Dead Shift (The Rho Agenda Inception Book 3)

by Richard Phillips

  Taking the airport exit onto NW 120th Street, Jack slowed and parked near the International Shipping Service cargo facility. A warehouse butted up against a large hanger, its front wall sporting a large sign that read ISS AIR CARGO.

  The rumble of distant thunder accompanied Jack to the lone metal door set into the cinderblock wall. He pressed down on the lever-shaped door handle and pulled it open. Stepping inside, he found himself in a small waiting area separated from another closed door by a gray metal counter. On the far side sat a heavyset woman who looked up and gave him a surprisingly warm and gracious smile. Jack glanced at the security camera mounted high up on the wall behind her and returned the smile.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  He glanced at her name tag. “Hello Patty. I’m Jack Frazier, DEA.”

  The credentials he flashed were good enough to pass initial scrutiny, but would never endure extensive follow-up. That was okay. He didn’t need them to.

  A look of surprise crossed her features, but she recovered admirably. “What can I do for you, Agent Frazier?”

  “I would like to speak to your supervisor. Would you call him, please?”

  Patty hesitated. Then she lifted her cell phone and speed-dialed a number. “Carl. There’s a DEA agent out front. He’s asking to speak with you.” She paused to listen. “Okay. I’ll send him on back.”

  Switching off the phone, the woman nodded toward the door. “The manager’s name is Carl Bogati. Through that door, his office is second on the right.”

  Jack stepped around the counter, opened the door, and found himself in a wide hallway that opened onto a big warehouse floor thirty feet ahead. The sound of moving conveyer systems accompanied the loud beep of a forklift backing up. Jack was five feet from the door when it opened. A bald white guy wearing a blue uniform with “ISS” stenciled on the left breast pocket stepped out to greet him. The fellow extended a broad hand and Jack shook it.

  “I’m Carl Bogati, floor manager for this air cargo facility.”

  “Jack Frazier with the DEA.” Again he flashed the DEA creds. “If we could step into your office, I’ve got a few questions I’d like to ask you.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Bogati stepped aside and motioned Jack into the office. It wasn’t much to look at. A gray steel-case desk held a computer, an in-box piled high with papers, and a coffee-stained blotter with this month’s calendar. Aside from some metal filing cabinets and Bogati’s rolling office chair, there was only one other piece of furniture, a metal folding chair leaning against the far wall. As Bogati took a seat behind the desk, Jack unfolded the other chair and sat down.

  “So,” Bogati began, his eyes narrowing ever so slightly, “why is the DEA interested in my facility? I assure you, ISS doesn’t transport illegal drugs.”

  “On Saturday, at approximately two in the morning, a cargo plane flew in from Baltimore, off-loaded some cargo, and then departed for Oakland.”

  “Yeah? So what. You have any idea how much cargo passes through here every day?”

  “I’d like to see the cargo manifest for that plane.”

  Jack noted that the man’s helpful look had left his face.

  “Have you got a warrant?”

  “I can get one, but I was hoping for your cooperation.”

  The look on Bogati’s face hardened. “Here at ISS, we value our customers’ privacy. You want to look at a manifest, come back when you’ve got a warrant.”

  Jack remained seated. “Maybe you’d be willing to answer a few questions then?”

  Bogati stood. “We’re done here.”

  Jack stood facing the manager and let a hard edge creep into his voice. “Our next meeting will be a lot less pleasant.”

  The bald man stepped forward, his invasion of Jack’s personal space intended to send a message. “Count on it.”

  Without a backward glance, Jack walked back the way he had come, confident that the ISS manager was already placing an important call. It wasn’t likely to be to one of his ISS supervisors. As Jack made his way out the front door, he passed a bigger man in an ISS uniform coming from the general vicinity where Jack had parked the Mustang.

  A low rumble of thunder drew Jack’s attention to the wall of clouds that hung like a curtain from the approaching storm. He climbed in, started the car, and pulled out of the parking lot. After getting to his destination, he’d find the tracking device the big guy had planted. Then he’d find out whether the NSA was right about who he was dealing with.

  CHAPTER 15

  Qiang Chu felt the blood drip from his right hand, heard the plop as it splashed into the red pool on the concrete basement floor, and marveled at the stupidity of the big man whose brains oozed out onto the floor through his shattered skull. Of course Qiang’s hand hadn’t cracked that skull open; it had been the impact with the concrete pillar that had finished this demonstration.

  The whimper from the figure huddled in the far corner attracted his attention and Qiang walked toward the man, the bare ceiling bulb casting his long shadow toward his target. Gan Liu was in his early forties and had grown fat since taking over leadership of the Asian gang known as the Bay Triad. Having just watched the way Qiang had killed Liu’s longtime bodyguard using only his hands and feet, Liu showed no sign of the bluster with which he’d confronted Qiang upon his arrival at this meeting place.

  That was good. Qiang didn’t have the time to deal with the battle for triad leadership that would result if he were forced to kill Liu. The fact that Liu had shown up accompanied by four of his enforcers had demonstrated he wasn’t completely stupid. Had he been meeting anyone but Qiang, that would have been overkill. But now, except for the four broken bodies that lay scattered across the floor, Liu was very much alone. From the look on the gangster’s pudgy face, he suddenly found himself very open to Qiang’s proposal.

  As he stopped in front of the triad boss, Qiang’s cell phone warbled. He pulled it from the pocket of his loose-fitting black pants, glanced at the caller ID, and answered, his eyes locking Liu in place.

  “Yes?”

  Feng Ma’s voice sounded tense. “We have a problem in Kansas City.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Just over an hour ago, a man claiming to be a DEA agent showed up at the ISS warehouse asking to see the cargo manifest for our flight from Baltimore on Saturday morning. Carl Bogati passed along some security video from the ISS lobby and one of his people managed to hide a GPS tracker on the man’s car.”

  “So he’s not DEA?”

  “Definitely not. In fact, the man who called himself Jack Frazier is an ex-CIA assassin who was supposedly killed in Calcutta two years ago. His real name is Jack Gregory. According to Beijing, he’s since been linked to a number of killings in Europe, Kazakhstan, and South America using the pseudonym ‘The Ripper.’”

  Qiang paused to consider this new information. “Why is a contract killer suddenly involved in this?”

  “Jamal Glover’s dead girlfriend was the daughter of the American billionaire Jim McPherson.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Apparently McPherson isn’t satisfied with letting U.S. government agencies handle the investigation. So he’s hired this Jack Gregory to find and kill the person who murdered his only child.”

  In front of Qiang, Liu shifted and seemed about to speak, but when Qiang lifted a finger to his lips, the gangster reconsidered.

  “Pick five men,” Qiang said. “I want them on a jet out of Oakland as soon as they can get there. Let me know when The Ripper is dead.”

  “Do you want McPherson killed too?”

  “No. He’ll get the message.”

  With a thin smile, Qiang ended the call and redirected his full attention to the shaking Liu. The time had come to give some detailed instructions to the overlord of the Bay Triad.

 
CHAPTER 16

  In the crime-ridden Kansas City neighborhood of Centropolis, the graffiti-covered two-story house with its rusting corrugated steel roof and outbuildings gave new meaning to the phrase “the wrong side of the tracks.” Jack had paid the absentee owner five hundred dollars cash for a week’s rent and reckoned that it was more money than the house was worth. The trees, brush, and weeds had so overtaken the property that the surrounding chain-link fence sagged beneath their weight.

  When he pulled the Mustang convertible under the decrepit, overgrown carport, Jack considered backing inside. But that sort of combat parking would raise suspicion in those that would be hunting him, so he parked straight in. Though the Mustang attracted the curious gaze of some of the drunks and addicts that lounged at the intersection, they would arrive at one very obvious conclusion: that he was a drug dealer here to conduct business with some local gang. The thought that somebody might try to steal the Mustang didn’t worry Jack. One less car thief would probably be a good thing for this area.

  After climbing out, it took Jack only a minute to find the magnetic GPS tracker that had been stuck to the frame just behind the front bumper. He snapped it free and mounted it on the outside wall of the carport, hidden by the thick vines that climbed up the rusting wall and onto the roof.

  When Jack stepped up on the front step, he was surprised that the key turned smoothly in the rusted lock, but when he shoved open the door, the hinges squealed so loudly he thought they might break. Inside, he found pretty much what he expected to see. A broken-down couch with a spring poking up through the left-most cushion occupied the center of the living room. Just beyond that, a thin sliver of sunlight squeezed through a painted windowpane to illuminate dust particles kicked up by Jack’s footsteps.

  There was no television, but the overhead light worked and so did the one in the adjacent kitchen. From the look of the stove, Jack saw that the only way he’d be doing any cooking here would be if he built a campfire on top of it. But the sink had running water of the cold, rusty variety, and the toilet in the first-floor bathroom flushed, a definite plus.

  One of the stairs failed to creak as he made his way up to the second floor, but it was only because that step had broken through, leaving behind a gaping hole from which several rusty nails jutted outward. At the top of the stairs, Jack found a short hallway with two doors on the left and one on the right. The hallway light switch was broken and the lone window at the far end of the hall allowed in just enough daylight for Jack to make out the decaying floral pattern of the green wallpaper. Lovely.

  The two doors on the left opened respectively into a completely empty bedroom and a small bathroom without running water or working toilet. The door on the right led into a bedroom with a marginally functional dresser, a small closet, and a bare mattress laid out on the floor.

  Jack walked across the room and undid the latch on a window that faced the street, pleasantly surprised when he managed to slide the bottom window all the way to the top. As he watched, the clouds closed in to block out the sun. The gusting wind had dropped the temperature at least thirty degrees in the last five minutes. A jagged bolt of cloud-to-cloud lighting danced across the sky, and the thunder that followed shook the building.

  For several seconds Jack stood there, feeling the cool wind ruffle his shirt and enjoying the smell of the coming shower. Then the clatter of hailstones on the steel roof was accompanied by rain that forced him to shut the window. Jack’s cell phone beeped and a quick glance told him that a tornado warning had just been issued for the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. Fine. The storm could give a nice Midwestern welcome to whoever was coming for him.

  Jack set his duffel on the mattress and began unpacking its contents. If he wanted to be ready for the arrival of his housewarming guests, he had some preparations to make.

  CHAPTER 17

  Nightfall came early to Kansas City, accompanied by chain lightning, thunder, and the periodic wail of distant tornado sirens, although the sirens seemed confined to the southern edge of the city. The men that would come for Jack on this night would be professionals. When they came, they’d hit the house hard and fast, tossing flash-bang grenades through the windows before crashing through doors or windows. If they were very good, they might expect the doors to be wired. And they’d leave backup outside to cover the front and rear exits.

  It would be over . . . bang, bang, bang . . . quick. Just not in the way they intended. For one thing, they would expect Jack to be inside the ramshackle house, not lying beneath a rain poncho in the high weeds on the opposite side of the street.

  Clad all in black, including his shooter’s gloves, Jack wore a light, pullover mask that didn’t interfere with his ability to get a good sight picture through the infrared scope mounted on the M4 carbine’s Picatinny rail. The suppressor screwed into the weapon’s threaded barrel wouldn’t completely dampen the sound, but it would make it much harder to identify the direction from which the gunfire was coming.

  Despite the protection the poncho provided, Jack was thoroughly soaked and surprisingly cold. But in life-and-death confrontations like the one that he felt coming, discomfort had always been his oldest and dearest friend. As old friends went, he felt another one stirring deep within, but this was only a friend in the sense that a long pull of whisky was a drunk’s best friend.

  Jack had always had that special sense, an ability to feel what his opponent was about to do even as he decided upon it. It was one of the things that had brought him to the attention of Garfield Kromly, the CIA’s chief trainer of field operatives when Jack was new to the agency. But ever since Calcutta, that sense of danger flooded him with adrenaline, pulling him toward it like a fish on the hook despite his best efforts to control those impulses. He’d hoped that the lucid dreaming technique would help him to better understand what was going on in his subconscious and how that something sometimes bled over into his conscious mind. But if tonight was any indication, his dream encounter in that Hawaii hotel room had only intensified that strange inner connection, heightening all of his senses in a way that thrilled and threatened him.

  Vehicle headlights, a rarity on a night like this one, at least in this neighborhood, crawled down the street toward him. They were high up and widely spaced, indicative of a large SUV or pickup truck. This was an SUV. From his hidden position, Jack watched it slow as it passed in front of the house before turning to disappear down a side street. When it rolled back around that corner with its headlights off, Jack wasn’t surprised.

  Through the FLIR scope he could see the bright heat from the vehicle grill and the lesser glow of five warm bodies inside the SUV: two in the front, two in the backseat, one more crouched in the rear cargo area. When the vehicle pulled to a stop half a block from the house, four doors and the rear hatch opened simultaneously as armed men piled out, silently closing the doors behind them. No interior lights flicked on and off.

  Now Jack could see that they each wore night-vision goggles. Hidden beneath the camouflaged parka, he would be invisible to their light amplification technology. Add that to the fact that their attention would be focused on the rundown house on the opposite side of the street and it wouldn’t be a problem.

  They moved along the edge of the foliage-draped fence in a tactical formation that totally belied any notion that these were mob enforcers. These operators were government trained and used to working together. The question was, which government?

  When they reached the carport, none of them went inside to examine the Mustang. Instead the team went through an opening where the chain-link fence had fallen down and split up, one going around the right side of the house while four stayed in front. Of those four, one slipped into the trees and assumed a prone firing position with his weapon covering the entire front on a diagonal.

  The other three positioned themselves on either side of the front door and paused to speak into jawbone microphones. Upon hearing
a response that was to their liking, they each hurled a grenade through separate windows, two on the first floor and one into a second-floor bedroom. The flash and noise of several concussion grenades going off in rapid sequence was followed up by an assault that launched the front door into the middle of the living room as the three men followed it into the interior.

  Jack waited a full ten seconds before pressing two buttons on the remote detonator he held in his left hand. In the house he’d rented for five hundred dollars, layers of C4 explosive propelled 1,400 tiny ball bearings from two M18 claymore mines at its current occupants, blasting out the windows and part of the front wall.

  The prone sniper reacted immediately, rising to his feet and running away from the conflagration back toward the parked vehicle, but the steady squeeze of Jack’s trigger finger dropped him face-first in the middle of what may once have been the front lawn. The sniper around back had better options and took advantage of them, only breaking out of the trees when he was next to the black SUV. The vehicle squawk meant that he had the key, something that the man verified by sliding into the driver’s seat.

  Jack’s sight centered on the middle of a glowing face as the driver ripped off his night-vision goggles and switched on the headlights. Although the bright beams washed the FLIR thermal scope white, Jack squeezed the trigger without allowing any movement from his previous aim point. Just to be sure, he lowered the barrel slightly and fired three more rounds. Then he was up and running along the edge of the road, moving parallel to the enemy vehicle, not crossing the road until he was directly opposite the driver’s side door.