He lifted the license from the wallet and examined it under the light of his phone. Looked from the photograph to the man’s face and then back again.
“Byron Hunt, huh? That your real name or a fake? And I strongly suggest you tell the truth.”
The man’s eyes fell and his shoulders slumped. Given the location of his bullet wound it had to be painful.
He sighed. “It’s real.”
Jack nodded. “Well, Mr. Byron Hunt of…” he made a show of memorizing the address listed on the license “…Eight Five Seven Melrose Avenue, Albany, New York, I’m going to take this little girl and disappear. You’re on your own as far as getting out of here goes, but if I ever see you again, if our paths cross even in the most random manner, I am going to finish you and you’ll never see it coming. Am I making myself clear, Mr. Byron Hunt of Albany, New York?”
“I get it,” he said. “The last thing I want in this world is to ever see you again, anyway, or the little girl for that matter, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Oh, I know that,” Jack shot back. “You’re the one who should be worried.” His head was pounding and the blood continued to flow slowly down the side of his face, but he locked eyes with Byron Hunt until Hunt dropped his gaze first.
Then he wheeled and held his phone face-out toward the interior of the cottage. He spotted the three guns that had been dropped in the violence of the confrontation and picked them up off the floor one by one.
He recovered his backpack and threaded the sound suppressor off his Sig. Dropped the suppressor into the pack and zipped it closed. Shrugged the pack over his shoulders. Slipped his gun into its shoulder holster and stuffed the other two into the waistband of his trousers.
Then he hurried to Janie. She remained in the fetal position, but she was moaning softly and her eyelids fluttered. She would be regaining consciousness soon and when she did, Jack didn’t want her anywhere near the dead man or his accomplice.
He bent and scooped her up in his arms. He felt like he’d been run over by a truck after absorbing several punches flush in the face from Mike Hargus, but she still felt light and insubstantial. In seconds he had crossed the room.
When he arrived at the doorway he turned one last time toward Byron Hunt. “The minute I get away from here, I’m calling the cops. Unless you want to face a lot of questions you can’t answer, I suggest you muster up the strength to grab Hargus’s keys and drive his stolen car the hell out of here.”
He spun on his heel and plunged through the door without waiting for a response.
He stumbled across the small front yard, turning right when he reached the road and moving as fast as he dared toward the clearing where he’d stashed his truck.
The going was slow, as the pavement was nearly as rutted as the sandy yard he’d just left, and a broken or sprained ankle at this point would likely land him in prison. He still hadn’t seen a single vehicle pass along the road, but kept a sharp eye out for approaching headlights anyway.
Janie continued to moan, becoming more active in Jack’s arms. Without warning she flailed her arms and legs and they almost went down in a heap.
She opened her eyes. They were wide and confused and terrified. “Where am I? What’s going on?”
Jack hugged her to his chest. “You’re okay, Tiger. I’m taking you home to your mom where you belong.”
“I get to go home? To see Mommy?” Her voice broke and Jack hugged her tighter.
“Yes, Janie, you get to go home to your mommy. And guess what the first thing is I’m going to tell her?”
“What?”
“I’m going to tell her how brave you were. I’m going to tell her your new nickname is ‘Tiger’ because you’re as brave as any tiger that ever roamed the jungle.”
“I don’t want to go back there, Jack. Those men were mean.”
“You don’t have to go back there, Janie. Not now, not ever. And I promise you those men will never bother you again.”
“I knew you would come for me.”
Jack felt himself tearing up. He wouldn’t have thought it possible to hug the little girl any tighter than he already was, but somehow he managed it.
He couldn’t answer for a moment.
Then he swallowed heavily and said, “I’m sorry it took me so long, Tiger.”
31
Janie was still awake when they reached Jack’s truck, despite the fact it was nearly four-thirty a.m. She complained of a slight headache, but seemed to be thinking and speaking clearly. If she had suffered a concussion from being thrown into the wall when Jack tackled Hargus, it was a mild one.
He unlocked the rear door in the Quad Cab pickup and began settling Janie onto the bench seat when she shook her head firmly. It had to be painful if she’d suffered even a minor concussion.
“I don’t want to be back here by myself,” she said. “Can’t I ride up front with you?”
“Aren’t you tired? We have more than a two-hour ride. It will be a lot easier to sleep back here.”
Another firm head shake. “I wanna be up front. I don’t want to be by myself. Please?”
He smiled and opened his arms again, and she crawled into them gratefully.
When he’d moved her to the front seat he said, “I’ll be right back. I just have to clear the brush away from the front of the truck so we can get out of here.”
Her eyes widened in panic and she said, “Can’t I come? Don’t leave me alone!”
“I’ll be right in front of the windshield, Janie. You’ll be able to see me the entire time, okay?”
She shook her head doubtfully. Her lower lip trembled and she reached for Jack’s arm, clamping onto it with vice-grip hands.
Jack snapped his fingers. “Oh my gosh,” he said. “I almost forgot.”
“Almost forgot what?”
“I brought a friend to keep you company on the way home. He’s been very worried about you, so you might have to hug him really tightly.”
“A friend? Who?” The fear was gone, replaced by a look of confused curiosity.
He gently pried her fingers from his arm and reached behind the driver’s seat, lifting a massive stuffed bear out of a duffel bag. Janie’s jaw dropped comically as Jack placed the bear on the seat next to Janie. They were almost exactly the same size.
“Your mom’s going to kill me when she sees how big he is,” Jack whispered conspiratorially. “But when I saw him in the store and told him about you, he begged to be your new friend and I didn’t have the heart to say no.”
“He begged?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jack said. “There was begging and pleading and even a little crying. It was quite a scene. I was afraid the store people were going to throw us both out.”
Janie giggled and hugged her bear.
“You think about what you want to name your new friend while I clean off the truck,” Jack said. “Remember, you’ll be able to see me the whole time I’m out there, and it will only take a minute. Then we can get going, okay?”
She nodded. “Okay. But I already know what I’m going to name him.”
“You’ve just met him. You picked out a name already?”
Janie nodded.
“What is it?”
“Jack.”
His tears were mostly gone by the time he finished clearing the brush away.
***
Jack opened the driver’s side door to find Janie rocking impatiently in the seat, her arms wrapped around her bear’s neck. If the stuffed animal had been alive, she’d be suffocating it.
“When do I get to see Mommy?” she whispered.
“Two hours, Tiger.” Jack fired up the Ram and began easing out of the forest and back onto the narrow trail.
“That’s a long time,” she said.
“I’ll bet she’d love to hear from you.”
“Yeah,” Janie agreed half-heartedly.
“Would you like to call her or are you too tired to talk?”
“We can call her?”
“We sure can.” Jack pulled out his phone and punched in his home number. He doubted Edie would mind being awakened before five a.m. under the circumstances—assuming she was even sleeping at all, which seemed unlikely—and guessed this might be the last time she would ever take a call from him.
It was answered on the second ring. “Jack? Is everything alright?”
He handed the phone to Janie, who screamed, “Mommmyyyyy!”
Edie shrieked. The sound was so loud he hoped she hadn’t just blown out her child’s eardrum. “Janie! Are you okay, baby girl? Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay, Mommy. I just have a headache from when Jack threw me against the wall.”
After a moment of shocked silence, Edie answered. She’d lowered the decibel level, though, and Jack could no longer hear her end of the conversation.
After a moment Janie said, “It’s okay, Mom. He was busy beating up the bad guys.” She sounded so grown-up, Jack glanced across the seat to reassure himself she hadn’t somehow fallen out of the truck and been replaced by a teenager.
The little girl and her mother talked a while longer and Janie’s head began to sink onto her chest. She dropped off to sleep mid-sentence and the phone plopped onto the seat next to her.
Jack picked it up and said, “She’s doing really well, considering what she’s been through.”
“When will you have her back?”
“Less than two hours.”
“Please hurry.”
***
Jack eased into his driveway in the muted light of an overcast New Hampshire morning. The previous night’s clear skies had been replaced by angry-looking storm clouds the color of a fresh bruise.
Before he’d made it halfway to his garage, the front door flew open and Edie Tolliver charged through it like she’d been shot out of a cannon. She sprinted across his yard barefoot, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and Jack’s terrycloth robe, which she’d left untied and which billowed behind her as she ran. He was still moving when she reached the truck and yanked at the door handle and he jerked to a stop, worried about driving over her feet.
The dome light flashed on as the door opened, and Janie opened bleary eyes and blinked rapidly. Then she saw her mother and screamed, and then Edie screamed, and then they were both screaming as they held onto each other like survivors of the Titanic, perfectly content to be half-in and half-out of an idling pickup in the chill of a late-May northern New England morning.
32
Bradley Chilcott’s eyes were glued to the large-screen high-definition television in the corner of his office. The TV had been placed atop an antique cherry cabinet with the screen angled toward his desk, perfect for watching porn or—as was the case this morning—CNN.
He’d been eating breakfast and drinking coffee when the call came in from one of Governor Studds’s staffers telling him to get his ass to the TV and turn on the news.
He’d asked why and the staffer said, “Just do it. Now.”
That was no way for a lowly staff puke to speak to an elected official and the number two man in the Maryland hierarchy. Bradley’s immediate and instinctive reaction had been to bite the man’s head off, to threaten him with suspension or even removal from his job for that kind of impudence, but something in the man’s tone stopped him.
Now he knew why the staffer had seemed so upset.
Acting on an anonymous tip early this morning, authorities had found Bradley Chilcott’s Chief of Security, Mike Hargus, dead inside his family’s vacation cottage on the northern shore of New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee. The New Hampshire State Police were terming the circumstances surrounding his death “suspicious.”
Details were sketchy and the official police spokesman—who was popping up every fifteen goddamned minutes on Headline News—wasn’t giving out much in the way of concrete information. Still, Bradley was able to gather the scene was violent and bloody.
And that the condition of Mike Hargus’s remains would not translate well to television screens.
For his part, Bradley didn’t need specifics to piece together what had happened. That damned fool Hargus had gotten careless and somehow led Jack Sheridan—ex-military Black Ops specialist and current professional assassin—straight to his supposedly secure hideaway. The place nobody in the whole world would be able to find because nobody knew about it.
Apparently Hargus had been wrong on that score. Sheridan had staged an assault on the cottage and recovered his girlfriend’s daughter. Bradley knew he’d been successful at getting the kid back because nowhere in the news reports was any mention made of a little girl.
Bradley sipped a mug of herbal tea and considered the implications of this development as he monitored the TV closely, alert for any breaking information.
The first implication was obvious: the planned assassination of Governor Jim Studds was off, for the foreseeable future and probably forever.
Of a more immediate concern was the fact that both the news media and the police would soon—very soon—be asking Bradley a lot of questions, ones to which he’d better have acceptable answers if he didn’t want to find himself being tainted politically and personally by Hargus’s death.
He was a little surprised the phone hadn’t already begun ringing, or that a police investigator hadn’t already shown up at his front door.
On the TV another live broadcast was being beamed from Lake Winnipesaukee, this one an aerial shot taken from a helicopter circling over the crime scene. There was nothing new to report, but the media had fixated on the story and Bradley knew he would have to ride out what would likely be an uncomfortable forty-eight to seventy-two hours.
Or more.
Bradley decided he would probably be okay. His staff at the state house had already informed media sources that Chief of Security Mike Hargus had been away from his job on a much-needed vacation, and Bradley intended to be no more specific than that when he took his turn on the hot seat.
After all, Hargus was just another civil servant, one of thousands of men and women employed by the State of Maryland. He’d been a fairly high-level employee; that much was true.
But there was absolutely no reason for anyone to think Bradley Chilcott would ever have discussed the man’s private life with him. The lieutenant governor was a busy man, why would the subject of how an employee chose to spend his free time even have come up? He certainly could not be expected to provide any insight into what sort of trouble Hargus may have gotten into while away from his official duties.
That would be Bradley’s story, and he would stick to it come hell or high water. He tried to pick it apart and couldn’t envision any way the authorities could disprove it.
He was actually more concerned about the media than about law enforcement. The police would treat him with kid gloves thanks to his standing in the community. They might be suspicious that something was not quite right. They probably would, in fact. But suspicions were irrelevant unless they could be backed up with hard evidence a prosecuting attorney could use to gain a conviction in court, and Bradley was one hundred percent certain they would possess no such evidence.
Dealing with the jackals in the media would be a completely separate issue, however. They were under no obligation to consider only prosecutable evidence when reporting a story. They could run with whatever embarrassing or damaging angle they wished. If they chose to, the media could destroy Bradley Chilcott, and in ways even the police couldn’t manage.
But Bradley hadn’t reached a lofty position in Maryland state government by underestimating the power of narrative control. In fact, if there was one thing in the world he understood intuitively it was media relations. And he thought that, if handled properly, this situation might actually be beneficial to him.
Bradley would term this situation a “terrible tragedy,” both for the family of Mike Hargus and for the people of Maryland collectively. Bradley would vow to fight as long as it took to get to the bottom of Hargus’s tragic death and to see
his killer brought to justice. His words would be simultaneously inspiring and sympathetic.
He jotted down a note to have a staffer drive out to the home of Hargus’s ex-wife to deliver a personal message of sympathy and to offer any assistance the lieutenant governor’s office might be able to provide. And to ensure that at least one media outlet was on hand to film the whole thing.
He nodded to himself and smiled.
This event really could turn out to be a publicity bonanza if managed properly. He tried to recall the last time he’d heard his name featured so prominently on the national news and could not. His Q-Rating had to be skyrocketing, and the old cliché about any pub being good pub had become a cliché in the first place because it was true.
Granted, some of the coverage would be negative, especially in the beginning. That was inevitable but it also didn’t matter. The ugly rumors already swirling around the circumstances of Hargus’s death would fade away soon enough, but with the proper media manipulation, Bradley Chilcott’s name would not.
If he played his cards right, Bradley decided he might well parlay this unfortunate tragedy into a national standing that would benefit him every bit as much as Jim Studds’s death would have. Maybe more.
But there was one more issue to consider.
And it was probably the most important issue.
Would Bradley live long enough to benefit from the national standing he was soon to develop? Did he now need to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life?
Clearly, Jack Sheridan had taken out Hargus. That was obvious and indisputable. There was one critical question Bradley had to consider: was there any possibility Mike had revealed his connection to Bradley Chilcott before dying?
Bradley didn’t think so. He’d retained Mike Hargus for so many years despite his many rough edges precisely because the man was as tough as they came. For all his faults, and Hargus had plenty, he knew how to keep his mouth shut.
And if Hargus hadn’t given Bradley up, there should be nothing to worry about. The cell they’d used to call Sheridan and his girlfriend after the kidnapping was an untraceable burner phone, and the email they’d sent was even more untraceable. It had been encrypted using technology available only to the CIA and NSA.
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