Forty
The Hughes touched down in a fenced-off courtyard surrounded on three sides by the shuttered Baychester Motel.
Tom saw that the pavement was riddled with cracks through which tall grass had grown.
He and Cahill exited and stepped away from the helicopter, and within seconds it was airborne again, rising high above them.
It wasn’t long before the sound of the rotors was just a muffled thumping in the distance.
Cahill was wearing a small ranger backpack containing a full field-med kit.
As always, he was armed with his subcompact Kimber.
Tom had the Glock 30S that Carrington had given him, along with the spare mags.
Cahill led the way to the center of the three buildings. Reaching the concrete steps to the second floor, he spotted a blood trail.
He and Tom followed it up to a room in the middle of that wing.
Moving to one side of the door, Cahill removed his Kimber and stood ready. Tom took the other side but didn’t go for his Glock.
“Hammerton, it’s Tom,” he called. “I’m coming in, okay?”
Tom waited, repeated himself when he got no reply, waited again.
Finally, he opened the door, letting it swing back a few inches by its own weight, and peered around the door frame.
He saw a room void of all furnishings, but to the left of the door was a makeshift wall comprised of stacks of concrete mix.
Stepping inside, Tom scanned the room, then stepped forward so he could see what was behind the stack.
Slumped against the wall was Hammerton, the floor around him blood-smeared; his eyes were closed.
Beside him was his Belstaff shoulder bag, on top of which lay an open bleedout kit, its contents scattered.
Tom hurried toward Hammerton. “Get in here, Charlie.”
He knelt down at Hammerton’s left side. Cahill entered, rushed around the stacked bags of concrete, and knelt at Hammerton’s right.
Swinging off his backpack, Cahill laid it aside and immediately began to assess the man’s wound. To do so, he had to peel back the Israeli battle dressing that Hammerton had applied to a gunshot in his abdomen.
The dressing was soaked with blood.
Hammerton opened his eyes then, or tried to; he could raise his lids only halfway at best.
“It’s about time,” he muttered.
“Don’t talk,” Tom said. “We’ve got you. You’re going to be okay.”
As Cahill looked at the wound, the expression on his face turned from concerned to grave.
Hammerton’s eyes closed again. Breathing was difficult; he could only manage rapid but shallow inhalations.
Tom glanced at the location of the wound.
It was an inch below Hammerton’s right rib, meaning it was likely that the round had struck his diaphragm. If it had pierced his lung, the wound would be making a sucking sound every time he breathed in.
“We’re going to get you out of here,” Tom said.
“All of our safe houses were blown,” Hammerton whispered. He was rambling. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Cahill asked, “Why didn’t you call for evac?”
“They took my phone. Didn’t have a backup.”
“Who took your phone?”
Hammerton didn’t answer.
“Hang tough,” Tom said. “We’re going to stabilize you, then get you out of here.”
Hammerton shook his head, then forced his eyes open and looked for Tom.
His doing so, Tom knew, was an act of pure will.
Tom shifted so Hammerton could see him without having to strain. “I’m right here. I’m right here.”
Hammerton said, “You need to know something.”
“Save your breath.”
“I need you to listen to me.” His voice was hoarse. “I didn’t hang on this long for the fun of it. I’ve been watching the door for . . . I don’t know how long. I’ve been waiting for someone to get here . . .”
Again, Hammerton’s eyes fluttered and closed.
Tom remembered lying in the Afghan desert and waiting for Ballentine to come back for him.
In reality, it had been only minutes for the recon marine to return, but they were the longest minutes of Tom’s life.
Hammerton had been here bleeding and in pain for eighteen hours.
Tom felt a wave of compassion for his friend, could well understand the fear and aloneness he must have felt, wondering whether he had been abandoned, minutes turning to hours, hour after hour.
Cahill said, “He needs to stop talking, Tom.”
Before Tom could say anything, Hammerton spoke.
“The kid bolted,” he said. “Ballentine. He bolted.”
Cahill shook his head in disgust. “I never understood why Raveis put him in the field,” he said to Tom. “He just wasn’t ready. They rushed him. Unless they were using him as bait. Or maybe they were counting on him being motivated, like they were with you.”
Hammerton let his frustration show.
To have waited so long only to be unable to make himself understood had to be maddening.
He put everything he had into his voice. “No. It wasn’t that. He didn’t bolt when the attack started. He bolted before it started. Like he knew what was about to go down. Like he knew it was coming.”
Tom and Cahill looked at each other.
Tom leaned close. “What are you saying?”
“One minute he was standing there in front of me, asking if he could borrow my phone. The next thing I know, he’s running off with it. By the time I figured out what he was up to, it was too late.”
Neither Tom nor Cahill spoke.
Hammerton turned to Cahill. “It always bothered me that they didn’t shoot into the van. That bothered you, too, right? I figured they wanted the girl alive for some reason. But now I know the person they didn’t want to kill was him. The kid. Ballentine.”
“But a hit team came after him,” Tom said. “Just a few hours before. You stopped them, remember?”
“I’m good at my job, but I’m not that good. Those men didn’t know what they were doing. Pros wouldn’t have filed into a doorway one right after another the way they did. Their last man in certainly wouldn’t have put his back to the street.”
“Ballentine was wounded,” Cahill said. “You’re saying he let himself get shot.”
Hammerton shrugged. “I don’t think he’s as inept as he made himself out to be. I don’t think his mistakes were mistakes at all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You can tell how deadly a man is by the way he stands. It’s just a feeling I had, I’d see him sometimes and there was something there. And anyway, Raveis trained him. Raveis could make a commando out of my dead granny.” Hammerton shrugged again. “It’s possible he didn’t let himself get shot. Those men could have panicked and forgotten their orders. Or they could have gotten carried away. You get what you pay for with thugs, and those men were the bottom of the barrel in every way.”
“The attack was staged,” Tom said.
Hammerton nodded.
“Why?” Cahill said.
“To set everything in motion. Draw the real targets out into the open.”
“Valena and her mother.”
“Maybe,” Hammerton said. “Or maybe one of us. Or all of us. Because this sure feels like hunting season to me. Like someone wants every person in the Colonel’s organization dead.”
“You’re saying Ballentine works for the Benefactor,” Cahill said. “But the Benefactor had his older brother killed. That’s why Ballentine came to us. He wanted to help find Frank.”
“How much help was he, really? Ballentine shows up with a sad story and all the documents we’re desperate to see, and we buy it. Meanwhile, he’s doing everything he can to derail the search he volunteered for. And learning the identity of our best operators and the location of every safe house in the Colonel’s network in the process.”
“He’s
the breach,” Tom said.
Cahill shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense. Why would he do that? Why would he work for the man who had his brother killed?”
Hammerton said, “It could be his brother isn’t dead. What if he didn’t disappear? What if he switched sides? The Colonel only just told us about the breach, but I’m guessing it started long before the kid came on board.”
“Why would Frank do that? Why would he betray us?”
Hammerton shrugged. “Why does anyone do anything? For the money.”
Cahill needed a moment to process that. “But how could the Benefactor even approach him? He was one of our best. He was undercover. I can’t imagine him slipping up.”
Hammerton shrugged again. “Maybe someone sold him out. Someone who knew the Benefactor was looking for someone to turn.”
Cahill thought about that, then said to Tom, “The kid signs up, feeds intel back to our enemy, and when the time is right, the Benefactor makes his move. And he starts by going after the only person who can identify his number one assassin.”
“The attack on Ula pushes everyone out into the open,” Tom said. “Like dominos falling.”
“And exposes you to the Benefactor. Suddenly he sees his chance to eliminate the son of a man he’d had killed. A son the Colonel has been protecting and grooming for over two decades. You become a priority-one hit, so he sends a team of men to kill you and the girl, men led by his best assassin.”
Tom froze for a second, his eyes looking off to the right.
Then he quickly snapped out of it and looked at Cahill.
“What?” Cahill said.
“Shit,” Tom muttered.
“What?”
“I knew I’d seen his eyes before.”
“Whose eyes?”
“The masked man.”
Tom remembered his attacker hovering above him in the dark last night.
He remembered, too, Frank Ballentine appearing that night in Afghanistan as Tom lay wounded.
Frank had left to carry Cahill to safety, had been gone for what felt like an eternity.
But then he’d finally returned, his shadowed face all but obscuring the night sky.
His eyes, all that Tom could see of him, had locked in a way Tom would never forget.
Those were the same eyes he’d seen last night—a context that was both similar and different.
He remembered one final and damning detail.
Frank Ballentine hoisting him into a fireman’s carry and starting toward the waiting Humvee. Turning when they came under attack and raising his sidearm, firing into the dark desert behind them.
And there it was now for Tom to see, as clear as if he were back there.
Frank Ballentine’s marine-issue Colt 1911 had been in his left hand.
“Frank is alive, Charlie. He was there last night. At my place. He got the Algerian out of there when Krista opened up.”
“Jesus,” Cahill said.
Tom leaned close to Hammerton again. “Do you know where the Ballentine kid would go?”
“No.”
Tom turned to Cahill. “It’s possible they could track him with the surveillance footage, right? Like they did Hammerton.”
“No time for that,” Hammerton said.
Tom looked at him. “What do you mean?”
Hammerton was fading. It took everything he had now just to draw breath.
“I need to stabilize him or he can’t fly,” Cahill said.
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a fresh dressing, tearing open the vacuum-sealed wrapping with his teeth.
Working fast, he applied the dressing over the bleeding wound. “Christ, he has lost a lot of blood.”
Tom waited for as long as he could, then leaned closer still to Hammerton. “What do you mean there’s no time for them to track him?”
“When we were at the old tavern the day after our attack, I saw something. Raveis’s men were about to put the girl into the Colonel’s caravan. I was watching from a window. Ballentine came over to say goodbye to her. I saw him whisper something into her ear. She nodded, and he leaned back, and it looked to me like she was slipping something into her pocket. Something he handed her.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t see. I didn’t think too much about it at the time. He was close to her and her mother, you know. Closer than we’re supposed to get. But if it was a cell phone, maybe what he whispered was something like, ‘Don’t lose this or let anyone take it from you.’ Or he could have been assuring her that he was only a phone call away. I mean, the poor girl had just watched her mother die. She was suddenly surrounded by a bunch of strangers in suits holding automatic weapons. He was the only person she knew, and she probably thought she could trust him. He probably did everything he could to cultivate that. Which would mean developing an attachment to her wasn’t Ballentine screwing up, it was Ballentine doing the job he’d been sent to do.”
Hammerton paused to catch his breath. “And if it was a cell phone he gave her,” he said, “then Ballentine could be using it to track her. Everywhere she went from yesterday on—wherever she is now, wherever the Colonel has put her for safekeeping—Ballentine would know. And what Ballentine knows, the Benefactor and all his goons know.”
Tom thought about what the Algerian had said.
The girl has something I need.
Tracking a cell phone could cut both ways, revealing the locations via cell towers of the person being tracked and, via the metadata stored in the phone’s memory, the location of the one doing the tracking.
Their enemy would know that as well.
Killing the girl wouldn’t be enough.
To fully conceal their tracks—to remain as ghosts—they’d need to secure the phone she’d been given as well.
No loose ends.
When Krista had asked for cell phones as they’d departed for her safe house, Valena had simply shaken her head.
Obviously, Cahill had reached the same conclusion, because he said to Tom, “Go. Now.”
Tom was torn, didn’t want to leave his wounded friend.
The man to whom he yet again owed so much.
“I’ll help you get him downstairs,” Tom said. “We’ll fly him back to the old tavern with us, Sandy can patch him up.”
“He wouldn’t survive us carrying him to the copter, Tom, never mind the flight back. I’ll get an ambulance here, ride with him to the emergency room. He needs more than I can do anyway.” Cahill pulled a small radio from his pocket and spoke into it. “Tom needs immediate exfil.”
From the radio came Krista’s voice. “Copy. Coming in.”
Cahill returned the radio to his pocket and withdrew his cell phone, punching in 911 with his bloodied thumb.
“You need to be gone before the cops get here,” Cahill said. “Go. Call Stella now. Tell her to get everyone in the bunker and not come out for anyone but you. At top speed, you can be there in thirty minutes.”
Tom was still looking at Hammerton.
“Thank you,” he said.
Hammerton nodded, closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Do me a favor, huh? Kill that little fucker for me.”
Tom rose and sprang for the door as Cahill completed the 911 call.
His smartphone in hand, Tom stepped out into the chilled spring night.
He ran the length of the landing, then down the concrete stairs, and was in the courtyard and keying in Stella’s number as the Hughes descended.
It touched down on the cracked pavement, the overgrown grass fluttering under the rotor wash.
Tom had the phone to his ear as he climbed in next to Krista.
Forty-One
Stella was seated alone at the kitchen table, her eyes on the clock above the stove and a cup of hot tea in her hands. The table was oak, old, and long enough to seat six people comfortably.
On it, right in front of her, was the cell phone that Tom would text when he was on his way back. Not far from that was her .357. Wh
en she wasn’t looking at the clock, she was looking at the phone.
The farmhouse was quiet, Grunn and Valena in the living room, Sandy and Kevin in a small office just off the front entrance.
The place had been still like this for hours, and Stella was reminded of the silence in which she and Tom had slept in their rooms above the restaurant.
A tranquil and hidden world that was now gone.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been alone for this long; Tom was almost always with her, or at least always nearby.
And when she wasn’t with Tom, she was with Krista, either working or training after work.
The next logical thought was that Tom might not return—not in the next few hours, not tomorrow, not ever.
But she could not let her mind go to that horrible place.
What was about to happen—what he would have to endure and overcome in order to make it back to her—was out of her hands.
It was an understanding she didn’t much care for.
Her tea was cold but only halfway gone when she heard the sound of commotion coming from the front of the house.
A door was opened, followed immediately by footsteps moving quickly.
Seconds later, Sandy was hurrying into the kitchen, Kevin close behind her.
There was no mistaking their urgency.
Professional and calm and well practiced, but urgent nonetheless.
Stella asked what was going on.
Sandy answered, “We have wounded incoming.”
Stella’s heart stopped. “Who?”
Kevin exited through the kitchen door and started toward the barn.
Sandy said, “He didn’t say.”
“Who didn’t say?”
“Hammerton. He’s bringing someone in. They’re just minutes away.”
Stella was confused. “Why would he wait till just now to alert you?”
Sandy opened the pantry, reached in, and grabbed a backpack off the shelf. She was a flurry of activity, her mind focused on the tasks at hand. “I don’t know. The text came from his phone. The emergency code was correct.”
The backpack over one shoulder, Sandy exited, following the same straight line toward the barn her husband had.
Rising from the table, Stella moved to the kitchen door and drew the curtain aside. Through the window she could see that Kevin was already at the barn.
The Rogue Agent Page 25