Hunt the Lion

by Chad Zunker

  Hearing her cell phone ringing, Natalie rushed back over to her desk, feeling a new spike of energy. Michelle Blair, her trusted friend and her best source within the FBI, had been digging into Dowerson’s situation for her all day. Natalie hoped she was about to get the confirmation she wanted.

  “We need to meet, right now,” Michelle said.

  “What do you got?” Natalie asked.

  “Not over the phone.”

  SEVEN

  Natalie picked up Michelle in her silver Jeep Cherokee right outside the Metro station at Fourth and E Street near the FBI’s office. Climbing into the passenger seat, Michelle looked serious as hell and instructed Natalie to simply drive. In her thirties, Michelle had short brown hair and an athletic build. The two of them had met several years ago, when Natalie was working a story where she’d first used Michelle as a source. They’d bonded quickly when they discovered both had tragically lost their mothers early in life and were basically raised by the men of their family. Natalie cruised past Lower Senate Park, waited for Michelle to speak. The intensity in the woman’s face got her really excited. Natalie could tell she had something big.

  “Talk to me, Michelle,” Natalie begged.

  “Pull over up here somewhere.”

  Natalie pulled into a near-empty lot next the Hart Senate Office Building.

  Michelle turned to her. “Where’s Sam?”

  Natalie tilted her head. The question caught her off guard. “He’s in London.”

  “When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “A few hours ago. Why?”

  Michelle pulled out a small computer tablet from her purse. Natalie had an uneasy feeling growing in the pit of her stomach. Why was Michelle mentioning Sam? Was this meeting not about Dowerson? Opening up a video on the tablet’s screen, Michelle handed it over to Natalie to view. She stared at the screen. The video looked like some kind of surveillance footage taken from inside a small house. What was this? The camera gave a wide-angle view of a small living room. Natalie could suddenly make out several people inside the room, only they weren’t moving. Some of them were lying on the floor, and several of them looked like they were covered in something dark. Was it blood? A man, probably in his fifties, was sitting in a chair directly in front of the camera, his head cocked all the way back with what clearly looked like blood running down his neck. Natalie grimaced.

  “Why’re you showing me this?”

  “Just keep watching.”

  A few seconds later, a man walked into the living room. Natalie stiffened. Sam! She felt her stomach coil up into a tight ball. Sam was wearing all black. Standing there, he looked around the living room for a few seconds, began carefully stepping around the bodies. He then moved directly in front of the surveillance camera. Natalie couldn’t believe her eyes. It was definitely him, although he seemed oblivious to being recorded. She could see fear in his eyes, and he looked like he was all wet. Why? What was happening? Sam reached down and grabbed something from the man who was sitting in the chair. A cell phone? He took the dead man’s hand and fiddled with the phone. He then began going to each of the bodies and digging in pockets. What was he doing? He moved offscreen for a moment. Seconds later, he came back on-screen again, then quickly left the room.

  The video stopped. Natalie could barely breathe.

  “We intercepted this from inside Moscow a few minutes ago. We believe the video was taken from a built-in computer camera. We don’t have the whole thing—it looks like the recording was triggered after whatever happened had already gone down. We’re not sure yet of the original source. Lamar, who handles our Russian affairs, thinks it’s CIA. I was with Lamar tonight digging for you on Dowerson when another analyst sent this over to him. Lamar didn’t make too much of it—he doesn’t know Sam from Adam—but I immediately recognized him.”

  “Moscow?” Natalie whispered, her head spinning. “That’s not possible.”

  “What’s he doing there?” Michelle asked.

  “He’s not there,” she insisted. “I just talked to him a few hours ago.”

  “He may have been in London earlier, Natalie, but he’s definitely in Moscow right now.”

  “Are those people really dead?”

  Michelle shrugged. “It certainly looks that way. Can’t confirm it, of course.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know. Not sure I’ll find out, either. If this video is tied to the CIA, we probably won’t touch it. I actually had to sneak this from Lamar, and I need to get this tablet back to him ASAP. You had some suspicions about Sam a month ago, so I knew you’d want to see it.”

  “I did. But nothing like this.”

  “I’m sorry, Natalie. I don’t know what to say.”

  “No . . . don’t be . . . thanks for showing me. I just don’t . . . I need to call him.”

  “Drop me first, okay? I don’t want to get into hot water over this.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Natalie pulled out of the parking lot. How could Sam possibly be in Russia, standing in a room full of dead people? Had he really been in London? Had he lied to her about that? She shook her head. He’d sent her photos of himself in London. They’d even done FaceTime yesterday, where he’d shown her the view from his hotel room. It was London! None of this made any sense. Her mind was bouncing all over the place. She couldn’t think of anything but the images of the dead bodies. She had to talk to Sam, make sure he was okay.

  Suddenly, the Dowerson story was the furthest thing from her thoughts.

  Still in a fog, Natalie was driving briskly down D Street to get Michelle back to her FBI office when a black Suburban came speeding out of nowhere from a side street at an intersection. Natalie caught only a half-second glance at the driver before impact. Gray ball cap. Glasses. Black goatee.

  Then metal crunched, and glass shattered.

  Natalie flew forward just as her airbag exploded in her face, then violently whipped her head back again. Coming from the front right of her vehicle, the collision made her Jeep spin in a full circle in the middle of the intersection before it finally settled in a heap of smoke and debris. Her world went dark.

  Seconds later, she was alert again, although her vision was fuzzy. The left side of her face throbbed from the impact of the airbag, and she could hear steady popping noises in both ears. But she couldn’t feel any other specific pain in her body. No clear signs of broken bones or other injuries, unless her body was in shock. Thankfully, she had been wearing her seat belt.

  She looked over at Michelle, who wasn’t moving. Her friend’s forehead was bleeding profusely. Although Michelle’s airbag had also engaged, she hadn’t worn her seat belt. She’d been tossed around inside the vehicle and now was slumped forward. Natalie tried to mutter Michelle’s name, but she couldn’t even tell if the words were actually coming out. The popping in her ears was so loud. She reached over, gently pushed on Michelle’s arm, but her friend didn’t respond to her touch. Natalie cursed. Michelle needed help. Natalie had to call someone. Where was her cell phone?

  She suddenly heard the roar of a car engine nearby—it was loud enough for her to hear over the popping noises in her ears. Natalie tried to look around through all the shattered glass. What was happening? She stared out Michelle’s broken window directly into bright headlights.

  The driver of the Suburban wasn’t finished with them yet. He’d backed up the large vehicle and was now racing forward for another round. Natalie braced for impact. The Suburban again crushed the right side of her car, this time pushing it completely across the intersection, until the tires of the Jeep collided with a sidewalk curb, and the vehicle flipped up onto its side.

  More glass shattered and fell across Natalie’s face and body. She tried to cover her eyes with her hands. She felt completely penned in, the concrete sidewalk just six inches from her bruised face. She could taste blood in her mouth. She could smell a terrible mix of gas, burned rubber, and lots of smoke. Michelle had been thrown all the
way into the back seat of the Jeep. She still wasn’t moving.

  Why was this happening?

  Who was doing this?

  Hearing tires squeal again on the street, Natalie wondered if she was about to feel the impact of yet another collision. How much could she survive? But a third impact thankfully never happened. She was relieved to hear multiple sirens quickly approaching. Then she heard Michelle suddenly moan in agony.

  At least her friend was still alive.

  EIGHT

  Fifteen minutes later, Natalie personally ushered Michelle’s gurney over to the waiting ambulance. Although she could now feel a sharp pain in her side, as well as scrapes and bruises all over her face, Natalie had basically walked away clean—even though the medics wanted her to sit still so they could check her out more thoroughly. She refused further medical attention until they’d fully dealt with Michelle, who though now alert was clearly in a tremendous amount of pain. Natalie heard medics discussing multiple broken bones and the possibility of serious internal injuries. Natalie squeezed Michelle’s hand and then stepped away as two medics lifted the gurney and slid it into the back of the ambulance.

  Moments later, the siren blared, and the ambulance sped away.

  Natalie said a prayer for her friend. Michelle would survive this. She was a fighter, just like Natalie. Sitting down on a street curb, Natalie finally allowed a medic to examine the extent of her injuries thoroughly. There were cops and emergency personnel everywhere, and a big crowd had gathered on the sidewalks to watch the chaos.

  Across the street, her Jeep was a mangled mess. It was a miracle she was not in the back of an ambulance right now. She’d already given her version of events to two officers. The Suburban had been abandoned six blocks away. One of the officers mentioned it was an armored SUV reported stolen from one of the embassies, which explained how the vehicle had survived the impact of the two collisions. She also heard murmurs about a hit-and-run, but Natalie knew it was much more than that. The first hit could be categorized as an accident. The second was attempted murder.

  Who had done this? Was it somehow related to her story on Dowerson and the Russian investigation? Did someone catch wind and aim to derail the story by completely derailing her? That kind of crazy thing had happened before in this morally bankrupt city. A fellow reporter’s car had been torched just a few weeks ago. Fortunately, he wasn’t inside the car. Or was Michelle the target? Did someone want to take out the FBI agent?

  Natalie’s mind switched gears. She thought of the video of Sam standing in a room full of dead bodies. Was this about something else? Somehow related to Sam? She desperately needed to call him, but she didn’t even know where her cell phone was.

  While the medic put a bandage on her forehead, Natalie scanned the growing crowd of onlookers. Had anyone else seen the guy behind the wheel? She searched the crowd, face by face. Then her eyes locked in on a man standing off by himself near the back. She cursed, bolted to her feet, shocking the medic who wasn’t finished with her bandage. That was the guy! The driver. Gray ball cap. Glasses. Black goatee.

  Natalie began to frantically point and yell at two nearby cops, when everything suddenly went dizzy and her legs fell limp. The medic caught her in midfall and slowly set her back down on the sidewalk, where he begged her to lie still so they could do a full concussion protocol. It took several minutes for her head to clear again.

  When it did, she slowly sat up, again searched the crowd.

  The goateed man was gone.

  NINE

  Spencer Lloyd sat in a booth in the back corner of Founding Farmers, a local dining favorite three blocks from the White House. He ate at the restaurant at least twice a week and often brought along Pop, his eighty-nine-year-old senile father, who lived with Lloyd in his cramped two-bedroom condo. As assistant director in charge of the FBI’s DC field office, Lloyd had hit every dining hotspot in the city more than ten times over. In his opinion, this was the best meat loaf and gravy in town.

  Lloyd checked his watch: 8:52 p.m.

  Agent Michael Epps, his right-hand man, should be joining him any moment. Epps had texted earlier, claiming to have news. A manila folder open in front of him, Lloyd studied a stack of eight-by-ten-inch surveillance photos they’d captured earlier that week near the Washington Monument. Two men were prominently positioned in the photos. Lloyd knew the identity of one of the men: Samuel W. Callahan. A twenty-six-year-old rookie attorney with Benoltz & Associates. A young man who’d made headlines last year because his job as a political tracker had unwittingly pushed him into a firestorm of an election scandal. A man who just last month happened to somehow become intertwined with Lloyd’s official hunt for an infamous German assassin named Alger Gerlach—also known as the Gray Wolf.

  Regretfully, Lloyd had not captured Gerlach. The assassin had simply vanished on him. To Lloyd’s further dismay, the boss man himself, Director Luther Stone, had shut down Lloyd’s involvement with Callahan. He’d ordered Lloyd to stand down, leave it alone, and not ask any further questions. Later, Lloyd had discovered that Stone’s orders had come at the specific request of CIA director Cliff Barton. This revelation had infuriated him. Normally one to stay in line and not rock the boat, Lloyd had a hard time letting this one go—especially when he believed the CIA was not only involved with Callahan but had also directly assisted somehow in the Gray Wolf’s overnight disappearance.

  In his mind, Lloyd had been played, then bullied, and he didn’t like it one bit. With the help of Agent Epps, Lloyd had been running his own off-line investigation the past month and keeping loose tabs on the lawyer, Callahan. Lloyd knew he was playing with fire. If Stone caught wind of it, Lloyd’s head would likely be on the chopping block. But he wanted answers so badly that it kept him up at night.

  So far, Lloyd had been unable to identify the other man in the photos with Callahan. Sporting a gray beard, he looked to be in his midsixties, only a few years older than Lloyd. Their inability to ID this guy had completely baffled Lloyd. After all, they were the FBI. They had access to damn near everything. Yet every trail on this guy went cold, and nothing came up in their facial-recognition software.

  By all accounts, the gray-bearded man was a living ghost.

  Taking another bite of his meat loaf, he looked up when he spotted Epps navigating the restaurant. A tall black man in his late forties, Epps had been Lloyd’s trusted colleague for more than a decade. And about his only friend. Epps slid his lanky body into the booth, set a brown leather satchel next to him.

  “You ever get anything but meat loaf, chief?” Epps asked him, eyeballing Lloyd’s plate.

  “You ever get anything but the pork chop?” Lloyd countered.

  Epps smiled. “Nope. Best in town.”

  “Then zip it,” Lloyd replied. “Before I fire you.”

  Epps shook his head, kept grinning. A waiter came by, and Epps ordered his beloved pork chop and a beer.

  “You mentioned news?” Lloyd inquired.

  “I finally got him, boss.”

  “Who?”

  Epps pointed at the surveillance photos on the table. “Our mystery man.”

  “You’re kidding? How?”

  “With all the failures on the high-tech front, I went the old-fashioned way. Tracked down an old friend of my father who did twenty-five years with the CIA. Retired ten years ago. Guy now spends nearly every day fishing over at Fletcher’s Cove. On a hunch, I showed him the photos. Thought maybe an old-timer could piece it together for us. Sure enough, the fisherman says he believes he knows the guy. Or he knew him a long time ago—he said he hadn’t spoken to the man in probably more than fifteen years.”

  “So who the hell is he?”

  “His name is Marcus Pelini,” Epps continued. “The fisherman said Pelini ran CIA missions in the Middle East for more than twenty years and then went way off the radar years ago to do covert ops. They called him the Lion.”

  “The Lion? Why?”

  “He said Pelini was king of t
heir intelligence jungle, a real badass, someone you did not want to mess around with. You did not ever want the Lion on your bad side.”

  “You ran his name up the channels?”

  “Yes, sir. I can find nothing. He’s a shadow.”

  “All right, so what the hell is the Lion doing with a guy like Sam Callahan?”

  Epps shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me.”

  TEN

  Sam stepped into a twenty-four-hour gas station near the Moskva River. At three in the morning, the store was empty except for a half-asleep young clerk who stood behind the front counter and casually eyeballed him while listening to headphones. Head tucked low, Sam took an aisle toward the back corner, where he locked himself inside a small but clean single-toilet bathroom. He set his black leather bag on the floor, quickly took off the black jacket and the black vest, set them to the side.

  Standing bare-chested in front of the mirror, he stared at himself, took a few deep breaths, and slowly exhaled. A new wave of disbelief poured through him. How could he possibly be stranded in a random gas station in the middle of Moscow with the team of highly trained special agents who’d brought him here all slaughtered a mile away? He cursed himself. He could be with Natalie right now, safe and warm inside her apartment, watching a good movie on the sofa. He yearned to feel her touch right now, hear her laugh. Instead, he was cold, hurting, and once again running for his damn life. He could have sidestepped this entire ordeal a month ago, just walked away and never again spoken with Marcus Pelini.