Arctic Fire

by Stephen W. Frey

  She kissed his neck. “Let’s make love, Bill. Right here, right now.”

  “Jesus, Rita, I don’t know if—”

  “Don’t do that, Bill,” she warned sharply as the softness in her voice evaporated. “Don’t deny me.”

  Hunter pressed his ear to the bedroom doorway. He’d hustled back here after he’d heard the man outside the apartment starting to jiggle the lock. It had occurred to him as he’d listened to the clicking and the rattling that the guy was probably capable of getting into anyplace he wanted to very quickly. He had that evilly competent look about him, even through the peephole, and it had scared Hunter to death—again. The same way it had the other night when the guy had his men force that plastic bag over his head the first time.

  He’d been right to run back here. The guy had made it into the apartment only moments after he’d run into the bedroom and shut the door hurriedly.

  The voices coming from the other side of the door were muffled, but Hunter could still hear the words. He felt terrible for leaving Lisa out there alone with the bastard, but what else was he supposed to do? If the guy found him here in the apartment, he’d probably kill him, which meant Lisa was in mortal danger as well because the guy wouldn’t leave a witness to a murder. It would probably mean the end for Amy too, Hunter realized. So it was better for everyone for him to cower back here like a little kid.

  “Where’s Troy Jensen?” the man demanded loudly.

  “I don’t know,” Lisa answered. “I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

  “When was the last time you heard from him?”

  “Awhile,” she replied.

  Hunter could hear her voice shaking with fear.

  “When was it exactly?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “When was it, damn it?”

  “Ay dios mio. Get your hands off me!”

  “You don’t tell me what I want to know, and I’ll hurt your baby.”

  “No, please,” she cried. “Please don’t touch him! Please!”

  Hunter reached for the doorknob. He felt so guilty standing here doing nothing. He’d told Jack he’d take care of the girl, and here he was hiding out like a complete coward.

  But he pulled his hand back as soon as his fingertips touched metal. It was as though he’d been shocked by a powerful electric current. He’d never been in a fight in his life. What chance did he really have against the man out there? The guy was small, but Hunter sensed that he was still so very dangerous.

  “Where’s your damn cell phone?” the man asked harshly. “I want to see for myself if he’s called you. Show me!”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  “Yeah, sure,” the guy muttered cynically. “Everyone has a cell phone. Even poor girls like you. Now where is it?”

  “Ouch!” she screamed. “Stop it!”

  “Give me your damn phone.”

  “Not my baby, not my baby!”

  Hunter burst from the bedroom and raced straight at the little man. He couldn’t take it anymore.

  As Hunter was about to hurl himself into Maddux, the little man stepped aside and shattered Hunter’s kneecap with a wicked chop kick.

  “Oh, Geeeoood!” Hunter screamed in agony as he collapsed to the floor and shut his eyes tightly. “Oh my fucking God!”

  When he grabbed his knee it felt as if the cap had spun around to the back of his leg. There was nothing but a depression where the kneecap should have been, and there was a huge lump at the back of his leg. He heard Lisa and the baby scream, but the pain in his leg was so intense he couldn’t pry his eyes open.

  Then there was a muffled bang and he thought he heard something fall to the floor beside him.

  When he opened his eyes, he was staring directly into the pretty face of Lisa Martinez. It was only a few inches away.

  “Lisa, are you—”

  He cringed when dark red blood began pouring from her mouth and nose and pooling on the floor. Then he felt something pressing against the back of his head. It was the working end of a pistol with a silencer screwed to the end of the barrel.

  Then Maddux fired a second shot from the pistol.

  Rita pulled back from their kiss. “Do you love me, Bill?”

  That was a question he didn’t want to answer. Either way, it was trouble. “Rita, I—”

  She pressed her fingers to his lips and smiled wryly. “Don’t answer. I know you don’t want to. I know you’ll never leave Cheryl.” She hesitated. “But you can love two women, Bill, I know you can. You’re that kind of man. So I’ll just assume you love me too.”

  The fact that Rita had even thought about him leaving Cheryl shook Bill to his core. It was all suddenly getting out of control. And he should have known that someday it would. “It’s just not something we should—”

  “Why did Jack come to visit you in your office on Wall Street the other day?” she interrupted.

  “Um, he just…well…”

  “Was it to talk about Troy?”

  “Yeah,” Bill muttered. “It was.”

  Rita kissed Bill on the forehead. “I’m so sorry about what happened. I wish he hadn’t gone on that crab boat. He was such a good kid.” She smiled sadly. “He was you.”

  “Thanks. That’s nice.”

  He’d told Rita right away what had happened to Troy. For better or worse she was part of the family, and it would have been wrong not to say something to her immediately. It would have looked wrong too. It was a bizarre thing, but Rita and Cheryl were that close. If Cheryl ever found out what had been going on, she’d leave a husband and a best friend.

  Bill shut his eyes. He’d been such a bad person. And Cheryl had always been so good to him.

  “He was a great kid,” Bill murmured.

  “And that was why Jack came to your office? To talk about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was the only reason?”

  It seemed strange for her to push so hard. “Yes,” he repeated. “Why?”

  “It’s just that I thought Jack told me he was going on a trip or something before you got to the office. I thought he said that, and I was just wondering where he was going.”

  Bill’s eyes moved deliberately to Rita’s as a cold chill crawled up his spine. Fortunately, he was able to hide its effects.

  He couldn’t believe what Rita had so blatantly asked.

  “This is nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

  “There’s been an accident in Building 2 of the Bayside Projects on Temple Avenue in Brooklyn,” Maddux answered calmly. “Get somebody to apartment 312 as fast as possible. You’ve got two individuals down and a baby in distress.” The two individuals who were down were dead, so there was nothing the EMTs could do for them.

  “Who is this?” the 9-1-1 operator demanded.

  But Maddux couldn’t leave a baby alone in that apartment with his mother lying dead on the floor. He wasn’t that cold. Close, but not quite. “Did you get the damn address?” he asked as he hustled toward the subway that would take him back to Manhattan, where he would catch an Amtrak to Washington.

  “Yes, I got it. I already have a team responding. Now tell me who I’m talking—”

  “Read it back to me,” he ordered.

  When the operator had read the address back correctly, Maddux ended the call with her immediately and dialed the man who was watching Amy Smith.

  “What is it?” the man answered before the first ring had ended.

  “She’s expendable at this point,” Maddux said matter-of-factly. “But make it humane. Got it? Don’t drag it out. Don’t even let her know it’s coming.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He tossed the cell phone he’d been using into a sewer. Then he pulled out one of the two other cell phones he was carrying. He cursed under his breath when he saw that there were no messages waiting for him on the screen.

  They had to find out where Jack Jensen was going. If Troy really was alive, that was undoubtedly where Jack was head
ed. Jack would lead them right to Troy, Maddux was certain, and then they’d kill both of them. Then everything would be fine.

  As Maddux slipped the phone back into his pocket, he thought about the Pegasus and the two hundred thousand cubic meters of LNG that were churning steadily toward Virginia Beach. And how so many people had no idea what was coming straight for them. Then he thought about how President Dorn had no idea what was coming straight for him either.

  Just a few more days and everything would come together.

  Maddux shook his head as he moved down into the subway. Troy Jensen was the only person who could crash the party at this point.

  “I feel bad, Bill. I’m going in and check on Cheryl one more time. I’ll be right back.”

  “OK.”

  Bill watched Rita trot back toward the mansion. As soon as she disappeared inside, he reached across the front of the Mercedes for her purse, which was sitting on the passenger seat.

  He found her cell phone right away and scrolled through her saved numbers. There were no names attached to the numbers he quickly focused on, just unrelated letters as identifiers. But he recognized the digits anyway. One was Jack’s cell phone and the other was the landline at Lisa’s apartment. He knew because he’d dialed both numbers very recently.

  Panic tore through Bill’s system. He couldn’t believe it. Rita Hayes was a spy. She’d gotten these numbers from his cell phone, which she always had access to for business reasons. It was the only explanation.

  He’d known Jack was in danger. Now he knew Lisa was too.

  CHAPTER 31

  JACK FINISHED the last sentence, then placed the paper carefully down on the stack of pages he’d already read. The stack rose from inside the black box, which was sitting in front of him on the desk of the Missoula, Montana, motel room.

  The story Troy had written on the pages was astonishing, almost unbelievable, really. It centered on a man named Shane Maddux…and another man named Roger Carlson…who seemed almost like mythic characters to Jack. Troy had basically told the story of Red Cell Seven.

  After he’d placed the last page carefully back in the box, Jack lifted his hands in front of his face and stared at them. They were shaking like mad, and he couldn’t make them stop.

  Troy had been specific about dates and times and people other than Maddux and Carlson who were also involved with RCS. And he’d been specific about why he believed his direct superior was clinically insane by listing the reasons that provided absolute proof.

  First, Maddux was going to assassinate President Dorn because he believed that Dorn intended to destroy Red Cell Seven.

  Second, Maddux was going to create another horrific 9/11-type disaster by detonating an LNG tanker in Boston Harbor. He was going to blow the ship up to throw the country into chaos. So the United States intelligence infrastructure could gain broader spying and interrogation powers on citizens at home and abroad.

  Last, Maddux was routinely carrying out vigilante justice. He was murdering people in cold blood who he and Carlson believed had wrongly escaped criminal justice. People who’d been released from prison or jail on technicalities, even people who’d been found innocent by juries but who Maddux and Carlson still believed were guilty. And they were killing anyone who the CIA believed might be spying on the United States. In some cases, people who the CIA didn’t really have much tangible evidence against.

  What really frightened Jack was that Troy had emphasized over and over in those pages how dedicated and incredibly capable Shane Maddux and Roger Carlson were. How almost nothing could stop them.

  “So what do you think?”

  Jack turned around as Karen sat down on the queen-size bed closest to the bathroom. She had only a towel wrapped around her slender body, and she looked sexy with her dark, wet hair hanging down on her slim shoulders. But he barely noticed how beautiful she looked. He was still so blown away by what he’d read.

  “I think it’s incredible.”

  Karen had read the material during the drive through North Dakota, but Jack had waited until he could concentrate completely on the pages. He’d gone through the single-spaced saga while Karen had taken a long, hot bath, and now he was glad he’d waited and that he’d asked her not to tell him anything about it. He would have been so distracted he might have run off the road and killed them both.

  “I think we’ve basically got a time bomb on our hands.”

  “And I think it’s as dangerous to us as it is to the entire intelligence network of the United States.”

  “Exactly,” Jack agreed. He moved to the other queen-size bed and sat down on it so he was facing her. “If this got into the wrong hands, it would compromise the lives of so many individuals, and that could mean a lot of damn trouble for us. It’s so specific about places and dates and people.”

  Karen nodded at the box. “Why would Troy write that?”

  “He must have thought he was in trouble,” Jack answered. “And he must have been really pissed off about it. That’s the only explanation I can come up with. Troy was too much of a patriot. He was too damn dedicated to this country.”

  “He didn’t send it to anyone,” she pointed out. “He just wrote it. Maybe that was enough for him.”

  “Maybe.” It seemed logical to assume that Troy hadn’t sent the information to anyone. Why would he have taken the time to hide the box in the cabin and then send the letter to Karen?

  “Do we call someone?” she asked.

  Now Jack understood what Karen had gone through when she’d gotten Troy’s letter. Who exactly were they supposed to call? If they gave all of this information to someone, they might never find out what had happened to Troy. Worse, they might become targets themselves. In fact, they almost certainly would, Jack realized. Even if they somehow got the information to the right people—whoever the “right” people were—it was logical to believe that the wrong people would ultimately find out what had happened. Presumably, those were people who knew how to kill very effectively and were comfortable taking that step to solve a problem or satisfy their desires for revenge—based on what Troy had written, anyway. And those weren’t the kind of people Jack wanted to piss off, even if President Dorn’s life was hanging in the balance. It sounded selfish, but after reading Troy’s story, Jack had no desire to get into it with anyone from Red Cell Seven, no matter what was at stake.

  “Do we at least call someone about Shane Maddux going for the president?” Karen asked.

  Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel like we’d be looking over our shoulders for the rest of our lives if we did.”

  She nodded. “That’s exactly what I thought after I read Troy’s letter.”

  “Yeah, I get it now.” He shook his head. “What’s amazing is that Maddux and Carlson think what they’re doing is right.”

  “Maybe some of it is,” she said after a few moments.

  Jack looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I was just thinking. What if you and I were married and some animal raped and murdered me. Would you want him to go free because of some stupid technicality? You know, like the cops not reading him his Miranda rights or evidence being collected the wrong way? Which, I’m here to tell you as an-ex cop, happens all the time.”

  It was incredible that she’d just alluded to them being married, even if it was in a hypothetical situation. He’d actually thought about it during the drive today, and he’d been forced to admit to himself that he was totally into her. She was the woman he’d been waiting for. He knew that for certain. It seemed crazy for him to fall for her so fast, but maybe that was the crazy part about love. Maybe you knew right away because it was so right.

  He glanced away from her and back toward the black box. He just wished she hadn’t made that crack about Troy being so much better looking than him as they were getting on I-94 back in Minnesota this morning. It was stupid, but it was still haunting him.

  “Of course, I wouldn’t want that,” he admitted.

  �
�But if he did,” Karen said, “wouldn’t you want justice for me?”

  “Sure I would. I’d do everything I could to get him another trial.”

  “What if that didn’t work?”

  He knew where she was going with this. “I don’t know.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to get justice for me any way you could?”

  “You mean—”

  “Yeah,” she said emphatically. “Wouldn’t you want Red Cell Seven’s help?” She started ticking the facts off on her fingers. “You have irrefutable evidence, you have his confession to the cops, and you have him laughing to the press about it when he gets wrongly released. He’s guilty, but he beat the rap and he’s having fun with it.” She hesitated. “Wouldn’t you want Shane Maddux and Roger Carlson on your side?”

  Jack took a deep breath. “But can that really ever be the right way to get justice, Karen? It’s wrong to ignore the system, it’s completely wrong. And you know it.”

  Karen rolled her eyes. “It’s easy to say that when it hasn’t really happened. But what if it did?”

  “I understand.”

  Of course, he’d want to tear the guy apart with his bare hands. But agreeing with her that vigilante justice was acceptable, even in just a single case, would violate one of his most basic beliefs—which was that you had to let the system work and you had to abide by its decision even if you hated it. If not, society disintegrated and mob rule reigned.

  “But I can’t agree with you on having some secret government crew getting revenge for us. I just can’t.”

  They stared at each other in silence for several moments.

  “Let’s go out for a while,” she suggested, changing the subject. “There’s a bar down the street I saw on the way in that looked pretty cool. Let’s have a few beers and some laughs and try to forget about everything that’s going on for a little while. What do you think?”

  “Are you serious?” It was almost midnight and they still had a long way to go. “We should get some sleep. We’ve got another long drive ahead of us tomorrow.”