Primary Valor

by Jack Mars

  “And that’s all we’ve heard?” Don said.

  “That’s all we’ve heard,” Swann said. “And that message just came through a few moments ago. So that means to me that nothing has happened yet.”

  “Do you still have the drone in the air?”

  Swann shook his head. “I returned it several hours ago. Its night optics aren’t great, so we weren’t going to see much. Anyway, it’s better that we don’t have it.”

  “Why’s that?” Don said.

  Swann looked at Don, then to Trudy, and back again. It was a rare moment when Swann could almost be thought to have a steely gaze.

  “This needs to stay in this room,” he said.

  Don suppressed a smile. Trudy said nothing.

  “I was talking to a friend of mine,” Swann said. “Not really a friend. A guy I know. As you’re both aware, the SRT seems to have sprung a leak somewhere. I’ve been wracking my brains, trying to figure out where it is. We’ve been sweeping these offices like crazy. We use codes and encryptions. We’re keeping information tight, on a need to know basis. So where’s the leak?”

  Don had been beginning to wonder if Swann himself wasn’t the leak. “Okay,” he said. “And did you find an answer?”

  Swann nodded. “Maybe. Maybe one answer. Maybe there are more than one, but this might be an important one.”

  “So give it.”

  “ECHELON,” Swann said. “It’s a monster computer application they have at the National Security Agency. The Patriot Act authorized its existence, but I know NSA had earlier versions of it going back to the mid-1990s, and possibly before. Those were unauthorized. The newest iteration is the most advanced and comprehensive data monitoring program ever invented.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Trudy said. “It can intercept messages.”

  “It can intercept every digital communication sent in the United States,” Swann said. “And communications are all digital now. Phone calls have gone digital. Emails, texts, satellite communications. It vacuums all of them up and collects them.”

  “Okay, but what good is it?” Trudy said. “No one can monitor all of those messages. It would take thousands of people, working in three shifts, twenty-four hours a day…”

  Swann shook his head. “That isn’t the point of it. That isn’t their intention. The program gets tripped by keywords. Any keyword they want can flag a communication for further investigation. Bomb. Assassinate. Al-Qaeda. Whatever keyword interests you. That narrows down who to listen to.”

  “I don’t know what kind of emails you write,” Trudy said. “But I don’t generally use those words.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Swann said. “They can also just pick and choose people to hone in on. My acquaintance suggested to me that the SRT has been flagged for close monitoring the past three months, maybe longer.”

  “Our communications are encrypted,” Don said. “Are they not?”

  Swann shrugged. “Yes and no. The encryption package we have was developed for us by the Bureau. Can a rogue outside party figure out what we’re saying? Absolutely not. Can NSA data scientists unravel standard FBI encryption? Of course they can. Or maybe NSA just reroutes our communications to FBI headquarters, where they have the decryption keys.”

  He looked at Don closely. “They gave us the encryption. You see what I’m saying? You said that was okay at the time we started. We work for them. We use their resources. They own this building. Of course we’ll use their encryption methods. It would seem a little odd if we didn’t.”

  “So you’re saying…”

  Swann nodded. “Yes. They never needed to bug this place. They can listen to us whenever they want. They know what we’re doing almost before we do.”

  He paused.

  “And they probably know Ed is going to Honduras.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  10:15 p.m. Central Standard Time (11:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)

  La Sierra de San Simon (St. Simon’s Saw)

  Near Honduras

  The Caribbean Sea

  “So much for night vision gear,” Luke whispered.

  The place was lit up like a wedding was going on.

  He was holed up, lying on his stomach, the sniper rifle on its bipod, in dense foliage at the edge of the compound, watching the house. With the black face paint on, and the dark clothing he was wearing, he was confident that no one could see him. But he couldn’t stay in here forever.

  The house was massive. There was a main house, and then wings heading off to the right and left. There were three floors, and there must be dozens of rooms. Some windows were lit up, and some were not. An area on the third floor, on the left, western wing, had dim, flickering lights, as though it was lit by candles. That might be something, and it might not.

  There was no way to search a house this big, not by himself, not with a dozen guys. He was going to have to take a hostage, preferably someone who knew where the girl was kept, and have that person lead him there.

  But he needed to make it across the compound to the house first.

  To his far left was the inground pool area. A blue light from the bottom of the pool shone, causing an eerie glow. There didn’t appear to be anyone over there.

  Closer, to his right, was an outbuilding, probably left over from the hotel days. Maybe it had bathrooms, or changing rooms, or some kind of snack bar. Three men dressed in drab green military uniforms were posted near the doorway to this building. They were smoking cigarettes and chatting in low voices. They had rifles slung over their shoulders. Hondurans.

  Directly across from Luke, maybe a hundred meters out, was an open rear door to the house itself. It was at the top of about six wide stone stairs. Two more men stood in that doorway. These men were larger, broad-shouldered, in civilian clothes. Luke guessed that they were private bodyguards, Americans in all likelihood, former military, maybe men like himself.

  The outbuilding was much closer. The men were on this side of it, standing in a little bit of shadow, shielded from the doorway to the house. The angle suggested that it was possible to take those guys without alerting the ones over by the house.

  That meant killing three men in cold blood, men in the Honduran military, who were assigned to this task, and might not know anything about Darwin King. Young men with families, perhaps. It would be easier to kill private contractors.

  “They know,” Luke whispered to himself. “They know what goes on here. They witness it every day. They work for the bad guy. They’re bad guys. It’s that simple.”

  After everything that had happened, there wasn’t much mercy left. He didn’t need to remind himself of the girls who had been kidnapped. He didn’t need to remind himself of Buzz MacDonald dead. He just needed to flash back to the child’s corpse in an overlarge ice chest. Yes, that case was unrelated to this. He knew that. He knew it rationally. But it was about impunity. This impunity in front of him was the same as that impunity behind him. Stealing people, children, treating them like objects to be used or discarded.

  That’s what he was dealing with.

  Moving slowly, carefully, he pointed the sniper rifle in that direction. Its long snout, with the massive sound suppressor attached, poked through the bushes. The three men stood together. Smoke rose between them. One said something, and the other two laughed. Luke could just hear their low voices from here, but nothing of what was said.

  He put one of the men in the circle. The man’s face seemed inches away, close enough that Luke could see the black stubble on his face. The man put the cigarette to his mouth.

  This would have to go quick. It was a bolt action rifle, so he had to manually expel each spent cartridge. Luke practiced changing the aim on the rifle, moving it from man to man.

  He put the first man back in the circle.

  Chung!

  Bingo. Luke ejected the spent cartridge and moved the gun.

  The next face looked down in horror at what had just happened.

  Chung!

 
Luke changed the aim one last time. The third man was crouched, his gun at the ready, staring out into the night, looking for where the shots had come from.

  Chung!

  Three men were now on the ground in a pile over there. None of them had made a sound, other than the rustling they made as they sank to the dirt.

  Luke checked the door to the house. The two big men were there, impassive as before. They hadn’t moved. Okay. Now he was in business.

  He left the gun in place, went back into the bushes, and wrapped around toward the outbuilding. He darted out across open land to the building. The three dead men were piled near the doorway. Luke glanced in. It was just a big open space, maybe a dining hall or a dancehall or a bar at one time.

  Luke took two grenades, put them both on timers for three minutes, and tossed them inside. Then he crossed back to the copse of jungle again.

  He checked the timer on his watch. Two minutes had already passed.

  He went to the sniper rifle. The timing needed to be good, not necessarily perfect, but close to it.

  Thirty seconds left.

  Twenty.

  He put one of the men at the doorway to the house in the circle of the telescopic sight. He was a tall guy in a black T-shirt, broad chest, big shoulders, close-cropped blond hair, a holstered gun at his shoulder. Hard, mean-spirited eyes.

  Ten seconds.

  Chung!

  Dead.

  He tried to put the sight on the second man, but that guy was already gone, disappeared. Luke looked over the top of the telescope, but he didn’t see him. The guy had training. The moment his buddy got hit, he…

  BOOOM!

  There was a flash of light and an eruption of sound, like an earthquake. The first grenade went off, taking out the far wall of the outbuilding. An instant later…

  BOOOM!

  The second one went off, deep inside the building.

  Luke was running now, staying low, the burning outbuilding to his right, the pool grounds to his left. His breathing was loud in his ears. He came at the doorway from an angle. The guard who had ditched was still gone.

  There was shouting to his right side. People were moving toward the outbuilding from the other side of it. He could just see them from the corner of his eye. Something inside that building had really caught fire. There was a tinkling as glass windows shattered and flames licked outward.

  He reached the doors to the house and darted up the steps, two at a time. His pistols were out, one in each hand, his and Bowles’s, two MP5s strapped across his chest, more grenades hanging from his vest.

  He burst through the wide double doorway.

  Here was the man who had ducked. A big guy in a Hawaiian shirt. He was moving down the wide hallway toward Luke. He was part of a group of three, two big guys, flanking a woman in a green dress between them.

  They had guns. He had guns.

  Luke aimed both his guns. The men aimed at him.

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

  BANG!

  They all fired at once.

  Luke shot them both in the face. One of their shots missed entirely.

  The other hit Luke in the left shoulder. It knocked him around sideways. The gun went flying out of his left hand.

  He heard himself grunt from the impact.

  He looked down at the injury. His vest was ripped apart there. It was bloody. A chunk of meat had been taken out. It looked red and raw. He couldn’t tell how bad it was. He couldn’t tell if the bone had been hit.

  It didn’t hurt, but that was the adrenaline talking.

  There was nothing he could do about it. There was no time. The fight was on. He had to do everything now, own this place, sow chaos, destroy opposition, press his advantage before he lost it. Injuries would have to wait.

  The woman stood there, between the corpses of the two men who had been with her a moment ago. She hadn’t moved, but she didn’t seem fazed in the least. She didn’t even glance down at the dead men. Her eyes were hard and cold.

  Luke walked toward her.

  She gestured at his shoulder.

  “You’re shot. You better get that looked at. We wouldn’t want you to bleed to death.”

  The woman’s eyes were a startling shade of green. They went with the dress she was wearing. She was not tall. She was thin, and very pretty, middle-aged, maybe fifty. She stared at Luke with those eyes. Something about them made her seem as if she wasn’t real. A different race, a different species.

  “They told me there was an explosion in the cabana. I thought I’d better come down here and check it out myself.”

  Luke put his remaining pistol to her forehead. It was Bowles’s gun.

  Her eyes never wavered. “You’ll never get out of here alive.”

  “Elaine Sayles, I presume,” Luke said.

  She nodded. “Of course. And you are?”

  Luke shook his head. “No. I’m here for Charlotte Richmond. You’re going to take me to her. You start now, or you’re dead in two seconds. I won’t even count them.”

  “Surely you wouldn’t shoot a woman,” she said. “Look at me. I’m unarmed.”

  “I don’t care,” Luke said. “If you’re here, you’re complicit. It’s open season on complicit people.”

  She hesitated.

  Luke jabbed her forehead with the pistol. She winced at that.

  “Last chance,” Luke said. “I’m out of time, and so are you.”

  Something had changed in her eyes. She believed him.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  * * *

  “Stay behind me, sir,” the bodyguard said.

  There was a security area on the first floor, the closest thing this home had to a panic room. It was a suite of rooms, with double-paned bulletproof glass, concrete reinforced walls, reinforced ceilings, its own dedicated generator, food and water to last several weeks, and satellite communications.

  The entrance to the area was sealed by an old bank vault door. Once closed, it was next to impossible to open or breach. The area was fireproof, bombproof, and was rated to withstand a Category 5 hurricane. There was one door to the outside of the house, which led to the parking lot and the small fleet of armored, four-wheel-drive SUVs. That door, double steel, flush with the outside walls, could not be opened from out there, and provided a last escape hatch, should all else fail.

  The problem, which Darwin had not considered until this moment, was that the security area was two floors below his private apartment. Getting there in a crisis… well, he was discovering how fraught that was. A hurricane was one thing, but this was an invasion.

  A group of seven came down the stairs from the private apartment, and moved along the wide hallway on the second floor. There was Darwin himself, the tallest person in the group. There were the three girls, 11, 17, and 21. And there were three big, stern-faced bodyguards. The men were doing their jobs.

  Two men walked in front, at either side of the hallway, guns out and pointed down. The third man walked in the middle of the hall. Darwin walked directly behind his broad back, the girls following along behind him. He hadn’t gotten the chance to show 21 the error of her ways tonight, but that was beside the point now.

  She had brought this upon him, whether she meant to or not. These people, whoever they were, were attacking because of her.

  They would be beaten back, and once they were…

  BANG! BANG!

  The lead man on the right, and the one on the left, both fell to the floor. Darwin saw a cloud, a spritz of blood, exit the back of the man on the left’s bald head before he fell. The girls behind him screamed. The man in front of Darwin froze into a crouch, his gun pointed up the hallway in front of them.

  The men on the floor were not moving at all. Pools of blood were forming around their heads.

  “Darwin!” a female voice screamed. Darwin recognized that voice instantly.

  He squatted behind the last remaining bodyguard in the group, his hand on the man’s back.

  At the
far end of the hall, two people appeared. One of the people was Elaine. She wore the shimmering green dress that he liked so much. There was a man behind her. He held a gun pointed at her head, and stayed low to keep Elaine’s body in front of him. He was hard to see back there. He was using Elaine as a shield.

  “Can you kill that man?” Darwin said to the bodyguard.

  “Only if I shoot Elaine first.”

  The man over there was big. He wore all black. His face was painted black and dark green. He wore a black cap. It was impossible to say anything about him. He was close to Elaine, one gloved hand around her throat, the gun to her head with the other hand.

  “Darwin,” Elaine said. It sounded like she had a lump in her throat. Darwin had never heard her sound like that before.

  “Shut up!” the man said.

  Darwin found himself unable to speak. He crouched there, behind his bodyguard, his voice failing him. He should take charge here. He should…

  “Sir, what do you want to do?” the bodyguard said. “Should I take the shot?”

  What was he asking? Should he kill Elaine so that he could kill this other man? Was he insane? Darwin and Elaine had been together for more than twenty years. But Darwin couldn’t speak. He couldn’t answer the question.

  If the bodyguard killed Elaine, and then killed the intruder, Darwin would be safe, for the moment. Maybe he could just shoot Elaine and get her out of the way, but not kill her. It was impossible to discuss that possibility in this moment, though. There should be a policy, but there wasn’t one. This had never been anticipated. He would leave it up to this man, this hired help, to set the new policy for himself.

  “Charlotte Richmond!” the intruder called. “Come here, Charlotte. Your mother sent me to get you.”

  Darwin heard 21 gasp behind him. Darwin glanced back at her. Her eyes were huge. She was still wearing the sheer nightgown. Even in this extreme moment, she looked beautiful.

  “Come to me,” the man said. “It’s all right. Come to me, Charlotte.”