And where the hell had Shannon Connor gotten off to?
Chapter 15
B laded, focused and as calm as he could be under the circumstances, Rafe pointed his pistol at the face of the man who had most turned to face him. He didn’t aim. That hadn’t been the way he’d been trained. Gunfights took place instantly, and usually the first person to start triggering rounds won.
With a tight grip on the pistol, his hands wrapped, the left hand on front and pulling back against the pistol butt as his right hand shoved the weapon forward because a relaxed grip could cause the pistol to jam, Rafe fired immediately. Brass flipped and spun in the air as the action spat the fired shells out.
The first man caught at least two rounds in the face. Dead or dying, he fell back into the man behind him. The four Asians had stayed bunched in together too tightly. Now that proximity caused them to bump into each other and become much easier targets.
Bullets whipped by Rafe’s left ear, and he knew he’d narrowly missed becoming a casualty himself. He shifted targets, moving to the man on the right. After bringing the pistol into line, Rafe fired again.
Part of him was afraid as he faced the men. He’d have had to have been brain-dead not to be afraid. For all intents and purposes, he was naked out in the hallway.
The second man went down, twisting sideways and corkscrewing into the floor.
The other two men split up, each taking a different side of the hallway.
Rafe went to ground, dropping low into a crouching position as he tried to track the men.
“You’ve got friendlies in the field,” Allison told him.
With all the thunder breaking loose in the hallway, Rafe could barely hear her. But he understood other people were going to be in the hallway.
The first one he saw was the slight young woman who’d brought him the SUV. She held a pistol and used it with grim efficiency.
Then she spoke in Mandarin Chinese. Rafe followed her in the language. His earliest career at NSA had involved China, so he’d learned that language as well as Cantonese.
“Put your weapons down,” the young woman said.
By that time, three other women were in the hallway. Two of them went forward and kicked the weapons away from the men Rafe had shot.
Where is Allison getting these women? Rafe wondered.
“Are you all right, Special Agent Santorini?” one of the women asked.
“Yeah.” With the adrenaline hitting his system and screwing with whatever was left of the drugs he’d been given, Rafe felt light-headed.
“Good. You handled yourself very well.”
Rafe watched in disbelief as one of the women put the surviving Asian man in a come-along hold and expertly bent him down face-first into the carpeted floor. She took a pair of disposable cuffs from the back of her waistband and zipped the man’s wrists together.
“Thanks. You, too.” Rafe looked at the young woman standing beside him and guessed that she was ten years younger than he was, barely old enough to walk into a bar and order a drink. “You do this kind of thing very often?”
The woman looked up and smiled. “Not often enough. I’m usually stuck behind a desk.” She nodded to the gunmen. “This is the kind of work I love to do. Catching the bad guy. Being face-to-face with something that could go incredibly wrong.”
Rafe shook his head. “You’re too young to be thinking thoughts like that.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “This coming from the man who joined the Army at eighteen and went straight into battle?”
Rafe grinned. “Okay.”
“But thank you for the thought. It was very sweet.” With a practiced flourish, the young woman holstered her weapon.
Rafe reloaded his weapon with a fresh magazine. That was a habit started in the military and continued through his time at the NSA.
Once the surviving Asian man had his hands secured, two of the women yanked him to his feet. The third woman calmly and carefully went through the dead men’s clothing. She dumped the wallets, watches and personal effects into a plastic bag.
Only then did Rafe realize the fourth woman was actually acting as lookout.
A few curious hotel guests stuck their heads out of hotel rooms.
“Please stay in your rooms,” the young woman said. She held up an ID case. “We’re with the Department of Justice, United States Marshal’s Office. Everything is fine here. You’re all safe.”
A moment later, hotel security arrived. Two big men in suits almost filled the corridor.
“Are you there?” Rafe asked over the cell phone.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if you see this, but—”
“Everything has been taken care of,” Allison said. “Just stay quiet. Don’t talk. And follow the lead of those women there.”
“All right. Where’s Shannon?”
“I’m looking. Whoever got into my system did a number on it. They also had enough foresight to send an encryption code to the off-site storage facility that handles the streaming video dump coming from the hotel cameras.”
“You don’t have a record of what happened here tonight?”
“The hotel doesn’t,” Allison said. “I didn’t say I didn’t. I twinned the outgoing video stream to an off-site dump I used. I’m accessing that now.”
“Hotel security,” one of the men arriving on scene bellowed as they took up positions around the edge of the corridor.
“We’re with the Department of Justice,” the young woman said in the tone of a jaded veteran. “United States Marshal’s Office. This is a Homeland Security matter. We’ve got this situation under control. Please stay back.”
“Lady,” one of the men said, “I don’t know who you think—”
The young woman’s voice turned to ice. “If you want to stay out of jail tonight, I’d suggest you do as I ask. Do you understand?”
After a long moment, the two men nodded. They didn’t give up their positions and they didn’t put their weapons away.
“How much trouble are we in here?” Rafe asked Allison.
“None. You’re going to be able to walk out of that hotel in a few minutes.”
Rafe couldn’t believe that. “How did you manage that?”
“I’ve helped a lot of people while I’ve had this career. Some of them remember they owe me a favor. I’m calling them in.”
“What about the Agency?”
“There are people in the Agency who owe me favors, as well.”
Seated in first class, awaiting takeoff, Shannon scanned the breaking news on the Washington Post Web site with her iPhone. When she found the story about the gunfight at the hotel where she’d stayed with Rafe, she nearly got sick to her stomach.
There weren’t enough details, but she knew there had been fatalities. The thought of Rafe getting hurt was almost more than she could take.
He’d protected her and come after her while risking his own life. Shannon hadn’t known many men who would do something like that.
Especially not for someone he thought was the enemy.
Shannon knew that Allison had turned Rafe against her. When they’d first parked in that lot, he’d been open and protective of her. After his phone call off by himself, he’d come back more defensive.
Maybe if they’d met at another time, under different circumstances—
Don’t play that game, Shannon told herself. Thinking like that only gets you in trouble. Stick with the story you’re after.
The story made her feel good. After fifteen years of being treated like an evil stepchild, Shannon was going to get to fight back.
She couldn’t wait.
In between refreshing the Web browser on the iPhone, she tried to call Kwan-Sook. But she got no answer.
A short time later one of the flight attendants got on the public-address system and asked everyone to shut off all electronics. Reluctantly Shannon did, reminding herself it would only be until the plane took off and leveled out.
; She took out a small legal tablet she’d bought at one of the stores in the terminal and started taking notes on questions she had about the genetic experimentation. When they were able to use their electronics again, she intended to make use of the slim-line notebook computer and mini satellite relay she’d been given to do as much research as she could.
“You don’t have to be here, you know.”
Frustrated and tired, Rafe entered the office where Allison sat at her computer array. True to her word, he’d been able to walk out of the hotel within minutes. No one had tried to stop him because the District’s top cop had been on the job.
“I know.” Rafe blew on the foam cup of coffee he’d gotten from the downstairs kitchen. He sipped, then peered over Allison’s shoulder at the computer monitors. “D.C.’s police chief ran interference for us at the hotel.”
“I know.”
“If you can pull him out of bed in the middle of the night to come down and clean up my mess, that’s pretty impressive.”
Allison sighed and looked back over her shoulder at him. “It wasn’t your mess. It was mine. I underestimated what I was dealing with.” She paused and her voice softened. “I was damn lucky I didn’t get you killed.”
“I can take care of myself.” Rafe sipped coffee again. It was still too hot.
“I should have told you more about what you were dealing with.”
“I’ll agree with that.”
Allison kept pounding the keyboard. The monitors shifted constantly, cycling through information and images. “This thing is personal, Rafe.”
“You think that this connects to your mom?”
“I know it does.” Allison paused and looked up at him. “I owe you, Rafe, and I know that.”
“It’s not—”
“No,” she interrupted. “I do. And I hate owing people.”
“We’re friends. Calling me in like this is probably the best thing I’ve had happen in a long time.”
Allison smiled and shook her head. “You almost get killed and it’s the best thing that’s happened to you. You have got to seriously reevaluate your priorities.”
Rafe smiled. “I think we both believe in what we do. That’s why we’re here.”
“I know. That’s why I’m going to tell you what I’m about to tell you. But you can’t talk to anyone else about this. It’s not just my secret. It’s also a matter of national secrecy.”
“All right.”
Allison turned back to the keyboard and typed, then pointed at one of the screens. It showed a picture of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman. “That was my mother’s mortal enemy—and the deadliest woman I’ve ever seen.”
Chapter 16
R afe studied the woman’s face. There were several pictures of her at different angles. She had hard, unforgiving eyes. “Who is she?”
“Was she,” Allison corrected. “Her name was Jackie Cavanaugh.”
More documents spilled across the array of monitors. There were also a few pictures. Some of them were of the woman in urban landscapes, but others were taken in the middle of a jungle.
“She grew up in Boston,” Allison said. “Her family was poor, Irish working-class. Her brother ran guns for the IRA. Her father cooked books for criminal business enterprises.”
“With a pedigree like that, I’m sure you couldn’t have anything but the best of hopes.”
Allison gave him a thin grin. “A lot of kids don’t ever get out of an environment like that. But Cavanaugh was smart. She went to college and signed on with the CIA back in the 1960s.”
Rafe stared at the photographs and tried to imagine what that must have been like back then for a woman to do such a thing. “Women were getting popular with law enforcement and espionage agencies back in those days.”
“While with the CIA,” Allison went on, “she became a sniper for the Phoenix Program.”
Rafe had heard of the Phoenix Program. The clandestine war effort was legendary. The CIA-driven operation had existed in one form or another before and after it had been set up in Vietnam.
“They were supposed to neutralize high-ranking North Vietnamese officers,” Rafe said. “But they ended up being primarily assassination teams. The South Vietnamese handed over four hundred targets that were marked for death. They worked in penetration teams. I’ve talked with some of those guys. Very hard-core.”
“That’s right. But while she was out killing CIA-designated targets, Jackie Cavanaugh met and fell in love with one of the assassins the CIA used. What she didn’t know about killing before joining up with Evaristo—a Cuban national who’d fled Cuba after Castro came to power—she learned from him.”
Another picture flashed onto the monitor. Rafe studied the hard, cruel face. “Doesn’t look like the kind of guy you’d want to meet in a back alley.”
“Unless you were really good, it would be the last time you met anybody,” Allison said. “Evaristo was good at his chosen occupation. He enjoyed the killing.”
“If Cavanaugh was an international assassin, how did she meet your mom?” Rafe noted the pain on Allison’s beautiful features and felt badly for her. His own relationship with his parents hadn’t been nearly that close.
“Mom was a new assistant district attorney in Phoenix,” Allison said. “Cavanaugh came to Phoenix to do a contract hit and hung around to murder a man named Tom Marker, who was a retired ex-Army colonel and Vietnam War hero. Mom prosecuted the case. Although it was never proven, Mom always thought the CIA had used Cavanaugh as bait in a trap for Evaristo. During the jailbreak, Evaristo was killed, but Cavanaugh escaped. She’d been pregnant, but she lost the baby.”
“Why did Cavanaugh murder Marker?”
“While Cavanaugh was working in Vietnam, the CIA decided to get rid of her. Marker was the one who set her up to be killed.”
“I take it Cavanaugh wasn’t exactly thrilled with that.”
“Marker was a frequent visitor at the home of Bryan Ellis’s family in Phoenix.”
The name brought up an immediate memory for Rafe. After getting out of North Korea, he hadn’t paid much attention to news. But Bryan Ellis’s story had been big enough that it had penetrated even the pain and confusion he’d carried out of prison with him.
“The Congressman Bryan Ellis? The one whose father hired the stand-in in Vietnam that got killed?”
Allison nodded. “Marker was the leader of the team that supposedly pulled Bryan Ellis and those other men out of the prison camp over there.”
“Cover-up much?”
“Yes. We’re not dealing with nice people in this. They’re not weak, either, Rafe. From what I’ve been able to find out, they are very powerful.”
“And this is what Shannon Connor is part of?”
Allison nodded. “It is now. I didn’t know that for certain before this evening.”
“What changed?”
Allison tapped another key. “This.”
As Rafe watched, the e-mail with the spider at the bottom filled one of the computer monitors. Reading the news of his impending death sent a chill through him.
“Glad that didn’t turn out to be prophetic,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. But inside he was seething. He’d risked his life to save Shannon Connor and she’d left him drugged and marked for execution. If he’d drunk more of the drug or it had hit him more slowly so that he’d gotten more of it in him, he might not have made it out of that hotel room alive.
“Me, too.”
“What’s the significance of the note?”
“It’s not the note. It’s the icon.”
“The spider?”
“Yes. That spider became Cavanaugh’s signature.” Allison tapped the keyboard and the image lit up. “She dropped her identity. She became an international blackmailer. An arms dealer. A contract killer clearinghouse. If it was illegal and made money, she tried to own a part of it. She called herself Arachne.”
Rafe was impressed that Allison was impressed. In the time that he’d known her Ra
fe had never heard that mixture of awe and dread in Allison’s voice.
“From what I’ve been able to find out,” Allison went on,
“Arachne’s database was incredible. She had dirt on heads of state and CEOs and she used her power to steadily build an empire down in Cape Town that you can’t imagine.”
“So Cavanaugh sent you this?”
Allison shook her head. “That’s not possible.”
“Why?”
“Because Jackie Cavanaugh is dead. I sent in the team that terminated her.”
Rafe took that in without comment. As an NSA handler, Allison was sometimes called upon to make decisions or recommendations that resulted in the deaths of others. That, Rafe had always thought, was infinitely harder than being in the field and getting menaced by someone gunning for him. In the hallway, against those men, there’d been no choice.
“You’re sure she’s dead?” he asked quietly.
“Yes. There’s no way she was left alive.”
Rafe stared at the spider. “Then someone’s borrowing her identity.”
“I know.”
“Gotta be a short list.”
“At the time of her death, Arachne—Cavanaugh—sent out three information packets. I tried to intercept them, then track them, but I lost them. All I know for sure is that one went to Shanghai, China. One went to Nairobi, Kenya. And the third went to Jammu and Kashmir, India.” Allison paused. “When it came to computer systems, Arachne was about the best I’ve ever seen.”
“Like the person that got around your systems watching over the hotel.”
“Exactly like that.”
“You’re sure Cavanaugh is dead?”
“There’s no question about that.”
“Then you’ve got to ask yourself where those three packets of information went,” Rafe said. “And whether Arachne had an apprentice.”
“I’ve been asking myself that for two months.”
While Allison continued working on her own avenues of investigation, Rafe turned his attention to Shannon Connor. No matter how things had turned out at the hotel, he had trouble believing Shannon had meant to kill him.
Beneath the Surface Page 13