by AJ Tata
“You’re a sick bastard.”
Hellerman produced a crazed, wicked smile, like a jack-o-lantern, as if to acknowledge Matt’s discovery. He held a small satellite phone in his hand as Matt walked closer and closer.
“Give them the order to stand down, Hellerman, or I’ll kill you myself.”
“You don’t scare me, Garrett. What’s another twenty or thirty thousand? That’s what it will take to make us serious about this, don’t you see? Our soldiers are dying, and until civilians start dying, no one will care. You and I both agree that this country is going down the drain. Rap music, drugs, money, credit cards, SUVs, and instant gratification. It’s all about people getting more and more stuff without ever having to work for it. You have to sacrifice every so often or you lose sight of what’s important.”
“You see the negative. I see the positive,” Matt argued, now standing a few inches from Hellerman. “You worry about this generation? News flash: worry about something else. We’re going to be okay.”
“You’re blind, Garrett. You don’t understand my genius. Madison’s genius. The roots of liberty must be nourished with the blood of the free!” Hellerman spat.
“Madison, I agree, was a genius, but don’t place yourself in his category. Madison fought tyranny and oppression. You’re fighting a phantom theory. It’s over, Hellerman. Now tell me the code word to call it off.”
Matt watched Hellerman, who began to shake, his eyes lifting to the white board on the wall. Matt looked at the white board and saw two words.
Cape Canaveral had a small check mark next to it and Octagon had a small X next to it. Matt turned back to look at Hellerman, but instead found the unwelcome sight of a Ruger pistol staring him in the face.
“It’s your turn to die, Garrett, and my turn to save this country.”
A shot bellowed loudly in the small cavern of the basement. Matt flinched, but as the smoke cleared, he saw Hellerman stumbling back against the wall. He looked over his shoulder at the angry face of Alvin Jessup, his right hand holding a Smith and Wesson Magnum, smoke wafting from its bore.
The Ruger dropped from Hellerman’s hand, and he lifted the phone to his ear. His thumb pressed the send button and Matt could hear Hellerman’s voice trying to make a K sound, trying to say a word.
“Damn it, he’s giving the go-ahead order!” Matt snatched the phone from Hellerman’s weakened hand.
“‘Octagon, octagon. I say again, octagon,” Matt said clearly into the phone. He heard mechanical voice come back at him, chuckling.
“Garrett, you just killed Ronnie Wood,” the voice said.
Matt listened to the confirmation of his instinct. The vice president was Ronnie Wood, the co-conspirator who led the Rolling Stones and perhaps was complicit in the 9/11 conspiracy. And who was this?
“Now leave me alone. You’ll never find me anyway.”
“Lantini?”
“By the way, all these yahoos are toast. But you’ve got some fighting left to do in the States. Not my problem. My conscience is clear. Goodbye.”
“Wait, Lantini. If you’re not Ronnie Wood, then why the hell did you run?”
“Figure it out, genius. We were a viper’s nest, each with enough to destroy the other. The best option for me to stay alive, which I intend to do, was to hide.”
This time Matt heard the audible click of the disconnecting phone line.
He looked over at Alvin Jessup, who was slumped against the wall, his head hanging low.
“I just killed the man I was supposed to protect,” Jessup said, his voice hoarse.
“You did the right thing. He’s killed a lot of people, and I suspect you’re more bothered by that right now than the fact that your friend is dead. Besides, if what Lantini says is true, Hellerman’s the real Ronnie Wood.”
“Pretty easy to blame it on a dead man,” Jessup said, shaking.
Palmer came running down the steps and surveyed the scene. “What happened?”
“Sir, the bottom line is that we need to send special ops down to the grid coordinate in Panama that Ralph Smithers mentioned,” Matt said. “Have some one raid the place where these guys planned this operation. Lantini was there. Says he killed them all. Might be good to go get him, too.”
“Lantini?”
“Yeah. He was involved in this somehow. Just talked to him. Says Hellerman was Ronnie Wood. Makes sense.”
Palmer stared at Jessup and then Matt.
Matt waited a moment, and when the bureaucrat had nothing to say, he patted Alvin Jessup on the shoulder and walked up the steps to find his brother and check on Peyton.
As he exited the vice president’s mansion, he walked down the marble flagstaff to the servant’s quarters that doubled as a medical clinic. He walked in and saw Zachary being treated for his wounds.
“Thanks, man,” he said, looking up.
“You okay?”
“I’ll live. Got some memory back too.”
“How’d you get that scar?” Matt smirked.
Zach rubbed his chin where the pellet from Matt’s shotgun had nicked him. He looked up with his trademark grin and said, “War injury, brother.”
“Thought so.”
The two brothers hugged and Matt turned to the doctor as they broke the embrace.
“Where’s Peyton?”
“Peyton?”
“Peyton, the redhead Jock brought over here.”
Doc Bell shrugged. “I know Peyton, but never saw her or Jock.”
Matt stared at Zach, who shook his head.
“Ah, man.”
“Gotta find this Jock dude,” Zach said.
“If he’s alive.”
“There’s that.”
“Or he could be part of it.”
Matt walked over to the window and stared into the darkness. How bad had she really been hurt? What was her motive?
Then he had a thought.
Lantini.
Epilogue
The white rubber tires created a low hum as they spun in opposite directions, ready to fire a fastball at Zachary. Matt watched his older brother from the deck as he held a cold beer bottle in his right hand. His left arm had been properly set in a sling by a stern doctor.
Matt continued to watch Zachary take solid cuts at the pitching machine, though he had tuned down the pitch speed to eighty miles an hour.
The tires slowed with a whine as Matt watched Zach punch the red button and flip the bat into the net. The machine spit a final ball out of the decelerating tires. The ball only made it about halfway to the plate and then rolled into the back net, causing Zach to look casually over his shoulder as he stepped from the netting.
“Beer?” Matt asked.
“That’s a stupid question.”
“Two left in the cooler,” Matt said, but Zach was already twisting off the top of a Budweiser.
“Thanks.” Then, “Blake okay?”
“He’s fine, other than his pride. He told me that he had bent down to secure the weapons in the duffel, and when he stood up, Peyton was over the edge and climbing the ship ladder like Spiderman.”
“Could have shot her,” Zachary said.
Matt smirked. “Then who would have flown the plane?”
“Good point. Any clues on her whereabouts?”
“I’m thinking she’s gone south. With Lantini. Either that or she was Hellerman’s spy and bolted to save her ass.”
Zach took a sip of his beer and pondered the notion.
“Or she was boning Jock Evans,” Zach said with his characteristic frankness.
“There’s that.”
They remained silent a moment.
“Gotta watch that machine. Tires catch a thread sometimes,” Zach said, staring into the backyard at the batting cage.
“Roger.”
“We both got thrown curve balls if you think about it.” Zach said.
“I’ve thought about it,” Matt said. “Somehow we got out of the inning.”
The two continued to t
alk in baseball analogies.
“We’re okay, you know. A few hit by pitches, but we’re solid again, Matt.”
“Getting there, anyway.”
“Sometimes I think of all these weasels throwing fastballs, junk, sliders, whatever at us, and they’re our own guys, you know?”
“That’s what makes it so hard.”
“Ever think Hellerman was onto something?”
Tricky subject, Matt thought to himself. The man had highlighted the nation’s complacency as a threat equal to Islamic extremism. But to attack ourselves to prove the point was over the top, to say the least.
“This whole stagnant spirit thing, he was probably right about that. But entirely dicked up in his approach to dealing with the problem,” Matt finally concluded.
“How would you have approached the issue?” Zach asked, a bit of challenge in his voice.
“Not sure, man. I mean, there are only a few, less than one percent, of us who are fighting these wars. So that’s ninety nine percent who don’t feel the sacrifice, the cost of liberty. How can you know the value of something if you don’t fully understand its cost?”
“Right about that. Maybe a draft or something like that to get everyone’s attention. Maybe he did the only thing he felt like he could do,” Zach said.
After a brief silence, Matt said, “And we did what we could do.”
Matt turned slowly and leaned against the railing of the deck. They remained silent for quite some time before Matt asked, changing the subject, “Have you talked to Amanda?”
He noticed a cloud drift across Zach’s eyes at the mention of his estranged daughter. “She still thinks I’m dead,” Zach said before taking a long pull on his beer. “Probably won’t be too happy to learn I’m alive.”
“Sensitive topic. I shouldn’t have raised it.”
Zach stared at Matt for a moment before saying, “No, you’re right. I’ve got to deal with it. Just so much pain for her . . . and me. I’ve only now started remembering . . . how much I miss her . . . and love her.”
“She loves you, too, Zach. Don’t sell yourself short on that one.”
Zach looked at his younger brother. “Thanks. Maybe I can pull it back together somehow. Maybe Riley can help.”
“That’s a thought,” Matt said. Riley Dwyer was Zachary’s former lover. A psychiatrist in Atlanta, she had become a recluse since Zach’s supposed death. It seemed Zachary’s rebirth would offer new opportunities.
They fell silent again until they heard a car door shut in the driveway.
“Expecting company?” Zach asked.
Before he could answer, Colonel Jack Rampert walked into the back yard and up the steps of the deck. He was wearing his Class A Army green uniform, medals crawling over his shoulder and making him look like a Spanish dictator.
“Colonel.” Matt nodded. “Beer?”
“For a smart man, you sure ask some dumb questions,” Rampert replied as he twisted off the cap of the Budweiser Zach had retrieved for him. He took a quick sip and then said, “Seems that Meredith’s ballsy move to steal Hellerman’s hard drive paid off. We found it in the laptop of some wire-head named Jacob Olney who was killed with Meredith. The killer took Olney’s PC with a bunch of Photoshop bullshit on it. Hellerman’s had the attack plan and years of conspiratorial data. All these surgical actions around the United States and Central America you’ve been hearing about the last week or so, they’ve been driven by the intel we got off that hard drive.”
The two brothers stared at Rampert in stunned disbelief.
“Meredith did well,” Matt whispered, looking away.
“That’s not why I came here, though,” Rampert said, leaning against the deck rail. “Zach, I’ve gotten you a battlefield promotion to colonel given your basic entry date. I’ve also gotten you assigned to my command at Fort Bragg.”
A breeze shot through the pine thicket in Matt’s back yard, pushing across the batting cage net.
“You report for duty Monday.”
Follow Matt and Zach Garrett in book three of the Threat Series,
HIDDEN THREAT
HIDDEN THREAT
Zachary Garrett makes a thrilling return in Hidden Threat with a promotion to colonel and a second chance to kill al Qaeda senior leadership. But Zachary’s mission takes a deadly turn as his team plows into a fierce ambush in the Hindu Kush Mountains.
News of the esteemed colonel’s death devastates the Special Forces community, yet Zachary’s daughter, Amanda, is unmoved when the Army casualty assistance team appears on her doorstep. Estranged from her father, Amanda only responds to the assistance team when they mention the $500,000 life insurance payout. But there’s a catch: Amanda must meet with revered psychiatrist Riley Dwyer, who has her own ties to Amanda’s father.
Eager to collect her payout, Amanda reports to her first sessions with Riley and begins a mind bending journey that strips away the façade of her life. Meanwhile, new clues regarding Zachary’s fate surface when his brother, Matt, and Major General Jack Rampert’s team embark on a mission of revenge into forbidden Pakistan territory.
A.J. Tata’s mastery of suspense keeps the reader guessing as Amanda and Matt begin a rapid-fire journey to discover the truth about Zachary in Hidden Threat.
Please enjoy a sample for another Variance militaristic thriller from the mind of #1 international bestseller, Steven Savile
SILVER
THEN
The Testimony of Menahem Ben Jair
Pieces of Hate
One garden had a serpent, the other had him.
There was a fractured beauty to it; a curious symmetry. The serpent had goaded that first betrayal with honeyed words, the forbidden fruit bitten, and the original sin on the lips of the first weak man. His own betrayal had been acted out from behind a mask of love, again on the lips, and sealed with a kiss. Both betrayals were made all the more ugly by the beauty of their surroundings. That was the agony of the garden.
Iscariot felt the weight of silver in his hand.
It was so much heavier than a few coins ought to be. But then they were more than a few coins now, weren’t they? They were a life bought with silver. They were his guilt. He closed his hand around the battered leather pouch, making a fist. How much was a life worth? Really? He had thought about it a lot in the hours since the kiss. Was it the weight of the coins that bought it? The handful of iron nails driven into the wooden cross that ended it? Or the meat left to feed the carrion birds? All of these? None of them? He wanted to believe it was something more spiritual, more honest: the impact that life had on those around it, the sum of the good and the bad, deeds and thoughts.
“Take them, please,” he held out the pouch for the farmer to take. “It’s five times what the land’s worth. More.”
“I don’t want your blood money, traitor,” the man hawked and spat at the dirt between his feet. “Now go.”
“Where can I go? I am alone.”
“Anywhere away from this place. Somewhere people don’t know you. If I was you, I’d go back to the temple and try to buy my soul back.”
The man turned his back on him and walked away, leaving Iscariot alone in the field. “If that didn’t work,” he called without turning back, “I’d throw myself on God’s mercy.”
Iscariot followed the direction of the man’s gaze to the field’s single blackened tree. Lightning had struck it years ago, cleaving it down the middle. Its wooden guts were rotted through but a single hangman’s branch still reached out, beckoning to him against the dusk sky.
He hurled the pouch at the mocking tree. One of the seams split as it hit the ground, scattering the coins across the parched dirt. A moment later he was on his knees, scrambling after them, tears of loss streaming down his face. Loss, not for the man he had betrayed, but for the man he had been and the man he could have been. He lay there as the sun failed, wishing the sun would sear away his flesh and char his bones but dawn came and he was still alive.
Under the anvil
of the sun, he stumbled back through gates of Jerusalem, and wandered the streets for hours. His body’s screams were sweated out in the heat. There was no forgiveness in the air. No one would look at him, but he couldn’t bear to look at his shadow as it stretched out in front of him, so why should they want to look at him? He deserved their hate. He shielded his eyes and looked up toward the crucifixion hill. He thought he could see the shadow of the cross, black against the grass. The soldiers had taken the bodies down hours before. The only shadows up there now were ghosts.
At the temple they mocked him as he pleaded with the Pharisees to take back the silver in exchange for his confession and absolution.
“Live with what you have done, Judas, son of Kerioth. With this one deed you have ensured your legacy. Your name will live on: Judas the betrayer, Judas the coward. The money is yours, Iscariot, your burden. You cannot buy back the innocence of your soul, and it is not as though you have not killed before. Now go, the sight of you sickens us,” the Pharisee said, sweeping his arm out to encompass the entire congregation gathered in prayer. He hit Iscariot’s hand, scattering the silver he clutched across the stone floor. Judas fell to his knees, as though groveling at the feet of the holy man. Head down, he collected the scattered coins. The holy man kicked him away scornfully. “Take your blood money and be gone, traitor.”
Iscariot struggled to his feet and stumbled toward the door.
On the road to Gethsemane he saw the familiar figure of Mary seated by the wayside. He wanted to run to her, to fall at her feet and beg for her forgiveness. She had lost so much more than the rest of them. She looked up, saw him, and smiled sadly. Her smile stopped him dead. He felt the weight of the coins in his hand. Suddenly they were as heavy as love and twice as cold. She stood and reached out for him. He had never loved her more than he did in that moment. He had gone against so much of his friend’s teachings, but never more so than in coveting the woman he loved. He ran into her arms and held her, huge raking sobs shuddering through him. He couldn’t cry. After all of those tears he had shed he was empty. “I am sorry. I am so sorry.”