by JT Sawyer
“That’s not enough.” He shook his head, keeping his hands on Tremblay’s abdomen. “You seem like a good woman, Carter. At the risk of putting you in the crosshairs, I suggest you anonymously look into Project 284. It may shed some light on what has gone down these past few days. There’s a much larger picture than either of us knows about at this point. This isn’t even about me. I was supposed to die with everyone else in that house.”
He heard the sound of sirens in the distance. “You can stay here and save your partner or arrest me, but you can’t do both…so decide.” He lifted his hands from Tremblay’s abdomen, the blood flowing freely.
“Don’t…no!” She shoved her AR at Shepard’s face.
He stood, slowly backing up. “Take care of your partner and let me get on with what I need to do.”
Carter narrowed her eyes, a vein throbbing in her neck. She slowly lowered the rifle then rushed over and knelt down beside Tremblay, putting her weapon on the pavement as she frantically tried to stop the man’s seeping wound, catching a glimpse of Shepard disappearing into the tangle of wrecked vehicles.
24
Diamond T Ranch, West Texas
Adam Hunley sat on a leather chair on the third-floor balcony at Roth’s sprawling home, enjoying the desert vista that extended for eighty miles to the north. He drained his second martini just as Roth entered from his office, which took up most of the upper level of the 14,000- square-foot estate.
Little of the space in the office was actually dedicated to running his business empire. Instead, the interior resembled a wildlife museum with mounted heads and full figures of trophy animals from around the globe—sambar, oryx, jaguar, gazelle, Kodiak bear, leopard, wildebeest, caracal and even a massive caiman from South America.
Despite his lust for international safaris in exotic locations, his prize possession came from North America—a rare albino grizzly bear taken from the Alaskan coastline during a hunt on private land. The taxidermized beast stood a full six feet taller than Roth when he was beside it, which he often was during video conferences with his senior staff in Houston, as if the bear was a silent partner.
Roth walked to the wood railing, leaning his meaty hands on the varnished spruce logs and scanning his kingdom below. He thrust his chin up at the sky as if in defiance then shook his head.
“What is it now?” said Hunley, waving off a fly near his ear.
“Fucking Landis. He had one job—to get Shepard out of the picture. Now he’s in the wind. That’s not the kinda guy I want lurking in the shadows.”
“Henderson destroyed the man. He’s got no credibility, and the Feds think he’s behind the explosion at Burke’s place. She even painted him as a sociopath who used his own wife in his cover story then got rid of her with the others that day. The man is on the run, probably halfway across the world by now, holing up in some tin shack in Guam.”
“He was supposed to end up in a shootout with the Feds. I thought that was the whole damn point of leaking his identity.” He pounded his fist on the wooden post beside him then turned to face Hunley. “This is exactly why I had Montoya and his guys waiting in the wings, and Shepard managed to drop three of them before escaping…again.”
Hunley rubbed his pointy chin, narrowing his eyes, trying not to reveal his anxiety over the news. “I’ll have Montoya circulate Shepard’s picture amongst the East Coast cartels and let them know there’s a considerable bounty on the man’s head. If he’s still here in the U.S. after today, they’ll have his head on a pike soon enough.”
“Montoya’s also got a coupla his guys staked out at Landis’ place in Virginia, in case Shepard somehow traces things back to him.”
“Unlikely, unless Landis has really grown that careless.” Hunley straightened up, leaning forward. “Look, I used to work with these agency types in Colombia. They’re well-trained but ultimately dependent on the actual fucking agency for support, supplies, intel, and for being told when to wipe their asses. Shepard’s only concern now is self-preservation, and he knows he’s not going to survive long in the U.S. being number one on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.”
Roth rubbed the back of his neck, muffling out a raspy exhale, then he deposited his hulking frame in the oversized leather chair across from Hunley.
“I hope you’re right. This whole operation with Rimaldi and my future oil holdings in Venezuela are only weeks away from being solidified in this election.”
“Our oil holdings.” Hunley smirked.
“It’s my engineers and technology doing the extraction. You’re the one providing transit for the barrels of crude with your freighters parked off Colombia.”
“Yes, well, be sure to leave that last part out of our conversation when we meet with Rimaldi.”
“Everything on track for his arrival?”
“Yes, he’s flying in on your company plane, arriving here around noon tomorrow. We’ll meet with him for a few hours at Roth headquarters before his fundraiser and speech with his former countrymen.”
“You say he met with an enclave of his in Miami already? How did that go?”
“Miami is home to the bulk of the Venezuelan elite who were connected with the oil industry in their country before the mass exodus following the economic collapse three years ago. But Houston is the other pocket of wealth from that country, and I’ve got a couple of presentations for him lined up there over the coming weeks. If he can win them over, they and the families in Miami will provide a unified front for supporting him in the crucial days leading up to the election and after he’s been installed. Many of them still have strong ties with the military officers in the current administration, who can help push Rimaldi into power if the election is looking like it could be close.”
“Close? Hell with that. Exactly why we’re dumpin’ all the funds into the news outlets down there. Ramp up those efforts if needed during these next coupla weeks. I want Rimaldi looking like a fucking superhero in a gold cape to the commoners.”
“They already love the man. He’s like a Spanish Jesus, for crying out loud. You’ll see…he’s got tremendous charisma. I honestly think he’s the kind of guy who could win a Nobel Peace Prize for his work amongst the poor. Plus, my social media targeter is blitzing the southern cities near Caracas with very specific messages aimed at the struggling families who were most affected by El Presidente’s layoffs in the oil industry a few years ago.”
“In my experience, conquest is sometimes easier than control over the long term. If Rimaldi has the magnetic personality you say, and which I’ve seen in his speeches online, then he will have to be kept on a tight leash once he’s in office.”
Hunley reclined back in his seat, resting his hands across his stomach. “Agreed. But I’ve also got a contingency plan in place in case he becomes unwieldy.”
25
After he escaped from the bridge, Shepard followed the creek bed for a half-mile, pausing to wash Tremblay’s blood from his hands, then made his way along a circuitous route on foot through the suburbs of west Arlington.
He stopped briefly in an alley to use his personal phone to Google a bus station on the opposite end of town, knowing the Feds would be tracing his digital trail.
When he was done, he tucked his phone into a bike courier’s saddlebag parked near a café then crossed the street.
Shepard waited until he was by a park to dispose of his encrypted agency phone, taking out the SIM card and smashing it then doing the same with the device before tossing it into the woods.
He took frequent stops, scanning the route ahead for cops, then waited in the shade on a side street near a community college, surveying the older model cars suitable for hotwiring, eventually locating a weathered Mazda.
He drove for just over an hour, arriving near the outskirts of Baltimore and parking the car in the congested parking lot of a big-box hardware store. He pulled out the iPhone he’d stolen from the teenager at the skateboard park and googled the region, searching for a secondhand clothing store
and a place to stay for a few nights, then he headed out on foot towards a stretch of strip plazas he’d seen on the drive in.
Shepard’s head was still swirling from the assault on his house and his narrow escape in the firefight.
Who the hell leaked my identity? And who were those shooters on the bridge? They moved like they had training, so not your average gangbangers, for sure.
There were only two choices now: stay or run. And if he ran, where would he go?
Our safehouses on the East Coast and elsewhere are off limits, plus my security credentials have probably been revoked. Airports, bus terminals and the vessels at the ports would all be on the lookout for me.
Plus, he had no desire to flee. He wasn’t a criminal.
I need to find out who’s behind all this. Clearly someone with connections and considerable hacking skills was behind a media event like that.
Staying in the area was the only option and one they wouldn’t expect.
I’ll need to hide in plain sight.
He had done it before in numerous countries where the agency wasn’t supposed to be operating, but then he’d had an elaborate cover identity, resources, and Vogel always watching his back.
Shepard had a dozen retired colleagues in the region, but he had no desire to get them entangled or put their lives at risk. He needed to go it alone and stay off the grid as much as possible. Easier said than done since there were cameras and phones everywhere, not to mention that he’d need to access the internet to further his investigation. His biggest challenge would be getting around the city. At some point, he’d have to steal a vehicle, but for now he would have to rely on the local buses, which weren’t equipped with cameras, and look up postings on Craigslist for people searching for rideshares. As he had learned repeatedly during his team’s annual urban survival course, Craigslist is an evader’s best friend.
But first, he had to get out of his clothes and modify his appearance then find a place to hole up for a few days.
He and his SD unit had spent two weeks with a trio of old-school spies that Patterson had hired to teach urban tradecraft and countersurveillance. These were men who had perfected their skills during the height of the Cold War, when they operated unsupported in foreign countries and where disguise and civilian concealment were critical to survival.
The two things they had ingrained in him were that your choice of clothing was situational and that you should never sleep in the same place more than two nights when you think you’re being watched. The places to consider were international hostels and the larger homeless encampments.
The latter wouldn’t provide him with the access to the city and internet that he needed, so a hostel was the answer for now. These were ideal, since they were low budget and used to dealing with patrons who paid in cash; had a mixed age group of international travelers who were bent on sightseeing, not being glued to the news in their room; and were located in heavily congested urban areas where you could blend in better and have access to numerous escape routes.
The added bonus with hostels was that you could often hitch a ride with a fellow traveler out of the city, which meant not dealing with the security staff and monitors in Greyhound and Amtrak terminals.
Shepard and his team had employed and perfected their urban escape and evasion in many countries over the years, but he never thought his skills would be put to the test on home soil.
He only had sixty dollars in his wallet, and his credit cards were worthless or had been closed out by the agency by now. He glanced down at the gold Rolex on his left wrist, dreading the thought of parting with it but knowing it would draw attention. He unclasped it and slid it into his pants pocket.
The next thing he had to do was change out of his tacti-cool pants and don some assorted garb that would enable him to fit into a handful of settings. If he was on the run, then his disguise efforts would be minimal, but staying in one place required more elaborate outfits.
A few blocks later, he entered a second-hand store and selected three types of outfits. The first was for blending in as an average Joe, which meant a pair of jeans, t-shirt, sweatshirt and tennis shoes. He sized out what he needed and then grabbed a few different baseball caps and a pair of sunglasses.
The next outfit was formal business attire. He located a dark blue suit coat, a white button-up shirt, a blue tie and a pair of gray dress slacks then found some black dress shoes that weren’t too badly scuffed.
The last outfit was semi-casual and involved finding a polo-type shirt and tan slacks. His ankle-high hiking shoes would fit two of his outfits, with the black shoes being reserved solely for the suit. When he was done, he headed to the fitting room, trying on the outfits, then changed into the jeans, t-shirt and tan baseball cap. He made sure the shirts were XL to conceal the small drone and his HK pistol and spare magazine.
At checkout, he explained to the girl behind the counter that he was traveling and had clumsily spilled a Coke on himself while eating at the Mexican restaurant in the plaza across the street, so he swapped out his other clothes. He added a tattered daypack to the purchase then stuffed everything inside.
He was in and out in twenty minutes. Cal kept his hat low as he made his way towards a pharmacy next door. He bought a dozen power bars, caffeine pills, black hair dye, water bottles, and an office stapler.
Stepping outside, he googled the locations of the hostels in the region then stripped out the SIM card and ground it up under his heel before dumping the stolen phone in a storm drain in the street.
26
FBI Headquarters, Washington, DC
Carter kept her fists balled to contain the lingering tremble in her hand that was as much from the recent adrenaline dump from the gunfight on the bridge as it was from the fury racing through her system at Shepard forcing her to choose between saving her partner’s life and shooting the fugitive before her. It was her hesitation that angered her the most.
I could have killed him and still saved Tremblay. Why did I hesitate?
From the beginning of this investigation, things hadn’t added up, and they made even less sense with the recent revelation about Shepard’s history as an operative with the CIA’s Special Activities Division.
Those guys are heavy hitters. Why would he be working with Burke unless it was on some top-secret program for their operators, not some bogus shit for our embassies. Were Burke and his people killed off to eliminate the competition or because of something that he discovered? Or was Shepard a double agent willing to sacrifice his own wife for the cause? And who the hell were the shooters on the bridge?
She bit her lip. Fuck, I’m going to need a whiteboard the size of this building to chart out the possibilities.
As she walked towards her office, she recalled, in vivid detail, that he could have killed her and her team at his house and again on the bridge. If he had no compunction about killing all of those innocent people at Burke’s along with his own wife, then why try to save Tremblay and me?
A young agent named Bedford hastily made his way across the room of cubicles full of other employees towards her. “We just got a hit on a guy possibly matching Shepard’s description near Annapolis.”
“That’s quite a distance for him to have traveled this quickly, but notify our field office there and then circulate his information to the local PD.”
He nodded. “And I already sent out dispatches to the TSA, Coast Guard and law-enforcement agencies up and down the East Coast, Midwest and Southeastern U.S. as you requested. He’s going to be hemmed in.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. This guy was trained to be a ghost.” She looked down at a new text on her phone indicating that Tremblay had made it out of surgery and was stable.
Thank God!
She tucked her phone away, raising up her hand and snapping her fingers. “Listen up. I know this has been an insane morning, but the good news is that Tremblay is in recovery. The not-so-good news is that our fugitive, Shepard, is still on the run, so let’
s find him and find whoever was behind those thugs shooting at us on the bridge. What do we have on ’em?”
A redheaded woman with her hair in a tight bun stood up from her desk to the right of Carter. “Nothing showed up on our databases, but our gang taskforce crew downstairs said the tattoo on the youngest shooter was something they usually see amongst the Colombian cartels along the East Coast.”
“Why would those guys be after Shepard?” She saw a bunch of quizzical looks from the twenty agents in the room. “That’s a place to start then.” She nodded at the redheaded woman and those around her. “I want all of you to dig deep on Burke and his staff and see if there are any correlations with the dead shooters.”
She waved her hand over the left half of the cubicles. “I want the rest of you working solely on Shepard. I know most of you have probably seen the media coverage about this guy, but we all know how material is scraped from the bottom of the barrel with these news outlets, so see what turns up on him elsewhere, then canvas his neighbors to see if they noticed anything out of the ordinary going on over these past few weeks. I’m planning to talk to the CIA director later today to see what I can learn, but I’m not optimistic given the way they operate.”
She hoped she was wrong about the latter.
I could use every ounce of help I can get to cut through this never-ending web of deceit and bullshit.
27
Patterson stepped off the elevator onto the sixth floor of the National Intelligence Headquarters building, feeling like his footing was uneven as he contemplated the scandal rocking the agency and his top operative, not to mention that the leak had compromised numerous agents and informants around the world whom Shepard had worked with. Not only was it a breach of national security, but now every journalist was calling the agency seeking confirmation of the story and inquiring whether Burke, a much-loved public figure, was really the target of a hit team led by Shepard, who willingly sacrificed his own wife for the cause.