The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  Landers was unlikely to make a big error, but Brock had seen him driven by anger and vindictiveness to make plenty of small mistakes. He was counting on the little guy’s temper, which he knew to be reliably quick and surprisingly long-lasting.

  Perhaps the general’s dour disposition came from a lifetime of feeling inferior due to his height. The man was almost comically short, barely over five-three. I’d be grumpy too, Brock mused.

  But I wouldn’t make it my business to screw people over.

  For many years, Brock’s career had appeared to be charmed. Everything he touched had turned to gold. He was promoted through the Air Force ranks ahead of his peers, and he had grown accustomed to shouldering substantial responsibility. He held sway, commanded respect, and, by all indications, was in the front of the line for general’s stars.

  Then, after a messy and humiliating imbroglio that was only peripherally of his own making, Brock had found himself persona non grata to the institution he had served for most of his life.

  Worse, the kerfuffle was over a private matter, and, Brock felt, his superiors had absolutely no business even getting involved, much less redlining his career.

  His protests fell on deaf ears, and Brock soon found himself passed over and washed up, yet still required to serve out his term.

  He had remained at the mercy of the big blue bureaucracy for the past several years, toiling under the auspices of lesser men, knowing all the while that he was wasting his time. Working for the irascible, under-talented Landers over the past year had been a daily dose of salt in the wound, and Brock was counting the days until his retirement.

  The agonizing end to Brock’s promising career came at the same time as the painful dissolution of his long but lonely marriage, and the one-two punches had left him reeling. He fell into a downward spiral of over-thinking and over-drinking that lasted almost a year.

  He had picked himself up and dusted himself off just in time to meet Sam. She had rolled into his world like a red-haired, green-eyed freight train. She was unlike anyone he had ever met, in all of the right ways, and he was mad about her.

  Thanks to her, for the first time in years, Brock loved his life.

  He added the onions and garlic to the pan with a dash of salt and a heavy dose of pepper, and was rewarded with the familiar, delicious aroma of a traditional olive oil sauté. “You can sure rattle some pans,” Sam was fond of saying. He was hoping that the evening’s fare would bring a smile to her face.

  After a glance at the clock, he began to work a bit faster. He wanted to have everything in the oven before she got home.

  Brock heard the lock in the door and her sexy voice. “Wow. That smells amazing. You’re more than just a pretty face.”

  He smiled and turned to see Sam enter the kitchen from the hallway, her steps echoing on the hardwood. Three-inch heels made her tower over most of her coworkers, and he found himself standing up a little straighter in her presence as well.

  She looked into his eyes on the way to kiss him, and he was struck again by how staggeringly gorgeous she was.

  Not flawless, but perfect just the same.

  “Four years, woman, and you still give me twitterpations when I look at you.” He reached his arm behind her back to draw her in, half-picking her up in the process. She smiled with obvious contentment.

  He loved that his masculinity and libido never threatened her. It wasn’t over the top by any stretch, but it was a marvelous thing to be fully and freely one’s self without fear of a poor reception.

  “I have a few plans for us this evening,” he said, leading her to the bedroom.

  24

  Camden, South Carolina. Friday, 4:40 p.m. ET.

  The Cessna flight down from Newport News had been uneventful, and the day spent holed up in South Carolina had given the assassin opportunity to catch up on sleep and exercise.

  He was anxious to begin his customary post-employment hiatus in the Caribbean, but not so anxious that he was willing to risk making a mistake.

  He had had almost no human contact, owing to both procedure and proclivity.

  What they said was mostly true: one really did get used to killing. There was even a certain thrill to it. He wouldn’t do it for pleasure, of course, but that didn’t stop him from acknowledging the part of his psyche that did take pleasure in killing other people.

  His first “wet job” had left him trembling and slightly nauseous, much like the way he had shook uncontrollably after killing his first deer when he was ten years old. His father had insisted that he be the one to slit the wounded buck’s throat, which he had done with an unsteady hand, tears streaming down his face.

  But he had done it, and he had learned that all things must eventually die.

  He also knew in a visceral way that all of human life was a story of consumption and destruction. We only stayed alive by consuming other life. It wasn’t a sacred thing or a horrible thing. It just was.

  He didn’t feel terribly badly about being the one to choose the time and manner of another person’s death. True, the process of dying involved a very brief period of intense pain and panic. But it soon passed, and there was no suffering beyond that. There was just peace, the pleasant nothingness to which we will all eventually return.

  Or, he sometimes mused, maybe the religious crowd was right. Maybe there were choirs of angels and planets full of virgins, eager for a heroic deflowering, waiting on the other side.

  Unless, of course, you were the kind of person who went around killing other people. The reward in that case was supposedly satanic sodomy, to the glee of heckling demonic onlookers.

  He chuckled. Guess I’ve cast my lot, haven’t I? I hope the goofballs are wrong.

  He ran his finger along the long scar beneath his right eye, the remnants of a job nearly gone badly. Feeling the scar was an idle habit, but it had lately served to remind him that he wasn’t living on the right side of the odds. It wouldn’t take much of a slip to wind up killed or captured.

  An exit strategy wouldn’t be a terrible idea, he thought.

  The ringing telephone interrupted his thoughts. It was an ancient wall phone, and the assassin wasn’t sure how it was still in service.

  The safe house was large, old, and reminiscent of the plantation days, but it wasn’t dilapidated, and his brief stay had not been uncomfortable in the least. The back porch looked out on an acre of grass and palmetto trees. A pond completed the bucolic postcard, and he had enjoyed more than one cold beverage while taking in the view.

  The antediluvian phone clanged out four rings. He started his stopwatch at the end of the fourth.

  Two minutes and thirty seconds later, precisely on time, it began to ring again. Three rings this time.

  Shit. He exhaled a deep sigh and looked at his half-finished beer. So much for the vacation.

  Reluctantly, he made his way to the bedroom to gather his things and sanitize the safe house. It was time to go. He had been summoned.

  The assassin leveled the small airplane off at 2,500 feet above the South Carolina scenery and made his way back to the north at a little over 110 miles per hour.

  He wasn’t excited about returning to the DC area, especially since it was only a couple of days after a very visible wet op. He had pressed the Intermediary hard to justify such a risk. “We’ve weighed the relevant factors,” was all the man said.

  “This is a ton of exposure. What if I say no?” he had asked.

  “You’ll want to think that through very carefully. As I said, we’ve weighed the relevant factors. In the meantime, I have your arrangements ready for you to copy down.”

  The assassin had dutifully written down the number emblazoned on the tail of the Cessna that now carried him northward in the crimson light of late evening, and the name of the sleepy back-woods airport where it was parked.

  He knew he didn’t really have any choice but to follow instructions. There was no statute of limitations on murder, meaning that he could be tried at any po
int in his life by the United States Government, for any of the crimes he had committed on behalf of the very same United States Government.

  Bastards.

  He also knew there was a high probability his handlers had evidence tying him to one or more of those jobs.

  No one discussed it overtly, but it only made sense. It was part of the elaborate system of leverage they used to maintain a tight lid on decades of government-sponsored assassinations. Killing faraway bad guys was one thing, but Tom the Taxpayer would have a hard time understanding why the government was killing its own citizens.

  So northward he flew, with no idea what kind of job awaited him.

  25

  Alexandria, VA. Friday, 4:47 p.m. ET.

  An e-mail message alert appeared on Vaneesh’s computer screen.

  He was a young, thin, athletic mathematician working at Pro-Tek, a small but well-funded private company, which everyone suspected was owned by the National Security Agency.

  There was no proof, of course, but one could very accurately describe the many visitors they’d entertained during the recent months as being very distinctly indistinct, almost a parade of plainness. They were government types, no doubt about it, though people at Pro-Tek made a point of keeping their speculation to themselves.

  Regardless of their ownership, Vaneesh’s company was clearly serving US government interests. They adhered to strict government security protocols, and paid frequent visits to government-owned research laboratories.

  Over the past two years, he and his fellow mathematicians at Pro-Tek had perfected a code-breaking algorithm that was equal parts brute force and elegance.

  Their work was accomplished under the close watch of their technical and fiscal minders, and it all took place within a secure, windowless room protected by alarms, motion sensors, a combination lock, and a biometric entry scanner.

  It wasn’t difficult to understand the emphasis on security, as there were very few computer security systems in the world that could withstand an onslaught from Pro-Tek’s new decryption algorithm. The financial and national security implications were enormous.

  Vaneesh didn’t relish working ludicrous hours in a windowless room in which day was indistinguishable from night. Perhaps that was by design as well, to help keep the team of young mathematicians focused and free from distraction.

  All of the security had made it very hard for Vaneesh to reproduce a copy of the code-breaking algorithm for himself. But he had forged on, driven by equal parts conscience and anger, and he had finally done it.

  Pro-Tek workers weren’t allowed to carry anything in or out of the secure work area that wasn’t searched and documented by the security guard posted at the door. No magnetic media or compact discs entered or left, ever, and the computers used in the vault weren’t networked to any external systems whatsoever. It was a completely isolated computer lab.

  So Vaneesh had stored the code in the only memory device that couldn’t be searched, and small chunks of top-secret code-breaking software had left the Pro-Tek vault tucked safely and securely in his brain. He had reassembled the code from memory and saved it on his own machine at home.

  It had taken the better part of a year to completely replicate the code on his home computer, and getting the code to compile properly took almost an entire month as well. He had inadvertently juxtaposed a couple of variable names deep in the bowels of the algorithm, and ferreting out the error was almost as painstaking a task as memorizing and copying the code in the first place.

  The whole process wasn’t unlike a monk assembling a picture from colored sand, adding one grain of color at a time with Biblical patience.

  The painstaking effort had taken tremendous force of will, but the doing was only half of the strain.

  Equally taxing was the constant knowledge that discovery of a duplicate copy of the algorithm in his possession would result in his spending the next two decades in a federal prison.

  Vaneesh read the new e-mail announced by the alert: “There is a new comment posted on the Shannon Strength Functional Fitness Blog. You are receiving this notice because you signed up to follow the discussion on the post titled ‘Intensity is the Answer.’”

  Vaneesh’s obvious predilection toward physical fitness made him somewhat unique in a community not known for its emphasis on the physical domain of human existence. He lived inside his own brain almost as much as his colleagues did, but he made it a point to shake himself free of the endless abstractions in order to exercise almost every day.

  Like many polymaths, Vaneesh read a wide variety of subjects, but he particularly enjoyed the subject of fitness. His computer search history revealed a voracious appetite for understanding and optimizing the way the body functions.

  Nobody would bat an eye at his subscription to this particular blog, as he enjoyed a subscription to many similar sites. One look at his muscular physique would tell even the most casual observer that he took to heart what he read.

  The fitness blog was therefore a perfect medium for covert communication.

  He followed the link to the new comment on the blog. His pulse instantly quickened and his stomach filled with butterflies upon reading the name of the comment’s author, someone with the profile name “whiteyfitness342.” He breathed deeply and forced himself to relax enough to read the remainder of the comment:

  “Today’s fun: 21-15-9 back squats 185# and strict pull-ups”

  It was a familiar nomenclature in the functional fitness world. It described a workout. This particular workout required a set of twenty-one squats with 185 pounds, then twenty-one pull-ups. The next “round” contained fifteen repetitions of both exercises, and nine in the final round.

  Practitioners of this strange form of fitness timed their workouts with a stopwatch. There were even televised competitions.

  The details of the workout itself were enough to elicit a cold sweat. It would be brutally difficult despite its innocuous description.

  But that wasn’t what got Vaneesh’s heart racing. Rather, it was the code embedded in the workout description.

  He suddenly had a great deal to get done, in very little time.

  Vaneesh hustled to his car, barely remembering to lock the exterior door of the Pro-Tek building. He was the last one out again, which had left him with the burden of following the protocol to secure the top-secret room.

  He didn’t have time to waste, but the penalty for violating security procedures was steep, so he had worked as quickly as possible to secure all of the classified and sensitive items in their individual storage vaults within the highly secure workroom.

  As he opened his car door, he took mental inventory to make sure that he had closed and signed off all of the safes, examined all of the printers to ensure no classified information remained in their trays, and shredded the last of the day’s working papers.

  His mind had been horribly preoccupied as he had performed the closing checklist, and now he was concerned that he had missed something.

  This new concern added to his state of anxiety, and he felt a rock in his stomach as he left the parking lot.

  “Dude, get yourself together,” he said out loud. “Some ninja you’d make.” He chuckled at the thought, and he felt his face relaxing into a slight smile.

  You have chosen this path for a reason. You know its dangers, but also its importance. This choice came from the center of you. Archive’s words had comforted him many times over the preceding months, and he thought of them again now.

  The drive to his apartment took fewer than ten minutes. The clock on the car stereo showed 5:06 p.m. as he pulled into his spot on the third floor of the parking structure. He didn’t have much time.

  He eschewed the elevator and bounded down the concrete stairs three at a time, filling his lungs every fourth step.

  Vaneesh reached the entryway of his mid-rise apartment complex. He paid entirely too much rent every month, but enjoyed the location. The hip bars provided a steady supply of female
companionship.

  He forced himself to remain present in the moment as the elevator slowly made its way to the lobby. It took deliberate effort to stop his mind from racing.

  The doors finally opened to reveal an empty car, and he began the relatively short ride up to the eleventh floor.

  He discovered that tension had crept back into his body, and he released it with another long breath. The things that need doing are simple things, he thought.

  He glanced at his watch. No time to waste, but time enough.

  He slid the key card across the slot in the door handle and heard the door unlock. He opened his apartment door, set his leather tote atop the kitchen counter, and walked toward the desk at the far side of the room. It faced the floor-to-ceiling window that offered a stunning view of New Rome, as he sarcastically referred to his DC home.

  He turned on the printer, which awoke his sleeping computer. He opened the compiler, a program that checked software code for errors.

  He loaded his bootlegged copy of the code-breaking algorithm into the compiler, and ran it one more time just to be sure. No errors.

  He printed the code. The pages emerged from the printer at a glacial pace, and Vaneesh busied himself by changing into his workout clothes and making a nervous trip to the bathroom.

  He rummaged for a blank envelope. His instructions had been explicit, but he wondered whether the pages would all fit into the envelope.

  He found a red pen, placed a small dot in the lower left-hand corner of the envelope, retrieved a roll of tape from a junk drawer, and returned to the main room. Vaneesh watched as page after page stacked up in the printer’s output tray.

  After what seemed like ages, the machine finally went quiet. He glanced at his watch: 5:14. Sixteen minutes.

  He folded the pages into thirds, and noticed a slight shaking in his hands as he maneuvered the folded pages into the envelope. He exhaled, forcing himself to relax.