What next, then? It all felt like an amusement park ride. He was strapped in, unable to climb off, and thoroughly apprehensive.
But it wasn’t accurate to say that he wanted it to stop. There was a sizable portion of his psyche that craved the attention, intrigue, and extremes of his precarious position, perched between two powerful interests that seemed to be at war with each other.
Sure, he might end up dead, but that wasn’t terribly different than the semi-stasis of his cubicle at the embassy, shuffling sterile and boring economic reports around while ignoring barrages of meaningless email from his coworkers.
He knew that his burgeoning buzz gave him a much more stoic attitude toward the risks and unpleasantness, and he needed only to twist his torso to remind himself just how uncomfortable things could become. His lower back was still covered in painful scars from his introduction to Quinn a few nights earlier.
But as the alcohol helped remove the sharp edges from his situation, his wounds served only to punctuate the relative excitement of his new reality, unreal as it might be.
It could always be worse, he thought. I could be sitting at my desk.
Which reminded him that he needed to call his supervisor at the embassy to extend his sick leave. He eyed the telephone, but immediately thought better of it. Maria had been more than a little angry about his ill-advised phone call the evening prior. He made a mental note to bring it up with her, whenever she emerged from her sequestration in the apartment’s second master suite.
It didn’t take long. The door opened, and Maria stepped into the hallway, transformed. She had been gorgeous when he met her, wearing tight-fitting casual clothing that had stirred his dormant heterosexual appetite, but she was resplendent now.
She wore a long, black gown that followed her body’s perfect contours to just below the knees, then flared elegantly toward the ankle. An improbably large diamond teardrop hung suspended just above her décolletage, punctuating the gown’s plunging neckline and threatening to disappear between her breasts at any moment. Her dark eyes smoldered, framed by long, dark lashes and smoky shadows.
Kittredge was taken aback. Hidden inside yesterday’s tomboy was a true international beauty. “Oh my God,” he said.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, offering a slight but reluctant smile. She straightened his tie as she walked past him toward the coffee pot. “You clean up nicely yourself.”
Kittredge heard the sound of the apartment door opening, and saw a blur of motion where Maria stood. He had no idea where she’d hidden it, but she produced a snub-nosed pistol and trained it at the hallway opening.
A deep male voice spoke in Spanish, which Kittredge translated roughly as, “The only pace is a suicide pace.” The phrase made no sense to him.
Maria responded instantly, however. “And today is a good day to die.” More spy shit, Kittredge realized.
Four men rounded the corner into the apartment’s posh kitchen. They wore suits identical to the one Maria had picked out for him.
A fifth man, older, grayer, and more distinguished, followed in something that was more formal than normal business attire, but somehow not quite a tuxedo. Extremely stylish, in a throwback sort of way, the gay man in Kittredge observed instantly.
All five men embraced Maria warmly, as if they were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while. But for a few glances that were just shy of openly frosty, they ignored Kittredge completely. He got the feeling that he was responsible for the morning’s exertions.
The distinguished-looking gentleman addressed him in flawless English. “Señor Kittredge, we will all leave here together. You will pretend to be part of a security entourage escorting Maria and myself through the lobby of the bank.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and produced an earpiece. “Wear this,” he said, handing it to Kittredge.
“Your job will be only to keep your rather large mouth shut and walk next to Alejandro.” He nodded to the largest of his compatriots, who smiled perfunctorily.
“Where are we going?” Kittredge asked.
The distinguished gentleman let loose a small, annoyed chuckle. “Maria was right. You ask too many questions. We are moving because you have compromised this location. As Maria explained last night, communications from here are generally secure. But when you contact a communications node that is under surveillance, such as the intensive care unit of DC General Hospital, it is possible with time and resources to trace the origin of the call. Our adversaries have both time and resources.”
“I’m sorry,” Kittredge said. “I didn’t realize. . .” His sentence faded away under the glare of the man’s hard gaze.
“It was a risk we took. You are inexperienced and impulsive. We will control you more closely in the future.”
He glanced at Kittredge’s cocktail. “Finish your breakfast. It is time for us to go.”
Kittredge took his place at the tail end of the entourage, walking in tandem with Alejandro, a mountain of a Venezuelan. He noticed that the other men wearing earpieces put their fingers to their ears, straining to hear instructions, but Kittredge’s earpiece was completely silent. For show only, he realized. He was along for the ride, again.
It was an interesting and exciting environment, but he resented his role as tyro. He realized that he wanted to be an insider, someone in the know, someone important in a difficult and harsh world, someone leading an inexperienced newbie by the hand, inspiring awe with his nonchalant gravitas.
Gaining that sort of importance would take time, undoubtedly. But he felt a deep desire to become the kind of person he was now following, the distinguished man in the almost-tuxedo, surrounded by heavies, an international beauty adorning his arm.
Their foray through the Banco de Caracas lobby was brief and anticlimactic, though they drew stares from everyone. Anonymity through ostentation, Kittredge thought. What an interesting phenomenon.
The front two “security men” opened the doors for the rest of the entourage, and Kittredge saw three black Suburbans parked at the curb as he exited the bank building. Maria and the older guy – Rojo was his name, if Kittredge had overheard correctly during the group’s pre-departure conversation – piled into the second Suburban in line.
Three security men climbed into the driver’s seats of the three Suburbans.
Kittredge was momentarily confused about what to do, but he felt Alejandro’s strong grip on his arm, leading him toward a white sedan at the tail end of the procession. Alejandro opened the rear passenger’s side door for him, and Kittredge climbed in.
The front and rear seats of the sedan were separated by thick Plexiglass. As Kittredge fastened his seatbelt, he noticed that there were no door handles. He got a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Apparently, Rojo wasn’t bullshitting about controlling him more closely.
Was he now a prisoner?
It certainly had that vibe about it.
43
El Jerga – The Shiv – was thankful that the Friday morning sun had finally climbed high enough in the sky to no longer be reflected into his eye by the rearview mirror as he headed west. He was near Pittsburgh, a name that he thought apropos, if his single job in Pittsburgh years ago had provided a representative sampling of the kind of life available in the rough post-industrial town.
Pittsburgh wasn’t his destination for the day. He motored westward, being careful to drive neither too fast nor too slow. His papers were authentic-looking, but were merely expensive forgeries. He didn’t stand a chance if anyone checked them against a database of real green cards, so he didn’t crave the attention of a traffic cop or state patrolman. His organization had yet to fully adapt to the new realities of the digital age, but he knew that El Grande was working hard to rectify the potentially crippling shortfalls.
His watch alarm beeped. Time to check in. His careful route planning paid off, and he was within two exits of the rest stop.
He pulled off the highway and parked near the
brick structure housing the restrooms, ensuring that the nose of his car pointed south.
He retrieved a laptop computer and a strange-looking antenna from his trunk, set both in the passenger’s seat, and powered on the laptop. He set the antenna on the dashboard and raised it at an angle, pointing it in the general vicinity of the geosynchronous communications satellites he sought. He plugged the antenna into the USB port of the laptop computer, locked the car door, and availed himself of the restroom while the system initialized.
When he returned, a nondescript welcome screen encouraged him to enter his thirty-two-digit case-sensitive password. El Jerga complied, entering a collection of unrelated Spanish and English words. It wasn’t perfectly secure, he knew, but it was a damn sight better than in the old days.
Twenty-two thousand miles above the equator, the telecommunications satellite mulled his logon request. Surreal, he thought.
After several seconds, the distant satellite granted him access to the network, and he opened a normal web browser window, into which he typed a twelve-digit IP address. It was the equivalent of a computer’s mailing address, and the particular computer with which he desired to communicate, which was physically located somewhere in South America, was ready and waiting for him.
The communications portal looked like an old-school web chatroom, though that similarity was lost on El Jerga. He’d never been an online kind of guy, until forced by his increasingly tech-savvy employers.
The cursor flashed expectantly at him, but he strictly obeyed the communications protocol: no typing, except in response to a query from his handlers.
At precisely seven minutes after seven a.m. Eastern, a message appeared on the chat board: “Good morning. Please authenticate.”
El Jerga typed a separate password, also thirty-two digits in length, and waited for his handler’s response.
It came a little over a minute later. “Difficult news follows.” A photograph slowly loaded, its encoded form traveling through open air and space for over forty-five thousand miles.
As the screen slowly filled, El Jerga was filled with a growing sense of dread. His fears were fully realized when the photograph’s final pixels arrived. His throat constricted in the familiar place, and his hands shook with rage.
The photograph showed a face he hadn’t seen in months, but one he’d known and loved since childhood, dressed in a tan jacket and red scarf, lying lifeless on a bed of grass and fallen autumn leaves.
“When?” El Jerga typed.
“Sunday.”
“You waited this long to tell me?”
“I’m sorry,” the typed message eventually said. “It took this long to confirm it was him. I will see to it that you avenge him.”
Like you have any say in the matter, El Jerga seethed.
His uncle had raised him since he was a boy, after his father died in the oilfield uprising. He had followed his uncle into the clandestine services, which had led him to loyalties of both necessity and convenience in a difficult journey that had ultimately revealed, cultivated, and refined his unique talents and proclivities.
“Send the picture.” El Jerga typed, hands still shaking.
“Your target is Agency,” came El Grande’s reply. “Proceed slowly and with caution. The stakes are high.”
As if trivia ever warranted assassinations, El Jerga thought with a snort. El Grande fancied himself a warrior-leader, but El Jerga viewed him as little more than a middleman, an office worker with fanciful affectations but infinitesimal power. El Jerga tolerated him only in small doses under normal circumstances.
These were not normal circumstances.
Killing was always both business and pleasure for El Jerga, but suddenly, it was also about honor, family, and Hammurabi’s code. He would repay his uncle’s killers, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and death for death.
The picture of his next victim appeared slowly, just as the picture of his uncle’s death-distorted visage had appeared moments before.
His target was rail-thin, bald, and had a skinny face with hollow cheekbones. Not at all unlike his last victim, though this man seemed less strung-out. The photograph showed him wearing some sort of green utility uniform with zippers and bright patches.
El Grande’s final instructions appeared moments later: “More to follow. Make this one memorable.”
El Jerga felt his heart pound in his chest and adrenaline zing through his veins. It was an order he could follow without compunction.
44
Sam drove the rented Rav4 with abandon through the streets of Alexandria, cursing impatiently with the growing gridlock as the Friday morning commuters became a maddening throng.
It took her several cycles of the light to get past the Highway 1 intersection, and she was fit to be tied by the time she turned south toward her house.
It was a horrible idea, she knew.
The voice in the back of her head, the one she’d learned to heed without question as a result of one painful lesson after another, was screaming at her to go anyplace but home.
She still strongly suspected that Homeland was no longer on Team Sam, and knew for a fact that the Metro DC police department certainly wasn’t heading up the Sam Jameson fan club. One or both agencies would undoubtedly have her house on round-the-clock surveillance, Sam thought.
Going home might very well be the worst decision of her life.
But she had to see for herself. She couldn’t not go home.
She now believed that, unlikely as it might seem, Brock might have been telling her the truth when he denied knowing Arturo Dibiaso. The cell phone evidence had seemed so unequivocally damning just half an hour before, until Sam connected the dots regarding the Pentagon slug line.
Suddenly, it seemed entirely plausible that Brock could have ridden in the same car with Arturo Dibiaso on two separate occasions without ever having any inkling who the man was, or what he was up to.
And, Sam realized, she had been looking for an excuse, any excuse, to give Brock the benefit of the doubt. He fit her perfectly, in every way she could think of and many more that she discovered all the time, and she realized that she desperately hoped that her original assessment – that Brock had lied to her and everyone else – was dead wrong.
She made several aggressive lane changes that ultimately netted no advantage in traffic, but satisfied her need to do something more proactive than simply sit motionless next to hundreds of other idling steel boxes.
She couldn’t help but worry that while she sat on her ass in traffic, something dreadful may be happening to Brock.
Hope was now a curse, she realized as the light finally changed. She was now scared to death for Brock’s safety. He had fallen off the grid, Dan had told her moments earlier, with no sign of him other than some blood on the floor of the house they shared together.
She’d thought a thousand times in the last several minutes of dialing Brock’s cell, but Dan told her that DHS had found it in his car, parked in front of their house. That meant that DHS probably had Brock’s cell in their possession, and she didn’t want to highlight her position by calling.
She longed for her smart phone to check traffic, but she knew that it would only have added to her growing aggravation and anxiety. So she inched along with the sheeple on their morning commute, hands gripping her steering wheel with far more force than necessary, jaws clenched shut.
She’d made it to within half a mile of her residence and was accelerating to take advantage of a momentary traffic letup, when she realized that she badly needed to get control of her emotions.
If you’re going to do something dumb, at least don’t be stupid about it.
She needed to take her time, to approach patiently and methodically, to make sure that if someone was watching, she found them before they found her.
She turned a block early, following the gentle bend around the road as it climbed the steep hill. Two blocks later, she drove past the house that was directly uphill from hers, carefully c
hecking parked cars for occupants and watching the street for passersby.
She saw nothing. If there was surveillance on this block, it wasn’t overt.
Sam paused between houses to glimpse downhill into her backyard. Trees, fences, and vegetation prevented a clear view of the entire yard, but what she could see looked clear. It would have been a great time for a multi-spec photo, but she didn’t have the specialized camera with her, and didn’t have the time to wait while Dan analyzed the photos.
She didn’t linger too long, fearing notice by unseen eyes hidden behind bedroom curtains, or by cameras hidden out of view. She continued, turning left down the hill toward her street.
Her heart rate was up, she noticed. She felt the Kimber .45 in its holster under her arm, grateful for its reassurance, but cursing herself for not taking a bulletproof vest with her during her hasty departure from home on Monday.
Stupid mistakes like that were how pros turned up just as dead as amateurs, Sam knew. But as a practical matter, it was often hard to transcend one’s humanity, which had an uncanny tendency to bite one in the ass at the most inopportune moments.
She turned left and drove slowly past her house, large sunglasses over her face, white scarf draped over her flame-red hair, eyes darting quickly between places to catch anything out of order.
The construction crew was hard at work on the front of her house. They’d cleaned up the debris, and were now repairing the damage done by the explosion in the wee hours of Sunday morning.
If I was a bastard trying to screw with me, Sam thought, I’d put a guy or two on that construction crew. Undoubtedly, the thought had also occurred to her pursuers, so she formulated a plan to deal with the crew as she passed down the street, noticing nothing else out of the ordinary.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 25