Sweet Dreams
Page 27
CHAPTER 28
KIRK OPENED HIS EYES and felt the dead weight of a body on top of him. Using all the strength he could muster, he rolled over and shoved the body aside. A pain stabbed at his chest. He grasped his ribs and felt something warm and sticky ooze between his fingers. Blood. Just an inch higher, and the bullet would have gone through his heart.
He was lightheaded but coherent enough to know he had to get out of there. The bomb would be going off at any moment.
He looked around. The woman was gone. He hoped she was okay. But Geoff, the double-crosser, whose headless body he’d shoved away, was dead, which was fine with him. Getting to his feet, he staggered up the stairs, down the hall and into the main lobby. The guards and a few men in business suits were all scrambling for cover. He could see flames coming from the outside of the building.
Finding a side door, he rushed outside and ran into the trees just as the building burst into flames. He smiled and dropped behind a boulder. He’d always enjoyed blowing stuff up.
* * *
LIFE WAS DIFFERENT FOR the Appleton family now. K was taking a self-defense class and learning how to shoot a gun under Mark’s careful eye. Mark spent every minute he could spare with his family.
Samantha went on as if nothing had ever happened. That made K happy knowing her child wouldn’t be scarred for life and wouldn’t need counseling because of nightmares.
Mark sat in the conference room at the WJA headquarters, being briefed by Johnny Jamison.
Tripp Maddock, or Geoff, had three brothers who worked for him and the general. The plan was to blow up three supermarkets and two schools and blame the bombings on WJA. Mark had thrown a wrench into their plans when he killed Geoff’s brothers in the cabin in the woods the previous year.
The general had escaped, and no one knew where he was. The consensus was that he was likely in Russia or the Czech Republic, but they didn’t know for sure. The agent who had double-crossed them was in prison for selling secrets to Russia, which was provided by an anonymous tip to the director of the FBI.
“You with us, Mark, or are you dreaming again?” Jamison smiled as he pointed to the picture on the screen.
“I’m here.”
“Good. This man is connected with General Karjanski and is involved with smuggling nuclear weapons into Iran. His name is Hokamend Mahmud-e-Raq. He is also part of the terrorist organization involved in the bus bombings last year in Oakland, plus the one in Los Angeles.
“We have a contact and a safe house waiting for you. You are to leave in twelve hours. This mission, mind you, could last a year or so. We need you to first get all information possible from his personal computer and locate his nuclear weapons warehouse. Then take him out.”
Mark nodded. He’d been studying Hokamend for the past few weeks. The terrorist’s twisted web of destruction was about to unravel. If the mission went as he dreamed it would, the mission would end with Hokamend dead on the floor of his palace in Tehran.
* * *
KIRK READ HIS OBITUARY and laughed out loud. He couldn’t believe all the lies his friends wrote about him. There was even a blip from his ex-wife. He was a kind and caring man.
“Bah, what does she know?” He took another sip of his peach margarita and set it on the table beside his chair. He dropped the back of the chair down, closed his eyes and relaxed, soaking up the sun’s healing rays. He loved Bali, which was always warm and smelled like the ocean. He loved the feel of the soft sand under his feet and the warm breeze that filled his mind with happy thoughts.
It felt good to be free of his past. Here, there was no one to bother him other than the local women and the occasional parrot that flew into his hut every now and then. He smiled as he thought about the million dollars he’d found in the rubble of what was left of the old asylum. He’d almost missed it—but when a dead man is handcuffed to a suitcase, it usually means something.
He couldn’t believe how cheap Bali was. The fully furnished villa he bought only cost two-hundred thousand dollars, and it came with hired servants, maids and gardeners.
His drink was replaced with a fresh one by a petite, brown, young woman. She smiled at him and wandered off to do whatever she did when she wasn’t waiting on him. He smiled. Life was good in Bali. Real good.
One day soon, he would pick up his gun again. He still had work to do. General Karjanski lived just two villas down the road.
Kirk smirked and reached for his drink. He wasn’t finished yet. Not by a long shot.
The End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aaron Patterson resides in Boise, Idaho. He has three children, Soleil, Kale, Klayton.
Available Now
Dream On
Book Two In The WJA Series
CHAPTER 1
YOU NEVER CAN TELL what will happen to you. Some people think of themselves as untouchable or above the rules. I wasn’t one of those people. On the other hand, I had believed that one day it might happen, or that if something terrible did, I would be ready for it.
However, nothing could have prepared me for this. This place, and the feeling of finality and judgment.
Mind numbing darkness crept all around me with a stench that hit my senses like a freight train. At first, I thought I was buried alive in someone else’s grave and the smell was the decomposing body with which I shared the box. Then after a few days or weeks, I can’t say which for sure, I figured out that the stench was I.
I was the terrible taste in the stale air that I tried to breathe. I was trapped in a wooden box that gave me about a foot below my feet and above my head. I felt around and touched the lid only to find that my fingers could barely fit between my nose and the top of my tomb.
I’m dying. The thought made me want to scream and struggle, kicking and thrashing with everything in me to free myself and drink in the sweet morning air that used to swim through my lungs. I did in fact do just that, for so long that I passed out with exhaustion and woke up in the same dark place. Only this time my head ached with a pounding that not just one aspirin would cure.
I would have believed I was already dead but the pain shooting through my body told me otherwise. I understand that you don’t know me and that I’ll never see you or know your name, but I need to tell someone what happened, and how I would end up dead.
My name is Mark Appleton—I know, not too flashy or in your face, hero kind of a name. But I’m no different than you or the stock broker working his eighty plus hours a week, or the guy standing on a highway holding a stop sign in a construction zone. I am your everyday, ordinary, run of the mill American guy, and I’m in a casket. My casket. I was buried alive and from what I can tell, I won’t be escaping anytime soon.
So why would someone do that to me you might ask?
Well, I have a job that involves a little different approach then your average mail carrier; you might say my job is to deliver messages to those in this world who think they can commit any evil they dream up without repercussion. I come into contact with people who would love to see me dead, hanged by the neck and swinging in the breeze.
That is where I come in. I am their repercussion!
I’m an assassin who is what some might call a vigilante or a mercenary of sorts. I know, I know, but laying here in a cramped box talking to myself, I cannot help wondering how I ended up doing what I do and how I ended up in a pine box underneath a ton of dirt.
The voice recorder in my watch is the only way you’ll ever know my story, so here goes…
Aaron Patterson
Sweet Dreams
Book One in the WJA Series
©2008 by Aaron Patterson
All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher.
StoneHouse Ink 2008
StoneHouse Ink
Nampa ID 83686
First Hardcover Edition: 2008
First Paperback Edition: 2008
First eBook Edition 2008
Second eBook Edition 2011
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to a real person, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Patterson, Aaron, 1979-
Sweet Dreams: a novel/ by Aaron Patterson. -1st ed. p.cm.
ISBN 978-0-9826078-1-7 (Paperback)
TXu 1-586-116 September 6, 2008
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010902250
Cover design by Andrew Garcia
Published in the United States of America
www.StoneHouseInk.net