remainder of the kill team—two more men—entered, Torres with them.

  “We need to get moving,” Tom said. “Raveis will want my report.”

  Ten

  The vehicle was a GMC Yukon XL Denali—an eight-seat luxury-trimmed SUV with a 6.2-liter, 420-horsepower, V8 engine that generated 460 ft-lbs of torque.

  Tom was in a center-row seat, passenger side, and one of Raveis’s men was beside him.

  The driver was the point man who Tom had spoken with in the courtyard. In his midthirties, this man had short-cropped dark hair and a few days’ growth of stubble on his face, so he was likely one of the suited and well-groomed men who Raveis always kept around him, only playing an undercover role tonight.

  Tom took note of the fact that the man had to have known about this job in advance, otherwise he’d be more clean-shaven; unless, of course, he was a very recent hire or had come back to work after a few days off.

  Either way, the man had the same bearing that all the men who surrounded Raveis had—that mix of athleticism, intelligence, and an alpha-male intensity that bordered on menace.

  These traits weren’t exclusive to former Special Forces operators—the pool of talent from which Raveis handpicked candidates for his private-security detail—but Tom had yet to cross paths with anyone from that rarefied world who didn’t possess those three specific traits, and in abundance.

  These consistent qualities, combined with the obvious devotion these men had to Raveis, were what led Stella to refer to them as zealots.

  Tom did not disagree with that assessment.

  In the front passenger seat was Garrick, and the third member of the driver’s team was seated on the bank seat in the far back compartment, Torres to his right.

  Tom noted that when the driver’s eyes weren’t watching the road ahead, they were looking into the rearview mirror, sometimes at Tom, though more often scanning through the heavily tinted rear window for any indication of a tail.

  The SUV, guided by the onboard GPS, moved through the streets of Ansonia toward the highway.

  Tom studied the traffic lights and streetlamps and telephone poles as they passed but saw no surveillance cameras mounted on any of them.

  And after just a few turns, the SUV was entering Route 8, which would take them south to I-95, and from there straight into New York.

  Tom realized that the entire meeting had been carefully choreographed, everything planned down to the minute, including the time needed for Tom to make it to the fourth floor and recover the items Carrington had left for him.

  The use of cell phones guaranteed that no one would hear Carrington’s side of the conversation, should Tom have arrived wired or carried with him some kind of recording device.

  The abundant broken windows were likely to render ineffective any laser-assisted listening device, had Raveis dared to send a surveillance team that managed to embed itself unseen by Carrington’s spotters.

  The short notice, along with the assumption that Carrington would have the designated location watched, prevented the planting of a bug inside the factory, as did the size of the factory itself, which would have required an unknowable number of devices.

  Tom doubted that he could have matched this level of tradecraft on his best day.

  More than that, it caused him to see his former CO—the person who had been in his life the longest—in a new light.

  He was dwelling on that when the driver spoke.

  The man’s eyes were on the rearview mirror, focused not on Tom but rather on something in the distance behind them.

  “Eyes up,” he announced. “We may have picked up a tail.”

  The man next to Tom responded immediately by turning his head, as did the man in the far back seat.

  Tom glanced over his left shoulder and looked past Torres toward the rear window.

  He spotted the headlights of a vehicle in the passing lane, roughly one hundred feet back and approaching quickly.

  There were other sets of headlights behind that vehicle, three by Tom’s count, but those were farther away and appeared to be maintaining both their relative distance and rate of speed.

  This highway was well lit, more so than most, and Tom could easily see that the set of headlights closing in on them belonged to a beat-up white Ford Bronco.

  As the vehicle drew nearer, Tom sought its driver, but every time the Bronco passed under one of the many overhead floodlights, a rolling glare was cast upon the windshield, blocking his view.

  When the vehicle was between the highway lights—for thirty seconds, max—all that could be seen of the interior was the vague silhouette of a single head.

  “It’s been behind us since right before we got on the highway,” the driver noted.

  Torres said, “Tap the brakes, let it pass.”

  “We’re almost at the exit for the Merritt Parkway. I’ll get off there, see if it follows.”

  “It would be better to stay on this highway,” Tom offered.

  The man next to Tom asked why.

  “Because there are a couple of stretches of no-man’s-land on the Merritt,” Tom answered. “If we’re worried about a tail, then this road is better. It’s well lit and wide, and the state police patrol it regularly. The Merritt is only two lanes and winds through some
wooded areas. A tail will stand out more on the highway, but it could close easier on the Merritt.”

  The driver ignored Tom and maintained his current speed.

  The Bronco continued to close.

  Maybe fifty feet now.

  Looking forward, Tom saw the southbound exit for the Merritt up ahead. He glanced down at the speedometer. The Denali had been doing seventy-five, but within a matter of a few seconds, its speed had increased to eighty.

  “You don’t want to get pulled over with select-fire weapons in your vehicle,” Torres said.

  The man next to Tom said, “We’re credentialed.”

  “Which the state troopers will take their time confirming,” Torres replied. “While all of us sit on the side of the road with our hands zip-tied behind our backs. We don’t have time for that.” Looking forward again, she said to the driver, “Slow down.”

  The man next to Tom said, “He’s the leader.”

  “Good for him.” Torres leaned forward slightly and spoke to the driver. “The main highways are better. Tom’s right. Route 8 to I-95 is the way to go.”

  The Bronco was beside the Denali now. The man next to Tom unfastened his seat belt and turned his torso so he was facing his door—a better position from which to fire if it came to that. He was holding the grip of his carbine with his right hand, and his left hand was hovering above the window control, ready to lower the glass at a moment’s notice.

  Tom noted this man had positioned the selector switch to automatic fire.

  The man in the back said, “Hey, maybe it’s just O. J. Simpson. He’s out, right? Maybe he bought a used Bronco for old time’s sake.”

  The leader told him to stay focused.

  Tom studied the white Bronco, straining to see the driver’s face, but the dashboard lights were too dim for him to make out any details.