Live to Kill

by Brian Drake

  “I don’t believe it, Perry. How long did Floyd give him?”

  “Six months.”

  “He’ll talk. Dying men always get ideas.”

  “Cyrus—”

  “I’m overriding your decision. Miller will be there later today.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Are you going soft on me, Perry?”

  “Gallagher and I have been partners a hell of a lot longer than you and I, Cyrus. We owe him.”

  “I don’t owe him anything. And you work for me.”

  “At least—”

  “No further discussion. Miller will make it look right.”

  Royce bit off the words he wanted, instead saying, “I guess that’s it then.”

  “Carry on.”

  “Yes, sir, Cyrus, sir.”

  A pause on the other end. Then: “Don’t get smart with me, Perry.”

  The line clicked. Royce turned off the dash phone and seethed. He had let Gallagher down, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

  DANIEL GALLAGHER shut the door and froze.

  The air in the house wasn’t right.

  Somebody was in his home. Waiting. Royce had lied. Well, no sense prolonging the inevitable.

  He walked down the hall to the kitchen with its adjoining family room, where he kept his books, television and a pair of guitars that now had a layer of dust on them. The man on the couch wore a white shirt, a black tie, gray slacks, with a matching coat laid neatly beside him. A leather shoulder holster suspended an unmistakable .45 automatic under his left arm. The man’s shoes were mirror bright. His hair was close-cropped, his jawline sharp, his eyes smoldering. A woman stood in the corner. She held a pistol. Unlike the male, she was dressed in jeans with a button-down shirt open to reveal a black tank top, her long black hair tied back. She had the high cheekbones of a Slav and was gorgeous enough to stop traffic. She kept the pistol visible but didn’t raise the muzzle.

  “Are you here to kill me?”

  The man said, “Take off your coat, Daniel.”

  Gallagher complied and tossed the overcoat on the back of a nearby chair. “I’m not carrying a weapon. I can barely walk.”

  “Sit down.”

  Gallagher dropped onto the chair, his breath short. The trip home had exhausted him.

  The man took out a cigar and a Zippo and toasted the tip. “My name is Steve Dane,” he said. He put the cigar in his mouth and took a puff. Blowing out a stream of white smoke that climbed toward the ceiling, he fixed his gaze on Gallagher and spoke again. “I think you know who I am.”

  Gallagher’s shoulders sank. He dropped his eyes to the carpet.

  Here was that one thing. Alive.

  2

  The Third Man

  STEVE DANE regarded the frail man silently as smoke trickled from the tip of his Montecristo.

  He’d expected to hate the man, and he did.

  He faced Gallagher with what looked like the same cold calculation with which he’d faced other vermin around the world, but this time it was different. A shot through the head wouldn’t suffice. He wanted to make the man suffer.

  “Tell me who I am,” he said.

  Gallagher cleared his throat. He looked a little unsteady. Dane gave him a moment.

  Gallagher said, “You’re the son of Richard Dane.”

  “That’s a good start. What does Richard Dane mean to you?”

  “He was a traitor who killed himself.”

  The woman near the bookcase shifted. Dane held up a hand. Nina Talikova stayed still.

  “Wrong answer,” Dane said.

  “That was the story.”

  “I came here to learn the truth.”

  Gallagher eased back in the chair. “What is truth?”

  “Pilate said the same thing, as I recall. He was stalling.”

  Gallagher fixed Dane with a cold stare. “You know as well as I do that the truth only depends on one man lying better than the next.”

  “I did a job recently,” Dane said, turning his attention to his cigar. He took a puff and blew out more smoke. “As a reward, my employer promised to help me solve the mystery of my father’s death. They provided your name. I’ve never believed the suicide story. My father was a patriot. He would never betray the U.S. You might recall I tried to prove that theory.”

  Gallagher nodded. “So I heard.”

  “And then this happened.” Dane clamped the cigar between his teeth and pulled back his right sleeve, revealing puckered, fire-damaged flesh. “A helicopter crash. Apparently I was getting too close to finding out who the liar was.”

  Gallagher nodded again.

  “You’re going to tell me the truth.”

  “Or what?”

  “You’re awfully defiant for a man who doesn’t have long to live.”

  Gallagher choked out a laugh. “You can’t threaten to kill me. I’m already dead.” His tone softened. “But I’m sorry.”

  Dane blinked. Nina shifted again.

  Gallagher said, “Of all the things we did, what we did to your father bothered me the most.”

  Dane stared. Frozen. But he started feeling very warm as his heart rate increased. He remained still.

  Nina said, “What do you mean?” Her Russian accent sounded thicker with anger.

  “Who are you?”

  “The one with the gun,” she said, raising the pistol. “Answer the question.”

  Gallagher looked at Dane. “You were sixteen?”

  Dane almost whispered. “Yes.”

  Gallagher nodded. “Your father worked for a man named Perry Royce. Ask around. Legendary spymaster. I worked with him on something called Operation Eagle. Our job was to sniff out Soviet agents around the world and assassinate them. All hush-hush, look-like-an-accident-type jobs.

  “We worked mostly in Central America,” Gallagher continued. “It was vital that the Soviets didn’t get a foothold there. It made supporting anti-Communist efforts in that area so important. Some of that was on the news every night. The Contras. Et cetera. Eagle was covert, and we did a heck of a lot more while the cameras were pointing the other way.”

  Dane sat straighter. “Where did my father fit in?”

  “Royce was a bad egg. He had other ideas when it came to using Eagle. He wanted to work his way into the criminal syndicates and make money on the side, and me and another man named George DeRocca helped him do it. We used agency assets to remove obstacles, and filled the voids.

  “Your father found out. He tried to stop us. We used a Mafia connection to—”

  Dane reached for his gun and removed it from the shoulder leather. The stainless steel weapon looked large in his hand, larger still because of the extra length of the silencer attached to the muzzle.

  “What … what are you doing?”

  “So Royce framed my father?” Dane asked with deadly calm.

  Gallagher started shaking. “He ordered it done. He also ordered the sabotage of your helicopter. When you left the U.S., he decided you weren’t a threat anymore. We had a big argument about that. I thought you were. I knew this day would come.”

  “Royce was never on my radar.” Dane clicked off the .45’s safety. “I remember DeRocca, though. Came to the house a lot.”

  “George was second-in-command.”

  “And what did that make you, Dan?”

  “The third man.”

  Dane rose from the couch and let the .45 dangle in his right hand.

  “You’re telling me the three of you betrayed your country and murdered a lot of people who were in your way?”

  Gallagher nodded but his head was shaking, so one nod turned into three in rapid succession.

  “How long did the doctor give you?”

  Nina said, “Steve—”

  “Six months.”

  Dane shot Gallagher’s left knee, then his right, the caps popping, splattering blood on the carpet and chair. Gallagher screamed in agony, falling out of the chair to the floor, onto his side. H
e looked up at Dane with pleading eyes. Dane put a third round through his head, and Gallagher’s body jerked with the impact, flopping flat.

  Dane jammed his pistol back into the holster. His eyes remained on Gallagher’s body, his jaw set tight.

  “Why did you kill him?” Nina said.

  He looked at her. “In case somebody finds a cure for cancer in the next six months.”

  “He had more information. Those other two—”

  Dane grabbed his coat from the couch and pulled it on while Nina stared at him.

  “He has everything we need,” Dane said. “Let’s tear this place apart and find the rest. You start upstairs.”

  Nina put away her gun and brushed by Dane without a word. He heard her feet pound the stairs on the way to the second floor.

  He started his meticulous but destructive search with the bookcase, paging through book after book and discarding them on the floor. No hidden computer disks or USB drives.

  The pictures on one shelf made him pause. Gallagher’s family. Wife. Two kids—boy and girl. There weren’t any pictures of mother or kids after the kids were teenagers, so he wondered if at some point they stopped talking to Gallagher. He took one picture down and slid off the back. Nothing hidden there. He dropped the frame, and it landed with a thud. He took the next three, and rage suddenly gripped him like a vise. He pivoted and flung the frames across the room. They smacked into the wall and broke into pieces, the glass shattering, bits raining down on the couch where he’d sat. Jaw clenched tight, breathing hard through his nose, Dane considered the mess momentarily and then moved down the hall to a den, where he found more books and trinkets from Gallagher’s life. He tore through everything, wondering if he was truly searching or just making a huge mess reflective of the rage running through him. He tore open the drawers of a desk and dumped out the contents, briefly pawed through the piles. He found a pocket-size spiral notebook with a bunch of words written on each line of each page, one after the other crossed out until he found one that wasn’t. Passwords? He pocketed the notebook and then grabbed the laptop sitting atop the desk. Everything he needed was probably on the hard drive. Or maybe there was nothing there. But he wouldn’t learn anything by destroying it. He tucked the computer under his arm and started for the hallway, where Nina met him halfway.

  “Are you done?” she said.

  Dane nodded and led the way to the front door.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me if I found anything?” she said.

  “I don’t care,” he said, storming out.

  3

  Priority Number One

  NINA DROVE while Dane sat in the passenger seat and turned on the computer. As soon as a password prompt appeared, he took out the notebook and found the page with the word that wasn’t crossed out. He typed the word and pressed the Enter key. The prompt cleared and showed him the desktop. A beach with a calm ocean served as the wallpaper. How appropriate.

  He wasn’t conscious of the scenery around him as Nina drove. He clicked on the documents file folder and started scrolling through the contents, presently letting out a low whistle.

  “What?” Nina said.

  “We got ’em dead to rights,” Dane said. “Copies of official mission files going back to the start, and an addendum document detailing the U.S. citizens killed by Eagle operatives.”

  “Now what?”

  “Go back to the hotel so we can finish going through this. If there are still gaps, we’ll go see Len Lukavina.”

  Dane closed the lid and finally looked up. They were at a stoplight, and Nina stared at him.

  HAL MILLER crossed the street, the illumination from the sidewalk lamps casting pools of light on the ground. He passed through the pools without care, black-gloved hands at his side, as he went up the walk to Gallagher’s home.

  At the door, he produced lock picks from the inside pocket of his jacket but stopped as he inserted the first into the bottom lock. No resistance. He tried the knob. It was already unlocked. With a quick glance back at the quiet street, he entered the house and shut the door.

  No lights. But the smell. The death odor had been building up for some time, Miller figured, as he advanced down the hallway. It wasn’t hard to find the body. He stopped and stared at the fallen form of Daniel Gallagher and didn’t even wrinkle his nose.

  Miller stood tall and trim with slicked-back brown hair and a smooth, chiseled jaw, not a hint of stubble on his face. Even his jeans were perfectly pressed.

  Miller took out his phone and snapped a picture of Gallagher’s body. He forwarded it to Perry Royce and then called the man. He glanced around at the rest of the room. No sign of forced entry, not even at the front door, but the place had been trashed.

  “What is it?” Royce said.

  “Gallagher’s dead.”

  “Good.”

  “Somebody else did it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I sent you a picture. It tells the story. Somebody got here first and put three bullets in him. That same somebody ransacked this house. I can’t tell if anything was taken.”

  “Hang on.” Royce muted the line a moment, then came back, his voice more energetic but nowhere near out of control. “Get out of there. We need to know who did this and fast.”

  “On it,” Miller said.

  “Leave everything as you found it. I’ll send a cleanup crew. We can’t have the cops learning about this.”

  PERRY ROYCE, in the kitchen of his home in Manassas, poured a cup of coffee and tried to take a sip, but instead frowned and put the mug on the counter. Leaning against the sink with his arms folded, he dealt with a mix of sadness and dread. Whoever had killed Dan had left a mess. The cleanup crew would take care of the mess, but that still left the mystery of who had shot him and why. It was his number-one priority now.

  And then there was the fact that the friend he’d served with for over thirty years was dead. He pushed those feelings away and grabbed the coffee. He hadn’t survived this long by letting sentiment blind him, but this was also the first time somebody close to him had been taken out. Ordering the deaths of people you’ll never see is one thing; when it’s a friend, that’s something else. Royce wasn’t exactly prepared for “something else,” and the coffee mug shook in his grip. He put the mug down again and squeezed his fists tightly. The reaction surprised him, but he couldn’t stop shaking.

  DANE SAT back and rubbed his face. His head hurt from the glare of the laptop screen despite his turning down the brightness.

  Nina sat to his left, nursing a glass of wine. They were in a much better hotel suite than the motel they’d stayed at in Wilmington. Nina had rubbed one of the bathroom towels on her right cheek and pronounced that they were back among the civilized.

  Dane scooted his chair back from the corner desk and started to pace.

  “So what do we know?” he said.

  Nina pulled the computer closer to her and consulted the screen.

  “We can confirm most of Gallagher’s story. U.S. citizens were killed, and they all had Italian names, so it’s safe to figure they were the gangsters Gallagher referred to. Their deaths left an opening for Royce and his crew to fill.”

  “But we don’t know who their contact is. Or was. Who benefitted from those murders? Who got elevated into the big chair because of Royce?”

  “We go see Len?”

  Dane stopped and nodded. “Let’s go see Len.”

  “It’s awfully late, Steve.”

  Dane glanced at his watch: 2:45 a.m. “Then we’ll wake him up.”

  4

  Not a Sound Strategy

  “Dammit, Steve.”

  “I wouldn’t be here this late if it wasn’t urgent. We need to talk. Right now.”

  Dane, with Nina slightly behind him, stood in the entryway of Len Lukavina’s home in Arlington. Lukavina’s wife stood near her husband. Both were in bathrobes, with sleepy eyes.

  At forty-six, a few years older than Dane, Lukavina had moved up the la
dder at the Central Intelligence Agency despite an almost fatal accident. One side of his face appeared warped. The corner of one eye drooped, and the lid didn’t move when he blinked. Lukavina had been one of the agents on Steve Dane’s Blackhawk helicopter when it crashed, and he was one of the last Dane had pulled out of the wreckage before the chopper exploded. Lukavina took the most punishing blast of the explosion, nearly burning to death. So extensive had been the damage that no amount of plastic surgery could fully erase the effects. The incident forced him to remain behind the scenes, even when in the field running other agents, until a recent promotion to director of the agency’s counter-terrorist division. He didn’t like riding a desk, but he appreciated the ability to still function in some capacity.

  Dane always felt a twinge of guilt when he saw Len. Not that he couldn’t have saved him sooner, but that Dane was scarred less. Dane could cover evidence of his injury with long-sleeved shirts. Lukavina had no such option.

  Lukavina and Dane stared at each other for a moment. Then Lukavina said, “All right.” His wife told him not to take too long and went back upstairs.

  Dane and Nina followed Lukavina across the living room to a small office with a desk and chairs, bookcases and no mementos of his CIA work. There were pictures of him in his Marine Corps uniform, and of his family. A silent desktop computer sat on the very clean desk.

  Lukavina sat behind his desk. Nina took a seat in front but Dane remained standing, starting to pace as he spoke. He told his friend everything about Daniel Gallagher, the files on the murder victims, all of it. He finally stopped talking and pacing once he reached the end of the tale.

  The CIA man sat stunned. Finally, he said, “Wow.”

  “We need to compare what we have with what’s in the agency archives. I want to know how they covered up the unauthorized killings. I’d also like to know where Royce and DeRocca are now.”