by Theo Cage
“He has to take bio breaks. But he knows we are on his trail and knows that leaving his cab potentially exposes him to an extraction team. He’s a pro and it will take some creativity to get him out of his man-cave on wheels. I’ve got some time to think about it. I’ll call you if I get a brainstorm.”
CHAPTER 13
CIA, Mountain View Branch, California
GEORGE KREEGAR WAS THE MOST UNATTACTIVE MAN that Trent Razer had ever met.
He wasn’t someone you might pity for a misshapen head or a slack jaw. He was just a mean, festering, anxious cancer of a man trying to make up for what he lacked in good looks by giving everyone within spittle range a stomach ulcer. The Razers unfortunately, brought him to the nadir of his ugliness – they were of chiseled jaw, Greek god-like cheekbones and both well over six feet tall. Trent towered over his desk even sitting down. Kreegar could barely maintain his calm.
“What are you doing here? You screwed up in the field and our target is now MIA. Every minute you sit here he grows the search zone by another hundred square miles? Shit – you have completely screwed this one up.”
“You had a simple pick-up to do. An old-timer. We even supplied back up. We are not paying for this.” Kreegar had gnarled hands, with cuticles chewed raw, and he used them to chop the air as he spoke. The poster child for high blood pressure.
And the head of a highly secretive government department most politicians had never heard of.
Trent glared back at his client. “You supplied a baby sitter and the baby sitter broke protocol. That’s why Rice is AWOL. Was your guy deaf or just fucking stupid?” Trent clenched his fists. “And you already know all of this, no doubt in 3D and Dolby surround sound. You don’t think we knew we were being monitored?”
Trent didn’t wait for an answer. “Just tell us we’re off this project. I’ve got lots of other offers right now and they don’t involve hiking into the Rockies for breakfast.”
Kreegar coughed. He was one of the last remaining smokers in the building and like most, perpetually quitting. Trent knew he preferred D.C. to Mountain View, where he had his own balcony. But he flew here so he could be closer to the action and enjoy micromanaging his contractors. “You’re going to finish this pickup or you and your brother will never work for the U.S. government again. Unless it involves breaking rocks or printing license plates under maximum security.”
Trent grimaced. It was always this way. Always. He tapped his fingers on Kreegar’s stainless steel desktop. The guy was whacked, but he had good taste. “We need more intel. I need to see his file.”
“Fuck you! We don’t hand out that stuff to anyone, especially not the Bobbsey twins.”
Trent ignored the usual taunt. “You’ve given us nothing, Kreegar. SOP is at least a cleared version of the record. How do I track a guy when you won’t even give us background? I’m getting the feeling he’s a lot ‘deeper’ than you told us and a lot ‘blacker’.”
“Spare me the feelings chat, Trent. I don’t do feelings.” He smiled, his fingers steepled. If Brent were here he would have wanted to pull his pants down and spank him like a six year old. Only this six year old had friends in high places. How else could you account for his career rise in the last ten years? “Track the guy down. Bring him in. One piece. No holes. That’s it.”
“Do you really want Rice? Or do you just want it to look that way?”
Kreegar closed his eyes. Here comes the explosion. Two in one day. But nothing came out of his mouth. He puffed his cheeks out. “Okay. Rice is a very dangerous man. I told you that. I also told you he has all the training the government can provide. CIA, DIA, FBI, Navy Seals. He needs to be brought in. We had a fix on this guy, finally, after many years of hard work. And now he’s out there somewhere. Heads will roll if we lose him again. You need to staff up, Trent. This is the most important job you will ever do for us. There is no option to fail.”
“So give us the file.”
Kreegar’s face twisted uncomfortably. He covered his face. Maybe he was just getting too old for this shit. “I’ll set up a meeting with Phillips, immediately following this. She will give you exactly thirty minutes, and not a second more, with the dossier. In our briefing room. Nothing leaves. You understand?” He got the nod he was looking for. “Then you move. Today. Bring me Rice or just don’t fucking come back here.”
Trent stood. He might have saluted at this point and he might have given Kreegar the finger. Instead he just grunted and left the room, thankful that the meeting was over. When he was in the hallway, Trent phoned his brother and filled him in.
“What’s up his ass?” Brent asked.
Trent sighed. “My guess? The President. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
CHAPTER 14
Spokane, Washington
FIVE MINUTES EAST OF SPOKANE on Highway 90 was a bar and grill famous for mountains of fluffy mashed potatoes and gravy like nothing else on earth. Rice knew this because Addie told him. She had quickly become his portal on local lore and legend. And she was also bringing him up to speed on the twenty-first century.
Rice pulled his rig into a parking lot clearly designed for truckers, and killed the engine. Addie had grown comfortable enough with him to actually nod off for half an hour and she woke looking somewhat surprised at the fact.
Rice had done a lot of thinking in the past thirty minutes. His long-term plan had always been to head north into Canada with its millions of acres of wilderness he could disappear into. He had seen no evidence of the military on the drive so far and the further he was away from Mt. Rainier, the better his chances of losing his trackers permanently.
Rice felt sorry about one thing. He doubted that Addie would be able to follow him north. He planned to broach the subject carefully; make it part of the job offer. He didn’t even know if she had a passport. She was unusual in that she didn’t carry a purse. All of her belongings were tucked into the deep pockets of her overcoat.
He questioned his motives too. She was very attractive. She was also about twenty years younger than him. He kept telling himself he was drawn to her intelligence and her wry sense of humor. She seemed like an old soul in a new body. She had obviously gone through something in her life that matured her beyond her years. She was also a valuable guide into the twenty-first century; witness to all of the things he had missed while hiding out in the mountains.
The greatest surprise for Rice was how readily she had accepted his offer of a ride. The Kenworth was something he had bought several years before for cash from a driver who had run into some financial difficulties. He was fine with no invoice and also rented Rice a garage massive enough to store the truck close to the highway, all under an assumed name. Why an eighteen-wheeler? It makes a pretty interesting getaway vehicle. Rice’s experience is that highway cops don’t even see them; they see so many on a daily basis. And you can pull it over to the side of the road and get a few hours’ sleep without checking into a motel. Half the wanted people on the run in the United States get made by a guy working behind the desk of a cheap motel for minimum wage. And they have better memories than cops.
Addie had her hand out. She knew why they had stopped.
“I’ll have a burger, everything on it, fries and a vanilla shake.” Rice handed her a twenty. “Get whatever you want. I’ll be in the back.” Addie shrugged her shoulders and got out. She slammed the door a bit harder than necessary.
The Kenworth had a premium sleeper unit behind the cab. All Rice had to do was angle around the center console and step into the back. Besides a full-size bed, the sleeper boasted a workspace, a flat panel display, a 3G tablet, microwave and a fridge. He booted up the tablet and checked out his Google mail account.
Rice was well aware that the trick with Internet access was the burden it came with; Homeland Security had spent billions over the past few years on the latest in monitoring technology. Every single email and cell phone call heading in or out of the country was being vetted now by automated snooping sof
tware looking for words and phrases that might lead them to a terrorist cell. Unfortunately, once you had the software to track Jihadists, why not use the same technology to look for every other kind of criminal activity. Or track Rice and his military buddies. So he had to be very careful about the messages he sent.
As soon as Rice got down off the mountain and hit the highway, he sent a message to Grace, a Navy Seal he was stationed with in Iran, long before he became a hermit. They’d stayed in touch. She promised to keep him informed of Kreegar’s movements over the next few days.
Wilson used to let Rice use his cell phone for updates. But now that Wilson was no longer available, Rice was hoping he could enlist Addie. That would mean exposing her to his present fucked-up situation. He hadn’t decided yet if that was the right thing to do.
Rice opened the most recent message. The first line made his heart rate spike. ID Compromised. There was a link to a news site. The counterfeiter, or cobbler who had created his new IDs, probably the best in the business, had been arrested in Chicago by the FBI a week earlier. They got lucky while breaking up a major credit card scam. He was a master “fake artist”, in the business for over thirty years. They found one of Rice’s operational names on a hard drive so they turned him over to Kreegar’s people. After several hours of “polite conversation” he turned over the fake names he remembered using for Rice.
The ex-agent pushed his hair back out of his eyes with his hands and rubbed his forehead. Now he knew how Kreegar had tracked him down. He had given one of his credit cards to Wilson to buy the cell scanner online. Which also explained why his delivery kid went missing in action. Probably buried somewhere in the Ghost Hills.
Rice laid back on the bed and squeezed his eyes shut. Wilson was the closest thing to family he had in years. He hoped they weren’t too rough on him and that he somehow managed to get away. But that was just wishful thinking.
Now what? Crossing the Canadian border was no longer an option for him. His new ID would be on the border guard’s terrorist list. Kreegar would make certain of that.
Being compromised also meant Rice was broke. He had about two thousand in cash hidden in the back of the truck, but that was all. His US accounts, held under several bogus names, would all be frozen by now. Or they could just be waiting for him to blunder into a bank or try an ATM.
Now he had enough cash to last him a few weeks. No credit cards. And ID that would blow up in his face the first time he tried to use it.
CHAPTER 15
CIA Mountain View branch, California
PHILLIPS RAN THE ARCHIVE DEPARTMENT for Special Ops in California. She sat Trent down at a desk in an interview room in the basement and left him with a dark-blue bound book. About one hundred pages. The title on the binder looked like a random bunch of numbers and letters, no names, no other ID.
Trent opened the first page. A doctored black and white photo of Rice fell out. The picture was taken in a jungle village. Rice wore fatigues and carried a Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle, 7.62 caliber. His full name: Edward Burroughs Rice
“Parents were Tarzan fans?” he murmured to himself.
Trent went through the book for almost forty minutes. Then Phillips came back to retrieve it.
“I need another hour,” said Trent.
“Maybe you do, but you need authorization from Kreegar.” She took and held the bound book close to her chest as if she were prepared to defend her property.
Trent felt the urge to comment on her clothes. She looked very professional today and she was a handsome woman, but he had known her for years and she had not once come close to forming a smile with those full, but completely unadorned lips. So he passed. He was also running out of time.
“What do you know about Rice that’s not in the book?” he asked.
Phillips stared down at him, serious as ever. But he could see her mind shift for a few seconds, accessing a memory perhaps. Digging down.
“He was one of the best,” she offered.
“What makes you think that?”
Phillips pushed a strand of hair over one ear. “The people who worked with him said that. Agents who depended on him with their lives. That’s the highest praise.”
“Maybe ten years ago,” answered Trent.
Phillips just raised an eyebrow. She didn’t look convinced by his argument. “Forty seven kills,” she said. Trent squinted. That wasn’t in the file. And why not? “Most successful kills of any operative in US history. There should be a statue of him on the White House lawn.”
In the car, Trent added up what he had learned.
Rice had started with the CIA. He had a Finance degree that he had added to a Criminology Diploma. The CIA liked those smart, degreed types with tons of ambition. Especially if they looked the part.
Rice had moved up quickly, took the toughest cases and dispatched each one cleanly and professionally. No screw-ups and he didn’t leave a trail of bodies and political landmines behind him. So they kept upping the ante on his professional training. Navy Seals. CIA. DIA. FBI. SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape). And the more he trained the more dangerous he became to them.
He was a highly skilled marksman and was trained in every killing method and martial art known.
His only brother lived in Los Angeles. He owned a car dealership on Sunset Boulevard. How poetic was that? They were estranged according to the notes. No contact in the past twenty years. No reason given.
Rice’s parents died in the late nineties. Carbon monoxide poisoning when a wood stove backed up in the middle of a cold winter night in a cabin they owned in Vermont. The property has been under surveillance ever since Rice disappeared, but he was obviously too smart to go back there.
There were professional acquaintances in the government and various police branches, but none who had any contact with him for the last decade. And they had all been monitored 24/7. Still, to this day. The expense was mind-boggling. Who was paying the bills?
Rice’s wife, Anika nee McCullough, was killed shortly after he went AWOL by a Chechen assassin who was hired to eliminate Rice. That wasn’t something that Trent read in the file; this was a well-known rumor that was as close to the truth as you could find in the security community.
The file didn’t discuss what caused the break and pushed Rice to run, but there were rumors about that as well.
The real question was – would he hide or would he lash out? Every hour the circle grew wider. The search radius was now the size of the state of Texas.
CHAPTER 16
Surrey, British Columbia
YURIK “SLUGGER” ZELEOS sat in his tricked out black Escalade, the sixteen thousand dollar sound system cranked up to twelve, the rain on the windshield vibrating to the beat of Swollen Members. This was his way of chilling, relaxing, strategizing. Well, one of the ways. The other involved an aluminum baseball bat that was his stock in trade when it came to administering justice or bringing certain important shit to the attention of the competition.
Yurik had made some good use of the Louisville slugger over the weekend. He smiled at the memory. Man, guns were so loud, so inarticulate. All you could do with them is make holes in people. The bat, on the other hand, was like a paintbrush. In the right hands, you could make art with a good slugger. And that’s what he had done.
Slugger had convinced a rival grower that his territory in Surrey, British Columbia, was not a place to do business. Not this kind of business, anyway. And he hadn’t killed the Asian gang leader in the process. There was no need. Just broke his nose in several places, rearranged his facial skeleton, shattered both collarbones, re-worked his knee and ankle joints. The gangbanger would now be a walking testimony to the new reality of the weed trade in Southern British Columbia. Well, maybe not walking anytime soon, but the word would get out. No freakin question about that.
Slugger was a full-patch member of Satan’s Raiders and managed all of their marijuana grow ops in Surrey, B.C. An all-consuming job.
<
br /> First, there were over a hundred shabby residences spread out over sixty square miles of the older part of the city. He had to buy equipment, sign leases. There were teams to train and keep in line. Slugger had a head for numbers and that’s why he was top dog. He counted every plant in every room and kept tabs. Plants went missing then so did someone responsible for those missing plants. There was a lot of remote land surrounding Surrey and a lot of deep unmarked graves.
Slugger also had another problem. Distribution. He had dozens of wholesalers, about three quarters of them in Washington State and they were constantly being wooed by a rival gang across the border, the Rocky Banditos.
Slugger took a pinch of chewing tobacco from the bag sitting on the center console and bit down on it, feeling it burn his mouth. One of his dealers had not shown up today, a guy by the name of Fast who worked the tourism areas around Paradise just east of Mount Rainier. He was a complete tool in Sluggers opinion, but he paid him more per gram than any other dealer, which he then sold in fairly large numbers to rich college kids hanging out around the resorts and bars in the area. If that pudgy asshole had gone over to the Banditos, it would give him great pleasure to use him as an example and hang his limp beaten carcass from the closest Mobil gas station sign.
He flipped through the satellite radio dial looking for another rap tune. Then settled on some heavy metal. He had called Frank three times in the past hour. No answer. Frank was avoiding him. No way could Frank be that stupid. Something was up.
CHAPTER 17
Spokane, Washington
JUST AS RICE JUMPED BACK in the driver’s seat, Addie arrived with their lunch. She crawled up into the cab and the aroma of grilled burger and onions hit him like a pile driver. It just about brought tears to his eyes. Let’s hear it for the simple joys in life.