Primary Target: Six Assassins: Book 1

by Heskett, Jim

  She pulled back the curtains next to the front window as blue and red lights flashed in the lot. An ambulance and two police cars. She retrieved her Nighthawk pistols from under the couch and stashed them in the vent next to her front door.

  Except, the cops didn't come to her place. They trundled up the stairs and stopped at the walkway. The older woman from before ushered the police up the stairs and pointed to the open apartment door — panic on her face.

  Ember had a sudden intuition about why the police and medical personnel were here. A series of revelations appeared like water trickling down her back.

  She stepped out onto the walkway as two EMTs hoisted a stretcher up the stairs. Across the walkway, the hot tattooed guy leaned against his closed front door, watching the proceedings. He lifted a hand to wave at her.

  Ember strolled over to him, navigating through the people crowding the walkway. She tried to conceal the tenderness in her side, a hangover from the baseball swipe last night. “Hi, Layne.”

  “Afternoon.”

  “Yes, it is. How’s your trash can level?”

  “Since I emptied it in the dumpster last night? Running at acceptable levels.”

  “Good to hear. Do you know what’s going on here?”

  “Not a clue, man. Cops showed up two minutes ago. It’s gone from nothing to all-hands-on-deck in seconds.”

  Next up the stairs came forensic techs in hazmat suits, clutching cameras to their chests. Heads down, legs hurrying them into the open apartment door.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Ember said.

  Layne shook his head. “No, it does not. Heart attack, you think?”

  Ember hadn’t known the woman, but she didn’t think they’d send in the guys with the cameras for a death by natural causes. No, they would’ve had at least some notion this was a homicide. And, she had a reasonable suspicion that this had been a casualty of Xavier visiting her place to install bugs. The neighbor must have seen something. Maybe she had interrupted Xavier. Caught him by surprise.

  A weight pulled at her chest. Members of the Assassins Club were not supposed to kill civilians unless absolutely necessary. She was sure Xavier had felt that at the time, what he'd been doing was necessary, but it was another reason she needed to find him and end this as soon as possible.

  “Maybe a heart attack,” she said, nodding. “But I don’t know.”

  The woman earlier this morning had said the name Karen. Ember didn't know her. She had exchanged pleasantries with the woman on the other side of the wall. She'd asked the woman to turn down her music a couple of times. But, like Layne before yesterday, Ember had never made the leap into becoming a friendly acquaintance with the lady. Now, she never would.

  A detective in a peacoat, holding a notepad strolled out of the apartment and squinted at the sun, then he turned toward Ember and Layne. She immediately ran through a revolving checklist of possible alibis for her for the last twenty-four hours, in case the detective wanted ‘to chat.’ The best one she could think was the simplest: a long day hike taking up most of yesterday’s daylight hours. She had a contact at the city who could fake a parking meter receipt for her, and there wouldn’t be much in the way of CCTV in nearby Chautauqua Park for them to check to verify her presence on the mountain trails.

  “Howdy, folks.”

  “Afternoon, sir,” Layne said. “What can we do for you?”

  “You both live in this building?”

  Ember and Layne nodded. He stuck out his hand first to shake. “Layne Parrish.”

  Ember introduced herself as well. The detective scanned along his notepad. “Were both of you here at around eight last night?”

  Layne shook his head. “Sorry, I was at the gym until nine.”

  “I was out for a hike,” Ember said, “and I didn’t get back until a little later than that.”

  Layne looked at Ember with a hint of a raised eyebrow when she said that, but Ember pretended she didn't notice anything. She could do damage control with Layne later if she needed to.

  The detective frowned. “Notice anything strange when you came back?”

  Now, Ember regretted asking Layne about a potential man peeking into the windows. She had no choice but to address it. "Not last night. But I thought I heard something weird a couple of days ago. A person lingered outside my front door for a minute. I'm afraid I didn't see anything that night, though. Just a shadow, then it was gone."

  She clenched her teeth and hoped against hope he wouldn’t ask her to come in to take her formal statement. The detective scrawled some notes on his pad, nodded, then said, “I might want to talk to you both later. I’d appreciate it if you’d stick around.”

  “Sure thing,” Layne said.

  Then, the cop turned and left. As he made his way back over to the crime scene, something caught Ember's eye. A new car was pulling into the parking lot. A rental. And then, a tall Asian woman stepped out of the car.

  Ember’s jaw dropped. She knew this woman. A ghost from the past.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ISABEL

  Agent Isabel Yang opened her car door and stretched her legs. The drive from the Denver airport up to Boulder had been a long one. Longer than she'd remembered from her small number of previous trips. The cold made her knee ache, but the city was still as beautiful as ever. Right up against the mountains, Boulder was as close to being in them as possible. Such an interesting layout; to the east, nothing but flatland. To the west, jagged peaks covered in snow for half of the year.

  But she wasn't here to do any sightseeing. Isabel was here for work. The multiple voicemail messages from her boss Marcus and the overall pressure of the job would never let her forget that fact.

  There were police cars and an ambulance in the parking lot, blue and red lights bouncing off the windows of the first-floor apartments. Two EMTs carried a covered body down the stairs on a stretcher. The figure was covered in a sheet, not moving. There was no IV suspended above. They had a dead person on the stretcher, no doubt about it. And, judging by the detectives knocking on doors and interviewing people, Isabel assumed they suspected the person's death had not been of natural causes.

  But that wasn't Isabel's problem. She wasn't here to involve herself in local law enforcement. She was here to speak to one particular resident of the condo complex.

  Isabel saw her, the lean woman with the pale white skin and the long, black hair, speaking with a brawny blond-headed man on the walkway out in front of the apartments. They were standing close to one another, their body language suggesting that they were being a little flirty, and Isabel had the strong notion he looked like some actor she vaguely recognized, but she couldn’t remember the name. Or, given his size, a professional heavyweight boxer.

  After a couple of moments standing in the parking lot, the woman finally looked down and saw Isabel. Her mouth fell open. Isabel waved her down, and the woman said a rushed goodbye to the man and then hustled down the steps. The scowl on her face told Isabel everything she needed to know about the woman’s feelings toward her presence here.

  Isabel returned to her car and leaned over to open the passenger side door. She tried to prepare herself for a multitude of possible outcomes. The directions the conversation might take, and Ember’s reactions to each one. The same internal dialogue she’d been practicing the entire car trip. What happened over the next few minutes could have a grave impact on Isabel’s future career options in Washington.

  The woman slid into the car, and they both shut their doors. A deep and dark silence blossomed between them for a few seconds. The two women stared ahead, breathing, waiting for the other to start.

  Ember finally turned to Isabel, glowering at her. “Isabel Yang.” Ember shook her head. “What the hell are you doing here in Colorado?”

  “Good afternoon, Allison. Long time no see.”

  Ember’s scowl darkened. “You don’t call me that. Not now, not ever, and especially not in earshot of anyone else. You call me Ember Clarke
.”

  “But that is your name. Allison Campbell. You seem to have forgotten, or did you have it legally changed?”

  Ember faced forward, a blank expression on her face. “What do you want, Yang? I don’t mean to be snippy, but I have a lot going on right now. This is a very strange period in my life.”

  “I want to buy you a cup of coffee so you can tell me all about it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “We’ll be quick.”

  Ember shook her head. “I don’t have time. I have to be somewhere in a couple of hours, and stepping out with you anywhere in public is likely to earn me a bullet in the back of the head.”

  Isabel started the car anyway and put it in reverse to back out of the lot. Ember flexed her jaw and wiped her hands on her jeans. She made eye contact with the brawny guy standing on the walkway outside the condos.

  “Let’s just go for a drive, then,” Isabel said. “I’ll have you back here in thirty minutes, tops.”

  “Fine.”

  Isabel pointed. “What happened to the back windshield on your car?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I also noticed you seem a little ginger on your side, favoring one leg. Did you pull a muscle, or is it related to the broken windshield?”

  “Neither.”

  “What’re the cops doing here?”

  Ember sighed. “Someone murdered my next-door neighbor. It happened last night.”

  “Does that have anything to do with your current line of work?”

  “Maybe. I don’t really want to… I shouldn’t say anything about it. All you need to know is that I’m handling it, so what’s happening there doesn’t have anything to do with you or the FBI.”

  “Okay, sure. If that’s how you want to play it.”

  Ember flexed her jaw. “You still shoot hoops?”

  “I get on the court when I can. Pretty busy these days.”

  “What are you doing in Boulder?”

  Isabel pulled out into traffic and kept a slow pace. “Our friends back in Washington are concerned about you. Some people at the Bureau asked me to come out here and do a wellness check. Well, specifically, they asked me to look into the Assassins Club, because they aren’t aware we’ve already had someone undercover out here for the last three years, recording names, making a case to follow the money.”

  “I thought I was ultra-covert out here?”

  Isabel nodded. “That was our intent. Only a handful of people in the Bureau know about your existence, but somehow, people are hearing things. You know how it is in that building; it’s like high school with all the whispering and gossip.”

  Ember smiled. “It’s funny how many of those teenage habits stick with us forever, isn’t it? Only a matter of time before the whole FBI finds out.”

  “Right,” Yang said. “You can only invoice the pocket protector crew so many times for expensive paperclips before they start to figure out you’re diverting funds to an investigation that might not have full approval across the Bureau.”

  “And I’m sure Marcus offered you up as the sacrificial lamb for when this all blows up in his face?”

  Isabel shook her head. “He’s doing his job. I’m doing mine.”

  Ember pressed on. “And he will make you the scapegoat when it doesn’t work out. Trusting Marcus to have your back is not a wise move. I thought you were smarter than that.”

  “I know how you feel about Marcus.”

  “No,” Ember cut in. “You don’t know half of how I feel about Marcus.”

  “Regardless, your position out here makes things... difficult. That’s the problem with deep undercover work. It’s often so secret that it gets forgotten, tossed aside.” Isabel considered adding, and sometimes the person going undercover can slip into denial that they’re actually undercover. Instead, she continued along the same tack. “It can cause problems that way. You know the old saying about one hand not knowing what the other one is doing?”

  "Well, Isabel, I'm fine. I'm still out here, collecting information, tracking dates and names, and making a case. It's taking a long time, yes, but I don't know what else I'm supposed to do. I can't just sneak a camera into assassins' houses and start snapping pictures. So far, I haven't found any connection at all to international terrorist groups, which was the whole point of coming out here in the first place."

  “Even if it’s not going as planned, you don’t check in with me anymore. That’s a problem.”

  “I’m often watched. It would be too dangerous. Showing up here at my house is dangerous. Do you know what they would do to me if they found out I’m a fed?”

  Isabel took a turn at the next light and pulled in behind a gas station. She parked in the shade and turned to face Ember. "Doesn't matter. You have to check in with me at regular intervals, the way it's laid out in the operation's parameters. It's not optional, Ember. Doesn't matter if you're deep undercover. Doesn't matter if this is an operation almost no one knows about. Doesn't matter that the people you're investigating are just as well-trained as you. At some point, all of this will become public knowledge, and we need to have everything documented and ordered. Crossed ’T’s, dotted 'I’s, the works. The decision to keep you dark out here wasn't mine, and it wasn't Marcus', either. Both of us inherited you from other people, but this is what we got. So, this is how we're going to do it."

  “And I already told you, I’m not able to check in on a regular basis.”

  Isabel hesitated, but she cleared her throat and pushed on. These things needed to be said. “If you can’t do your job as defined, then we’ll pull you.”

  Ember’s eyes flared. “You’d pull me, three years in? You’d waste all that work because of a procedural disagreement?”

  Isabel stared, unsure of how to continue. She'd known this conversation might not go well, but not to this degree. Agent Allison Campbell—or Ember Clarke—had changed in her extended silence. Snippier, more prone to argue.

  Isabel didn’t know if she should keep on this path or back off, wanting to trust her agent to do the right thing in the field, but at the same time not sure she trusted herself to see it through the way it had been going.

  She took a breath and said in a calm voice, “What do you need, Agent Campbell?”

  "I need to be left alone to do my work. I've always liked you, Isabel, even though we haven't worked together for long. You're one of the good ones. I know it's them. I know how they pressure you. I know how they turn the screws, and before you know it, you find yourself cutting corners because the result is all that matters, not how you got there. I'm asking you, just this once, let me do my job the way I know is right. Give me the space I need to conduct this case in the best way I know how.”

  Isabel gripped the steering wheel, letting Ember’s words bounce around inside her head.

  Ember looked at her, eyes pleading. “I’ll wrap this all up with a bow and place it on your desk, but I’ve got to do this part of it the way I’ve been doing it. The way it has to be done. What do you say?”

  Isabel pursed her lips and sucked in a deep breath. She didn’t know.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ZACH

  Zach opened the door for Ember, and she strolled into the sushi restaurant. He stole a glance at her butt as she walked in front of him, one of the side benefits of opening doors for women. He was quick and careful, though. He didn't know if she would find it cute or insulting if she caught him taking a peek.

  Ember was dressed casually this evening in tight black jeans and a billowy blouse top thing. Zach didn’t know if it was exactly a ‘shirt,’ but he didn’t know what else to call it. Whatever it was, it looked great on her. Ember had curves in all the right places. Not voluptuous like one of those bikini models throwing up heart hands in front of the sun to snap social media pictures. But, she took great care of herself and knew how to sashay from side to side when she walked, drawing eyes from all around. Zach counted at least five different men inside the restaurant whose heads pivoted to
catch a glimpse of her as she walked in. He didn’t like that they were ogling her, but he did feel a spark of pride knowing that she was his date.

  The hostess at the front picked up two menus and escorted Zach and Ember to a side room with a little table, sitting only a foot off the ground. She asked them to take off their shoes, and Ember had no problem doing so, which Zach appreciated. He’d known girls who had a weird thing about their feet, so he was happy to see Ember had no such hangups.

  They slid onto pillows in front of the table, and each picked up a menu. He also noted she didn't take her phone out of her purse and set it on the table, which was another positive sign. He could tell a lot about what a person thought about him, depending on whether they chose to set their phone face-up or face-down on the table.

  She wasn’t wearing makeup, or, if she was, he couldn’t tell. It wasn’t much. Her lips were naturally crimson. Maybe offsetting the pale white of her skin made them look redder than they actually were.

  She grimaced a little as she folded her legs underneath her.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Bumped into the oven door last night. I got a bruise on my side, but it’s no big deal.”

  “Still bothering you, huh?”

  "I was looking the wrong way, the oven door was open, and it sits right at about hip level. I was going full-speed from one side of the kitchen to the other and smacked right into it. I may or may not have been deep into a couple of glasses of Prosecco already."

  Zach smiled and refrained from asking her what 'Prosecco' was. He had to assume it was some sort of wine but didn't want to expose his lack of culture. Better to smile and nod. What was it his dad used to say? Better to keep your mouth shut and be assumed a fool than to open it and prove it true.