Assignment- Adventure A SpyCo Collection 1-3

by Craig A. Hart

  Turf exploded about them as if they were running through a minefield. Something hot creased Burke's arm. He heard the barking of dogs. They redoubled their efforts and soon plunged into the darkness of the trees. The dogs were growing ever closer and Burke palmed his USP.

  A huge form rose out of the darkness before them—the wall. Burke stopped in front of it and estimated its height, about eight feet. He dropped the briefcase and cupped his hands.

  “Give me your foot and I’ll boost you up,” he said. Lyndsey did so and soon stood on top of the wall.

  “Watch out for the barbed wire,” she called to him. “There are only a couple of strands, but it’s vicious stuff.”

  Burke handed the briefcase up to her. He was looking around for an escape route when he heard a panting sound close behind him. Jamming the USP into its holster, he jumped for a low tree branch, caught it, and felt the teeth of one dog graze his heel. He clambered higher into the branches until he was even with the top of the wall. The guard with the dogs fired a shot, but it was too dark and the shot flew by, doing nothing more than throwing a few pieces of bark into Burke’s face.

  Burke edged his way out onto the branch, trying to reach the top of the wall. The limb creaked and sagged. He crawled out a little farther and stretched out his hand. He could touch the wall from his position, but not secure a good grip.

  The branch snapped.

  Burke launched himself out, grabbing for the wall. His hands closed on something and from the sudden pain, he knew he had grasped a strand of barbed wire. The barbs dug into his palms, but he knew he could not release his grip. He clenched his teeth and pulled himself upward. Another bullet sailed by his ear. Finally, he was atop the wall. He saw Lyndsey standing on the other side.

  Without warning, the moon came out from behind a cloud, turning Burke into the perfect silhouette target. He jumped, rolling as he landed on the other side. He lurched to his feet, trying to ignore the shooting pain in his ankle. Lyndsey put a supporting arm around him and together they hurried down the hillside and toward the car.

  14

  Upon returning to their hotel, Burke opened the briefcase and looked through the papers. They appeared authentic and in perfect order. He contacted Moore and told him the good word.

  “You are still in danger, Tiger. Both you and Venus. Change hotels for the night and make immediate reservations on the next flight back to the States.”

  “Chief, I have loose ends to tie up here. Can’t we stay until—?”

  “Absolutely not! Your mission was to recover the briefcase. You have completed that assignment and must return immediately. We cannot jeopardize the integrity of the mission on mere niceties.”

  “But—”

  “Tiger, you have your orders. Carry them out.”

  Early the next morning while the sky was still dark, he and Lyndsey gathered their bags together and carried them down to the car.

  “Going somewhere, Mr. Burke?”

  Burke’s head jerked, and he stared at the speaker. “Any objections?”

  “Not as long you grant me one request.”

  “Only one?” Burke said.

  “The briefcase. You leave it with me.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Burke loaded the luggage into the car. “Thanks for your offer, but we must be going. We have a plane to catch.”

  “I would not suggest you resist, Mr. Burke. You might get hurt.”

  Burke laughed. “Pardon my skepticism, but I don’t see you taking on even one of us, much less both at the same time.”

  “I will not have to.” The little man pointed over his shoulder and Burke risked a backward glance. Three men were approaching them from out of an alley, each armed with various street weapons, clubs and chains.

  “Your henchmen, eh?”

  The man motioned to his confederates, and they moved in.

  “Before you four gentlemen beat us into unrecognizable pulps,” Burke said. “Would you mind answering one question? Who are you and what is your connection to this case?”

  “Two questions,” the dark man said, smiling. “But no matter. I am an independent agent, you might say.”

  “Independent?” Burke looked at the three menacing figures behind him.

  “I assure you those men are mercenary. They do not obey my orders out of loyalty or belief in a cause. If I were to stop paying them their wages, they would turn on me as fast as they would you.”

  “How did an independent agent get so much information?” Burke asked. “I assume you’re the one who tried to shoot me while I was driving to my hotel on my first day here and had a man waiting for me at the hotel. You seem well informed for a free agent.”

  “I must admit I have more sources than most,” the man said.

  “And those sources are?”

  “Your boss, J. Carlton Moore, for one.”

  Burke laughed. “Are you telling me the SpyCo chief leaked information to you? If that’s true, why did you ask me to kill him? You’d be losing your primary source of information.”

  “Am I to assume it was you who took a shot at me at the Parthenon?”

  “It was and if the sight had been zeroed in properly, I would have hit you, too.”

  “Then I am fortunate,” the man said. “To answer your question, the demand was to give you the idea we were offering you a bargain and not setting you up for a trap. We would not have allowed you to carry out the plan, specifically because had you met with me at the Acropolis, you would have been killed.”

  “Not very sportsmanlike of you.”

  “No, but expedient. In answer to your other question, Moore was not aware he was giving me this information, but he was nonetheless. Are you aware Mr. Moore has been battling depression?”

  “Depression? What does that have to do with—”

  “I am his psychiatrist. Throughout his visits to my office, I gathered information from him through advanced relaxation and hypnotism techniques. The system worked beautifully.”

  “You learned about the briefcase and changed professions?” Burke was finding this difficult to swallow.

  “No, Mr. Burke. I already knew about the briefcase and its importance. Had I not known, it is unlikely I would have stumbled upon any sensitive information. As it was, I could ask specific questions and get specific answers. I was a Scorpion agent even while practicing.”

  “And all the time, Moore was unaware of what was happening?”

  “Mostly, yes. Do not misunderstand. This did not happen overnight. It took a long time to condition him before I could get information.”

  “You learned the details about the mission and acted independently of Scorpion?”

  “It’s much more profitable that way. It would have been a simple matter, but I did not figure on things going wrong so quickly. And you kept getting in my way.”

  “I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you.”

  “All is well that ends well, as they say. Now, the briefcase if you please.” The man reached out his hand to take it, but instead of handing it to him, Burke grabbed his wrist and pulled the man toward him. Burke wrapped an arm around the man’s throat, holding him in front, putting him between Burke and the advancing hoodlums.

  “Call your men off, Doctor, or I’ll break your neck.” Burke slowly applied pressure. The man gagged and struggled. “Don’t try it, Doc. You’ll never get away. Your men might get me, but you’re going out with me.” He squeezed a little harder.

  “You are choking me!”

  “I’m aware of that, Doc. Call them off!”

  “All right, all right!”

  Burke relaxed his grip, but did not release the man. “Come on, tell them to get lost or I’m snapping you like a twig. I’m counting to three, Doc. One…two….”

  “All right!” The little man waved his small army away. “I have changed my mind. We will not kill these people.”

  For the first time, one man spoke. “Our money. Do we still get our money?”

  “Say, yes
, Doc,” Burke muttered.

  “Yes, of course. You will be paid.”

  “Tell them to get lost,” Burke said.

  “Go to the meeting place,” the dark-skinned man ordered. “I will meet you there with your money. Go now!”

  The three ruffians ambled away, glancing back as if waiting for a bullet in the back.

  Burke released the man, and the doctor stood, wincing and massaging his throat.

  “What are you going to do with me?”

  Burke shrugged. “Nothing. Right now, we have strict orders to return home. See you in the States?”

  “I think that most unlikely.”

  “That’s probably wise. When Moore learns you’ve taken advantage of his patient’s rights, he’ll be furious.”

  Burke reached into the car and pulled a length of rope from the pack of equipment. While Lyndsey held her gun on the little man, Burke tied and gagged their prisoner. Glancing at his watch, Burke whistled.

  “We’d better hurry if we’re going to make the plane.” He threw Lyndsey the keys. “I’ll throw this educated bum into the alley and we’ll get the hell out of here.”

  15

  The flight to New York was uneventful. Compared with what they had been through the past few days, anything short of a terrorist takeover would have been downright boring.

  Lyndsey and Burke sat there together, listening to the thrum of the engines. Lyndsey was first to break the silence.

  “Burke."

  “Yeah?”

  She paused for a moment as if unsure how to form the question she was thinking. “Do you think Stu would have approved of me?”

  It was a simple question, but Burke knew from both her tone and attitude, how important the answer was to her. Lyndsey never fished for compliments, never needed to be emotionally propped up. But her confidence as an agent had been shaken that horrible night and Burke sensed she was on the verge of recovering a little of her former self-assurance.

  “I know he would have, Lyndsey.”

  She was silent for another long moment and then said, “It was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

  Burke knew he didn’t have to answer. He felt good. Lyndsey still had a long way to go before she would be the person she had been before the unfortunate incident, but she had made a start. And that was all he needed to know.

  Assignment: Paris

  A SpyCo Novella #2

  Prologue

  Amanda Pickering wasn’t dressed for slumming. But this fact did her exactly zero good as she stood in a dark alley far from Rue de Lyon, the Opéra Bastille, and her husband, Barton Pickering III. Concern for the love of her life rose inside her chest and she tried to calm herself by picturing him pacing the venue, frustrated by her tardiness and looking scrumptious in his immaculately tailored Armani evening wear. But she feared her fantasy was merely that—a fantasy—and that something far more sinister might be at work.

  The alley wasn’t simply dark. It was black, not even brightened by a bare bulb from the only window she could see, two stories up. The rats made no attempt at hiding as they scurried about in the garbage that was the dominant decor of the area.

  Amanda looked at her watch. Precisely fifty-eight minutes ago she had hailed a cab to meet Bart at the Opéra. Her tight-fitting Carolina Herrera black gown—with strategically arranged shawl—was certain to disrupt any chance he had of paying attention to Mozart. But as soon as the cab door slammed shut, she knew she’d be late for the opening curtain. As the driver lurched into traffic, ignoring a symphony of horns and shouted curses, he reached through the narrow Plexiglas window and handed her a compact phone. It resembled a small cell, but with an antenna reminiscent of an old style cordless—a satellite.

  “Prenez le téléphone,” he grunted.

  “Merci,” she replied, not the least bit thankful. She knew whose voice she would hear. “Yes, sir?”

  As always, the voice of J. Carlton Moore sounded like a cigar being snipped for lighting. “Diva, you’re not going to the opera tonight.”

  “I had a feeling,” she said, as always wincing a bit at the use of her codename, selected for her years before she began frequenting opera houses. It’s use always meant there was trouble. “What’s going on?”

  “Barton made a serious mistake tonight. He had arranged to meet with a courier during the intermission, and was carrying some extremely sensitive documents in a titanium clutch, tucked in the inner pocket of his tuxedo.”

  “Why would he arrange to meet a courier at the opera house, when he could have just picked up his phone at the embassy and had one knocking on his office door ten seconds later?”

  “Not the kind of documents one transfers at his workplace, even if his work place is the U.S. Embassy.”

  “Jesus,” said Amanda, beginning to get the picture.

  “We’ve suspected Scorpion had ears in the embassy for some time. Now it would seem we were right. Barton was intercepted somewhere between your hotel and the opera house.”

  “He was walking? The Hotel Esméralda is all the way across the river from the Opéra.”

  “Not a bad strategy if one wants to appear carefree. Also, he knows how cab rides have a way of being…unpredictable.”

  Amanda heard the irony in Moore’s voice, as she glanced at the driver of her own taxi. His studied indifference to the conversation made it more than obvious he was used to being in the employ of SpyCo, if not actually an agent himself.

  “Did we have eyes on him?”

  “Until right before he was taken, yes, as we knew there was a chance for trouble. He took an unexpected turn onto Rue Beautreillis, we think to buy flowers.”

  “How sweet,” Amanda said, only slightly sarcastically.

  “Indeed. That was when they took him. No one saw a thing, not even the flower vendor.”

  “But we should know where they took him. He’s chipped.”

  As a high-level diplomat, Bart had been given the option to have a subcutaneous transmitter implanted somewhere on his body. Knowing, as embassy chief of communications he presented an attractive target for terrorist organizations he’d agreed and it was placed between the first and second toes on his left foot. Amanda remembered how he’d whined about the pain.

  “Indeed,” Moore intoned. “Precisely why your driver has by now left anything remotely resembling the safer sections of Paris.”

  Amanda looked out the taxi window and saw they were passing through narrow, poorly-lit streets, and that the landscape was devolving by the minute. She didn’t need any further information, and the two disconnection tones in her ear made it clear she wouldn’t be receiving any.

  “Prenez le suivi,” the driver said, once again reaching back to her.

  This time he handed her an electronic tracking device about the size of an iPhone a few generations old. The blinking red blip on the screen was the signal from her husband’s chip. He was nearby. She slid the tracker into her handbag, which also contained two other items: a compact and a purse-sized .22 caliber pistol. She left the compact where it lay.

  It had now been exactly sixty minutes since she’d hailed the cab, and she was walking carefully down the rat-infested alley, listening to the tracker’s audible signal. The long shawl, one end draped over her hand, made the gun considerably less visible. The handbag was left unfastened to allow quick glances at the tracker screen, but the increasing pace of the tone let her know she was getting closer. It was now beeping like a smoke detector with a dying battery—steady, annoying. The chip—and therefore Bart—could be no more than five or ten feet from her.

  Amanda’s foot kicked something. She pulled the tracker from the handbag and pointed the bright screen toward the ground, dimly illuminating a discarded shoe. She glanced away without interest, but then her eyes snapped back downward. The shoe was highly polished and expensive, not the sort one would expect to find amid the rubbish in a Paris alley. But that was not what caused her to stifle a gasp. That honor was reserved for the severed foot, still en
sconced within the shoe.

  As Amanda wavered between reaching down to take it and turning to flee, a sudden blur of motion in her peripheral vision was followed by a hard blow to her head and everything went black.

  1

  Perry’s alarm had been going off for ten minutes, but it was the quiet whine of Fleming, his English bulldog, that woke him. As happened every morning, he reached out to touch the dog’s head. “Okay, buddy,” he mumbled. “Okay.”

  For several minutes that was the extent of his movement, so the dog whimpered again, this time nudging his ear with its cold nose. That got Perry’s attention, both because it was a very cold nose and because Fleming was too fat to climb onto the bed with him. If the dog could nuzzle his ear, then Perry must be…he tentatively opened one eye. He was on the floor.

  “Well, shit,” he said.

  He opened his other eye, hoping to kick start his depth perception, but that useful feature seemed loath to function. As his vision came into focus he saw three things, all seemingly in the same place: a bottle of vodka lying on its side, exceedingly empty; Fleming’s dog dish, equally empty; and a piece of paper, apparently blank. After a few more seconds he realized these things looked like they were all together because they were. He brushed the dead Russian soldier away from Fleming’s bowl, against which the paper leaned, and sat up.

  Fleming made a noise somewhere between a pleading growl and a sigh of disappointment.

  Perry nodded his head. “I know, I know. Don’t preach.”

  For several minutes, he remained where he was, unable to decide on his next move and unsure he could pull off a next move even if he came up one. A full-on bark from Fleming helped him decide.

  “That was loud…and just mean,” he told the dog. As he slowly rose to his feet, Fleming’s stubby tail began wagging as the dog realized his human might not die after all.

  Perry took a minute to steady himself. All the parts of the vodka he appreciated were done with him now, leaving the parts that led him to suspect the Cold War had never ended. He reached out for one of the smoothly-carved marble columns that marked the separation of the dining area and the kitchen in his well-appointed Upper East Side penthouse apartment. After a moment, he made his way into the kitchen and pushed a button on his coffee maker. Three years of periodic (frequent) heavy drinking had trained him that setting up the coffee pot the night before was a necessary and a holy thing. He then moved to a blue plastic storage bin and pulled off the top. As he did, Fleming’s non-tail spun even more rapidly, the delicious odor of kibble reaching his flat nose. Perry reached in and used the empty cottage cheese container that sat amongst the dog food to scoop out a healthy serving. As he walked to Fleming’s empty dish, he shook the container, causing the food to rattle.