Power Move (Alexander King Book 4)

by Bradley Wright

  “Well, that is oddly nice of them.”

  “Yeah, so you and your husband Alexander King are celebrating when you stayed in that room ten years ago on the night you were married. So . . . happy anniversary, you two.”

  “Clever,” Sam said. Then she looked over at King. “Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve played the part.”

  “That is true,” King said. “Anything else on the men at the bank or any word from Ortega?”

  “Nothing on the men at the bank, but I’ve hacked the security cameras there. I’m combing the footage now. I’ll run some facial recognition when I get a good view of one of them.”

  “How will you know which ones they are?”

  “Kyle said he’ll be able to tell who they are.”

  Sam chimed in. “Use the black man in the jogger attire as a clue as to who they are. It was Omari who helped signal us.”

  “Ooh, okay. That will help. Thanks.”

  “And Ortega?” King said.

  “Right, I’ve called him and left messages. Haven’t heard anything back.”

  “All right,” Sam said. “Keep trying, and I’ll do the same. We really need to speak with him.”

  “You got it. If you need anything else, just give us a shout.”

  Sam ended the call. Then her phone dinged as a text message came in. “Perfect timing. Omari says he has eyes on us.”

  “In that case, Mrs. King, shall we check into our room?”

  They both stood, and Sam walked around the table and hooked her arm around his. “It’s been a great ten years.”

  13

  On their way across the street to check in at the Hotel de Paris, King and Sam inserted their earpieces so Omari could stay connected to them at all times. They had no problems at the front desk, and the two of them waited as their elevator made it down to the lobby.

  “You with us, Omari?” Sam said.

  “Copy. Walking the perimeter. Looking for anyone wearing a T-shirt that says Bad Guys on it.”

  “I get this sort of terrible humor enough from Xander. I don’t need it from you too.”

  “I just want you to be yourself, Omari,” King said.

  The elevator dinged and the doors opened. King and Sam stepped inside.

  King pressed the 3 button. “So, what’s the guess on what is waiting for us?”

  “Honestly? Nothing.”

  “Has to be nothing, right?”

  Sam raised an eyebrow and one side of her mouth. A face that said maybe she knew something she wasn’t saying.

  “What?” King said as they reached the third floor and the doors opened. “You know something, don’t you?”

  They walked out into the hallway. “No . . . Maybe. Thomas and I, since I was an aspiring agent and he was a war supplier, if you will, we used to have conversations about, you know, spy things.”

  “You mean, like gadgets and stuff?”

  “Yes, but more so situational things. Like what would you do if you woke up in a dark room tied to a chair? Or could you get yourself out of ropes if you knew you only had five minutes to escape? Things like that.”

  “How could you have ever let him go?” King said with a laugh. “So what does that have to do with you making that face about something to do with this room?”

  They approached the door with the 323 plaque beside it. Sam stopped before touching the key to the electronic lock. “One of the scenarios we talked about a lot was leaving clues.”

  “Seriously?”

  “What?”

  “You said you didn’t think this would be anything from the very beginning and you didn’t want to look into it. How could you ever think that if one of the things you and Thomas always did was talk about leaving clues?”

  “I never said it would be nothing, Xander. I said it would be nothing but trouble.”

  “Semantics. Point is, at the bank you acted like you had no idea what that number on the back of the photo meant. But you knew immediately, didn’t you?”

  Sam placed the key card over the electronic lock, and a green light blinked. She pulled the handle and pushed the door ajar. “Yes. But I still don’t know what it means.”

  “But you knew Thomas was leaving you a clue.”

  “Maybe. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow it.”

  “Until we got ambushed. Then you knew you had to.”

  Sam pushed her way into the room. “Yes. But I’m telling you, if there is something in here, it will be what I said from the beginning.”

  “Trouble,” King said following her inside. “I get it.”

  He looked around the room. In front of him was a wall of windows that overlooked the ocean. The burnt-orange sky hovered over the water as the sun disappeared. The room was modern but not uncomfortable. Shades of cream and tan were the theme.

  “So what’s the clue then?”

  Sam pulled an oversize lounge chair over to the wall and stood up on it. “One of the ways we always said would be a good way to leave something for another agent in a hotel would be behind an air conditioning vent.”

  “C- for originality,” King said. “But I’ve heard worse.”

  Sam fidgeted with the white vent cover. “Got anything to get this open?”

  King pulled his EDC Chris Reeve Sebenza knife from his pocket and thumbed open the blade. He gave it to Sam, and she began working on the screws. He walked over to the windows and took in the scenery. There was a street directly below, then a building, then the ocean. A seagull floated across the tangerine sky, and he just couldn’t help himself.

  “Man, this place is romantic. I can just imagine you standing here ten years ago in your robe. Sipping your champagne. Absolutely fuming while you looked out at the ocean because your man would rather be at a poker table than with his bride on their honeymoon.”

  “I really do hate you, you know?” Sam said.

  “Yeah, I—”

  King stopped his sentence when three police cars passed beneath him. He leaned toward the window, looked down the road, and four more were on their way, with two black SUVs sandwiched in between. They all had their blues and reds flashing and their sirens blaring.

  “What’s going on out there?” Sam said.

  “Uh, I think we better consider getting the hell out of here.”

  “What?” Sam froze and looked over at him.

  Omari spoke up in their ears. “Guys, I know it could just be a coincidence, but there are a lot of police here if you haven’t noticed. And I just passed three men in suits looking an awful lot like agents on my way by the front entrance. Might be time to move on.”

  “How’s this possible?” King said.

  Sam went back to the screws on the vent. “I can’t get this damn screw loose!”

  King rushed over. “Give it to me. You go out to the hallway and find us an exit. I’ll be right there.”

  Sam handed him the knife and did as he asked. King slid the blade in the screw slot and began attempting to turn it.

  “Yeah, it’s go time,” Omari said. “I’ll get the car and meet you at Pattaya restaurant. When you make it out of the hotel, head southwest. It’s on the docks less than half a mile.”

  “Copy,” King heard Sam say.

  The blade of his knife was too thin, and he was really having trouble getting it started to turn. As the sirens blared outside, his PTSD from being hunted by the police in Mexico City was beginning to mess with his mind. He knew he’d done nothing wrong, but that hadn’t mattered in the past. And because of that, a seed of anxiety began to bloom in his stomach. It is a slippery slope if you let doubt and worry creep in when the stakes are high, so he took a calming deep breath in an effort to squelch it. But other thoughts—like whether it was even worth it to stay there for a silly ex-husband goose chase—also blossomed. He was about to bail when the what-ifs began. What if all the police hoopla outside wasn’t just for him and Sam? What if it was because of whatever may or may not be on the other side of that vent?

  “If you h
aven’t already left, now’s the time,” Omari said. “I made it into the lobby before the surge of cops. Just watched the three suits hit the elevator. I’m going for the car now. Get out!”

  King repositioned the blade in the head of the screw. He wasn’t giving up.

  The hotel door beeped, and Sam flung open the door as she stepped back inside. “We gotta go. Just leave it. Omari can try late tonight or in the morning.”

  “It will be gone by then,” King said.

  “We don’t even know if there is something there!”

  King continued to work at the screw. His forehead beaded with sweat even though the room was cool.

  “Xander!”

  “All those cops aren’t here for us, Sam. They are here for the same reason we are. You know that.”

  “No, I don’t know that. It feels more like we’ve been set up somehow. If we get caught without anything on us, we’ll be fine. But even if something is behind that vent, if we get caught with it, we might not be leaving Monaco.”

  “You’re not helping!”

  King gave the last of his elbow grease, and the screw finally made its first move. But his blade slipped off immediately.

  “It moved!”

  “This is insane, Xander. Let’s go!”

  The screw turned a little more. Then the two of them heard a faint ding that traveled down the hallway. King looked up at Sam. She pulled her Glock and poked her head out into the hallway. King didn’t wait to see her reaction; he already knew they were coming. He went back to the screw and got one more twist with the blade before he put it away. He shot his hand back to the screw, wrapped his thumb and index finger around it, and twisted as fast as he could.

  “They’re in the hallway, let’s go right now! Right now!”

  King felt the screw come loose, and it fell to the carpet below. The vent swung downward and hung by the other screw. King shot his hand into the vent and squeezed something small that was sitting inside.

  “Freeze! FBI! Hold it right there!” a man’s voice echoed in the hallway. An American man.

  King jumped down from the chair and sprinted for the door. “Go, go, go!”

  Sam moved left out of the door and disappeared into the hallway.

  “I said freeze!” the man shouted.

  King traded the thumb drive he’d found in the vent for his gun as he hurried through the door. As soon as he stepped foot in the hallway, the three men from the elevator were right behind him. They were in suits just as Omari had described. King heard the man say FBI, but he wasn’t about to stop running. Trust was not automatic in his game, and there was no time to stop and ask for credentials.

  King had no idea what he had in his pocket, but he knew it was important. And he knew there was no way anyone else was going to see it before he did.

  14

  Outside Mexico City, Mexico

  “We good now?” Juice said to Andre, his contact with notorious drug lord and international criminal Raúl Ortega.

  Juice towered over Andre, so much so that Juice’s men found it comical Andre had been trying to intimidate him. He’d got the nickname Juice when he first joined the Army. He was fresh off his senior year of football at Nebraska. He was naturally big as a kid, but when he discovered football, lifting weights became a daily habit. And even though he’d never touched a steroid in his life, you couldn’t tell by looking at him. When his bunkmate told him he looked like he juiced in the shower in front of the other men, he was known as Juice thereafter. Six foot six and 240 pounds of solid muscle made it a hard moniker to lose.

  “Mr. Ortega is on his way,” Andre said. “Nothing goes through till he gets here.”

  Andre walked away, and Juice tried to hold his anger. He wasn’t upset because of Andre; he just wanted to get the deal over with so he could get the hell out of Mexico City. They’d flown in late last night and were supposed to be rid of the weapons already. The longer it took to do these criminal deals, the higher the chance things could go wrong.

  Juice watched as Andre got in his car and drove back down the dirt road. He’d been summoned to meet a long way from the city, at the small airport where they’d landed. Now it was just him and two of his men in a Jeep waiting for one of the more notorious criminals in the world. And he’d never been meant to meet with him at all. Juice didn’t like the way things were going.

  “What’s the problem, big man?” Luc said. Luc had been with Juice for six years, since Juice first broke away from the military to form his own mercenary-for-hire team. Luc, like Andre, was the opposite of Juice—short and wiry—and he hadn’t lost one bit of his Australian accent. Juice, being a former Army Ranger dealt more with logistics, tactics, and overall just being the muscle. Luc didn’t seem like it, but he was the brains. He and electronics had been forever friends since he was a kid.

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” Juice said as he got in the passenger seat. “But I ain’t about to stick around and find out.”

  James turned toward him from behind the wheel. “The guy said Ortega was on his way. We can’t leave yet.”

  James was Marcus’s man. Marcus sent him along to keep an eye on things and to make sure he was being reported all the information. Juice had been reluctant to take the job when Marcus called. Something had felt off about Marcus. And his gut had been right when he found out after taking possession of the weapons that they were supposed to drive out to the middle of nowhere from the already remote airport to complete the sale. And he would have just called it off right then if he hadn’t got the news about his daughter only a week earlier.

  “Head back to the airport, now,” Juice said.

  “Might want to listen to him, mate,” Luc spoke from the backseat. “He gets quite grumpy when he ain’t had a proper meal.”

  “We’re not leaving,” James pulled the keys from the ignition.

  Without hesitating, Juice threw a right hook that landed on James’s cheekbone. His head bounced back; then his chin came to a rest on his chest.

  “Oh, I’ve been wanting to see that since we left Turkey with the weapons.”

  “You drive,” Juice said as he yanked James out of his seat and tossed him in the back of the Jeep. “I have a few phone calls to make.”

  “You think this is the right move? Ortega’s not some small-timer.”

  “We don’t really have a choice.”

  “Always a choice, mate. Told you that when this Marcus guy called with the job, and told you that again when we found out we were supposed to drive away from the shipment to complete the sale. Not sure what it is about this job, and making sure we do it, but we’ve got to start making smart moves.”

  Juice didn’t speak; he just gave Luc a hardened glare. But he knew Luc was right. He’d made a bad decision taking the job and an even worse decision to continue it. And worst of all for him, he broke the cardinal rule when he’d broken out on his own—never to take a job because he needed the money, only if he wanted the money. Sticking to that simple rule would help him have a clearer head on which were good jobs and which weren’t. He’d let his personal life cloud his judgment. And now not only had he more than likely lost the sale, but he’d put his men in danger by having them there.

  Luc grabbed the keys from where they’d dropped on the floor and started the Jeep. He pulled away, leaving a trail of dust behind them as they went. Behind them, they could hear James’s phone ringing. Luc and Juice shared a knowing look. It was Marcus checking in. He would know the deal should have been done by then. It continued ringing, but instead of answering it, Juice pulled out his own phone.

  “What’s going on, boss? I was just about to call you,” a man answered.

  “Charlie, fire up the plane,” Juice said. “We’re getting the hell out of here.”

  “No, we aren’t,” Juice’s man said.

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “About ten of Ortega’s men just showed up. They have the plane surrounded. Unless we shoot our way out, we
aren’t going anywhere.”

  15

  Monte Carlo, Monaco

  As Alexander King bolted down the hotel hallway, running from the three men shouting at him to freeze, it crossed his mind that he really didn’t have any idea if they were American agents or not. Or any sort of law enforcement, for that matter. The man sounded American when he shouted, and Omari mused that they looked like FBI, but like the men in the bank, he didn’t know who they were. But he sure as hell wanted to find out.

  Sam was waiting just up ahead, holding open the door to the stairwell. King motioned for her to go first, and the two of them hurried down. When they were almost to the bottom floor, King noticed three tall stacks of chairs that looked like they were about to be moved to a conference room. Sam surged ahead and reached for the door that led to the lobby, but King wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her behind the chairs.

  “What are you doing?” Sam whisper-shouted.

  “I have to know who these men are,” King whispered back.

  Sam moved to get free of him, but he held tight. The door three floors above them swung open and clanged against the wall, echoing down the stairwell.

  “We have to know,” King said.

  “They’ll see us!”

  “Don’t move!”

  King jumped up, opened the door to the lobby, slammed it shut, then hurried back behind the chairs as quietly as he could. The footsteps of the men squeaked and stomped as they sped down. The first man ran straight to the door and blasted it open. He stopped just outside the door in the hallway and jerked his head left toward the lobby, then right toward the exit.

  The other two men raced up, and with a breathy shout the first man said, “You go toward the lobby, you go back upstairs in case we went the wrong way, and I’ll check the perimeter. If the police try to stop you, just get the hell out of here. Go!”

  King watched two of the men move; one went right and one went left. The last man came back inside the door and headed right for the stairs. King sidestepped the chairs, reached out, and caught the man’s blazer, yanking him back as hard as he could. The man spun and tried to keep his balance, but King finished him off with a kick to the right calf, and it swept the man off his feet. King pulled his knife on the way down to putting his knee on the man’s chest. If he had to kill him, he didn’t want to make any noise.