Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels)

by William Brown

  “I understand your brothers martyred themselves, Aslan.” Al-Zaeim finally broke the silence, daring to comfort the big man.

  “Mergen, yes. Batir, curse his name, permitted himself to be captured.”

  “Insha Allah, it must have been God’s will, my friend,” the Caliph said as he placed his hand on Khan’s shoulder.

  “A temporary setback, no more.” Khan glared at the hand until al-Zaeim took it away. “We are not done with them. We must redouble our efforts. You must redouble your efforts, al-Badri; otherwise your days are numbered, too.”

  Khan only called him by his real name when he was angry and wanted to put the little man in his place, so the Caliph knew not to say anything else. They continued to stand there in silence, enjoying the cool night air and staring vacantly into the empty desert while Aslan Khan finished his cigarette. It was hard to say which of them saw the two blue-white flashes on the low ridgeline to the northeast first, not that it mattered.

  XXX

  If you enjoyed the read, I would appreciate your going to the Burke’s Revenge Kindle Book Page and posting a rating and comment.

  And to receive a copy of Aim True, My Brothers, the e-book version of my very successful hardback novel originally published by St. Martins, just click on the link below. It has 4.7 Stars on 87 Kindle Reviews, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WILLIAM F. BROWN

  With the addition of Burke’s Revenge, I’m the author of nine mystery and international suspense thrillers, exclusively available on Kindle.

  A native of Chicago, I received a BA from The University of Illinois in History and Russian Area studies, and a Masters in City Planning. I served as a Company Commander in the US Army and later became active in local and regional politics in Virginia. As a Vice President of the real estate subsidiary of a Fortune 500 corporation, I was able to travel widely in the US and now travel extensively abroad, particularly in Europe and the Middle East, locations which have featured prominently in my writing. When not writing, I play bad golf, have become a dogged runner, and paint passable landscapes in oil and acrylic. Now retired, my wife and I live in Florida.

  In addition to the novels, I’ve written four award-winning screenplays. They’ve placed First in the suspense category of Final Draft, were a Finalist in Fade In, First in Screenwriter’s Utopia — Screenwriter’s Showcase Awards, Second in the American Screenwriter’s Association, Second at Breckenridge, and others. One was optioned for film.

  The best way to follow my work and learn about sales and freebees is through my web site http://billbrownthrillernovels.com, which has Preview Chapters of each of my novels, interviews, book reviews, and other links.

  Burke’s Gamble can be found at http://amzn.to/2lORmXJ

  Burke’s War can be found at http://amzn.to/2muFG9C

  Cold War Trilogy can be found at http://amzn.to/2mmTweV

  The Undertaker can be found at http://amzn.to/2l9Chfg

  Amongst My Enemies can be found at http://amzn.to/2lTovlu

  Thursday at Noon can be found at http://amzn.to/2ljs1SI

  Winner Lose All can be found at http://amzn.to/2lTqRke

  Aim True, My Brothers can be found at http://amzn.to/2lPbj0t

  DEDICATION

  To the best set of cross-country helpers and proofreaders a writer can have: my wife, Elisabeth Hallett in Montana, my friend Loren Vinson in San Diego, and my neighbor in sunny Florida, Beth Schmidt. I want to thank Hitch, Barb, and the staff of Booknook Biz in Phoenix for their help with processing and conversion of the manuscript into Kindle-Speak. I also want to thank Todd Hebertson at My Personal Art in Salt Lake City for the outstanding cover art he has provided for all of my recent books, and my website wizard Pat Costa for all of his technical help on MailChimp, Facebook, and many other programs.

  Preview and Sample Chapters of

  The Undertaker

  A snarky, at times funny and scary domestic suspense thriller starring my readers’ favorite couple, Pete and Sandy.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Boston: where California meets New Jersey

  I knew I was in trouble when Gino Parini shoved that .45 automatic in my face and made me read my own obituary. I’m not talking about something vague or California-cosmic, like the San Andreas Fault will turn Nevada into beachfront property, or those McDonald’s French fries will seal my arteries shut, or second-hand smoke will give me lung cancer. I’m talking about my own honest-to-God black-and-white obituary ripped from page thirty-two of that morning’s Columbus, Ohio newspaper:

  TALBOTT, PETER EMERSON, age 33, of Columbus, died Sunday at Varner Clinic following a tragic automobile accident. President and founder of Center Financial Advisors of Columbus. Formerly of Los Angeles, a 1999 graduate of UCLA and a lieutenant, US Army Transportation Corps…

  That was me. I was Talbott, Peter Emerson, 33 years old, and formerly from Los Angeles. I had graduated from UCLA and I had been a lieutenant in the Army. Coincidence? I didn’t think so. There was only one of me and I didn’t die in the Varner Clinic or anywhere else last Sunday. I was an aeronautical software engineer and I had never been to Columbus or heard of Center Financial Advisors much less been its President. Still, when somebody points a .45 automatic at your chest, it is hard to argue the fine points.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  That day began normally enough. For the past two months, I had been settling into a new job as a systems designer and software engineer with Symbiotic Software in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was one of a hundred programming shops in those big, mirror-glass office buildings that dot the Route 128 Beltway around Boston. You know the kind: no hard walls, no doors, just dozens of low, pastel-colored cubicles filled with a mixed bag of grungy 20-somethings in every size, shape, color, orientation, and gender. My cubicle was like all the others, except for the cheap plastic nameplate that said “Peter E. Talbott, Senior Systems Engineer” hanging at the entrance. Inside, the wall behind my chair featured a framed poster of Eric Clapton, signed by The Man himself, ripped off from an LA record store back in my younger and much crazier days. On the wall across from my desk hung a beautiful Air Mexico travel poster: a color shot of a beach at sunset near San Jose down on the Baja, with a thin, solitary young woman in a bikini walking away down the sand. That was where Terri and I were supposed to go that last fall, but she got sick and we never made it. Other than the simple 8" x 10" photograph of her sitting on my desk smiling up at me, the Baja beach poster was easily my most prized possession.

  It was already 5:30 PM. Headset on, I stared at my big, flat-screen computer, pounding away at the keyboard, dressed in my treasured but badly faded Rolling Stones 1995 Voodoo Lounge World Tour T-shirt, blue jeans, and a worn-out pair of Nikes. Like the shoes, I was a tad older and more scuffed than the rest of the hired help, so clothes helped me fit in during those first awkward weeks after I moved there from LA. Anyway, I had just finished a crash project and was slowly coming back down as I listened to the last tracks of a two-CD set of Clapton’s Greatest Hits. When I really get into a problem, the building could go up in flames, and I’d never notice unless my monitor went blank.

  I leaned back in my chair, eyes closed, playing air guitar riffs along with “Tears in Heaven,” when a cold hand lifted one of the earpieces and whispered in my ear. “Earth to Petey, you are going to have the sub-routines done by tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  “You said ‘tomorrow’, as in ‘close-of-business tomorrow,’ not ‘tomorrow-tomorrow,’ or ‘tomorrow morning’, or ‘today-tomorrow,’” I answered.

  “I know, but I’ve got a problem and ‘tomorrow’ just became first thing tomorrow.”

  Looking over my shoulder was Doug Chesterton in his “harried boss” costume: a wrinkled white shirt, a cheap necktie with soup stains, and a pocket full of pens. It read MIT all the way — smart as hell, but dumb as a rock.

  “Douglas,” I smiled. “Having anticipated that you’d be a completely disorganiz
ed and unreasonable asshole…”

  “And your brother-in-law, your boss, and the magnanimous owner of the company.”

  “They’re done. I e-mailed them to you twenty minutes ago.”

  “That’s why I brought you here, big guy,” he said as he gave me a big bear hug and planted a disgustingly loud, wet kiss in my right ear, tongue and all. “You’re like a bloodhound when you get the scent, Petey, you’re fucking relentless.”

  “Relentless with a wet ear, you moron.”

  Doug leaned in over my shoulder and looked at the screen. “Then what the hell are you still working on? Wait a minute. That’s the Anderson job I gave Julie, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t get pissed at her; it was my idea. She had some meetings at school with her kids, so I said I’d help her out.”

  Doug laid his hand on my shoulder. “I’m not pissed. I’m glad. I know it’s been hell for you since Terri died, but you moved here to get a fresh start and Julie is drop-dead gorgeous. She’s divorced and she’s exactly what you need.”

  “Julie? Oh, come on, I’m just helping her out, I wouldn’t…”

  “No, you probably wouldn’t, but she would. Trust me. The faithful widower? Half the secretarial pool wants to take you home and mother you, and the other half wants to have your baby. They think you’re a saint.”

  I looked over at Terri’s smiling photo. I knew he was right, but that wasn’t what I wanted or what I needed. He saw me look, too.

  “She’s gone, Pete. It’s been a year now and it’s time you moved on. She was my sister and I loved her as much as you did, but that’s what she’d tell you, too.”

  “I know, Doug, I know.” The truth was, Terri did tell me that, almost every day at the end and almost every day since. That was where Doug and all the others had it wrong. I wasn’t alone. I still had all my memories of Terri, and my life was full, so full I didn’t have anything left to give to anyone else. Someday, maybe, but not then.

  “Look, I didn’t come out here to bug you,” Doug said. “But accounting keeps gnawing on me about your social security number. The IRS still has your account blocked.”

  “I’ve called them three times. They keep mumbling something about a ‘numeric anomaly.’”

  “It’s no anomaly. They’ve got you mixed up with somebody else with the same name and they think you’re dead. So, if you want to see a paycheck anytime soon, get the damned thing fixed.”

  I shrugged and put it on my list of things to do. Maybe it was number fifty-nine, but it was there. Besides, Doug was right. He was boss. More importantly, he saved my life.

  I was born in Los Angeles — a child of the Golden West, raised on a steady diet of hard rock, fast cars, Pacific beaches, and the trend-du-jour. After UCLA, I went to work at Dynamic Data in Pasadena. It was Terri who introduced me to her MIT techno-nerd brother. We both bounced around Pasadena, going from one hot software shop to another, doing what we both loved and what we were good at. I was smart, but Doug was always smarter. He sold his old Porsche and moved to Boston with his three mangy cats, sinking every dime he could beg or borrow into his own start-up software company, which he named Symbiotic Software. The title was just vague enough to let him take on all sorts of work. However, trading the beaches and sun of Tinseltown for a long, gray winter of snow and ice in New England wasn’t my idea of fun, so I stayed in LA. Shows what we knew. Doug’s little company found a niche and he never looked back.

  Back then, LA was the “land of milk and honey,” where the growth curve only pointed to “UP” and “MORE UP.” Like the white rabbit told Gracie Slick, though, “one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.” Gracie had no idea how small. Outsourcing was a new word to us “left coasters.” Layoffs and downsizing were something for the Midwest autoworkers and the steelworkers in Pittsburgh with the beer guts and lunch pails to worry about. This time, however, it was us smart guys with the white shirts and the glasses of Napa chardonnay who found ourselves on the chopping block. Yep, ask not for whom the HR manager tolls, he tolls for me and for thee.

  I became a WOOWCP-WFP as we Southern Californians called ourselves — or at least the ones who still had a sense of humor. That’s a White-Out-of-Work-Computer-Programmer-With-Few-Prospects. The big aeronautical engineering firm in Glendale that I was then doing software design for was spinning off people faster than an Oklahoma tornado. Half of the parking lot was empty and the signs on the executive parking spaces had hastily painted-over names or no names at all. We’d been downsized and out-sourced to India and Pakistan and most of my friends were now calling themselves house-husbands, shoe clerks, the Orange County Militia, or alcoholics. My defense mechanism had always been a cynical black humor, but even that gets real old, real quick. So does the weekly humiliation of the unemployment line, a McJob that wasn’t worth going to, or sharing my afternoons with Oprah. When Doug phoned me from Boston and offered me the job, I packed the Bronco, did a reverse Horace Greeley, and headed east. Why not? Terri had died of cancer the year before and there was nothing holding me in California anymore. All I had left were my memories of her, but I soon discovered they were surprisingly portable. I could take her with me anywhere I went, and she never complained, not once.

  Terri and I met at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Oakland when we were young and Bruce’s liver was a lot older. She was a reporter for an online weekly e-paper and rock blog in Mendocino, a stringer actually, all bright-eyed and serious, hoping to catch the big break with an in-depth retrospective piece on the inner meaning of Springsteen’s lyrics. Me? I had cut class for the week and hitched my way up the coast from LA, hoping to catch the music and some fun with the tailgaters and groupies in the parking lot. Don’t ask me why, but for some strange reason we stuck. The unity of opposites? Who knows, but we had eight incredible years together and a lot of good times, right to the bitter end. When it came, I was left with a lot of pain and a gaping hole where someone else should be — a hole I thought could never be filled. Fortunately, I had all those good memories of her too. Memories. Without my memories of Terri, I would never have made it. They were the parts of her I could tuck away in the back corner of my mind and pull out whenever things got really bad, when the hurting parts of me ripped loose and started to fly away. Those were the times I needed something firm to hold onto until I could pull myself back together. That was why they could kill me if they wanted to, but I refused to let them hi-jack my memories of Terri. They were too precious. I owed them everything.

  There’s an old saying, “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” but it’s not true. Things can maim and hurt too, and leave you an emotional cripple. I’ve got to hand it to Terri. She fought the disease for many months and as she did, she taught me what real determination and courage were all about. When she finally did die, I fell into a black hole. I couldn’t help it, but I had had more than I could stomach of doctor’s offices, hospitals, medicine smells, denatured alcohol, pill bottles, flowers, funeral homes, and the musky smell of freshly turned dirt. Funeral homes. I swore I would never enter one again, not on my feet anyway. Even today, the smell of cut flowers and organ music can push me right over the edge, and all because of one tiny little lump, a growth no bigger than a pea.

  I was numb at her funeral. When it was over, I piled into my Nissan 350-Z and headed south to Mexico, determined to drink them out of tequila. The next three weeks were a blur. Like Jimmy Buffet, I ended up with a blown flip-flop, an unwanted tattoo, and vague memories of too many barroom floors. I’m still not sure where I was or what I was doing, but they say my 350-Z hit a semi head-on out on the main highway. The Mexican cops found a charred body inside. Everyone assumed it was me, but it was probably some poor, dumb Mexican kid having the time of his life in a drunken gringo’s Japanese sports car. Whatever, they packed the crispy critter back to LA and buried him next to Terri, and I’m told they threw me one Hell of a funeral. Coming right on the heels of Terri’s, our friends’ worst problem was to make sure the
y wore a different dress or a new tie. They didn’t even have to ask for directions. It was sympathy squared, with tons of tears and an instant replay for those who missed the first show.

  Whatever, the crispy critter wasn’t me. I saw a copy of the Mexican death certificate and the florid obituary that somebody wrote for the Pasadena newspaper. The eulogy was so stirring; they said Doug never did stop crying. When they finally let me out of the drunk tank in San Jose and I talked my way back across the border a few weeks later, it really pissed off a lot of people. Talk about your emotional pratfall. All those tears wasted, all those interrupted vacations, all the schedules that had to be rescheduled — how rude.

  That was their problem. Me? I had hit bottom. No, I had crashed through bottom and landed in my private little hell somewhere below the sub-basement. Funny though. Even when I sank to the lowest point I could get, after mopping up half the bars in Baja, Terri didn’t abandon me. I saw her face staring up at me from the bottom of every tequila glass I downed. She was watching me from the dark shadows in the corner of the filthy hotel room I crashed in. Whenever I paused to raise my blood-shot eyes to the puffy, fast-moving clouds in that high, blue Mexican sky, I saw her face up there on the clouds looking down, watching over me. No, Terri had not deserted me. She would always be there, but I knew she was not very happy watching what I was doing to myself.

  When I got back to LA, they put me on medical leave. They called it stress, but the place was shutting down anyway. Four months later, they locked the doors and I found myself standing at the end of the unemployment line like everyone else. Let’s face it, there was nothing left for me in LA and I was ready for a change of scene. I’d proven I couldn’t in fact drink all the tequila in the world no matter how hard I tried, and that there were easier ways to kill myself if that was what I really want to do. But I didn’t. Terri was up there watching me. I couldn’t put up with her frowns and unhappy looks any longer, so I got myself dried out. No AA or twelve-step method, I simply took a good look at myself in the mirror one morning and stopped cold.