by Marc Cameron
Bo felt the first flutter of uneasiness ten blocks from the hotel when the truck in front of him slowed for a man with a hardhat and road construction flag past the Libertador tunnel. His brother, Jericho often said that the air smelled different just before a bad event. You just had to learn to recognize it. He took a deep breath through his nose, getting nothing but the sweaty odor of five thousand miles in the same helmet. “That’s no help at all, brother,” he whispered. Jericho would have called the nagging feeling in his gut by its Japanese name, haragei—“art of the belly.” Bo tapped the rear brake with the toe of his boot and hoped he just needed to take one of Matt King’s Alka-Seltzers.
The flagger directed the truck ahead to turn right, down a tree-lined residential street. Bo considered making a U-turn, but Matt hadn’t quite mastered that basic maneuver and would have to duck-walk his motorcycle in the busy thoroughfare to go the opposite direction, slowing everyone down. The presence of a second flagger at the next intersection, assisting with the construction detour, brought Bo’s nerves down a notch. The truck ahead made a left, paralleling the main street.
“Heads up,” Bo said, mouth to the Cardo Bluetooth mic inside his helmet.
The truck in front of them slowed again, as if to make another left, forcing the riders to roll to a stop behind it. Quinn gritted his teeth as a dark blue van made the turn behind the group, looming larger in his side mirror. The van accelerated quickly, roaring up behind Eva Turcott and bumped her motorcycle hard. The bike went down, engine roaring, rear wheel spinning. Eva had to crawl to drag herself out from under it. Steven jumped to check on her. Sputtering with fury and adrenaline, he forgot his side stand and let his big bike fall on its side in the middle of the street.
Three men wearing black balaclavas poured out of the van while two more bailed out of the pickup. All five of them were armed with wooden clubs. Bo saw at least one pistol, stuffed down the waistband of the stockiest of the lot.
Bo and his brother had spent many hours talking tactics—with each other, and with their old man around campfires in Alaska. Admittedly, Jericho had had more opportunity to bring those tactics to play—and he agreed with their father that it was better to attack back through any assault. You didn’t try to negotiate with five guys with clubs.
Assessing the situation in an instant, Bo used his right thumb to flick the small button on an orange device the size of a cellphone that was mounted on his handlebars. Alma’s husky voice was the only one that came across his headset.
“Bo,” she all but growled. “What do you want me to do?”
Quinn gave a tight smile at her ballsy attitude, but looked up in time to see a big guy with a pistol stuffed down his pants heading straight for her. Instead of answering, Bo gunned the throttle and plowed the front wheel of his bike directly into the one with the pistol.
The big guy’s right leg bent unnaturally as eight hundred pounds of Harley Davidson motorcycle slammed into his thigh. Bo watched him fall, and gunned the throttle again, spinning the rear tire in an attempt to turn and face one of the other threats without dismounting the bike. The full-face helmet made it impossible to see everything that was going on around him. He heard the engine on Alma’s Honda rev to his right, but before he could turn, something heavy slammed into the back of his head. He slumped forward, immediately losing control of the bike so the handlebars came around and slapped the tank. Stunned and seeing stars, he gave a valiant attempt to hop off, but something hit again, rattling his teeth and driving him to the pavement. A third blow caught him across the shoulders, keeping him there.
Alma’s scream buzzed in his earpiece as he sank into unconsciousness.
On the handlebars of Bo Quinn’s downed bike, the satellite communications device flashed a message that his SOS and GPS location had gone out to the numbers he’d preprogrammed. The little man with the baseball bat who stood over him was panting too hard to notice.
Chapter 1
Alexandria, Virginia
Six minutes earlier
Heads down, shoulders heaving, Jericho Quinn and Jacques Thibodaux faced each other, circling for the fifth time in as many minutes. Quinn’s dark eyes narrowed above a week’s growth of dark beard. Thibodaux’s high and tight haircut glistened with perspiration in the orange light that filtered through the spring foliage on the sycamore and oaks. Gravel crunched under their boots on the concrete driveway in front of Emiko Miyagi’s colonial brick, a short jog from George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate.
Copper skin and a dark beard left him with what his ex-wife called an ambiguous ethnicity. At an extremely fit thirty-seven, he could, and often did, pass for someone of Middle Eastern descent, a Native American like his maternal grandmother, or the deeply tanned son of an Irish fisherman that he was. His shaggy hair was just long enough to curl over the top of his ears.
At five feet-ten, Jericho had held the Alaska state Golden Gloves title in his weight classes through five of the eight years from sixth grade until he graduated high school, and had gone on to box for the United States Air Force Academy, winning the Wing Open his junior year. He’d trained in several martial arts, but leaned toward an ancient form of Japanese jujitsu—with plenty of striking mixed in with joint manipulation and throws. More than a series of techniques, it was a way of strategy. Beyond his years of training, he was an instinctive fighter, born with not only the physique and intelligence for close quarters battle, but the willingness to inflict maximum sudden violence on his fellow man when the need arose.
Officially a special agent with Air Force Office of Special Investigations, he’d been seconded, along with his partner, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Jacques Thibodaux to the office of the national security advisor to the president. When they weren’t working, they were training—and according to their instructor, Emiko Miyagi, there was always something to learn.
Thibodaux had Quinn by six inches and sixty pounds. The man was massive—but his were no mere mirror muscles. He had plenty of experience in the octagon, where he fought amateur MMA bouts under the name Dauxboy. The Marine’s black eyepatch and an impossibly square jaw added a severity to his already imposing look. Still, his broad face generally held a smile, even in the middle of a fight.
Both men were strategic thinkers, and both knew there were rarely any winners in an actual fight—only those who lived, and those who lost. Real fights were car-wreck quick, emergency-room gory, and brick-to-the-head final.
The problem with fighting someone who sparred with you weekly lay in the fact that you started to learn each other’s rhythms, discovering each other’s tricks. The benefit, as Miyagi explained, came from the need to constantly adapt in order to conceal one’s strategy. If an opponent knew you favored a series of exploratory left jabs prior to bridging the gap of distance, he or she would be ready for the attack long before it came. As such, both Jericho and Jacques varied their movements in an attempt to throw the other off his game.
Neither man was a tentative fighter, though Quinn was a skosh more thoughtful. Thibodaux tended to use his tremendous size to crash in and overwhelm, but when sparring with Quinn the big Cajun often switched things up—as he was doing now—circling, waiting for just the right moment to make his move.
Jacques stutter-stepped, almost tripping on a patch of gravel and glancing for an instant down at his feet. Quinn seized the opportunity and moved in, catching a strike to the nose for his trouble, feeling the cartilage grind under Jacques Thibodaux’s forearm.
Neither man was the sort to take it easy in a sparring match; training had to reflect life in order to be beneficial. So, the two men battled like bulls at eighty percent, taking care not to cause serious incapacitating injury. Unfortunately, reality came with a good deal of pain. Each man knew his abilities—and his limits. If a blow would have defined the fight at a hundred percent—the receiver would have no problem conceding that fact. Eighty percent from the mountainous Cajun would be enough to flatten anyone, but Quinn knew how to move, and a broken nose w
as nothing new to him.
Quinn let his head flow with the Cajun’s forearm, following up with machine-gun strikes to Thibodaux’s liver and neck as he turned sideways from the momentum of his arm-strike. The big Marine’s neck was protected by thick muscles, but Quinn knew it was folly to hit the man in his iron jaw. The liver strikes were sickening, even at eighty percent.
The six-foot-four Cajun winced, both hands raised in surrender. “Fairly certain that one chopped me down to your size, Chair Force.” Even in defeat, the Marine couldn’t help the little jab at the Air Force. Blood trickled from a small cut Quinn had given him under his left eye.
“Sorry about that,” Quinn said, dabbing at his bloody nose while he nodded to the gunny’s swelling wound.
Thibodaux waved him off, chuckling. “I ain’t no Cinderella, mi ami. Lucky enough I had a pretty face when I needed it to catch Camille.”
A compact Asian woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail stepped onto the concrete driveway from the lawn. Emiko Miyagi wore a white t-shirt and khaki 5.11 cargo pants. The scooping neckline and thin material of the shirt did little to hide the intricate and colorful Japanese tattoos that covered her torso. As the men’s instructor, she insisted much of their training occur in street clothes—and most often on an actual street rather than the padded floor of a dojo. In this case, the concrete driveway in front of her brick home provided for the realistic backdrop—as well as plenty of bruises and raspberries for all three of the combatants.
Miyagi was forty-seven years old—but could have easily passed for a woman in her mid-thirties. Where the two men under her tutelage had years of experience in fighting, Miyagi had trained as a killer from her early teens. There was something other-worldly about the way she fought, as if she could anticipate her opponent’s moves even before they knew they were about to make them.
Her training sessions always ended with a short bout between the instructor and each man. The fights were not short because she planned them that way, but because it did not take her long to win them. Jacques was good, and Jericho was very good, but Emiko Miyagi was better—a lot better.
* * *
“I truly hate this fighting friends shit,” the monstrous Cajun said, four minutes later as he limped across the circular driveway toward a stainless steel water bottle in the shade of Miyagi’s porch. He kept his arm tucked in tight against his side, wincing from Quinn’s liver strike and the machine gun beating Miyagi had given him to his floating ribs.
Quinn stood at the edge of the driveway beside his gunmetal gray BMW GS Adventure motorcycle and pressed a wad of tissue to his bloody nose. “I’m with you there,” he said, sounding like he had a bad cold. Jacques Thibodaux knew how to throw a forearm. That was an undeniable fact.
Miyagi took a long drink from her own water bottle, then shook her head. “Are you such an excellent judge of character, Jacques-kun?” she asked, using the more familiar form of the Japanese honorific san. “Sometimes, those we believe to be our friends turn out to be something else entirely.”
“Yeah.” Thibodaux rubbed his ribs again and nodded. “I’m gettin’ that.”
Miyagi canted her head to one side and shrugged at her disbelieving student. “On more than one occasion I have found myself engaged in battle with those who should have cared for me. Each year we read of men and women who believe themselves happily married—until their spouse tries to murder them.” She gave a little nod to drive home the seriousness of her point. “Just last week an Alexandria police officer’s wife was arrested for attempting to poison him by putting rat poison in his spaghetti.”
Quinn sighed, but kept his thoughts to himself. He was sure there were times his ex-wife had been mad enough to feed him d-Con.
The big Cajun gave an adamant shake of his head.
“I trust my Camille completely.”
“I’m sure many of those involved believed that same thing about their own companion,” Miyagi said.
Thibodaux set his jaw, glaring with his good eye. “I’m tellin’ you, Camille wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“But suppose she did,” Miyagi said. “What would you do then?”
“She wouldn’t.”
“But if she did?”
Thibodaux shrugged, as if it were all so clear.
“Then I’d eat the spaghetti. No point in goin’ on if the last fourteen years have been a sham.”
Miyagi smiled softly, displaying uncharacteristic emotion. “We should all be so fortunate to have—”
The chime of a cellphone cut her off, and caused all three to look at the black leather jacket lying across Quinn’s BMW.
Thibodaux shot his friend a quizzical look. “What the hell, Chair Force? Since when did you start using a ringtone?”
A chill ran up Quinn’s back. He kept his phone set to vibrate at incoming calls from everyone but the company dispatching his brother’s emergency locator beacon.
He dug the cellphone out of his jacket pocket and answered it by the second ring. A male voice that sounded like a college student advised him that an SOS signal had been triggered at 7:46 a.m. local time on a device registered to Boaz Quinn. So far, the company had been unable to make contact with the registered number. Authorities in Buenos Aires had been notified but were not yet on scene.
Quinn looked at the TAG Heuer Aquaracer on his wrist and noted the time. It was 6:54 a.m. Eastern, an hour earlier than Argentina, eight minutes gone from the time of Bo’s SOS. He asked the dispatcher to call him back as soon as he had more information, then hung up and started the protocol he and his brother had already worked out. When an SOS went up, it was too late to start planning.
First, he called Bo’s cell, getting nothing but voice mail.
He scrolled through the list of contacts Bo had given him while he explained the situation to Jacques and Emiko. Both knew Quinn’s brother was on a protection job in South America and they listened intently, stone faced. Neither had to say anything for Quinn to know he had their complete support. At length, Quinn found the number he was looking for and called the personal cell number for the man who had employed Bo’s services.
“Riley Grey,” the voice said.
“My name is Jericho Quinn. I just received an SOS message from my brother. Has anyone been in contact with you?”
The line was silent for a long moment. Quinn could imagine the stricken look on the face of the father at the other end. He’d been there himself.
“Steven?” Riley Grey whispered. “What about my son?”
“I don’t have any more information yet,” Quinn said. “I’d hoped you might have heard something.”
“I . . . I haven’t.”
“Very well,” Quinn said. “Bo’s GPS puts them in Buenos Aires. Local authorities are en route to the coordinates where the SOS went up. I’ll let you know when I get anything else.”
“Any chance that this is a false alarm?”
Quinn took a deep breath. “It’s possible,” he said. “But unlikely. It takes two distinct movements to activate the SOS on his device—sliding a button sideways and then depressing it. Considering their location and your net worth, I’m afraid your son is a possible target . . .”
“I appreciate your honesty,” Grey said.
Quinn looked at his watch again, though only seconds had passed since he’d done it last. “I’ll call you back.”
“Ten minutes,” Grey said. “Even if you don’t hear anything.”
“I’ll try,” Quinn said. “Until then, I need to get started on some things. It’s best to move quickly in this kind of event.”
“You have experience with kidnappings?”
“I have experience with bad men,” Quinn said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to make some calls.”
“Wait!” Grey said, clinging to the call like a lifeline. “What are you going to do?”
Quinn groaned. He couldn’t help but feel for the father’s helplessness, but every moment he spent on the phone was time he could be movin
g toward Bo.
“I’m going to get a ticket on the next available flight to Buenos Aires out of Dulles. If this turns out to be a false alarm, I’ll cancel. In the meantime, I need to be moving forward.”
“I can help with that,” Grey said, giving an audible sigh at being able to do something tangible. “I’m in Baltimore for meetings. My Citation is sitting at BWI airport right now. Are you closer to Dulles or Reagan?”
“I’m ten minutes from Reagan,” Quinn said.
“Good,” Grey said. “My plane will be waiting for you when you get there.”
“And you?” Quinn asked, fearing the strings that always seemed to be attached to the goodwill of the rich and powerful.
“I broke my leg waterskiing in Tahoe three weeks ago,” Grey said. “It kills me not to go down there myself, but I’ll be more use to you working from here, providing resources.”
“Okay then,” Quinn said, relieved but anxious to end the call.
“Bo and I have been friends for a long time,” Grey offered. “I don’t know much about you, but I trust him completely, and I know he trusts you. He told me that you’d pulled his fat out of the fire on more than one occasion.”
“And vice versa.”
A tense chuckle came across the line. “Bo told me you’d say that.”
Chapter 2
Anchorage, Alaska
1998
Fourteen-year-old Boaz Quinn drifted the back tire of his street-legal Honda dirt bike, throwing up a rooster tail of gravel before coming to a stop in the alley behind the Lucky Wishbone restaurant. Four other motorcycles rolled in behind him. The other riders were all in high school, or at least they should have been.
Jace, a short kid with a wild look in his eye, slid to a stop on the cracked pavement and held up his hand in the dusky light.