The Sector

by Kari Nichols

  “It may be too little, too late. You said terminations, plural,” he reminded her.

  “Dan Jarvis was killed in his home. Shot to death and then his house was set on fire. He was responsible for the team once they were in the field. He took the brunt of the blame for their disappearance. He came to me after we’d activated the team’s locators and wanted to know why they weren’t working.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I mentioned that they were the upgraded locators and they hadn’t been field tested, because some of the higher ups wanted them in, straight away. He demanded to know who the driving force in that was.”

  “And you told him,” Tank assumed.

  “Yeah, I told him. I never trusted Mark Blackburn, but I didn’t think he’d do something like this. I don’t know how he’d do it.”

  “Because you’re not familiar with the dark side of people. You’re a good person who likes to believe the best in everyone.”

  “I need to be more of a skeptic, like you,” she teased.

  “It’s not skepticism, it’s realism. Especially in this industry. I probably lean too far the other way, but at least it keeps me alive.”

  “I’m still alive,” she reminded her brother.

  “Yeah, but if you hadn’t stopped for that coffee you’d have been inside that car when it blew.” The idea of her sitting there, halfway across the world where he couldn’t protect her, nagged at him.

  Emily didn’t want to continue. She could hear the worry in his voice, even if he didn’t say anything about it. But her honesty won out. “I just learned that Walter Freemantle was killed. I knew he wasn’t going to make it.”

  “How did you know?”

  “He ran, but he didn’t hide. He took stress leave and went to his home in Vancouver. Everyone who knew him knows he had a place there.”

  “And where are you, right now?”

  Emily cringed. “Your apartment.”

  Tank barely managed to keep from swearing out loud. He took a deep breath before he felt confident about speaking in a rational voice. “You can’t stay there. Even if they don’t know your real name now, they’ll discover it. Use one of your fake passports and get out of the country.”

  “I thought about going to London,” Emily began, only to get cut off.

  “Not London. They have too damn many CCTV cameras. If they find you there, you won’t have the experience to get hidden again. Go to Paris, or Milan. They’re big enough places to get lost in without all the prying eyes.”

  “I’ll book a flight as soon as I get off the phone with you,” Emily promised.

  ***

  Godin walked through the submarine into the main engine room. Finn had taken over a small workbench to continue his trials with the locators. Pieces of wire, various tools and tiny electrical components lay scattered across the work surface. A pool of solder had dripped to the floor and hardened. Finn looked like a mad scientist with his magnifying goggles on and the solder gun in his hand.

  Godin tapped him on the shoulder and waited for the man’s full attention. “Explain to me what happened with yesterday’s experiment,” Godin ordered.

  Finn jumped up and whipped the goggles off. Picking up his glasses, he ran a dirty hand through his hair, messing it further. “It should have worked,” he murmured.

  Godin backhanded him across the face, sending him crashing into his workbench. Finn’s glasses flew off his face and hit the floor. Grabbing Finn by the hair, Godin raised him up until he stood on his tiptoes. He leaned in close to Finn’s face. “I have had enough of your errors. You agreed to crack the self-destruct codes in The Sector’s locator beacon. This has not happened. Are you incapable of completing this task?”

  “I can do it,” Finn argued. If he said he couldn’t do it, Godin would toss him out a torpedo hole without benefit of any scuba gear. He didn’t know what would happen to his body at 300 meters below sea level, but knew it would not be pretty.

  They’d parked the sub just off the coast of an island in the Kuril chain, per Finn’s request. Godin had been harping away for results and Finn had felt certain he could deliver them this time. And he’d failed. They’d sent a soldier into the water and let him swim away. And he’d just kept on swimming. They’d had to deactivate the signal jammer again to find the guy. With McMaster dead, the codes for the self-destruct had died with him. This was good news for Finn. It forced Godin to keep him around. The bad news was that he hadn’t determined the frequency for the secondary GPS burst yet. He needed to track a burst in order to analyze the frequency it used. When they’d deactivated the jammer, Samuelson’s active locator had shot both signals out. One bounced back to them, but the other made it to the outside world. At least he could now add the second signal to his blind.

  Finn had expected Godin to order his men to kill the soldier and leave his body wherever it was. Instead they’d tracked his location and brought him back to the sub. They’d even allowed him to shower off after his swim. He’d been in a dry suit, but his head and his hands had been bare. The shower would have moderated his body temperature. Godin’s reasons for sparing the soldier were simple. They needed to keep enough soldiers around until they had those codes, to ensure they had locators to test on.

  They’d left Kuril the day before and were pushing hard for northern Russia. Finn would get no more pit stops before their arrival, no matter how much confidence he had in his work.

  “We will arrive at our final destination in three days. I will expect you to have a working demonstration of your modifications by then. Do not disappoint me again.” Godin turned and walked back out the hatch and returned to his private quarters.

  Finn collapsed into his chair, sweat beading across his forehead. Godin would only put up with so many excuses before he killed Finn and found someone else who could get the job done quicker. Blackburn was looking for that someone already. Finn’s own replacement at The Sector was reputed to have those skills. Fuck Morrison for telling Blackburn that. He’d put their whole plan into jeopardy. And fuck Blackburn for not talking his way out of the corner he’d gotten himself into with Godin. Now they were all scrambling to misdirect Godin long enough to put the final touches on their own plan. Finn would be rich, if he could just stay alive long enough.

  ***

  “Got another plan?” Piggy asked, his eyes still watering.

  Warp sighed, his split lip still bleeding. The guards had come to take them to the mess for dinner. Once three of their men had been unchained from the wall and chained together, they had attacked. Warp, Piggy and Samuelson had managed to kill two soldiers and incapacitate three before one of the guards outside the room had tossed a can of tear gas into the room and closed the door.

  When the door had opened again, no one had entered. A lone Russian stood at the door with a gun. Warp had never seen the likes of this gun before. The man had shot each of them with a dart that knocked them out cold. It had happened so fast they couldn’t react quick enough to counter the move.

  When he’d come to, he was once again chained to the wall, only this time he’d not been fed. That looked to be their punishment. No shots had been fired when they’d attacked the guards. It told them a lot. They were needed alive.

  At least for now.

  When that changed, Warp knew that every one of them would die. He needed to come up with a plan before then.

  “I’m working on it,” he said with more confidence than he was feeling.

  ***

  Mapleton, Maine

  It was after 10pm when Tate arrived at the airport in Presque Isle. The house in Maine was the third on the list that Tommy had sent her. An aunt held the title, but a quick search showed she paid her taxes in Georgia. Tate left the terminal and walked out to the parking lot, looking for her ride. The place was deserted, so he wasn’t hard to find.

  Morrison was leaning against a brand new Range Rover, smoking a cigarette. Evan had tracked him down twelve hours after the mess in West Vancouve
r. He’d followed the hitter – some Russian unknown – to the airport and hadn’t had a chance to check in before he’d boarded a plane to keep the man in sight. Evan had let Morrison sit on the man for two days before calling him off. In that time the Russian had spoken to no one and taken no visitors.

  “Those things will kill you,” Tate said, referring to his cigarettes. She had never picked up the habit. Cigarettes could leave DNA behind, not that hers existed in any computer, anywhere. She tossed her bag into the back seat.

  Morrison smiled and flicked the cigarette away. Stepping away from the Rover, he came over and bumped his body into hers, nudging her against the back door.

  She let him get his hands on her. He had great hands. She happened to know that he had great everything and he knew how to use it. Heat flashed through her, but she tamped it down.

  “You got time for me?” he asked, biting her earlobe.

  “Nope, got a strict deadline,” she replied.

  He leaned back to look down at her, the question in his eyes, but she didn’t answer. Stepping back, he nodded and smiled. “Next time, then.”

  “Sure.”

  They both knew next time could be a week away or a year away. It was the nature of the business. Morrison headed toward a tan Toyota Corolla parked at the other end of the lot.

  Tate hopped in the SUV and closed the door. A backpack sat on the floor in front of the passenger seat. There’d be a case in back with her preferred weapons.

  The backpack carried an industrial flashlight, high magnification night vision binoculars and a map of the area. The case held a Sig with two 15-round magazines. Picking up the map to learn her way, she started the Rover and headed out of the airport parking lot. Mapleton lay west of Presque Isle and Emily lived on Sunrise Circle.

  She was there in less than fifteen minutes. Sunrise Circle literally turned in a circle. It returned to the same road, which linked up to Pelkey Rd and then on to the main road in Mapleton which was called, appropriately enough, Mapleton Road. The woman’s house was on the outside of the circle, at the southeast corner of the curve. Set back from the road, her house nestled up against a small forest of trees.

  Her house faced west. The whole of Sunrise Circle was home to four houses with a few acres in between each one. The lights were off in Emily’s house. Tate made a quick circuit around the outside of the house. All doors were locked; all windows had a piece of wood wedged in the frame.

  Tate took a slow drive through the neighborhood. Each driveway had at least one large truck in it. Most houses were dark. No one walked the streets. Coming around the circle, she parked her car opposite Emily’s house and settled in to wait.

  One hour went by, then two, then three. Nothing moved. If Emily was home, she’d be asleep. Stowing the NV binoculars in the backpack and tucking the Sig into the waistband at her back, she grabbed her sunglasses and headed across the street.

  Tate switched her glasses to NV and panned the area. The quality of the image was greatly improved over the goggles she'd used back in her Army days. Tate completed a full circuit of the house, switching from NV to IR and EM-scan.

  Everything was clean and quiet. The first two houses she'd checked off her list had had a definite lived-in look about them. People had been home, the lawns had the typical detritus most families kept lying around. The farmhouse was the first place that Tate had gotten a good feeling about. On the run and trying to keep ahead of a hitman, Emily wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere near her family. Mapleton, Maine felt like the middle of nowhere and with so few neighbors around, it looked it, too. The chances of innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire would be minimal.

  Tate scanned the rear door for wires, but didn't see any. Pulling her lock picks from an inside pocket, she had the door unlatched inside two minutes. The security system was not armed, which set off an alarm inside Tate's head. Someone as savvy about electronics as Emily was wouldn't forget to set it. Tate grabbed the pistol from the small of her back and flipped the safety off.

  The rear door led into a mudroom, with the kitchen beyond that. Tate cleared both rooms, scanning the inside of the house with her glasses. She cleared the main floor of the farmhouse in less than a minute and continued upstairs to the second floor landing. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom, all of which had their doors closed. Tate walked to the end of the hall and started with the master bedroom, leaving the door open when she was done. She cleared the second floor.

  Returning to the main floor, she was about to go back into the home office when she heard the sound of an engine firing up outside. Running through the living room to the front of the house, Tate watched as a pickup truck raced up the street, all of its lights off. Tate gave the front entrance a quick check through her glasses before ripping the door off its hinges and bolting across the dirt driveway.

  The bomb exploded when she was a foot from the SUV. The concussive force blew her into the side door. Tate turned at the last second so her right shoulder would take the brunt of the impact. The house had been reduced to a pile of rubble. The bomb had been large enough to erase everything inside the house and within a fifty foot radius of it. The evergreen trees at the back of Emily’s house were engulfed in flames. Debris scattered halfway down the block.

  The bomber must have placed it outside, knowing it was strong enough to destroy everything. If it hadn’t been such a quiet town she wouldn’t have heard the truck engine starting. She would have been inside when the bomb blew.

  Tate checked the neighbors’ houses to see if any were coming to investigate. A twinge in her left arm caught her attention. There was a piece of house shrapnel sticking out of her jacket. It looked like glass, probably from a side window. She knew better, but she pulled it out anyway.

  Opening the driver’s side door, she hopped in, started the SUV and drove away. She didn’t need to sit around and wait for the police to arrive. Tate drove toward Pelkey Road, watching for any cars nearby, but the road was deserted. She took a left onto Mapleton Road and headed toward Ashland and Highway 95. It was the quickest way out of the area.

  With her body banged up and her arm bleeding, Tate recalled her good feeling about the farmhouse and wondered if she needed to get her head examined. The only way she could have been more wrong about that house was if she’d been inside when the bomb blew. She pulled her phone from her jacket and set it in the docking station on the dash. She pressed the power button to turn it on and the screen lit up. Using the voice activated function, she called Evan.

  Tate started talking the minute he picked up. “The house is gone. Obliterated and it damn near took me with it.”

  “What happened?”

  “They waited until I was in the house and then they set up a bomb on the outside, near as I can tell, anyway.”

  “They?” he asked.

  “I saw two heads in the pickup truck as it was barreling down the road away from the house. One was the bomber, the other probably a lookout. Their directive is either coming from outside The Sector or someone wants me gone but doesn’t want to leave a trail.”

  It took a lot of work to splinter an agent and that work left a paper trail. Two people had to sign off on what essentially turned into a manhunt until the agent was terminated. A team of 16 highly trained soldiers were sent out with a GPS unit tied to the locator beacon in the back of her neck. The beacon would be activated and the team would start the hunt. In the past, 45 agents had been marked for termination and only two had ever managed to outrun their hit squads. Tate figured her chances were fair to middling, but didn’t want to put it to the test.

  “How big a mess did you leave behind?” Evan asked her.

  “It wasn’t my idea.” She cringed at the defensive tone in her voice. “I took some shrapnel and there may be some blood on the ground because of it. I’ll need a few stitches. You got anyone local who can see to it?”

  “Give me a second.”

  She could hear clicking in the background. Evan would s
leep with his computer while she was working this job.

  “How far are you from Waterville, Maine?” Evan asked.

  Tate keyed in the GPS on her phone and added Waterville as her destination. “It’s three hours from here.”

  “Can you make it that long?” Evan asked.

  “Yeah, give me the address.” He rifled off an address and she added the new information to her GPS’s destination.

  “Gibson is a GP and he’s Sector. Pull around to the side of his house. I’ll get Tommy working to see if your SUV is being looked for. I’ll call Gibson to let him know you’re on your way.”

  “Thanks, Evan.”

  “No problem. Anything else you need from me?”

  “No. I’ll call you when I’m on the road again.” Tate disconnected the call and settled in for a long drive.

  Chapter 8

  Off the northeast coast of Japan, near Habomai

  Tank rested his elbows on the rickety table, his movements clumsy with the drink. He plunked his face into his hands and stared blearily at the rest of the patrons. He’d spent ten hours in this little shithole on the wharf and he’d been drinking the entire time. He’d washed down the salty peanuts with watered down beer. It tasted like swilling piss, and for all he knew that was exactly what they were serving him.

  Tank had pinpointed the coordinates that Emily had given him to an area in between two of the larger islands just beyond Japan’s northernmost shores. He’d spent the previous day watching the area and spotted the fishing boats that had traveled through the waters, but hadn’t stopped. He’d followed them as they’d returned to their home port and had asked around for information about the area.