by Nate Hawk
Burn Notice
A Key West Thriller
CIA Ops * Blackmail * Murder
A Kelly Maclean Novel
Nate Hawk
Burn Notice is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual people, alive or deceased, events or locations is entirely coincidental.
The author is solely responsible for any mistakes within the writing.
Copyright © 2015 by Nate Hawk.
Natehawk.com
All rights reserved.
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Readers like you allow me to spend my professional time writing. I hope that you are able to spend your professional time doing something that you have a passion for as well! Thank you!
-Nate Hawk
Reviews for:
Burn Notice
“Like other Hawk writings, this book is action packed from the first page to the last. No disappointments!”
“Hawk’s political action thrillers are sure to be counted among other great thrillers of our time!”
“Hawk is an artist at crafting suspense!”
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Prologue
Thomas Swanson was a good-looking man with olive skin and dark hair. He towered over most men at a bigger than life six and a half feet. Out of his many positive attributes, his smile was his best weapon. It was one that any plastic surgeon would have been proud of and one back home in Florida was proud. Swanson was running an eclectic yet predictable campaign of government accountability and reform; in the areas of economic, military and national security. He was well aware that he had made more promises than he could possibly keep in three lifetimes.
Swanson was born an American citizen to a well-off, first-generation immigrant family. Although his surname originated in Denmark, his skin color was traced to Argentina, where his mother had been from. He was still light skinned but he had just enough South American DNA to look the part. Damn, if I only would have changed my last name before getting into politics, he had privately thought to himself. These elections would be a hell of a lot easier. En lieu of changing his name around he just changed the pronunciation of his first name to “toe/ mas”. It was a clever cultural twist and thus he had made his first name a household name by invoking his minority heritage. For a bit of political filler he had thrown in his military background (which of course had been classified by his friends in the Army so that the press couldn’t get ahold of any of it and embarrass him by citing his luke-warm performance in the military). He uttered many empty promises on how a novice politician could improve the economy, run a foreign policy plan that pulled only a few troops out of a few publicly known places (leaving the empire intact) and finally he supported a hard-hitting national security plan that left the United States’ borders completely unsecured. Essentially, he was making a job out of keeping the status quo while empowering himself to a powerful public office. All things considered, nothing new for D.C.
Six months before the general election, Thomas Swanson had been a no name Democratic Congressional Candidate. His bid for the Democratic Party nomination had been uncontested and he had then easily taken Florida’s 23rd District US Representative seat from the Republicans in the general election. I’m a genius, he had shamelessly thought to himself at the time. “Damn, times are a changin’,” his closest friend and advisor, Will Riley, had told him late that night when NBC had been the first to call the election. “We’re going to D.C., Mr. Representative!”
***
Southern Import and Export was housed in an antiquated concrete building in a sleepy neighborhood just west of Stock Island but still on the island of Key West. The offices were up front and the merchandise was held in the warehouse to the rear. There was a reception upon entry from the customer entrance. The men had employed a series of secretaries but none of them had ever worked out. The position had been vacant for some time and the men at the company didn’t mind. Past the reception desk were two offices. One was to the right and one to the left.
Lou Deluca’s office was to the right. He was of average height but he was thick. He had dabbled in body building in his younger years and he still looked the part. After 25 years of carrying lean mass around (and imports), he had now lessened his focus on sculpting his body. His muscles were still strong but they lacked some of the expert tone that they once had. He had defined facial features and his brown hair always appeared to be freshly manicured. He had a generally likeable demeanor and was an organized man who was clearly the heartbeat of Southern Florida Import and Export.
Franco West’s office was to the left. He was the opposite of Lou Deluca in several obvious ways. His long hair was captured in a ponytail and had it been bleached lighter from the Florida sun. Franco was a beast of a man. He was nearly six feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds. He seemed to have grown as much horizontally as he had vertically. He appreciated eating too much to have a competitive edge within the bodybuilding circuit. He lived life fast and hard. His idea of a good day was getting high on crank or coke, driving his sport bike around Key West like a madman and then retiring to an evening of heavy binge drinking. He partied late and rarely came in to work in the morning hours. He’d had a tough life though and he was dirty and brutal. All of his poor decisions were bearing down on him with the ferocity of a quick-moving, derailed train.
The two executives of Southern Florida Import and Export were brothers; well, half brothers that had shared the same father. Where Lou had benefitted from living with his father and having the man’s constant guiding hand growing up, Franco had been the product of a multi-year affair between surreptitious lovers. Melinda West had insisted that Franco have the same name as her. If Franco’s father wouldn’t marry her, then they’d both keep her maiden name.
But surnames weren’t the concern of the day. Being precise and professional was. When Lou phoned his brother the call went straight to voice mail.
“Damn it, Franco! We’ve got a shipment leaving in an hour and I haven’t seen you all day… Worse, we’ve got that high dollar Russo coming over here anytime to take your photo for your fake passport and license.”
He hung up in disgust and began to wonder if Franco had gone off on another binge. His bro
ther sure seemed to have a different set of priorities. Didn’t he see the opportunity that was in front of them? Damn it, Lou thought to himself. This is an important shipment! A few more of these and we can retire. Even better, we can leave this humid climate behind us for good.
***
Owen “Tiny” Tucker was an Agency man. The position was what he’d always wished to accomplish with his life and career. Predictably, with a name like Tiny, he was huge. He was black and he was one tough son-of-a-bitch. Loyal too. He had done a stint with the Army’s Delta Force, which had acted as a springboard propelling him to his current career. Even amongst other Deltas he had quickly attracted his commanding officers’ attention by consistently receiving some of the highest marks within his battalion.
Neither the Delta Force nor the CIA was relevant at the current moment though. He had taken some time off of his always-busy schedule and had committed to a flight back home. He’d not been to California for several years and his parents were always quick to point out that they were aging. Plus, he knew it was past time for a visit. If anyone with the Agency would have seen him that day, he knew that his tough guy image would be shattered for life. He entered Jerry’s Auction House in Redondo Beach and headed towards the display of paintings that would be on the auction block shortly.
“Let me getta an uni, a one, one, one, just a single folks, your chance is here, be the proud owner of this antique chest…”
Owen tuned-out the sweaty and obnoxious auctioneer as he continued on to the oil-covered canvases along the far wall. He knew that Jerry’s Auction House held art auctions regularly because his parents had taken him to the very same place when he was growing up. In fact, Mr. and Mrs. Tucker held degrees in history and economics, respectively and had built their reputation as art pickers from their humble beginnings in Compton. They didn’t have a traditional storefront, per se. Their specialty was purchasing artwork from uninformed sellers, applying a historical narrative and then connecting their purchase to a high-end market where they could unload the items at a tidy profit. Any time Owen had a spare minute and was near an auction or an antique store, out of habit or nostalgia, he’d wander in and look for undervalued items.
Jerry’s specialized in estate sales so they were mostly focused on the quantity of items that they could move through the doors. The Tuckers had uncovered several profitable finds there over the years and out of pure interest if nothing else, Owen couldn’t allow himself to drive by without first having a look. He walked past several gaudy landscapes and portraits and finally past one really ugly bowl of fruit before an interesting canvas caught his eye. At first, it wasn’t the actual image that caught his attention but a color. Could it be lapis lazuli? The Afghan shade was the finest and most expensive of all medium blue pigments and Owen understood its significance. As he looked more closely he noticed other telling features. Like different shades of what appeared to be Indian Yellow.
Those two shades in themselves were good indicators that the artist who applied the paint to the canvass had enjoyed some success. An aspiring artist would likely not have spent the additional funds needed to acquire the expensive colors. Owen quickly looked for a signature. There was none. However, the brush strokes were like their own fingerprints. They were detailed and crisp. There was a familiarity to the photo and to that of the subject within the photo. A window was on the left side of the frame and light was working its way into the painting, providing brilliant colors and casting long shadows. An architect stood over a desk working with papers and a compass and a ruler. Part of the right side of the painting looked somewhat shadowy and undefined, as if it had gone unfinished.
Owen picked up his phone and dialed old man Tucker. He relayed the info to his father and waited to see what his thoughts were. It turned out that both of them had come up with the same conclusion: buy it! Both agreed that the artwork had potential to be an unfinished Johannes Vermeer piece. It was an outside chance for obvious reasons, but it could be one of the Dutch artist’s last works that went unfinished upon his untimely death at 43 years of age. There were only a few dozen paintings that were officially authenticated as painted by Vermeer. The shades used within this artwork were very similar to Vermeer’s preferred shades. Owen knew that Vermeer’s paintings mostly took place in one of two rooms. Most were extremely similar to each other with the subject being the main difference between each of his works. If it could be proven, the painting would easily sell for an untold fortune. At worst, if it couldn’t be proven to be Vermeer but turned out to be an authentic canvas from the Dutch Golden Age, it would fetch thousands once the right buyer was located. Owen knew colors. With the pigments and the quality of brush strokes that he had picked up on, he was confident that the painting was an authentic Dutch era piece. Owen stayed late and much to his satisfaction, won the auction for $425.
***
Chapter 1
The answer that Kelly Maclean had given had been a simple “No”. He had zero interest in going back into law enforcement, much less the bureaucracy surrounding a federal agency. The conversation with his CIA friends had ended rather abruptly when they understood that there would be no future together with Kelly. Over the previous ten years he had fought a war in the Middle East, he’d had a few run-ins with trouble around the States and then there was the Boston Marathon and the devastating personal fallout that it had created for him. He still wasn’t whole from that experience and he realized that he never would be: physically or emotionally. He’d been injured in the first blast that rocked the finish line. He never did get back two of his toes on his left foot. After awaking from a coma he had learned that the same blast had killed his family.
The Boston Marathon blast wasn’t the first time that Kelly had been in danger. Before that tragic event, he’d killed in excess while a Marine so he had recently reasoned that Karma had come back around to take everything important from him. Again.
As a younger man he thought he knew everything. But then as the years had gone by he had found himself asking more and more questions that he didn’t have answers to. He also noticed that this phenomenon seemed to become more polarized the older he got. He was now questioning almost everything that he once thought he knew as his inner being seemed to be gaining velocity in a downward personal spiral.
In an effort to escape it all, Kelly had pointed his car south on US1 and kept driving until the road literally ended. He had parked his Magnum at mile marker zero, purchased a freshly-rolled local cigar and smoked it while he leaned on the hood of his vehicle. Kelly wasn’t sure what he would do with his life but knowing that he must rebuild, he was determined to do so in a new place.
Whether it was from the law or the snow or the rat-race, Kelly had found that most everyone in Key West was running to the island from something on the mainland. It seemed almost poetic for him to begin his new start there. At the very least, he knew it was a place where he could get a good cigar.
He had stumbled across a boat for rent while he was driving across the north side of the island on North Roosevelt Avenue. At the time, the owners of the old boat were embarking on a one-year trip to South America and perhaps to other parts unknown. Kelly wasn’t big on paperwork and it turned out the older couple wasn’t either. He’d given them a two thousand dollar safety deposit and had prepaid the first and last month’s rent. While they were gone, one of the neighbors in the slip next to Kelly’s had agreed to accept the monthly rental payment of fifteen hundred dollars and to deposit it in the couple’s account. The price they had offered was the “cash” price so Kelly didn’t mind saving some money and retaining his privacy at the same time. Kelly knew that the boat was equipped with a GPS tracker so he figured that the couple found comfort in keeping an eye on where their boat was while they were gone. The arrangement seemed to be a good fit to all parties. The last thing the couple had said to Kelly before leaving was something along the lines of keeping the ship’s hull away from protruding areas from sunken ships and the coral reef. E
ither one of them could open up the hull of the ship, quicker than a cold beer after a hot day on the ocean.
Several months after arriving Kelly found himself driving around the small island of Key West in no particular hurry. The coolness of the morning had given way to a rising temperature. As the temperature had increased, so had the activity on the small island. Kelly’s A/C was in need of a recharge but he couldn’t be saddled with such responsibilities so he instead chose to roll down the windows. A serenade of Bob Marley crackled from a street vendor’s old stereo as Kelly stopped at a traffic light. He looked over and studied the man who seemed to have figured out (or lucked into) some secret to happiness. He was selling lunch items with a level of enjoyment higher than that of a paid comedian on stage after four drinks. Kelly didn’t know if it was the man’s enthusiasm or the flavor of the hot dogs or the combination but there was a line of eager customers staggered down the block.
Kelly’s car maneuvered around a curve and past tourists and locals alike. As he drove, he realized that he was letting the maintenance on his car go. In addition to a faulty A/C system, it had developed a rattle and a shimmy. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since the last oil change and the window sticker reminder had long since peeled off. His once highly regarded sports car had become just another maintenance point that competed to steal his time and money. All things considered the vehicle still got him around. He found himself indifferent at its current state. He noticed an older man in a wheel chair on the sidewalk and gave him a wide berth as he turned off the street into a parking lot. As Kelly pulled his car over and glanced in the rearview mirror of his white Dodge Magnum, he realized that he was letting himself go too. His reddish beard had gone from his preferred three-day beard to a long-forgotten, overgrown warren of underbrush that was half plastered to his face like long overgrown grass. The hair on his head was racing down over his forehead and closing in on his eyes for the first time in as long as he could remember. Again, he found himself indifferent.