“That little shit is still alive?” The shark snarled from his seat. So close beneath the surface, Lindsey hadn’t even seen the change.
“I don’t give a fuck about who’s giving you static. Buy a goddamn airport if you have to. Get this guy gone.”
He slammed the phone back into the cradle.
Lindsey could feel her blood run very, very cold.
“What was that about, dear?” She managed the “dear” without choking on it. Every once in a while, if she timed it just right, he’d speak his thoughts. She took a seltzer she didn’t want from limousine’s bar and sipped it lightly.
He glared at her, but his anger didn’t appear to be aimed at her in particular.
“Nothing for you to care about.”
“Oh, I know that.” She knew more about foreign relations that he did, had steered every one of his successful international voyages from start to finish. And she knew almost as much about domestic affairs.
It was the covert operations that she was out of the loop on. He only talked to his college buddy about those; Stephen Richards up in his plane, spying on the world. He was easily the creepiest man she’d ever met. Not typical, testosterone, macho jerk creepy, she’d certainly been the brunt of enough of that kind of attention in college. Stephen was creepy right out of Edgar Allan Poe.
“But sometimes it helps you to talk it out. Glad to listen, if you want a sympathetic ear.” Okay, that time she almost gagged. Far too saccharine for the man who would no longer be her husband six months from today. Would effectively cease to be her spouse when it all went public in the next few days and she moved back to California.
“Bloody Stephen. We’ve got this one loose cannon wandering about the country.” He paused for a moment. She was afraid he’d stop as he studied the roof of the car for a moment.
“Fucking terrorist.” He seemed to like the way that sounded.
“We’ve tried to get rid of this guy, but he’s slippery, dangerous. And now someone is refusing Stephen all helicopter transport for his insertion team.”
She resisted the cheer aloud, but did one in her head, in full high school cheerleader outfit. Go Crazy Eddie. Rah! Rah! Rah! He’d just earned a kiss on the cheek at breakfast tomorrow.
“Whoever did, his ass is grass when I track him down.”
The cheer died. She hadn’t thought about the consequences of a vengeful President. Quick, Little Nell, think quick.
“You know,” she didn’t, but she’d already started the sentence so she’d better finish it and see where it led. “Didn’t you always say that Stephen’s whole purpose was to keep the President out of the loop? For him to do the work and take the heat?”
And she hated the arrangement. She’d been afraid of it ever since she’d heard the two men planning it during the campaign five years ago.
First thing she’d do if she were in charge was shoot Richards’ plane out of the sky, preferably with him still aboard.
Her ex-husband-to-be continued his inspection of the ceiling, where he always did his best thinking.
“You’re right, Babe. That is his job. If he can’t do it, I will find someone else who can.” He started whistling the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies. That meant he was pleased with himself.
Still she’d better warn Eddie in the morning.
And she’d better find a way to warn Amanda tonight.
CHAPTER 85
“This is officially weird.” Jeff scrolled through the file again.
“What is?” Mandy settled in the chair close beside him. So close he could feel her body heat along his whole arm.
“It’s not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
Well, there was a question he wasn’t going to be answering any time soon.
“I didn’t expect my research on defoliants. Agent Orange. Purple, Pink, Green, Blue, and White. The wonders of the Rainbow Herbicides. We dumped nineteen million gallons of this shit in ‘Nam. And then Phillip and I would follow after each one and see which was most effective on which plants. When we started observing what it did to the fauna, they immediately locked us down. We went from lab rats to top secret faster than a bagel going from perfect to charred.” A moment his grandmother had missed every single time in the twenty-five years their lives had overlapped.
“This file is a lot of thirty-year old research that never saw the light of day. It would have settled a few lawsuits differently for the vets a decade ago. We had the whole thing documented long before they stopped using it. But this isn’t worth killing over and it’s not related to Phillip’s other files. We were shifted to napalm documentation after this. I don’t get it.”
Mandy flipped open the files lying before them. “Are these plants resistant to those herbicides?”
“No more than any other healthy plant.”
He printed the file and was flipping through it again when Shelley and Clarice returned. They were both talking animatedly until the moment the door opened. Suddenly Clarice was having a conversation with herself about her first helicopter ride as Shelley reverted once more to the silent stoic.
Social skills were not the girl’s strength and not exactly her mother’s either. Mandy rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. But she was always right, so most learned to accept it. He’d come to value that laser insight, he hadn’t known how much he’d missed it.
But some grew to hate it. If her daughter had the identical trait of being right all of the time…
“You opened the file!”
“I’m not a complete blockhead.”
“What was the password?”
Okay. There was a question he’d rather not answer. Maybe if he mumbled it, “blockhead.”
“And have you kissed her yet?” Clarice barbed back at him.
The silence hadn’t stretched more than a second when she answered her own question.
“I rest my case. And?” She pointed at the screen.
“Junk. Old junk. No one except Phillip would have wasted his time archiving this.”
“He wasn’t big on wasting time.” Shelley spoke from where she leaned against a corner wall.
No, he wasn’t. Ever.
CHAPTER 86
Shelley and Clarice had given up and gone to bed.
Mandy was yawning and the couch was starting to look good.
Jeff shut down the computer and rubbed his eyes. His feet were killing him. He needed more drugs, twenty-four hours uninterrupted sleep, a quiet day with a good beer and a bad movie, and nothing out of the ordinary.
Mandy slid a hand along the back of his neck and every hair on the nape of his neck prickled as if it had just been electro-shocked. She shifted into his lap and kissed him.
Not a schoolgirl kiss. Not a tasting, testing, tentative kiss.
A straight-on smacker that had his head spinning in seconds. He slid a hand into her hair, still thick and soft, better than he’d remembered.
The real thing was always better.
Some infinite time later, some time when his body was responding and his feet weren’t, she shifted back. Not far, just to his shoulder. She nestled her face down in the crook of his neck and purred. He’d never found another word for it. It wasn’t a cat purr, nor a hum, nor a sigh. Mandy could just purr from complete contentment.
He held her tight. Held her as if twenty-seven years of life had not come between them. As if they were still curled up together on the old sofa in the living room, neither of them in the least aware of how precious each moment was and that their futures would be spent apart.
“You know…” her voice was soft and dreaming.
“Nuth-zink. I know nuth-zink!”
She stroked a hand across his cheek and pulled up the corner of his mouth. She’d often made him smile for her when she was too comfortable to offer one of her own.
/>
“You know, there’s a very nice bed not far from here. I’m not making any promises, but we could snuggle down together.”
He swept her up in his arms. Pulled her tight against his chest and made it halfway to his feet. The pain roared up from every single nerve below his ankles. He collapsed back in the chair, landing hard. He landed with Mandy’s weight high against his chest and that tipped the chair over backwards. With a crash that could wake the dead, they were both sprawled across the carpet.
It took them a few moments to get untangled, and several long embarrassing moments as she helped him hobble to the bathroom and then to bed.
Once under the covers, he remembered putting his arm around her bare waist and pulling her into him spoon fashion.
He was almost sure he remembered it.
Or he might have been dreaming.
CHAPTER 87
“What’s this?”
First Lieutenant Bobby Stenman was praying this shit wasn’t for real. Some joke spun by a higher-up just to mess with him. Military humor showed its ugly head in the strangest of ways sometimes.
“They’re called helicopters, you idiot, now get your men saddled up.”
Stenman looked at them. He knew his men, in loose array behind him, were making the same unhappy assessment.
A pair of Bell LongRangers were parked on the tarmac. The pilots were lounging against the nose of the farther craft sipping coffee from white paper cups. Their flight suits matched their aircraft.
The craft were white. Bright, glow-in-the-dark white. With a rainbow spiral that started small at the rear tail of the aircraft, swooped under the belly and exploded around the main rotor housing in a broad assortment of Crayola colors. “White Mountain HeliTours” emblazoned in each stripe in a contrasting color. Thankfully the pilots were adorned in a slightly different pattern, starting at the back of their neck instead of their butts and sweeping under one arm.
What he also saw were narrow doors neither sized nor placed for rapid exit, no easily accessible equipment space for all their gear, and a couple of twenty-five year old pilots with under five hundred flight hours between them.
“What’s our target?”
“I’ll tell you once we’re airborne.”
He hated missions like this, it already had the feel of a seat-of-the-pants disaster. But the orders had been clear. This guy had absolute authority and it was an emergency priority from the President himself.
The guy in charge didn’t impress him much. Battered briefcase, suit that had seen more than one dance, and the wide, bloodshot eyes of someone running on adrenaline and caffeine rather than sleep.
“And where are you going to sit?”
“What do you mean?” The idiot was taking a picture with his cell phone for his scrapbook for crying out loud.
Stenman pulled it from his hand and tossed it over his shoulder. Back and to the left Bradley caught it and, after a brief crunch of boot on electronics, that was dealt with.
“Goddamn it! That was—”
Bobby thumped the man hard enough on the sternum that he whooshed and shut up.
“How many of us are there?”
“Twelve,” he croaked. Wimp. Stenman hadn’t hit him that hard.
“Twelve plus you. Those are Bell LongRanger 206L4s. Very cushy. Seating capacity of six plus the pilot. We need another craft.”
“There wasn’t one. I had to pay a fortune to get these.”
Stenman snapped his fingers and pointed at the craft. The team moved around them like flowing water, unshouldering their gear bags as they went. In moments the aircraft doors were open. Power wrenches sounded and under thirty seconds later the first seat was tossed out on the tarmac.
The pilots were slow to respond but they finally came round.
“Hey, what are you freaks doing?” “Mr. D. is gonna be pissed.”
Sergeant Tompkins casually slid his .50 cal Barrett sniper rifle around until it was almost pointed at them. Not really all that useful under a couple hundred yards, came into its own out in the five hundred to thousand range, but it was four feet of badass-looking rifle.
They froze, clearly not knowing enough to see there was no magazine loaded.
Other seats followed without further questions.
The loud pop and actinic light from Bander’s oxy-acetylene torch lit the night. One minute and thirty-five seconds later the side doors were off both craft and lying on the tarmac. Another pop as he shut it down.
The men began loading up. Tompkins nudged the two pilots free from their lethargy with a gentle prod on the arm.
“Time to fly, flyboys.”
The leader of this cluster fuck, Mr. Cell Phone, had gawked, speechless the entire three minutes the operation had required. Now he turned and snarled like a rabid Westland Terrier, red-faced and riled.
Bob Stenman clamped a hand around his throat and squeezed a little.
The man’s eyes bugged out.
“From here on, you will answer my questions directly. You will not speak to me or anyone else until you are told to do so? Comprenda?”
He took the squeak for a yes.
CHAPTER 88
“First flight. This is Second. Three minutes to objective. Follow us down.”
Anders hated that the operation had been taken out of his control, but he could still feel that iron hand that had been clamped around his windpipe. The guy could have snapped his neck as easily as a twig, even The Troll had never left him feeling so helpless.
He’d always known he was a man of action, right until the moment he was begging for his life on the tarmac at Pease airport. So conveniently quiet in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. So quiet, he could die there and no one would notice.
When Stenman dropped him, he’d fallen onto all fours. The Special Operations Forces jerk had yanked out Anders’ wallet and inspected his driver’s license. He threw the wallet back at him with enough force to hurt. This time there was enough anger in his face that Anders wondered if he should stay on the ground here. He’d been hauled back to his feet by his lapels until their faces were two inches apart.
“And you are not going to touch a fucking radio, don’t even think about it. Right?” Stenman shook him hard enough that he flapped like a rag doll.
He’d nodded vigorously, only to be dropped again.
Anders rubbed his neck once more. Maybe once they were done, he’d have the whole team removed. Richards could do it, The Troll might still have his uses.
Stenman leaned over and shouted above the roar of the air coming in where the doors had been. “We can’t bring the helicopters in until we have our ground team in place. I heard about the team gone missing in Ohio, and it won’t be happening to us.”
Anders could tell him not to be so cocky. The chef had literally blown that entire team apart.
And The Troll still claimed the chef had no team. His people had axed an Alpha team without breaking a sweat. He’d stashed a Comanche RAH-66 for crying out loud, and Richards didn’t know it. Any respect he’d had for The Troll was fast disappearing. Of course, he hadn’t known about the damn thing either until he saw it fly right over him.
“You,” the goon poked his upper arm sharply with an index finger and his whole arm went numb. “You are staying in the goddamn helicopter where you can’t cause us any more trouble.”
He nodded. Easier to agree with him than argue. Another minute and they’d be on the ground. One day this Stenman would find out who he was messing with. He was the man who’d be replacing The Troll and his stupid-ass wheelchair. Then there’d be a reckoning.
The pilots, once over their initial jitters, had done well enough. Richards could replace the stupid doors and seats, spread a little of those government greenbacks around to close a couple mouths.
Or maybe they should crash these guys into a mountainside later. H
e’d suggest it to Stenman after they were done here.
The helicopters landed and men poured out into the predawn darkness.
Two men stayed on each craft.
Within thirty seconds, they were airborne again. They soared upward, cut to the side.
One of the goons Stenman had left behind shoved him toward the missing door.
“Hey. What? Wait!” But he was out the door. Falling. Falling through space.
He tried to scream, but crashed onto the ground with a shoulder wrenching crunch not ten feet below.
A moment later his briefcase thumped onto the dirt a foot from his head splashing dust and dirt into his face and eyes.
“Stenman, you bastard!”
The helicopter was gone. No one was listening anymore.
CHAPTER 89
Anders had studied the area and knew it better than most who hadn’t been there. EMS had started here. He’d been hunting them for years and had made himself the world expert on them. He knew what they did and that the money behind them was staggering. Over four thousand patents and they practically gave the shit away.
“Service to the people of the planet.” Dumbass motto. He’d been working on Richards to bring them into the fold. He’d gotten the green light a year ago, but hadn’t managed to move close until four weeks ago. Now he was this close and he wasn’t going to miss the main show.
Stenman had actually done him a favor, though his shoulder hurt like hell. He was on the Greenleaf trail just behind Eagle Cliff. He could come at the farm from the backside, from upslope, probably be in the woods above the farmhouse before Stenman and his goons arrived.
He headed down the narrow trail. The growing light was just sufficient to show the trail’s white paint markers on the trees.
CHAPTER 90
Lindsey knew it was nerves because she’d been unable to reach Amanda. She only had the one phone number and had left messages four times in the eight calls she placed. It was plain and simple nerves that had made her change her clothes three times this morning before going to see Edward Johns. She’d certainly needed something to do, anything to forget the long sleepless night.
Swap Out! Page 25