Vendetta Target: Six Assassins Book 5

by Heskett, Jim

  Bam shrugged. “Maybe they’re not scattered. Maybe they’re all in one place. I’ll give you your next clue when the time is right, and not a second before. Now: lower the gun. I’m tired of asking you.”

  “Or what, Bam? What are you going to do?”

  His weird eyes flared again, along with his nostrils. “I’ll prove to you how bad your judgment is. You think I’m some disorganized and sloppy pothead? You’re so wrong, you have no idea. Now lower the gun. You’re starting to make me mad.”

  “No. I don’t think so. Why don’t you tell me where those bombs are and save us both a ton of time?”

  “Patience.”

  Ember flexed her jaw. “I ran out of patience weeks ago, kid. Now you’re going to—”

  Before Ember could even flinch, Bam swung his arm down and knocked the pistol from her hand. It thudded onto the soft carpet below. For a split second, Ember didn’t even know it had slipped away. Bam was a blur.

  She made a fist to punch him back a step. She intended to reach down and pick up her weapon, but he smacked her against the cheek with an open-handed slap. Her head jerked to the side. His swipe had been so fast and hard, she hadn’t been able to pull her head out of the way in time.

  Next, he brought a knee up into her chest, and all the air rushed out of her lungs. He spun and gave her the back of the other hand. Ember had no time to counter any of the moves, and she couldn’t predict the next one coming.

  How the hell was he so fast?

  Ember dropped down to avoid the next punch, and she wrapped her arms around his knees and drove forward, tackling him to the ground. He bumped against his couch, grunting, then brought a fist down on top of her head before she could contain his arms.

  Ember’s vision immediately blurred, and she sat back to heave a breath, a headache worming through her head. Eyes watering. Both of them were sitting up on the couch, only a couple feet away from each other.

  Ember tried to pivot toward him, but he was gone.

  She blinked a few times and when she opened her eyes, Bam was on his knees, a Sig Sauer in his hands. Elbows locked, and one eye closed. He had her dead-on, pistol aimed at her head.

  “That was not a very smart thing to do,” he said.

  Ember stared, breathing. Why didn’t Bam just shoot her? Why was he stalling?

  “Pull the trigger, Bam.”

  “I told you. It’s not time yet. Pick up your pistol and go. You’ll hear from me about the next clue, and not until I’m ready, okay? Until then, leave me alone. Bitch.”

  Ember picked up her pistol, with Bam tracking her, keeping his gun pointed at her at all times. She slipped it into the back of her waistband and stood, feeling a little wobbly. Never had she had her ass kicked so thoroughly by someone so young and skinny and seemingly burned out on weed. He was like a caged lion inside the frame of a skateboard kid.

  Without a word, she opened the door and backed out of his apartment. On the way out, she rubbed a hand atop her head, feeling for the lump that would soon form there.

  And even though she was hurting—both physically and her pride—she smiled.

  Because Bam hadn’t seen what she’d slipped inside his shoe.

  Chapter Sixteen

  WELLNER

  The President of the DAC opened the front door to his house in Highlands Ranch to see his secretary Naomi standing there with a backpack over her shoulder. She was bathed in golden hour light, a tentative smile on her face as she waited to be allowed inside.

  “Afternoon, sir,” she said. “What a great neighborhood, huh? I’ve never been around here before.”

  “Come in,” he said, looking past her to check for lurking eyes on the street. He didn’t see any, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

  His heart hadn’t stopped racing all day long. Like a low rumbling stomach ache constantly pushing up into his ribcage. Wellner had developed the ache some number of years ago; he couldn’t even remember anymore. Like an extra limb, it was always with him. Either a sign of advancing age, or a sign of anxiety. Or both.

  She entered the house and looked around. “Nice house, too. You decorate?”

  “My ex-wife. I would love to make it more modern and get rid of a lot of the crap she put up, but I just don’t have the time.”

  “You need to take some vacation days and get it done. When was the last time you took a day off?”

  “Uhh, not sure. It’s been quite a while.”

  She crossed the foyer, her flats clacking on the tile below. She stopped in front of a canvas painting, some splotchy red and green thing his ex had hung there ten years ago. “I hear you about not having any time,” she said, musing as her eyes trailed over the art.

  “Speaking of being short on time,” he said, raising his eyebrows. He didn’t want to have to tap on his wrist, hoping she would pick up on the urgency in his voice instead.

  “Right,” Naomi said. She removed the backpack from her shoulders and squinted around. “I can hook this up to your TV, if you want to do it there. Maybe better than being hunched over my little laptop screen.”

  “Of course,” he said. Wellner guided Naomi down the hall and into the living room, which had a tall ceiling and an open floor plan that spilled into the kitchen. Bay windows to the east overlooked the valley, bathed in pinkish late afternoon light. Three-quarters of a ring of couches surrounded a fireplace in the middle of the room, with a 60-inch television hanging on the wall opposite the couch ring.

  “Again, David, very impressive. I hope I can have a house like this someday.”

  “Thank you. If only I was here enough to enjoy it.” He handed her a slip of paper with the WiFi password.

  Naomi took a laptop from her bag and nestled into the couch. Her little frame sank into the billowing couch cushions, as if it wanted to swallow her. The glow lit up her face as she typed on the keyboard. He stood there, hovering nearby, feeling like an idiot. Should he offer her a drink? Maybe that would be too forward. He had to keep reminding himself that she was basically half his age, and he was chubby and balding. Nowhere close to the type this beautiful young woman would go for. Naomi was a 9.5 and Wellner was a 4 on a good day.

  Still, he couldn’t help but notice the curve of her breasts in her sweater as she typed. He tried not to stare, but found it impossible. Everything about her was perfect. Was he only focusing on this now to distract himself from the revving anxiety he felt? Probably.

  “Want something to drink?”

  “No thanks, I’m good. You can turn on the TV now. It should be loading up and almost ready to go.”

  He selected the right remote from an array of six, then he eased onto the same couch as Naomi, but he left three feet of barren space between them. Any closer and he might be tempted to absent-mindedly reach out and grab her hand during the show. “Bring me up to speed.”

  Naomi pointed at the TV as the image came into focus. A video of Vice President Jules Dunard’s house, from a low angle in the front. The house was framed by bushes and shrubs on both sides. “We have three drones, all of them tiny and almost silent. But at that size, they’ll only give about ten minutes of surveillance footage. Those are mostly for backup. We have cameras pointed at all the major windows at Jules’ house. I can switch between any of the visuals at any time.”

  “Wow. This is amazing. Seriously, Naomi, I’m very impressed.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but then paused, her lips moving as she read words on the screen. “We have something, sir. Car coming.”

  She tapped a key, and the camera angle switched to up above. Must have been one of the drones.

  “That’s her car,” Wellner said as he watched the drone track the car up the winding road in Morrison, Colorado. A cold tingle of fear spread up his spine. Was he really going to do this? Could he really kill Jules?

  She had tried to kill him. At least, that’s what the evidence suggested. Wellner wasn’t a hundred percent sure any more if she had sent the assassin from Boulder
Branch to kill him in the parking garage.

  Maybe she had, maybe she hadn’t. If she had, she deserved what was about to happen to her. Sending an expendable Branch member to do her dirty work had been a despicable act.

  David Wellner had labored for years to work his way into the political system of the Denver Assassins Club. He had sacrificed relationships and neglected his self-care to focus his energy into what was best for the Club. And he hadn’t done it all so this usurper could steal it from him. Not this time.

  Never again.

  “She can’t see these drones?”

  “Not likely, sir, unless she’s deliberately looking for one. They’re pretty high up. Quiet, too.“

  He considered saying something to Naomi about his level of anxiety, but he hesitated. He felt a droplet of sweat trickle down his chest and onto the top of his belly.

  Was this the right thing? Was it too late to abort?

  Maybe going after the drug angle was a better way to do this. He had circumstantial evidence that Jules had attempted to create a drug cartel inside the Assassins Club. But therein was the problem. The evidence didn’t rise above circumstantial. Jules was too smart to leave a paper trail. Those witnesses Wellner had questioned in the basement of the Holdings building had talked, but it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t present the rest of the Board with evidence taken from the confessions of men with warm pistols against their temples.

  Jules’ car parked in front of her house. The drone feed zoomed in, focusing on the car.

  “Interesting,” Naomi said.

  “What?”

  “Why isn’t she using the garage? Why is she parking outside? We had expected her to do the same thing she does every day, but she’s deviating from her norm.”

  “Where’s our guy? Is he in the garage, expecting her there?”

  “We have two, sir. One in the garage, one outside.”

  Wellner drummed his fingertips on the thighs of his slacks and tried to breathe through his nose to control his racing heart, but it only made a loud whistling sound in and out. The edges of his vision began to blur.

  Jules’ driver side door opened, but then the passenger side door opened, too.

  Wellner pointed at the screen. “Why are both doors opening? She’s supposed to be alone. Is someone else with her? What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Naomi said, stammering. “She is supposed to be alone. She was alone when she left the Holdings building half an hour ago.”

  Jules stepped out of the driver side of the car, but then a tall black man in a gray suit emerged from the passenger side. They both stood by the car and closed the doors. The man looked around and then nodded at Jules.

  Wellner gritted his teeth. Something was definitely wrong here. “Who is that? Who is that guy?”

  Naomi squinted. “It looks like Robbie from Security.”

  “Jules has a bodyguard? Since when does she roll around with personal protection?” Wellner tried to swallow, but the lump in his throat was too much. He pressed his fingernails into the fleshy palms of his hands. “Abort,” he managed to spit out. “We have to abort this, right now. Tell your two guys to back off, immediately. They have to find a window on the other side of the house, or something like that. Get them out of there.”

  Naomi typed, her nails clicking on the keys. “I’m trying to get a message through, sir, but it might be too late. I think they’re on a private channel so there’s no chance for outside interference.”

  Wellner stood up and took a step toward the TV. “Oh, shit. Tell me this isn’t happening.”

  With no sound, Wellner had to watch it play out in silence, with only the beating of his heart to provide a soundtrack. From the right side of the frame, a man dressed in all black burst forth from the bushes. Robbie the bodyguard immediately drew a gun from inside his coat and put a bullet in the man’s chest before he could do anything about it. It happened in less than a second, but Naomi’s agent went down and did not attempt to rise again.

  Their hitter had been hit.

  Jules screamed a silent scream and ducked down. Her bodyguard raced around the front of the car, holding his pistol out, pointing it all around to look for other threats.

  Wellner saw what looked like puffs of smoke coming from on top of Jules’ car. No, not that, exactly. With no sound to help, he couldn’t tell what had happened.

  “What is that?” Wellner asked. “Are those rounds fired?”

  “Our backup man. He’s shooting from somewhere, but he’s only hitting the car. If he’s in the garage, he might not have an angle on Jules from there.”

  By now, the bodyguard had Jules down on the ground, covering her body with his. More shots popped off from somewhere, and now Wellner could see a window on the front of the house had been knocked out. He tracked the barrel of a rifle as it poked out. Flashes of light coming from the end of it. More shots.

  The second man had moved over from the garage to the foyer of the house.

  Robbie covered Jules until the first round of blasting stopped, then he turned around and unleashed a barrage of bullets toward the house. A moment later, the bodyguard took his finger off the trigger. He waited, then he stood up, the gun now aimed low.

  No shots came back at him. No movement through the windows.

  “You have to be kidding me,” Wellner said. “Jules’ guy killed both of ours? Is that what I’m seeing? Please tell me that’s not what just happened.”

  The feed glitched for a moment and then returned. Naomi frowned, clicking on the keyboard. “It looks that way, David. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”

  He took another step toward the TV as Robbie ducked down and helped Jules to her feet. “Are we blown? Is there anything there that can connect these two guys to us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Wellner whirled around and glared at Naomi. “Is there?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. They’re outside contractors. Not DAC. Their phones should have no record of communication with me. They shouldn’t have any paper on them at all that can link them to you.”

  Wellner again focused on the TV as Jules stopped and looked straight up. As bile bubbled up into Wellner’s throat, making him sneer, Jules looked directly into the drone’s camera above her.

  Directly at him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  EMBER

  DAY FOUR

  Ember checked her phone as she drove, tricky since she had to accomplish so many things at once. First of all, not crashing her car. Second, maintaining a reasonable distance between herself and her target. And third, keeping an eye on the little blue dot on the app on her phone, in case Bam took a sudden detour, or she somehow lost visual contact with him. He drove like a maniac, passing people across double yellow lines, swerving for no reason, sudden starts and stops.

  Getting the tracker into Bam’s shoe had not been easy. Ember had gone to Bam’s apartment last night all full of venom and justice, driven by anger over Bam’s killing of innocent civilians because he was too cloudy to set the right time on a bomb. With a tiny amount of additional finger pad pressure, she could have pulled the trigger of her Enforcer and killed him. She’d wanted to.

  But she’d had the foresight to bring along a tiny GPS tracker — they were incredibly small these days, powered by a single teardrop-shaped battery and able to broadcast a weak signal, barely strong enough to be triangulated by the satellites above. And while Bam had been easily kicking her ass in his living room, she had managed to drop down low and slip the watch-battery-sized tracker into place. That in itself had been especially tricky. If it went into the heel or toe of his shoe, he would feel it rattling around, pressing under his foot. Ember had instead slid it into the corner of his shoe’s top, nestled between the tongue and the laces. She’d had to hope for a little luck that it would stay there and not fall out when he laced up this morning, even though she’d added a small bit of velcro to the back of the thing.

  So far it was working, or h
e was doing an excellent job of pretending. And now Bam drove north on Highway 36, on the road from Boulder that eventually went to Lyons and then on to Estes Park. In a perfect world, he would lead her right to his cache of bombs, or the next bombing location. There had to be some way she could get an advantage on him.

  North of civilization, though, there wasn’t much aside from cow farmers, open spaces, and barbed wire fences. It wouldn’t make sense to plant a bomb out here. What was he doing north of Boulder?

  A text from Zach popped up on her phone as she was tracking the location:

  I’m about to do something stupid.

  Ember gritted her teeth and pressed the button to dictate a text back. “I wish you wouldn’t,” she said, then the words appeared on the screen and she hit the send button. A moment later came his reply:

  I think it’ll be okay. I’m being very careful.

  She wished she could divert from this current task right now and swoop him up from wherever he was. But he was a grown human male with free will, and she couldn’t tie him up and make him stay at the motel all week until she could figure out what was next. He had been more patient and compliant than she had expected, actually.

  Ember: I think you should reconsider

  Zach: I appreciate that, but I’m good. There are things I have to do. Things that can’t wait.

  Ember: I know you don’t want to sit around all week. But there is dangerous shit out there.

  Zach: I know, but “dangerous shit” is my middle name

  Ember: wut?

  Zach: that joke worked a lot better in my head. Anyway, miss you. Gotta go.

  She grunted and switched back to the maps app. If she couldn’t keep Zach in line, solely based on the overwhelming evidence of the peril facing him, she would have to have someone look out for him. There was no other way than to have Zach tailed by someone from Boulder Branch. As much as Ember had wanted to avoid giving Fagan a full briefing, it seemed like she had no choice now.