Unless it had something to do with Tripoli. Or Nico Gold. Or Jack Brenner. Or the Pink Dragon. Somehow, he had crossed an invisible line.
Even so, how had they found him? The only person who had known he was coming to Arizona was Julian Speers. A man he trusted with his life.
As he watched the men approach in the distance, Carver mentally retraced his steps. He had booked his own flight to Vegas at the counter at Reagan National Airport, just 40 minutes before flight time. And from Vegas, having made last-minute tickets, he had flown a tiny commuter plane to Flagstaff, where the airport was a single-airline hub that was scarcely bigger than a bowling alley. He had studied the face of every person on both planes. The assassin he had seen in Vegas wasn’t on either aircraft.
Fast-forward to this morning. The only person who had knowledge of his plans had been…
…his father.
Beijing
Jasper Blick stepped outside the print shop, holding one of his new business cards up to the scrutiny of sunlight. Or at least what passed for sunlight on a red alert day. The gray haze was thick and low to the ground for the fifth day in a row. He liked to say that if the ladies of Beijing didn’t kill him, the air quality just might.
To his eye, the business cards looked authentic. “I’m Massive!” he said with vigor. He had purchased a good thick card stock. The MassiveStreamz logo looked authentic. If there was one thing Chinese manufacturers were excellent at, it was the art of forgery.
He checked his watch. Titus was due to call at any moment. Despite the ministry of environmental protection’s warnings about spending prolonged periods outside, Blick stopped dead in his tracks while he still had a strong mobile signal.
What a crazy predicament he had gotten himself into. This guy Titus was both employer and blackmailer. He had – how had Titus put it? – plucked Blick out of the slush pile of humanity, and hacked into his bank account. As Blick saw it, his only choice was to roll with his strange new adventure and see where it led.
The phone rang right on cue, and his employer/blackmailer spoke even before he could. “Do you have the business cards?”
“I do. And they’re ah-amaz-ing!”
“Pull that mask off. I can barely hear you.”
Blick pulled the face mask down below his chin. “Yes, I was just saying that I have the cards. I’m officially David Stone, SVP Entertainment Content, MassiveStreamz, at your service.”
“A car service will pick you up in an hour. The driver will take you to a warehouse, where you’ll pick up five boxes. Each box contains 20 MassiveStreamz Sticks.”
“Those things that people plug into their TVs to stream movies and stuff? Aren’t those pretty much banned here in China?”
“Of course they are. Our entire plan depends on it.”
“Okay then. Five boxes. Twenty sticks each. What then?”
“You’re going to deliver them to a government worker named Zhang Wei at Zhongnanhai.”
“Zhongnan-what?”
Titus sighed. “You’ve been in Beijing for three years, and you still don’t know where the president of China works? Look it up. Listen, I sent a script to your email, and I’m expecting a top-notch performance from you.”
“Not to worry. I keep the bar for my acting very high.”
“I’ve already contacted Zhang Wei on your behalf, so he’ll be waiting for you at the Zhongnanhai gate. Your job is to convince him that MassiveStreamz Entertainment will do anything – anything! – to get government approval to sell streaming content within China. As a sign of your goodwill, you are presenting him with a gift of 100 free streaming sticks, which he will personally deliver to the 100 most important officials in the Communist Party. Make a point to emphasize all the banned American TV shows they’ll be able to stream.”
“One question. What makes you sure he won’t just sell these things out of the trunk of his car?”
“I hacked into his back account. That’s the stick. Then I deposited cash. That’s the carrot. Sound familiar?”
Kaibab National Forest
A cold wind stirred as the sun crept over the horizon, further illuminating the forested valley before him and the purple-tinged mountains in the distance. The assassins came back into view. They were perhaps four football fields away, walking along a gulch that led in his general direction.
For professional hit men, they walked clumsily. They stepped heavily, trampling dried branches that broadcast their movement. Rabbits and squirrels that might have otherwise sat tight, waiting for them to pass, fled well ahead of their advance. It was clear that they had no formal military training. But that made them no less dangerous. If anything, they were less predictable.
The wind let up and it was suddenly very still. It was then that the dog heard it - a high-pitched whistling noise. Duke looked up and barked twice. Carver followed the dog’s gaze.
A tiny low-altitude S33KR drone, scarcely 14 inches in length, hovered just 40 feet overhead.
The S33KR was essentially a bloodhound with wings. Carver had attended a private demonstration of its capabilities some two years earlier, at which time the drone had been marketed as a cheaper and more effective alternative to helicopter coverage during manhunts. One of its most impressive features was the ability to use thermal imaging to systematically sweep a predefined area, and relay live aerial footage back to law enforcement.
So this was what the assassins had been assembling in the pre-dawn light. They were using it to track him.
Carver pushed the stock of his father’s 12-gauge shotgun against his right shoulder and raised the barrel. When he pulled the trigger, some three hundred birdshot pellets blasted forth, clipping the little drone and sending it into a death spiral.
Something hot nicked Carver’s left ear. An instant later the thunderous report of a heavy caliber rifle shot erupted throughout the valley.
Carver grabbed Duke and slid down the backside of the ridge as fast as he could, determined not to give his assailants another distance shot. Once he had found cover behind the hill, he paused momentarily to remove the battery from his phone. Unreliable as cell service was in that neck of the woods, there was just one explanation for the fact that they had followed him there – the S33KR drone had somehow penetrated one of the location-based apps on his phone.
With Duke on the leash, Carver headed down a game trail heading due south. The typically obedient dog pulled obstinately. It was no wonder. He had been trained to retrieve waterfowl immediately after the blast of a shotgun. He couldn’t understand why Carver was retreating from the kill area.
The trail meandered and narrowed as they went. After just 20 minutes, Carver, who ran three miles daily back in D.C. but wasn’t used to the high elevation, was already winded.
He pushed on nevertheless. They ran for 15 more minutes until they came across a mountain spring that hadn’t completely frozen over. Carver checked his six. Nothing moving. He dropped to a knee and let the dog drink, but not too much. Then he too drank. And then he splashed the frigid water on his face and hair.
They retreated to a nearby thicket where they had a partial view the valley to the south. Duke settled in beside him.
His left ear stung badly. Carver swatted it with his fingers, expecting to find a wasp or bee. Nothing flew. He then probed with his fingertips, and did not like what he discovered.
The top of his ear - the outer rim called the helix - was no longer smooth and contoured. He had been shot. Thanks to the assassin’s bullet, blood oozed from a dime-sized semi-circle notch in the top of his ear. Had the bullet traveled an inch to the left, Carver knew, he would be missing far more than some skin and cartilage.
He tore off a piece of his shirt and applied pressure to the wound. The bleeding, in his estimation, was not bad enough to have left a blood trail. At least there was that.
The mind chatter started up again. Who were these people? Why had they followed him out here? How had they even known he would be here in the first place?
He focused on what he had seen through his binoculars that morning, assessing his adversaries. Replaying every image in his mind, looking for any detail he might have missed. Yes, they had technology and firepower on their side. But they did not walk like experienced outdoorsmen, or even men who had ever had military training. They had moved out in the open, sticking to the road, where they could have easily been picked off. They had worn sneakers, stepping clumsily on dried sticks and other noisy ground cover. They had walked continuously, never stopping to glass the hillsides for the glint of a metallic object or the reflection of a riflescope. They had instead relied entirely on the data from the drone, never changing course until it had located Carver and relayed his location.
Carver considered his options for escape. These were his old stomping grounds, and virtually every game trail and contour of these forests was etched in his memory. He and Duke could easily travel southeast, sticking to the brushy ridges, until they reached I-40. From there they would cross and travel the back roads, reaching the town of Williams before dark.
That wasn’t a good option. Because sooner or later they would give up looking for him and head back to the truck. And when they did that, they would find his father’s registration card, which had his address. Then they would surely head to the ranch. Unless, God forbid, they hadn’t been there already.
Besides, Carver decided, he had to know who they were. And more importantly, who had hired them.
Since nicking him with the rifle shot, he reckoned that the assassins had likely split up, dividing and conquering the territory. They might hunt for two or three more hours before giving up.
Had Carver been alone, he would have taken them one at a time out here in the woods. Stalk, hit and run. But with Duke beside him, there was virtually no chance of success. The dog’s natural instincts were to run, flush and circle back, over and over again, with his human companion the center of his universe.
But the dog was also trained to wait patiently, hours at a time if needed, in a duck blind.
It was settled, then. If Carver couldn’t stalk these men, then he would ambush them.
Kaibab National Forest
Carver tore off another piece of his shirt and used it to fashion a muzzle for Duke. “Sorry bud,” he said as he wrapped it around the dog’s snout, careful not to restrict his breathing. “This is the only way I can keep you from blowing our cover.” The pair set out again at a slow pace, sweeping up and around the next ridge, circling back northeast toward the road they had come in on before dawn.
Fifty-seven minutes later they came full circle. Carver settled Duke behind some underbrush, and then topped a rocky crest overlooking both the road and the pond. He raised his binoculars and glassed the surrounding area. He saw neither the men nor any drones. He also didn’t see any other people. He reckoned the gut-busting road and the gate might be enough deterrent to keep most people out.
A pair of ducks circled high above the pond. They swooshed in low, taking a close look at the duck blinds, and then disappeared over the ridge before circling back again. Carver found them in his binoculars as they made their final approach. Green-winged teal. Nice fat ones that would have made a good dinner.
The ducks spread their wings wide, arched their backs and extended their legs like fleshy landing gear. And when their paddles hit the layer of ice covering the little pond, they slid in what could only be described as a controlled crash before lifting off again, deliriously quacking and honking as they went back over the horizon in search of warmer water.
Looking out along the road, he saw that the Toyota sedan remained where he had last seen it this morning. That meant that the assassins were still out here, somewhere. Carver hoped they were still far afield. He needed more time to get into position.
He and Duke moved on, remaining high above the road, following a sheltered trail that gave him intermittent visuals on the canyon below. Soon he was directly above and across from his father’s truck. The two-ton vehicle seemed to hunch painfully over the shot tire.
He spotted a pair of mature bucks grazing on the opposing hillside. That was a good sign. They would never be so calm with those clumsy bushwhackers tromping around. Deeming the immediate area safe, he did not linger, silently making his way to the hillside to his east until the Toyota sedan was directly below him. He inspected it with his binoculars. The license plate frame read FLAGSTAFF RENT-A-RIDE.
Carver found a flat piece of earth under a pine skirt with both a view of the car and cover on both sides. He took the Leatherman from his pocket, pulled out the little saw, and cut pieces of the pine skirt just enough so that he could bend them over him to form a canopy.
He tethered Duke’s leash to the tree, then lay prone and waited as the dog slept.
The mind chatter came and went like ocean tides. Old combat experiences played endlessly in his head. He struggled to focus on the present.
Everything in its right place.
Around a quarter till noon, noon, the two men came ambling back down the road. Both were breathing hard, no doubt whipped by the altitude. One of them was actually limping. Neither spoke, but they walked with guns brandished, right in the center of the road, like they owned it.
Perhaps sensing Carver’s tension, the dog shifted awake and let out a whine that was no more audible than the wind. Carver laid a reassuring hand on the animal’s shoulder. Shhhh.
He felt the dog quiver with excitement as Carver held the butt of the Mossberg shotgun to his shoulder and peered down the length of its barrel. He would only have one chance at this. And given that he was packing birdshot, his targets would have to be at close range.
Carver waited until the two men were directly in front of the car, about 25 yards below him.
Suddenly, one of them spoke. “Samui, ne?”
“So desu ka.”
Were his ears playing tricks on him, or were they speaking Japanese? Although Carver was inexplicably terrible at speaking foreign languages, he could understand several. During his year abroad in Japan, just after college, Eri had tried – and failed – to make him conversationally fluent. Nevertheless, he had committed more than 3,000 words of Japanese to memory.
Now Carver took aim. He fired two shots in quick succession. He hit the shorter man directly in the center of his back, the shot forming a jagged circle in his jacket about 20 inches in diameter. He aimed to maim the other man, blowing out his left knee, causing him to drop his TEK-9 machine pistol. When he reached for it, Carver fired again, blowing the weapon out of his reach, as if God himself had exhaled a mighty breath. The boulder behind him was a canvas of blood, tissue and bone.
Carver left Duke muzzled and tied to the tree for his own safety. Then he got to his feet and slid by the heels of his boots down the ridge, keeping his eyes and weapon trained on the one who was still alive.
The assailant’s eyes were weepy and bloodshot. His right hand was a gooey mess. As he saw Carver close the distance between them, shotgun in hand, he defecated in his pants.
Carver braved the stench, pushing the Mossberg into the man’s abdomen. “Who sent you?”
That was the most important question to ask in the moments before death. Discovering this man’s identity would be relatively easy. Within 24 hours, the Guardian could likely learn his alias, his birth name, who his parents were and where he had gone to school. But finding a professional hit man’s employer was exponentially more difficult.
The man glared at him and spat. Semi-transparent spittle landed in a gooey clump on Carver’s chin. He wiped it with his jacket sleeve and then stepped on the man’s blown out knee with the heel of his boot. The man howled.
“Tell me who sent you.”
“Wakarimasen!”
“Nihonjin?” Carver said. You’re Japanese?
The would-be assassin made a quick grab into his jacket pocket.
“Don’t!” Carver yelled as the atta
cker reached for his secondary weapon. It was too late. Carver stepped back, blasting his chest with birdshot.
A loaded Beretta fell from the dead man’s hand.
Carver dropped to a knee. His ears rang. Duke was barking now, having managed to work free of the muzzle, but Carver could barely hear him.
He needed a minute to think. And catch his breath.
Speers’ words loomed large in his mind. Don’t do anything stupid. This thing is going to blow over, I promise.
He had shot these men in self-defense, but it might not look that way to a judge. The intelligence community already thought of him as the grim reaper, and a task force was getting ready to burn him at the stake. Adding two more notches to his belt wasn’t going to help at all.
So there it is. No one can know about this. Not even Julian.
Carver whistled. Duke stopped barking. He settled down again, watching Carver as he dragged both corpses behind the rental car, where both the vehicle and a cluster of pine trees would shelter his activities. Then he set about searching the bodies. Given that he had shot both at close range with birdshot, there was no way to avoid getting his hands sticky.
He pulled a game bag from his vest that he had intended to fill with ducks. Instead he filled it with the duo’s personal possessions – rings, watches, miscellaneous paper from their pockets, phones, the remote control for the S33KR drone, and a hair sample from each man.
Their passports gave him pause. Maroon-colored passports from the People’s Republic of China. They were also biometric, containing a microprocessor chip with the bearer’s image and fingerprints.
And they were most certainly faked. After all, he had heard the two men speaking Japanese with native fluency. He was sure of it. It didn’t add up. English, not Japanese, was the primary business language learned in China.
No time to dwell on that now. He had to collect evidence that might help him identify these men. He would then destroy anything that could tie him to the shootings.
Rogue Empire Page 15