Savage Reborn (Team Savage Book 1)

by Michael Todd

  “You seemed in shape to me. Just saying,” she said.

  “Well, comparatively speaking,” he replied as he bound his ribs with some tape. He winced at the immediate pain that came from it but sighed as the anesthetic in the tape took immediate effect. He was finally a little more comfortable. “Wait, you can see me?”

  “Of course not,” she said with a chuckle. “But I do have footage from the fight. And the sprinting up the stairs. And seriously, I hang around people who stay in combat shape all the time, and I don’t think any of them could keep up with what you did.”

  “Well, yeah, obviously,” Jeremiah said with a chuckle. “They pick the best and brightest to join the 75th, and it only gets harder from there. All respect to the Marines that they probably have scouring that Zoo place—and if I’m honest, they probably have more balls than I do by running around there, but…”

  “What?” Anja asked as his voice trailed off.

  “I…army guys make it a habit to trash everyone who isn’t army,” Jeremiah said with a chuckle. “I mean, that’s the same with most of the branches. They trash everyone who isn’t them, but there’s always respect between the boys in the service. We all put our lives on the line for our country. Except I’m not one of the boys anymore. I’m a dead man, and all my ties to any of my service died with me.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Sorry,” he said and dragged in a deep breath. “I’m bringing the mood down. I…kind of…uh, have to be alone right now.”

  “No worries,” she said quickly. “Take the earpiece out of your ear and it’ll disconnect you.”

  “Thanks for all your help today, Anja,” he said softly. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Duh,” she said with a chuckle. “Rest well, Jer. You have a long day tomorrow. I need a couple of hours to decrypt all this junk from Carlson’s phone anyway.”

  He made no answer and instead, removed the earpiece and placed it on the bedside table. Having someone in the fight with him was all that he could really ask for, but he still felt like shit.

  While he still had the energy, he applied the same tape that he’d put around his ribs to his knuckles and growled softly as it squeezed and felt more painful than the ribs had. Once the pain subsided, he lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. Despite the drowsiness, he still felt wired. It seemed very clear that he wouldn’t drift off to sleep, despite the lateness of the hour. He had taken a shower, had a decent meal, and now, he was supposed to sleep the adrenaline hangover off.

  It was the coffee. He shouldn’t have drunk the damned coffee.

  Irritated, Jeremiah rolled over to the side of the bed and picked up the burner that he’d left on the table beside it. He flipped it open and took a moment to familiarize himself with the controls of the cheap, old device.

  He found the numeric pad, and after a few seconds of internal debate, he entered a telephone number. One of the downsides of having a memory as good as his was the knowledge that he would never be able to forget the number that he’d made himself delete from all his phones and all his databases. Of course, he didn’t actually have those phones anymore, so it was a moot point.

  The phone rang and he pressed it to his ear. The call was across the country, so he was sure that it would bite deeply into the prepaid minutes on this phone. That was fine, of course. He didn’t need to make any other calls, so it wasn’t like the minutes would be missed. It was only a way for Anderson to contact him when he needed something.

  Jeremiah stared as the phone continued to ring, and as he waited, he began to question whether or not this was a good idea. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that it was terrible.

  At the eighth ring, the dial faded at the press of a button on the other side.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice answered. He opened his mouth, but he couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Jules had been to his funeral. She’d met with all his old army buddies who were there to tell her what a hero he’d been and that his memory would live on. Abigail needed to have her normal life with Andy as her dad. Sure, she would feel sad that he was gone, but there was already someone there to take his place. He’d already been obsolete, and they both knew it. There wasn’t much to say that would change that. He was a relic from a life that she’d already left behind.

  Him calling in a moment of stupidity wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t make anything better. It would only complicate her life—and his. There was no way that would all end without pain for everyone involved, including him.

  “Hello?” she said and sounded frustrated. “Look, I can hear you breathing, asshole, so don’t think that I won’t pass this number on to the cops. I don’t need this kind of harassment.”

  Thankfully, he knew her well enough to feel confident that she wouldn’t follow up on that threat. She’d simply vent her frustration and ignore it for now—as long as he wasn’t stupid enough to pull the same trick more than once. Even twice was once too many. For sure, she’d call out the cavalry if he made another dumbass attempt to hear her voice.

  Still, a few more seconds passed before he could actually bring himself to press the button that cut the connection. Warm tears trickled down his cheeks as he placed the phone on the bed. The device slipped from his numb fingers.

  Jeremiah Johnson was dead. He wouldn’t come back, and he wouldn’t reconnect with his family. Jules wouldn’t see him across a crowded room and jump into his arms. Abigail wouldn’t come over and hug him and be happy that Mommy and Daddy were together again. That simply wasn’t how the world worked. He needed to get that information through his thick skull. There was no coming back from the dead for him. Not today, not tomorrow, and not ever.

  He lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. The tears fell for a short while, but after a few minutes, they stopped and something that definitely resembled peace filled his mind. Closing that door in his life for good, while painful, was something that he hadn’t looked forward to doing at all. He knew that it needed to be done, even if he had courted the idea that he could somehow slide away from the inevitable.

  That didn’t mean that it might not happen one day. He could always circle back in a couple of years in the future and meet his daughter, have a coffee, and maybe crack some joke about actually being a zombie—provided he survived that long. Considering the day that he’d had, it wasn’t a given that he would be around for a few more years. Things would only get worse from here on in.

  No. He shook his head firmly and had a mental conversation with himself. Jeremiah Johnson would be a dead man from this point forward. There was no daughter, no ex-wife, no detestably likable new boyfriend—or fiancé, rather. Jeremiah Johnson was dead.

  Jeremiah Savage was who remained, and he wouldn’t live in the past or be chained by futile longings that would only bring more pain to everyone concerned. He had a job to do, one that would save the lives of the men and women whom he cared for. He could do that in the guy’s honor.

  His muscles gradually relaxed as he looked at the ceiling. Releasing that part of him felt…pleasant. Like he no longer carried a heavy load and he could actually start to live his life. From here on out, he could live free from all entanglements and from everything that had held him back before.

  He closed his eyes, and this time, coffee or no coffee, he drifted off without any effort. It had been a long day.

  Chapter Ten

  His eyes flickered open. Whatever bright something that glared into them remained persistent and, for the life of him, wouldn’t fucking go away. He blinked a few times and rolled in the bed as he wondered if he’d closed the blinds in his room. No…

  He blinked a few times and finally realized what had woken him. The blinds were pulled, which meant that the tiny blot of light that came through and ruined his sleep pushed through the cracks in the shades. Which, he reasoned morosely, was only to be expected from a place like this. Running cheap was basically their business motto. That, and ID’s weren’t
necessary for check-in.

  Something buzzed in his room—something loud and obnoxious, which made it impossible for him to go back to sleep. He still felt like he needed a couple more hours, but it obviously wouldn’t happen.

  The buzzing thing was the phone he’d put on the nightstand. The one he’d called Jules with. He scowled at it and wondered for a moment if she had redialed. All the complications that would come with that were notably cringe-worthy, but he quickly put that thought aside. It wasn’t the likely answer.

  More than likely, though, was that it was his employers wanting to get in touch with him to talk about what had happened the day before. The men had been found and there was probably an ongoing investigation, but the fact that no flashing red and blue lights were outside to help ruin his sleep along with the sunlight meant that Anja had done a good job of covering his tracks.

  He picked the phone up as it started to ring again and groaned softly as he pressed the receive call button. “What?” he demanded into the receiver as he dragged himself up from the bed.

  “What?” Anja’s very familiar style of sass and Russian accent sounded way too chirpy for this early in the morning. “Yeah, that’s nice. What, is that I’ve called you for the past fifteen fucking minutes. Why don’t you answer your damned phone? Or phones, I should say?”

  Well, this wasn’t a promising start to the day. He drew in a deep breath and tried not to get defensive. It helped to remind himself that he did not need to go on the attack. Self-control was necessary these days, he mused as he scratched the stubble that had made a home on his cheek.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t sleep well,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I’m still decrypting the stuff from Carlson’s phone,” she replied, and he could hear her typing into a computer through their connection. “There’s a lot of stuff to work through. I’ve already sent everything that I have to Courtney and Anderson and given them a heads-up about what Carlson might be up to.”

  “Do you know what he’s doing?” he asked and grimaced at the crumpled clothes that he hadn’t bothered to remove before he went to sleep. At least he had some new duds to change into. The thought made him feel marginally better. He knew that very soon, he would head out to hunt or kill or acquire intel—wherever it was that Anja would send him next.

  “I don’t have a perfect bead on it yet,” she said quickly. “But it seems that after everything happened three weeks ago, he’s been doing damage control. A lot of people were fired and then rehired by another shell corporation that was tied to Pegasus, but again, not after three weeks ago. He’s pulling everything that he’s been doing in Pegasus away. There’s a lot of work that he put into the company that I think he wants to continue, and he’s putting the continuation of the work above actually getting back at Courtney and Anderson. It would seem that they’re not really a priority at the moment.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?” Jeremiah asked, moved to the closet, and examined the new clothes inside. The tags were still on them, and he chose a pair of chinos and a pale blue Polo shirt. Knowing he would be there for another two and a half weeks or so, he looked high and low for an iron in case he needed to launder what little he had. He was fresh out of luck, though, and scowled as a single word came to mind. Unacceptable! It was the military man in him, of course. Steel-edged creases had been drilled into him for years, and it wasn’t something you simply walked away from. Not willingly, anyway.

  “Do you think he means to pursue what happened to his men yesterday or get back at us in some way?” he asked.

  “Well, not really,” Anja replied, still tapping at her computer. “It means that while getting back at our people is on his list of priorities, it’s pretty damn low. It also means that since we don’t have to be on the defensive, we can actually go on the offensive. There’s still a lot that we don’t know about this man. He could have plans on top of plans that could end up hurting our benefactors anyway.”

  “I have to imagine that after yesterday, our man knows that he has someone on his tail and will eventually want payback for his injured men, right?” Jeremiah asked. He had pulled his new pants on and now stood staring at himself in the mirror. His body sported a lot of fresh scars, but many of them were hidden behind the tats that covered the flesh of his right side. He was inordinately proud of his ink. Much of it was military and some of it was taken from snapshots of his ex-wife and daughter, intertwined with vines of ivy and the serpentine tail of a fighting dragon. Anja’s words interrupted his thoughts.

  “That’s the thing,” Anja replied. “After he found the men you left behind, he didn’t try to call any emergency services or anything. I have audio on the call from the cameras, but I only have one side. He was calling someone to tell them to step up the schedule, and that he needed the facility empty before the weekend.”

  “Were you able to track the call and find out where this facility is?” He hurried into the bathroom to brush his teeth, twisted the water faucet, and winced as his wrist twinged in outrage. As he hissed through his teeth, he decided to stop lolling around like a lazy piece of shit and buff up smartly before his hard-earned strength abandoned him completely when he needed it the most.

  “No and yes, respectively,” Anja said. “Tracking the call was a little complicated, considering that it was routed through a lot of redundant VPNs and the call cut off before I could get around to finding the source. But I did see that the IRS was notified about a massive chunk of funds pushed into a small Pegasus facility in North Carolina. There are a lot of payments into that place, but they were always very well-covered. It seems like he doesn’t care much about covering his tracks anymore.”

  “Or maybe Carlson is trying to use the IRS to depose Monroe and Anderson,” Savage replied. “Or both. There’s no reason he couldn’t be using the one stone, two birds tactic. I can’t imagine that he doesn’t have something like that in mind.”

  “Right,” Anja said. “Anyway, Mr. Carlson has chartered a company jet to head to North Carolina to look over Pegasus’ business interests in the area. Apparently, that’s where the company sent most of their research—you know, enough big locations to keep all the goop research away from the civilians.”

  “The what research?” Savage asked.

  “Oh…nothing, never mind,” she replied, evading the question quickly. “Courtney had to approve the chartering since there’s no reason why one of the senior members of the board shouldn’t go out to check on how all the research is coming along. That said, she and Anderson don’t trust him as far they can throw him, as Americans say, so they want you to head to the location as well and keep an eye on him.”

  “You keep using American idioms, but you constantly reinforce that it’s what the ‘Americans’ say,” he said with a chuckle. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that it’s what you say too. Don’t Russians have your own idiots to translate?”

  “Our idioms don’t really work in English,” Anja said but didn’t sound quite sure, like she’d never actually tried it. “They don’t translate well from language to language. It requires too much knowledge of the culture. Kind of a linguistic form of an inside joke.”

  “Right. I’ve always hated inside jokes, ya know,” he said. “So, is it wise that I’m the one tracking Carlson down? Won’t he recognize me from the dust-up yesterday? One of his goons could have given him a description.”

  “Well, he never ran into you personally,” Anja reminded him. “And the men whom you worked over are still in the hospital. He made no effort to speak to them on site or at the hospital. Anyway, like you said, they wouldn’t have recalled much as it happened so quickly. It looks like they’ll make a full recovery, but I can keep an eye on them if you’d like.”

  “That’s not necessary,” he said.

  “Well, the records and security feeds have all been wiped,” she confirmed. “It was a rush job, so the people combing through the servers will know that they were wiped, but they won’t ever be able to rever
se-track me. I’m good like that. Still, they know that there’s someone working in the shadows against them. You’ll need to be a touch more careful from this point forward. Anyway, you should be in the clear.”

  “Roger that,” he said with a nod. He had been rushed into some situations that he would have preferred to avoid back there, so he wouldn’t argue against the obvious. “Wait a second, should be in the clear?”

  “It’s the best I can do,” Anja said. “I have a plane ticket lined up to get you to Charlotte, but you’ll have to rent a car and drive to the location. Your plane leaves in…three hours, so you might want to hurry and get packed, and I’ll text the details to your phone. Oh, and try and keep your earpiece on.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement.” He grinned as he pressed the button to end the call, opened the bathroom door, and tossed the phone onto the bed. Three hours. He had time for a quick shower, a shave, and packing before he called a taxi to get him to the airport once he dropped the rental off. It was unlikely that he would need his passport, but it was like Anja had said when he first moved into the room. It wasn’t like the safe would actually stop anyone from coming after him, so he would need to keep everything he owned close. Now that was he was on the radar of the people he was going up against, he didn’t want to leave anything behind for them to use against him.

  He stepped into the shower and turned the water as hot as he could stand it. The familiar sting rushed over his body as he lathered himself hastily in soap and shampoo and washed it all away. He took a moment to inspect his wounds, new and old, to make sure that nothing had broken or ruptured during the night. He could still feel pain in his side, and there were additional colors behind his already colorful tattoos. His newer wounds ached more than usual, but not so much that he entertained the idea of visiting a doctor. That was a luxury that his inherent caution rejected.

  Walk it off! he mused with a sardonic smirk. Rub dirt on it and the pain will go away. That was what the drill instructors always said, but right now, that phrase seemed like the story of his life.