by David Perry
St. George, the patron saint of England, and courage.
Michael recited from memory the inscription on the back.
Always do the right thing … no matter how hard it seems.
Michael’s crying intensified. He’d not shown much courage around his father, a giant in Michael’s world. A godlike figure. Tomorrow, he would summon his courage and get the truth. Once and for all.
He wiped the tears with the sleeve of his t-shirt, turned out the light, and tried to sleep.
Chapter 11
“Je me vengerai!” Delilah Hussein demanded. I will have my revenge!
Her enormous guest shifted his bulky frame in the freshly painted Adirondack chair situated on the covered patio. The warm breeze dissipated the blue smoke wafting from his lips. Through a slit in the silk mask that covered his face, a curved pipe rested between his lips.
“Why the mask, Hammon?”
“Precaution. I’m sure your cameras are recording this meeting.”
“Thank you for meeting me in person,” she said. “It was hard to convince you to come.”
“Your communication intrigued me,” Hammon replied. “You mentioned that there is something in it for me? A way out?”
Hussein nodded. “If we can come to an agreement.”
“There is much going on in Washington. It’s much too soon,” he replied. The small droplet of sweat running down his temple belied his anxiety. It stopped, absorbed by the top edge of the large scarf covering his nose and mouth.
“I need something from you,” she said.
“I met you face to face as a courtesy,” the three-hundred-pound man said. “It has only been two years since the attacks. My government is still on high alert. They are actively searching for you and my moles. My men have gone underground and will stay that way until I decide it is safe.”
“Searching for me?” Hussein asked, picking up on the spy’s comment.
It was amazing he could function at all, she thought. How a man possessing Hammon’s girth could perform the subtle manipulations of a spy escaped her. But, she concluded, this man sat behind a desk, covertly directing others. Such duties required an adept, sharp mind but little physical dexterity or energy.
Hammon nodded with one emphatic head bob. “They have knowledge that you did not die on the yacht in Newport News. They have begun a massive manhunt. It is only a matter of time before they come across the recordings made by Jason Rodgers and the dead private investigator, Waterhouse.”
Hussein felt her pulse quicken. “How did they come by this knowledge?”
“I do not know that. My access to that intelligence is limited.”
“The Americans may find the recordings, but they are inconsequential now. The government will never let them become public. It will be too embarrassing.”
“Perhaps,” Hammon replied, clicking his pipe stem against his teeth.
“What else do you know?”
“They also know that you have a plan underway. You should withdraw to fight another day. You risk capture and failure.”
She shook her head. “We have an agenda and a timeline. The attacks on the presidents were part of a larger, coordinated effort to bring America to its knees. It will happen. We have worked too long and too hard to turn back now.”
“Our participation,” Hammon continued, “only extended to the assassination attempt. We were unaware of a larger plot. That is of no concern to us. We are simply being prudent, Lily,” he continued, using Hussein’s alias. “You have a beautiful estate here on this island. It was a stroke of genius to build a compound on a resort island. It’s the last place they will look.”
“This is not my estate, you idiot. Do you think I would bring you to my headquarters? This is a secondary property. My headquarters are far from here.”
Hussein watched the eyes of the spy grow wide for an instant. Then they reacquired their steely glare.
“This surprises you? We have many resources.”
Hammon shrugged, trying to feign indifference. But Hussein could see his frustration. The man had thought he still had her trust and could waltz into her headquarters. He had struck a deal with his government to save his own ass. Of that Hussein was certain. It’s the only reason he would agree to such a meeting.
“Has our failure to kill the father and the son caused you to become meek and timid, Hammon?”
Hussein smiled. Her impression of him had changed in the first thirty seconds of their meeting. He was no longer the all-powerful, never-to-be-questioned font of wealth from which she had once drawn support. He was transformed in her mind to a morbidly obese means to an end. Delilah Hussein did not know this man’s real name. She did not care. It did not matter. She knew him as Hammon, the leader of a secret faction embedded deep within the American Central Intelligence Agency. He was a spy. She no longer needed his money. She needed something else.
“Hammon, what happened to the $24 million that was supposed to be transferred into the accounts after the assassinations?”
Hussein saw the skin around the fat man’s eyes crinkle as he smiled beneath the scarf. “That money was dissolved back into secret accounts automatically after the assassinations failed. You are not asking me to pay you for a failed operation, are you?”
Hussein returned the smile and shook her head. “Non, mon ami. I would never do that. But I do want something else. A favor, actually.”
Hussein had already aligned The Simoon with the growing, wealthy terrorist organization known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or ISIS, an organization spawned by the power vacuum in those two countries. Hussein had secured additional funds from The Watcher, the disgruntled, former colleague of Hammon and his terrorist organization, al-Nusra.
The round man shifted again in the wooden Adirondack chair. Its planks creaked in protest. Hussein sighed and leaned back, looking like a beached whale covered in a large floral print shirt. He placed the Sherlock Holmes-style pipe through the slit in the mask, revealing plump lips. He relit the blackened tobacco in its bowl.
Winter in America was winding down. Soon the tourists would vacate until the Northern Hemisphere autumn reappeared. Hussein liked it when the island became less populated. She had more freedom to move around. During the tourist season, she was a recluse.
“A favor?” Hammon replied with air of indignation.
Hussein could almost read his thoughts. This bitch has the audacity to ask for favors!
“I do not believe you are owed any favors, Madame! You have forgotten, Miss Lily, without my organization’s help, your operation would never have gotten off the ground. Do not blame us for the failings and incompetence of your operatives. If you are to proceed with further endeavors, you will do it without our assistance or funding.”
“Your Steven Cooper—or whatever his name is—was a key cog in that failure,” Hussein retorted. “He folded like a cheap lawn chair.”
“There were plenty of mistakes and failures to go around.”
“I see,” she continued, “that you will not be swayed by my words.” Hammon nodded. “That is correct. I have no money or favors for you.”
“I feared as much,” Hussein stated flatly. “You can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?”
“It never hurts to ask.” The crinkle around the man’s eye above the scarf told her he was smiling.
“So this meeting is not a complete waste, Hammon, you will give me something else. Something that is actually of much greater value than money. It is in fact the real reason I wanted to meet you.”
“And what is that?” His voice filled with concern.
“A piece of information.”
Hammon’s forehead wrinkled. “I don’t understand.”
“Non, this information I wanted you to deliver personally.”
“I have no information for you.”
“Mais oui, you do.”
Hammon turned his palms toward the black night sky.
“I want to know where my son is being
held.”
Hammon glared for a long moment. “I do not have such information.”
Hussein’s lips flattened into a thin line. She removed a handgun from beneath her silk gown and leveled it at her guest.
“I know you do.”
“I cannot give you something I do not have.”
“Then we will have to use other means to extract it.”
Chrissie felt as if she’d been teleported back in time. Her body shook. All the demons she’d fought and managed to suppress for more than a year lurched at her. Simply because she’d thought she seen a shadow move in the back yard.
I thought all that was in the past?
She truly understood how war-ravaged veterans felt. She watched the shadows for two more minutes. Nothing.
She refused to let the ghosts in.
The thought of removing her father’s Colt from its lock box in the bottom draw of the night stand flashed through her mind. She had slept with it under her pillow, loaded, for nearly six months after the presidential ordeal.
No! she told herself. I’m not going to be held captive by those memories. I have enough to deal with.
Chrissie climbed back into bed. Her thoughts shifted back to Jason. Her eyes found the familiar crack in the plaster of the ceiling and focused on it, her mind reliving the emotions and hurdles of the past two years.
Even if there were no other woman, should she marry Jason? Hell, should she stay with him?
In the last months, two critical issues had bubbled to the surface.
One was Michael, and the way he acted toward her. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she sensed Michael’s inability to accept her had something to do with the assassination attempts or something that had happened because of it.
The second was the way Jason himself acted.
In the beginning, after things had calmed down, they grew into a routine, keeping The Colonial running and getting to know each other again. In the days and weeks that followed, she saw the warm, sensitive man she’d fallen in love with all those years ago. He worked hard and was very attentive toward her. She knew that he, too, was in love.
As days turned into weeks and then months, their thoughts turned to building a life together. Confident that they would make it work this time, they discussed combining their households and their finances, where they would live, and even children. Chrissie told him that she wanted to get to know his son, Michael.
“He will always be the priority in your life,” she had told him one night. He comes first. And I want to build a new family around the three of us.”
Jason seemed motivated and enthusiastic about all of it. And they started to take steps to make it all happen. Jason introduced Chrissie to Michael at dinner one night at his house in York County.
Jason thought it would be best to have the meeting take place in surroundings the boy was familiar with. Dinner was simple: hamburgers on the grill, corn on the cob, macaroni salad, and watermelon wedges.
Jason and Chrissie did most of the talking. Jason tried to draw Michael out, prompting him with questions and observations. Michael seemed shy and withdrawn, responding with one-word answers.
Chrissie chalked it up to Michael’s understandable discomfort with Jason’s new girlfriend. But the distance between her and Michael never seemed to close. He was standoffish and avoided her whenever possible. It frustrated Jason. Chrissie told Jason to leave it alone. But Chrissie’s presence in Jason’s life seemed to be driving a wedge between Jason and his son.
Then there was the subtle evidence she’d found that Jason was doing things behind her back. He’d say he was going out for a while and disappear for four and five hour stretches. The phone would ring and Jason would go into another room and close the door to take it.
After four weeks of ignoring it and trying to convince herself that it was nothing, she’d finally asked, “What’s going on?”
“Nothing you need to worry about,” was his reply.
She pressed him on it. “Just mind your own business, please,” Jason demanded. Chrissie backed down and did not bring it up again. The matter, however, festered.
After enough gut-wrenching, she’d decided to follow him. He’d stopped at the strip joint. He sat outside in the Mustang waiting for almost fifteen minutes. Chrissie could not bear to see Jason with another woman. She left before her heart could be broken.
Chapter 12
Sweat poured from Hammon’s forehead. It was early in the morning. He had not slept for almost twenty-four hours.
“You … you think that threatening to kill me is the answer? If I’m dead I can’t give you any information. And I took precautions.”
“Such as?”
“I have a thick file and electronic data about the assassination attempts locked away in a safe deposit box on the East Coast. It details everything about your operation. If I do not return to America in the next twenty-four hours, I have left instructions for that box to be opened and delivered to the Secret Service and the FBI.”
“That’s ancient history. It will not give them my location. They already have my son and Cooper in custody. I’m sure your CIA has extracted information from them using very persuasive and horrific techniques. You cannot provide them with much more than they already have.”
“Perhaps. But I can give them you.”
Hussein let the direction of the gun’s barrel slip a few millimeters toward the patio bricks. “No, you were brought here by a very circuitous route. Five different planes and two boats. You were strip searched. Your electronic devices were confiscated long ago. I told you this is not my base of operations. There is no way …”
Hammon was desperate now, clutching at anything to gain an advantage. He was trying to stay alive. If he had information she needed, she would not kill him. The CIA, his own service, was getting close. They would discover enough evidence to implicate him in high treason.
He had resisted Hussein’s queries to meet face to face. But that was when America did not know she was alive. Once they’d discovered she was not dead, Hammon saw a way to mitigate his precarious situation. If he could bring them to Hussein, he might just be able to negotiate himself a lesser punishment. Hammon was acting on his own. If he could go to the intelligence community with information about where Hussein was, along with her operation, he could negotiate a deal—perhaps the chance to not die in prison.
But she had thrown him a curveball. She led him to another location, away from her base of operations. Hammon had hoped that she would still trust him enough to allow him a glimpse into her web. But he knew when he arrived he had been duped. There was nothing in this small resort villa that revealed any communications equipment, weapons, or a human apparatus of any kind.
She had played him. Now, it was his turn to play his hand, as weak as it was. He was about to play the bluff of his life.
He could see the frustration etched on the woman’s face as he smiled under the scarf. “You are too trusting, Delilah. I’ll show you,” he said. “Do you have a knife?”
Hussein shot him a quizzical look.
“You can keep the gun on me. I need a knife. A sharp knife.”
“I’m going to ask you questions. Just move your head to answer. Do you understand?”
Hutton nodded. Jason was grasping Thomas Pettigrew’s Colt firmly in his right hand, the distal half of the barrel buried in the former guard’s mouth. The effects of the alcohol had evaporated, replaced by abject fear played out in Hutton’s wide, terror-filled eyes. By the angle of the weapon and the pressure Jason exerted, Clyde Hutton must have thought it would be shoved down his throat.
Jason escorted the smaller man to the Mustang, forced him on his back onto the front seat by way of the passenger door. He led Hutton out just prior to closing time. Jason, perched atop the man, waited until the crowd filed out of Headlights. The parking lot had emptied minutes ago. With his left hand planted on Hutton’s chest, supporting his body and pinning him to the front of the Mustang’s
bench seat, Jason began his interrogation.
He had taken a slew of photos of this scumbag from a distance. Jason now studied him up close for the first time. His ferret-like face, thin with a long nose, was reddened by drink. The weak chin disappeared into his neckline. The sad, gray eyes pleaded from under a shroud of pockmarked skin.
“Good,” Jason said smiling. “If you try anything, your brains will be splattered all over my car. And if I think you’re lying, same result. Got it?”
Hutton blinked slowly, and nodded again.
“How long were you a guard there?”
Hutton tried to speak, but the gun barrel stopped him. Jason removed it from his mouth but kept it trained on Hutton’s nose.
“CO,” Hutton answered.
“What?”
“We are corrections officers, not guards.”
Jason lifted the hand from Hutton’s chest and rammed his fist into the nose with a sickening crack.
“Don’t play games with me, Clyde! I’m not in a good frame of mind.”
A rivulet of blood dripped from both nostrils.
“Let’s try this again. Two years ago, you allowed someone to enter my cell at the Regional Jail in Williamsburg. He was sent there to kill me. The man with all the tattoos. Is that correct?”
Hutton nodded.
“How much?” Jason pushed the barrel between his lips. It clicked against teeth.
“How … mush … wha?” Hutton replied, his words muffled.
Jason removed the gun once more from Hutton’s mouth, raised it, and smashed it into Hutton’s cheek. The skin ruptured. A crimson trail snaked past Hutton’s ear, dripping onto the vinyl.
“How much were you paid?”
“If I could go back and do it over, I’d never have agreed. I lost my job and was lucky I didn’t go to prison. They never knew that I was paid off. I told them I made a mistake putting him in there with you. And they bought it. I lost my house and my wife left me. I got nothing left.”
“I know, Clyde, you weasel. I’ve been watching you for a long time. I almost went to prison, too, for murder. I’ve killed a few men. I don’t have a problem with adding you to the list. How much were you paid?”