[John Flynn 01.0] The Final Tour
Page 22
His drop box was in Barcelona. Colonel Laporte had prepared his men for all eventualities. The colonel had explained during long conversations with him that the work they did was vital not just to France but to the world. Despite that, the political winds could change. They were in a position to become convenient bargaining chips. Or scapegoats. They must be prepared. Their work prepared them.
They were not pirates. They took only what they needed and only from the worst. Currency was important to terrorists around the world. It garnered them arms and fed their men. But moving it had become difficult. In caves in Pakistan and mountains in Afghanistan and bunkers in North Africa they had tracked terrorists, found terrorists, dispatched terrorists. And the spoils, the caches of cash and gold, had mostly been turned over to France.
Mostly.
Colonel Laporte had introduced him to a banker in Paris with orders to make his own connections from there. The less they each knew, the better it would be. He had wound up with a box in a private bank in Barcelona and filled it with cash and documents he might need. They helped him form a shell company in the Bahamas, which purchased a tract of land in the hills of Colorado. Now he made his way to the bank in Barcelona again. He took most of what he had in the box and filled a backpack. Then he left the bank with an introduction for another private bank on the island of Manhattan.
During one of their late-night conversations, he had asked Colonel Laporte where he would go to hide if such action was required. The colonel replied in typically cryptic fashion: If I were a grain of sand, I would choose to hide on the beach.
His protégé thought long and hard about his answer and when the time came he headed for the one place he could hide in plain sight. A Portuguese fishing vessel off the coast of Maine shuttled him onto the shore of his birth land, if not his homeland. He had been born in the United States but had never lived there. Now he would disappear into the crowd. He had learned much and his needs were few.
He had been born John Weatherston, Jr. He had become Jacques Fontaine. Both those men were dead. He left them, along with most of what he carried in his backpack and the small duffel in the basement of a private bank in New York City. The man who stepped out of the bank onto the streets of lower Manhattan and set off marching west wore his father’s first name and his mother’s last.
John Flynn wore a pack on his back and good boots on his feet. He took the ferry to Hoboken. On board he looked west. There was no looking back. He thought about the shipment. It was gone somewhere whoever wanted the weapons couldn’t get them. He thought about his men. Babar was gone. The others would return to France. Gorecki had already been interrogated. Manu and Thorn would face the same questions, with the same smile of a shark. Perhaps they would be discharged from the Legion, but he knew that like him, they had made plans for such an event. He disembarked in New Jersey and settled his pack across his hips. The rest of the journey to Colorado would be on foot.
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Also by AJ Stewart
Jacques Fontaine/John Flynn series
The Compound *
The Final Tour
Burned Bridges
One for One
Miami Jones series
Stiff Arm Steal
Offside Trap
High Lie
Dead Fast
Crash Tack
Deep Rough
King Tide
No Right Turn
Three Strikes *
* The Compound and Three Strikes are only available to members of AJ Stewart’s readers’ crew. Click here for details.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Constance, Marianne, Charlene, Bob, and Wayne.
About the Author
A.J. Stewart wrote marketing copy for Fortune 500 companies and tech start-ups for 20 years, until his head nearly exploded from all the stories bursting to get out.
He has lived and worked in Australia, Japan, UK, Norway, and South Africa, as well as San Francisco, Connecticut and Florida. He currently resides in Los Angeles with his two favorite people, his wife and son.
AJ is working on a screenplay that he never plans to produce, but it gives him something to talk about at parties in LA.
You can find AJ online at
www.ajstewartbooks.com
Jacaranda Drive Publishing
Los Angeles, California
www.jacarandadrive.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover artwork by Streetlight Graphics
ISBN-10: 1-945741-05-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-945741-05-0
Copyright © 2017 by A.J. Stewart
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the author.