Vigilante

by Robin Parrish

  Start Reading

  © 2011 by Robin Parrish

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  E-book edition created 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-3236-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. www.zondervan.com

  Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  For my precious, precious Emma.

  You are my sunshine.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: The Plan

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Part Two: The Hand

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  Part Three: The War

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Book List

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  PROLOGUE

  For the United States, it is a time of revolution and unrest.

  Nine years ago, a long, bloody war waged on foreign soil came to a bitter end. It was a war against evils and crimes against humanity not witnessed since the reign of Adolf Hitler—evils that cut into the very soul of man.

  In the years since, America has grown increasingly unstable. A faltering economy is on the brink of a second Great Depression. Despair and apathy have led to nationwide demoralization.

  And once again, seizing the moment, organized crime spreads like a cancer. . . .

  1

  Nolan Gray gritted his teeth and closed his eyes as the pistol was aimed at his face from just inches away. The barrel of the SIG Sauer P226 was so close, he could clearly see the tiny gold anchor engraved on its left side, designating it as a standard Navy Special Forces weapon.

  Beads of sweat beneath Nolan’s mop of unkempt hair gave way to droplets, and traced a path on his skin down to his eyes, nose, ears, and neck. He was waiting for the pain, knew it was coming any second, but despite his immense training and experience, it was still an incredible thing to know you’re about to be shot.

  Finally he blinked when the gun never went off.

  “Look . . .” said Branford, the man across from him. His arm never wavered, his hand never shook. It was steady and sure, outstretched directly toward Nolan’s head. Branford’s crusty voice never sounded anything but confident. His comment was one of clarification.

  Nolan was becoming angry, his carefully attuned discipline threatening to falter. The moment was at hand. There wasn’t time for this, not now.

  The light of the moon was brighter than the nearest street lamp. Nolan glanced around, the city eerily silent at this dark hour, yet he could detect a distant bicycle, a jogger—probably female, from the sound of the footfalls—and someone coughing. Sooner or later one of these passersby was going to cross his path, and he was going to lose his chance.

  “Just do it!” insisted Nolan.

  Branford’s hand cinched tighter around the polymer grips of the matte black P226, so tight his knuckles showed white. Still he never quivered, the gun an immovable mass of metal that could have been grafted to his arm.

  Nolan closed his eyes and braced himself again.

  “This is asking an awful lot. . . .” muttered the other man.

  Nolan’s eyes popped open, and he choked down the outrage rising within him. “There isn’t anybody else!” he said through bared teeth. “You think Arjay could do this?”

  “And if I miss?” asked Branford, his voice the bark of a Rottweiler.

  “You would never miss,” Nolan said without hesitation.

  “Always a first time,” griped Branford with a sigh. “All right. On three. One . . .”

  Nolan steeled himself one last time. He closed his eyes when Branford reached “two.”

  Branford squinted slightly, adjusting the angle of his weapon by the slightest degree. “Three.”

  The sound was swallowed by the SIG’s attached silencer, but Nolan never heard a thing, even at such close range. Instead, he was on fire with a pain so intense it brought rushing back long-suppressed memories of the horrors he’d been subjected to during the war.

  And just when he was about to allow himself to pass out from the powerful sensation and the crippling memories it brought, another shot rang out, and the pain became twice as searing.

  He couldn’t hold on any longer.

  This was the end. His end.

  As it should be. As it was meant to be. Nolan Gray was no more.

  ———

  Aaron Branford stared at the man on the ground, his blood seeping into the soil. A brief examination later, he glanced around the area in every direction, careful to ensure that no one had heard the muffled shots from his sidearm.

  Satisfied, Branford quickly retrieved a shoe box–sized package from a nearby bush and placed it on the ground beside Nolan’s body. As he opened the box, he pulled out a phone from his pants pocket and dialed the only number saved to the phone’s memory.

  He set to work on the box’s many contents, placing them in the proper positions while waiting impatiently for the phone to be answered.

  “Branford?” shouted a smooth voice over a pronounced clamoring of metal.

  “Who else would it be, genius?” Branford growled back, peeking around the area again for unwanted eyes. “Nobody else has this number, Arjay.”

  On the other end of the line, Branford could hear the crackling of soldering in the background. “You were successful?” shouted Arjay over the noise.

  “The tr
igger’s been pulled,” Branford said, the phone held between his ear and his shoulder as he continued to put the objects from the shoe box on the ground. “You better be on schedule.”

  “My work is well in hand” was Arjay’s smooth reply.

  A gruff “hm” was all Branford gave as a reply. “You’d best do everything you can to give him the advantage, you hear me? I’ve got to get off the street. Once things have simmered down, I’ll check in.”

  There was a pause. “And then what?” asked Arjay.

  Branford creased his eyebrows, his worn, leathery skin nearly cracking. “Then we begin,” he replied, and snapped shut the phone.

  2

  President Thornton Hastings sat up, his mind unable to accept the information that had just been relayed to him from his bedside phone. It was 2:51 in the morning and he had the sensation that he might be stuck in a dream. But then the fog cleared and he was suddenly alert.

  Quietly, so as not to awaken his wife, Glenda, he slipped out of bed and carried the pearl-colored phone to the outer room of their White House living space.

  “I’m going to need you to repeat that,” said Hastings into the phone.

  On the other end was the voice of FBI Director Bob Yeager, speaking low and reverent, underscoring the magnitude of the tragic news he was giving to the president of the United States.

  “A small explosion—maybe a couple grenades or a stick of dynamite—went off in Central Park tonight, Mr. President,” said Yeager. “NYPD believes that an individual was in close proximity to the bomb when it went off—possibly holding it—because trace human remains have been recovered in the radius of the blast. I’m afraid a set of dog tags were found on the scene—tags identifying the victim as Nolan Gray.”

  Hastings’ heart thudded heavily, his thoughts spinning. How could something like this happen? And to Nolan, of all people!

  “Anyone could have been holding those tags. How certain are we that Nolan was the victim?” the president asked mechanically. He already knew the answer, but he was obligated to ask.

  “It was, uh . . . I’m afraid it was a rather gruesome crime scene, sir,” replied Yeager. “Blood belonging to Lieutenant Gray was found on the grass in patterns consistent with at least two gunshots, probably to the head, in addition to the wider spatter from the bomb blast. Trace amounts of skin tissue and even some bone fragments were also found at the scene; the blood’s a positive match to Lieutenant Gray, and NYPD believes the rest will be as well. The Bureau believes he may have been taken hostage by one of the New York City crime syndicates and killed in this manner as a political statement against you. Or more specifically, a warning about passing the crime bill. I’m deeply sorry, sir.”

  This couldn’t be real. Nolan Gray was not someone you simply kidnapped or even murdered. Hastings had once witnessed Nolan single-handedly take down over a dozen enemy soldiers without benefit of a weapon.

  Still, this isn’t the battlefield, Hastings mused. Nolan has been a private citizen for almost a decade now. Maybe he got soft.

  He immediately scolded himself for criticizing Nolan now that he was dead and gone. But his next thought was no better.

  If someone killed Nolan as a way of hurting me . . . well, they certainly knew what they were doing.

  “Did Lieutenant Gray have a next-of-kin that we should notify, sir?” asked Yeager.

  “No,” replied Hastings. “He was raised by his grandmother, and she died years ago—before the war.”

  Lieutenant Gray . . . Yeager had said. It had been quite a while since anyone had referred to Nolan by his rank. Nine years. Had it really been nine years since . . . ?

  He remembered it all so vividly. It was impossible to forget. It had changed his life, just as much as it had changed Nolan’s. The endless horrors of it. Everything that happened in those darkest of days was the primary reason he’d been elected president.

  And now Nolan was gone. Dead. Despair seeped into Hastings’ chest, but he pushed it away. There would be a time and a place for that. For now, there were more pressing matters.

  “Director,” said Hastings, “it is now your personal priority to find the perpetrator of this crime and bring them to justice. You have no other tasks on your agenda until the assassin is in custody. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied, though Hastings was sure he’d heard a note of hesitation in the man’s voice. Hastings knew he’d set Yeager on an impossible task—bringing to justice what was probably a major crime lord—but he didn’t care.

  He clicked the phone off. Another thought occurred to him and he clicked it back on, dialing the White House operator.

  “Get me Marcus. . . . I’m aware of what time it is, Sarah, just call him.”

  When Chief of Staff Marcus Bailey’s even-toned voice answered the phone, Hastings could already tell that he wasn’t going to have to deliver the news.

  “You heard?” asked Hastings.

  “Just,” replied Bailey. The two men were so used to working closely together that they used a clipped shorthand when speaking to each other. “I just got off with Carson; he expects it to hit the press by daylight, so he’s working on a statement.”

  That was all well and good, but it wasn’t what Hastings was calling about. “I want a state burial at Arlington. Honor brigade, the works,” he said.

  Bailey sighed on the other end. “They’ll fight it on the Hill. With the cutbacks—”

  “I don’t care. Can we win?” asked Hastings. He’d been anticipating this argument. Hastings himself had pushed through a budget cutback bill with nothing but his own charisma, a bill that called for all elected officials in Washington, D.C., to take a pay cut, including him. He’d stood before the entire nation at the State of the Union address and argued passionately that he couldn’t ask the American people to shoulder the burden of a staggering budget deficit if their elected senators, congressmen, and president weren’t willing to do their part as well. There was only a smattering of polite applause in the House that evening, but the speech drew such a flood of positive reaction from a recession-weary public that Congress had no choice but to vote in favor of the bill. But behind closed doors, even the senators and congressmen from the president’s own party harbored resentment toward him for taking away a portion of their salaries and many of their benefits.

  A pause. “It’ll require some serious political capital, Mr. President. We’ll have to call in favors, maybe even make some compromises on the crime bill.”

  Hastings sobered at these words. With drugs, money laundering, illegal weapons, prostitution, and human trafficking at an all-time high, his promise to make the war on organized crime a federal priority had been one of the key selling points of his election campaign. It had taken over a year to get a bill before Congress that would crack down on crime organizations, but it was currently hung up in a Senate committee comprised of many of his enemies on the Hill. The bill called for the creation of an entirely new law enforcement agency Hastings had dubbed the OCI—Organized Crime Intelligence—which would focus squarely on rooting out the sources of modern organized crime and applying new technologies and techniques to apprehending them for good.

  He couldn’t afford to lose the crime bill, for the sake of every person in America. But still . . . “This won’t hurt the crime bill, Marcus. It’ll prove why we need a dedicated agency to root out and destroy organized crime. Nolan Gray is—was—the most respected war hero of our time. Every child in America knows what he did. He was my friend. I owe him my life, many times over.”

  How could Nolan be dead? He hadn’t spoken to the man in more than five years, but it just seemed impossible that someone with as strong a will to live as Nolan Gray could have died so suddenly, so tragically. Maybe the NYPD was wrong and the DNA analysis would prove it so. Or maybe he’d been right earlier and this was a terrible dream.

  Marcus made no reply. He didn’t have to. Hastings could picture the taut expression on his chief of staff’s face. />
  “Make this happen, Marcus,” he said. “Don’t touch the crime bill, but do whatever it takes.”

  3

  Nolan stirred to the sound of frantic crying.

  Was he dead, and his friends and loved ones were weeping over his body? No, of course not, that couldn’t be it.

  He didn’t have any friends or loved ones. Hadn’t for years.

  His head pounded, the muscles beneath his skin flared and clenched. He could feel the bandages wrapped around most of his head, although the top of his scalp down to his eyes still seemed to be free. He felt the sting of an IV in his arm, slowly dripping needed medication into his veins, dulling the pain by a few degrees.

  If things had gone as they’d expected, it had probably been two or three days since Branford had shot him. Days he’d been kept completely unconscious.

  Finally he opened his eyes and found himself in an apartment he didn’t recognize. Branford’s place, his mind told him. He didn’t know this apartment, but it was the only place he could have been. It was dark outside, probably the middle of the night from what he could see through the window beside the bed.

  The window was cracked, bringing sounds Nolan recognized from the ruined streets of New York City. Horns blaring under the fists of angry drivers. Police sirens screaming, the cars running this way and that through the streets and alleys. Raucous, high-pitched laughter from what sounded like a group of hookers, trolling the sidewalk below in a herd. Screams of the innocent. In the distance, he could even hear gunfire.

  The sounds, these reviled disturbances of that which was good, made his pulse quicken. His fists clenched at his sides, involuntarily.

  There was so much wrong on the other side of that window. So much pain and cruelty and wickedness. And so many others, simply standing by, watching, doing nothing. Coasting along in apathy.

  He massaged his temples, pushing those thoughts aside, unable to bear following their trail any further. Very soon now, things were going to change. It would require an act of wonder, a marvel, to capture the attention of this city and change its beating heart. And a marvel was exactly what he was going to give them.