by Kari Nichols
She’d expected a call sooner. She was still twiddling her thumbs and starting to get antsy. She didn’t like to remain in one location for very long, especially after completing a job. If she wasn’t on leave after a job then she was onto the next task. Not so with this one. Yesterday she had express-posted the documents she had recovered from McMaster’s safe to HQ. She couldn’t make heads or tails of the stuff and figured that was Bailey’s job anyway.
She had just spotted a tempting sale offering a super low rate for a 7-day all-inclusive resort in the Bahamas when her cell phone rang. Checking her surroundings for anyone paying too much attention to her, Tate picked up the phone and checked the caller ID. “Yeah,” she answered. About fucking time, she thought.
“Walter Freemantle is Deputy Head of Deployment for the Sector,” Evan said without preamble. Evan was her handler. Everything Tommy knew, Evan would know.
“And who or what is he in charge of deploying?” She could make an educated guess at the answer. He had more information, but that was likely the biggest shocker. It wouldn’t have taken Tommy two days to determine that Freemantle worked in the same building as he did.
“He deployed Sector Task Force teams directed to kill a splintered agent,” Evan confirmed her guess.
“He deployed TA-4 to take out Simon Elliott?”
“Affirmative,” Evan replied.
“I want to talk to him.” Tate tossed a twenty dollar bill onto the table for what amounted to a ten dollar breakfast, grabbed her coat off the seat beside her and walked out.
TA-4, or Sector Task Force Team Alfa-Four, was a 16-man covert unit consisting of ex-JTF2 and ex-SAS, with the odd SEAL thrown in for good measure. Deployed to eliminate a rogue Sector Agent, they had gone missing two months ago, without a trace. The sub-dermal locator beacons implanted in the back of each soldier’s neck had yet to transmit a signal to the satellite.
Suspecting an internal cover-up, General Ogilvie, head of The Sector, had ordered Tate to conduct a clandestine investigation into their own organization. Those orders had come down two weeks ago now and so far she’d come up empty. Someone has scrubbed all data that pertained to TA-4 from the system. The backups for that system were missing. Now, with Freemantle, they had someone who knew about TA-4 and their disappearance. It was the best piece of news she’d heard all year.
“Freemantle’s on leave the past week, according to his file,” Evan explained. “Stress leave. Tommy is uploading his file to your cell phone.”
Tate crossed the road and entered her hotel room. She grabbed her bag and headed out the door to the Jeep. Tossing her bag in the back seat, she headed for the front desk to drop off her room key.
“The order to send in TA-4 was sanctioned by his boss, a man named Greg Parker. He was killed in a single vehicle accident two weeks ago. Brake failure.”
“They shut him up.” Tate tossed the room key onto the counter and headed out the door.
“Most likely,” Evan concurred. “Freemantle was never questioned in the disappearance because it was determined that he’d done his job according to set protocols. Once deployed, he had no further contact with the team, nor would anyone expect him to. Field contact was handled by Lieutenant Dan Jarvis.”
“Also dead,” Tate knew, based off the letter she’d read the night before.
“House fire, the day after Parker was killed,” Evan confirmed. “He smoked and it was determined that the fire was started in the bedroom. Body had to be ID’d by dental records.”
“That much damage to the body, pathologist would have a hard time determining foul play.”
“He had a dislocated shoulder, but the body was found at the base of the stairwell. Coroner doesn’t believe it was an accident.”
“Why not?” Tate asked.
“Someone shot Jarvis in the head.”
Tate frowned, trying to get a picture of the scene in her head. If the house was on fire and Jarvis was racing down the stairs to safety and tripped, he wouldn’t have shot himself in the face before landing at the bottom of the stairs.
“Someone fucked up that cover up,” she decided.
“Yeah, that’s what I reported to Ogilvie. He stressed the need for this case to be solved, quickly.”
Tate ignored that. She was doing as much as she could, with what little information she had to work with. “And Engleton?” she asked.
“No idea. Fiona Engleton disappeared a week ago after her car blew up. Cops think she used the remote starter and it blew the bomb early. She wasn’t in the wreckage and no one was hurt in the blast. They traced her to Toronto and then they lost her.”
“If she’s hiding, she could still be alive.”
“Her passport hasn’t been used since before she disappeared.”
“Family, friends, spouse?”
“Not married and no known boyfriend or girlfriend. No one has filed a missing person’s on her.”
If she had family, either they weren’t close or they knew she was OK. It wasn’t impossible to get a fake passport made, if you knew who to ask and had the money to pay for it.
“What was Fiona’s part in this?” Tate asked.
“She was the head tech in Signals. She monitored the locator beacons of all of the soldiers, for all teams. If a beacon sent out a signal, the bounce back would have gone to her first.”
And she could have passed the information along, or covered it up. Someone would need a very strong incentive to get another person to delete the signals on sixteen missing men.
“I’ll start with Freemantle. He knows he’s a loose end.”
“I’ve got you booked on a flight to Vancouver, leaving in two hours,” Evan continued. “He lives in West Vancouver and, by all appearances, is home now.”
“That puts me over five hours away. Do we have anyone closer?”
“Morrison’s already on the way. He should arrive in an hour.”
“That’ll have to do. I’ll call you when I land.”
South China Seas – Con Dao
Simon Elliott felt three things, very strongly. It was hot as hell and he had the heat rash to prove it. He felt close to an exhaustive collapse. But by far the strongest feeling, at least on an emotional level, was the bitterness raging through him. He’d been set up from the very start and used as a pawn, nothing more. He realized that now, but it was far too late to act on the knowledge. Now he had to react.
The heat was curable; he could leave the islands for a more temperate climate. According to the data he’d found in Godin’s private office, that’s what he’d be doing, very soon. He was more than a little pissed off that he’d missed Godin by less than three days.
The exhaustion could be fixed by getting a little shut-eye. That, too, would be on the way. He would need his wits about him and exhaustion was the enemy of any soldier. He’d been a soldier too long to succumb to it now.
The bitterness, now that would be a more difficult emotion to combat. It welled up inside him until he felt close to choking on it. He knew that Godin held all of the strings, but someone a little lower on the pay scale had to have helped him and that was the person Simon wanted. That person was the reason Simon hadn’t left Godin’s island yet.
If not for the early warning system he’d asked a friend to create, he’d have never known he was being hunted until it was too late. The Sector had sent him out on a mission, dropping him in the middle of Vietnam. Not due at his first check-in for another three days, he’d felt the ping of the GPS unit he kept with him at all times. He’d stared at the screen in disbelief for close to five minutes before he’d comprehended what it meant.
He’d been splintered and one of The Sector’s hit squads would soon be dogging his trail. The locator beacon’s coordinates had a margin of error of ten feet. In the desert, ten feet would mean nothing. In the jungle, it could mean the difference between living and dying.
He had spent two weeks creeping through the jungles of Vietnam, submerged up to his eyes in swamps filled with ev
erything from deadly creatures to deadlier diseases. He’d expected to feel the sting of the sniper’s bullet at any moment. The bullet had never come and that had surprised him. He knew who was coming after him. He’d helped train The Sector’s task force teams. They should have found him. Not that he’d made it easy and he still had a few tricks up his sleeves.
After those first two weeks Simon had found a village doctor with enough skill to cut the locator out of the back of his neck without causing any irreversible damage. He’d destroyed it with a rock and instantly felt invisible. Then he’d gone hunting.
He was looking a little wild. His dark blond hair, already long for a soldier, was getting a little ragged after two months on the run. He had a full beard that the heat made unbearable. His long, lean frame was twenty pounds leaner than usual. His muscles were still strong, but he’d lost what little protective fat he’d carried. The harsh sun had darkened his skin to mahogany. He needed a bath and a change of clothes.
Simon had no idea what had happened to the task force team deployed to track him, but they hadn’t found him. And now he had more pressing matters to see to. The house was empty. Godin had pulled up stakes and moved his operation somewhere else. No one who still resided on the island –just a bunch of thick-necked grunts on patrol – knew anything about the new location. Simon had questioned a few of those men to be certain of that fact.
He’d searched Godin’s office, locked up tight to keep the guards out, but not tight enough to keep Simon out. He’d found a very interesting request for payment on a couple of Akula-class submarines. Not your average mode of transportation, they required a crew to operate them and a large area to hold them in. He found the cavern that Godin had blasted out of the rock, some eighty feet below the house. It was large enough to have housed one submarine, but not both of them. So where was the second one?
Further searching had provided him with two potential locations to check. Simon tucked the papers into an inside pocket. He was about to check out of Hotel Godin when he heard a commotion out in the hall. Flipping the security cameras on, he switched through them until he found one for the hallway outside Godin’s office. The guards were trying to waylay a giant of a man. The barrel of an automatic rifle in their faces gave them pause.
Simon walked over to the hallway door. Beside it was another door leading to the entrance to the cavern below the house. Simon had already explored that avenue and determined that it was a long way down, with no way out, unless he was prepared to go for a swim. He was too damn tired to swim anywhere. But there were plenty of natural crevices he could tuck into, to avoid the intruder. He shut the door behind him and moved down the long hallway.
Tank opened the door to Godin’s office, dragging the two guards behind him. He hadn’t given them enough time to call for backup. He didn’t need the hassles of a full-scale shootout. Dumping their bodies inside the door, he turned his attention to the room. The GPS coordinates that his sister had given him led him to a spot a mile off the coast of this island. Discreet inquiries on the neighboring island of Con Son had given him Godin’s name. Tank already knew who Godin was. The CIA had been trying to eliminate the guy for years. Just when they had an agent in a position to see the job done, the mandate changed. Godin had enough money to hire friends in high places.
Tank opened the doorway to his right and stared down the long hallway. He’d have to examine that further, but his immediate concern was Godin’s current whereabouts. He’d known the instant he’d landed on the island that it was all but deserted. The guards at the marina had been too lax for their boss to still be in residence. A fleet of Jeeps were parked in a lot to the east of the main house, unused.
Tank rifled through the papers on the desk, spotting the same bill of sale that Simon had noticed earlier. A submarine explained how Godin was able to transport the soldiers off the island without any prying eyes watching him. And it would be damn difficult to track. Finding nothing else to aid his search, Tank returned to the second doorway.
The hallway was blasted rock. The narrow passage extended forty feet, opening up into an enormous cavern. Two hundred feet across and six hundred wide, the east side of the cavern led out to the sea. A rough dock had been created on the far side of the cavern. Five small boats and one large cabin cruiser rocked in the gentle current. The middle of the waterway was empty.
Tank didn’t bother descending the staircase to take a closer look at the cavern. He hadn’t found what he was looking for in Godin’s office, but he wasn’t finished with the place yet. Someone on this island had to know where Godin’s alternate hideaways were.
Chapter 5
West Vancouver, BC, Canada
Tate parked her Range Rover along the side of the road, three houses past Freemantle’s. She could see no sign of Morrison or anyone else. Advancing toward the house, she kept an eye on the neighbors. Neither house appeared to be occupied, it being a work day and all. A small gate next to the driveway swung open when she gave it a nudge. Tate slipped inside and pulled her gun from her shoulder holster, keeping it tucked to her thigh. She stopped to set up a motion beacon aimed at the driveway before heading toward the house.
Circling the perimeter of the house, she peered in each of the windows. No movement on the ground floor. That left the second floor. Tate edged up to the patio doors. The right side French door stood open an inch.
Morrison?
She couldn’t be sure. Until she saw him, she would assume hostiles. She pushed the door open far enough to pass through, into the dining room. The open concept provided an uninterrupted view from the kitchen through to the living room. A ticking clock on the wall kept rhythm with her heartbeat.
Having viewed the lower level from the outside, she still took the time to confirm no one lay in wait before heading up the stairs. Tate paused as her head came level with the upper floor. Tucked away at the far side of the house, she had a wall to her back and rooms extending in every other direction. One main hallway, eight feet wide, connected the entire upper floor.
Climbing the remaining half flight of stairs, she smelled it. Blood’s metallic tang hit her like a fist to the face. She was too late. She strode left, down the hall toward the front of the house, peering in the three rooms at the far end. Empty.
She turned and made her way back to the master bedroom which looked to span the entire back half of the house. The door was closed. If anyone was still in the house they would hear her open the door. It was too quiet even for well-oiled hinges not to make a sound.
Safety off and gun up, Tate kicked in the bedroom door with her boot. She went in low, giving the entire area a quick scan. Freemantle’s body was lying in pieces in the middle of the floor. She was too late to get anything out of him. The doors to the closet and bathroom were closed. Striding across the room, she kicked in the closet door. Empty. The bathroom door received the same treatment. Empty.
She returned to the body and studied the damage. Freemantle looked like a cadaver on a slab at the morgue, except that he was lying on his own carpet. His ribs were cracked wide. Each major organ within his body had been severed and removed. They were placed in order, on the outside, as they would have appeared on the inside.
Freemantle hadn’t died easy or, by the looks of the mess, quickly. There would be no supposition of self-termination or accident here. Tate walked over to the body even as she keyed in her mike to contact Evan.
“What do you have?” he asked.
“Freemantle’s dead. Morrison isn’t on scene. Where the hell is he?”
“He should be there,” Evan confirmed.
“If I don’t find him hacked to bits and shoved into the washing machine, I’m going to be pissed. He had plenty of time to get here and stop this.”
“What do you have there?” he asked again.
“A fucking mess. They carved the guy up like a Halloween pumpkin. Everything that belongs inside his torso is now outside of it.”
This wasn’t done purely as a means of
torture. He’d have died long before his heart was cut out. Someone carved him up out of sheer pleasure. “You need to get a team in here. We can’t have the local cops finding this mess.”
“On their way. You’ll wait for them,” Evan told her.
“I’ll have a look around. If Morrison was here, something or someone led him away.”
Tate pulled out her cell phone and called up the blueprints of the house that Tommy had sent her earlier. She had a limited amount of time to search the remainder of the premises before the team showed up. Once they arrived, the house would be sanitized, top to bottom. By the time the team was done, no one would ever know that a human had been carved up on the bedroom floor. If the cops came in afterward, their techs would find nothing traceable to examine.
She had hardly stepped from the bedroom before the motion beacon signaled movement. Keying in her mike, she pinged Evan. “Cleaners have arrived already?” Tate asked. She exited the master bedroom and walked down the hall to one of the front bedrooms. She looked out through the window, down toward the driveway.
“Impossible,” Evan warned her.
Tate watched as a white Econoline van pulled into the driveway and stopped near the front door. Both the front doors opened and two men got out, automatic rifles in hand.
Bolting for the master bedroom, Tate leaped over the body and headed straight for the balcony at the back. Whipping the door open, she hustled down the steps three at a time. Heading away from the house at a sprint, Tate raced alongside the fence that separated the two yards. The fence ran from the street at the front of the house all the way through the side yard and out the back, stopping ten feet from the edge of the water. She’d crossed half the distance of the backyard when someone rounded the house and spotted her.