Rogue (An American Ghost Thriller Book 1)

by J. B. Turner

  Not smothering him with affection but glaring at him before taking off his thick leather belt, wrapping it around his nicotine-stained fingers, and lashing out at Nathan, his son, just a skinny, nervous, bed-wetting boy. He still remembered the look on his father’s face. Cold eyes, sneering smile, and clenched teeth. He was like a wild animal. That was what Nathan had faced. Each and every night when his father returned home from drinking.

  Nathan stared at the children. He felt envious. He never knew what it was like to be treated nicely. He remembered tasting the blood in his mouth. Then closing his eyes tight as he pleaded, to no avail. The punches rained down on his face and head. Then the belt would whip through his dirty T-shirt and lash his back. If he was lucky, it would only hurt for an hour or so. But the norm was being beaten unconscious for imagined slights.

  The more he thought of it, the more he didn’t care. He didn’t care that he was the way he was. He didn’t care that he didn’t feel. In fact, it meant he didn’t have to worry about appearing to care.

  The only thing on God’s earth he cared about was his sister. She had always been nice to him. He remembered when Helen had taken him to Rockaway Beach. He thought he’d died and gone to heaven. The sun was burning hot, and the beach was packed with thousands of New Yorkers. He remembered running headlong into the cold water and screaming with delight. He remembered turning around and looking back down the beach and seeing his sister watching him, always alert. It was such an adventure and release to get out of the stinking hovel. Far, far away from the Lower East Side. He remembered closing his eyes and wishing to float away up to the fluffy white clouds in the dark-blue sky and never come down. He willed it to happen. He thought of running away. Helen talked about it with him. But they were too scared. They didn’t know what to do, where to go. Their only release was their father’s death. But that turned out to be a prison. They were separated. Now she languished in a psychiatric unit in Florida. Alone. Dreams had turned to dust. He hadn’t visited since his near-drowning.

  But she more than anything was the one who had allowed Nathan to escape his hell. She was the one who had driven the steel scissors into their father’s heart. He had watched and screamed. Until he couldn’t move. Struck dumb eventually.

  His sister just stared down at their father’s body, smearing her face in his still-warm blood.

  Whenever Stone closed his eyes, he could still see that image. Like a stain that could never be removed. A ghostly memory that would haunt him till he himself was six feet under.

  His cell phone rang. In the background, a loudspeaker announcement.

  “The target and his aide are now together. She had one carry-on bag and a case. They’ll be coming your way in a few minutes.”

  The minutes dragged as the London visitors filtered out to the waiting taxis. Emerging almost last from the arrivals area came Senator Crichton and a young, stunningly attractive woman, hand in hand.

  Stone watched as they jumped into a taxi together. He sipped his coffee, not keen to attract undue attention.

  His cell phone vibrated in his pocket.

  “We’re watching this on the airport’s security system. Get a good look at her, Nathan.”

  “Yeah, I already have. Pretty.”

  “This wasn’t in our plans.”

  “So?”

  “So things just got a whole lot more complicated.”

  Stone finished his coffee and dropped the empty cup at his feet on the car’s floor. “How so?”

  “You’re going to have to take down both of them, perhaps at the same time.”

  Stone started up his car. “They’re on the move.”

  “We’ve got their conversation covered via electronic surveillance. But we need to know where they go, unless they play it cute and take the batteries out of their phones.”

  Stone pulled away. “I’m on it.”

  “Don’t lose them.”

  Brigadier Jack Sands was being buffeted by gale-force winds as he walked on the high cliffs at the edge of the facility. Saltwater spray was being whipped up from an angry sea. He liked to clear his head with bracing walks. Miles and miles of walks. Hundreds of feet below the sheer face of the cliffs was a rocky shore. He stared over the gray seas in the direction of America. That was what he did it for. For his country. His blood. His soil. He thought of his family, unaware of exactly where he was and what he was doing. And then he thought of his sister-in-law, a dyed-in-the-wool Hillary Clinton supporter. He had lost count of the number of times they’d fallen out.

  He couldn’t abide bullshit liberals with their hand-wringing about unfair quotas and how fucking hard life was on minorities. What a bunch of bullshit.

  He’d grown up in a shithole town in western Texas. But he had a stable, hardworking family. A mother and a father. His father was a handyman. Mending cars, tractors, trucks. He was good with his hands, they said. That was true. His temper was even. Sunny nature. Nothing got him down. His mother, by comparison, was cut from a different piece of cloth. She was a Southern Baptist, originally from outside Austin. She had a hot temper. Eight kids to feed and a husband who didn’t bring home much.

  It was hand-to-mouth.

  But their Christian values were instilled at an early age. Hard work, God, country, and service.

  Sands closed his eyes for a moment as he remembered the pride in his mother’s eyes when he had won a Bible story contest run by his local church. His mother felt the need to tell everyone in the neighborhood. The family was proud. But he was teased mercilessly at school by some of the older boys.

  He missed his mother and father. But more than anything he missed his wife. She’d died nearly twenty years earlier, from cancer. And he’d found it tough trying to raise their kids the best he could as he flitted from army base to army base.

  Four good kids. Three boys and one girl. All grown up. One still at college. One in the army. And two working for the CIA.

  He couldn’t be any prouder.

  They were following in his footsteps.

  But there was an emptiness in his life that had followed him around. It wasn’t just being without his wife. It was the nature of his job. What he did. What he knew.

  Sands reached the farthest point away from the facility on the island and stared out at the sea. It was in turmoil. Restless. Unpredictable. He sometimes wondered if it wasn’t time to pack it all in and return to a stable life back in the States. Maybe set up a consultancy.

  He turned and headed back to the warmth of the facility. He checked his watch and remembered he had a meeting with Stone’s psychologist. He arrived just a minute late.

  Sands dried himself off with a towel, grabbed the hot coffee handed to him, and sat down.

  The psychologist was leafing through Stone’s file. “I saw something interesting last night when I was looking over my notes and all the interviews I’ve done with Stone. I thought it was right to let you know.”

  “What was that?”

  “I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I thought I’d raise it with you.”

  Sands shrugged and gulped some hot coffee. “Shoot.”

  “The first few weeks he was here—in fact, all his time here—he said he had no memory of his family. He always said it was sketchy. But a couple of days ago, just before he left, one of the teammates looking after him found a drawing hidden in his mattress.”

  “In his mattress?”

  “Yes, inside the mattress.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a doodle.”

  “Doodle?”

  The psychologist handed him the picture.

  Sands held the picture and looked at the image of a young woman gazing out of a window, cigarette in her hand. He was then shown a photo from the file of Stone’s sister.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what this proves.”

  “I think it’s a striking likeness, don’t you?”

  “It’s pretty basic. I don’t know.”
<
br />   “I think it looks pretty much like her. Cigarette too. She smokes, doesn’t she?”

  Sands nodded.

  “He remembers her.”

  “Which contradicts what he’s said to you.”

  “Exactly my point, Jack.”

  Sands got to his feet. “Appreciate the heads-up, Doc.” He headed back to his office, locked the door, and dialed the direct number for Clayton Wilson. He answered after the fourth ring. After a few pleasantries, Sands described the brief meeting with the psychologist.

  Wilson spoke first. “Let’s recap. First, I get information from his sister’s psychologist in Florida saying that Stone was in touch. Now there’s a drawing of someone with a likeness to his sister that was tucked inside his mattress.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You think he does remember his sister?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know.”

  Wilson said nothing.

  “Is it possible, sir, that we’re putting one and one together and getting three? He’s a valuable asset.”

  “But he could well become a liability. And if that happens . . . if he’s concealing far more of his memories than he’s letting on . . . it’s possible that Nathan Stone could become a problem.”

  “You think he might go rogue?”

  “It’s rare, I’ll give you that. But he wouldn’t be the first operative in my experience.”

  Sands sensed the matter was concerning to Wilson. He didn’t like the direction the conversation was heading. “I’m at a loss to understand what you’re getting at, sir, with all due respect.”

  “The more I think about this, the more Stone begins to worry me.”

  “He’s one of the finest operatives we have at our disposal.”

  “We need people to be trustworthy. One hundred percent trustworthy, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is all about the mission, not the man.”

  Sands closed his eyes for a moment. “I guess I need to know, sir, how would you like to deal with this?”

  “If we lose control of a man like Stone, on the streets, uninhibited, we’re all in trouble.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I think we need to ensure that Mr. Stone sticks only to the mission.”

  Sands’s blood ran cold. “I thought that was a given, sir.”

  “It should be. And I hope it will be. But we need to think of the big picture, don’t we?”

  Sands sensed that Wilson was talking around exactly what he wanted to say. “You want him rubbed out, is that it?”

  “What I want, Jack, is to be assured that we aren’t storing up problems for further down the line.”

  “You want him taken care of?”

  Wilson said nothing.

  “This might be in his sister’s head.”

  “But what about the drawing? That wasn’t in her head.”

  Sands sighed. “Sorry to labor the point, sir, but do you want me, in light of what we now know, to arrange plans for Nathan, sir?”

  “I think it’s for the best. But only once he’s carried out the mission. Do what’s necessary.”

  Sands ended the call and felt a terrible emptiness inside.

  Twenty-Seven

  Clayton Wilson was sitting at the head of a huge table with the other members of the Commission. He flicked through the file on Jessica Friel and stared at the grainy black-and-white photograph of the attractive political staffer. He looked across the table at Richard Stanton. “You’ve put this on the agenda to be discussed today, Richard. You wanna explain?”

  Stanton cleared his throat and looked around the table. “We have a new problem. While Jeff Patterson is no longer a concern, electronic surveillance of this woman, as well as Senator Crichton, indicates she was contacted by Patterson only hours before he died. A search of Patterson’s computer records shows he’s composed a letter to his lawyer asking for documents, unseen by his lawyer, to be sent to Ms. Friel in the event of his death. We believe these are the highly classified documents that came into his possession from a CIA contractor.”

  Wilson stared at the photo of Friel taken when she was out jogging near Capitol Hill. “And we’re sure this is Crichton’s mistress?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “That’s why I’ve put this on the agenda as an emergency item. She’s now in Scotland with Senator Crichton.”

  “How didn’t we know about this?”

  “We didn’t foresee Patterson having the foresight to send such documents to his lawyer.”

  Wilson felt his stomach tighten. “So he must have suspected he was under surveillance.”

  Stanton sighed. “I don’t know.”

  Wilson looked around the table. “We’re at a critical juncture here. We could abort the operation right now. Or we could continue. We need to figure out where we go from here. Gentlemen, your thoughts, please.”

  Crawford McGovern, former director of the CIA, was nodding. “Shit happens, right?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “You do stuff like this, prepare yourself for the unexpected. The unforeseen. My take on it? Dumb fucking luck. First, the CIA contractor having this goddamn flash drive with fragments of this plan, which was then handed to Patterson. Second, this Patterson, he’s given himself an insurance policy by mailing the information secretly to his lawyer, only to be forwarded to Friel in the event of his death? I mean, shit, that is dumb fucking luck number two. But she now poses a real and credible threat to this operation. And sometimes, just sometimes, the end justifies the means.”

  A few nods among the apprehensive faces.

  Wilson said, “The operative in question can take out both Crichton and Friel if the occasion arises.”

  Stanton nodded. “Our man on the ground assures me that the operative can deal with both. Easily.”

  McGovern stared long and hard at the picture of Friel. “The third option is to neutralize Crichton, but without any blood being spilled. By that I mean, leak details of the affair, compromising photos, to National Enquirer. His campaign would never recover from that.”

  Wilson rubbed his eyes. “I think we ran through that option before on Crichton. Sure, we could tarnish his good name, drag him and his family through the mud. But we only have to look at goddamn Bill Clinton. Goes on TV with Hillary, and they get back in the race. Not only that. They go from strength to strength. No one thought it was possible. Not a soul. But he showed it can happen.”

  McGovern nodded. “Very true. Good point, Clayton.”

  Wilson breathed in deep as he contemplated what they should do. “Let’s leave aside the people involved if we can for a few moments.” He stared across at Stanton. “This flash drive, is it still with Friel?”

  “So far,” Stanton said. “But it’s just a matter of time before she passes it to Senator Crichton.”

  Wilson shifted in his seat. “That is not good. If we leak information to the Enquirer, Crichton might think he has nothing to lose by releasing details on the flash drive.”

  McGovern nodded.

  “I guess the next question is,” Wilson said, “do we have someone who could retrieve the information from inside the house where Crichton is staying?”

  Stanton cleared his throat. “Assuming it’s kept secure in a safe and not on a person, we can do that.”

  “Insertion team?”

  “Probably a two-man team,” Stanton said. “We have uniforms already made up in case our operative needs to gain access.”

  “Deal with that side of things.” Wilson looked around the table. “The flash drive we’ll take care of. But that leaves another person who may have knowledge of its contents, in addition to the senator.”

  McGovern said, “Let’s not sugarcoat this. We need to clarify if both Crichton and Friel are to be neutralized within the next forty-eight hours. So we need to do this on a show of hands, right?”

  Wilson nodded. “Everyone who believes that Senator Brad Crichton and
his aide cum mistress Jessica Friel should be dispatched in Scotland, raise your hands.”

  Everyone’s hand went up.

  Wilson leaned back in his seat. “Unanimous. From now on, I don’t want to hear of any more problems. Let’s get this done. Dismissed.”

  Twenty-Eight

  Crichton put his arm around Jessica as they sat in the rear of a taxi headed back to the country house. “Look, maybe I overreacted on the phone. I’m sorry. Are you OK?”

  “No, I’m not OK. I’m scared.”

  Crichton caught the driver watching them in his rearview mirror. He moved closer. “You wanna keep it down?” His voice was a whisper. “Listen, I’ll be able to get clearance for you at the place where we’re stuck for this conference. But if word got out that you were here, my wife would be asking some serious questions. Did you think of that?”

  Jessica closed her eyes, tears streaming down her face.

  “You didn’t have to come all this way, goddammit, Jessica!” he said. “Oh shit, don’t cry.”

  Jessica dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. “What did you expect me to do?”

  The rest of the journey was made in awkward silence.

  When they arrived at the country house, Crichton signed Jessica in. She was taken to security, where she was photographed, her name and ID were checked, and her retina scanned before she was given security clearance and her passport details taken. The two of them then retired to Crichton’s suite.

  Crichton slumped on a sofa as Jessica reached into her handbag and pulled out the lip balm. She took off the top. Inside was a flash drive. She handed it over, along with the note from Patterson that had been sent from his legal firm.

  “Strictly for Senator Brad Crichton, it says.” He looked at Jessica. “And you checked to see what’s on it?”

  “Yes. And I’m terrified.”

  “What about anyone else on the team?”

  “No. They don’t know about it.”

  Crichton sighed long and hard. “I don’t know . . .”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know if this is the right way to go about this. Should I get some legal advice first?”