“Satisfied?” Mahegan said. “You’ve cut your security by more than half.”
“Both of you, look at me,” Biagatti said. O’Malley continued to watch the screen.
“I’ve got blue dots headed this way,” O’Malley said.
“Look at me, O’Malley. Now!” Biagatti said. “I need both of you to focus on the mission at hand right now. We’ve had an attack of an unprecedented nature on our country. Are you up to the challenge? Because if you’re not, I’ll find new men to provide my security. My team needs to be top notch. The very best. Only those that can cut it in today’s intelligence community—”
“We get it, director,” Mahegan said. “Just let us do our jobs.”
“Do them,” she said.
There was a thud on the doorstep, followed by soft footfalls on the roof. O’Malley typed more commands, sending the Team Artemis tracking information into the cloud so that Cassie could continue to maintain situational awareness. He snapped the lid down on his MacBook and unlatched the window when Biagatti had turned away toward the basement door.
“What do we have?” Mahegan asked.
“Movement outside. Four blue dots around the house, maybe on the roof. This doesn’t give relief,” O’Malley said. “A few fleeting images on the cameras, as if they know where they are.”
“Zombie women from the valley?” Mahegan asked.
“Maybe,” O’Malley said.
“Get your stuff and put it in the gun safe. Then stay up here while I get the director downstairs to the safe room.”
“Never leave your wingman, boss,” O’Malley said.
“I’d feel much better with both of you downstairs with me,” Biagatti said.
“Sean can be down in two seconds. Let’s go,” Mahegan said.
O’Malley nodded and drew his pistol from his hip holster. Mahegan grabbed Biagatti by the arm and escorted her down the steps. She turned and locked the dead bolt of the basement door, saying, “Don’t want those bitches getting down here.”
“Let’s go, Director,” Mahegan said.
“Roger, as you would say,” Biagatti said.
Muffled pops rang out all around, but the deeper they retreated into the basement, the more distant the shots sounded. Mahegan’s job was to protect the director of the CIA during this time of national emergency. He had always been duty bound, and always to a fault. The only competing factor to ever make him waver in choosing between duty and another component of his life had been Cassie, but he trusted Cassie’s competence, and General Savage had given him the mission to keep the CIA director alive, and so he would.
The moment he stepped onto the concrete floor of the basement, he knew something was significantly wrong. The air was cooler than normal, probably from an open window or back door. After another half step, Biagatti stepped back, wrenched her arm free of his firm grip, and retrieved her pistol, aiming it at him.
Hobart’s voice sounded through the Band-Aid comms device: “It’s a trap. Four Artemis around the building now. We circled back. In a firefight.”
Mahegan looked at Biagatti.
“Now drop yours,” she said, motioning at his Tribal.
A movement to his right told him that they were not alone in the basement. The only person who could have opened the steel door or triple-bolted windows would have been Biagatti. Perhaps she had snuck down here when they were on the mission at Zara’s condo.
Two women emerged from the dark corners. The metal Lexan container that served as the interrogation site and holding cell sat in the far right corner. Otherwise, the basement was sparse. Some random yard tools, such as a hoe, hedge trimmer, and weed eater were hanging from a Peg-Board to the left. An extra washer and dryer were to the front, and the stairwell to the outside alley behind the garage was in between the washer/dryer combo and the holding cell. Its door was triple-bolted with locks and keypad access. There was a similar door beyond that one, with equally challenging security.
The Artemis assassins remained in the corner, apparently ceding control of the situation to their leader. He had three weapons aimed at him, making any kind of artful dodge a near impossibility. He knelt down and placed his Tribal on the concrete.
“Duty always calls, Jake Mahegan,” Biagatti said. “The best deception plans use a sliver of the truth, right? Similarly, the best way to deceive someone is to appeal to their basest element. What moves them? What motivates them? Why do they act? What do they do?”
She tossed a pair of handcuffs at him. “Put these on. Then get into the holding cell.”
He caught the cuffs. “Double lock, triple hinged? You’ve put some thought into this, Director.”
“Yes. And I’ll put a bullet in your head if you don’t put those on right now. Three pistols aimed directly at you right now. Make the call, Jake.”
Mahegan slipped the cuffs over his wrists and snapped them shut with a click. The woman in the far left corner stepped forward with a vest rigged with C4 and a timer. She slipped that over his shoulders and zipped it all the way up then looped a coil of rope around him, securing everything in place.
The assassin had short black hair, a hard edgy face, full of scars, as if she had been on the Ultimate Fighting Championship circuit or hit in the face with an IED. That’s actually a possibility, Mahegan thought. She had the lean, bony frame of a hardened soldier. The woman’s irises were black as night, either dilated from the Zara drug concoction or a genetic mutation. She smirked with thin lips, the only sign she was actually human, as she cinched the knot and then placed the pistol to his forehead with one hand and then a wiry hand in the small of his back, nudging him toward the holding cell. He stepped toward the open door, contemplating his moves, but a needle slid into his neck.
He felt the liquid seep into his body. His mind swooned. His final stumbling steps were into the holding cell. He was aware enough to realize she had shoved him through the doorway. As the woman was closing the door, he heard Biagatti say, “Find and kill the others if your two partners haven’t already.”
Then Mahegan’s mind went blank.
CHAPTER 20
CASSIE SURGED FORWARD, PROPELLED BYTHE DHT-AND-FLAKKA SHOT.
She was like a high-powered motocross bike spitting dirt behind her. She emerged from the tunnel, bursting through the hanging gray tarp that Jermaine had led them through earlier. Pistol at the ready, she fired twice at the recognizable woman in the near left corner and then twice at the woman in the far right.
Scoring direct hits on both, she scurried to the nearest woman and fieldstripped her of all intelligence and weapons. A pistol, knife, radio, and two fragmentary grenades. The woman who had been two rooms down from her in the Valley Trauma Center had been an Olympic-quality alpine skier who had suffered a traumatic brain injury when her helmet had come off in a spectacular fall from Jackson Hole’s treacherous double-black diamond run. At least that’s what she had told Cassie, but after seeing Bergeron at Daingerfield Island, she wasn’t so sure anymore. Maybe they were all legends? At this point, it didn’t matter other than to figure out that, if Jamie Carter was behind this, why would they let her, Cassie, into the mix? Perhaps it was the “friends close, enemies closer” theory, or maybe it was what Cassie called “snuggle tactics.” ISIS and Taliban forces knew that the American military could easily defeat them using stand-off: jets, helicopters, artillery, mortars, or long-range rifles. They adapted, however, and began fighting in close where those systems weren’t effective or would risk killing American troops as well.
Maybe Jamie was holding Cassie close to minimize her ability to see the bigger picture. Pull her in and make her go native, get intoxicated by the power and want more.
For all her years of knowing Cassie, Jamie evidently didn’t understand her goddaughter very well.
Cassie moved to the woman on the far right, whom she had seen but never met. She made the same haul from her. The women were uniformly outfitted right down to the number of grenades. This one had a cell phone, though, whi
ch Cassie pocketed.
Scraping and clicking noises escaped from the tunnel mouth. Whoever was chasing her from that direction was closing in. She quickly cleared the subterranean rooms beyond where she had just killed the two assassins, and returned to take a solid shooter’s stance aimed at the mouth of the tunnel.
She saw the tarp flutter with a hand pushing at it, and quickly fired two shots at where the head connected to that hand might be. The movement stopped and Cassie bolted forward to the tunnel mouth, pressed her back to the side, retrieved a hand grenade, and flipped the pin. She heard a similar ping from inside the tunnel. The assassin had her own grenade.
Cassie lifted the tarp and hurled the grenade in like a baseball pitcher with a submarine fastball, getting it as deep as she could. The explosion was loud, but muffled by the earthen tunnel. For good measure, she lifted the tarp and fired two rounds into the lead woman and two more into the trail.
Four dead.
There were more coming her way.
Stepping around the corner was a slight figure.
Emma? My roommate? How the hell did she cave in to the pressure?
“Emma? What the hell?”
“Hi, Cassie.” Emma raised a pistol. “You’re proving quite difficult to kill.”
Emma fired. Cassie dove to the side and returned fire. Everything in Cassie’s mind was upside down. Emma, her friend, was now a member of the Resistance. Did the Resistance place Emma next to me? All this time, Emma was protesting my presence, and she was actually doing the spying?
Cassie charged her wounded roommate and tackled her wiry body. Emma retrieved a knife and tried to stab Cassie in the neck, but Cassie blocked that effort with her forearm. Emma’s wiry body squirmed beneath her. The professional bull rider was expert at holding on and Emma was proving challenging to pin down.
Cassie swiped at her forehead with the butt of her pistol, which glanced off Emma’s temple.
“Bitch,” Emma grunted.
Voices began floating out of the tunnel behind her. Emma was delaying her escape. Another straight downward blow with the pistol had more effect. Oddly, she didn’t want to kill Emma, who seemed intent on killing her. Emma’s eyes rolled backward and she went limp, the knife falling from her hand onto the dirt floor. Cassie didn’t discount Emma’s deception, though, and remained ready.
“The last ride is never the last ride, and the end is never the end,” Emma said. She spun on one knee, ready to rebound. A roundhouse kick to Emma’s face made the small woman do an aerial flip and she landed on her back, this time unconscious. The voices in the tunnel became louder and Cassie was moving.
She pressed the Band-Aid communications device, hoping she had reception.
“Jake, Cassie.”
No response.
“Jake, over.”
Static over the comms line matched the electric charge she felt in her veins. As she knelt next to the brick wall, the BLEPs reconnected, red dots—fourteen in all—appearing near the two locations she had been. However, there were five blue dots concentrated at a location in Southeast Washington, DC, across the Anacostia River.
Knowing she needed to get away from Emma and the others, she hustled through the dilapidated tenement, found a different staircase than the one through which she had entered, and popped out on Morris Road. With the onset of the evening a couple of hours ago, the day’s relative tranquility was replaced by cars cruising slowly, dealers hanging on the street corners, and kids on bikes, sentries, reporting intel to their network. Jermaine was nowhere to be found. She hoped he was safe.
The roving drug dealer and territorial patrols provided her some advantage by keeping the assassins on the move or in hiding. She dashed across the street to a wooded, empty lot. There was some elevation to it and she burrowed through the underbrush, climbing the surprisingly steep hill. The trees and foliage gave way to construction equipment and a partially cleared spot at the top. She moved to the far side of the backhoe and knelt.
Why isn’t Jake answering me?
All this time, they thought she was the one with the riskier mission, which maybe it was, but that didn’t mean that his task was without peril.
“Jake, Cassie, over,” she tried again.
“Go,” Jake said.
Her breath caught. Surprised at her own reaction, she took a second to compose herself and respond. Still amped. Still pumped. Still fired up. Her veins were burning hot. She’d killed and she was ready to kill some more.
“Status?” she said.
“POW,” he whispered.
“Team status?”
“Uncertain.”
“Location,” she replied without hesitation.
“Sierra Echo Sierra Hotel,” he replied. “Study window. Cease comms, out.”
Mahegan’s words were rushed. She didn’t respond. She retrieved the burner phone she’d found on one of the assassins and pulled up the map function, corresponded what she was seeing in her heads-up display to an approximate location on the map. Five assassins in one location would have to be a high-value target for them.
Jake had rattled off the phonetic letters SESH. Jake was a surfer and often called his outings sessions, or a “good sesh,” but she didn’t believe that he would be joking about that, given his predicament.
“Southeast,” she whispered. Everything in DC was NW, NE, SW, or SE. So that had to be the first half. He was with the CIA director, who operated typically from safe houses. Southeast safe house. While she didn’t know where that might be, she looked in her BLEPs and figured she had a pretty good idea.
She wanted to tell Jake that she knew where he was, but if his comms had been compromised, she would be giving away everything, including her ability to help Jake. Still pumped. Still surging. Still electric. She turned her head, scanning for threats, and focused on her path to the river. She moved swiftly, like a running back slicing through a hapless defense, catching the seams, the intervals, the tactical equivalent of hitting every green light on the way to the hospital with a pregnant wife.
Back at her original landing spot from earlier in the day, she was surprised to find the appropriated kayak was still lying on its side. She approached carefully, expecting a trap. Circling wide and then closer, she checked the park buildings, the bridges on I-295 and I-395. Nothing she could see. She darted to the kayak and slid the plastic boat into the water, snatching the paddle with her free hand. She rowed with silent abandon, feeling like a Native American in a hollowed-out canoe paddling to deliver a message that could save her tribe.
In a way, that’s exactly who she was. She alone held all of the firsthand information that could expose the coup and who was truly pulling all of the levers. With each stroke of the dual-bladed oar, her hands brushed the surface of the river. The smell was musty, a combination of dead fish and the sewage plant upstream. The water was cool to the touch. Powered by her surging adrenaline, Cassie made landfall near the marina from which she had originally acquired the kayak. No one seemed to be looking for it. She pulled it onto the bank and bolted across Water Street and then followed a bike path across Southeast Freeway. Traffic was heavy, but no one seemed to be concerned about a grungy white chick dodging cars in this part of town. She began following the map in her BLEP toward the row house on Third and K Southeast. That was all she had to go on.
She thought about where she was going. Either she was going to barge in on a meeting of the assassins, or they had descended on a high-value target and were guarding him or her. Jake? Biagatti? Both?
She slowed, only to make sure she was moving toward the target, and expected that the assassins would be using an exterior and interior defense array. While she couldn’t fathom who might be able to best Jake, Sean, Patch, Hobart, and Van Dreeves, she became concerned that they had somehow become separated. Five of the best operators in the military would be nearly unbeatable.
Unless they were outranked. Jake and his men were tough, seasoned operators, but they were also patriots who followed orders
. Who could have split them, if that’s what happened? Biagatti? Jamie?
Either one of them could have done it, but were they both in on the coup? She knew that Zara and Syd Wise were the masterminds behind the overthrow of the government. To what extent did Jamie know any of this? Was she simply a beneficiary of massive good fortune?
The wild card had always been Biagatti. General Savage had placed Jake there for a reason. Ostensibly, the reason was to protect the director of the CIA. But did Savage know more? And if he did, why hadn’t he said so?
She was two blocks away. Traditional DC row houses, with their blocky, rectangular façades, dotted the streets in every direction. These were newer homes, maybe five to ten years old, built with two-car garages and small front yards the size of two picnic tables. Cute black two-foot-high wrought iron fences outlined the yards, serving decorative purposes only.
If the safe house was the home at the center of the congregation of blue icons, then she was two blocks away. She anticipated guards on the rooftops, so she circled wide toward a soccer field and saw . . . a Little Bird helicopter.
Kneeling over two men on the ground was Hobart. She pressed her Band-Aid and said, “Hobart, Cassie. Status?”
“IED. Two wounded. Evac time now,” Hobart said.
“On location. Going in,” she said.
“Wait for me. They have Sean and Jake.”
As she had feared, the team had been split.
“Roger, meet you at the northeast corner of your location.”
“Roger, out.”
She moved away from the safe house and circled around the soccer field to the opposite, northeast side. The MH-6 lifted off with two bodies strapped to the bench seats. Owens and Van Dreeves, she presumed, based upon Hobart’s report.
Hobart moved silently toward her, a phantom appearing in a different location every five seconds. Suddenly he was next to her.
“You okay?” he asked. A rare show of concern from the robotic warrior.
“I’m good. Ready to go in. What happened?”
“Unimportant. We’ve got four bogies guarding the house. Two inside and two outside. One of them is on the roof and she’s got a sniper rifle. But if you got this far without getting shot, she’s probably not much good in close, given the angles and dead space.”
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