He walked past his Ember-modified GMC Yukon to his personal vehicle. His work truck needed to stay in the garage tonight; it would take a helluva lot more than a knife to remove the Yukon’s tracker.
He climbed into the driver’s seat of his silver BMW X5, pressed the ignition start button, and shifted the automatic transmission into drive.
Time to go have a conversation with his boss.
CHAPTER 42
Dempsey’s House
5209 Brigstock Court
Williamsburg, Virginia
May 26, 2130 EDT
Dempsey leaned back on a deck chaise and told himself he didn’t feel his age.
He took a long pull from his beer and smiled.
All was not right in the world tonight, but given the constraints of his new life, this was probably as good as it would get.
The air smelled of honeysuckle and fresh-cut grass, and occasionally he’d catch a waft of smoky BBQ as the breeze blew past the Weber cooling in the corner of his deck. It was the perfect night for a cookout, and he’d called the gang over to his place at the last minute. Jarvis had declined, Wang never responded, and Mendez said he had a hot date. So it wound up being just the three of them. Smith leaned against the railing, staring at Grimes’s ass as she bent over the Igloo to fish three more longnecks from the icy slush. He decided he liked his new team, especially these two. They had grit and attitude. And they were both damn good operators. Originally, he figured that after he got his vengeance, he would drift off into the sunset—on a sailboat, or a fishing boat, or some damn thing. Now, he realized he was home.
“Here,” Grimes said, handing him another beer. She sat down on the twin chaise beside him, set her beer down on the deck, and tossed the remaining beer to Smith. “Yaoow,” she said, wincing and clutching the left side of her chest.
“How are the ribs?” Dempsey asked as he watched her hiss a short breath out of clenched teeth.
“Hurts like hell,” she said, taking a long swig.
“Mendez and Wang should be here,” Smith said.
“Yeah, if they’re too cool to hang with us,” Grimes said with a laugh, “then fuck ’em. Just means more beer for us.” She extended her arm to clink bottles with Dempsey and winced again.
“Mendez claims to have a hot date,” Dempsey said. “And Wang is probably off playing Dungeons and Dragons somewhere.”
Grimes gave him a funny look. “Dungeons and Dragons? Jesus, how old are you, Dempsey?”
He laughed. “Okay, fine, maybe Wang is off playing Assassin’s Creed on his Xbox—is that better?” This time he clinked her bottle with his.
“What do you think will happen to Ember?” she asked, her tone turning serious.
“Don’t look at me,” Dempsey said. He nodded toward Smith. “There’s the man you need to ask.”
Smith shrugged. “This last mission was our charter, but that doesn’t mean we’re done. We uncovered the UN plot and stopped Masoud Modiri, but Amir Modiri and Behrouz Rostami are still out there. Hell, there’s plenty of other counterterror work that needs to be done. I think, with Dempsey on board and the Special Activities Unit concept, Ember could be the next evolution of Tier One operations.” Smith took a long pull from his beer. “But, that being said, we all need to prepare ourselves for the most likely scenario—that Ember will be shut down.”
Dempsey felt a surge of frustration. Like so many times in the past, he just wasn’t ready to ring the bell. Not in BUD/S, not on the white-side SEAL teams, and not during his tenure in Navy Tier One. He realized now that he couldn’t ring the bell on Ember, either. “Did Jarvis say anything specific to you after New York? Anything about going after Amir Modiri and his VEVAK minions?”
“Nope,” Smith said. “He has a meeting in DC tomorrow with our sponsor, but until then, even he doesn’t know our fate.”
“Wait, you’re telling me the all-knowing, all-powerful Kelso Jarvis is actually in the dark about something?” Grimes said, trying to lighten the mood. “I call bullshit.”
This time they all laughed and clinked their three beer bottles together.
Dempsey watched Grimes smile and pull her legs up beneath her in the chair. Tonight he was getting a glimpse of the girl beneath the armor—feminine, playful, and young. When they first met, he’d considered her a nuisance. Over the past month, his opinion had morphed three times: from nuisance to adversary, from adversary to liability, and finally from liability to asset. During that time, he hadn’t devoted any time to ruminating about what was beneath the surface—what filled her with such motivation and anger. He’d been so focused on his own rage that he didn’t give a shit about the reason for hers. Everything they’d been through had changed that.
“Mind if I ask you a personal question?” Dempsey said.
Grimes hesitated a beat before answering. “You can ask. Doesn’t mean I’ll answer it.”
“What’s your story? Why did you join Ember?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, off-limits.”
“All right,” he said. “Then your NOC, Elizabeth Grimes, did you pick that?”
“Yep.”
“Any significance?”
Her lips curled into a wry grin. “Of course.”
Dempsey took a pull from his beer. “Care to share?”
“Only if you promise not to laugh.”
He drew an X across his chest with a fingertip. “Cross my heart.”
She shifted her gaze to somewhere in the night sky. “Elizabeth was my mother’s name. She wasn’t in the military, but she was the strongest woman I’ve ever known—mentally, emotionally . . . spiritually. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was sixteen. I was so scared, but she fought it and beat it. We became best friends after that. But four years later, the cancer came back, and this time they found it in her liver, too. They said she would last three months, but she made it thirteen. I . . . uh . . . I pray every night that I can live with half the courage she did.”
She took a sip of her beer.
“I think you do,” Dempsey said. “What you did at the UN is proof of that.”
She shrugged. Her eyes were wet now.
“And Grimes? Where’d that come from?”
She laughed, while wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Grimes I borrowed from The Walking Dead.”
“The zombie show?” Smith asked. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah, the lead character, Rick Grimes, is a total badass. He never quits. No matter the odds, no matter how miserable and terrible and hopeless it gets, he just kills every fucking zombie who tries to hurt his family . . . That’s what happens when someone goes after my family.”
After a long pause, Dempsey said, “Sounds like Rick and I would get along.”
“Most definitely,” she said, then got up and walked over to the deck railing, putting her back to both of them.
Dempsey glanced at Smith.
Smith nodded. “Mind if I check my high side?” he asked, but he was already heading toward the sliding glass doors.
“My house is your house—I mean, like, literally, they’re exactly the same,” Dempsey said. “Sure, knock yourself out.”
After Smith disappeared inside, Dempsey asked, “What will you do if they shut us down?”
“It’s hard to think past tomorrow,” Grimes said, not turning around. “I burned a lot of bridges to get here. I don’t know if going back to my old job is an option. Even if I could go back, I don’t know if I want to . . . What about you? Will you go back to the teams?”
Dempsey shook his head. “Can’t,” he said simply.
She turned around.
They locked eyes, and he felt a twinge in his chest.
“John?” came Smith’s voice from the house, interrupting the moment. From the somber intensity of his voice, Dempsey knew something was wrong.
They followed him to the TOC in Dempsey’s basement, where Smith pointed to the middle of three computer screens.
“What’s wrong?” Dem
psey asked.
“Read this,” Smith said, and slid out of the way. Grimes crowded in beside them. “Just Dempsey,” Smith said, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“Fuck that,” Dempsey said, pulling Grimes in closer by a belt loop on her low-riding jeans.
He began to read, unsure at first what he was seeing.
“Ian sent it to Jarvis, but he copied the department directors.”
“What the hell is he talking about?” Dempsey asked. The message rambled on and on about intersecting lines among satellites and cell towers, and graphing them against the movement of subjects from some list Jarvis had given him. Then, there was a math equation in the middle of the text that made Dempsey’s head hurt. “Shane, what are you showing me?” he finally said with irritation.
“It’s an algorithm to figure out who was messaging and sending data from a series of burner phones,” Grimes said.
“To who?” Dempsey asked.
“Amir Modiri,” Smith said.
“So what?” Dempsey asked, standing up. “Do we go to the hangar and see if they match the burners we recovered off the Al Qaeda shitheads in New York?”
“These calls are all dated much earlier,” Smith said.
“Before the massacres in Yemen and Djibouti,” Grimes added, her voice now a whisper.
Smith leaned in and scrolled down in the message.
They read the last paragraph together. The evidence was damning. The White House chief of staff, Robert Kittinger, had communicated with Amir Modiri on eleven different occasions, the last call placed ninety minutes before launching the raid in Yemen. This was more than just an OPSEC violation; Kittinger had compromised the entire mission by providing time-sensitive information, communication frequencies, and status reports to the enemy.
“We need to call the boss,” Smith said, and reached for the secure phone on the desk. As he reached for it, his secure cell phone rang. “Smith,” he said. He listened for a moment. “We just saw it. Did you talk with the boss?” Another pause. “Understood. We’ll head in . . . Okay, I’ll keep trying, too. What happened to the detail?” He chuckled. “Well, that’s Jarvis, right?”
Smith shoved his phone back in his pocket and turned to Dempsey. “That was Quinton Thomas. We’re on full recall. He wants everyone at the hangar until this is sorted out.” He fished out his phone again and started to dial. “I’m gonna call Ian and see if he knows where the boss is. The stamp on the e-mail shows Jarvis has read it, so he already knows what’s going on.”
Dempsey felt an eerie calm envelop him, followed by a vision of perfect clarity. He knew now the answer to Grimes’s question. He knew what he needed to do next, and when he was done, there would be no after.
He shoved past Smith and opened the heavy glass door to his weapons room. He selected a form-fitting backpack—one he had worn on countless operations with the teams—and opened it on the countertop. He pulled two handguns from the shelf—the Sig Sauer 229 and the more compact 239. He thought of these two weapons as an extension of himself. He had carried them in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Somalia, and at least half a dozen other shithole countries—countries where he had fought and bled and cried for his nation while that fucker Kittinger ate steak at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington. He took the short-barrel Sig516 and grabbed a PEQ-4 IR target designator and snapped it onto the rail.
“What are you doing, John?” Smith called to him.
Dempsey didn’t turn around. “Ending this,” he said, and slipped the bag with his night vision gear into the backpack. “Completing the goddamn mission and fulfilling our charter.”
“Slow down. We need to think this through,” Smith said. “We’re talking about the chief of staff to the president of the United States, for Christ’s sake.”
“He’s just a man.”
“What you’re talking about is treason, John.”
“Yes, exactly. Kittinger is a traitor—a crime punishable by death.”
Smith ran his fingers through this hair. “We need to talk to Jarvis.”
“Fine, call Jarvis,” Dempsey said. He stripped off his black T-shirt and then slipped on his low-profile body armor, dragging the rough Velcro straps over his bare skin. “You guys can talk about this all night long, but I’m going to take care of fucking business.”
“I’m going, too,” Grimes said, and reached for a pistol from Dempsey’s top shelf.
“Like hell, you are,” Dempsey said, grabbing her by the wrist.
Grimes shook off his hand and shoved him backward.
He recoiled and took an uncertain step toward her.
“Fuck you, John,” she said, pushing him again. “This is my mission, too. I deserve to be here—just as much as you do!”
Dempsey felt his body surge with anger. “This has nothing to do with you wanting to play dress-up and pretend you’re an operator. I don’t give a shit about your pedigree or whoever the hell you’re trying to impress. They were my brothers, Grimes. This is my justice to serve.”
“He was my brother, too, goddamn it!” she screamed, her spittle splattering his face.
She tore her wrists free with a Krav Maga move he should have seen coming and pounded her fists against his chest.
Instead of stopping her, he let her pound on him. A silent voice whispered epiphany in his mind. He grabbed her in a bear hug and pulled her close.
“Who are you?” he whispered, his lips by her ear.
“I’m Kelsey Clarke,” she sobbed. “I’m Jonathan Clarke’s sister.”
SO1 Jonathan Clarke, USN. Tier One SEAL. Spaz, to his teammates.
Fuck.
“I didn’t know,” he whispered. “I didn’t know . . .”
At that, she stopped squirming and let him hug her.
Dempsey looked at Smith over a tousled mess of auburn hair. “She’s coming with me,” he said.
Smith threw his hands up in exasperation. “What the hell is wrong with you guys?”
“Jonathan Clarke was one of mine,” Dempsey said, releasing Elizabeth from his grip. “He was in the TOC in Djibouti when it blew.” He turned his back on Smith and resumed packing his bag. Grimes moved next to him and went to work, snapping an EOTech Holosite onto the top rail of a SOPOD M4. Dempsey handed her a night vision kit, and she slipped it into the bag. “I’ll get you body armor,” he said. He returned a moment later, adjusting the Velcro on one of his spare vests so it would fit her better. Grimes pulled her T-shirt over her head with no shame, and then pulled the body armor on over her head, her face tight with pain from her two fractured ribs beneath the black bruise on her otherwise perfect skin. She pulled her black T-shirt back on and selected a tactical knife with a long, folding blade for her pocket. Dempsey put a hand on her shoulder and then looked over at Smith, who was back on the computer. “What did Jarvis say?”
“I still can’t reach him,” Smith said. “Which is weird. I’ve tried his high-side and low-side phones, I’ve texted him, and sent an urgent e-mail—nothing.”
“What did you tell him?” Dempsey asked. He selected his own tactical knife and then zipped the backpack and slung it over both shoulders. He checked the right panel for the two medical blowout kits he always kept packed. Hopefully he wouldn’t need those tonight.
“That I urgently needed to speak with him,” Smith said, snapping the lid of the laptop closed. He stood up. “But I have a feeling that doesn’t matter now.”
“Where are you going?” Dempsey asked.
“With you,” Smith said. “You’ll need eyes and ears. I downloaded what I could find on the house. I also pulled the details I need to hack the security system and tie into the cameras.”
Dempsey placed a hand on Smith’s shoulder and looked his new brother in the eyes.
Smith met his gaze. “We’re a team. If we do this, we do it together.”
Dempsey nodded and turned to leave, but Smith caught him by the shoulder. “Hold up,” he said, jogging back to the weapons room. He returned a minute later with tw
o tiny pistols that Dempsey wouldn’t even consider for paperweights. “For this mission, you might want to reconsider your hardware selection.” He handed one baby Sig to Dempsey and the other to Grimes, along with a threaded suppressor for each.
“What the hell is this?” Dempsey asked, looking disdainfully at the cap gun in his palm.
“That is a Sig P232 22LR, my friend,” Smith said. “And that is what you’re going to use to shoot Kittinger.”
CHAPTER 43
McLean, Virginia
May 27, 0245 EDT
John Dempsey ran his fingertip along the place where the jihadist’s dagger had cut him. The scar wrapped his forearm like a serpent. It was an old wound, pearly white and smooth, all the pink and tenderness bleached away by sea, sun, and time. But now, in the dark of night, it burned. Burned with pride and prejudice. Burned with retribution.
Even in the dark, a man cannot forget his scars.
Dempsey waited, his NVGs tilted up and off his eyes. Grimes waited with him. He looked over at his battle buddy, his gaze drawn to her taut, muscular arms—pale and defined in the moon’s shadow. They were hiding in the bushes that surrounded the bureaucrat’s manicured lawn. She didn’t notice his gaze because she was scanning the residential street with her NVGs.
They had conducted surveillance for over an hour, from these bushes and other equally scratchy and annoying shrubbery locations. Through the windows they had watched Kittinger drink scotch in his office, and they had watched the bureaucrat’s two-man personal-security team depart around eleven thirty, a half hour after Mrs. Kittinger had retired upstairs for the evening. That left a roving patrol, which they would have to rely a bit on luck to avoid. They had all agreed they would take their own casualties rather than permit collateral damage. The chief of staff was a traitor, but the security guys were just doing their jobs.
While they waited, Smith acted as OTC in his SUV, giving them reports over their encrypted comms circuits about everything he saw inside the house. To Dempsey’s surprise, Smith had managed to hack into the home security system and was streaming the video feeds on his laptop. Dempsey made a mental note to rib him about spending too much time with Wang.
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