He saw the flares of three gunmen a hundred and fifty yards away. They were using flash suppressors, but in the verdant luminescence of the goggles they lit up like starbursts. Matt switched the AK-47 to full auto and fired a sustained burst at the first and second positions, the hot 7.62mm shell casings flying around him. When the gun was empty, he ejected the exhausted magazine and pawed another free from the dead guard and slammed it home, then peered around the rocks.
The shooting from the two gunmen he’d spotted had ceased, but there was still another out there firing at his position — no doubt also equipped with night vision gear. He leaned towards one of the pair of guards cowering behind the rocks and barked a terse command. The closest one nodded. He shouted a rough bearing to the men, and on his signal, they began laying down covering fire while he dodged to another outcropping.
Bullets pounded into the ground around his heels, and then he was behind the boulders, the tribesmen still shooting. Judging by the incoming fire, there were two more left. At least.
He popped up and fired half the clip at the position of the last gunman he’d seen, and the shooting from that position stopped.
A chunk of rock flew off near his head and grazed his cheek. He wiped away a trickle of blood as he tried to gauge where the final shooter was concealed. At the edge of his field of vision, he saw another bloom of bright light, his ears confirming that the shooter was to his left. He took two deep breaths and then emptied the rest of the clip at the hidden man, strafing the area with measured precision.
No further gunfire answered him.
He waited, thirty seconds, and when there was no more gunfire, he called to the leader of his security team, “Go get flashlights from my hut. I have three by the door. Don’t touch the bodies. I want to see them as they fell.”
The leader nodded and was back in a blink with the lights. Matt watched as his men crept into the brush searching for the attackers’ corpses. A shout from one of them confirmed a find, and then another a few yards away.
He looked around, mentally counting the number of his guards that had been killed, and spotted eleven bodies in the near vicinity. It was a bloodbath, and two more men groaned where they had fallen, wounded, not long for this world.
Matt stood, still wary, and made his way to the edge of the clearing where the flashlight beams burned bright in the gloom. One of the attackers was still breathing, gasping for breath, and Matt looked down at his Caucasian features and battle-hardened face without pity.
“Who sent you?” he demanded, but the man’s expression froze as he shuddered and then lay still. Matt was walking over to the second body when a woman’s scream pierced the night. He spun and ran back to the camp as the cook came running out of her hut, hands stained with blood, screaming into the night sky.
“Runs like a champ.” The young man patted the hood of the black Chevrolet Tahoe with seeming affection.
The bright morning sunlight exposed where the rust damage on the quarter panels had been sloppily repaired. She’d spent the evening scouring the classifieds and the internet for vehicles and had set off early to get the chore over with.
“You mind if we take it to a mechanic for a quick once-over?”
“I’ve got a lot of people who want to buy this baby. I don’t have time to take it somewhere so a mechanic can nitpick it.”
“That’s a shame. Good luck selling it.” Jet returned to her rental car and pulled away, frustrated that this was proving so difficult. She’d looked at three possible candidates, and all were garbage. Not that she particularly cared, but she couldn’t afford a vehicle to break down in the middle of an operation. She moved to the next on her list, five miles away.
The black Ford Explorer was owned by an older couple who seemed genuine and had no reservations with her taking it to a mechanic. After an hour inspecting all the basics and running a compression check, the mechanic she’d lined up gave her the thumbs-up, and she paid the couple in cash. She arranged to have the husband follow her to the rental yard so she could return her car, and paid for a taxi to take him home.
Her first hurdle had been surmounted, and she knew that the DMV system wouldn’t list the Ford as sold for days, by which point she’d be long gone.
She thought the next vehicle would be harder to acquire, but was pleasantly surprised when the first one she looked at proved to be exactly what she was looking for — a 201 °Coachmen Freelander RV with only eighteen thousand miles on it, owned by an old man who could hardly walk. The wife told her their sad story — about the dream trip they’d taken around the country before the husband endured his final battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — and tearfully told her that they’d be willing to take a beating on it because they could use the money.
Jet paid them full price and asked if she could leave the vehicle sitting in their driveway until she could come and get it. They were overjoyed to do so, eyeing the stack of hundred dollar bills as though they’d just won the lottery.
As she pulled away, she tried calling Matt, but he didn’t answer, and she resolved to try him again in three hours, as agreed.
After a late lunch, she drove through both Briggs’ and Arthur’s neighborhoods, familiarizing herself with the layouts. Briggs lived outside the city limits in Arlington, Virginia, in an estate home near the river at the end of a cul-de-sac that backed onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. She had studied the satellite images and confirmed her impression on the drive by. Relatively rural suburb for the well-heeled. Nice, but in keeping with a man who wasn’t living beyond his means.
Arthur’s townhouse was a different story. In the heart of Georgetown, a densely-populated, affluent section of Washington near the university, it would present some challenges. It was an older building that had been remodeled, she could see, and looked expensive. A security camera peeked from under the edge of the roof, another by the front door. It looked like the home had been built in the 1800s, but was immaculate. Easily worth ten million dollars these days. Unexpectedly opulent digs for a CIA career man.
She would need to look at the blueprints and the schematics, but it looked do-able for someone of her skills. Briggs’ house was child’s play.
Her final stop was a lavish nine-thousand-square-foot mansion near CIA headquarters, adjacent to Pimmit Bend Park — a faux Tudor home at the end of a long private drive. That one would require some additional research, but she was confident.
Matt’s sat phone continuously rang without response, and she spent the remainder of the day growing increasingly concerned. He didn’t strike her as the type to go dark for no reason, but there was nothing she could do but wait. Jet checked the blind e-mail account he’d had his contact send the blueprints to, and saw three large files sent from an anonymous remailer. She downloaded them to her laptop, opened them, and studied the floor plans and electrical diagrams with interest. As she had suspected, there were a number of weak areas, and she made mental notes as she pictured the layouts in three dimensions.
She tried the sat phone one last time after dinner but still got no response, and as she lay her head on the down pillow for the evening she had a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach.
Something was wrong.
She knew it.
Chapter 35
The following morning, Matt answered on the third ring.
“Where have you been? Is everything okay?” Jet demanded.
“No. There was an attack yesterday. We took heavy casualties.”
“Are you okay?”
“For now.”
His voice sounded odd. Tight.
“What happened?”
“Best I can tell the drug lord who provided the men sold me out. That’s the only possibility. They knew where the camp was.”
“Tribesmen?”
“Negative. American, by the looks of them. Four. All dead.”
Her thoughts raced at the implications. “All they understand is retribution. You know that. The drug lord has to go.”
>
“I know. I’m making plans to take him out tonight, before word gets back to him. But…I don’t know how to tell you this…”
“What? Tell me what?” she asked, her heart sinking.
“It’s Lawan. She was hit by a stray bullet. She didn’t make it. She’s dead.”
Jet couldn’t breathe. It felt like someone was standing on her chest, and Matt’s voice seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel. Then the sensation passed, and she gulped air. Her hand shook almost imperceptibly as she brushed away the beginnings of a tear.
“Those bastards. Saved from a nightmare only to be killed by…this had to be Arthur’s doing.” She fought back the rage, replacing it with a glacial calm. “Did she suffer?”
“No. I don’t think so.” The lie trembled over the line.
“Bury her and say a few words for me, will you, Matt? She deserves at least that.”
“I will. I’m sorry.”
“Just make sure you take care of yourself. You’ve used up all nine of your lives.” She paused. “What are you going to do?”
“Kill the warlord and then move the camp to one of my other sites.”
“All right. This cinches it. I’m going to go in tonight. This will be over soon.”
“Believe me. There’s nothing I want more. But I’ll believe it when I hear you confirm it, not before.”
An uncomfortable stillness hung between them.
“I’m going to get going. Good luck,” Matt said.
“Luck will have nothing to do with it,” Jet responded, then stabbed the cell off.
She brushed her arm against her eyes, blotting tears, and then overcome by fury again, hurled the phone at the wall. It exploded into fragments. Jet buried her head into the pillow and sobbed for Lawan, whose life was over before it began, her brutally short interlude marked by tragedy and abuse. Shuddering rocked her as she screamed her anger and frustration into the bed, and then she quieted, her body growing still as the emotional storm blew over.
She looked up at the mirror on the far wall, face distorted and eyes red, and vowed silently to avenge Lawan, even though it wouldn’t make anything better or bring her back. It didn’t matter.
They would pay.
Jet’s tires whirred beneath her as the anthracite mountain bike carved through the moist soil and dirty gray patches of snow that clung to the ground between the tall trees. Her breath steamed out of her mouth as she panted, having ridden two miles from where she’d left the Explorer. The moon peered through the patchwork of heavy clouds, pregnant with snow, as she glided like a silent wraith through the woods.
When she was a hundred yards from the house, she leaned the bike against a tree and adjusted her backpack, then trotted towards the hedges that ringed the palatial rear yard.
The lights were on in the ground-floor living room of Briggs’ house, and she watched as he reposed in a green silk bathrobe, reading the paper, a bottle of expensive cognac on the table beside him. Upstairs, she could see a woman in her fifties sitting at a makeup table brushing her hair, her face a mask of unhappy resignation as she considered her reflection, a glass of wine near her right hand.
A dog barked several homes down the row, and she waited until the animal settled down before edging to the rear dining room door, next to the room where her target sat scratching himself. She reached into her backpack and pulled out plastic bags, which she quickly slipped over her feet, holding them in place with a rubber band on each ankle, then donned a pair of latex gloves. The lock took twenty seconds to open, and then she was creeping into the house, the soft soles of her Doc Martens boots inside the plastic sheathes soundless on the hardwood floor.
Briggs must have sensed her presence a few moments before she looped the wire over his head. He was in the process of turning when she wrenched it tight, the wire biting into his skin as he writhed in an attempt to get free. A line of blood trickled from the gash it had sliced, and then a geyser sprayed forth as the garrote severed his carotid artery.
“Honey? What’s going on down there?”
The woman’s voice sounded worried, but obviously not enough to descend the stairs. Briggs’s blood sprayed the painting that hung lavishly on the wall in front of him; a stern nobleman rendered in ancient oil — now with crimson splatter marring the surface.
Briggs stiffened and then went limp.
“Honey? Answer me.” Annoyed now, the words slightly slurred.
Jet dipped her finger into Briggs’ blood and scrawled Lawan’s name across his forehead, then pulled the wire free and glided quietly back to the dining room door, leaving blood-smeared footprints on the polished hardwood as she went. Once outside, she retrieved a liter water bottle filled with gasoline from her backpack and unscrewed the top, then stuffed a rag into the neck and lit it with a disposable lighter, leaning it next to the home’s wood siding before vanishing into the dark.
A minute later, Jet heard the woman’s scream even through the closed windows, a muffled high-pitched bleat of shock and horror. She slid the bloody shoe bags off her boots and packed them into a third bag along with the gloves and the garrote, and then bolted for her bike as flames licked at the outside of the house, the gasoline having erupted a few seconds before, igniting the shingles in a fiery blaze.
By the time the police arrived, there was no trace of her, a phantom come to exact a terrible retribution before disappearing into the night.
She looked at her watch as she pedaled hard through the woods. She would be at the second target’s home within ten minutes. Jet turned onto the pavement a quarter mile away and pointed the handlebars east.
The assistant director of the CIA stirred and turned onto his side, his small frame dwarfed by the ornately-wrought headboard of the king-sized bed. An antique that had been chosen by his third wife, he’d battled her for the bed during a bitter divorce and eventually won. It wasn’t so much that it was important to him as it meant a lot to her. She loved the damned thing. Not that she ever seemed to enjoy being in it with him.
Something caused him to start, and he slowly came awake, opening his eyes to see the shadowy outline of a figure standing at the foot of the bed. A figure dressed entirely in black. He tried hard to focus without his glasses and saw that it was a woman. A beautiful woman.
Pointing a gun at him.
He sat up.
“I…I have some money in my wallet, and my watch is a Piaget,” he stammered.
“That figures. Piagets are crappy watches for rich morons with no taste.”
“It’s…worth a lot of money. Take it. And I have a few thousand dollars here.”
“That’s good to know.”
Confused by her tone, he reached for the bedside lamp.
“Move one more inch and I blow your head off.”
He froze, then slowly resumed his sitting position.
“What do you want?”
“I’m here with a message.”
“A message?”
“Yes. It’s a short one. Either you die by the gun tonight, or you die by the needle. Your choice.”
He swallowed with difficulty, his throat suddenly dry.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m here to kill you. But I’ll give you a choice. Do you want a bullet, or a shot of the heroin you’re responsible for selling to millions of kids all over the world?”
“Look, lady, you’ve got this all wrong…” The pistol didn’t waver. “Do you have any idea who I am? You’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” he snarled.
She ignored him.
“What’s it going to be? Bullet or needle? I don’t have all night.”
He lunged for the bedside table, and she shot him in the leg, shattering his kneecap. His scream was cut off by another round directly between his eyes. The back of his head blew onto the coveted headboard. She stepped to the bedroom door and flipped the lock closed, then moved to the window and slid it open. His scream would bring his two bodyguards and his maid w
ithin seconds, but by the time they got in, Jet would have vanished.
With a final look at the dead man on the bed, she climbed through the window and lowered herself until her feet were ten feet above the grass, then dropped softly, rolled backwards, and took off at a full run to where she’d left her bike in the dense cover of the park.
Five minutes later, she was in the Explorer, driving the speed limit on her way to Washington.
“Yes?”
Silence greeted Arthur’s interrogative. He held the handset out and stared at it, then clenched it to his ear again.
“Who is this?” The line was unlisted. Perhaps a wrong number?
“Wake up, Arthur,” Jet finally said.
“Who…where are you? I haven’t heard from you for a week,” Arthur demanded into the phone.
A sound rattled from downstairs, and then the line went dead.
Arthur rose from his bed and wrapped a robe around his pajamas, then slid his nightstand open and removed a small pistol — a Ruger LCP 380. He lifted the handset again to call for help, but there was no dial tone. And he’d left his cell phone downstairs to charge overnight, as was his custom.
Mitzi, his pug, whined and stretched, peering up at him in confusion. Was it time to wake up and go for a walk?
He crept cautiously down the steps and turned the corner at the base, entering the living room, where Jet sat in the dark in one of his colonial-era chairs, a briefcase in her lap, one foot swinging lazy circles. He flipped on the light and regarded her, the pistol trained on her head. Mitzi yelped happily and ran to her. Jet reached down and scratched her furry little head. Mitzi pushed her face into Jet’s hand and then lay by her side with a plop.
“You won’t need the peashooter,” she said with a smile.
Betrayal j-2 Page 23