by Scott Blade
He said, “I done told you. I owe you. I consider this to be an obligation.”
The man in California closed his eyes, briefly and tried to recall what it was that he was holding over the head of the guy on the phone, but it had been ages ago.
That’s the way he used to operate. He worked in Naval Intelligence and was good at observing and uncovering things about targets. He had dug up dirt on the guy on the phone and threatened to use it unless the guy provided him with useful information.
It had been so long ago, that he couldn’t even remember what he had on the guy to intimidate him ten years later. Whatever it was, it must’ve been something damaging.
The man in California asked, “So, what’s going on?”
“Unit Ten.”
“What?”
“Have you ever heard of it?”
“No.”
“The NCIS has this special unit, like a special crimes unit.”
“Special crimes? I never heard of it. Is it new?”
The caller said, “They don’t advertise. It’s an undercover project. It’s old.”
The man in California fell silent.
“They’ve opened an investigation.”
The man in California paused a long, troubled beat, like he was punched in the gut. He didn’t have to ask because his old contact had said investigation and undercover, which told him enough. It told him that he was the subject of that investigation. He got the picture.
Still, he asked, “What’re they investigating?”
The caller said, “Something cold.”
“Like what?”
“Sounds to me like the kind of thing that ends with court-martials and federal grand juries.”
The man in California said, “They investigated us before.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“This special unit is deep cover. Not just your run of the mill kinda thing.”
The man in California said nothing.
The caller said, “They’ve infiltrated the SEALs.”
Again, the man in California was quiet.
He didn’t have to ask why a special unit would infiltrate the SEALs because he already knew a guy who used to be in the SEALs and he had done a lot of illegal things—terrifying things.
What bothered the man in California was how they had infiltrated the SEALs.
He asked, “How could they possibly have gotten an undercover agent into the SEALs team? I never heard of that before.”
“They had a guy. He was undercover with the teams for years.”
“How though? You mean he was a SEAL? Like a turncoat?”
“I don’t have details. But I don’t think so. I heard they trained a guy and he made it onto the SEAL team. He stayed in for years.”
“Who the hell would do that?” the man in California had asked the question, but immediately after he thought, A double agent.
The caller said, “Not a guy I wanna meet.”
“Even if that’s true, what the hell would that have to do with us?”
“Are you listening to me? Unit Ten is not just an undercover unit for the SEALs. They’ve got several open investigations. Your company is one. You’re under the microscope. They might already have someone undercover. You need to move fast.”
“Why the renewed interest?”
The caller said, “There’s an article about him.”
“Who? The agent?”
“No. Your guy. They’re unplugging him.”
“What?”
The caller said, “Read the article. Looks like a last-ditch effort sort of thing. You know? They’re afraid that if he dies, the truth dies with him.”
The man in California stayed quiet.
“Check your email. I sent the link.”
A brief pause and then the caller said, “We should never talk again. We’re even now. I’m not a part of this. Okay?”
The caller didn’t wait for a response. He hung up.
The man in California looked around his corner office. His walls were all glass, which he didn’t like, but the designer in the short skirt had said it was the modern look that people in the financial district loved. It wasn’t what he wanted to look at right now.
He swiveled in his chair a couple of degrees and looked at the back of his assistant who sat in a low-back chair, no headrest.
She also wore a short skirt, like the interior designer. He had insisted on it because she had legs that were built to be on display. She wasn’t the most proficient assistant, but he liked to look at her. Which was why he had hired her in the first place. Plus, she looked good to his clients and business associates. Perception was everything. That had been one of the many, many mottoes that he had learned in his Naval days.
Ninety-nine percent of his clients were straight men, many of them foreigners. All of them were the kind of men who were accustomed to getting what they wanted. They were the kind of guys who were once frat boys and never grew up. That was a part of selling the kind of products that he sold because men of integrity tended to be in other industries, not his.
It wasn’t his ideal to be dealing with foreigners, to be selling to foreigners, but the dumb politicians in Congress didn’t want to buy from him. All they ever did was complain about cost or that there were no jobs in their districts or that the military already had products like his.
He had tried to bring his commodities and services to the US military. He had stood in front of Congress, more than once. The last time was a little over ten years ago. He had shown them evidence that Sossaman Medical Technology was better than the industry standard.
He had campaigned for military contracts. He had campaigned hard. He was on TV, even. It was just C-SPAN, but he was there. Again, he had faced Congress the last time and had asked, “What’s it cost for being the most advanced nation in the world? Having the most advanced military forces? This is the future. This is the price.”
He had been proud of that line. But the suits in Washington just weren’t interested in Medical Tech for the military.
That would have been the end of his company if he hadn’t made the decision to sell to foreign countries instead. Plenty of other countries saw the value in his products.
The man in California opened his MacBook and typed in his password, only eight keystrokes. It was simple but complicated. A trick that he had learned ten years ago from his Naval days, was to substitute symbols for letters, the dollar sign for “s” and so on. This way all he had to remember was a word, but spelled with symbols and numbers. And he had had a list of words in his head, memorized. He rotated them every week as his newest passwords. Of course, he only did this on his MacBook and two of his email accounts. The first email account because it was his official business account. Keeping that secure was for obvious reasons, but the second email was one that only twenty-five people in the world had. It was for his more sensitive dealings.
The network of people on the list who knew of his secret email were either foreign officials of other countries, high ranking, or they were contacts that he had made over his years in Intelligence.
The latter list was required to give him information, like the caller from NCIS.
Only two people on that part of the list knew his real name and his secret phone number. The guy who had called him was one of these two people.
The man in California typed in his password and then opened a secure VPN, which hid his IP address. Then he logged into his secret email account and saw that he had one new message from the guy who had called.
The subject was Sossaman.
He opened it.
There was a link, nothing else.
The man in California clicked the link, which instantly opened his browser and took him to a cheap-looking website for a small-town paper. The town was so small that the local news coverage was entirely online. The paper didn’t even print on paper. What for?
The link led to a specific article that the paper had published rec
ently. It was about a man whose family owned a cattle ranch. It made mention of how the cattle industry in the area was declining. It wasn’t a nationwide epidemic; people were still purchasing meat. But they were buying it from major corporations instead of small farms. Most of the names of these companies usually had the word farm in them, but was all an industry ploy, a simple and common practice by companies everywhere.
The person who threatened the man in California’s success was in a coma. He had been for ten years.
The man’s name was Liam Sossaman.
CHAPTER 4
AT THE PRESENT MOMENT, it was still nighttime and it was still pouring rain. Widow had left the sports bar and walked three miles on the opposite side of the road, hoping to avoid the six guys piling into their vehicles and tracking him down. The three-mile hike had taken him about an hour, maybe less. He wasn’t sure of the time, but he knew it was getting late because he was sleepy. He decided to call it a night and find shelter.
He walked on until he found a busy street and assumed that he’d find a couple of motels nearby. He was right and he was wrong. He found a motel, but only one. It was a small single-story L-shaped location.
The rain hammered down on him. He had his shirt pulled up over his head like a hood. And he looked like a total idiot. He jogged through the full parking lot and up underneath a tin overhang. He let his shirt fall back down to where it was meant to be. He spent the next seven minutes huffing and puffing. He shifted from one foot to the next, trying to warm himself.
He turned and walked past a soda machine that hummed and he walked into the motel’s main office, which was a lot nicer than the motel deserved. The outside was standard for a cheap motel, but the office was big and there was a good-sized lobby, with two sofas and even a sixty-five-inch flat screen. It was on, tuned to the end of the same football game that he had been watching back at the sports bar.
He shook himself off, like a wet dog, and walked to the counter. There was a young woman standing behind it. She was a little plump and a little dour, like she had just received some bad news. He said, “It’s really pouring out there.”
She nodded and smiled and even that made her face look more dower and preoccupied with some other news that he wasn’t aware of.
He smiled and said, “I need a room for the night.”
She said, “Sorry, but we’re all booked up.”
He felt defeat and gravity force his shoulders to automatically drop a few inches. He said, “Every room?”
She nodded and said, “Every room.”
He looked down at the back of a computer monitor like there was a way to change that information, but there wasn’t.
He asked, “Where’s the next place?”
“There is no other motel in town, sir.”
Widow felt his jaw drop and hang there for a good long second. He asked, “Nowhere? Not a single other motel?”
“No. There’s one in Windmill Ranch.”
“Where’s that?”
“You can probably get a room there. Just drive north along the highway.”
“How far is it?”
“Maybe twenty miles.”
Widow said, “I’m walking.”
“Your car break down?”
“I don’t have a car.”
“You just walking around? In this weather?”
He nodded.
She said, “I’m sorry, sir.”
Widow smiled and now he felt dour. He thought about plopping down on one of the sofas, but he was certain that she’d ask him to leave or worse. The thought occurred to him that she’d call the cops on him, which had happened to him more than once. He debated taking that chance. He debated it because a night in a warm, dry jail cell sounded great right about then.
In the end, he decided to leave the office and the lobby. He walked back out into the rain and parking lot and started to come up with a plan.
He glanced back into the windows and saw that the girl behind the desk had gone back to whatever she had been doing. He looked right and looked left. The motel didn’t have any surveillance cameras, not that they’d be working in this rain anyway.
Widow yawned and stretched. His body was not going to make it another long walk on the highway, in this rain. No way.
Maybe he could catch a ride. A passerby might feel sorry for him being caught out in the rain and all. The problem was that most of the cars he’d seen had headed south and not north.
He walked away from the office and strolled down the exterior corridor to the corner and took a left. He tried to make it as far from the office as he could. He stopped at the end and decided to take a seat. He slid down the wall and pulled his legs in and waited.
He waited for his body heat to kick in and for his shivering to subside, which it finally did. Then he waited to see if anyone would notice him or ask him to leave. No one came out of any of the rooms and no one was coming in.
The room behind him was pitch black and silent. The occupants must’ve been fast asleep.
He decided to shut his eyes. He could just wake up at first light and return to the road without anyone noticing.
Or so he thought.
CHAPTER 5
THE RAIN HAD STOPPED, but the pounding had gotten so hard that Widow could feel it. And the reason for that was because something metal and hard hit him right across his shins.
Widow’s eyes fired open and intense pain shot through his body. The only sound that he could make was a groan from the pain. He felt it burn through his legs. He toppled over and grabbed his shins.
His vision was still hazy from just waking up. He shook it off and let his eyes focus.
He looked up and saw six familiar faces. One of them, the short one, had a metal pipe in his hand.
They were even bigger to Widow now that he was lying on the ground. They were circled around him and laughing. Their eyes were red and their breath reeked of beer. They must’ve been out all night drinking and were just now coming back to their motel. Which was a horrible coincidence.
The smallest one said, “First, ya spill my beer. Then you run out a window. Now you’re sleepin’ in front of our door?”
Widow’s shins hurt. He lifted his arms near his face in a defensive position in case they tried to hit him on the head with the pipe.
He said, “I don’t have any beef with you fellas.”
The short one raised the pipe again, but didn’t swing it. He said, “Get up, loser.”
Widow said, “Don’t hit me again. I’m getting up.”
The short one said, “Get up. We wanna finish what ya started.”
Widow stood up, clocked the guys surrounding him. Widow wasn’t keen on fighting six on one. Especially big guys, most bigger than him. There was one guy in particular that he didn’t like the look of. He had the Spartan beard, like four of the others. But he also had something in his eyes, in his movements. The others, minus the short one, were all tatted up and mean looking, but they all had that gym muscle. They had that bulk that comes from lifting heavy things and putting them back down. Lifting and putting back down. There muscle wasn’t to be confused with natural, street-grown muscle.
Street muscle was the kind that Widow had. And he was pretty sure it was the same kind of muscle that the guy with that look in his eyes had.
All six guys were younger than him. The shorter one seemed to be calling the shots, but it also seemed that the one guy Widow had noticed was texting back in the sports bar could also be the leader of the group. Or maybe they shared leadership. Widow figured this because the others kept looking between the two of them, like they were waiting for commands.
The shorter guy said, “You got anything to say?”
Widow ignored him and automatically sized up his opponents. Then he smiled because he noticed something that they all had in common, other than the Spartan beard and the size.
The first couple of things that Widow had been trained to look for in any opponent were weapons, intelligence, and trainin
g. The only weapon that he could see was the pipe. The only intelligence that he could see was that one of them could speak and he assumed they could drive.
The third thing was training. That usually meant military training. These guys had none. He was about as positive as a stranger could be. And the reason for his certainty was that he noticed three of them wore a local high school class ring. Then he saw that the same three wore Arizona State attire, probably bought on campus. One had a belt buckle in the shape of a devil’s pitchfork, which was the university’s mascot. They were known as the Sun Devils, at least that was their name the last time that Widow followed college football.
Another guy had a hoodie with the logo on the front and the third had a Sun Devils ball cap, turned to the front, with the bill straight and flat. The purchase sticker was still stuck on it. This had been a new fade that Widow noticed a couple of years ago. Like the Spartan beards, it was meaningless to him. The way a guy wears a ball cap or the time he takes to keep his beard perfectly groomed didn’t mean he was a badass.
The shorter guy jabbed the pipe into Widow’s chest plate. Not hard, but enough to irritate him. He said, “I’m talking to ya!”
Widow couldn’t possibly keep his eyes on all six of these guys at once. Two were out of sight. Behind him.
The guys behind him had their backs close to the wall of the motel. One at the four o’clock position and the other at the seven. The seven o’clock guy was near a window. The four was near a brick wall.
There was no one at his six. The other four he kept in his line of sight. The only guy who worried him was at his twelve, head on, which was part of what worried him about the guy. He wasn’t trying to flank Widow. He wanted Widow to see him coming.
The twelve o’clock guy was also the biggest of the six, not in pounds but in brawn. The guy at his one o’clock was the biggest in pounds. He had a big fat guy look about him, but plenty of upper body strength and thick shoulders to match, like a running back.
Widow said, “Don’t do that.”