Biagatti held a set of night vision goggles up to her eyes, looking like a field commander staring through binoculars.
“Both dead,” she said. “Good work.”
A rare compliment from the taciturn director. Mahegan found an asphalt road, sped north, and gained access to I-66. He hit the blue grille lights and raced to 120 mph until he was on I-495 and finally at CIA headquarters in Langley.
Once inside and on the eighth floor, Biagatti told him to sit down. Mahegan sat in a chair at her conference room table. Biagatti walked over to a ballistic window and stared into the night.
“Why did two people try to kill me tonight, Jake?”
“Technically, it was five,” Mahegan said. “One got away and two were in the ambush site at the hairpin turn.”
“Bob did tell me you were a bit of a smart-ass,” Biagatti said.
Bob. Major General Bob Savage. Mahegan’s boss. To let Mahegan be near Cassie while she recuperated at Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Savage had put Mahegan on loan to the director of the CIA, who was unclear as to whom she could trust.
“Just making sure you understand the severity of the threat, ma’am.”
“I get it. Five people at least. But why? And all women? What is going on?”
Mahegan’s phone buzzed with a text: Lane Charlie-274 paces-southeast firebreak.
He didn’t recognize the number, but immediately knew that the message was from Cassie or one of his teammates, such as Owens, Sean O’Malley, Van Dreeves, or Hobart. But the latter four were at a nearby safe house positioned for whatever would happen next.
“Bet mine is better than yours,” Biagatti said. Her phone had buzzed as well. Things were happening fast, Mahegan thought. The shit was going down.
Mahegan looked at Biagatti, who showed him her phone with a news alert: Newly elected Senator Jamie Carter wins praise of peers with selection as the Senate president pro tem.
“That was fast,” Mahegan said.
Carter had famously run against President Jack Smart, a businessman with no political experience, and lost an election she was expected to easily win.
“Someone killed Hite three months ago. You were meant to be dead. And Carter is now a senator again . . . this time from North Carolina. Crazy time to be in politics.”
“I’m not a politician, Jake. And Carter is in the opposite party. None of this is connected,” Biagatti said, looking at her phone.
“Too much happening in twenty-four hours for it all to be one big coincidence,” he said.
Mahegan stood and began walking to the door.
“Where are you going?” Biagatti asked.
“I need to go find something,” he said over his shoulder.
“What about me? This job? I can get you intel. You can’t just leave,” she said.
Mahegan looked around the director’s expansive office.
“You’re in the safest place in the country at this moment. I’ll be gone less than twenty-four hours,” Mahegan said. “You’ve got Sean O’Malley and the rest of my team at the safe house in Loudoun County. They’re on standby. Don’t leave this building without me or one of them.”
Typically, the CIA director had a full time security team, but given the Resistance’s penetration into the government, many senior officials were opting for private military contractors. As long as Biagatti didn’t leave the building, she’d be fine.
He was out the door and into her Porsche with the flashers on as he sped toward I-95, plugged in his phone, and looked at the text again. He calculated the time it would take him to get to the Uwharrie National Forest in the middle of North Carolina. At 100 mph, he could make it in less than four hours.
* * *
Took him a shade over four hours. Twice he got caught in construction traffic and then had to wind his way around Raleigh and down US 1, which caused him to bump his speed down to 90 mph, sometimes 80 mph, but never less than that. Plus, he had pulled into a Kangaroo Gas Station, near Apex, which was a necessary pit stop. He navigated from memory past Camp Mackall, the Special Forces’ training area, and onto the gravel roads he had memorized from his unit training. The Uwharrie was to Delta and Green Beret Special Forces as the Farm was to CIA paramilitary operators. Soon, he was driving through a tunnel of trees along the control road, where the land navigation course began. Every couple of hundred meters, there were “lanes,” meaning start points for long and nearly impossible land navigation and orienteering courses. He slowed the Porsche to a crawl, keeping the high beams on. He spotted the letter B nailed to a tree. Most people would have missed it in the dark. A green-and-black square of plywood with a faded letter on it, but Mahegan knew what he was looking for. He gunned the Porsche, saw the C, and immediately spotted the tire tracks and a blown-out area where a helicopter could have landed. This could have been from training, or it could be where Cassie had been.
He stopped, shut down the Porsche’s turbo engine, then moved to the tree with the letter C. He remained motionless, letting his senses adjust from the ergonomics of the car to the familiar sounds of a wilderness training area. Owls hooted. Bears growled. Smaller animals rustled in the undergrowth. Mahegan knew this piece of land nearly as well as he knew his hometown in Frisco, North Carolina, maybe better. Days and weeks of training, surviving, evading, and winning the inevitable contests between trainee and trainer. He breathed deeply, inhaling the musty scent of the Uwharrie Forest.
The Uwharrie were an extinct Native American tribe, for which the oldest mountain range had been named. He thought about his native Croatan blood and how his ancestors were also extinct. Alone in the forest where his Native American brethren had hunted and gathered centuries before, he felt a peace wash over him. Disconnected from the erratic rhythms of today’s connected lifestyle, Mahegan thought about tossing his mobile phone and walking into the darkness, never to return.
But this time, both duty and the woman he loved beckoned. Typically, he had to choose between the two, which usually led in polar opposite directions. Now he was in the atypical position of having alignment between his call to duty and helping Cassie. He retrieved his phone from his cargo pocket: Lane Charlie-274 paces-southeast firebreak.
He moved to the center of the firebreak, the ten-meter-wide gravel-and-dirt road intended to prevent fires from spreading and destroying the eighty-square-mile national forest filled with the first gold mines discovered in America.
Much of the land was as close to pristine as anyone could find in America, which made it the perfect place for training U.S. Army Special Forces.
Mahegan began walking, counting his paces, figuring one of his steps was one-third longer than one of Cassie’s, but then again she might have been running, which would lengthen her stride. In the end, his gut told him that one of his walking paces would be about 10 percent longer than one of her running paces, which would make 274 of Cassie’s steps equal to 300 of Mahegan’s steps. He assumed she used the pace count method where she counted with every step of her left foot, not every step of both feet. He walked, counting his left footsteps, and put a rock in his pocket with each one hundred steps. He passed areas where the vegetation was thick on either side and noticed midway through his 280th step a disturbance on the firebreak. Footprints and shuffle marks toward the left side, to the east. Nonetheless, he continued walking and stopped when he had three rocks. He was standing in an area where the trees gave way to a more open area. Just behind him, there was enough room to land a small MH-6 helicopter, the type he had flown on many times.
He stopped and listened. Animal noises. Nothing out of the ordinary. The growling black bear sounded closer. The owls sounded farther away. There were smaller animals everywhere, making their rustling noises in the leaves. Most likely, whatever had happened to Cassie here had occurred as a onetime shot.
Unless people were looking for whatever she had.
Mahegan walked toward the thinning wood line at his three-hundred-pace mark. Stood and listened again. His hearing was in the
top 1 percent of all U.S. Army personnel during his time of service, despite all of the combat and loud machinery. Sure, he had worn the earplugs some of the time, but mostly he hadn’t. His hearing, like his sense of direction, was exceptional.
The slightest ting of metal on metal echoed from deep in the woods. There it was again. Facing the woods, he calculated the noise was coming from about fifty meters away at his ten o’clock. That azimuth and distance would put the trail near the 280-pace mark, where he had seen the footsteps.
There was a whisper, words he couldn’t make out, but definitely a human voice. Mahegan took a knee and retrieved his night vision monocle from his pocket. He flipped the ON switch and held the goggle to his eye, scanning like a pirate searching for land. His goggle picked up the glint of a flashlight and the darkened forms of two men.
“Where the fuck is it?” a voice asked, louder this time.
Someone was looking for Cassie’s medical cooler. The same people that had captured her? Someone else Cassie had asked to find it? That seemed unlikely. Cassie was not a trusting person, and she wouldn’t play both ends against the middle to see who could find it first. Assuming he was confronting foes, he retrieved his Sig Sauer Tribal pistol.
Always preferring to remain on the offense, Mahegan scanned in the other cardinal directions, looking for accomplices and a vehicle. Certainly, these people hadn’t walked into the Uwharrie National Forest. He saw the car parked about a hundred meters up the firebreak. They’d either missed their mark or had the sense not to park directly where they had entered the forest. Mahegan walked directly at the car. An object coincident with a person’s line of sight was less likely to be detected than one moving laterally.
Head-on, directly at the vehicle, Mahegan walked. As he approached, he saw a head in the driver’s seat. It was turned down with a light shining on his face. The man was on his cell phone, which was a bonus for Mahegan. The man’s pupils would be constricted from the bright light of the phone. Mahegan continued walking straight toward the car until he was standing ten feet from the hood. They had not been there long, the engine’s warmth radiated out from the grille. He stood motionless, watching the man smile as he was texting, head down.
Mahegan lifted his Tribal with its Maglite on the rail underneath and took a large, slow step to the east, toward the passenger side of the car. If there had been a passenger, Mahegan would be looking directly at him. He watched. The man’s head didn’t move, so he took another soundless step to his left. Now he was beyond the car, eyeing a dark path between the undergrowth and the automobile, which was a black Dodge Charger. Its front end was solid and sleek, showing the heft he would expect of a muscle car. The side windows, he could see now, were tinted, which would further help him. The cant on the windshield was beyond forty-five degrees, which further strengthened his plan.
Mahegan slowly lowered himself and knelt. Stayed still. Waited. He was eye level with the man in the driver’s seat, who was now laughing at some hilarious information on his brightly lit phone screen. After two lunge-type steps, Mahegan was even with the back door of the Charger. He briefly considered it for a return vehicle to Washington, DC, but the Porsche Panamera had performed well and had better options. Looking into the backseat, he only saw fast-food bags and drink cups.
Now Mahegan elevated and slowly walked around the vehicle, approaching from the rear. Positioned over the man’s left shoulder, directly behind the driver’s window, Mahegan studied the man. The texts were coming from someone named Patti. Pictures were being exchanged. Nudes. Sexual innuendo back and forth. Mahegan figured he could stand in front of the car and do jumping jacks and the guy wouldn’t notice. He didn’t do that, though. Instead, he spotted the man’s pistol in the passenger seat and made a mental note as he refined his plan. Unsure if the doors were locked or not, Mahegan made sure his safety was in the ON position, grabbed his pistol by the barrel, rotated his right arm and upper torso to the left, and then stepped forward and slammed the pistol into the window, which shattered into a million pieces.
He quickly reached in with his left hand and grabbed the man’s shirt, pulled him halfway through the window, and used the pistol to deliver a solid blow to the man’s head.
A new text scrolled down on the man’s phone.
What was that?
Mahegan grabbed the phone and looked at the thread, then mimicked a response.
Fuckin bear wanted our leftovers, dude
No shit?
Yeah I gave him yours
Haha ok
Any luck
All over it but can’t find it
How’s Patti?
Mahegan paused.
You know, the same
Come help us and fuck the opsec just shine us some light
Roger
Roger? When’s a Navy guy say that?
Aye just fuckin w u
After a long pause, the next text read: K, just come on, Ben.
Mahegan reached into the unconscious man’s pocket, retrieved his wallet, and saw his driver’s license claimed he was Stanley Edgars. Mahegan figured Stan was the most likely name for Edgars, so he replied with:
Ben? WTF? This is Stan
Lol, k, just making sure you weren’t the bear
Quit fuckin around . . . otw
K
Mahegan checked the unconscious man for weapons and found a Buck knife, then dragged him into the backseat. He put the man’s knife and phone in his pocket, snagged his pistol, and cranked the engine. He drove until he was near the spot with the footprints and scuff marks. He Y-turned the vehicle so that its headlights were aimed in the general direction. He then turned on the high beams and showered the woods in penetrating light.
He exited the vehicle and jogged toward the noise, heard someone shout, “Stan!” and vectored in that direction. About a hundred meters in, he found a trail and saw two men staring in his direction. They were highlighted and he was backlighted. They were looking into the lights and he was looking at where the lights were shining. He was the rock star; they were the fawning fans, holding their hands up to block the high beams.
“Stan, what the fuck?”
Mahegan approached and flipped on the flashlight function on Stan’s cell phone and the flashlight on his pistol rail.
He did his best neutral-toned voice, saying through panted breaths, “Hey, sorry.”
He was ten feet from them. They were standing next to a large tree.
“Turn off the fuckin’ lights and help us find this thing. The GPS shows us right on it.”
Mahegan kept running, sizing up the two men. The guy on the left was bigger than the one on the right, so he went after him first. He picked up speed and barreled into the one who had been talking. Raking the pistol butt against the man’s head, Mahegan spun and landed a solid boot in the chest of the second man. He barreled into the stumbling second man and powered two right crosses against his chin.
He had no idea who these people were, but they were in between him and finding what Cassie needed. With both men unconscious, Mahegan found a handheld GPS device next to the big tree. It was an oak, towering high into the canopy. He checked the two men with the toe of his boot, nudging them. No response. He gathered two pistols, two wallets, two cell phones, and a knife. He used the thumbs of the two men on their phones’ respective touch pads so that they were open. With his phone, he took pictures of the call and text screens to see who the contacts were, in case the phones closed again. To prevent that from happening, he silenced the phones and found the YouTube app on each, then turned on a repeating series of videos that would keep the phones open for him to later exploit. Then he pocketed the entire haul.
It took him less than five minutes to find the large opening at the base of the tree. The dark night and thick canopy concealed the gap, but it was there, easy enough to find. These guys had done most of the hard work, such as it was, but Mahegan shone the Maglite into the hole. A raccoon’s shiny eyes peered back at him. He used the knife to s
lide the nocturnal scavenger out of the way as he reached in and grabbed the blue medical cooler.
Retracing his steps to the car, he approached carefully, saw the man in the back was still unconscious, slid him out onto the firebreak, and then drove the Charger to where his Porsche was parked. He slammed his knife into the four tires on the Charger and tossed the keys into the woods on the far side of the road. Emptying out his find onto the Porsche passenger seat, he sorted through the guns, wallets, knives, and phones. It was a substantial haul that could result in a significant connection to whatever had happened to Cassie, or it could lead to some hired amateurs.
Mahegan was betting on the amateur angle when he started the Porsche and began his return to DC.
Almost on cue, Biagatti called and said, “Get your ass back here now. We’ve got a coup.”
CHAPTER 7
A RECTANGULAR BEAM OF LIGHT CUT ACROSS THE ROOM AND BURNED through Cassie’s eyelids. She struggled to open her eyes, slammed shut by fatigue or drugs, or both.
Someone was efficiently moving throughout the room, opening the heavy silk drapes on three sides of the bedroom. A woman in a black maid’s outfit, with a white apron, was hefting back the last of the drapes, tying them off with a knotted silk cord the color of gold.
Cassie rolled over and stared at the woman, who glanced at her.
“Miss Bagwell, Senator Carter will be hosting you at eleven a.m. this morning. Your clothes are on the bench,” she said.
Cassie’s tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth, her lips sticky with dehydration.
She tried to recall the events of the last, what, twenty-four hours? She didn’t know. The name Senator Carter bounced with familiarity in her mind: Images of growing up in Northern Virginia, near the Pentagon, found their way through the fog. Visits to a young congresswoman’s house. Parties. Christmas caroling. Then, as she attended the University of Virginia, a woman hugging her as she received her diploma. The big grin, blond hair, and a steely voice saying, Congratulations, Cass, so proud of you.
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