Ambush

by Barbara Nickless

  Dougie had been right. My brain, finally allowed to rest, had focused on the clue that had been in front of me all along. I was now sure that Kane hadn’t let himself be distracted by a pretty woman. He was too much of a professional. The answer we sought was with one of the people who watched him die that day. One of them was the key. To the Alpha. To Cohen’s location. To our way out of this maze. One of them would provide the link Osborne had not.

  I zoomed in on the first address.

  A few minutes later, the light in Sarge’s room went out, and he came outside. He nodded at me and tossed his bag in the back of his truck.

  “I’ll call as soon as I know anything,” he said, opening the driver’s door. “And you let me know when you two yokels nail down some details.”

  I stood. Our eyes met over the hood of the truck. Sarge looked like he was thinking the same thing I was—that if everything went to shit, this might be the last time we saw each other alive.

  I said, “For a man who tried to kill me, you’re not a complete asshole.”

  “For a woman who kicked my ass twice, you aren’t too shabby yourself.”

  I summoned up a smile.

  If all went well, by the time Dougie and I were standing on Vigilant’s doorstep ready to move against Osborne, Sarge would be on his way back to Denver with the video. As soon as Sarge confirmed, Dougie and I would walk into Vigilant and explain to James Osborne how things were going to go down.

  He’d give us Cohen. We’d give him the phone. Promises would be made on both sides. Dougie and Sarge and I would remain silent. Osborne would leave us alone. Malik would be allowed to grow up and grow old without ever looking over his shoulder.

  Like any good Mexican standoff, each side would be bound to its promises by the threat of mutual annihilation.

  It had worked in the Cold War.

  But it was bullshit, and all of us knew it. The only people who survived a Mexican standoff were the ones who fired first. Plus, there was no way I could let this asshole walk away free.

  We needed our finger on the trigger.

  My smile faded. “Stay frosty, Sarge.”

  “Eyes in the back of my head.” He grinned and reached over the hood. We clasped hands. “Take care of yourself, Parnell. Never thought I’d say this, but it hasn’t sucked being on the same side.”

  I nodded.

  He cleared his throat, got in, and started the truck. Clyde came running back. I placed a hand on my partner’s head, and we watched until the taillights of Sarge’s pickup disappeared in the distance.

  Then I returned to my laptop and got to work, searching for a trigger.

  Half an hour later, the sun had spread a red-gold fan across the picnic table. Clyde took a post-breakfast snooze at my feet. He opened one eye and thumped his tail when Dougie came out of the room carrying two cardboard cups of instant oatmeal and more protein bars.

  “You let me sleep,” Dougie said.

  “You needed it.”

  He handed me one of the cups and a spoon, then sat across from me, his hair falling in untidy waves around a face still creased from sleep.

  “I’ve been working.” My knee jittered up and down.

  Dougie’s eyes went from my bouncing leg to my face. “What did you find?”

  I pushed up from the table, unable to sit still. “I was looking for leverage to use against Osborne.”

  Dougie lifted the lid on his oatmeal. A cloud of steam rose into the air with the scent of maple. “Tell me.”

  I turned the computer around to show him the DMV photos of the people standing on the platform. “These five people were almost the last thing Kane saw before he died. He was handling a belligerent man who turned out to be his killer. But his last act was to turn his back to this man and zero in on one of these five people.”

  Dougie pulled the computer toward him, frowning. “Go on.”

  “I eliminated Martinez, Parker, and Wilson. There’s nothing special about them other than their presence on that platform.”

  “Okay.”

  “I also eliminated Kenneth Napierkowski.” Talking fast, I explained. “Neither he nor the fifth person, Laura Almasi, have any social-media presence. Rare these days, but not unheard of. Plus, Napierkowski lives in the Golden Triangle, which means he’s wealthy, even though I can’t find a job history for him. That’s potentially suspect. But he isn’t military. And as near as I can tell, he’s never left the country. He’s overweight and serves as president of an African Violet Society. He doesn’t fit the profile.”

  Dougie nodded and moved his hand in a “go on” gesture.

  I reached over and clicked on one of the photographs, enlarging it. “This is Laura Almasi.”

  “Tell me.”

  I moved around to his side of the table and scooted in next to him. “According to the Texas DMV, she lives in a wealthy enclave of Dallas called University Park. That’s only forty minutes from Cedar Hill.”

  “And—?”

  “Valor is headquartered in Cedar Hill.”

  He looked at me, eyebrows up, then used his forefinger to scroll through the information I’d pulled up on Almasi.

  “This shows a PO Box in Colorado,” he said. “Lindon.”

  “Right.” My knee started bouncing again. “Lindon is on the eastern plains, an hour’s drive from where we sit. It’s a post office and a hundred and fifty people scattered around the area. But take a look at the satellite imagery south and east of the town.”

  I clicked on the tab I’d brought up for Google Earth. The screen showed an aerial photo of the Colorado plains centered around an area so pixelated and blurry that it was impossible to make out what was there.

  Dougie gave a low whistle. “This kind of obstruction is extremely hard to get. Takes connections.”

  “Government ones?”

  “Probably not. In the US, Google doesn’t block even those sites that involve national security. A raft of public-access lawyers make sure of it. But a private entity can request masking. There’s an entire city on the East Coast that did just that. It’s rare, though. There must be something pretty damn interesting going on out there.”

  For the first time since we’d been back together, I heard the old excitement in his voice, like a line of quicksilver.

  My own excitement bubbled up, and I forced myself to take a deep breath. We had very little time to find Cohen. I needed to be sure.

  “Why else might this area be obscured?” I asked.

  “There are a few possibilities.” He zoomed in and out of the satellite photo. “Google occasionally blocks places for unusual reasons. Like protecting rare species from poachers.”

  “Last I looked, prairie dogs and cattle aren’t on the endangered species list. Even more interesting—just two years ago, this area wasn’t obscured. It was just a three-mile square stretch of grassland in the middle of nowhere. Then suddenly we get Almasi’s PO Box, a land title held by a holding company that I can’t dig into no matter what I try, and a flurry of construction permits. I even found a reference to the FAA, which suggests there’s a runway out there.”

  “Fascinating.” He looked up from the computer, his eyes bright in the morning sun. “You think Cohen is out there.”

  “It’s remote, out of sight, and way off the beaten path. If you want to hurt someone, maybe kill and bury—”

  I stopped.

  Dougie dropped his hand on mine. “The most likely explanation is that a private company wants to hide what they’re doing from their competitors, and they have the clout to make it happen.” He withdrew his hand, leaned back on the bench, and folded his arms. “They wouldn’t be in the assassination business.”

  “Unless they have something big to hide.” I laid out Kane’s photographs on the table. “Kane took these before he was killed. Somehow they learned he’d snapped them, which meant he might have connected the dots between Iraq and Valor. The Alpha had to eliminate him.”

  Dougie went through the pictures. “You�
�re assuming that what’s out there has something to do with Valor. We need a connection between Laura Almasi and Valor Industries.”

  “Let me show you.” I clicked on another tab. “Laura Almasi barely exists in the virtual world. But someone digitized Cedar Hill’s old newspaper. This came up when I ran a search on the family patriarch, Sheldon Osborne.”

  Dougie studied the scanned image while I swallowed down the oatmeal and mentally repeated a version of last night’s mantra. Food, sleep, fight.

  Dougie’s eyes narrowed as he read.

  Catherine and Sheldon Osborne of Cedar Hill, Texas, are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Laura Ann, to Arvin, son of Mr. and Mrs. Almasi of Dallas. Laura is a graduate of Rice University and is employed at the Osborne family business, Valor Industries. Arvin is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Materials Science Program and is an intern at Valor Industries. An August wedding is planned.

  I peered over Dougie’s shoulder at the photograph. Arvin appeared happy, his handsome face creased in a wide smile, his rakishly long hair combed back from his face.

  Laura looked quieter. Almost somber. She was young, but there was a no-nonsense air about her short, simple haircut, plain blouse, and un-made-up face. Her gaze was direct and almost challenging. But it also held a faint hint of something else I couldn’t put my finger on.

  As it had the first time I’d seen it, Laura’s expression made me shiver.

  I pulled up her DMV photo so that the pictures were side by side. It was clearly the same no-nonsense woman with the simple haircut and shirt. Only the look in her eyes had changed, flipping into something else.

  An approaching madness.

  “So there it is.” Dougie curled a fist under his chin.

  “The first time I saw Laura’s name,” I said, “I thought Almasi was Italian. But it means ‘diamond maker’ in Persian.” I pushed away the cup with its remnants of oatmeal. “The Almasis are Jewish Iranians. Arvin and his parents came to the US in 1979, a few months before the fall of the shah.”

  “I’m not surprised. A lot of Jews didn’t do well after the ayatollah took over. Some of them were executed as accused spies. If Arvin still has family there”—this time there was no missing the gritty enthusiasm in Dougie’s voice—“then Laura—and through her, Valor—are vulnerable to blackmail.”

  At Dougie’s confirmation of my thoughts, the excitement that had been building over the last thirty minutes shot a bolt of lightning from my brain to my gut. “She’s part of what happened in Habbaniyah. Her brother, James, was in Iraq when all this went down, so he must be involved as well. You said he green-lighted bringing in the EFPs.”

  Dougie nodded. “And gave the order for us to go after them. It would have been a major triumph for him, capturing Quds forces and weapons inside Iraq. Then he suddenly put things on hold. When the order came to stand down, we just figured the intelligence was no good. That maybe there weren’t any weapons.”

  “But Dalton knew otherwise because he’d seen the video.” My excitement grew. “I’ll bet Osborne talked to his sister. Boasted that he was about to bag some high-level Iranians. And she was forced to confess that she’d been selling arms to Iran.”

  “And those arms were now in Iraq.” Dougie’s expression flatlined into an icy, contained rage. “It was Osborne who sent us into that ambush. He couldn’t run the risk that we’d realize the intelligence was good. That there really were weapons. His sister’s weapons. If your theory is right, he was the one who betrayed us and meant for us to die.”

  “And he ordered the deaths of Haifa and Resenko. Anyone who knew about the video.”

  Dougie crossed his arms. “Osborne dropped a stone in the water. He had to catch all the ripples.”

  I touched a finger to the computer screen. “But I don’t think he was the real instigator. I think she was. She set up the arms sales. Then she told Osborne to cover it up. Osborne was taking his orders from her.”

  His voice was a growl. “She does look half mad, doesn’t she?”

  “And she has Cohen.” I pulled up the photo the Alpha had sent of Mike. “Look there, over his left shoulder.”

  Dougie took my phone and enlarged the image.

  I pointed. “You see the letters?”

  “L A G E.” Dougie enlarged the picture more. “Looks like part of a name. L A G E C O N.”

  “Remember those construction permits I mentioned? If we fill in the missing letters, this could be Phlage Construction, which is one of the largest corporations in Colorado. Their website lists military-grade construction as the biggest part of their business. I think Valor hired them to build whatever it is they’re building out there.”

  I brought my hands together like a prayer as Dougie’s gaze met mine.

  “James Osborne isn’t the Alpha,” I said. “His sister is. And somewhere beneath that dark cloud, she’s holding Cohen.”

  It was all I had. I’d better be right.

  CHAPTER 24

  Find somewhere to put the fear, Rosie. A place inside where you don’t have to look very often.

  —Doug Ayers. Private conversation.

  Wind buffeted the truck as we headed east. The sun came in hard through the windshield, slanting through the cab and flashing off our sunglasses.

  Dougie drove while I rode shotgun, Clyde between us on the bench seat.

  The engine in the rancher’s truck we’d rented from the couple at the motel whined at a top speed of sixty-five—twenty miles over the posted limit. The truck bed smelled of hay and manure, the interior of coffee and cigarettes. Rips in the seats oozed stuffing, something loose rattled inside the dash, and a network of cracks splayed across the lower left corner of the windshield, glinting a rainbow of fractured sunlight.

  The old Ford had been young when Elvis was. But it provided cover. A rancher and his wife, out for a drive.

  Now why would you want to borrow this old bucket? the rancher had asked us back at the Coach Motel.

  We’d spotted the Marine decal on the truck’s rear window, and now Dougie all but stood at attention. We need it, sir. It’ll get us in.

  The old rancher’s eyes narrowed as his gaze moved back and forth between Dougie and me, taking us in. After a moment, he gave a small nod. No doubt he’d seen faces like ours before. At Hué and Khe Sanh. In his own mirror. War faces. Is this a matter of life or death?

  It’s a question of both, sir.

  He looked over the gear we carried. Are you the good guys?

  Yes, sir. We are.

  If my truck will do the trick, please take it. Bring it back if you can. He fished the keys out of his pocket and handed them over.

  Appreciate it. Dougie jerked his chin toward the rancher’s Circle F Feed & Supply hat. That ball cap. Looks like it does a good job keeping the sun off.

  Consider it yours.

  As we climbed into the cab, I heard the old man whisper, Semper Fi, Mac.

  Fifteen minutes along, we exited the highway and moved to side roads. From there, we wound our way onto narrow paths carved out years earlier by the locals.

  The prairie stretched out in undulating rolls of green and brown. The occasional herd of cattle watched our passage as the truck rattled over metal cattle guards and bucked through ruts deep enough to swallow the truck right up to the side mirrors.

  “We’re ten minutes out,” Dougie said.

  We’d studied online maps before we left. Highway 36 approached the Valor complex on a straight path from Denver—it was probably the road Kane had taken when he snapped the pictures. Way too risky for us to follow all the way east.

  We would approach the complex from the north, staying on private property and hopefully eluding both the locals and anyone from Valor who might be keeping watch. The truck was the only disguise we had.

  Per an old online topographical map, a thirty-foot-high ridge ran east-west just inside the blurred area. It would provide both cover and a good place from which to surve
il the site, assuming it got us close enough to whatever was going on inside the pixels.

  The transmission complained as Dougie dropped gears and we edged down a dry wash that cut across the road.

  My phone buzzed. Sarge. I hit speakerphone.

  “I’m twenty miles along the highway to Bullhead,” Sarge said. “Zero traffic and no tail.”

  “We’re heading to where we think they’re holding Cohen.” I filled him in on what we’d learned about Laura Almasi and Valor.

  “The Alpha’s a woman? I should have figured.”

  “Because women are tough and determined.”

  “Yeah . . . that’s what I was thinking. I’ll call back as soon as I’ve located Rick’s box. Keep those fingers crossed. If it’s empty—”

  I locked the doubt away with the fear. “If there’s nothing, then you’d better get back here and pick up our carcasses in case things go wrong. We’re going in for Cohen no matter what.”

  As I disconnected I caught my reflection in the window. The woman who looked back at me wore her combat face—lips a thin line, eyes flat and cold.

  Dougie wore the same look.

  The only thing missing was war paint.

  “We’re inside the pixelated area,” Dougie said a few minutes later as we jounced over another cattle guard.

  I studied the grassland around us—360 degrees of empty beneath a flat sheet of washed blue. Just visible in the distance, a herd of pronghorn stood on dancer’s legs. Closer by, a jackrabbit darted into cover.

  “So far, so good,” I said.

  Five minutes later, we hit trouble.

  Dougie tapped the brakes as we rounded a curve and a roadblock came into view—an orange-and-white gate with a sign that read ROAD CLOSED. On the right was a guard shack. As we watched, a man appeared at the window, then strode outside. He wore a khaki uniform and carried a rifle.

  “No time to backtrack,” Dougie said. “We’re going through.”

  He gunned the engine. The truck responded with a groan, creeping up toward thirty miles an hour. Ramming a barricade on a stretch of road like this felt as though we were running in slo-mo.