The Shadow Agent

by Daniel Judson

  Cahill and Sandy had remained close friends during that time, and her family farm in Connecticut, a mile from the prep school where they had met, had become his own personal Alamo.

  After the murder of Sandy’s husband, she and Cahill had needed somewhere to go where no one would look for them.

  Stella’s building, its upside-down mortgage having been paid in full by the Colonel and his associates, seemed a good place for them to stay and regroup.

  Unused and tucked away in this out-of-the-way town, it would serve as Cahill’s second secret Alamo.

  Despite Tom’s state of mind—his urgent desire to set his plan into action—he took a moment to ask Sandy if she liked living here.

  She smiled politely. “It’s a quiet little town you’ve got, I’ll give you that much.”

  “Yeah. There’s peace in boredom, though, don’t you think?”

  “I guess.”

  “Stella and I loved it here. We had a routine. Every moment we got to spend together was gold, you know. There are times I wish we’d never left.”

  Sandy nodded. Her eyes were locked with Tom’s, and there was no avoiding the sorrow they held.

  “We’re all set here,” she said finally. “Charlie’s waiting for you.”

  She stood, returned her gear to the med bag, then gathered up the bandage wrappers and tossed them into the trash.

  Walking into the hallway that separated the kitchen from the bedroom, she turned in to the bathroom and closed the door.

  With the hall now empty, Tom could see into the bedroom, where the only bed in the small apartment was located.

  By the way the blankets had been left, he knew that two people had been occupying that bed, likely rousted out of a sound sleep when his emergency text had come in.

  Suddenly he felt as though he were invading his friends’ privacy, so he turned away and began to gather his things from the table.

  Leaving the coffee, he headed downstairs.

  The ground floor appeared to be in the early stages of renovation.

  Scattered about the empty space were stacks of two-by-fours, piles of paper-wrapped Sheetrock, several pallets of floor tiles, and rolls of electrical wire.

  A partially constructed wall frame was laid out on the floor.

  Farther into the room were a table saw and a pair of sawhorses.

  Having been a Seabee—construction battalion—Tom could recognize an amateur’s work space when he saw one, and this had all the markings of that.

  In the middle of the room was an antique desk—a partner’s desk, large enough for two individuals to sit at and work facing each other. Stella had told Tom that she believed the desk had been in the building since it was first constructed in the late 1800s.

  On that desk were a laptop computer and router.

  The computer’s display showed what looked to Tom to be a secure messaging program.

  A chain of incoming and outgoing messages was visible, though Tom wasn’t close enough to read any of them.

  Cahill was nowhere to be seen at first, but then Tom heard footsteps coming up the basement stairs.

  He looked at the door and waited.

  Cahill appeared, carrying a messenger bag. Black and compact, it was made out of thick ballistic nylon.

  He walked to the desk and laid the bag upon it.

  Tom said, “Doing some renovating, I see.”

  Cahill looked around the unfinished space. “I was thinking maybe Sandy could set up a private practice here. Anyway, it gives us something to do.”

  “How is she doing?”

  “She has good days and bad.”

  “It’s a long road.”

  Cahill nodded, said nothing.

  Two years ago, the woman Cahill loved had been killed by a Chechen hit squad, shot in the chest at point-blank range in front of him.

  It seemed to Tom that Cahill and Sandy were members of a terrible club, one to which no one would want to—nor should ever have to—belong.

  Though Tom had lost loved ones, he hadn’t witnessed their murders like Cahill and Sandy had.

  He was grateful for small mercies.

  Cahill checked the laptop display for any new messages.

  “What have you got for me?” Tom said.

  Cahill minimized the chat window and maximized another one.

  On the screen now was the photograph Tom had taken of the sharpshooter he’d shot, placed side by side with what appeared to be a boot-camp graduation photo of the same man.

  “Facial recognition got a hit,” Cahill said. “I’m running the woman’s photo through now.”

  Tom stepped closer to the desk.

  Next to the laptop were his cell phone and the flash drive.

  Tom asked, “So who was he?”

  Twenty

  “His name was Walker,” Cahill answered. “Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, enlisted in the army straight out of high school. The guy was a paratrooper, Tom, served in the 82nd Airborne, but he was stripped of his jump wings and was facing a bad-behavior discharge after assaulting a medic who happened to be an immigrant from El Salvador. At the last minute, though, Walker’s discharge was averted when a general stepped in and handpicked him to be his personal driver. Walker spent the next three years stationed in Germany, but he was eventually court-martialed for another racially motivated assault. Our true natures always win out, right? After his discharge he went back to Ohio, worked a series of shit jobs, had a couple of minor run-ins with local law enforcement, then eventually fell off the radar entirely. But before he did, he managed to leave one hell of an online footprint.”

  “What kind of footprint?” Tom asked.

  “He spent a lot of time in chat rooms—neo-Nazis, white power, all that bullshit. Of course, he wasn’t just an internet warrior of hate; he also attended dozens of white supremacy rallies across the country. For a time he belonged to a group in Illinois that called itself the First Workers’ Party. A straight-up hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Walker was even recruited by a militia group in Kentucky to teach military tactics. He spent at least a half dozen weekends in the woods showing them everything he knew.” Cahill paused. “Frankly, Tom, I’m glad this asshole is dead. He was a disgrace to his jump wings. Too many men from the 82nd got killed fighting Nazis, and here’s this moron teaching neo-Nazis modern shock-troop techniques.”

  “You said he fell off the radar at one point.”

  “That’s where it gets interesting. The general who handpicked Walker to be his driver is a man named Graves.”

  Cahill opened another screen, replacing the images of Walker with a photograph of an older man.

  It was a standard military portrait, with an American flag serving as the backdrop and the subject, in his dress uniform, facing the camera squarely. The man—midsixties, Tom guessed—wore a scowl on his weathered but taut face.

  “One of the first things I learned when I enlisted was that the attainment of high rank was no guarantee of character and wisdom. In fact, in many cases, it was the exact opposite. We tend to want to think our generals are the cream of the crop, disciplined and honorable men, but more than a few of the ones I’ve crossed paths with over the years were useless—or worse, self-serving and arrogant pricks. It seems General Graves here was the latter. Five years ago he got caught up in a bribery scandal. Large sums of cash were exchanged for military contracts, and he was the intermediary, bringing the right Pentagon officials together with interested business leaders, all for a share of the profits. He was under investigation by the DOJ when he abruptly disappeared.”

  Cahill switched back to the two photos of Walker.

  “About a month after Graves goes dark is when our man Walker here falls off the radar as well. And stays off for six months.”

  “He was somewhere being trained,” Tom said.

  “That would be my conclusion as well.”

  “But trained by whom?”

  “No one we know,” Cahill said.

&
nbsp; “How can you be sure of that?”

  “He exited the country on his passport, bound for Serbia. Raveis has no training compounds there. He’s strictly US.”

  “You’re positive about that.”

  “Yes.” Cahill paused, looked at Tom. “You’re thinking Raveis has something to do with the attack.”

  “I’m not sure what to think.”

  “I know the two of you have had your differences, but the close-protection agents escorting you were his men, Tom. You mentioned Lyman. I know him; he was a SEAL, decorated, four tours of duty. Raveis is an asshole, yes, no argument from me, but having his own men killed, that’s a lot even for him. And sacrificing a Tier 1 asset like Lyman—I just don’t see Raveis doing that. Plus, you said he gave you that vest before you left. Why would he do that if he was planning on having you killed?”

  “The vest would only protect me from pistol-caliber rounds. It’d be useless against Walker’s .308.” Tom shrugged. “Who knows, maybe this conversation is the very reason he gave it to me.”

  “To raise doubts about his guilt.”

  “Get us to waste our time sorting through all the contradictions. Confuse us into inaction.”

  “Psy-ops,” Cahill said.

  Tom nodded. “There was a woman with Raveis. It was her meeting. All I got was a last name. Slattery. Ever hear of her?”

  “No.”

  “She knew all about me—the Algerian, my father, what happened in Vermont. She knew about all of us. Her accent was predominantly southern, but it was a strange mix of southern.”

  “Like you hear from military brats? After a childhood spent moving post to post, picking up inflections from here and there?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We should probably at least find out who she is. And sooner rather than later.”

  “I’ve got someone for that.”

  “Someone you can trust.”

  “Yes.” Tom looked at the laptop. “How’d you get all this information on Walker so fast?”

  “The Colonel has been interested in Graves for a while now, has teams of profilers gathering everything they can on the man and his associates.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he suspects that Graves has done what disgraced generals sometimes do.”

  “Betray their country,” Tom said.

  Cahill nodded. “If Walker was sent by Graves to kill you, then that’s the link the Colonel has been looking for.”

  “What link?”

  “The one that connects Graves with the Benefactor.”

  “Graves is building his own private army,” Tom concluded.

  “And he’s either subcontracting his men out to the Benefactor or worse—they’re directly allied and pooling their resources.”

  “How many associates does Graves have?”

  “We’ve accounted for close to fifty. All former military. But I’ve heard estimates of over a hundred. Our recruiters had actually looked at some of the same men after they separated from their respective branches, but in every case their social media activity was enough to rule them out as possible recruits.”

  “Neo-Nazis?”

  “Not all, but enough. Every one of them, though, was either pissed off about something specific or disgruntled about everything in general. The classic loner-victim profile—the kind of person we know to avoid because they’re often looking for an excuse to pull a trigger as opposed to dreading the day they might have to. So if the estimates are correct, that means Graves has at least a company of operators like that.”

  Tom thought about the implications. “His own zealots,” he said finally, recalling Stella’s observations about the men whose loyalty to Raveis was so apparent.

  “Every authoritarian has them.” Cahill continued. “You’re not the only one of us to have a run-in with some of Graves’s men. A three-man team was ambushed and killed in New Orleans six months ago. And a deep-cover operator in Miami—one of our best—was assassinated a few months after that. Both instances resulted in some of the attackers being killed. In New Orleans it was a mercenary from South Africa and an American. In Miami, it was two Americans. In both cases, the Americans fit the same pattern as Walker here. Former US military, angry, few prospects, and a sudden trip to Europe that lasted six months or more. The fact that the New Orleans team was comprised of a foreign-born merc and an American was what first raised the concerns that Graves was working with the Benefactor.” Cahill stopped to give Tom time to take all that in, then said, “The prisoner you took, any idea what her nationality is?”

  “She hasn’t spoken.”

  “She was searched for intel?”

  Tom nodded. “Yeah, nothing.”

  “Normally, we’d turn someone like that in for interrogation. It seems that option is out of the question for you.”

  “I’ll see what I can get out of her when I get to the safe house.” Tom paused. “There were certain lines I swore I’d never cross.”

  Cahill took a breath, let it out. “When it comes to loved ones, I don’t think there is a line.”

  Two years ago, Cahill had hunted down and killed the man who had ordered the murder of the woman he loved.

  A woman Cahill had done his best to keep hidden and safe.

  Tom had been standing beside Cahill when Cahill had crossed the line separating justice and vengeance.

  Cahill hadn’t thought twice about it, and neither had Tom.

  “It’s not an easy thing to do right,” Cahill said. “Interrogation, I mean. We’re taught the techniques, we endure some of them as part of our training, that’s one thing, but to actually apply them, that’s something else. And it takes a certain kind of person to be on one of the Benefactor’s hit teams. They make Raveis’s zealots look like Boy Scouts. For them, there aren’t any lines to cross.”

  “The thing is,” Tom said, “I don’t think that’s what this was. I don’t think the attack on me was just an assassination attempt.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The explosive that sent us off the road was only powerful enough to take off the front tire and disable the vehicle. If whoever put it there wanted me dead, they would have opted for something bigger, don’t you think? Blow me into a few hundred pieces, do the job that way, eliminate the need to deploy a kill squad altogether.”

  “Maybe whoever planted it couldn’t sneak in anything larger.”

  Tom nodded toward the flash drive. “Or maybe someone didn’t want that destroyed.”

  Cahill looked at the device.

  “The explosive had to have been put in place before Lyman left New York,” Tom said. “I assume Lyman was as well hidden as the rest of the Colonel’s assets, so that means the device had to have been put there by someone on the inside.”

  “We should keep in mind that Carrington was one of our best recruiters. He knows a lot of our people, and he’d know how to get to them. Where their families are, what their weaknesses may be. He could have coerced someone inside the organization into doing that for him.”

  Tom shook his head.

  Cahill asked, “Why so certain?”

  “We were heading home down Route 8,” Tom said. “That’s a wide and relatively flat highway. If the device had been detonated there, the SUV would have spun out or maybe rolled once, but either way, everyone inside would have been easy pickings. The kill squad would have overwhelmed us with immediate force on terrain like that, killed us while we were still in our seats, recovered the flash drive, then gotten back into their vehicle and taken off. A minute, tops, maybe less. But it didn’t work out that way. We got . . . lucky.”

  Cahill said, “And since it was Carrington who gave you the flash drive in the first place, why would he want it back? And want it back intact? I see your point.”

  “It was someone inside the organization,” Tom said. “Someone who knew what vehicle Lyman would be using to take my team and me back to New York. Someone who had access to Lyman’s vehicle for the time it would take to att
ach a precision explosive device. That person not only had to know about the meeting with Carrington in advance but also the where and the when so his team could be waiting, ready to launch their attack.”

  Cahill looked at the flash drive again. “And that someone had to know the reason for the meeting,” he added. “He had to know what Carrington was planning on giving you. Which is?” He looked at Tom.

  “Instructions.”

  “Instructions for what?”

  “Meeting with a man who has information about my father.”

  “What man?”

  “Carrington didn’t give me a name. But the man claims that he was in the hotel the night my father was killed. In the next room.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Monitoring surveillance. Audio and visual. And apparently, he was supposed to be my father’s backup, but something happened.”

  Cahill paused. “That sounds like an operation.”

  Tom nodded. “That’s what Carrington seems to think.”

  “Did he tell you what information this man had?”

  “No.” Tom paused. “But it seems what we’ve all been told—that my father was driven to revenge and went rogue—isn’t the whole story.”

  Cahill thought for a moment. “I had no idea, Tom. I would have told you if I’d known.”

  “I know.”

  “It makes you wonder what other lies we’ve been told.”

  Tom told him about the Colt that Carrington had left for him.

  “You saw it,” Cahill said. “It’s definitely the same one?”

  “The serial numbers were right,” Tom said. “It looked like it had been preserved, too. So any fingerprints or DNA I left on it could be used against me.”

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  “If Carrington is right, Tom, if there is a shadow agent high up in the organization, then we’re all pretty much fucked, no matter who it is.”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  Cahill let out a breath, studied Tom for a moment, then nodded and said, “I think I know what it is you really came all the way up here to ask for.”

  “Grunn’s taking care of Hammerton,” Tom said. “Torres and Lyman are in a safe house. Krista and Valena are off the radar, and Sandy is here with you. That leaves Stella. I can only guess where she is right now, and I have no way of reaching her. We set up a system before Raveis separated us, a way to communicate secretly via email, but she won’t have online access for another three days. I can’t wait that long.”