by L. T. Ryan
Noble Ultimatum
Jack Noble Book Thirteen
L.T. Ryan
Copyright © 2021 by L.T. Ryan. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book. This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. For information contact:
Jack Noble™ and The Jack Noble Series™ are trademarks of L.T. Ryan and Liquid Mind Media, LLC.
[email protected]
http://LTRyan.com
Contents
The Jack Noble Series
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part II
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part III
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Also by L.T. Ryan
About the Author
The Jack Noble Series
The Recruit (free)
The First Deception (Prequel 1)
Noble Beginnings
A Deadly Distance
Ripple Effect (Bear Logan)
Thin Line
Noble Intentions
When Dead in Greece
Noble Retribution
Noble Betrayal
Never Go Home
Beyond Betrayal (Clarissa Abbot)
Noble Judgment
Never Cry Mercy
Deadline
End Game
Noble Ultimatum
Noble Legend (Coming Early 2022)
Receive a free copy of The First Deception & The Recruit by visiting http://ltryan.com/newsletter.
Part 1
Chapter 1
“Why did you murder Frank Skinner in broad daylight, Mr. Noble?”
The man gripped his pen between his teeth as he slipped one arm free from his blue blazer, shifted his notebook to his other hand, then let the jacket slide onto the Victorian-era couch. He pulled the pen from his mouth, dabbing the end against his tongue. With it hovering over the blank page of his notebook, he stared unblinking over his gold-rimmed glasses at Jack Noble.
Jack held the man’s gaze for several seconds before attempting a reply. When he opened his mouth to speak, he couldn’t find the right words.
The man, whose name was Schreiber, tapped the end of his pen against his pad. The thump-thump-thump of a waltz. He glanced toward the narrow part between the drapes.
“That make you nervous?” Jack asked.
Schreiber nodded, tight and terse. His hair was pulled back into something akin to a man bun, only a little lower. “If you don’t mind?”
Jack planted both palms on the hand-carved wooded arms of the chair he occupied and pushed himself off the seat. He took note of the other man stiffening. Jack would have been concerned if the guy hadn’t. Schreiber’s occupation was that of a journalist, not a soldier or a spy or a lawyer or a cop. He wasn’t used to dealing with this element of society.
He didn’t want to acknowledge people like me existed, but he sure as hell slept better because of our existence.
The meeting had been secured through back-channel communications. The risk in reaching out had been great. Jack trusted maybe six people enough to call upon while in his current predicament. The Agency knew the names of all six. The Agency presumably monitored all incoming and outgoing emails, messages, and phone calls of the six.
And that’s what made the favor he phoned in all the more valuable. An old friend’s mentor, who had nothing to do with the life Noble led, had arranged for Schreiber to book a room at the Hotel D’Coque in Luxembourg City. Noble spent three days tailing the man, first in his home city of Dresden, Germany, then as he made the trip to Luxembourg. If anyone else had followed Schreiber, they deserved to get the jump on Jack because he had failed to spot them.
Noble spread the blinds open another inch with his scissored index and middle fingers. Dark passing clouds diffused the light streaming through the window. Gusts of wind whipped dead leaves on the sidewalk into mini-cyclones, a hint of a late-spring storm brewing.
The busy street below was lined with four- and five-story buildings. Shops and lobbies on the ground level. Offices and apartments above. From a hundred-fifty feet up, the meandering pedestrians were nothing more than flat representations of themselves. Not real. Maybe that’s what made dropping a bomb from thousands of feet up so easy to do. Noble scanned the passing throng for anyone who looked out of place. An individual overdressed for the heatwave. A guy lingering under an awning. Someone staring back at him from one of the many windows nestled in the steel and brick facades across the street.
The numbers offered anonymity. For Jack and for them. And make no mistake about it. The people hunting him were out there. Since he’d left Clarissa’s hideout in Italy, the place she insisted no one knew about, they’d been a day behind him. Had she informed someone higher up the food chain about his presence? Or had they been watching her? He watched her sleep and told her where he’d be for a little while longer. She never showed, and he hadn’t spent more than twenty-four hours in one location since.
A chance existed a few of the faces of his hunters would be recognizable. But agents came and went and died in the line of duty. Fresh recruits stepped up to take their place. The cycle repeated, depending on the state of the world, which, face it, had been shit for almost two decades now. Jack would lay odds it’d be some twenty-two-year-old fresh-faced kid wearing black glasses and carrying a Glock while possessing orders to kill on sight who would do him in.
“Mr. Noble,” Schreiber said. “I was promised a story, an exclusive story. A CIA Director was murdered in the middle of a city street. By you. Are you going to answer my questions, or should I press the send button on my phone to have the police sent to my position?”
Jack let the sheer curtain fall shut and lingered there for a moment staring at the now-hazy street. They were out there. Somewhere beyond the veil. The room darkened after he pulled the right side of the drapes over the left.
Schreiber sulked back to the table and half-rested his ass on it. The guy didn’t fancy getting too comfortable. At the moment, nothing stood between him and the door. As long as he wasn’t too relaxed, he might be able to get to it before
Jack felt like stopping him.
“Frank Skinner recruited me into the SIS in the days after I left the Marines and the CIA-sponsored program they forced me into before I had completed recruit training. He found me outside a dive bar in Key West. My first inclination was to turn him down. It’s funny. A nagging feeling tells me that’s what I should’ve done.”
Schreiber dragged his pen across his notebook. Sounded like leaves scraping the street. A few seconds later, he stopped and glanced over his glasses again. “When was this?”
“Spring, 2002, I suppose.”
“And what was your opinion of Skinner then?”
“Any opinion I had of Frank Skinner circa ’02 has been affected by the events of the past decade. And those have been washed away by what’s happened this year.”
Schreiber focused on the tip of his pen for a few moments before asking another question. “A man with your skills, you could have done this at any time. Why in the middle of the day? In the middle of a street? Why in front of so many witnesses?”
Jack had relived that moment thousands of times. Truth drenched Schreiber’s words. A planned hit would have served Noble better. He could have returned to the shadows, tracked Frank to his next destination, and taken the man’s life in the middle of the night.
“Hate.”
“Excuse me?” Schreiber said. “Hate?”
“Hatred. Pride. Hubris. Arrogance.” Jack rose from his chair and walked back to the window, eliciting a groan from Schreiber as he pulled the curtain back again. Noble squinted against the sunlight knifing through a slit in the clouds. “Take your pick, man. If I could go back to that day, I’d kill him again, same place, same manner.”
The room darkened again as he turned and let the shades fall in place.
“What specifically did Frank Skinner do to you?” Schreiber perched atop a stool with his right leg crossed over his left. His foot bounced.
“What didn’t he do? I don’t have all the evidence. OK? For all I know, every negative event that’s taken place, every person I’ve lost, every time I’ve been in danger, I can attribute it all to Frank Skinner.”
“So that’s why you did it, then? That’s why you murdered him.”
Jack stuffed his hands in his pocket. The mousy man across from him again reacted by straightening up, eyes wide, pen clutched tight as though he could use it to knock away a bullet.
“I did it because the guy was a traitor to his country. He’d been working against the States for a decade, maybe more. I didn’t murder him—and when I have all the evidence, everyone all the way up to the President will agree with me.”
“Surely you are aware you can’t act as judge, jury, and executioner, Mr. Noble.”
“Surely you are aware I can snap your neck easier than you can a pencil, Mr. Schreiber.”
Schreiber produced a tablet. He turned it horizontally in his palm and tapped on the screen several times. The muffled sound of a crowd of people speaking French floated out of the speakers.
He held the device up for Jack to see. There Noble was, in the middle of the road. Frank Skinner on his knees. A pistol aimed at Skinner’s bloody head. The quick flash of muzzle blast followed by the eruption of gunfire. People screamed and raced past the cameraman, who only stood there for a few additional moments before running off. The image jumped and panned all around. The last thing Noble saw before the footage cut off was Frank Skinner collapsing on the ground.
Dead.
Chapter 2
“What were you thinking at that moment?”
Schreiber rose from the stool, pen pressed to paper. He sucked his bottom lip into his mouth. His dangling mustache touched his chin.
Jack stared at the footage, now frozen on the image of Frank’s slumped body. Noble stood over him, eyes cast down at the lump that used to be a man he trusted at one time. How long ago had that been? Had he ever fully trusted Skinner?
And what was he thinking after he killed Frank?
“I can’t recall.”
“You can’t recall?” Schreiber deflated with a heavy sigh. “So, all I have from you is a confession? Should I call the authorities now?”
“You know you won’t make it out of the room alive if you do.”
He leveled his pen at Jack as though the thing were loaded with 9mm rounds. “That is exactly the reason I didn’t want to take this meeting. You reached out to me, Mr. Noble. You wanted to tell your story.”
Jack took a second to consider this and nodded at the guy. It had been Jack’s idea. He wanted the truth out there. Schreiber needed to ask the right questions though.
“Look, you’re wanting me to tell you what I was thinking at that time? I have no idea. Probably good riddance, Frank. Countless moments led up to me playing judge, jury, and executioner that day. I suppose I knew if I didn’t do it then, Frank would get away with it. He’d find a way to silence me for good. Christ knows he’s been trying for years.”
“Can you explain what you mean there?”
Jack revealed a few events from the past. Things that were classified, but even the classified docs didn’t tell the truth. “None of this happened during my time with the SIS. But that was a couple years later. Afterward, I worked on a contract basis. The first time I believed Skinner wanted me dead is when he offered me a job to take care of a supposed rogue agent named, Brett Taylor.”
Schreiber listened intently as Jack listed events, frequently holding up a finger asking for time to jot down his thoughts on the matter. When Jack had finished, Schreiber set his pen and notebook down on the weathered coffee table between them.
“And what about the evidence that Skinner was working against the United States?”
Jack swallowed back the lump in his throat. This was the most he’d spoken at once in a couple of months. Clarissa had left shortly after he arrived at her hideout, and she hadn’t come back. Everyone in the little village spoke Italian. Jack could get by with a few phrases, but that was it. They welcomed him into their homes, their bars, their cafes. But hardly anyone attempted to communicate with him.
“You have to take me at my word.”
Schreiber scoffed. “At your word? I can’t print any of this based on what you’ve told me. Your country thinks you are a murderous traitor. My country thinks this. The whole world thinks this, Mr. Noble. I need hard proof.”
“I know you do. That’s why I arranged our meeting.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“I need your help.”
The slim man shifted his pen to his other hand and brushed his mustache inward with his thumb and forefinger. “I can’t begin to understand what you mean by that.”
This was the risk. Jack understood that when he first made contact. Schreiber was at the top of his game. He had contacts globally who could trade in favors and provide him with the intelligence Jack would use to piece together his case against Frank. Noble’s word would never be enough. Not after the life he’d lived. But if this benign-looking journalist could gather the evidence, it could get Jack off the hook.
“I’m a wanted man. You know that. And with technology today, I can’t get within a mile of the places I need to without being caught on a surveillance system. Facial recognition, license plate readers, they’d have me surrounded before I knew they’d spotted me.”
Schreiber nodded at this. “I presumed that’s why you chose Luxembourg. An assumption they don’t have that kind of tech, when, in fact, you can’t escape it unless you stick to the smallest of towns. That is how you’ve managed so far, isn’t it?”
“More or less.”
“Have you remained in one place the entire time you’ve been off the grid?”
“More or less.” Jack smiled. The gesture seemed to influence the journalist.
Schreiber took a deep breath and let his shoulders slump and head fall forward an inch as he exhaled.
“What is it I can do for you, Mr. Noble?”
Jack proceeded to tell Schreiber the names of five
individuals placed in high-ranking positions in intelligence agencies in the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, and Israel. Schreiber committed each to memory as well as the information he needed to procure from them. His reward for this would be uncovering one of the greatest intelligence scandals the world had seen.
“Why can’t you go to these men directly?” Schreiber asked. “It’s not like years ago where you’d have to expose yourself in order to do so.”
“To get close enough, I’d have to. I can’t take that risk.”
“These men, they’d vouch for you?”
“It’s not about vouching for me. Exposing the truth. That’s what we’re after. I can live the rest of my life on the run if need be. Prefer not to. Each of those five men hold a key. I also hold something over them. As soon as you mention my name and Frank’s, they’ll know what your meeting is about.”
Noble returned to the window. He parted the drapes and curtains a foot or so. The sun had again retreated behind a silvery veil of racing clouds. Lightning flashed far off over the city skyline. The storm would arrive soon. Jack had use of the room for another night, but he wouldn’t stay. Not here. Too exposed. Too much risk now that he’d met with the journalist. He had to work on a plan to get to the small country’s border with Belgium. A friend there would allow him passage.