Termination Orders

by Leo J. Maloney

  “Who has a gun? Alex, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know what he’s talking about, but he says you have to bring the chip, and that you have to come alone and not tell anyone or he’ll kill me. The ankle monitor—he says the code is 254766. He says to come to the barn at the Old Mill Road outside Arlington. Please, Daddy, please—!”

  And someone hung up before she could say any more.

  He heard Lowry’s footsteps, heading back into the room. Morgan stood up as he appeared at the door.

  “I really needed this,” Lowry said, holding up a can of energy drink. Then he spotted the screen. “Hey, Cobra, what did you do there?”

  But Morgan had already made his way behind him and deftly locked him in a sleeper hold. Lowry, whose natural response was not to struggle, was easily subdued and fell unconscious quickly.

  Morgan set him down in the chair and then disconnected the chip from the computer and pocketed it. I give it to Boyle, and then what? he thought. He lets me and my family go? Not likely.

  But what choice did he have?

  He was about to walk out when he saw Lowry’s smart phone on the desk. He had a crazy thought, and a desperate plan began to form in his mind.

  He had to do it. He had to go face off against Boyle. But he wasn’t going in empty-handed.

  CHAPTER 47

  Morgan spotted the grain silo first, towering above the trees, dirty white with rust peeking through the old paint. The air was quiet here, the noises of the city far behind. He stopped at the side of the road. Through the trees, he could catch glimpses of a run-down barn, and he wondered if there was a slaughterhouse here, and at what distance it was possible to hear the screaming of dying cattle. He decided to approach on foot and rolled to a stop.

  Before he got out of the car, he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out his backup gun. Then he picked up Lowry’s phone from the passenger’s seat and looked at its glowing screen. God, he hoped his plan worked. He reached for the ankle monitor. Here goes nothing, he thought, as he reconnected the loop. It began blinking red, while emitting a high-pitched, droning buzz. Someone, somewhere now knew that he was far out of his designated perimeter.

  Morgan got out of the car and zigzagged his way to the barn door, taking cover behind Boyle’s Mercedes, and then running to stand flat against the barn itself. He peered through the cracks in the decaying planks that made up the wall. Light filtering in through the crumbling roof revealed Boyle standing in the hayloft, holding a weapon in his hand, his eyes fixed nervously on the door. Alex was there, too, sitting beside him on a bale of hay and sobbing quietly. If it were anyone else, he would go in guns blazing. But not this time, not while Boyle had Alex.

  He pulled the heavy barn door, and it creaked loudly. The drifting dust motes glowed in shafts of sunlight that poured inside. He walked in, hands raised. Boyle moved fast, grabbing Alex by her hair and holding his gun under her chin.

  “Cobra!” said Boyle, looking down at him from the hayloft. “How nice of you to show.”

  “Dad!” screamed Alex.

  “Stay calm, sweetie,” said Morgan. “I’m going to take care of this. It’s going to be okay.”

  “You got a gun, Cobra?”

  He reached for his weapon, tucked in the rear of his pants at the base of his back, and, holding it by the muzzle, dropped it at his feet.

  “Kick it away.”

  Morgan did. It scraped noisily against the dirty barn floor.

  “And the chip?” said Boyle.

  He took the small black square from his pocket and held it up for Boyle to see.

  “I’ve got a little something else, too,” said Morgan, and he took Lowry’s phone out of his shirt pocket. “Marvelous things, these phones. Did you know I can get an Internet connection all the way out here? Did you know, in fact, that I can send an e-mail to the editors of every major newspaper with the click of this one tiny little green button?”

  Boyle glared at him, understanding plainly what Morgan was really telling him. Morgan went on.

  “There were an awful lot of incriminating files on that chip. It would be a shame if a handful of them happened to be attached when this e-mail message goes out.”

  “You’re bluffing!” said Boyle. “There were layers of encryption on that chip. There’s no way you could have broken it already.”

  “No, there’s no way. Unless, of course, I happened to know the password.”

  Boyle glowered, his eyes slits, and then burst into derisive laughter. “Nice try, Cobra. But you’re a rat backed into a corner. There’s nothing you wouldn’t say to escape. Do you really expect me to fall for that?”

  “ ‘You failed, and now I’m sending Wagner to finish what you couldn’t do, Natasha.’ Sound familiar, Boyle?”

  Boyle’s gloating expression took an apprehensive turn, and he looked at Morgan in angry, stunned silence. Then he screamed, “Drop the phone. Drop it now! Or the little bitch gets it!”

  “You touch a hair on her head—”

  “And what?” Boyle pulled harder on Alex’s hair, and she whimpered. The two men looked at each other in silence, furious. Then Boyle said, “You think I care about my reputation as much as you care about your daughter, Cobra?” Morgan just looked at him, concentrating to keep his anger in check. In another situation, he might try to go for his gun and shoot. But if he did, he knew Alex would be the first to die.

  “See, Cobra, that’s your problem. Your attachment to your family. It stops you from going all-out. Keeps you from taking the risks that made you a great operative. Keeps you from making the hard decisions.”

  “Like you did, Boyle? Betraying your country? Was that a hard decision?”

  “You don’t know the first thing about patriotism, Cobra,” he fumed. “You risked your life, yes, but you hid behind your code name. You still do. And you never had to make the decision to kill a person, or twenty. You just followed orders. You were never ultimately responsible for the security of this country. You have never made a decision to kill fifty people today to save a hundred tomorrow. You don’t know what it means to make that kind of decision!” In his anger, he pulled Alex’s hair. She sobbed.

  “Look, Boyle, I don’t care,” said Morgan. “You did what you did for your own reasons, and I don’t give a shit what they are. I just want my daughter back. So I’m forcing a draw. You toss away your gun, and we make the exchange. My daughter for the phone.”

  “Are there any more copies?”

  “This is the only one,” said Morgan.

  “Suppose I believe you. How do I know that no one at the Agency has seen this?”

  “Do you really think that they would let me come out here alone?” said Morgan. “This place would be swarming with Feds if I had told them.”

  “How do I know it isn’t?” said Boyle.

  “If it is,” said Morgan, “then you’ve already lost.”

  Boyle watched him, as if mulling it over, and then said, “Okay. Come up. Slowly.”

  “Lose the gun first,” said Morgan.

  Boyle tossed it behind him, and it hit the wooden loft with a thud. Morgan walked to the ladder that was propped up against the loft and climbed, slowly, his eyes steadily on Boyle and his daughter, who was no longer sobbing but still shaking.

  Finally, he stood on the loft, about fifteen feet away from Alex, facing Boyle. The wooden floor seemed shaky, the wood itself rotted through. Morgan took a step toward him.

  “Easy now,” said Boyle. Morgan looked at the phone in his hand and then at Boyle. He had gotten close to Boyle and, more important, to Alex, But this was about as far as his plan went. Now he had to improvise.

  “So what are we going to do once we make the exchange, Boyle?” It was an awkward question, but then again, they were far past social niceties.

  “I should ask you the same, Cobra. How can I believe that you’ll just back off?”

  “Give me my daughter, Boyle, and I disappear. I take the blame, just like you planne
d. The operative gone rogue. You go back to selling out your country, to being some senator’s bitch, and you never hear from me again.”

  Boyle cringed in anger at his words. “And suppose I don’t believe you?”

  “What do you think I’m going to do, Boyle? You control the intelligence. I give you the chip, and it’s the last bit of evidence that connects you with any of this. I disappear as a fugitive. Who’s going to believe anything I say?”

  As Boyle paused, thinking, Morgan gave Alex a look that he hoped would be comforting. It will be all right, he wanted to say. I’ll die before I let anything happen to you.

  “So do we have an understanding?” Morgan said instead. “Give me my daughter, and we all walk out of here unscathed. After that, I disappear.”

  Boyle nodded. Morgan approached him, one tiny step at a time. He extended his hand holding the cell phone and the chip. Alex was just beyond his arm’s reach.

  Morgan tossed him the phone, then the chip, and Boyle shoved Alex forward into her father’s arms. Morgan’s stare never left Boyle, whose eyes went wide as he examined the phone and realized Morgan’s deception. He looked fiercely at Morgan for a split second, and then his hatred erupted in a determined lunge to recover his gun.

  Morgan pushed his daughter to the side into a bale of hay. He rushed at Boyle, hitting him in his midsection. They toppled over together and hit the loft floor hard. It splintered under their weight, and they fell through the stale air.

  Morgan hit the ground hard and then felt piercing, disorienting pain. His bad knee had made contact first and absorbed much of the impact. After lying for a few moments dazed and in pain, he tried to get up but stumbled, falling facedown in the dirt.

  He raised his head and saw Boyle on his feet, panting, incensed. He limped to the nearest wall, where several rusty farm implements were hanging, and grabbed a large, rusty machete. Morgan tried to get up again, but again the pain was too much, and his knee buckled.

  Boyle shuffled back, his fist wrapped tightly around the handle of the machete. With a great roar of triumph, he raised the machete over his head, ready to strike.

  Alex’s voice pierced the air. “Stop!”

  She yelled it through her tears but still sounded commanding and self-assured. Boyle froze and turned around slowly. She had come down from the hayloft and picked up Morgan’s gun, which was now in her trembling hand. Boyle took a step toward her.

  “Stay back!” she screamed, no longer tearing up. She was angry. Enraged. And it seemed to give her power. “Stay back, or I’ll shoot!”

  “Do you know,” said Boyle, panting, “how to use one of those?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s just point and shoot,” she said with resolute bitterness.

  “There’s a little more to it than that,” Boyle told her. “Put it down, little girl, or you might hurt yourself.”

  She sneered at him. “I’m not a little girl.” And she squeezed the trigger.

  One shot—BAM!—hit Boyle squarely in the chest, and a red bloom grew on his shirt around the wound. He stammered, as if to say something, and then he fell as if the ground had shifted beneath his feet.

  “Dad!” Alex exclaimed, and she ran over to him. He had crawled to the wall of the barn and was leaning against it, next to the hanging tools, trying to get up on his own. She extended her hand and helped him to his feet.

  “You know something, kid?” He was half hugging, half leaning on her for support and glowing with pride. “You’re my hero.” She beamed and hugged him.

  Morgan almost didn’t see him. Boyle, blood-drenched, had staggered to his feet, machete in hand. He was breathing in wheezing gasps, and his eyes were wide like a cornered animal’s. With an inhuman scream, he raised the machete and charged. Alex screamed.

  Morgan, with no time to think, grabbed the first thing his hands found on the wall—a pitchfork. He swung it to parry Boyle’s attack, but the man didn’t stop. His own momentum impaled him on the rusty tines of the pitchfork. They broke through his flesh and pierced him upward, from his gut into his chest. The machete dropped to the ground. He let out a weak grunt, gurgled, and tipped over onto his side, twitching, the pitchfork still sticking out of his torso.

  Crying again, Alex fell into Morgan’s arms.

  “It’s okay,” he said, holding her tightly. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay now.”

  “Daddy,” she said, sobbing, “can we go home now?”

  “Yes, honey,” he said, as he heard distant police sirens approaching. “We can go home.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Edgar Nickerson looked out the plane’s window at the fields far below. They were over—what?—Alabama? Tennessee? In any case, it was flyover country. He looked for Vinson to ask him, but Vinson was up in the cockpit with the pilot.

  For the past hour or so, Nickerson had been replaying the same scene in his head, again and again—Cobra, bloody and tied to a chair, right in front of him. Except now, in the vision in his head, there was no offer. This time, Nickerson didn’t leave, didn’t entrust Natasha with the task of killing him. Instead, Nickerson himself killed the agent, each time a different way—a bullet to the head, a knife to the gut, a length of pipe, a two-by-four.

  He tried to suppress those thoughts and relax. Fine, Boyle was out, and the CIA had some dirt on him. So what? They wouldn’t go public with it, not the CIA, and in this business, it was the votes that counted. And fine, that goddamn McKay would get her law passed. After the assassination attempt, she had a Swiss bank’s worth of political capital. Yes, that would hamper his influence in Congress and probably necessitate that he sever all his dealings with Acevedo. And even if, in the worst-case scenario, this shit did go public, he’d be gone long before they could grab him, and he’d live out his days in a tropical paradise with more money than he could count. And as worst-case scenarios went, how bad was that, really?

  His reverie was interrupted by a sinking feeling in his gut. The plane was losing altitude, fast enough for him to notice. He was about to shout for Vinson when the man emerged from the cockpit, calmly strapping himself into a parachute.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Nickerson, gripped with fear. “Is the plane going to crash?”

  “Yeah, ’fraid it is,” said Vinson, without looking up from adjusting the ties on the parachute.

  “What did the pilot say?”

  “Pilot’s dead,” said Vinson. “And the autopilot is a couple of seconds away from getting fried.”

  “What? Then what are you waiting for? Give me a parachute!”

  Nickerson got up from his seat, but before he could take a step, Vinson drew his gun.

  “You want to stay in your seat.” He motioned with the firearm, and Nickerson sat back down.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Don’t take it personally, now, boss. It’s just business.”

  “Who’s paying you? How much? I’ll double it!”

  “Sorry, Ed, but you can’t pay me enough. You’re out. History. And I’m not hitching my wagon to a dead horse.” Vinson pulled down the lever to the cabin door, braced himself, and with a heave, opened it.

  A buzzing alarm rang, and the emergency lights tinted everything red as air rushed out, sending loose sheets of paper and cups flying; then the roaring wind began, a hurricane inside the tiny jet’s cabin. Vinson, holding fast on to a hand strap, gave him a little wave, and then he was gone, out into the blue expanse.

  The plane bucked wildly. Nickerson held on, white-knuckled, to his armrest, tying to remember the emergency positions on the card he never read. Then the plane pitched into a nosedive straight down, lifting him from his seat so that he was held down only by the seat belt, so hard that he wondered whether the force might be enough to break every bone in his body. Squinting his watering eyes, he glanced out the window just in time to see the ground, so close, he could make out individual branches on the trees, reaching up at him like a giant hand swatting him out of the sky. Nickerson closed his ey
es and hoped that it would be quick.

  CHAPTER 49

  Morgan and his daughter were brought back to CIA headquarters in handcuffs while a team stayed back to analyze the scene. They had to practically pull Alex away from him when they separated them for one-on-one questioning. Morgan went over the story in detail and produced Natasha’s chip along with the password to access it. Then they locked him up in a holding cell, only to return a short while later to get him for further interrogation. Finally, they locked him up and left him in holding overnight.

  The next day, they let Conley talk to him under heavy supervision.

  “Jenny and Alex are together, and they’re okay,” said Conley. “From what they told me, which, granted, was not a whole damn lot, they’ll let you out once they determine that the recordings on Natasha’s chip are legit. What I do know is that there’s a hell of a lot on it. More than we could have hoped—a heck of a lot more than the memory card we started with. I think we’re going to nail Acevedo good. Hang in there, Morgan. You’ll be out soon.”

  It was another day before they called him out of confinement again, and this time he sat down at a table with Julia Carr, who looked both weary and hardened by the recent events.

  “Cobra, we need to know that we can count on your help in this time of crisis,” she said. “There’s a lot of turmoil in the agency at the moment, and we are hoping to be able to deal with it . . . in-house.”

  “I see,” said Morgan. “So you’re here to negotiate my silence—is that it?”

  “We were hoping we could appeal to your loyalty and patriotism in the matter,” she said. Then, with a thin smile, she added, “Or, failing that, your self-interest.”

  He didn’t smile back. “There are two things I’m going to need from you,” he said. “First, my file is purged. I walk out of here accused of no crime, and the CIA never bothers me or my family again. Is that clear?”

  She nodded. “That can be arranged. And the other?”

  “I need to know that Nickerson and Acevedo are going down. Keep secret what you have to keep secret, but they do not get away with what they did. Deal?”