by Mike Ryan
“I kind of doubt I’ll get killed today just because I beat you into the office.”
“Let’s hope not.”
After quelling Jones’ fears and taking care of a few last-minute details, Recker grabbed some of his favorite weapons out of the gun cabinet and left the office about 10:30am. It was a half hour drive to the bank, getting him there about an hour before the job was supposed to go down, giving him ample time to wait for his targets, as he liked to do. He was in constant communication with Jones throughout the morning through the com device in his ear.
“How’s everything looking so far?” Jones asked.
“Quiet. I’m just hoping nobody sees me sitting here for an hour and thinks I’m the one robbing the bank.”
“That would qualify as a disaster, wouldn’t it?”
Fueled by the jewelry store job, where Recker couldn’t quite make up his mind on how to attack, he had already decided on a plan this time. Though he didn’t think his lack of a decision at the jewelry store played any part in how things unraveled towards the end, he certainly didn’t think it helped. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again here. He figured out the best strategy and he was sticking to it. He was going to hit them as soon as he saw them arrive, hopefully killing them before they even stepped foot in the bank. The hour passed by quickly, probably because of the constant communication with Jones which kept Recker’s mind off other things. As Recker looked at the time, he watched the last couple of minutes tick by until twelve o’clock hit. He did one last check of his weapons to make sure they were fully loaded, including his two hand guns and his assault rifle.
Recker’s eyes were diverted to the right entrance when a black cargo van pulled in and pulled up right in front of the bank’s entrance.
“A van just pulled up to the bank. Think this might be it,” Recker said.
“Please be careful,” Jones said.
Recker jarred open his door, waiting for the bank crew to unload out of the van before he fully got out of the car, not wanting to show his hand too quick and scare them off. Two members of the crew got out of the passenger side of the van, and with a black bag in hand, started walking toward the entrance of the bank.
“Showtime,” Recker said.
He quickly got out of his car and jogged closer to the bank. Not wanting them to drive off after seeing him, Recker’s first action was to shoot the tires of the van with his assault rifle to make a getaway not possible. As he scurried to the van, the driver threw a gun out the window and stuck both his hands out to indicate he was giving up. Recker thought it was a bit strange the man was giving up so quickly and without even putting up a bit of a fight. Unusual for someone with the violent background these men possessed. Recker quickly turned his attention to the men near the door, only to find they’d done the same. Their guns were on the ground and their hands were already in the air. Recker was slightly unnerved by what was happening and took a couple of steps backwards.
“Something’s not right,” Recker said.
“What’s wrong? What’s happening?” Jones asked.
“Nothing. That’s the problem. They just threw their guns down and put their hands up without even firing a shot.”
“Mike, get out of there, it could be a trap.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right.”
Just as Recker turned around and started running back to his car, sirens blared, marked and unmarked police cars raced into the shopping center from every direction. As he looked around to figure out his exit strategy among the increasing crowd, another door opened from the black van. One of the CIA assets assigned to Lawson’s team took aim at Recker’s chest and fired, hitting him near the shoulder. Recker grabbed at his shoulder and looked down, seeing the tranquiliser dart sticking out of it, and realized what was happening. His old friends had finally caught up with him. Breathing heavily and starting to lose consciousness, he sought to give Jones some final clarification as to what was happening so he’d know.
“David, looks like this is it,” Recker said.
“Mike? Mike, what’s happening?”
Recker didn’t have time to respond. As soon as Jones finished, another dart made its way into Recker’s chest. He dropped to a knee, feeling his last few streams of consciousness leave his body. He eyes were getting heavy and he could barely keep them open any longer. He took one last look at the black van, seeing a rifle pointed straight at him. A few seconds later, Recker finally blacked out and collapsed onto the pavement underneath him.
“Shelly, we’ve got him.” One of the CIA officials radioed the news.
“Great, bring him to me,” Lawson said.
The joint CIA/police raid was now officially over. With the police’s help in securing the exits, Lawson kept her word that they’d take Recker off their hands. The men in the van took Recker’s body and dragged it into the van and were gone within seconds. Jones, meanwhile, was frantically trying to figure out what had happened. While he couldn’t be sure of anything yet, he could only assume Recker was trapped by either the police or the CIA. He immediately retraced everything they knew of the bank crew that turned out to be false. Unfathomably to him, someone pulled the wool over his eyes, and it quite possibly had cost Recker his freedom or his life.
As Jones panicked and started doing some computer work to figure out what happened, Recker was being taken to a facility the CIA had rented for the week. As soon as Lawson figured out how they would trap Recker, she knew they needed a secure place they could take him for the time being. Seeing as though they didn’t have any nearby facilities they already owned, she found a semi-remote location in a former shipping business inside a business industrial park. It’d work perfectly since they’d only need it for a day or so.
About five hours after being taken there, Recker finally opened his eyes, only to find he was sitting with his hands behind his back and handcuffed to a chair. There was no doubt he was now in the hands of the CIA. This was their MO. Sitting by himself, tied up in an empty dim lit room, this was their style. After a few minutes, a door opened and a woman started walking toward him. She sat in the empty chair a few inches across from him. It wasn’t quite what Recker had expected. He figured when he was caught, assuming he wasn’t shot and killed first, his final interrogation would be handled by someone he knew from Centurion.
“Hi, John. Is that what you’re still going by these days or is it something else now?”
“Whatever you wanna call me is fine.” Recker smiled, not seeming a bit nervous about his situation. “I can be whoever you want me to be.”
“My name is Shelly.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Lawson returned his smile, impressed with her prisoner’s calm and pleasant demeanor, who didn’t seem the slightest bit anxious. “You seem awfully calm for someone in your situation.”
“Well, not much else I can do right now, is there? I mean, you didn’t tie my feet together, so it is theoretically possible that I could strangle you with them, but I’ll wait a little while to see what you have to say first.”
“Confident.”
“I’ve done it before.”
“After reading your file and your background info, it really wouldn’t surprise me if you had,” Lawson said.
“Considering Davenport isn’t here, I assume he was bypassed and they brought you in to find me?” Recker asked.
“Perceptive. So who were you talking to in the earpiece?” Lawson said.
“What earpiece?”
“The earpiece we found inside your ear when we grabbed you.”
“Oh, that. Yeah, I had it linked to my iPod so I can listen to some tunes while I work,” Recker said, smiling. “I find music helps calms my nerves in situations like that.”
“Always play it cool and calm, huh?”
“I try.”
Lawson pulled Recker’s phone out of her pocket and started looking through it. Luckily, Recker had gotten in the habit of deleting all his text messages and any voice m
ails every day, so there wasn’t anything in there for her to see. Except his contact list.
“You wanna tell me who these people are?” she asked.
“No idea,” Recker said.
“Who’s David?”
“Uhh, pizza guy. Yeah, I don’t like meeting strange people so I request the same driver all the time.”
“You know we can check this out, right?”
“Wouldn’t get you anywhere.”
“How bout Tyrell?”
“My supplier.”
“Vincent? Malloy?”
“My vet and my pharmacist,” Recker said.
Lawson chuckled, getting a kick out of his responses. “How about Mia? Girlfriend?”
“Just a prostitute. Gotta get your fix on somehow, you know?”
“I’m sure.”
Lawson put his phone back in her pocket then pulled out a piece of paper, which was folded up. Recker wondered what she was going to try to throw on him next. She unfolded the paper and looked at it for a few seconds before talking to him again.
“So, kind of strange you have someone like Vincent in your contact list, isn’t it?” Lawson asked.
“What’s strange about it?”
“Someone like you doing business with a mob boss like him? I don’t see the connection.”
Recker smiled. “You’re not supposed to.”
“Tyrell Gibson. Looks like a low-level hoodlum. What’s your connection to him?”
“He gets me my toys.”
“Mia Hendricks,” Lawson said. “You know what’s strange about her?”
“You tell me.”
“She’s different from the others in your list.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“The others have criminal backgrounds. She doesn’t.”
“Maybe she’s better at not being caught than them,” Recker said.
“Or maybe because she’s a nurse. Maybe you settled down. Maybe she means more to you than the others.”
“That’s a lot of maybe’s.”
“OK, let’s talk about this David fellow,” Lawson said. “We can’t find a last name for him, nothing comes up through his phone number, as far as we can tell, he doesn’t even exist.”
“Hmm...that’s strange.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You know, this is all very enlightening, but what is it you hope to accomplish with this?” Recker said. “You know I’m not gonna tell you anything. What exactly are you fishing for?”
“I’m curious about your life for the last few years. How exactly did you come up with this system of yours? Obviously, you have some type of program pulling information from emails or texts or phones that you can act upon.”
“It’s really not so complicated. I’m just fighting crime wherever I find it.”
“OK. Let’s move on to another topic.”
“Can’t wait.”
“Gerry Edwards. Know him?” Lawson asked.
“Is, uhh, is he on television?”
“No, he’s an agent of ours who was killed in an airport in Ohio.”
“That’s a shame,” Recker said. “Dangerous profession, isn’t it?”
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it, would you?”
“Afraid not.”
“And you didn’t know he was the one who killed your girlfriend down in Florida a few years ago, right?”
“Oh, man, I’ve been looking for him too. Guess someone beat me to it.”
Lawson couldn’t help but smile, amused by Recker’s sense of humor. She didn’t figure getting any information out of him was going to be easy, but she was hoping he’d give her something, even if it was only one small thing she could run with. But Recker was an old hand at this, and he wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of learning a single thing about him since the day he left them. He knew what the plan was for him. They were going to try to learn as much about his friends as they could and possibly go after them, then wind up killing everybody they considered to be any kind of threat. He figured they’d leave Mia alone since they already had him, but Jones was another story. With his computer skills, and the fact he was already wanted by the NSA, he would likely be terminated along with Recker. The CIA wouldn’t take the chance of leaving Jones alone then hoping he didn’t come back for some type of revenge. Recker, though, wasn’t going to give them anything on Jones, no matter what kind of technique they used on him. He knew them all and was ready for whatever they threw at him. But he was hoping to bypass all the nonsense and just go straight to the part where they killed him. He didn’t want a long goodbye.
“Excuse me, you seem like a very nice person, but can we just get on with the killing,” Recker said.
“What killing?”
“Mine. I hate dragging things out.”
“What makes you think that’s what’s going to happen?” Lawson asked.
“Listen, I know the game, I know how it works. You wanna pump me for whatever information I can give and when I run dry, you finish the game. I’m not gonna play.”
“Well, regardless of what you think you know, you don’t. Let me explain to you exactly what’s going on here. We know Gerry Edwards killed your girlfriend, Carrie. We also believe that several months afterwards you relocated to Philadelphia. How, we don’t know. It is my personal belief that you hooked up with some computer geek who gets you information on what criminals or jobs to go on. I also think he found out where Edwards lived and passed the information on to you. You’ve been looking for him all this time then you went down there and killed him.”
“Nice theory,” Recker said.
“John, I know you don’t trust me, and that’s fine, I understand. I wouldn’t trust me either in your shoes. I’ve looked over your package, your background, every mission you’ve been on, the doctors you’ve talked to, everyone who’s ever had a connection to you since you’ve been in the CIA.”
“And what’d you find?”
“I found someone who was wrongly terminated, attempted anyway,” Lawson said. “But what you think is happening here, isn’t what’s happening.”
Recker wasn’t sure what the woman was talking about, but he was skeptical about anything she said. He figured this was the nice guy routine to get him to open up. She was good, because it almost worked. But Recker wasn’t falling for it. By his facial expression, Lawson could see he was less than impressed by anything she was saying. If she wanted him to even remotely trust her, she was going to have to make an extreme move. One that could cost her life if she was wrong about him. She got up and walked around behind Recker, just standing there for a minute. Recker was starting to feel a little uneasy, thinking this might be it. He was waiting to hear the click of a gun, or feel the sharp steel of a knife. Instead, he felt his hands become free as the rope bonding them together was untied. He brought his arms around in front of him and he rubbed his wrists as Lawson walked back around where he could see her.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Lawson said. “If I did, you’d be dead already.”
“What makes you think you’re safe enough that I won’t do it to you?”
“Because I’m trusting you won’t. I’m not Sam Davenport. I’m hoping that has something to do with it. And if none of that does, then there are several men outside the door who would kill you if they hear something doesn’t sound right. And if none of those do it for you, then maybe your curiosity will, wondering what it is I want.”
“I’m listening,” Recker said, confirming that he was indeed curious.
Untying his hands was a move Recker wasn’t expecting. There he was sitting in a chair without a single restraint to hold him back. Yet here was this woman talking to him like they’d known each for a long time, someone who knew what he was capable of, but didn’t appear to be afraid of him in the least. It was a strange play on her part from his perspective.
“I was brought in to find you because Centurion believed you were responsible for Gerry Edwards’ death,” Lawson
said. “After a few months of no progress, I was brought in from another agency to find you, or his killer, or both if it turned out it was you.”
“Well congratulations.”
“But I don’t think you’re a bad guy, or you’re a threat, or you should’ve been rubbed out in London.”
Recker just looked at her, wondering where she was going with this.
“I was tasked with bringing you in, one way or another. But like I said, I don’t believe you’re a bad guy. I don’t want to bring you in dead.”
“Honestly, you seem like a nice woman, but I don’t wanna go back alive. Someone in Centurion will find a way to kill me anyway, or they’ll stash me in some dark hole for thirty years. Neither one is an appealing proposition to me,” Recker said.
“I asked Director Roberts personally if I could bring you back into the fold, if he would sign off on it, and he indicated he would,” Lawson said.
Recker was a little astonished. Coming back in to work for them was literally the last thing he would have ever thought of, if he ever thought of it at all. It was so far fetched to him he had never even considered it a possibility. Recker tilted his head back and looked away from her, thinking about what she just said. Lawson could tell he was taken aback.
“I understand you would still have trust issues,” Lawson said. “We can put you in another division, another project, we can work with you to get you acclimated again.”
“Why? Why go through all this trouble for me?”
“Like I said, I read your file. I didn’t think what happened to you was right. And I believe you’re someone who still has a lot to offer. There’s a lot of things you could’ve done to hurt us, Centurion, the United States, but you didn’t do any of them. It says a lot about you.”
“I understand the way things work,” Recker said, beginning to open up. “There was only one person I really had an issue with.”
“Gerry Edwards?”
“Yeah. You’re right. I killed him.”
“How’d you find him?” Lawson said.