The Warriors Series Boxset II

by Ty Patterson

  He stopped in a Safeway’s parking lot, changed the plates on his SUV, turned his jacket inside out and donned a ball cap. His jacket had different colors on the inside and outside and could be worn both ways. Small changes in appearance made a big difference. People generally looked at the whole, not at specifics.

  He dug out the men’s phones and extracted a tool kit from underneath the rear bench seats and cloned their phones. He inserted the duplicate SIM cards in spare handsets and deactivated the hood’s phones. Now they couldn’t be tracked via their GPS signals, but any incoming calls would be diverted to the duplicates Zeb had made.

  He headed out of the city, driving steadily, heading east. He heard the phones ring several times, ignored them and when he was on County Road 215, he floored it. He headed to an abandoned farm he had used in a previous mission, drove off black top and bounced on a country road for fifteen minutes before he halted.

  He stepped out and hauled the men out unceremoniously and dumped them on the ground. The second gunman swore unintelligibly behind his tape, Swarthy was unconscious and lay unmoving.

  Zeb stood silently letting the gunman who was awake, take him in, take in his surroundings. They were in the middle of nowhere; the country road that Zeb had taken widened into a patch of land and stopped. No other roads or trails led from the patch, which was a rough oval, dirty brown with not even a blade of grass on it.

  Maybe at one point there had been a building on top of the patch, a farmhouse or a barn. Now there was nothing. Hard ground that merged into grassy land that ran for as far as the eye could see and then became sky at the horizon.

  Zeb drew his Glock out and saw the gunman’s eyes sharpen and look around.

  ‘Yeah, this place is ideal for burying a couple of bodies, isn’t it?’

  The gunman’s eyes grew mean and the noises behind the tape grew louder. Zeb removed his jacket and placed his gun on top of it. He reached down to an ankle sheath, withdrew his Benchmade which glinted once in the light.

  It didn’t shine for long as in the next second it was buried deep in the gunman’s right thigh.

  It was late night when he made his call and gave names. ‘Luke Wasserman, Jason Studelander, Fred Polks, Gabby Porterman, Mike Barrow and Diego Luca. Porterman and Polks are with me.’

  He spelt the names to Broker who typed rapidly and saved the names.

  ‘They the ones who killed her?’ Broker’s voice turned into electronic signals and bounced between towers as packets of data, which unpacked themselves when they reached Zeb’s phone and turned back into a rumble in Zeb’s ear.

  ‘Not by these guys. Some other perps that these dudes don’t know of. Studelander is the guy who used Morrow’s name and he’s their immediate boss. He reports to Wasserman, but I’m betting that dude isn’t the paymaster.’

  ‘But they’re sure Elena was killed by someone in their crew?’ Broker asked again.

  ‘Yeah, but like I said, they don’t know who. Studelander and Wasserman have organized this crew neatly. There are about twenty men, all mercs, all who work in teams of twos or threes. No one team knows the other. They all hang out in Wyoming or Los Angeles, and whenever a job comes up, Studelander picks a team, meets them in person and issues instructions.’

  ‘Like terrorist cells.’

  ‘Exactly. By the way, these guys knew who I was and where I had served. They had access to the redacted version of my records.’

  Broker grunted. ‘That’s not hard to get. Some of your details are on our firm’s website.’

  He thought aloud. ‘Those names aren’t common. Betcha they’re fake. If they are based in Wyoming or L.A., maybe Studelander or Wasserman are in one of those two locations’

  Zeb agreed. ‘It’s worth running those names through Werner, even if they’re covers. Also put the word out and see if anyone knows of mercenaries teaming up to form a private army.’

  He, Broker and the rest of them had extensive contacts in the military contractor and Special Forces world. Their network actively fed them intel on who was operating where and for which client.

  Broker replied. ‘Will do.’ A grin laced his voice. ‘I hope Wasserman sends a crew after us. Bear and Bwana were griping just yesterday that they were getting rusty.’

  Zeb smiled in the darkness. His crew could hold off an army, and had done just that on a few occasions. Wasserman could throw everything at them and he would still fall short.

  ‘You got any numbers off their phones?’

  ‘I’ll send you the logs, but if they’re this organized, chances are all those numbers belong to throwaway phones.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering about Petrova. If she was working on so important a story, wouldn’t she make more than one copy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Zeb admitted. ‘That was going through my mind too. She would have at least a backup. It’s the way we would work. But where?’

  Zeb heard the tap of a putter against a ball; Broker practicing on the putting strip as he thought furiously.

  ‘She could have a hard copy backup as well as an electronic one. The electronic one could be saved in the cloud; the paper copy could be anywhere.’

  ‘Why don’t you look into those cloud storage services?’ Zeb’s voice sharpened when an idea floated in his mind. ‘The files I got from Parrish or the downloads from the twins, didn’t mention any address for her folks. Maybe she sent stuff there and removed their details from all records?’

  ‘You heard that?’ Broker called out and Zeb heard a chorus of yells from the twins. Broker had put him on speaker; the twins had been listening all along. Zeb interrupted their excited discussion.

  ‘Broker, can you get a GPS map for wherever her phone has traveled? And also her car?’

  ‘We can look into those locations and see who or what she visited.’ Meghan’s voice was electric. ‘I’ll get onto that. The only problem might be how far back we can get records.’

  ‘Anything will help.’

  Broker came back to the captives with another question. ‘Why did Studelander use his own crew? He’s used the 38th Street so far?’

  ‘Looks like that gang got cold feet. Besides they don’t have much of a presence outside of L.A.’

  ‘You plan to go after Cisco?’

  ‘Nope. Now we have two names to go after.’

  ‘I’ll dig out everything on Wasserman and his sidekick and get back to you,’ Broker promised. ‘Where are you heading next?’

  ‘Nowhere. I am expecting a call.’

  Chapter 13

  The call came an hour later.

  An hour in which Zeb prepared a cold meal and ate silently with the stars and a distant coyote’s howl for company. The two hoods were unconscious and whenever they came to, Zeb helped them back to oblivion.

  One of the cloned phones rang when he had stowed away his gear and was leaning against the side of his vehicle. He took the call and listened silently.

  He heard faint breathing at the other end.

  A warm laugh broke the silence finally, the same voice that had spoken to Zeb in Pinedale. ‘Mr. Carter, I presume?’

  Zeb didn’t reply and the voice continued after a pause. ‘You are proving to be much more of a nuisance than I anticipated, Mr. Carter. I thought you would be out of my hair after we spoke that night, but you keep turning up like a bad penny.’

  ‘Why’re you doing this, Mr. Carter? You have a business in New York. Shouldn’t you be running that, instead of digging into this woman’s death? Who is she to you?’

  Zeb turned the phone on speaker and checked on the two men. Polks was unmoving, though he was breathing deeply. Porterman had roused when the phone rang and was glaring at him with bright eyes. He twisted frantically on the ground and grunted loudly to signal his presence. His thigh was dark with blood and his combat trousers were soaked.

  Zeb kicked him in his belly and he gasped and lay still.

  The voice on the phone rose. ‘Are those my men? Are they alive, Mr. Carter?’

&n
bsp; Zeb ignored him and checked the bindings on the men. They were secure.

  All levity left the voice when he spoke again. ‘You think you are getting somewhere, Mr. Carter. Let me tell you this; you’ve no idea who you’re dealing with. You do not know what I am capable of. You cannot imagine the resources we have. You will lose. If you don’t stop, we will hunt you and kill you like a dog.’

  ‘But maybe it’s not you we need to go after. You’ve got colleagues in New York. The twin sisters, and some other people. For such a resourceful man, you were very easy to track down.’

  Yeah, good luck with going after Broker, Bwana and the others.

  Zeb dragged Polks over to Porterman and laid the two men side by side. He drew his Glock and watched the whites of Porterman’s eyes flash, his thrashing increase.

  Two shots rang out, loud in the stillness of the night.

  Zeb glanced at his phone and finally answered the voice.

  ‘You talk too much.’

  An hour later, he was driving back to Cheyenne, back to Petrova’s apartment block. He circled the block a couple of times, spotted nothing alarming and nudged into the parking lot.

  Mom with the baby chair could have called the cops, but I am guessing she didn’t. Folks tend to mind their own business these days.

  It was full, every space occupied. He stopped behind a Chevy Blazer, put on his Kevlar vest, grabbed his backpack and keyed in a code at the rear entrance. Porterman had been most helpful with the various access codes in the building.

  He took the stairs and when he reached the last flight of stairs before the fifth floor, he stopped. He extracted a slender cable and pushed one end of it, snake-like, onto the landing. The telescopic lens at the end of the cable threw a magnified image of the landing on his sat phone. He adjusted the controls on the screen and the size reduced, its resolution increased.

  The landing was empty.

  He curled the cable and went past Petrova’s door, bending as he crossed it to remain out of sight of the peephole. He hugged a wall and fell prone and ran the cable through the thin crack under the door.

  He got a view of a hallway and then the living room, the television and a couch. The living room seemed to be empty, the TV was turned off. He twisted the cable through various angles but didn’t see anything else.

  He extracted a compact thermal imager.

  It showed no heat. The apartment was empty.

  What I expected. Barrow and Luca must have checked out the moment they realized their two men were missing.

  He entered the apartment, Glock at the ready, and once he had checked out all the rooms, he began searching. He booted her computer and was unsurprised to find all its files had been erased. He removed its hard drive and slipped a dummy one in its place. The hard drive would go to Broker to work his magic on.

  Petrova’s work desk had a shelf with several files in them. Bills, bank statements, mortgage statements, letters from publishers; nothing pointed to any piece she was writing.

  The bedroom had photographs of her at various events; a couple of them were with presidents at the White House. A drawer by the bedside had an album containing more photographs from her work life.

  She was single, never married. There’s nothing here about her folks.

  Two hours later, he gave up after searching for secret hideaways and finding none. The apartment was sterile.

  I’ll bet that hard drive will have nothing on it too.

  He exited as quietly as he had come, dragged the two men out of his SUV and dumped them on concrete. Both men were awake and both wriggled and lashed out with their bound feet. They calmed down when the Benchmade appeared in his hand again.

  He inserted the SIMs in their handsets and dropped the phones on their chests.

  If Wasserman is smart, he’ll track the GPS signals and recover his men.

  He went back to the patch in the middle of nowhere and caught up on his sleep.

  The beeping on his computer woke Wasserman at around two a.m. He blinked for a second and moved from sleep to alert in a matter of seconds. He rose to his feet and when he saw the GPS signals at Petrova’s block, he called Barrow.

  Barrow’s voice was hoarse when he picked up the phone. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You said you checked the parking lot, Polks and Gabby weren’t there?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ A scratch sound came over the phone as if Barrow was rubbing his stubble. ‘That’s when you asked us to haul our asses away from there.’

  ‘Their phones are back online. They are in the lot.’

  Barrow fell silent as he put it together. ‘Carter must have brought the bodies back. You want us to check them out?’

  ‘Do that. I don’t want their bodies to end up with the cops. All our gigs are zero footprint ones.’ He went to the kitchen filled a glass of water and drank it. A thought struck him as the cool liquid made its way through him. ‘It’s possible he didn’t kill them. He shot them while on the phone with me, but shots don’t mean anything. Be careful. It could be a trap. ‘

  ‘Roger.’ Barrow hung up.

  Wasserman rubbed his eyes and swore softly as a thought entered his mind. He’s yanking your chain.

  The assassin was working to a schedule. He would kill the oil minister next week and then Wasserman would issue him his next target. His principal had all of them identified and wanted all of them killed before a certain date.

  Carter couldn’t be allowed to interfere.

  He won’t. Wasserman wiped the thought in sudden fury. He will never know what the journalist was working on. He got lucky so far. On the other hand, I am prepared and have been working on this for a long time.

  Preparation always wins over luck.

  The assassin was in the same hotel that the oil minister would be staying in. He had checked in as an oil industry delegate from Brunei, in town to attend the same conference that the minister would address.

  As always, his cover was immaculate and would stand up to the deepest scrutiny. His cutout had arranged for his cover to be backed up if anyone called the oil ministry in Brunei. The assassin had checked that out by placing several calls himself, disguising his voice each time. In a couple of instances, he had demanded further proof and a minister’s letter. All of those had appeared in his email, backed up by hard copies.

  He was impressed. The people behind the killings had juice. He asked his cutout to provide him with a layout of the hotel and the minister’s schedule. They were emailed to him the next day. The minister was whimsical and his schedule often changed at the spur of the moment. He was a known womanizer and patronized a discreet escort service.

  That makes it easier. That and the hotel.

  The assassin liked hotels. They provided anonymity, had several exits and also threw up several opportunities for his targets to be alone.

  He studied the conference schedule; it was a three-day conference in the ballroom of the hotel. The minister had booked a suite on the thirtieth floor, the assassin was on the eighteenth. The minister traveled with two bodyguards, whose bios were in the package provided to him.

  Ex-Army, competent, but I’ll bet all the high living has dulled them.

  He made his plans.

  Zeb woke at four a.m. in the vastness of Wyoming and with a curious raven for company, performed his routine of yoga, tai chi and martial arts. Slow, fast, slow, fast, till the blood sang in his body and the beast roared in exultation.

  The raven cocked its head and watched on curiously and pecked at the crumbs Zeb threw when he opened tin cans and ate what passed for his breakfast.

  He packed, threw his gear and when he turned on his laptop, his lips twitched. The GPS sensors he had concealed on Polks and Porterman were on the move. The sensors were as small as a coat button, were effective in a hundred mile radius and showed the men traveling on the I-25 North. They were traveling at a steady speed at forty-five miles an hour and had just hit the highway.

  A recovery team to pick the men up. Cou
ld be the two men in the apartment.

  North was Casper, about a hundred and eighty miles from Cheyenne.

  Just before sleep claimed him the previous night, he had firmed up his strategy.

  Till the time Petrova’s trail threw up anything substantial, he would hit Wasserman. Hard. Wherever he found his crew.

  Zeb drove through the countryside, through small towns that had yet to wake up, through Meriden and Hawk Springs and Lingle and then Fort Laramie. He stopped when the GPS signal stopped, filled his tank and joined the I-25 at the US-26 junction, south of Glendo.

  He floored it once he hit smooth concrete, overtaking the light traffic and when the signal showed he was a mile behind the men, he slowed down and followed at a light pace.

  Casper was the second largest city in Wyoming and started its life as a frontier outpost for settlers on their way to Oregon and California. It sat at the foot of Casper Mountain and was experiencing a boom in growth driven by oil and minerals mining.

  Zeb followed the vehicle through the town, over the North Platte River, past several government offices and reduced the distance when it left the highway. Through small streets, past office blocks and then a residential area.

  He could now see the vehicle far ahead, an SUV, too far away to determine its make. They drove past a school and entered a tree-lined street which was dotted by several single family homes. Trailers, trucks, RVs, broken fences lined the street. Urban detritus that hundreds of years later would look like the droppings of humankind.

  The flasher on the recovery vehicle went up and it bounced over pavement, past a sad looking truck under a tree, and came to a halt on a dusty driveway.

  Doors burst open at the front and the driver and a passenger exited. They opened the rear doors, reached inside to help Polks and Porterman.