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

by Lars Emmerich

  He raised his head to peer through the back windshield of the parked sedan, and saw a flurry of activity near the back of the van. Four men in orange utility vests were hauling the senator toward the open van doors.

  They would have to lift him up to get him inside the van, the assassin realized.

  He raised his pistol again, setting up for a second shot. Insurance. He steadied the pistol against the back of the sedan and lined up his shot.

  He saw a flash from inside the darkened van. Before he could flinch, the rear passenger window and back windshield of the car exploded, throwing shards of glass into his face and hands. He ducked behind the car’s bumper.

  After a second, he crept forward to peek around the car’s tire, just in time to watch the rear doors of the van slam shut. The van drove away, chirping its tires on the hot pavement.

  Interesting turn of events, he thought.

  He heard sirens blaring in the distance, growing louder.

  He rose from the street and walked to his car.

  74

  Alexandria, VA. Monday, 5:37 p.m. ET.

  Frank Higgs woke up with a pounding headache. He brought his hand up to his forehead and felt thick bandages covering most of the balding real estate from his temple to the frown line above his nose. The skin felt numb, as if he’d been given a local anesthetic.

  He was lying in the back of a utility van, jostling with each bump in the road. A circle of faces and orange vests hovered over him. “You’re a lucky guy, mister,” one of them said in a strange accent Higgs couldn’t place. “That bullet could have taken your face off.”

  Another voice chimed in. “And you’re popular, too. What, you’re some kind of a spy or something?”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Higgs said weakly.

  Farhoud smiled in the driver’s seat. Oh, but we do. And much more, Senator Higgs.

  Mullah would certainly be pleased, though he would surely be troubled by the appearance of the unidentified gunman.

  But Mullah would know what to do. He always did.

  Farhoud checked his mirrors and mentally catalogued the cars following the van in traffic. He would make several turns to draw out any cars that might be tailing them. It was important not to bring along any uninvited visitors.

  The assassin followed the white utility van at a distance. It was pointless to try to tail a professional muscle team with just a single car, but those were his orders.

  He would be detected within two or three turns, and would then be at a disastrous disadvantage.

  It wasn’t a risk he’d take under normal circumstances.

  But this wasn’t an ordinary situation. No risk too great, the Intermediary had said. Higgs must die.

  He hoped for the best as he kept tabs on the van in front of him, trying hard to be inconspicuous, but feeling reckless and horribly exposed nonetheless.

  He had no idea what information was stored inside his target’s head, and he didn’t care. But he knew it had to be something big. He could have sworn he heard something in the Intermediary’s voice that he had never heard before. Fear.

  75

  Alexandria, VA. Monday, 5:43 p.m. ET.

  Alfonse Archer was still in the bathroom, a hand towel wrapped around his wounded arm to stop the bleeding. The intruders never bothered to come after him. It was Higgs they were after.

  He had made a 911 call to initiate a local police response, but he hadn’t called back to headquarters for more FBI reinforcements. The attack had erased any doubts in Archer’s mind that the Bureau was compromised, and he didn’t need another gunfight, especially not with just one usable arm.

  He prepared to carefully make his way toward the basement on the off chance that the attackers had left the senator wounded but alive.

  He pressed his ear against the floor, listening for footfalls or voices. Any vibrations would be transmitted through the floorboards.

  His cell phone rang. He cursed the noise—he didn’t care to have any extra attention drawn to him in case any of the gunmen remained in the safe house, though it was now clear that he wasn’t the object of the attackers’ social call.

  The phone call was from Sam Jameson. Something told him he should answer, despite the bad timing.

  76

  South of Richmond, VA. Monday, 5:57 p.m. ET.

  Protégé motored south on I-64 in the lumbering GE Government Services Division delivery van. It had raised eyebrows at his division – the boss never drove himself, and he never drove the delivery van. He hoped his subordinates bought his cover story, which was actually quite plausible: security prevented him from taking anyone else along on this particular trip.

  It was actually true, but not for the reasons Protégé hoped his employees would assume.

  He glanced once again at the authorization papers tucked in the blue folder on the passenger’s seat. Signed by Mr. Mike Charles, a member of the DoD Senior Executive Service, it granted the driver, one Robert Johnston of General Electronics’ Government Services Division, the authorization to convey the classified material in the back of the van onto the premises of Langley Air Force Base without being searched by the gate guard.

  Explosives-sniffing dogs were permitted to inspect the cargo, but the sealed wooden crate containing the high-powered directional transmitter was not to be opened under any circumstances.

  Protégé hoped Stalwart’s authorization letter would carry enough weight to prevent a hassle. Military installations were accessible only with a government-issued ID card, which Protégé possessed as a result of the work he frequently did for three different military branches.

  Getting himself past a gate guard would be no problem whatsoever, but driving a delivery van onto a federal installation was another matter. All cargo had to be searched, a lengthy process that was inconvenient in the best of circumstances.

  If Langley’s security personnel didn’t like what they saw, it could bring the entire operation to a screeching halt. And there could be jail time involved if things went badly. Nobody had time for that.

  He stopped for gas just outside of King’s Dominion. He checked for phone messages.

  There were no messages from any of his co-conspirators, but there was a text and a picture from Allison.

  He opened the picture. He instantly recognized the small heart tattoo on her inner thigh. A satisfied smile crept across his face.

  “You’re delicious,” he wrote back. He knew he didn’t need the distraction at the moment, but damn, what a gorgeous distraction she was.

  77

  Crystal City, VA. Monday, 5:59 p.m. ET.

  Sam gripped the steering wheel of her silver Porsche with an angry, vise-like grip. She had bounced between rage and despair several times in the scant few minutes since the phone call with FBI Special Agent Alfonse Archer ended. She called Archer, who was guarding Senator Frank Higgs against a future attempt on the senator’s life, to ask for his help.

  Sam’s search for Brock had taken her to an unlikely intersection between Frank Higgs and Major General Charlie Landers. Her investigation had revealed that both Higgs and Landers had spoken repeatedly with some of the same shadowy figures.

  Sam wanted to know who those people were, and how they might relate to Brock’s kidnapping. She had to get to Landers right away, but she needed as much information as possible before questioning him.

  She needed answers only the senator could provide.

  Archer hadn’t had good news. An entire FBI protection team had been murdered just minutes before she called, and Big A was alone in an empty safe house with a bullet wound in his arm.

  Higgs was nowhere to be found. Probably dead by now.

  Sam fought despair. She did her best to avoid thinking about what Brock might be going through at the moment. She couldn’t bear to look at the photo on her phone, but the image was burned in her brain. Brock’s face was contorted in agony, his body curled into a ball on a bare mattress, lying next to today’s newspaper.

&
nbsp; Was this the start of some sort of blackmail scheme? Was Brock being held for ransom? If so, she would have expected some sort of demand to accompany the horrifying picture, but there was nothing of the sort. Brock’s captors had just sent the picture, and nothing else.

  Sam had forwarded the file to Dan. She hoped he could make something of it.

  At least he’s still alive, she reminded herself as she sped through traffic, her portable police light flashing atop her car roof.

  She knew that her plan—if it could even be called a plan—was a little bit desperate, and frankly, not very good. She had called Archer in order to get information from Higgs, which she had hoped to use in order to break the ice with Landers. She needed information the little tyrant wasn’t likely to give.

  Which meant she needed leverage.

  Unfortunately, without any priming information from Higgs, Sam found herself at square one trying to figure out how to approach Landers.

  She had momentarily considered going in cold, relying on her interrogation skills to back him into a corner or trick him into revealing something of value.

  But cold interrogations were hit-or-miss, and relying on her interrogation skills was not the best idea at the moment. She was tired, strung out, and a little bit hysterical.

  She called Dan. “Dig through Landers’s entire life,” she said. “Find something I can use to pry him open.”

  “Like what?”

  “No idea. But Brock swears that Landers is on the take.”

  “How long do I have?”

  “I’ll be at his office in twenty minutes.”

  “You’re the world’s worst boss,” Dan said, bringing a small smile to Sam’s face. “But I’ll have something for you, even if I have to make it up.”

  She hoped he made good on his promise.

  Sam wiped the smeared mascara from her eyes, straightened her blouse, and looped her ID lanyard around her neck. She sat in her car in the garage below a mid-rise office building in Crystal City, engine running to keep the air conditioning going.

  Ten floors above her was the office of Major General Charles W. Landers.

  One floor below that was Brock’s empty office.

  She was having trouble keeping her composure. She kept thinking of the picture of Brock, writhing in agony.

  Her phone rang. Dan Gable. “I found something on our friend Charlie Landers. I think you’re going to like it.”

  She took careful notes, then turned off the ignition of her car and walked to the elevator in the dimly lit parking garage.

  Time for a chat with Charlie, that little bastard.

  One step closer.

  78

  Clarksville, MD. Monday, 6:03 p.m. ET.

  Rand Wilson, NSA computer technician, was a bookworm. He especially liked reading alternative accounts of historical events. While he wasn’t an angry banner-waver, he was innately distrustful of authority (father issues, his wife’s therapist had said).

  He was wired to reject the mainstream view of almost everything that he couldn’t prove for himself. Propaganda never announces itself, he was fond of saying, but it’s always around.

  He hated authority. There was a conspiracy behind everything. Even 9/11 involved a government cover-up.

  Yet he worked for the National Security Agency.

  His wife called him her “walking contradiction,” a phrase she lifted from a song by her favorite punk-rock band in college. The phrase described Rand Wilson as accurately as any other. He was complicated and his disposition had grown dark over the years, but she still loved him.

  Wilson sat on his covered porch in Clarksville, Maryland, enjoying his first cigarette of the day. His wife forbade him from smoking indoors, citing the inevitable reduction in their resale value, as if fresh-smelling carpet would somehow mitigate the fact that they were upside down on their mortgage by many tens of thousands of dollars.

  As he inhaled the smoke into his lungs, he heard a skateboard approach, its wheels clicking rhythmically over the cracks in the sidewalk. A kid with spiky blonde hair and gold-embroidered pants zipped by Wilson’s front yard, iPod earphones stuck in his ears.

  Rand heard a metallic clang as the skateboarder passed his mailbox.

  “What was that noise?” His wife’s voice carried through the open screen window. She was sitting on the sofa in their living room, reading a romance novel.

  “Nothing, babe.” Rand exhaled smoke from his lungs. “Just some punk on a skateboard.”

  He smiled to himself. Tomorrow was going to be an extremely big day. Historic, even.

  In fact, it was going to be a big day for the entire world.

  Rand Wilson was proud of the role he was about to play. He finished his cigarette and rose to get ready for his graveyard shift in the NSA data center.

  79

  Washington, DC. Monday, 6:08 p.m. ET.

  Mullah risked the call to Archive because he had no choice.

  It had fallen to Mullah to do what no one had ever done before: learn the name of the Facilitator, the mastermind behind the ultra-powerful Consultancy. Then take him out.

  The Facilitator had the power to stop Archive, Mullah, and their like-minded associates. And the shadowy power broker would do so rapidly and easily if the Consultancy ever became aware of Archive’s intentions.

  Just as significantly, the Facilitator had the power to undo what Archive and his friends were working so feverishly to accomplish. Even if Archive’s plans succeeded in the short term, an intact Consultancy meant that Archive and his fellow reformers had little chance of creating the permanent change they sought.

  The Facilitator would simply maintain the same relationships and preserve the same distribution of power, albeit with slightly altered mechanisms.

  If the Facilitator wasn’t found and stopped, Archive knew it would only be a matter of time before things returned to their normal, exploitive state. All of his efforts would ultimately be for naught.

  The odds against Mullah were long. The Consultancy’s existence had been a closely held secret for over a hundred years, and few even knew the Facilitator’s title.

  Almost no one alive knew his name.

  Mullah explained the current situation to Archive. The chief of clandestine operations for the Devolution Movement felt certain that Senator Frank Higgs knew the name of the Facilitator. He would know for sure within the day, as Higgs was now Mullah’s guest. It had come at the cost of four FBI agents’ lives.

  Archive exhaled slowly, feeling deep sadness at the loss of life. “Be kind to the senator,” he admonished.

  “If it is possible,” Mullah replied. “There is more. I believe the Facilitator suspects that Higgs knows his identity. Someone has been trying to kill the senator since Friday.”

  “Does this development pose a threat to your team?”

  “Possibly,” Mullah replied. “But also an opportunity. An assassin shot at Higgs while my team was extracting him from the FBI safe house. The shooter is following the van carrying Higgs, but our detached reconnaissance man is keeping tabs. We’ll be waiting for him. Perhaps the shooter will provide us with another route to the Facilitator, if the senator doesn’t pan out.”

  “Please be careful. The stakes couldn’t be higher.” Archive replaced the encrypted phone on its cradle and closed his eyes. It was going to be a long evening.

  80

  Crystal City, VA. Monday, 6:09 p.m. ET.

  “Hi, Sam! Great to see you! Did you keep Brock at home today? I missed him at my staff meeting this morning.” Charlie Landers wasn’t without his charms. He reached up to take Sam’s extended hand in greeting, a broad smile on his pudgy face.

  Sam had met the general on several occasions, at office Christmas parties or farewell gatherings for departing employees. The general seemed just a little lubricious in social settings, but nothing too overt. He made small talk well enough, a skill military men tended to cultivate as they ascended the ranks.

  “He’s been on his ba
ck since Friday night,” Sam said. “Leg injury.” It wasn’t a lie; it just wasn’t the entire truth. The last thing Sam wanted was for Landers to start sniffing around Brock’s disappearance.

  Landers was Brock’s boss and had a legal right to know Brock’s disposition. But she needed the waters as unperturbed as possible in order to find Brock’s captors. Even if he wasn’t directly involved, Landers would surely tip off whoever was behind it all, just through his sheer clumsiness.

  Landers offered sympathetic platitudes for Brock’s injury. She thanked him. She had been prepared for a cool reception to her unannounced visit, but she was surprised by Landers’s good mood.

  “I know you’re a very busy man, so I don’t want to waste your time,” she began. “The bad news is that I’m here on business, but the good news is that it will just take a minute.”

  She watched Landers’s face change ever so slightly, but only for a moment before its friendly joviality returned. Sam’s occupation wasn’t a secret, and she also had something of a reputation. It was clear that Landers didn’t relish having an official conversation of any sort with her.

  He motioned to the sofa in front of his large desk. Sam thanked him and sat down, and he sat in the upholstered chair to her left.

  “I’m in the middle of a case,” Sam said in a friendly tone, “and I think you can help us.”

  Landers nodded.

  Sam checked the page of notes she’d written as she listened to Dan Gable. “The name Hiram Angstler has come up,” she said.

  Landers’s face frosted over. It was clearly not a subject Landers was excited to discuss. She’d dropped the name for shock value. It had clearly produced the desired effect.