by Martha Carr
Dan couldn’t watch any longer. He pushed Rick out of the way and with better balance and momentum, he broke the lock and the door flew wide. He crouched and jumped aside, expecting there to be someone waiting and ready to attack.
Rick looked in and rushed through the open door. Two people were on the floor tied up and gagged.
Evelyn and Kate.
An ugly growl from the hallway told him that they weren’t alone.
Sergey lay in the hallway where Rick had dropped him, and Dan held Irina by the hair while the two men Rick had seen by the pool blocked the hallway. They each carried a knife. Dan had his pistol, but it was on the same side as the young woman, and the men were closing.
Rick had no time to untie the women and there was nothing in the room to use as a weapon.
So Rick did like he always did. He used his body as a weapon. He ran out the door and straight at the Russians. The knives made him change his mind, and he dove to the side, bouncing off the wall and sliding to the floor. The first Russian dodged out of the way, then came back with a vengeance, leading with his knife.
Rick pushed the man’s arm aside with a desperate block. Rick winced at what sounded like a cannon firing in the hallway. A thin tendril of nearly non-existent smoke trailed from the barrel of Dan’s pistol.
The Russian tumbled onto Rick and the other man bolted, sliding across the marble before bounding up the stairs. With Sergey in the way, Irina wailing and scratching, Dan couldn’t chase him. He didn’t even have a free hand to use the radio.
Rick was no help until he worked his way from under the dead body. He kicked the man, took his knife, and returned to the massage room to cut the tape from his friends.
When the police arrived, they blocked the entrance to the Holton and conducted a search for the second Russian, but the man was long gone. They took Irina away in handcuffs and Sergey out on a stretcher. Kate and Evelyn gave their statements, but they hadn’t seen much.
“Where’d all the blood come from?” Rick asked, after discovering that it wasn’t from Kate or Evelyn.
“Stupid man messed with the wrong women!” Evelyn said proudly. “One kick in the eggs and sausage, and he went down like Paul Bunyan felling a tree. He smacked his head against the wall. It was that second sumbitch that caught us by surprise.”
“You weren’t here on vacation were you? Running an IE op, in Hawaii? Where do I sign up for that kind of duty?”
“We weren’t, as far as you know, but our backup was clearly too far away, and that is going to earn someone a stern talking to,” Kate said, nodding toward her shorter partner.
“Such a punishment I wish on no man,” Rick intoned, holding his hand over his heart.
Rick’s stomach growled. Sadie raised her eyebrows at him. “Hungry!” he exclaimed.
The security chief stood to the side, looking like the humble pie he had eaten had been laced with vinegar and arsenic.
“If I may,” he started, holding his hat in his hand, “the offer for dinner stands. All of you, on the hotel at the KPC, our finest restaurant. We will provide private space for you. Please allow us to do this little thing for you.”
Dan didn’t want to take it, but the others were perfectly happy for the selfish reason that Rick wasn’t the only one who was hungry.
“Come on, Dan, we’ve got some things to discuss. We might need your help in other areas,” Rick suggested, tapping his credential wallet, the one holding his CIA identification.
“I’ll want to talk with you later about how such a conspiracy can run out of your hotel,” Dan said, slapping the security chief on the back as the five of them paraded past.
“Are you really?” Rick wondered as he held his wife’s hand.
“No. He’s a nob, and it gives me pleasure thinking of him sweating it,” Dan chuckled.
About the Author, Craig Martelle
I'm a lifelong daydreamer and student of human interaction. I have some degrees, but those don't matter when it comes to telling the story. Engaging characters within a believable narrative- that's what it’s all about. I live in the interior of Alaska, far away from an awful lot, but I love it here. It is natural beauty at its finest.
I wrote this story while on vacation in Hawai’i. We stayed at the Hilton Waikoloa and it is a sweet place! I can only imagine something so nefarious happening within its welcoming embrace. I changed the names to protect the innocent, of course, but if you head to Kona, you should give it a look. That resort is magnificent – they have sharks and dolphins, but alas, none of the sharks had laser beams attached to their fricking heads.
Amazon – www.amazon.com/author/craigmartelle
Facebook – www.facebook.com/authorcraigmartelle
My web page – www.craigmartelle.com
Twitter – www.twitter.com/rick_banik
Want a little more?
A Sample From -
People Raged and the Sky Was on Fire
A Rick Banik Thriller
People Raged and the Sky Was on Fire
A Rick Banik Thriller
Chapter 1 - Why Would You Do That?
Now is the winter of our discontent, Rick quoted while daydreaming, hoping the madness before him would stop. Our world is doused in gasoline, and while we vote on whether we should call it gas or petrol, a dark stranger lights a match and approaches. As they tally the ballots, the match drops and fire fills the sky. The people raged in disbelief that good men could fail so completely.
The room smelled of emotionally charged sweat. Men, arguing about the way ahead. The catalyst? A single sheet of paper with a single paragraph. The cover sheet marked TOP SECRET//COMINT-GAMMA //ORCON/NOFORN, was cast aside, long since forgotten. Very few people in the country were allowed access to it. Even fewer actually read it.
Rick sat along the wall, a mid-level analyst without a seat at the big table.
He read the message before the meeting. One terrorist talking to another, translated, analyzed, condensed, re-analyzed, and reported. The analysis was odd, so he dug into the system and pulled the original analysis before it was reduced to one alarming paragraph. Then he pulled the first translation of the original conversation and finally he pulled up the conversation itself, in its native Arabic.
He didn’t speak Arabic, but he had friends who did. He ran it by them. Their translation was different. The report with the analysis of the analysis of the translation was wrong. And the men in the meeting haggled over their interpretations as if they held the Holy Grail in their hands.
Rick fidgeted, waiting for the opportunity to take the stage, deliver his conclusion and how he arrived at it. But would they listen? He waited until his boss, Colonel Tom Alexander, US Army Retired leaned back.
Rick whispered in his ear, “Sir, they have it all wrong. I pulled the original material and got another translation. It’s different. I think we need to stop the madness and start with a new look.” The Colonel nodded, excusing himself from the meeting, motioning Rick to follow as he worked his way toward the door.
When they were in the hallway, the Colonel held a finger to his lips stopping Rick from talking. Once they were in the Colonel’s office and the door closed, Rick unloaded.
“They’re wrong. They see an attack next month in Europe from a group that’s forming now. The linguists I talked with said that the group is already formed, and they weren’t talking about Europe, but right here. They’re in the U.S.!” Rick walked as he talked. His blond hair, shot through with streaks of gray, whipped about his head as he gesticulated wildly.
The Colonel sat at his desk, calmly watching, letting Rick run through the course of his argument.
Tom Alexander earned his education through an ROTC scholarship to the Citadel. He worked his way up through the infantry, successfully commanding a battalion as a Lieutenant Colonel, before moving to Intelligence. His monitor told him that it was critical for future promotions to get a staff billet behind him. He did well, earned his eagles, symbols of how high Colonels were
supposed to soar before he’d had enough with the Pentagon. He topped out after a few unsavory conversations with politician Generals.
He retired last year and started work at the Emerson Partners Enterprises Corporation think tank, a run-of-the-mill DC contractor that provided work for the intelligence community, the IC. EPEC drank from the terrorism spigot, a seemingly endless flow of money thrown at a problem identified in the media as the Global War on Terrorism.
Rick finished and sat down, leaning back heavily.
“I couldn’t agree more, Rick. Give me a report, something in writing, and I’ll take it back in there and present it. Rick nodded and walked quickly to his desk in the cube farm. He pulled up the report he’d already prepared on his yellow-tagged, Top Secret computer and hit print. The special printer sat in a closed room a few steps away. He held his badge to the door’s access panel, typed in his PIN and went in. He pulled the page from the printer, letting the door close behind him as he returned to the Colonel’s office.
It was a good thing Rick glanced at the page before handing it over. The report in his hand wasn’t his. This was a report someone else had printed referencing a Talent-Keyhole classified image of a terrorist camp in North Africa. He checked the print time. Someone printed this report hours ago and forgot about it.
He went back to the printer room. His report was now in the printer’s discharge tray. He put the first report back, then thought better of it. He shoved it into the burn bag to the side. A member of the night shift would close the bag and take it to the incinerator in the building’s basement. If whoever printed it wanted it, they would have already collected it.
In Rick’s opinion, there was too much paper floating around the office spaces. He had to pass two sets of security guards and numerous bank-vault style doors to get to his desk. He carried nothing in and nothing out. It was the cost of doing business in the IC. He hadn’t printed his report before because he didn’t want to have to destroy it, but now it held a purpose and it would see the light of day.
Rick was glad he stayed late the day before to work on this report. He always had some pet project going on in the background, taking positions and thinking about things the others didn’t. He gave himself more work than the bosses ever would, but published no more than a third of it. He went forward with something only if he could defend it fully. The others went forward with everything. He had no respect for those guys.
Rick wrote a lot of reports. Maybe EPEC charged the federal government per word. He produced enough that it would be lucrative. And he was one of the slower analysts on the floor, something that did not cause him any shame. His reports were better, more concise, more thoroughly researched. The way the reports went forward made him wonder. Did anyone ever read them?
He convinced himself that EPEC charged by the word. He shook his head. Maybe someday it would matter. He didn’t want anything to come back to him. He treated every scrap of intelligence as if it was critical, then pushed it aside when he learned it wasn’t.
It took a special person to wade through the reams of reports to find the nuggets, the bread crumbs. As politicians liked to say, connect the dots. What they don’t tell you is there are the same number of dots as there are stars in a clear night’s sky. Weeding out those that don’t matter from those that do is an overwhelming job. What makes it harder is dealing with reports at the highest classification that are blatantly wrong.
Those with chairs at the big table didn’t have the time to weed through the raw data. They only dealt with reports of pre-analyzed data, like the one they were beating to death in the conference room right now.
Rick tried to work through how he felt. Raging about the endemic shortcomings of the IC wasn’t going to change anything. He needed to get back on track, fight individual battles, not the whole war.
Rick’s report would change the flavor of the conversation from how do we inform our allies to one of how do we protect ourselves. The “NOFORN” classification meant Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals. It made informing the Europeans problematic. Not impossible, but it could only be done at levels far over Rick’s head, levels that people like Colonel Alexander aspired to.
Rick handed the Colonel his report and prepared to follow him back to the conference room, but Tom stopped him. “I need you to dig more into this. Is there anything else? Build me a network diagram of who else these people talked with. Is there any kind of metadata originating from within the U.S.? Important people are going to have questions, and we need to be ready with answers. This changes everything. Thanks, Rick. Great work, as usual.”
Rick smiled tensely before heading back to his desk. The Colonel hadn’t read his report before returning to the meeting. Rick had little confidence that he would properly represent his position, their new position, the right position. Maybe the Colonel would read it to the group.
If he did, would he give Rick credit? Everyone had seen the exchange between him and the Colonel. Probably not. He’d let them all assume that it happened due to the sage guidance of senior management, in this case, one Colonel Tom Alexander.
Read the rest of People Raged, a full-length Rick Banik thriller, available exclusively from Amazon.
My Book
Five
The Spy Who Came in from the East Coast
By Erika Mitchell
CIA case officer training demands a lot of recruits. You’ve got to learn how to lie, how to tell when others are lying, how to extract information from someone who doesn’t want to give it to you, and how to convince someone to betray their country while making them believe it was their idea. You will suffer, and your instructors will teach you how to cope with it. They will torture you, and you will thank them for it because they’re preparing you to deal with what is perhaps the hardest part of being a field operative.
What they don’t prepare you for is perhaps the second-hardest part of being a field operative: Paid time off.
Every spy comes from somewhere, and we’ve all eventually got to go home in one way or another. We can’t all be orphans like James Bond, the lucky bastard. No amount of training can ever prepare you to suffer through dinner with your parents when just last month you were fomenting an insurrection in some backwater country your racist uncle’s never even heard of.
I personally wouldn’t know, having spent the last seven years answering to the cover name Bai Hsu, and working around the world doing morally questionable but still very cool things. I’d decided it was time to come home, though, which was why I was fidgeting outside baggage claim at Oakland International as I waited for my father to come pick me up. I had a handful of wrongs to atone for, and my hope was that I could mend some fences in the short time I was in town.
It’s just four days with my family. I can do four days with my family. I survived three weeks in a North Korean detention facility, I can handle a little quality time with my parents.
This was what I told myself as my father pulled up to the curb in his silver Nissan Leaf.
He lowered the passenger side window and leaned over. “Get in, son. You’re holding up traffic.”
In the time it took you to say that, I could’ve climbed in already, I thought as I threw my stuff into the backseat. “Hi, Dad.”
I buckled my seatbelt and surveyed his new car as he pulled away from the curb. Even though he’d bought it months ago, the floor was still covered in white paper mats that read Thanks for buying at Oakland Nissan! The inside of the car smelled new, but the new car smell was losing ground to the scent of the Dapper Dan pomade my dad had used in his hair for as long as I could remember.
There was more gray in my dad’s hair than the last time I’d seen him, but it was still mostly black and shiny, worn parted to the side and short enough to stay above his ears. His eyeglasses were new, too--an updated style with titanium rims that looked pretty good on him.
“I like the new car,” I said as he negotiated evening rush hour traffic. “What’s the range?”
�
�107 miles on battery-only. Not too bad.”
“Does Mom like it?”
He shrugged. “She thought the old car was fine. She still doesn’t understand why we had to sell it.”
“The ‘99 Subaru? She didn’t understand why you might want to upgrade from a car that was old enough to vote?”
“You know your mother. She doesn’t like change.”
I reached over and tapped the side of his new glasses. “You seem to be doing okay with it, though. These are nice.”
“Thank you.” He straightened his glasses and looked me over when traffic came to a stop. “How is work?”
I leaned the seat back and folded my hands behind my head, hiding my small gasp of pain with a fake yawn. My arms had healed from the lacerations I’d gotten from tackling a U.S. Senator through a window over the summer, but the crosshatched pink scars still pulled when my skin stretched. I’d worn a sweater to keep them concealed from my mother’s all-seeing eyes, but was certain she’d ferret out the information before my visit was through. “Work is good. Keeping me busy.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’d say that’s an understatement. I hope you have a more thorough response for your mother.”
“Is she doing better now?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the pristine roof of his car.
“Do you mean, now that FBI agents aren’t interrogating us about whether we’ve seen our son lately? Or now that our son’s face is no longer all over the evening news because he’s suspected of being a terrorist? Because we could also discuss whether she’s doing better now that our bank accounts are no longer frozen. Which of these do you mean?”
His voice never wavered from his usual mild speaking tone, but I could feel anger simmering off him in waves. It was obvious in the way his knuckles whitened where he gripped the steering wheel, and in the way he was braking. We were jumping forward and screeching to a stop as he battled traffic on Route 13 North through Oakmore.