by A. M. Murray
Ashton looked at Isa, his face distorted with a fusion of anger and disappointment. “You think you’ll take that from me out of misguided loyalty to your country. You’re disposable. I can live without you.”
He turned back to face Deacon. “Let me be clear. My actions will destabilize the global balance of power. Relations with the Chinese will implode when they learn they’re the victim of a massive Western scam. The era of world domination by the US and the UK will end, as—”
“Cut the crap, Ashton,” Deacon said. “You don’t give a dog’s dick about dwindling global resources and peak oil. You’re driven by frustrated ambition and basic greed. It’s that simple.” He narrowed his eyes and, without waiting for a response, went on, in Ashton’s face now. “Your rapid rise to prominence in security circles came to an abrupt halt before you reached the top. Passed over at the DIA. No future. They don’t need you any more than a hooker needs underwear. And an individual responsible for killing seven people doesn’t have any rights, by the way.”
Deacon’s words grabbed Ashton’s full attention and gave Slade the chance to edge closer to Isa.
“Your story is all about wanting,” Deacon said, trying to distract him even more. “And wanting combined with the rejection of integrity can be a dangerous motive. Look at what it’s done to you. You were a protector of our country. Now you’re a traitor and a murderer. And if you escape a death sentence and Hell is not your new address, prison will be, for a long time. Just how long depends on whether you cooperate with us and return the money you’ve scammed from the Chinese. You’ll never get away with this. We’re all over you like fleas on a sewer rat.”
“That’s not going to happen. And if you want this woman to live, you’ll let us walk out of here and escort us to my yacht.” Ashton pushed the muzzle of the gun hard against Isa’s head.
The door opened a crack, and Slade saw one of Ashton’s remaining heavyweights peer into the study from the passage to check on the commotion. Slade glimpsed the other three members of Deacon’s team moving in behind him. Two of them grabbed the man’s arms while the third used his jiu-jitsu training to strike the brachial plexus origin on both sides at the base of the neck. Ashton’s man fell down unconscious long enough for them to silence and incapacitate him with duct tape and vinyl cord.
Deacon’s men charged through the study doorway from the passage, guns raised, only to lower them after taking in the situation.
The distraction allowed Slade to lunge for Ashton’s gun, but Ashton, hyped up on a combination of irrational passion and fury, responded faster. He heaved his body into Slade, elbowing his chest and knocking the air from his lungs. The body punch hit deep, and an explosion of pain doubled Slade over. He lost his footing and fell to the ground, temporarily immobile.
Ashton lifted the gun again to point at Isa’s head, his index finger resting on the trigger. A flicker of alarm showed for an instant in her hazel-brown eyes, but her calmness suggested it was not the first time she’d had the barrel of a gun jammed on the side of her skull by an unbalanced antagonist.
“All of you. Drop your weapons in the fish tank over there.” Ashton turned his head toward the tank behind him and watched them follow his instruction. “Now, walk on either side of us. If you even look like you’ll try something, I’ll shoot her.”
The group, with Ashton head and shoulders above Isa and Deacon’s men, shuffled through the French doors onto the patio and down steps to the main path leading to the marina and Ashton’s yacht. Slade stood up and followed them, thrusting the pain in his arm and chest out of mind.
Fragmented clouds rolled in swift gray waves across the island, allowing the moon to cast an intermittent silvery blue light over the landscape. Slade saw flashes of light reflect from a steel surface at shoulder height, among the overgrown shrubs where they’d left Fontaine and Roche outside Ashton’s study.
His mind raced, and he used every vestige of self-control to quell his turbulent emotions. He raised his arm, signaling Fontaine and Roche to hold and ready themselves for a shot. In a move fueled more by inchoate hope than rational analysis, he yelled in Japanese at Isa to drop to the ground. At the same instant, he lowered his arm, instructing Fontaine and Roche to shoot.
They didn’t hesitate. Isa threw herself down at the moment a bullet shattered Ashton’s right shoulder and another severed two fingers of his right hand, causing him to drop his weapon and scream with pain.
In a knee-jerk reaction to regain his hostage and avoid capture, Ashton lunged, his arms flailing at Isa, but she was too fast for a man whose right shoulder and hand had been blown out of action.
She moved with fluid ease, bending as he swung. She blocked his arm, and threw him over her back in a lightning-fast karate yari-dama move, then crouched down to regain her normal breathing rhythm.
Ashton crashed into the hard-packed ground and blacked out. Deacon’s men cuffed his hands behind his back before he had time to recover.
Slade exhaled and took a deep breath when he saw Ashton injured, but not killed. He’d never become accustomed to killing. In his business, people invariably turned up dead, sometimes as a consequence of his actions. Difficulty in dealing with it was a constant challenge. Even knowing this man had been threatening Isa’s life, Slade had found it hard to contemplate ending his. He harbored little self-recrimination about killing the mercenary, Tomic, though, as that was a case of shoot or be shot. The man had even bragged about torturing and butchering scores of people who hadn’t cooperated with his bullying demands, and Slade did not doubt the veracity of his claims.
“Perfect reaction when I made the call.” Slade bolted over to Isa.
She stood up straight, soil spilling from her clothes. “Perfect shooting,” she said to Fontaine and Roche, who sprinted after Slade. “Luckily, I understand Japanese, or I’d be dead.” Her gaze focused on Slade. Eyes charged with emotion locked with his own.
“Now I’m aware of your front-line offensive skills,” Deacon said to Fontaine and Roche. “Stationing you two outside was the right decision, you’ll agree.”
“De fait, it was Fontaine who did the shooting. I was just the spotter and Japanese interpreter. My main contribution was holding the branches down to give him a clear sight,” Roche said.
“It was good teamwork, and damn good shooting, Fontaine.” Deacon paused to remove Ashton’s shirt. He ripped it into strips and used the pieces to bind the man’s mangled hand and shoulder.
“But our work isn’t finished. Roche and Fontaine, get the computer and every phone and document you can lay hands on. The rest of you round up Ashton’s remaining security detail and advise the crew of his yacht to leave. Slade, you and I will take Ashton and Kato to our departure point and wait for everyone there.”
Slade walked, cuffed to Ashton, who’d recovered consciousness and leaned heavily on him for support, with Isa following a few yards behind them.
A slight movement in the brush ten feet away from Slade caught his attention. Isa saw it too and charged ahead to intercept one of Ashton’s heavyweights, blundering out of the vegetation toward them with a telescopic baton in his hand.
She bent as he swung and attempted to extend the stick and knock out Slade. She blocked the man’s arm and launched him over her back with perfect execution of what appeared to be her favorite karate move.
The thug crashed into a tree behind her, and he too blacked out.
“Well that’s one less goon to worry about,” Slade said.
“I’m impressed.”
# # #
It was as late as it could be without transforming to early morning. Daylight crept into the sky and dampened the iridescent glow of the moon and stars. The island was stripped of all sounds, including the feeding frenzy of the now replete bats. The cruiser set off for Dubrovnik, shattering the silence as it left.
CHAPTER 53
(Saturday Afternoon—Washington DC)
The mood of the group seated around the conference table in the
FBI’s HQ building on Pennsylvania Avenue could not have been more upbeat.
Slade sat with Deacon, Fontaine, and Roche along one side with the Deputy Director of the FBI. Across from them sat Isabella Kato, the acting deputy director of the DIA, the President’s national security advisor from the White House, and the deputy director of the National Clandestine Service, the espionage arm of the CIA.
Deacon and Slade had provided a capsulized account of the scheme from the first killing in Tokyo through its labored unfolding to culmination in the Croatian operation. Now Roche took the floor to bring them up to speed on extraction of the money from Ashton’s Croatian account.
“I worked out the password during our trip back to Dubrovnik from Bubreg. In the end, it wasn’t difficult. I searched Ashton’s computer and found numerous files related to his island, castle, and superyacht, all tagged Sailable-Nile 1, Sailable-Nile 2, and so on; his superyacht’s name was Nile Adventurer.” Roche wrote Nile on a whiteboard at the head of the table.
“When we first approached Bubreg, we saw Ashton’s five-hundred-foot megayacht head toward the marina. The vessel is massive, with too deep a draft to sail the Nile, so it had to be an anagram of his name, Neil. In fact, the name he used in Croatia was Nile Thanos, an anagram for
Neil Ashton.”
Roche stopped again to write Neil beside Nile.
“Once I knew about Ashton’s obsessive romantic interest in Ms. Kato, I realized that Sailable is an anagram of Isabella.” He scribbled Sailable-Nile on the whiteboard and its anagram, IsabellaNeil, beside it.
“I entered IsabellaNeil as the password to Ashton’s Croatian account and bingo, the gates opened. We transferred the funds to the FBI holding account that Bill Deacon’s section set up for that purpose.”
The deputy director of the NCS put up his hand. “Ashton spent huge bucks to set up his luxury lifestyle. He was not a wealthy man in his own right. How did he pay for the work on his island and the yacht before he got control of the money?”
Roche cleaned the whiteboard. “The Palmers held a considerable amount of money in their account before the Clear Skies scam. Richard Palmer ran his company into the red and faced the inevitable embarrassment of bankruptcy and being kicked off BFI’s board. But he’d hidden a vast amount in an offshore account to sustain his lifestyle even before the Chinese payments started coming in.”
Roche paused to clear his throat and swallow a mouthful of water.
“From the documents we found in the castle, it appears that eighteen months ago, Ashton demanded a substantive up-front fee from Palmer to manage the operation, and that would have funded his Croatian island project. When Sakata killed Carol Palmer in Tokyo and Chloe stepped into her shoes, Ashton gained access to the Palmer couple’s offshore account. He killed Richard Palmer and transferred everything from their BVI safe haven to his own account in Croatia, with the help of Chloe posing as Palmer’s wife. She trusted Ashton—partners in crime and all that. But unfortunately for Chloe, he arranged her hit too and gained sole access to a great deal of money.”
The White House NSA leaned back in his chair and surveyed the group.
“The US ambassador to China is meeting right now with China’s Minister of the Guófángbù, the Ministry of National Defense, the commanding general of the Zhōngguó Rénmín Jiěfàngjūn Kōngjūn, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, and the manufacturing company. The President instructed her to apologize for the actions of the DIA’s rogue official. She’ll assure them that the US and UK governments did not sanction the sale of flawed technical blueprints for a plane that falls out of the sky after three hours. She will arrange for the money to be returned to their nominated account today. There’ll be no questions asked or judgment passed on the motives and unethical behavior of the Chinese in all of this.”
The acting deputy director of the DIA shook his head. It looked like he’d rather take a different course of action.
“I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” he said. “Signals intelligence has shown us that Chinese black-hatters have stolen upward of ninety terabytes of sensitive US military information, including technical details of our current joint AAC-BFI fighter, our nuclear submarines, and naval air-defense designs. The sheer volume of the data lifted is staggering. In my view, they deserved a takedown.”
“I’m sure our military cyber experts have not been idle either. Cyber espionage is one thing. Swindling a nation on the scale of Ashton’s scheme is at another level entirely,” Deacon said.
The White House NSA surveyed the group. “Plainly, the situation’s not ideal, but we have to maintain détente with the Chinese at all costs. It’s not just a question of preserving the current global balance of power. The President doesn’t want them calling in their US foreign debt, which is close to 1.3 trillion dollars. It could be a simple and immediate retaliation on their part and would certainly destroy our economy overnight.”
“Bringing down the finances of the rest of the free world as well,” Deacon said.
“Correct. But thanks to everyone’s swift work, we believe there won’t be any such fallout. But I do need to remind you—this is a top security matter. The file will be sealed for fifty years. If anyone leaks information, the source will be identified, prosecuted, and incarcerated.” The White House NSA stood up and prepared to leave. “The President also instructed me to say he does not want any internecine repercussions among the agencies over who stepped on whose turf, if that should ever become an issue.” He paused for effect. “There’s to be no further discussion on this case either within or between the agencies. Understood?”
“Understood,” Deacon said. “I speak for all of us at the FBI.”
The deputy director of the NCS stood to leave. “And I for the NCS and CIA.”
CHAPTER 54
(Saturday Afternoon—Washington DC)
Slade and Isa walked from the meeting room to the elevator and across the entrance hall, now dimly lit and deserted. He was deep in thought, and the stretch of silence between them persisted until they stepped outside. A torrent of rain splattering off windows in deafening cadence, and the flashing of moving headlights, as lengthening shadows faded into the blur of dusk, brought him back to reality.
He fixed her with a look.
“If you analyze our relationship, it plainly did not spring from a solid foundation. A tenuous liaison at best, if you think about it—merely based on a common foe and purpose, even though I had no idea what you were really doing.”
Isa sent him a puzzled glance. “You have a habit of choosing the most inappropriate time and place to wax philosophical and deliver a speech.” She glanced upward. “Now is definitely not the time. I’m soaked already.”
“Okay. We’ll go to my hotel for a drink.” Slade flagged down a cab.
They leaned back in the seat, and he felt her stroke his cheek and settle against him.
“I think you meant our hotel.” She kissed him lightly on his cheek and took his hand. “I need a place to stay.”
“The Agency didn’t fix you up with a room?”
“I told them I was staying with you.” Isa looked sheepish.
“Presumptuous.” There was an awkward silence as Slade weighed whether to let his feelings lead the way or take a more cautious approach and keep his emotions intact. He took a deep breath and chose the latter.
“From the moment we met at Palmer’s apartment in Tokyo, my instincts told me to trust you, but you were never honest nor upfront with me, even though we had the same goal.”
“They gagged me with a confidentiality agreement.” Isa released his hand and slid across the seat, away from Slade, toward the window. “I told you that in Monte Carlo. The CIA and White House suspected Ashton of subversive activity and were concerned enough to insert me into his scheme and find out exactly what he planned to do. If his operation proved to be legit, they didn’t want him or anyone else in the DIA to know he’d been the target of an investigation. That would have played havo
c with interagency relations. So I had strict orders from the director and the President’s office to operate solo and, above all, in a low-key manner.”
They locked gazes for a moment. “You tried to pass yourself off to me as a maid, for God’s sake,” Slade said. “And you were not entirely solo. You tagged along with Alex and me. Viewing everyone as a potential asset is typical CIA behavior.”
“Yes, I did tag along, but I recall helping you in Monaco. And no, I did not regard you and Alex as CIA assets. In a strict sense, I did work as a maid. And what I told you in Monte Carlo about my sister and how Ashton recruited me for his project was the truth, just not the whole truth. I was not in a position to explain my work for the CIA or that the Agency engineered Ashton’s interest in me.”
Isa slid even closer to the window.
“When I reached London, I knew even less than you did about Ashton’s scheme,” she said. “He called when I arrived there and invited me to join him for a vacation on his island. It was the perfect opportunity to leverage his attraction to me and finish what I’d been tasked to do—find out what he’d been up to, end it, and take whatever action proved necessary to avoid consequences. If you hadn’t shown up, I’d have succeeded.”
“Only if you’d spent time and energy in his bed.” The corners of his mouth tightened.
“Avoidance is one of my strengths, but I do what I have to do to complete a mission,” Isa said.
“So back in Tokyo and Monaco, you made no attempt to avoid me in bed. Was that you the woman or Isa the CIA agent?”
“Me, the woman. And don’t forget, you put the make on me.”
Isa replied with no perceptible hesitation. Until recently, Slade had trusted his ability to detect when someone lied to him, a skill honed by his years of investigative work. Signs were evident, like forced smiles, reluctance to make eye contact, and coughing. Isa had never shown any of these traits since their first meeting. But then, a professional agent is trained to modify their natural behavior. Take her words at face value even now, he told himself, although he knew only part of his brain was listening.