“She could be piecing things together with Rothchild’s help,” Sanders said.
“You don’t even sound like you believe yourself,” Porter observed.
The truth was, Sanders was grasping at straws. Feigning hope. Because he had no idea what had gotten into Emily LaGrange’s head.
“So we’re just going to wait?” Porter asked.
“She has to head home to Minneapolis soon,” Sanders said.
That was probably true. But so was the fact that time was running out. He had no specific intelligence to point to an imminent move being made on Simon Lynch, but, with Damian Traeger in the picture, the resources available to make something happen at a moment’s notice were virtually limitless.
His resources were not.
“She has to do the right thing,” Sanders told the man from the CIA as the waitress came to freshen their coffees. “At the end of the day, she has no choice.”
Porter nodded and sipped his coffee. The man who headed their group seemed as though he truly believed the words he’d spoken. And maybe Emily LaGrange would, ultimately, do the right thing.
It was what she might do before that moment which scared the shit out of him.
* * *
Emily LaGrange stepped off the plane in Idaho Falls and made the call as she walked through the small terminal.
“May I help you?”
The voice on the other end was feminine and pleasant. Emily suspected it was the minder who’d ridden with her in the van, and who’d gotten more familiar with her than anyone since the boyfriend she’d broken up with before her undercover assignment began.
“You know who this is,” Emily said.
“Agent LaGrange,” the minder said. “How can I help you?”
“I’ll be in front of the market in twenty minutes,” Emily told the woman as she exited the terminal and waved a taxi forward. “Get the choppers warmed up. I’m going to see Simon.”
An expected silence followed, then the almost sugary voice returned. “That is not how—”
“Here’s how I do things,” Emily said as she opened the back door of the taxi but didn’t get in. “You give General Vance a call and tell her that what Jefferson wrote in his memo is nothing compared to what I’m going to shout from the fucking mountaintop about how you people are drugging Simon Lynch into oblivion when you’re not pimping him out like some human supercomputer. Now, does how I do things register with you, lady?”
There was another burst of silence, broken first by hushed mumbles through a covered phone, then the voice was back, not a hint of sweetness about it now.
“I’ll have to relay your statement,” the minder said.
“Miss, are you getting in, or what?” the taxi driver asked impatiently.
“Relay all you want,” Emily said, ignoring the driver. “But if your van isn’t at the market when I expect it, the good general is going to have a lot of explaining to do. I’m not some fucking over the hill retired agent—I’m a goddamn sledgehammer. I’ll break your fucking project into a million pieces unless I see Simon and get assurances from Vance that the shit you people are putting him through stops.”
That was the carrot. The way out for them, and, hopefully, the way in for her. Vance would want an adversary on her turf. She’d want to choose the terrain for any battle to be fought. Maybe the project was vital enough that the general believed she could silence Emily outright. Have her flown from The Ranch to some stateside version of Gitmo. Or worse. In the end it wouldn’t matter. Emily was offering up an illusion to make her way to Simon Lynch. The reception she received was what it would be.
You just have to get there…
“Be at the market,” the minder said after another brief hesitation.
Emily said no more. She ended the call and leaned down to make eye contact with the driver. “Just one second.”
She stepped away from the taxi and walked to a nearby trash bin, wrapping her phone in a piece of tissue before dropping both in the receptacle. There would be no more need for communication, and she wanted nothing electronic attached to her. Kirby Gant hadn’t cautioned her about the phone he’d already sanitized, but she wasn’t going to take any chances that it could be compromised again. Not now.
She looked back to the taxi, its impatient driver eyeing her over the front seat and through the open back door. There was no hesitating now. Dozens of actions she’d taken already would end her life as she knew it if she backed out at this point. At best, she’d end up in a federal prison for decades. At worst…
Emily LaGrange wasn’t scared of dying, though she preferred that not be her end. It would almost certainly be the fate Simon Lynch would meet if she did not act, though.
“Are you coming?”
She nodded at the driver’s half-shouted question and returned to the taxi, sliding in the back seat and closing the door as she gave him her destination.
“It’s almost midnight,” the driver said. “That place closes at, like, ten.”
“Just get me there,” Emily said.
The driver took the hardly veiled hint to shut up and did so. Behind him, Emily LaGrange sat in matching silence and considered what was to come, and what had already transpired. All because of a man whose worth had been pegged to his afflicted brilliance. That wasn’t why Jefferson had given his all for Simon Lynch, though. And it wasn’t why she’d set herself on an equally treacherous path.
He was a human being whose humanity was being stripped from him day by day as those with power over him squeezed his psyche for every last morsel of that afflicted brilliance. Simon Lynch was locked in a shit show dreamed up by others, with no way out. In that reality, Emily LaGrange saw, and felt, a kinship with the man, though she’d found her way out of her own hell—mostly.
Simon Lynch, she thought, deserved at least that much—a chance at something that wasn’t the life in which he was trapped.
* * *
Andrew Wyland grabbed his car keys and headed for the door. His wife’s voice stopped him.
“I thought you were working from home today,” Cecelia Wyland said.
“Just the morning,” Wyland said. “There is some business I need to tend to at the office.”
Cecelia frowned obviously, pouting her disappointment as she crossed from the living room and pressed herself against her husband in the foyer of their flat.
“I was hoping when Charles went down for his nap we might…”
Wyland wanted to smile at his wife’s suggestive forwardness. He tried, but he couldn’t.
‘…little Charles…’
Their child was down the hall, in his playroom, smashing lorries together with glee and vigor. He would, as Cecelia had said, be napping soon. Asleep. In bliss.
“I wish I could,” Wyland said. “I wish we could.”
Cecelia leaned in and kissed him deeply. He brought his hands up and held her, extending the embrace. Until he could do so no more.
She felt her husband’s hands shift to her shoulders as he pushed her away. The frown that rose now was real, not impishly feigned.
“Andrew, what’s wrong?”
He heard her, but he wasn’t looking at her anymore. His gaze had drifted down the hallway, toward the open door through which his son’s childish play sounds drifted. More than anything, he wanted to stay. To put his son down to sleep. To make love to his wife. But to do so would condemn them to a fate he did not want to imagine.
You can’t fuck this up…
How true that was, Wyland knew, even if it was out of his hands now. But he had to be there. Had to be in contact. Had to know the moment that they’d achieved their objective so he could report as much to the man he served.
“Andrew…”
Her voice was more pleading now. She sensed that he was troubled. More so than he’d ever been before.
“If I’m not home for dinner,” Wyland said, looking to her now as he struggled to complete his thought. In the end, he could not. He simply leaned toward hi
s wife and planted a soft kiss on her forehead before leaving her, and their son, to go do what he must.
* * *
Kirby Gant pushed a chair from his kitchen table against the west wall of his living room and stepped onto it, a hammer in one hand. He glanced down, to the unused phone jack on the wall below, and traced an imaginary line upward, fixing on a point at eye level. Then he drew the hammer back and swung it hard against the plaster, bashing a hole through the old surface.
The neighbor on the other side wouldn’t give a damn about the noise. He was sixty, half deaf, and a hundred percent drunk most days. As it was, though, only a few hits were necessary to expose what Kirby needed to access.
Wires.
He could have easily accessed those that serviced his apartment through the jack below. He could also simply pick up the handset of the landline phone in his bedroom that his parole agreement allowed. Doing either, though, would mean that any call he placed would be traced back to him, if not monitored and recorded outright.
That he could not accept.
He tossed the hammer onto the nearby couch and gently pulled the wire bundle through the hole in the wall. Balancing on the semi-sturdy chair, he used a box cutter to carefully slice through the sheathing to expose the color-coded wire pairs within.
“Brown and white,” he said to himself as he fished a pair of alligator clips from his back pocket, lengths of wire already affixed to the connectors. He clamped the clips on the chosen wires and stepped down, unspooling the wire pair until it reached the coffee table.
That was where he’d placed his bedroom phone. Two minutes' worth of snipping and twisting connected the phone to a line belonging to one of his upstairs neighbors, and a quick lift of the handset confirmed that he had a dial tone. Kirby dialed a number from memory and, ten minutes later, a friend of an acquaintance knocked at his door. The old hacker gave the much younger man a pair of hundred-dollar bills, plus a third for gas, then passed him a package with specific instructions on what to do with it.
“A friggin’ church?” the man asked Gant.
Gant held his hand out, palm up. “Give the money back. I can find someone else.”
“No, no, I’ll do it. But a friggin’ church?”
“Behind the church,” Gant reminded the younger man. “Not in—behind.”
“Still a friggin’ church,” the young man said, then turned and set off to carry out the task he’d been paid to do.
Gant closed the door of his apartment and looked around. It was the only home he’d known for years, but that was about to come to an end. Before that moment came, though, he had one more thing to do. One more familiar place to visit a final time.
* * *
The pale green van was waiting when the taxi pulled into the parking lot, driver at the wheel and the minder seated next to him.
“Let me out here,” Emily told the taxi driver.
He stopped fifty feet short of the van and looked back to his passenger. “Is everything okay, miss?”
Emily nodded and handed over two twenties for the twenty-five-dollar fare. “Keep the change.”
She stepped from the taxi and waited for the driver to pull away before crossing the parking lot and approaching the van. The minder stepped from the passenger seat and met her beneath the glow of a flickering lamp high above the asphalt.
“Let’s go,” Emily said.
“Do you have any prohibited items?”
“No,” Emily told the woman, an annoyed wariness plain about her. “But you’re going to check me anyway.”
The minder thumped the side of the van with her fist and the back doors clicked open.
“Yes, I am,” she told Emily as she pulled one of the doors open.
Emily climbed in, a journey she could not have imagined just a week ago about to begin.
Twenty Three
Three teams surrounded The Ranch, one sniper and one spotter in each. They’d come in over land, going to ground two miles from the perimeter which had been identified from satellite images. From that point they’d moved cautiously as darkness set, reporting to their higher authority that no ground or thermal sensors were apparent, inexplicable evidence that those in charge of the target considered remoteness to be their greatest defense.
It would turn out to be their greatest weakness.
The first team reached their position just after dark, setting up and scanning their sector of responsibility.
“Red One, west sentry zeroed,” the spotter reported for his rifleman.
* * *
Nearly five thousand miles and an ocean away, Andrew Wyland sat at the console in the basement control center, headset on and multiple video views from his team showing on the array of displays. The controller was not present. Not for this. She, nor any of those employed by Traeger in sensitive positions, had zero reason to turn on the man who paid them generously. Money, though, was only part of the equation which maintained their silence in the sensitive, and illegal, things which were accomplished. Respect might influence their reticence. But there was a more profound motivator.
Fear…
That was the thing which ensured compliance. Regardless of the person.
‘Happy birthday to little Charles…’
Fear for others trumped fear for self, Wyland thought. At least in his case it did.
He leaned back in the chair and focused on the screens. Multiple displays showed feeds from dozens of cameras, the main overhead satellite video fixed on the large central monitor. On the others, Wyland could switch among images from the sniper teams, the assault unit, and the inbound helicopter carrying the latter. Communications between the various elements crackled through his headset. Every sight, every sound, played out before him, but the only thing he truly wanted to see was Simon Lynch being hauled aboard the extraction helicopter for a fast flight away from his protectors. That would mean success.
It would also mean salvation.
* * *
The homeless woman looked up through the layers of blankets that encased her and pushed the radio mic button just below her neck.
“Watch One,” she whispered, eyes tracking Kirby Gant as he came out of the building that held his secret apartment. “He’s on the move. Moving fast.”
“Copy.”
The acknowledgment came softly through her earpiece, the voice anonymous, as so much of this was. Few knew who others were. Losing one piece of the chess set might weaken them, but it would not put the others in jeopardy. The only person she knew by name was the woman who’d recruited her. The woman she’d served under overseas. Colonel Madeline Harrison was a warrior whom the homeless woman, whose name in everyday life was Bella Jeffs, would follow to the gates of hell.
This wasn’t that, she knew. But it was something.
She’d been on Gant for days now. Spying his every move as he moved between his legitimate dwelling and the covert getaway he’d set up. The FBI agent had been with him on at least one occasion which, when reported to Harrison, had cemented the man as a primary target to be continually surveilled. Now, though, he was…different. She didn’t know quite how to put it, but there was a quickness to his manner as he left the building. A furtiveness to his attentiveness. He scanned his surroundings. For a man who needed to remain unassuming, there was suddenly much to assume about him.
“Watch Two on him.”
The report from her colleague around the corner meant that responsibility had passed from Bella. She could stand down, and, if released from duty, could leave the spot she’d staked out next to the stoop of a three-story walkup across the street, ready to return when needed. As it turned out, she wouldn’t visit that spot again.
“Something’s wrong,” Watch Two reported.
“What?” the handler asked.
“He walked right by his house and flagged down a taxi,” Watch Two reported.
There was a moment of silent contemplation from their handler as some decision was made. “Watch Two, get on him. Watch Te
ams, setup for vehicle handoffs. We can’t lose him.”
Bella stood quickly, shedding the filthy blankets which had shielded her from their target’s prying eyes. She was ready to rush to her car two blocks over to join the roving tail their handler had initiated, but she never got the chance.
“Watch One, get inside and report.”
Bella hesitated only briefly. The instruction she was being given was an active measure. A very direct active measure. Something they’d been cautioned against forever. It had been a long time since most of them had participated in an actual operation, but that edict hadn’t changed.
Until now.
“This is Watch One,” Bella said into the unobtrusive throat microphone covered by her jacket collar. “Confirm going active.”
“Confirmed,” the handler said. “Do it fast.”
Bella Jeffs, who’d maintained her physicality since leaving the Army as a lieutenant at the age of twenty-nine, pushed her thirty-nine-year-old body across the street and up the steps of Gant’s hideout building with agile speed. In just seconds she was inside, and within a minute she was standing at the door they’d previously identified as the entrance to Kirby Gant’s hideaway. She’d been trained in picking locks, and could bash the barrier open if necessary.
It wasn’t. Neither would she need to utilize the intricate metallic tools hidden under the back of her jacket.
Damn…
“Watch One, his door is open,” Bella reported, eyeing the slender space between door and jamb. Scanning it for triggers or trip wires, neither of which seemed likely considering the target who’d occupied the space. Gant was a felon, to be sure. But his true nature was cerebral, and personally non-violent. He’d no more plant a bomb to menace any pursuers than he would slap a stranger on the street. “What do you want me to do?”
There was only the briefest pause as some consideration was given to the next move. “Check it out.”
Bella Jeffs, who’d kicked doors in Afghanistan behind the muzzle of an M4 assault rifle, gently pushed this door open with one gloved hand, the other empty but ready. She carried no weapon. To be found with one by a curious police officer was a risk too great to take, it had been decided. Their target, also, was no threat. Still, instinct and training brought the streak of combat readiness to the surface as she crossed the threshold and entered the apartment.
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