“I pulled my last mag from my jacket pocket and reloaded, just in case, then hurried to Ula. She was bleeding bad, and in a lot of pain, but she looked at me, locked eyes with me, then raised her head up off the pavement and said, ‘The Algerian.’ She repeated it several times, and I realized that from her position she’d been able to see him, too. Which meant I had seen him, Tom. I had seen the face of the Algerian.”
Tom understood the significance of what Cahill had just told him.
“The Colonel knows that she identified the Algerian last night,” Tom said. “But you left out that you had seen him, too. The Colonel doesn’t know about that.”
“Correct.”
“Why keep him in the dark about it?”
“Because if he knew I was the only one left who could ID the Algerian, he’d keep me out of the field, probably even lock me away someplace safe, and if I let that happen, if I went and hid somewhere, crawled into a hole and hoped for all this to work out somehow, then I’d never be any good to anyone again. I tried limiting my role—tried doing the least I could to help, literally—but I just found myself right back where I didn’t want to be. You can’t hide, not from who you are, not from what you’re meant to be. I have no choice now, Tom. If I don’t do this, then my fears will own me. Marines aren’t owned by their fears. And if I’m not a marine, then I don’t what I am. I don’t want to know.”
Cahill started the truck, shifted into gear, and steered back onto the road.
Tom asked what exactly he was going to do.
“We have a rogue agent in our operation. That’s the only explanation for the Algerian waiting for us at a safe house with a hit team. A hit team that was instructed to spare someone inside that van. And that’s the only explanation for what happened to Frank. He’s not the kind to blow his own cover. He’s not the kind to make a mistake. We find our rogue agent, we find the Algerian. We find the Algerian, and he leads us to the Benefactor. That’s the mission here. That has been the Colonel’s mission for a long time. All the intel Frank’s kid brother brought us indicates that Frank was getting close to uncovering the Algerian. I’m going to do whatever it takes to get us the rest of the way. For him.”
“You’re sure you should go back undercover? I mean, after last night.”
“I appreciate the concern, but I want to do this. I have to do this.”
“Maybe I should go with you.”
Cahill shook his head. “No. You keep an eye on the girl. My guess is she’s the one they wanted alive.”
“Why, though?”
“I don’t know. There’s the chance you’ll find that out for us. She might open up to you over the next few days. I won’t lie to you, Tom, that’s what we’re hoping for. You’ve been through what she’s now going through. You’ll know better than any of us what to say to her to put her at ease and get her talking.”
Tom said nothing.
“I know, it sucks, right?” Cahill said. “That we’re asking you to do this. Manipulate a girl who just watched her mother die. But we’re at war, Tom. And it’s a war we’re losing.”
Tom remained silent.
He’d been asked to do worse things than show kindness to an orphan.
At least that’s what he was telling himself he was being asked to do.
“I’ll help any way I can,” he said finally. “You know that.”
Cahill nodded toward the smartphone in Tom’s hand. “We’ll be clear of the blackout in a few minutes. You can power up then and call Stella, let her know what’s coming her way.”
The problem Tom had postponed was now facing him again. But while the Colonel and Cahill had addressed many of his questions, one had not been answered.
And it was an important one.
“The Colonel said Ballentine’s brother got emotionally involved with his partner and her kid. And the Colonel seemed to almost, I don’t know, coddle him. Have you considered you might be going into the field with someone who isn’t up to the job?”
Cahill nodded. “I have, yes. But Raveis trained him. Personally, one on one, in secret. According to him, the kid passed everything with flying colors.” Cahill paused. “Of course, training is one thing, and actual fieldwork is something else. No one can know how they’ll react under fire until they actually are under fire. Some men remember their training, others freeze. But what the kid did for us was brave, Tom. We have to acknowledge that much. For the past six weeks, he’s passed himself off as something he’s not. He’s done business with dangerous people. Undercover work takes guts. And the kid could have stayed in grad school, could have played it safe, but he didn’t. He answered his brother’s call. He volunteered for the same mission that probably got his big brother—his badass recon marine big brother—killed.”
Tom thought about that, then nodded. “Fair enough.”
“You’re set where you live, Tom, right? Your place, I mean. It’s secure. You’ve done your Seabee tricks.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have something more than your sidearm? A rifle or shotgun, anything?”
Tom nodded. “Yeah. We’re good, thanks.”
“It’s best if I don’t know where you actually live, so I’ll be bailing in a bit. The Range Rover will take me back to the city. If either of us needs to reach the other, we’ll stick with your protocol and go through Carrington. But for any number of reasons that might not be possible, so I’m going to show you a phone number. It’s monitored twenty-four-seven. You call it, and they’ll connect you to me right away. I go through burner phones quickly, and it’s more efficient for me to provide a central person with new numbers as they come up.”
Cahill reached into his jacket and removed a scrap of paper on which eleven digits were written in precise handwriting.
It took only a glance for Tom to memorize the number.
“You’ll be asked for a code word before they’ll connect you to me. The one I’ve assigned to you is ‘Colt.’ You good with that?”
“Yes.”
“If I don’t get back to you within thirty minutes, and if you need a safe place to go, you remember how to get to the compound, right?”
Cahill was from a wealthy family, and among the many properties they owned was a secluded home on Shelter Island, located between the north and south forks of eastern Long Island.
It was from this safe place that Tom and Stella had slipped away in the middle of the night, crossing to the mainland in a rowboat like two refugees, each torn by war.
That night was the last time Tom had seen the Colonel and Raveis. And while Cahill had brought him to the compound the day before, he had disappeared hours after that.
Tom’s part was done, but Cahill’s work was ongoing.
“I can get us there if I need to, yeah,” Tom told him.
Cahill returned the scrap of paper to his pocket, then looked ahead through the windshield, searching the road as he drove. Tom knew he was looking for a specific landmark to indicate that they had cleared the blackout zone.
It took a moment, but Cahill spotted what he was looking for. “You can power up your phone now.”
He steered the pickup to the side of the road and stopped.
The tailing vehicles lined up behind them.
Cahill extended his hand. Tom took it.
“Good luck,” Cahill said.
“You, too, Charlie.”
Cahill moved to exit, but Tom spoke, stopping him. “When you saw the Algerian, he saw you, too, right?”
“Another reason for me to be out front on this. What better way to flush out a hunter than to be what he’s hunting?”
Tom said nothing.
Cahill smiled.
In it was a hint of that old recon marine confidence.
Whether it was an affectation or not, Tom could not tell.
He could only hope for the best for his friends.
“I’ll see you, Tom,” Cahill said.
He got out, and Tom waited until the Range Rover had made its U-turn
and was driving away before he pressed the power button on his smartphone.
Twenty-Two
With the harsh headlights of the waiting SUV directly behind him lighting up the truck’s interior, Tom waited for his phone to power up.
As he did, he was tempted to remember the last time he’d seen Frank Ballentine.
The chaos of battle—in this case a fighting retreat from a nighttime ambush, in a desert as barren and as torturous as a moonscape.
Tom had done his best to forget the night he and Cahill were wounded—forget the horror of it, the excruciating pain and sudden rush of fear that had overtaken him in the moments that followed that grenade’s explosion.
But he’d also forgotten something he maybe shouldn’t have.
Fragments had torn through Cahill, losing much of their deadly velocity before coming to a stop inside Tom’s torso.
Shallow wounds, for the most part, that had left him badly scarred.
The sound of the blast had temporarily deafened him, and the shock wave generated by it had forcibly voided his lungs of all air.
He’d been gasping, desperate to fill his lungs again, and looking up at the night sky cluttered with storm clouds and swirling sand when a solitary figure had appeared above him. Leaning close, the figure—Frank Ballentine—had eclipsed everything that was in Tom’s view.
“I got you, Seabee,” he said.
In his late thirties at the time, Frank had been the oldest marine in Cahill’s unit, having completed four post-9/11 tours of duty before becoming a recon marine, after which he’d gone on countless missions, from South Africa to the Middle East to the Philippines to Latin America.
Force Reconnaissance Marines were deployed to places where other—and more high-profile—spec-ops units couldn’t.
They were the true “quiet professionals.”
Frank Ballentine had seen and done it all—and had lived to tell the tales, though he rarely spoke about himself or the things he’d done.
A legend is a man others tell stories about.
But that long-ago night in Afghanistan, Frank had dragged Cahill, the more badly wounded of the two of them, to safety first before coming back for Tom.
Those moments during which Tom had been left to wait—bleeding, burning, fighting an inner battle with his own primal fears—were among the longest of his life.
His only solace, other than that there would be no one to mourn him should he bleed out and die, had been that his life was in the hands of a man like Frank Ballentine.
If anyone could make it back for Tom, it would be him.
Ballentine had in fact returned to lug Tom to safety as well—or to the relative safety of Humvees waiting a half kilometer away.
And he had administered field first aid to Tom and Cahill as their Humvee carried them back to base.
The last Tom saw of the man had come as the stretcher bearers hurried him to a waiting chopper.
Ballentine had walked alongside Tom, saying something that Tom could not hear. A faint ringing sound had replaced his temporary deafness, and of course there had been the wash from the spinning rotors.
Finally, though, Ballentine had leaned close so Tom could see his face clearly, repeating one last time what he’d been trying to communicate.
Tom’s eyes went to the man’s lips.
“You saved our lives,” Ballentine had said.
The next thing Tom knew, he was inside the chopper and it was lifting off.
Cahill had been on the stretcher beside him, the medics working frantically to keep the badly wounded marine alive.
It was a risk for Tom to remember this now—to remember what he had finally moved beyond—but he knew that he needed to, if only to put his current situation into perspective.
How could he not participate in the search for this man, especially since the role he was being asked to fill was one that would allow him to remain hundreds of miles back from what was essentially the front line?
A supporting role, nothing more.
There was no doubt in Tom’s mind that Stella would feel the same way.
Or at the very least understand his feelings and recognize that, Tom being who he was, and why, meant that he had to do what he was being asked to do.
And anyway, they’d both known that this day would come—the day when the men Tom had killed for would find them, when they would need him again, and in one way or another draw him back into their world.
It was a day for which they had prepared in every way they could imagine.
Tom checked his watch, knew that by now Stella had finished up her workout and was likely chatting with Krista, as they often did for a few moments postworkout.
Of course, Stella was likely to also be holding her smartphone in her hand, waiting for Tom to contact her and inform her of the outcome of his meeting.
He wanted to relieve her of this anxiety as quickly as possible.
The phone had completed its powering-up cycle, and Tom shifted into gear and steered the pickup back onto the road.
The trailing SUV hung back slightly, sparing Tom the harsh glare from its xenon headlights in his rearview mirror.
Opening his text conversation with Stella, Tom pressed the small icon of a telephone receiver in the upper right corner of his display.
The screen lit up as his call was connected.
PART THREE
Twenty-Three
Still in their workout clothes, Stella and Krista were standing outside the restaurant when Tom pulled in. Parked by the front door, its lights on and engine running, was Krista’s four-door Jeep Wrangler, rigged for off-road excursions. A kayak was usually strapped to the roof rack but had been replaced tonight by the mattress Tom and Stella needed for their guest.
Tom’s pickup was followed by the SUV, which he led to the section of the gravel parking lot that wasn’t visible to the main road—the tree-lined corner where the two dumpsters were located.
As Tom got out of his truck, Grunn exited the rear passenger-side door of the SUV. She was looking at the two women, who were now working together to take the mattress down from the Jeep’s roof.
“Who’s that with Stella?” she said.
Tom wondered how exactly Grunn knew what Stella looked like. As far as he knew, the only photograph of her in Raveis’s possession was a private cell phone pic that Stella had once sent to Tom and that Raveis had intercepted.
But that was years ago, and there was for Tom a bigger concern at hand.
“That’s Krista,” Tom said. “She’s our cook. And Stella’s name isn’t Stella. Krista only knows us by our aliases.”
“Jim and Anne.”
“Yes.”
Grunn was staring at Krista. “And she’s loaning you a mattress?”
“Yes.”
Grunn looked at Tom. “And she just happened to have one lying around.”
“She rents a room at the farm across the field. It’s kind of a boarding house. Maybe they had a spare.”
Grunn turned back and watched as Stella and Krista carried the mattress through the front door, Stella walking backward, Krista directing her.
The twin-size mattress was difficult to hold because of its floppiness, but the two women got it through the door.
Grunn continued to study Krista, sizing her up.
Once Krista was out of sight, Grunn shifted her attention to the front of the restaurant, which she scanned before surveying the parking lot and the perimeters of the property that were visible to her.
Tom knew she was searching for vulnerabilities; all properties had them, and theirs was no exception.
Grunn’s partner exited the vehicle, as did the vehicle’s driver.
She introduced the two men to Tom. Her partner was DiBano; the driver, Sheridan.
“All right, let’s get moving,” Grunn said.
There was urgency in her voice, and Tom understood why. With its lights on, both upstairs and down, the restaurant looked as if it might be open for business.
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The last thing they wanted was someone looking for a place to eat to pull in as they were transferring their protectee inside.
The reaction to such an event by Grunn’s men would be less than subtle.
Tom noted that Sheridan, unlike all the other bodyguards he had seen tonight, wasn’t sporting the standard neat businessman haircut. Instead, he wore a freshly buzzed crew cut, which led Tom to surmise that either he had come to this job straight out of a branch of the military, or he was someone who was determined to always maintain his military edge.
Sheridan was young, maybe midtwenties at the most, and since Raveis generally only picked former service members, Tom was fairly confident that he was looking at someone who had signed up for service either as the only means out of his hometown or because it was the only place he could go once he’d left it.
For Tom, all those years ago, it had been the latter.
With their backs to the SUV, Sheridan and DiBano quickly scanned the surrounding area.
They wore their suit jackets open and held their hands in a manner that would allow them to reach quickly for their respective sidearms, should the need arise.
The only person remaining in the SUV was the girl. She made no attempt to get out, and Tom could only glimpse her through the open door.
But a glimpse was enough for him to recognize the face of someone who was both grieving and frightened.
It wasn’t until Grunn stepped to the open door and waved to the girl that she moved.
Her movements were those of someone who was accustomed to being under close protection.
Head down slightly, she stood ready to follow the lead of those surrounding her.
Grunn said to Tom, “Lead the way, please.”
He started toward the front door, had noted before he had turned that the two suited men were behind the girl, DiBano touching her shoulder and guiding her forward, Sheridan right behind DiBano and facing backward so he could cover their rear and observe the road as he walked.
The tight group of four individuals moved as one unit, their feet shuffling quickly and in sync. Once through the door, Tom stepped to the right and let them move inside.
The Rogue Agent Page 14