Rex Dalton Thrillers: Books 1-3 (The Rex Dalton Series Boxset Book 1)

by JC Ryan

  He realized his mistake when Usama’s countenance clouded. “And why would you think that, my friend? What do you know about it that we don’t?”

  “N-nothing, really,” Karif stammered. “I just…” He stopped, unable to go on without being questioned further. But it did him no good. Usama was on his feet, now, striding to Karif’s seat and looming over him.

  “No, I think you do know something. Why don’t you tell us?”

  Lying to him would be worse than not answering, Karif thought, so he tried the latter and just stared at the floor.

  “I am waiting,” thundered Usama.

  In a very small voice, Karif explained. “I just thought only the Americans would have the personnel and materials to do so much damage in so short a time.”

  “So much damage?” Usama said, his voice dangerously quiet, hissing like a cobra before it strikes.

  “Well, your storehouse. My, uh, my truck.”

  “Your truck. And why did you not tell us the truck that exploded was yours before?”

  Karif felt the cobra hypnotizing him, and he was helpless to break away. “I, uh, I thought you knew?” Making his reply a question had been a mistake, he realized, as his words were still hanging in the air.

  “You thought I knew. How would I have known? Are you accusing me of spying on you?” Usama’s voice had raised a little.

  “No, no, of course not.”

  “Let’s go back to your words ‘so much damage’. Is there more you’d like to tell us?”

  “I-I don’t th-think so.”

  “How about more you wouldn’t want to tell us? There’s more, isn’t there, Karif? You must tell us, and no more of this game.”

  Karif knew he was defeated. “All right, yes. There’s more.” He explained that one of his small storehouses nearby had been hit a few hours before the truck had exploded. “And then, of course, there’s what happened the night before.”

  He couldn’t believe Usama didn’t know about his large warehouse. But the man’s face told him he didn’t. Now he was going to be in trouble for not reporting that immediately. But there was no turning back now. “My largest warehouse… destroyed… fifty tons gone.” He was so distraught he couldn’t form a complete sentence. But then, a miracle.

  Usama took a step back. He stared at Karif for a moment, then turned on his heel and went back to his own chair. In an even more dangerous tone, he asked, “Does anyone else believe the Americans are involved?”

  Nervously, the others shrugged or nodded, or both. It wasn’t so much that they were unsure. They just didn’t want to contradict Usama’s conclusion. Seeing this, he thinned his lips at their cowardice. Only Karif had the courage to tell me what he believed was the truth.

  Usama turned his thoughts inward for a few minutes, testing Karif’s interpretation of the facts. Yes, it could be the Americans, but it would have been a small, covert operation. He searched his memory for any written or official verbal agreements there might have been. The government of Afghanistan was a joke – he and his compatriots in this room were the real power. They produced the country’s most valuable export, and it ran the economy, including the taxes the government collected, as well as funding the various terrorist organizations.

  The US and a few of their friends, allies, were in his country because of the cooperation of its government. It was true that the Goliath of world governments would be there if they wanted regardless, but he’d observed the giant making concessions, back-door deals, and even contradictory decisions. All in aid of remaining in control, pulling the strings that made all other governments dance. They knew as well as he did that destroying the opium economy would destabilize the country and put it back in the hands of the Taliban.

  Either someone in some US agency hadn’t gotten the memo, or it was a rogue operation. Either way, the major importer would have influence, he thought. However, approaching that man with a humble request for his help would be a mistake in terms of their balance of power.

  Abruptly, he remembered there were others in the room with him. He shook himself from his trance-like analysis and glared at them. “What are you waiting for? Get out! Go and see to your security. Karif, not you. You stay.”

  Everyone else but Karif rose and shuffled from the room, unsatisfied as to what the great man would do for them, but intent on obeying his instructions to redouble their security, and then redouble it again.

  Karif wasn’t sure what to make of the command to stay. He remained in his seat, which was already as far from Usama’s person as it could be and still be in the room.

  Usama forced geniality into his voice. “Karif, please. Come closer. I will call for food and coffee. Tell me more about your conclusions.”

  Karif cautiously moved up the table to sit near Usama. “I beg your pardon? You want to know more about why I think this has been the work of the Americans?”

  “Yes, precisely. You were the only one with the courage to speak up. The others are mere sycophants. If your insight proves true, you will henceforth be my lieutenant.”

  “And if not?” Karif asked, caution overruling his pleasure.

  “If not, you have merely made a mistake. But you still showed courage, my friend. In our line of business, courage is everything. The courage of a lion, you might say.”

  He means his own courage, thought Karif. But this could be my chance to move up in the world.

  “Sayyd, you honor me,” he replied. “In answer to your question, I followed your wisdom in demanding that my suppliers report to me their impressions of these tragic events. Without fail, all suspect the Americans, most specifically either the CIA or perhaps those devils, the Delta Force warriors.” In crafting his reply, Karif meant to both flatter his leader and display his knowledge of worldly affairs. He considered he’d succeeded when Usama nodded sagely.

  “How clever of you. Yes, perhaps I should have consulted my suppliers instead of our group only. I believe your theory has merit, and I will look into it. Will you excuse me, while I make some phone calls? Please make yourself comfortable. I wish to talk more with you over our meal, which will be ready soon.”

  Karif smiled graciously. From disaster to incredible fortune, this day had been like racing a camel – bumpy but exhilarating.

  Usama shouted an order for food to be prepared as he strode to his private office. He gave no thought to the time difference between his city and that of the man he was about to waken, and he spent only a moment considering what he would say. It was imperative to take the offensive. After all, he reasoned, he could find another buyer easily. This man was but a middleman, certain to be selling to the American Mafia, whom everyone knew controlled all drug trade in the US.

  When the man answered the phone with a surly expletive, Usama drew on his full dignity to advance his attack.

  “You must do something about these attacks your government is mounting against us, my friend, or you will find yourself short of goods.” His cold delivery, he’d found, worked better on Americans than the shouting and curses that kept his countrymen in line.

  He continued. “In the past thirty hours or so, half of our stockpiles have been wiped out.”

  Chapter Six

  Manhattan, NY, NY June 21, 2014, 2 am

  WINSTON REGINALD HATHAWAY woke from the deep sleep of the righteous to the obnoxious sound of his cell phone ringing. Two things surprised him about it. First, that he’d been sleeping so soundly. Not at all righteous, he had no right to sleep well, and he usually didn’t. Which made it all the more annoying that someone had disturbed him at the ungodly hour of 2:00 a.m.

  “What,” he demanded. What he heard swept the last vestiges of sleep from his brain and caused him to sit straight up in his opulent bed. He smacked the sleepy woman next to him on her bare bottom and gestured for her to get out. Then he turned his attention back to his caller.

  “What do you mean, wiped out? All of it?” He listened and swore viciously. “I’ll take care of it. Yes, now.” He listened
to the answer and fought down the anger that wasn’t good for his blood pressure, according to his doctor. “You’ll remember to whom you’re speaking. I said I’d take care of it. Now, what you’d better do is get more security on those warehouses. I won’t hear any more excuses from you.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he jabbed the icon on the screen with an angry pointer finger. He missed the old landline phones. It was so much more gratifying to slam down an old-fashioned receiver to signify rage than merely pushing a button. He looked on his nightstand for something to throw at a wall, but the only available object was a Faberge egg, and as enraged as he was, it was too expensive to consider throwing.

  Instead, he took a moment, remembered his doctor’s advice, and attempted to center himself. He mustered the calm he needed to get out of bed, pull on a smoking jacket of silky satin, and pad to his bathroom, where he placed a tiny nitroglycerin pill under his tongue.

  Before returning to his bedside to make his next call, he glanced in the mirror and smirked at his youthful image. Not bad, he thought, for an old duffer of sixty-something.

  Hathaway, ‘Winnie’ to his friends, actually believed his own legend, which was the mark of a great con artist. His home, his bank account, his wardrobe, and even his accent proclaimed him ‘old money’ in the rarefied environs of New York’s nouveau riche social circles. By carefully avoiding the real scions of old money, he’d clawed his way up the ladder of wealth and respectability despite his humble beginnings.

  Hathaway’s real name, long lost to time and expensive eradication, was Joe Fink. Not Joseph. Joe. He’d spent his formative years in orphanages and foster homes, and he’d learned to bully back when other kids bullied him about his name. In the streets of the poor neighborhoods where he’d been housed, ‘fink’ meant snitch. And snitches died. However, Joe was one tough cookie and his mission in life, since a very tender age, was to get to the top, by any means.

  At first, he headed in the wrong direction, thinking violence, stealing, and robbery would get him to the top, but by the age of eighteen, with a juvenile record longer than he was tall, he’d committed his first adult felony and landed in prison. There, the good-looking youth, in return for favors he’d never spoken of or cared to remember after his release, had turned his life in another direction. He learned from a much older felon with an upper-class British accent the fine art of the con. Fink was released at the age of twenty-one and had never looked back. His upbringing might have been deficient, but there was nothing wrong with his mind.

  He went through several changes of identity while pulling off more and more sophisticated scams, finally achieving a semblance of respectability. By the age of thirty, he’d married wife number one, the first of three, a former Miss Georgia and the heiress to a minor fortune. His philosophy was that it is not your fault if your dad is poor, but it definitely was if your father-in-law was poor. Her untimely death in an auto accident fueled his rise to fortune. His second wife, the love of his life, died while giving birth to their second child. He married the nanny, with a watertight prenup in place, only a few months later, simply to save her salary. By then, he had all the money he needed, though he never felt he had financial security until he’d become a major importer of Afghani heroin.

  How he escaped with his life when he muscled into his status as supplier to the Mob, no one could explain, and no one who was alive knew to ask. To the world, he was a man of leisure, overseeing his own fortune and that of his late wife in trust for his two adorable children. The nanny was wise enough to get the message when he started treating her like dirt, and when the children were in their late teens, divorced him and moved on. So, he became the most eligible bachelor in New York, and a playboy. His social circle loved him, foibles and all. Sixty was the new forty, so his age would have been no hindrance, even if he hadn’t had several plastic surgeries to disguise it along with his previous identity. And what he lacked in looks and youth the money made up for.

  To the Mob, he was the sole source of Afghani heroin and a major source of cocaine product from South America. His customers would not be pleased when they learned their supply had been jeopardized by an unannounced American operation targeting the warehouses at its source. He had to nip that in the bud.

  Neither of them knew it at the time, but that phone call had been the first salvo in the war between Winston Reginald Hathaway and Rex Dalton.

  ***

  Washington DC

  IT WAS 2:15 a.m. when a certain senior senator from Georgia, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, received the irate call from Winnie Hathaway.

  “Why the hell didn’t you warn me about the operation?” Hathaway shouted without the courtesy of a greeting.

  The Senator, a man of seventy-eight years who had a bourbon habit, at first thought he’d forgotten an appointment for some kind of surgery. It took a moment for him to clear his head of the bourbon-induced sleep and age-induced fog. The voice kept shouting, until he finally found his own.

  “Who is this?”

  After a few minutes of confusion, the Senator was wide awake and equally enraged. “I don’t know a damn thing about it. I’ll have that rascal’s head on a platter.”

  “Don’t bother serving him up, just get it fixed, pronto,” Hathaway ordered, forgetting for a moment to adopt his genteel accent.

  Hathaway was able to order the Senator to do anything he needed, thanks to a little scam he’d pulled back in his Georgia days. The Senator’s mental state had been deteriorating for a few years, and when Hathaway realized the Senator didn’t recognize him for the person he’d been back then, he took full advantage by blackmailing him.

  As the son-in-law of the Senator’s best friend, Hathaway – under another name – had made an indiscretion go away that would have ended the Senator’s career in that conservative state. The Senator, however, never knew that the indiscretion had been engineered by the helpful young man, to serve his own purposes. He’d felt betrayed when Hathaway in his current incarnation had called and told him how to keep the indiscretion a secret. Though he’d long since lost track of the son-in-law after his friend’s daughter was killed in that car accident, he hadn’t expected the man to reveal his secret. Southern gentlemen just didn’t do that.

  Now the Senator and Hathaway had a relationship much like the nuclear standoff between the US and Russia, known as mutually assured destruction. Both would thrive as long as they didn’t push the buttons to start an attack on each other — it helped to keep the peace. The senator knew and colluded in the source of Hathaway’s income, and Hathaway knew his deepest, most shameful secret. If they each kept the other’s secret, they’d both prosper. They both acknowledged it without saying it and indeed they prospered.

  The Senator knew he was losing his grip. Alzheimer’s ran in his family, and he strongly suspected he’d soon succumb to it. But while he had even half his former vigor, he was driven to wield the power his long tenure in the halls of government had given him. One of the many powers he wielded was that of control of the Director of the CIA. He made the call.

  Chapter Seven

  George Bush Center, CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia, 2010

  THE CURRENT CIA Director, Bruce Carson, had been in the saddle for a little over four years. He had grey hair, smallish watery eyes, a pale complexion, a croaky, almost cartoon character-like voice, and a predominant interest in furthering himself.

  Carson was a political appointee, just like all his predecessors over the past seventy-plus years. However, it had become clear to expert observers – both within the Company, as they referred to the CIA, and outside it – that the appointees over the last fifteen years or more had trended more to the politically adept than to qualified spymasters.

  Carson had never been in the field as an agent. He’d joined the CIA directly out of college, meeting the minimum requirements as an analyst for European affairs, specifically France. He wrote lackluster reports, kept his head down in a crisis, and attended
social events to rub shoulders with the upper levels. Everything expected of a career bureaucrat with his sights fixed on the top of the food chain. It worked. Decades later, he was considered an experienced administrator and a safe bet for a President who had bigger battles to fight.

  The President definitely didn’t want an aggressive CIA Director who would want to take the fight to the enemy. He wanted a fellow internationalist and hater of the CIA to be their Director. Some of the main reasons the President got into office in the first place were his promises to end the Afghan and Iraqi wars, stop treating Russia as an enemy, and repair America’s image on the world stage. That was apart from his promises to end global warming and replace fossil and coal fuel with clean energy sources.

  The president would not admit that the CIA and most of the US intelligence community had become so bogged down in red tape and risk-averse bureaucracy, political correctness, and cultural sensitivity that they could not function. Political strife and division when it came to every aspect of American society, including protection of the homeland, rendered the intelligence community all but powerless to assure the safety of the citizenry.

  This state of affairs was not all of the president’s making. The rot had been building up for decades, but the president certainly contributed to it, just like his predecessors, by not even making an attempt to fix a dysfunctional system.

  Top tier CIA officials were more concerned about being politically correct always, securing their own positions, and moving up the food chain, than about supporting their field operatives. The latter were understaffed, ill-equipped, unsupported, and poorly managed.

  Yet, the vast majority of the American public was oblivious as to just how unsafe they really were. Over time, the people became disillusioned with the entire political system, and became insensitive to it, distancing themselves from what was going on and escaped it all by indulging in the abundance of pleasure and entertainment available to them.