by Michael Todd
Either way, it was the best he could do at this point. He moved away from the plane and realized when he looked around that he had lost a couple of hours on the trip to Seattle. It had been late before the plane had been prepped for the trip, and yet according to his clock, only three and a half hours had passed, more or less. The airport they had landed at was a private strip outside the city of Seattle and he wondered if he would have to call a taxi or an Uber or something. Then he saw the Audi parked out near where the plane taxied into a hangar.
Signed rental papers had been left on top of it, with a message from Anderson that he should deliver the car to the company when he was finished with it and keep his refueling receipts.
The man had apparently missed the fact that he’d rented an electric car. Savage snatched the keys up from where they had been placed on the roof. The details of the vehicle were included with the rental papers and confirmed that the car was delivered with a full battery. On the top of the vehicle, solar panels were fitted to keep recharging it throughout the day, but a small gas-powered engine was stored in the back, just in case. It was designed to be a fully electric car.
It wasn’t his favorite kind of car, but he wouldn’t turn his nose up at one that was better than the two he still technically owned. They were both in fake names, of course, which was the next best thing to a rental for anonymity. He heaved the duffel bag into the trunk and slid into the driver’s seat. When he reached the exit of the small airport, the GPS activated and directed him into the city, although there weren’t any actual destinations marked on the map.
“Oh, dang, are you already on the ground?” Anja said and yawned for a few long seconds after she’d asked the question.
“Evening, Anja,” Savage said and resisted the urge to join her in the yawn. It was more difficult than he thought it should be.
“Evening, Jer.” She yawned again.
“Did I wake you?” he asked and turned the car onto a long, winding street that descended from the elevated location the airport was on. The silence of the electric motor was a little unnerving, but he simply needed to get used to it. He gave himself fifteen minutes to adjust to the new lack of noise.
“I needed sleep, and since everyone is either out of reach or resting themselves, I thought it was as good a time as any.” The hacker chuckled. “I managed about five hours, which is more than I get most nights. I’ll find coffee in a while too.”
“Well, I had about five and a half hours, so there.” He chuckled. “I win.”
“Yeah, Jer one, Control five hundred,” Anja replied with a trace of a sting in her voice. “It’s good to see you starting to cut into my lead there. I thought I was playing on my own for a while.”
“Aw, don’t feel bad.” He smirked and guided the car onto a more-heavily populated road. It looked like the city of Seattle had begun to come alive with the morning rush hour. He knew the city well enough that he didn’t need the GPS to order him around. It had been a while—a few years—but you didn’t forget a city like this one.
“How long has it been since you left?” Anja asked and appeared to read where his mind was at in the silence.
“About a year and a half.” Savage shook his head. He remembered having to be recalled to this city. It wasn’t a pleasant memory. Off time was supposed to be spent with your loved ones, or lacking that, getting yourself wasted in preparation for resuming your tour. He had been pulled back to Seattle almost against his will.
“I grew up around here, but both of my folks are gone,” he said and decided that she was ready to hear the truth about what he was doing there. “We weren’t really close with the rest of my extended family. I think I have a couple of uncles and aunts living somewhere in Texas, but I never really knew them, never really cared to, and the feeling was mutual. By the time I was sixteen, it was only me and Jules. We’d been together since our sophomore year in high school.
“We married a couple of years later when she got pregnant but we separated after Abby was born. Things were…complicated. She was anti-military and had been supportive of my time with the Army despite that, but with a kid, she became a little more insistent, to the point where I decided against my second tour and came back home instead. I found a job and felt a little resentful about it too, I guess.”
She didn’t say anything. He didn’t know if she was actually listening or if she had turned his connection off until he was done sharing, but the floodgates had opened. She’d asked to know about it before and he now obliged. It was up to her whether she wanted to know or not.
“Anyway, things got tense, and she told me if I wanted to go, I should go.” Savage pressed forward and pretended he was merely talking to himself to make the whole process easier. “And I did. I picked up another tour and was out of the country again less than a month later. When I went home for some time off, I asked if she wanted a divorce, and she said no. I think she wanted to maintain the marriage at least until Abby turned eighteen. When I got back again a year later, though, she called and said she’d changed her mind and she did actually want a divorce.”
“Shit,” Anja interjected, which confirmed that he wasn’t merely talking to himself. The conversation helped to distract him from rising irritation when traffic slowed to a crawl through a construction zone.
“Yeah, she met a lawyer, actually,” Savage continued. “Andy…something. I forget his last name now. Anyway, they started dating, he proposed, and she accepted. She was still technically married to me, so they needed me back there to sign papers before they could get the marriage plans underway.”
He fell silent as the memories surfaced, still a little raw around the edges. Rather than dwell on it, he focused his attention to stare at the cars ahead which moved as best they could in the usual stop and go pattern that defined heavy traffic. He removed his hands from the wheel and turned on the auto-drive features that had been developed for traffic jams exactly like this one. It would keep him moving steadily along the road until he needed to take control of the car again once they could increase speed.
“I wanted to hate him so much when I heard about it,” he said softly into the silence. “I needed him to be an asshole—a rebound who Jules would realize wasn’t right for her so she’d come back to me. But he’s awesome, and that’s the truth. He’s a great lawyer and has his own practice and everything. He’s successful, treats Jules like a queen, and Abby adores him. The man was a fucking boy scout. He did the triathlon in college and he still runs a marathon every year.”
“How do you know all this?” Anja asked. She sounded curious but also a little hesitant as if she didn’t want to push.
“What, do you think I’ll let a man live in the same house as my baby girl without making sure I know every dirty little detail of his life?” Savage asked with a scowl and thumped an open palm on the steering wheel. “My first CO was out and in the FBI at the time, and he agreed to run a couple of background checks on the man when I asked.”
“Did he find anything?”
“He was busted for possession a couple of times in college.”
“Why do you sound so disappointed about that?”
“It was pot possession,” he grumbled in response. “Nothing serious or life-threatening that might rear its head later on and be a problem they need my help with. I think I would have preferred it if he was merely some boring-ass choirboy. But no. Not only is he perfect Mr. Lawyer, but he also has a trace of bad boy—a hint of a dark side, enough to make him exciting.”
“So, while we head in there to deal with the threat against your family, will we save his life too?” the hacker asked.
“Only if it’s on the way,” he replied. “If I have to choose between saving Jules and Abigail and saving Andy, I’ll leave him behind without a second thought or a hint of regret.”
“That sounds fair,” she agreed. “So as of right now, we’ll work to keep Jules and Abigail safe, yes?”
“I have a feeling you already knew who we were coming he
re for.” He glanced into the rearview mirror at the seemingly endless stream of cars. “That you might have looked into my personal life anyway despite knowing I wanted to keep my family’s privacy intact.”
“It’s adorable that you think there’s any privacy in this world of ours.” Anja cackled and almost sounded like a Bond villain. “But I like to let people think that basically, everything about them isn’t readily available online these days. It makes them feel a little more comfortable around me.”
“Right.” He knew he should have felt annoyed—or even insulted—that she hadn’t respected his wishes, but he should have known that telling her not to look into something was like telling a kid not to touch the giant chocolate egg on the counter and then leaving kid and egg alone for a couple of hours. While he could hope she would have stopped herself from accessing the information, he really shouldn’t have expected it.
“Anyway,” Savage said when he decided to simply move past it. “We’re—and by we, I mean me, of course—here to make sure Jules and Abby are safe and sound. I don’t really care what happens to Andy. He can die or get kidnapped for all I care.”
“You don’t really feel that way, do you?” the hacker prompted.
He smirked when his mind went back to the last time he’d had a conversation like this—in the steak place, sitting across from Coleman. Her words at the time sprung to his mind at this point too.
“Well, the jury’s still out on that,” he murmured under his breath, knowing she could still hear him. “But that’s the official story and I’ll stick with it.”
“Okay, big guy.” Her voice held an edge of amusement. “How do you want to do this? I have the street address where the ex and the kid are living with the lawyer. I have the addresses where the ex works, where the lawyer works, and the school where the kid is.”
“Is it a school day?” he asked.
“Yeah, Thanksgiving is tomorrow, so all the schools are still open. I can look into Abby’s schedule right now if you’d like.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary—” he started to say, but he could already hear her clattering away on her keyboard.
“It looks like she has classes all morning,” Anja said. “But she’s been given a pass from classes later—she’s earned it due to good grades—and will be at soccer practice all afternoon.”
“Okay.” He rolled his neck to ease the tension creeping in. He didn’t know how he would take this. If having a discussion with Coleman had been difficult, he wasn’t sure what to expect from himself in this situation. While there were feelings involved when it came to Coleman, this was his baby girl. The apple of his eye. The single person in the world who would turn him from mildly violent to over-the-top genocidal.
“I should probably do a couple of sweeps during the morning,” Savage said as a plan came together in his head. “I can check the house and make sure there’s nothing there for me to deal with. Look up Jules’ workplace and maybe even Andy’s practice too. With that done, I can circle back to Abby’s school and make sure she’s okay. And once I’ve established that everyone’s alive and well, I can mount a defense for them over the next few days while we decide how to deal with Banks and make him leave them alone. If he’s actually targeted them, of course.”
“It’s nice to hear you all unreasonably optimistic about how well today will go.” The Russian chuckled. “But that sounds like a plan, Daddy-O. I’ll patch your day into your car’s GPS with all the addresses.”
“Daddy-O?” He narrowed his eyes and wished she could see his disapproving expression. “You’ve never said that before in your life, have you?”
“Nope,” she confessed cheerfully. “What do you think? Does it suit me?”
“Nope. In fact, I’m of the opinion that the never-er you say it, the better.”
“Duly noted,” Anja replied, and he could have sworn she grinned while she said it.
Chapter Thirteen
He’d spent most of the day out and about and reacclimated himself to the city of Seattle after his time away, and it was enough to settle him and restore his sense of familiarity. The adjustment gave Savage the confidence that he was capable of taking on the task he was there to accomplish. Anja might as well have been a superhero based on her abilities behind a keyboard, and as long as he was able to fulfill the physical demands of the mission, he would be able to resolve the whole situation if he was called upon to do so.
A trace of hope remained alive in his mind that there was nothing to worry about. At times, he almost convinced himself Banks had accessed his file only to know what he was up against at Carlson’s behest. The hope that the ex-CEO had learned the very pointed lesson he’d been taught when they met face to face in the plane remained obstinately alive. After all, he’d left a bullet in the man’s knee to ensure he would not forget it.
On the whole, though, common sense retained supremacy and he didn’t feel overly hopeful. Carlson did seem like the kind of man who thought the rules that governed the actions of the rest of the world didn’t apply to him. He would try again and even believe he could be smart enough to get away with it too.
He hated that kind of person. In his less calm and rational moments, he wondered if he should have simply put a bullet through Carlson’s neck and another in his head, just to be sure, and left the FBI out of it. Frontier justice had a strong appeal.
But Monroe and Anderson had insisted, and Anja listened to them more than she listened to him. That had left him with only a warning shot and the cops. Now, the bastard had targeted his family too—his instincts told him he could be sure of this. He had already made up his mind that he wouldn’t let them call the shots on the field if his inner certainty proved correct.
He drove past Andy’s practice first. Andrew Devers, Esq, was the name on the plaque outside the office. The car Anja had identified as his was parked outside in one of the reserved parking spots, and after about fifteen minutes, the man appeared and talked to one of the receptionists who had stepped out with him.
His gaze focused and intent, he studied him carefully, looking for any indication of stress or nervousness. He appeared to be his usual confident self, and there was no sign of surveillance or any indication that things weren’t exactly as they should be. Satisfied, Savage drove to where Jules worked. She wasn’t in the real estate business anymore. It had merely been a job to pay for her college education.
Now that she had her business degree, she had been hired to help organize the finances of a marketing company. It was small but seemed to make significant waves in the industry by the looks of it. According to Anja, they could anticipate a very profitable year, which could result in a couple of buy-outs next year. He didn’t know much about how all that played out, but she seemed to know what she was talking about.
Things were going well for his ex-wife, and that was good enough for him. Unfortunately, her offices were on the fifth floor of a building with solid security, so he wasn’t able to manage a visual. After Anja ran a couple of checks to make sure nothing hinky was happening around the building, he headed off.
He took a long lunch at a nearby shopping mall’s food court to get himself a burger while the hacker updated him. Terry and Sam had already relocated to New York, where they had eyes on a certain Mason Banks. Anja had run facial recognition software and found cameras around Jenkins’ office that placed the lawyer there a day or so before the leak happened. So far, everything confirmed the story the congressman had sold him.
Which was a relief. Savage doubted that reaching Jenkins a second time would be as easy as the first. You couldn’t necessarily trust a man who talked with a gun to his head, so it was good to know that so far, the story he’d been given stood up under scrutiny. His teammates ran surveillance on the lawyer for the moment and Anja kept track of his online activity, which had registered the files arriving in his work email.
It seemed as though he hadn’t even anticipated that anyone would come looking for answers. There were hint
s that he’d passed the data on to third parties, but thus far, the Russian had a little difficulty in tracking the possible contacts.
All in all, it had been a productive day of stalking for the crew. Anderson had stayed home from work with his family to keep an eye on them with Terry and Sam away on their mission. Monroe was still out in the Zoo and appeared happy to delegate the day-to-day running of Pegasus and the challenge to whip it into shape to Anderson and Coleman.
Savage was Anderson’s delegate. He was very clear on that, and the operative saw no reason to complain.
After lunch, he had made his way to the school where Abby was supposed to have soccer practice. It was a good school—a private school, the kind a lawyer could afford these days.
“Interesting,” Anja said as he pulled up at the gated entrance. “The security is essentially as good as you can find out here without being military grade.”
“Many rich or even simply well-off people send their darling heirs here to be educated,” he pointed out and displayed a police badge to get through the security checkpoint. The guard manning the gate ran a quick check with the Seattle PD to confirm that they did, in fact, have a Detective Brian Jackson working in their department. Thanks to Anja’s intervention, the department was able to vouch for him and he was waved through quickly.
“How would they get security like this, though?” she wondered aloud as he guided his Audi to the parking lot in view of the soccer fields. He could already see a team outside, starting practice.