Tom said, “What makes you suspect the first attempt wasn’t the mission?”
Cahill answered. “Hammerton was acting as security for one of our operatives. The four men sent in that first attack didn’t strike him as being anywhere near tier one. As you know, probably better than anyone, Hammerton’s instincts are impeccable.”
Knowing what Tom knew about the Brit—having fought beside him, but more importantly having thought beside him—he saw no reason to doubt the man on anything. “Hammerton was involved in the first attack.”
“Yes.”
“Is he okay?”
“He made it through the first attack fine,” Cahill said. “But he was wounded during the second attack.”
“How bad?”
“Minor injuries.”
Tom glanced again at the bandage on Cahill’s neck, wondered whether that qualified as a minor injury. “Where is Hammerton now?”
The Colonel answered. “He’s back in New York. He’s fine, Tom. I promise.”
Tom thought about that, then looked back at Cahill. “I take it the second attack was tier one.”
Cahill nodded. Tom got the sense that the former recon marine was bothered by something about that event, but before he could ask a follow-up question, the Colonel spoke again.
“The operative Hammerton was assigned to watch is named Dante Ballentine.” He paused to give Tom a moment to place the name.
Tom of course recognized it immediately.
Carrington’s Seabee Reconnaissance Team had served as support to marines stationed at the forward-operating base, Nolay, in Sangin, Afghanistan.
Among the marines operating from that base had been the Force Reconnaissance unit for which Cahill had served as a squad leader.
It was there that heavily armed insurgents had ambushed Cahill’s squad while it was making its way back from a three-day patrol. Tom had led a late-night rescue squad composed of a ragtag mix of Seabees and marines, and had done so against the direct orders of a superior officer.
He had saved all of Cahill’s men while losing none of his own, actions that had, once the issue of a court-martial had been dropped, resulted in his being awarded a Silver Star.
During the fighting retreat, however, with Tom and Cahill providing rear security, a Russian-made grenade had landed in the sand just feet from Tom.
Instantly, Cahill had dropped to the ground and laid his body between the grenade and Tom.
Tom had spent the next two months recovering from the fragments that had come to a rest inside his torso after first moving through Cahill.
Though he barely remembered that night anymore—rarely relived it in his sleep, that is—Tom of course remembered the men Cahill had led.
And the marine who had pulled Cahill and Tom, their bodies torn, to safety.
A marine sergeant named Frank Ballentine.
Tom looked at Cahill. “He’s related to Frank.”
Cahill nodded. “His kid brother.” He paused. “Frank went missing six months ago. He was on assignment when he disappeared.”
The Colonel said, “Dante approached Raveis, saying he wanted to help find his older brother, or at least learn what had happened to him and bring his family some closure. We recruited him, Raveis trained him, and he was put into the field six weeks ago.”
“He approached Raveis, so that means he knew what his brother was involved in. Isn’t that against protocol?”
“It is,” the Colonel conceded. “Frank left a recorded message for his brother to find.”
“Left a message how?”
Cahill answered, “He had an app on his phone. If the device was inactive for more than eight hours, a prerecorded voice memo was automatically forwarded to his brother’s phone.”
“The voice mail directed Dante to an online storage site,” the Colonel said. “Frank had uploaded to it everything he had. His contacts, as well as all the intel he had collected so far. Frank’s partner had received a similar message from him with instructions to go into hiding and wait for his kid brother to make contact.”
“Why send his partner into hiding to wait for his brother?”
“Apparently, just prior to his sudden disappearance, Frank had come to suspect that our organization had been breached at some level. Since Dante came to Raveis directly, as Frank had instructed him to do, the list of people who knew about Dante was limited to myself, Raveis, and Frank’s partner. Obviously, we took Frank’s concerns seriously and kept Dante sequestered from all aspects of our operation while he was trained.”
“What about the people who trained him?”
“Raveis trained him, just the two of them, twenty-four-seven, for six months. The result was an operator that was entirely clean. He was a ghost, even to our own people, but what really made him special was the fact that his motivation was pure. He and Frank were close. He wanted this as much as we did—more than we did, even. That was his edge as far as we were concerned. That would make up for whatever shortcomings he came to us with.”
“What shortcomings?”
“His youth, plus his complete lack of experience prior to training with Raveis.”
Tom considered the advantages inherent in controlling a ghost as it sought unseen to avenge the loss of a loved one.
He understood the temptation that would cause a man as careful and deliberate as the Colonel to take such a gamble.
“You said Frank had a partner. Where is he now?”
“She,” Cahill corrected. “Unfortunately, she was killed in last night’s attack.”
Tom waited a moment, then said, “So who was she?”
“One of our best recruits, it turns out,” the Colonel said. “Her name is Ula Nakash. Carrington brought her to us three years ago. She had served in the Syrian military for several years before spending four more years in the Military Intelligence Directorate. She emigrated to the United States with her daughter after her husband, an officer in Israeli intelligence, was murdered. She was skilled and smart, but more importantly, we shared a common enemy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her husband was assassinated. The man suspected of ordering it and the man we believe carried out that order have been at the top of our most-wanted list for a long time.”
“Who are they?”
“The man we believe ordered the hit is a power broker who calls himself the Benefactor. He is allied with no government, though we know his services have been hired by several, mostly dictatorial regimes in the Middle East and Africa. He has no political affiliation or agenda, is in every sense of the word a true mercenary. The more chaotic the world, the better business is for him, so if he isn’t being paid to destabilize a region by some strongman or multinational corporation, he is quietly taking steps to destabilize it himself, for his own gain. He has arranged the assassination of both political and business leaders, has sold weapons to freedom fighters and terrorist groups, often arming both sides of a single conflict, and is even suspected of having brought down a commercial airliner as a means of taking out just one target. The man suspected of carrying out the hit on Ula’s husband, along with countless others, is a professional killer known only as the Algerian. He has been an assassin-for-hire for twenty-five years, but the intelligence community believes he has been working exclusively for the Benefactor for close to twenty. He’s the ghost of all ghosts. Little is known about his background. He seemingly came out of nowhere. There are no photographs of the man, no fingerprints, nothing. No one can ID him because no one has ever survived one of his hits. And there have been no eyewitnesses, with one exception.”
Tom said, “Frank’s dead partner.”
The Colonel nodded. “Correct. Ula’s death sets us back significantly.”
“You had a composite sketch of him drawn up, no?”
“Yes, but a sketch can’t positively identify him. A sketch can’t be fed into facial recognition software. More to the point, a sketch isn’t enough for me to authorize a kill order. When Carri
ngton found Ula and brought her to our attention, she had already done more than anyone to track the Algerian. And she’d done it on her own, with little money. Bringing her onboard represented the only significant progress we’d had in two decades.”
“Frank and Ula were looking for the Algerian when he disappeared.”
“Yes. They had picked up a trail that indicated the man was in New York.”
“What kind of trail? You said he was a ghost.”
Cahill answered this. “One of the few pieces of information Ula had brought us regarding the Algerian was that he has a fondness for two things: dark-haired prostitutes and a very specific combination of drugs. Frank went undercover as a drug runner. He served as the middleman between the out-of-state source of that product and those who sold it on the street. It took some time, but he gained a number of regular customers.”
The Colonel took over. “We believe one of these dealers was the Algerian’s seller. Surveillance indicates that this seller sold the product to a street-level career criminal who then delivered it to a young woman. This woman, we believe, is the Algerian’s New York City courier. She’s what allows him to remain in the shadows. And she’s our only link to him. We’ve run the photographs of her through facial recognition, but no hits. It’s fitting that a ghost would employ another ghost. Whoever she is, though, she’s good at disappearing. Every tail we put on her, she loses. When Frank disappeared, we immediately feared that he’d been killed. Maybe he did something that blew his own cover. Maybe he slipped up somewhere. But we also had to acknowledge the possibility that someone on the inside had blown his cover, that someone within the ranks of our organization was actively betraying us. That possibility was elevated to certainty by last night’s attack.”
“How?”
“We were hit coming out of a safe house,” Cahill explained. “A safe house even I didn’t know about.”
Tom again sensed something in Cahill’s voice.
A regret, or maybe some kind of self-recrimination.
Tom realized that before him now was not the man he had last seen two years ago.
Not the type A, onetime elite marine who, without a hint of recklessness or bravado, had exuded confidence.
That mix of high intelligence and physical prowess—a prowess bordering on quiet menace—that was the foundation of every good special operator.
And was to some degree missing now.
While hardly crippled by this absence, Cahill nonetheless seemed less self-assured than he had once been.
He had been driven by vengeance the last time Tom had worked with him, hunting down the man who had ordered the death of the woman he loved.
On that man’s order, a bullet had been put into her chest.
Cahill, with Tom beside him, had done the same to that man.
Tom had little doubt that Cahill could live with that action, though it was possible he’d found it difficult to deal with what had led to it.
His failure to protect the woman he loved.
And here now was another dead woman, killed in some firefight in which Cahill had been involved.
Tom had questions, naturally, but he focused on what was at hand: what these men wanted from him, and for how long he would be required to be away from the woman he loved. “How is it you think I can help?”
The Colonel said, “There’s someone we need protected. We’re asking you to take that person in, Tom.”
Tom glanced at the SUV from Raveis’s detail that had remained behind.
Looking back at the Colonel, he said, “You and Raveis have safe houses everywhere. All over the world, from what I understand. And you each have your own private army, exempt from a number of state and federal laws. So why me? Why here?”
“Our list of people we can fully trust has suddenly been cut very short. Out of an abundance of caution, we need to assume that all our safe houses have been compromised. When you left us, I gave orders that no one was to look for you. We understood that Carrington knew where you were, and that he could reach you when the time came, and that was good enough for me. As far as I was concerned, considering what you did for us, and for your country, you more than earned the right to slip quietly away. It turns out, though, that the steps you’ve taken to make sure no one could find you—your friends and enemies alike—is what makes you even more of an asset to us than you already were. It makes you—it makes the life you’ve built here—exactly what we need right now.”
“I can’t put Stella at risk. Not again.”
“You’re not bait this time, Tom. And you’ll have a security detail watching your perimeter. My best-trained and most reliable personnel. The only people who’ll know about your guest—who’ll know who she is and that you’ve taken her in—are the three of us plus Raveis, Carrington, and Hammerton. My organization is highly compartmentalized, designed with a number of fail-safe measures that enable it to become even more so in a state of emergency, which is what we’re in tonight.”
“Who would I be protecting?”
“Frank’s partner had a daughter. Her name is Valena. She lost her mother last night. Unfortunately, that’s a particular type of grief that you know something about.”
“I’m not a counselor,” Tom said.
“We understand your reluctance. Ballentine wants to get back out there. Ula’s death wasn’t entirely in vain. He’s even more motivated now than he was before. Raveis believes we should give him that second chance. He thinks we don’t have any other choice, and I agree. But we need Ballentine focused. His recent failures aren’t lost on us, so Cahill here is returning to the field and will serve as his handler. With our organization compromised, though, you’re our only way of guaranteeing the girl’s safety until we can make other arrangements, which will take time. Apparently, Dante had formed an emotional attachment to Ula, one that extends to her daughter. Without giving away your location, we informed him who would be watching her. It seems Frank had told him what you did back in Afghanistan. And he knows what Frank did for you and Cahill. So the idea of you being the one to take the girl in and watch over her eased his mind considerably.”
“I can’t just spring this on Stella,” Tom said. “I can’t just show up with a refugee for us to take in.”
More to the point, of all the scenarios he had anticipated facing, this wasn’t included among them.
He couldn’t have predicted this one if his life had depended on it.
So he had no three-digit code to text to her that would cover this.
“We understand your situation,” the Colonel said. “But we are pressed for time. Grunn will drive you back in your pickup. Once you’re clear of the blackout zone, you can use your phone to contact Stella.”
Tom looked at Cahill, then back to the Colonel.
It took a moment, but he finally nodded.
As Raveis had said, there was no way Tom could say no.
“How is Stella, by the way?” the Colonel said. “She’s a lovely woman. And she suits you; that much is obvious to everyone. It’s not always easy for men like us to return to the world, so it pleases me to see that you’ve taken the steps you’ve taken. It took time for you to find your place, but that’s the nature of the beast. It took time for me, too. In one way or another, it takes time for all of us.”
After his discharge—after eight years of following orders—Tom had chosen to live as a wanderer, sometimes working, sometimes not; sometimes sleeping in cheap motels, sometimes living out of his pickup.
Alone every night for five years, he’d read to pass the time.
He’d met Stella by chance when he stopped for an early lunch in an old railcar diner in a small town he had intended on just passing through in northeastern Connecticut.
His fondness for all things historic had required that he do that.
They had barely said more than a few words to each other when Tom had decided that he would end his wandering there, in that town.
But because of him—because he loved her—
Stella had faced death once already.
Faced men who’d been sent to harm her and kill her.
Men who hurt and murdered for no other reason than to earn their money, though Tom knew it was also likely these men sought to fill darker needs.
And now here was Tom, about to report to Stella that while he wasn’t returning to the world in which men such as those dwelled, he was skirting the edge of it.
His only hope was to take the Colonel at his word when the man had said Tom’s service would last only for as long as it would take them to make other arrangements.
“Stella’s fine,” Tom answered. He felt no compulsion to say more than that. “But if you don’t mind, I’d prefer Cahill drive me back home.”
The Colonel smiled, looked at Cahill, then back at Tom, and nodded. “Of course. You two can catch up. Grunn and her partner will follow you. They’ll be in charge of your security detail. But they work for you, Tom. You make all the decisions. It’s their job to make whatever you decide work. If you want them to remain out of sight—if you want to try to keep their presence from Stella—that’s their burden, not yours.”
Tom didn’t consider for a second keeping Stella in the dark, even though a part of him wished he could, for his sake as well as hers.
“Any further communication from me will come to you through them,” the Colonel said. “And should you need to reach me, for any reason, any time of the day or night, they will put you in touch with me right away. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Tom glanced at Grunn standing just beyond earshot. The idea of allowing strangers into the secret life he had built—even strangers assigned by the Colonel—made him uneasy.
It was an emotion that must have showed on his face, because the Colonel was quick to add, “They’re among the best we have, Tom. Fully vetted, impeccable credentials. You can trust them with your life, because I trust them with mine.”
Tom looked at the Colonel and nodded. “Very good, sir.”
“Regretfully, here’s where you and I say goodbye. For now, at least.” The Colonel extended his hand again, and Tom took it.
The Rogue Agent (The Agent Series) Page 12