Night Strike

by Michael W. Sherer

  “Did you find your uncle?” I said.

  The corner of his mouth turned up. “Sadly, he died. But perhaps you knew this.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know him.” I glanced out the window. “Where are we going?”

  “Not far.” He tossed a cloth sack over the seat. It hit me in the chest and dropped in my lap.

  “You’re kidding.” The look on his face said otherwise. I pulled the sack over my head. Immediately, my chest constricted, my breathing grew fast and shallow, my face flushed and my heart banged on the bars of my ribcage to get out.

  “Hey, hey! Take it easy back there! What’s wrong with you?”

  I clutched at my chest and searched for a drishti, anything that would focus the thoughts spinning through my head, but the panic was full blown, and I thrashed on the seat like a fish in the bottom of a boat.

  “Ebanatyi pidaraz! What the fuck? We’re not going to kill you, for god’s sake!”

  “I figured that,” I gasped.

  “Then what…? Oh, for shit’s sake.”

  He hit me hard, ringing my ears, and the shock of it made me suck in a big enough breath that I finally gained control of my diaphragm. Pulse pounding, I slumped in the seat and let the adrenaline drain away.

  “What is problem? Hood make you—what is word?—claustrophobic? Or are you just pussy?”

  Marko laughed at that, a guttural sound closer to a growl. Under the circumstances, I saw no reason to share, and the car fell silent. I tried keeping track of time, counting seconds and the number of times we turned. After a few minutes I was hopelessly lost, but calmer. I gave up and settled back in my seat.

  When the car came to a stop, Marko got out, opened the door on my left and ordered me out. I struggled to get my feet free. He grabbed my arms and roughly dragged me out. With an occasional prod they steered me across hard pavement and through a door into a narrow hallway. The hood smelled of grease and someone else’s sweat. I could see my feet in the lighted space from under the hood, but little else. Music pulsed through the walls from somewhere in the building, more felt than heard. They pushed me around a corner and through two more doors before we came to a stop inside a more dimly lit space with carpet under my feet. The two men flanked me, and one yanked the hood off my head.

  I blinked several times as my eyes adjusted to the light from a desk lamp in front of me and a table lamp off to one side. The large office was tastefully furnished with antiques, not square, industrial pieces from a supply house. The carpet turned out to be a dark Oriental with lots of navy and deep red in the pattern. A man as thick as the trunk of an old oak contemplated me from behind the double pedestal desk with eyes as hard as marbles. Black hair generously flecked with gray swept back off a broad forehead and lay flat against his skull with the help of hair product that made it glisten as if wet. The collar of an expensive silk dress shirt descended from under the hinges of his jaw and disappeared under a suit jacket, a cream-colored tie around it knotted neatly under his chin. A suit coat draped his massive shoulders without a wrinkle, and he shot French cuffs from the sleeves while he watched me, cufflinks catching the light as he rested his forearms on the desk.

  “You know who I am?” he said.

  I shook my head. “Not a clue.”

  “Pyotr Dmitrov.”

  “I’m sorry, is that supposed to mean something to me? Your associates here kidnap me at gunpoint from my workplace, put a hood on my head and bring me here, I’m going to guess you’re not someone I want to know.”

  He looked sharply at the men, and addressed the one with the gun. “Is this true, Grigori?”

  “He wouldn’t have come otherwise,” Grigori said, surprise in his voice.

  “But once he saw gun, he shake like baby,” Marko said with smug satisfaction.

  The shelf of eyebrow above Dmitrov’s glittering eyes rose. “You were frightened? My apologies, Mr. Sanders.”

  “It was a panic attack,” I muttered.

  He tipped his head and looked at me curiously. “You are anxious about something? No need for that here.”

  “What do you want?” I was exhausted from too little sleep and the aftereffects of the anxiety attack. I bit the inside of my cheek to remind myself to think hard before allowing words to come out of my mouth that I might quickly regret.

  He rested one hand atop the other on his desk. “I’m a simple businessman, Mr. Sanders. Two nights ago, my associates asked you if you’d seen a man they were looking for.”

  “Right,” I snorted. “Their ‘uncle.’ Yours, too?” I bit my cheek again, hard enough this time to taste blood.

  “No,” Dmitrov said, “just a business associate. This man was supposed to deliver something to me, and I would like to have it.”

  “Why don’t you ask him then? What does this have to do with me?”

  “The man, unfortunately, is dead. And apparently you knew him. Anthony D’Amato?”

  I nodded. “Sure. I know the name. He’s on my paper route.”

  “Perhaps you knew him better than you suggest. You went to his apartment building.”

  “To pay my respects,” I snapped. “I didn’t know him personally, but my customers are people, not just an address on a list, Mr. Dmitrov.”

  His head tipped slightly. “Perhaps you can also explain why NCIS picked you up and took you to the naval base for questioning.”

  The question took me by surprise. I didn’t answer right away, wondering how Dmitrov could possibly know this.

  “Come now, Mr. Sanders. You’re not thinking of denying it, are you?”

  “Why would I? But I really can’t tell you much. NCIS was looking for a missing agent. They thought I might know something about it. I have no idea why. So, unless D’Amato was working for NCIS, I don’t see a connection. As far as I’m concerned, they made a mistake.” I shrugged. “Our tax dollars at work.”

  He regarded me the way a cat might look at a bird that had landed too close to the spot where it sunned itself, as if he couldn’t decide whether or not he was hungry enough to bother.

  “I lost a lot of money because of you once, Mr. Sanders,” he said finally. “A Pac-Twelve game.”

  The comment blew the dust off an old photo album in my head, revealing snapshots that were yellowing with age. I felt a vague and dull stab of pain, a tiny echo of what had once felt like a mortal blow.

  “Stanford,” I said, and saw him nod.

  The game had been my last, the one during which the small handful of Vicodin I’d taken before the game no longer had any effect. The one in which the deterioration in my hip joint from osteomyelitis had become so severe that I had collapsed on the basketball court. The one during which I’d been rushed to the hospital on a morphine drip for an emergency hip replacement while my teammates went on to let a fourteen-point lead slip away.

  Dmitrov waved the wisps of memory out of the air between us. “We are both older and wiser, yes? I’m sure you won’t disappoint me now.”

  “I’ll mind my own business; you mind yours.”

  He smiled. “Sound advice. Grigori and Marko will take you back to your place of employment.” He didn’t try to hide the contempt in his voice.

  Marko gripped my arm.

  I shrugged him off. “Next time you want to chat, try the phone. Nifty little invention.”

  I turned around and waited until they pulled the hood down over my eyes.

  * * * * *

  Dmitrov had intimated that he hadn’t intended to frighten me. Whoever he was, I knew he’d meant to do precisely that. And every time that thought crept into my consciousness as I drove my route, the band around my chest constricted, threatening to trigger another panic attack. If ever there was a time I wished Charlie were around to lend a hand this was it. But I was already in way to deep for Charlie to help me, and judging from what I’d seen earlier not even Charlie’s resources at SPD would be a match for Dmitrov.

  When I finally got home and stripped to my shorts to crash, too t
ired to make breakfast or even read, I found the scraps of paper from D’Amato’s scooter in my pocket. Carrying them to the kitchen to throw in the wastebasket under the sink, I glanced at them again and stopped. D’Amato was a neat-freak, his apartment immaculate, but it hadn’t been OCD. It had been a deliberate attempt to remain anonymous, to hide a personal life. So why had these bits of trash been in the compartment in his Vespa?

  I spread them out on the counter—two receipts and a strip of slick, plastic-coated paper. One receipt was for a doll from a store in the Alderwood Mall up north. The other had come from a post office. I stared at the three white rectangles on the counter and forced my tired brain to put it together. The third strip had come from a self-sealing box or large envelope.

  D’Amato had mailed a present to the girl he wanted me to find—the doll she clutched so happily in the photo. But why? A birthday? And how would that help me find her?

  Chapter 18

  July 26—Seattle

  The plane flared just before the pilot cut power, and touched down with a soft bump and screech of rubber. Those air force jocks, always showing off. The result of flight training on runways a couple of miles long. A navy driver would have flown the plane onto the deck, smacking it down hard and fast to catch the hook. This pilot braked gently, and the plane rolled onto a taxiway. Reyna smiled at the soldier next to her. She’d pretended to sleep for most of the flight to avoid conversation, or worse, being hit on. But even relaxing with her eyes closed, sleep hadn’t come because of the whirlwind of thoughts in her head.

  She knew she was over-thinking her dilemma. She’d drive herself crazy going in circles until she had some answers. And those wouldn’t be forthcoming until she got out there and asked some questions. The first person she planned to start with was Blake. She tensed as the plane approached the JBLM passenger terminal, wondering if MPs would be waiting there to take her into custody. She hadn’t committed a crime, but she’d directly disobeyed orders of her commanding officer, so was subject to sanctions, punishment. No red lights flashed, and she didn’t see any vehicles other than those waiting to service the incoming flight. Still, they could be waiting for her inside the terminal gate.

  The plane crept to a standstill and the engines shut down with a slowly dying whine. A soft ding indicated the seat belt sign had been turned off, and the aisle suddenly crowded with large men in fatigues who smelled as if they’d been travelling for a day and a half. Reyna didn’t find it unpleasant. In fact, she’d gotten used to it over the years, and it brought back memories of her various tours. The murmur of voices around her grew louder and more boisterous as airstairs were rolled up to the plane. Through the windows, Reyna could see crowds of people, mostly women, pressed back behind an invisible line at the edge of the tarmac. As the first men deplaned, the line broke and wives, husbands and children ran toward the plane as their loved ones came down the stairs and ran to greet them.

  Reyna grabbed her bag and shuffled toward the front of the plane sandwiched between a couple of six-foot slabs of beefcake, and tried to insert herself into the midst of a group of soldiers headed for the terminal. She watched the tearful reunions on the apron, full of smiles and hugs and joyful kisses as she passed, wistfully wishing she could be greeted like that. No one was left, really, to make that happen for her. Her brother and only sibling had followed her father’s footsteps into the army, but had passed the grueling training required to become a member of Delta Force, and now was stationed somewhere in the Middle East. Not even Reyna, with her Top Secret clearance, knew where he was or what his missions entailed. Her mother had died several years earlier from ovarian cancer that hadn’t been detected until it had reached Stage 4, far too late for treatment. Her mother’s death had broken her father’s heart. An army colonel, he’d retired soon after the funeral, and had quickly faded to a desaturated version of his former self, gray and listless. A stroke had landed him in a nursing facility in Fayetteville, N.C., just outside Ft. Bragg, his last posting. Reyna didn’t have the heart to visit him.

  Without realizing it, she’d walked through the door into the terminal with the soldiers. Chastising herself for losing her focus, Reyna quickly scanned the interior, but saw no sign of a welcoming committee for her. Janet, bless her, had come through and stalled for time. Reyna hurried through the terminal and caught a cab out front to a nearby car rental agency. Fifteen minutes later, she was on the road north to Seattle, the terrain and landmarks now all too familiar. A glimpse of snow-capped Mt. Rainier in her side mirror, rising above the surrounding mountain range into the blue summer sky sent an odd pang through her that felt surprisingly like homesickness. Several miles later, after she passed Seatac airport, the Seattle skyline spread out in front of her at the top of a rise. She suddenly realized with surprise that her homesickness was for this place. It felt, oddly, like home.

  She shook her head. This was not her Washington. Hers was the seat of political and military power in America, the nerve center of the world’s mightiest country. And though she was a tiny cog in a vast intelligence gathering organization, her job was important, and she did it very well. Seattle was a backwater, a city that would have been an afterthought had it not been for Boeing first, and Microsoft later, huge companies that had kept the economy alive and attracted other businesses. Yet she’d been called to these boondocks four times now because things happened here, world-changing events. Its proximity to the Pacific and all the countries along that ocean’s rim made it a gateway for commerce, technology, and criminal enterprise in both directions. Maybe the other Washington was passé. Maybe this was where the action was.

  After the commendation she’d received for services the last time she was here, preventing a group of terrorists from setting off a dirty bomb atop the Space Needle, she’d considered transferring out of ONI’s Farragut Technical Analysis Center and into the agency’s Kennedy Irregular Warfare Center. She enjoyed data analysis and found her skills a good fit for what she’d been doing for the past several years. But the few times she’d been in the field had reminded her how much she missed her flying days and the thrill of deployment. Kennedy was where most of the field intelligence agents lived. If she figured out what was going on and cleared her name of any suspicion, maybe she could push for special assignment—stay in analysis, but work field assignments when something came up that fit her skills set.

  She sighed. What the hell was she thinking? She’d be lucky to get out of this mess with only a disciplinary slap on the wrist. Every minute she spent in Seattle put her career at risk.

  In the center of downtown, she exited the freeway onto a street that climbed up First Hill and dropped down behind Capitol Hill toward Lake Washington and the Madison Park neighborhood. In the no-man’s land between the Central District and Madrona neighborhoods, she turned onto familiar side streets and worked her way toward the house Blake shared with the gay couple who owned it. She’d only been to Blake’s apartment a couple of times, but the route was indelibly etched in her memory. Everything about her three previous encounters with Blake Sanders were imprinted on her like a computer virus that had gotten tangled up in her software. Stop it!

  Now was not the time to be thinking of Blake in that way, to be thinking that way at all. The last time she’d been here, she’d been so angry with him, all his whining about “Molly this” and “Molly that.” Okay, so his ex had been kidnapped. He’d had a right to be concerned. And when it was all over, when they’d gotten Molly back, Blake had told Reyna he loved her. Wasn’t that what she wanted? But she couldn’t make a life with him. Not here in Seattle. Could she?

  Shoving the thoughts aside when she spotted the house, she slowed and looked for a place to park. Halfway down the block, an open slot on the opposite side of the street beckoned. She whipped the car around in a three-point turn and jockeyed it into the space. Less than two minutes later she stood on the little stoop outside Blake’s apartment, fist poised to knock on the door. She hesitated, thoughts racing, heart th
umping her ribs like a prizefighter working a bag. Damn it, she was here for results, not romance. She knocked, hard. No one answered, and no sounds emanated from inside. She knew Blake worked the graveyard shift on his route and sometimes slept until late afternoon, so she gave it some time and knocked loudly one more time.

  When she got no response she walked back to her car, climbed in and got comfortable for what could be a long wait. An hour into her stakeout, a passing car snagged her attention. Moving slowly, as if looking for an address, its brake lights flashed as it drew abreast of the house where Blake lived. The passenger door opened and a man dressed in black slacks and black leather jacket got out. The clothes were far too warm for the summer weather, leading Reyna to conclude that he carried a gun and the car had a seriously powerful air-conditioning system. A second glance at the car confirmed her guess—a black Mercedes AMG sedan.

  While the passenger strolled across the street, the driver threw the car into reverse and backed toward her weaving into a space at the curb eight or ten cars ahead of her. The passenger disappeared around the back of the house, headed for the entrance to Blake’s apartment. Reyna sat a little straighter to get a better view, but kept her head out of sight of the Mercedes’ side mirror. No more than a minute or two passed before the passenger reappeared, checked for traffic and hustled across the street to the Mercedes. Rounding the front, he got back inside, where the temperature was a nice cool 65 degrees, no doubt.

  Reyna expected the car to pull away from the curb. When it didn’t, she settled in again, ignoring the mounting pressure on her bladder. Blake had become a popular man, a development she found more than curious. And his newfound acquaintances didn’t appear particularly friendly.

  Chapter 19