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

by Lars Emmerich

  “Law enforcement officials and our National Guardsmen,” the president continued, “are authorized to use all measures necessary, including lethal force, in the enforcement of these important measures. Our nation, and indeed our way of life, faces a test unlike any before in our history. We must band together, call on the great strength within us that made America the greatest nation in history, and, most of all, we must obey the rule of law. It is our calm obedience that keeps civilized society from descending into barbarism.”

  Protégé shook his head. “How are they going to enforce the debt collection measure?”

  Archive was already dialing his phone. “Archive for General Williamson, please,” he said when the general’s secretary answered. “Yes, that’s right. Tell him Archive is calling. He may choose to adjust his schedule.”

  She placed him on hold. A few moments later, the deep voice of NORTHCOM, the commander of the military’s Northern Command, resounded in Archive’s ear. “I know what you’re thinking,” the general said. “Please keep in mind that what the president says on television is a different thing than the orders my troops receive in the field.”

  “Understood, General, and never for a second did I doubt your levelheadedness or commitment to a peaceful outcome. I just wanted to know what we can expect in the way of enforcement. I’d like to help keep the wheels from falling off.”

  “My orders against looting and violence actually won’t change at all in light of the president’s announcement. Lethal force has been authorized from the beginning.”

  “But the debts?” Archive asked.

  The general was silent for a moment. “It’s obvious to me that special interest has gotten the president’s attention, to the detriment of the greater good. There is no way in hell I’m going to let loan officers at some bank finger citizens for incarceration, or worse. It’s just not going to happen.”

  “So you’re going to disobey the president’s orders?”

  “I’m not stupid. There’s a long line of ambitious assholes behind me who would enthusiastically enforce that executive order in exchange for a chance to sit in my chair,” the general said. “I’m going to make use of the most powerful foot-dragging tool ever invented by mankind. I’m going to form a committee.”

  Archive smiled. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll see right through you?”

  “Not at all,” the general said. “I’m not going to call it a committee. I’m going to call it a Tiger Team.”

  Protégé laughed out loud. He was very familiar with the term. It implied a reduction in bureaucratic red tape, but in reality, tiger teams generally produced little more than lengthy reports that nobody read.

  “I’m thinking thirty people, from law enforcement, military, and banking communities. The first meeting will be an emergency organizational meeting. It will all sound very urgent.”

  Archive chuckled. “And the even number gives you the opportunity for gridlock.”

  “Absolutely,” Williamson said. “I’ll actually invite thirty-one, but ensure that someone is called away at the last moment.”

  “You’re an expert bureaucrat,” Protégé teased.

  “Not at all,” Williamson said. “I have no time for pencil pushers. But I’ve learned a thing or two along the way about how to use the system against itself, when necessary.”

  “How can we help?” Archive asked.

  The general thought a moment. “Maybe it’s time for your Monopoly Man to make another appearance.” NORTHCOM was referring to the series of cartoon videos that Archive’s group had produced in the immediate aftermath of the cyber attack, which playfully urged citizens to use their heads, to ask themselves what, if anything, had really changed, and to take a circumspect approach to the short-term chaos. If Vaneesh’s assessment of the downward trend in society’s apparent angst was an accurate indication, the videos seemed to have had a positive effect.

  “An excellent idea,” Archive said. “We’ll get busy.”

  “And I’ll get busy pretending to be busy,” Williamson said.

  Archive chuckled. “I hope you do a good job of it. It would be crippling, perhaps catastrophic, if you were to be replaced.”

  NORTHCOM agreed. “I have very, very few trusted agents in my command,” he said. “And most of them are too junior to really make an impact if I were to be canned.”

  “You’re really hoping the masses behave,” Protégé observed. “You’ve basically cast yourself on the mercy of man’s better nature.”

  “We all have, son,” Williamson said with a chuckle. “We all have.”

  Archive’s relative calm was short-lived. Less than half an hour later, a breaking news alert flashed across the screen. “We warn you,” the talking head said gravely, face stern in a look of practiced concern, “this footage is graphic, and some viewers may find it disturbing.”

  The broadcast cut to grainy video, obviously taken by a smart phone. Hollers and screams were audible just beneath the shouted commands of a bullhorn-wielding soldier. The soldier’s counterpart carried an M-4 carbine slung across his shoulder, muzzle pointed toward the ground.

  The screams and shouts of the crowd grew louder. “I say again,” Megaphone called, urgency in his voice, “stop what you’re doing and lay face-down on the ground!”

  Carbine raised his weapon to low ready.

  The crowd’s intensity grew. Alarmed shouts drowned out Megaphone’s next amplified demand.

  Carbine aimed. Women screamed, men shouted. The center of the crowd melted to the side, split by Carbine’s aim.

  But the edges of the crowd closed in around the soldiers, who were vastly outnumbered. And, evident even in the grainy video footage, vastly afraid.

  A crushing sadness descended over Archive as he watched the inevitable tragedy unfold. There was only one possible outcome.

  Megaphone’s final warning was lost in the din of the agitated crowd.

  The shots rang loud, clear, devastating.

  Bedlam.

  Horrified citizens sprinted for cover. Enraged alpha males charged the soldiers, hurling rocks, brandishing sticks and baseball bats.

  Several men were chopped down by a maelstrom of 5.56 rounds from Carbine’s weapon. They were dead before their faces shattered on the pavement.

  But the crowd was too close, and there were too many of them, and they were too far gone, utterly consumed by righteous outrage. The soldiers didn’t stand a chance.

  The news broadcast cut to a still photo of the aftermath. A half dozen civilians lay dead, their blood darkening the street and sidewalk. The soldiers’ bodies were battered and broken, limbs bound at disgusting angles. The uniformed men were suspended by their necks from the overhanging arm of a street light. They’d been lynched.

  “My God, it looks like fucking Baghdad,” Protégé said, mouth agape.

  He looked at Archive, and saw tears welling in the old man’s eyes.

  The words didn’t need to be spoken. Their worst fears had materialized before their eyes. We’ve started a civil war.

  22

  The DIS hostage rescue team member gave Sam a decidedly frosty look. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. She and Dan had just arrived at the scene of a warehouse standoff, complete with reports of hostages and gunfire. Unwanted help always tended to show up at inopportune times, especially in a relatively sleepy town with little violence, and Sam understood the unfriendly glare on the DIS man’s face. She also understood why he tried to get her to wait behind the police perimeter.

  But she didn’t have any time for it. She flashed her DHS badge, stepped confidently across the police line, and reiterated that a credible report had placed two American hostages inside the building.

  “You must wait here,” the DIS agent commanded.

  “You must point out the agent in charge,” Sam retorted, striding past the armed agent.

  “I’m afraid your American credentials don’t entitle you to access to this scene,” the agent said, placing his hand on her a
rm to restrain her from moving closer to the warehouse.

  Sam glared. “Two of those hostages are my people,” she said, shaking her arm free. “So unless you’re the agent in charge, which would be a big surprise given that you’re obviously on traffic duty, I’m afraid you and I are done talking.”

  Dan shrugged an apology to the agent as he followed Sam toward the front of the warehouse.

  “Who is the agent in charge?” Sam asked loudly, badge held high, her voice cutting through the noise of radio chatter and background conversations.

  Half a dozen faces turned to look at her, then most of them turned to gauge the reaction of one particular agent. Sam deduced that the individual whose facial expression was of such interest to the rest of them must be the honcho. She held her hand out in greeting and announced her name.

  “Javier Mercado,” the agent replied. He carried a handheld radio and wore slightly-too-tight slacks and a light tan sport coat with dark stitching. An unfashionably large mustache adorned his pockmarked face. He looked like a character out of a 1980’s cop show, a caricature of himself, like mariachi music personified.

  “Pleasure, Javier. What’s the plan?”

  Mercado eyed her warily. Gringo interference, even in sleepy Costa Rica, was nothing new. But there was a protocol, an established hierarchy of gringo meddlers, and the buxom redhead was nowhere on the list of the usual holier-than-thou “advisors” who showed up to provide condescension disguised as expertise. “I am securing a perimeter around the building and assessing our options,” Mercado said.

  A bureaucrat’s answer, Sam thought. But there was something in his eyes that triggered her bullshit detector. “There are reports of gunfire,” she said. “And have you seen the far wall? It’s already breached, by a car I’m guessing.”

  Mercado’s radio crackled. He turned the volume down quickly and stuck the radio to his ear. It was clear he didn’t want Sam to overhear. He spoke quietly into the radio. Sam read his lips: tres minutos. Three minutes. They had a plan after all, and they were going to execute the plan in three minutes’ time. Sam felt relieved that the DIS hostage rescue guys weren’t nearly as incompetent as Mercado’s original answer had implied.

  He turned his attention back to her. “I’m afraid you must leave,” he said.

  “I’m afraid I’m not going anywhere. There are two Americans hostages in that warehouse, and I’m going to make sure they get out alive.”

  “This is not America, Agent Jameson,” Mercado said. “And I have a job to do.”

  “I’ll stay out of your way,” Sam said. “But I’m not leaving.”

  Mercado shook his head, and motioned back toward the perimeter. “You may not be inside the perimeter. I cannot assure your safety.”

  “I’d never ask you to,” she replied. Sam was tempted to secure Mercado’s permission to stay at the scene by divulging that she had intimate knowledge of the interior of the warehouse, and that she had a solid understanding of the kind of people they were facing, but she thought better of it. It would create far more complication than it solved.

  Instead, she dug out her phone and dialed the embassy. When the operator answered, she asked for a particular individual, Joel Griffin. Officially, Griffin was a mid-level functionary on the embassy staff. Unofficially, Sam knew, Griffin was the CIA station chief. He dispensed the bribes upon which the DIS’s underpaid agents had come to depend, and made the local puppets dance when he desired.

  Before Griffin answered the operator’s page, Mercado got the message. “That is not necessary, Agent Jameson,” he said, looking tired and put-upon. “You may stay. But you must remain back here. I cannot tolerate anyone placing my agents in jeopardy.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Sam started to say, but she was interrupted by shouts from the crowd of agents.

  “Fuego!” they cried. Fire.

  Sam turned to look at the warehouse. The flicker of flames was clearly visible through the row of windows high above street level. It wasn’t a small fire by any stretch. It appeared to be coming from the large loading bay, the same place Brock had aimed his driverless sedan to create the diversion that had allowed her and Dan access to the warehouse just minutes earlier.

  There was no time to lose. The DIS hostage team had to storm the building, or risk losing everyone inside.

  Sam turned to prod Mercado to action, but he was already on the radio: “Go,” he commanded.

  Sam heard the distinctive sound of flash-bangs exploding inside the warehouse, devices that created a blinding flash and a deafening noise. Even if occupants were prepared for the assault on their eyes and ears, it was difficult not to wind up incapacitated for a few critical seconds.

  DIS agents charged the building on three sides, using battering rams to break through doors. Sam knew that at least one of the doors was unlocked, because she had picked the lock herself, but she kept quiet and observed the assault from behind Mercado’s car.

  Three shots rang out above the din of crashing doors and shouting DIS agents. Then three more. Sam instinctively drew her pistol and crouched behind the nearest car.

  Smoke began to billow from open windows in the warehouse bay, and more gunshots came from inside the building. Seconds later, two DIS agents charged from the building, carrying a corpulent middle-aged bald man. Harv. He appeared to be fine.

  A third agent emerged from the building and dashed for the cover of the row of cars, with Trojan thrown over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The agent ducked behind the car adjacent to Sam, and set Trojan down on the pavement. The skinny hacker also appeared unharmed. Sam breathed a sigh of relief.

  A burst of gunfire came from behind them. Sam whirled to see a DIS agent on the roof of the building across the street, firing carbine bursts into the evolving fray in the warehouse.

  The line of agents taking cover behind their autos also opened up on the warehouse, and it didn’t take long to figure out why. The fire had driven a suspect out of the burning building. He had emerged with his gun leveled at the line of officers, which earned him several dozen bullet holes.

  Motion caught Sam’s eye, toward the side of the warehouse. She saw three DIS men hustling Rojas and Alejandro out the side door, the same door through which she and Dan had hustled them into the warehouse moments before the hostage team’s arrival.

  Rojas and Alejandro appeared little worse off than when she and Dan had deposited them in the supply closet. She was relieved that they had made it out alive. She wasn’t particularly fond of the men who had tried to kidnap her team at the airport, but she certainly wouldn’t have relished being responsible for their deaths.

  A final burst of gunfire sounded from within the warehouse, then relative calm, with only the noise of the flames crackling in the warehouse bay reaching Sam’s ears. Three DIS agents hustled out of the front door, accompanied by a chorus of “Hold fire, hold fire!” commands.

  It was over.

  After several seconds, Mercado ordered his team to check in. All agents were accounted for, and all hostages had been rescued. One DIS agent was wounded, shot in the thigh and in the ass. Already the jokes began, and Sam had to suppress a laugh. The only casualty was Rojas, and the bullets in his skinny body were from her weapon.

  Sam released her grip on her pistol, clicked on the safety, and holstered her weapon. Be quick but not too quick, she thought. She needed to take advantage of the relative chaos, but not act so hastily as to arouse undue suspicion. “Congratulations, Agent Mercado,” she said, shaking his hand. “Your team did an outstanding job in a very dicey situation. You should be very proud of them.”

  Mercado smiled and thanked her for the sentiment. He offered no resistance as Sam grabbed Trojan’s hand and ushered him quickly toward the car. Dan grabbed Harv Edwards, and seconds later, the four of them were strapped in and ready to leave the scene. “I’ve got to get these guys to the embassy,” she lied to Mercado in answer to his askew glance. “Otherwise, the ambassador will have me shot at noon.
”

  If Mercado recognized the car as one of the DIS fleet, he certainly gave no indication, and while it was clear to Sam that Mercado knew instinctively that something wasn’t right — hostage victims as a matter of course first went by ambulance to the hospital, and when deemed sufficiently healthy, were made immediately available for hours of questioning and form-filling by various functionaries — Mercado allowed Sam to whisk her two former hostages away without anything more than a quizzical and slightly disapproving expression.

  Sam didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and the Costa Rican DIS sedan full of Americans soon sped away from the scene, back toward the gas station to pick up Brock and their own DIS hostage, along the way passing an ambulance and a fire truck heading the opposite direction toward the burning warehouse.

  Sam climbed the steps to the US government jet’s cabin, and turned to watch the DIS sedan drive away. She hadn’t even bothered to ask the third DIS agent’s name. She had held him hostage as insurance, in case a little leverage became necessary to nudge the DIS in the proper direction.

  Fortunately, it hadn’t, and Sam had given the DIS man all of the money — in the form of silver bullion taken from the Lost Man Lake Ranch in Colorado earlier in the week — she had promised to Rojas for his cooperation. Without Rojas’ phone performances over the past few hours, her investigation would still be dead in the water, and her two compatriots would still be hostages. Sure, the two bullets she’d lodged in Rojas’ mortal coil had certainly ushered things along, but money was still a powerful inducement.

  As insurance against a double-cross, Sam had used her phone to send a text message to Rojas, indicating the exact weight of silver she’d given to his counterpart. Then she commandeered the DIS guy’s phone and sent Rojas another text message: I have received fifty ounces of silver.

  With that bit of business settled, and with her entire entourage safely aboard the airplane, it was time to get back to the real business at hand: figuring out who the hell was stealing tens of thousands of Bitcoins every hour, and how to stop them.