Live Fire

An Ian Bragg Thriller

Craig Martelle

Craig Martelle, Inc

This book is a work of fiction.

All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

Live Fire and Ian Bragg Thrillers (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright © 2021-2024 by Craig Martelle

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Craig Martelle.

Version 1.0

Cover by Stuart Bache

Editing by Mia with LKJ Books (lkjbooks.com)

Published by Craig Martelle, Inc

PO Box 10235, Fairbanks, AK 99710

United States of America

Contents

DEDICATION

1. CHAPTER ONE

2. CHAPTER TWO

3. CHAPTER THREE

4. CHAPTER FOUR

5. CHAPTER FIVE

6. CHAPTER SIX

7. CHAPTER SEVEN

8. CHAPTER EIGHT

9. CHAPTER NINE

10. CHAPTER TEN

11. CHAPTER ELEVEN

12. CHAPTER TWELVE

13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN

14. CHAPTER FOURTEEN

15. CHAPTER FIFTEEN

16. CHAPTER SIXTEEN

17. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

18. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

19. CHAPTER NINETEEN

20. CHAPTER TWENTY

21. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

22. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

23. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Author Notes - Craig Martelle

DEDICATION

To those who support any author by buying and reading their books, I salute you. I couldn’t keep telling these stories if it weren’t for you and for the support team surrounding me. No one works alone in this business.

The Ian Bragg Thrillers team includes

BETA / EDITOR BOOK

Cover by Stuart Bache

Editing by Mia with LKJ Books (lkjbooks.com)

Beta Readers and Proofreaders - with my deepest gratitude!

James Caplan

Kelly O’Donnell

John Ashmore

Chris Abernathy

Ian Bragg 1—The Operator

Ian Bragg 2—A Clean Kill

Ian Bragg 3—The Replacement

Ian Bragg 4—A Fatal Bragg

Ian Bragg 5—The Tower

Ian Bragg 6 – The Spider and the Scorpion

Ian Bragg 7 – Live Fire

Ian Bragg 8 – Contract on a Billionaire

Ian Bragg 9 – Shattered Illusions

Craig Martelle Social

Website & Newsletter: https://craigmartelle.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorCraigMartelle/

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Craig-Martelle/e/B01AQVF3ZY

CHAPTER ONE

“Ican't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” –Jimmy Dean

The streetlights did little to illuminate the area. Shadowy figures walked here and there. A lone soul leaned against a wall, smoking a cigarette. I watched from a rooftop where I shouldn’t have been, but the regional director had cleared the way by disabling the cameras and unlocking the door. He stood a few feet from me, watching the scene below.

He was the new director, going by the name of Bob Casey, a former operator moved into a management position after the last director was caught during an attempted hit. After getting him off on a technicality, we had whisked him away to a non-extradition country where he was enjoying a quiet retirement. The Peace Archive took care of its own. Loyalty went both ways.

Devin MacGregor was the man leaning against the wall. His target had yet to show. Yet another drug dealer. The war on drugs was being fought by people like me. Operators. Hitmen for hire by people with money who had to take the law into their own hands. Criminals and bad players were messing with the wrong people.

I’d take their money, and I gave them what they wanted—if the target vetted on the bad side of the red line. It was a tough moral position. I had become the determiner of life and death. I shared that responsibility with the regional directors because we were busy, and I couldn’t vet them all. I didn’t want to put that curse on Jenny’s shoulders, although she would have borne it. That’s what our marriage was all about. A partnership. She focused on getting the contracts. I handled the vetting and the operators.

“He’s good,” Bob whispered, as if we could be heard from below.

“So I’ve heard,” I replied noncommittally. I didn’t usually get to see others in action. My wife Jenny was efficient. She didn’t like the killing part and had only done it when her personal safety was at risk. She was brutally efficient. No sensationalism. No ego. Her actions weren’t made for TV. Get it done and get out. The worst nightmare was getting caught.

It made it that much more exciting.

A Cadillac Escalade appeared from the main road, slowly turning into the smaller side street. It turned off its headlights. The streetlights flickered and went out.

“This is like out of a comic book,” I muttered. I could feel my face screw up as if it had a mind of its own. I put on my monocular night vision, but the distance was extreme. It was almost harder to see through the green grain of old technology. I took it off and handed it to Bob. “You need better equipment.”

I squinted into the dark. The glow from the main road provided enough to make out shadows as they moved with purpose.

“What are they doing?” Bob asked. “They act like they’re military.”

“Very much so, clearing the block for whatever meeting their boss has. He’s in the Escalade but hasn’t gotten out yet. Do you know where Devin went?”

“I lost sight of him the second the lights went out. And I’m not trying to be funny.” Bob continued to whisper.

The Escalade’s parking lights came on. After the nearly complete darkness, those lights were enough to highlight the key players in the street below. The shadowy figures from before were gone. The only ones who remained were those from the vehicle. Three men carrying weapons, maybe submachine guns, maybe sawed-off shotguns. I couldn’t tell from this distance.

Three spread out past the front of the vehicle, each pointing their weapon along a different angle away from the vehicle. A door opened from the nearest building. Two laser-targeting systems pinpointed the individual.

“MP-5s.” Whether fully auto or not didn’t make any difference. They were effective weapons at short range. The new figure would die if the drug lord wanted him dead.

On cue, he stepped from the vehicle. He wasn’t what I expected. A thin, young man in jeans and a hoodie. He walked toward the newcomer with a pronounced swagger, hands held within the pouch of his sweatshirt. He walked boldly past his security team. They moved to the side to maintain clear lines of fire.

The newcomer held up a hand in greeting.

“Is that Devin?” I wondered.

“I don’t think so,” Bob said. “Too tall.”

A movement from beneath the Escalade, highlighted by the parking lights. A hand rolling a ball. Not a ball, a grenade. One of the guards turned. The fuse of a grenade made a noise, a hissing that would go unnoticed in combat but not in the silence of a vacant backstreet.

The head man turned in time to see what was coming. The guard was halfway to throwing his body between the grenade and his boss when it exploded. The blast leveled the five people in the street.

Before the smoke cleared, a figure could be seen running toward the main road. The driver exited and fired his fully automatic submachine gun at the assassin in one final act of defiance. A pop signaled the radiator blowing out, sending a stream of vapor and steam out from under the hood.

The running man, who I assumed was Devin, lurched and hit the deck, rolled back to his feet, and ran away with a pronounced limp. The driver changed magazines. When he brought his weapon to bear, his target was gone. He tucked the MP-5 under his loose jacket and ran in the opposite direction, not looking back at the vehicle or the bodies on the ground.

Atlanta didn’t have a shot detection system, but I expected the authorities would be showing up soon. An explosion like the one from below would draw attention. The gunfire would add to it.

No doubt. The good guys were coming, but it was way too late.

“I think Devin was hit.”

“What’s his egress plan?”

Bob shrugged. “Don’t know. But there’s a nurse who’s friendly to our team. I’ve had her on retainer. He’s on his way to see her if he’s injured. She has a setup where she can fix just about anything.”

“Good thinking, but you’ll need to let her go if she knows anything about us or our people.”

“What? She’s good to have on the payroll,” Bob argued.

I faced him. “I need to be crystal clear on this. We cannot have extraneous ties to the Peace Archive from random people.”

He waved dismissively. I felt the heat rising. It was dark so he didn’t see.

“She knows nothing about what we do. She thinks we might be gangbangers. I assured her we don’t run drugs. That’s her one disqualifying criteria, but to our clients’ credit, we have reduced drug crime here in Atlanta. Another one, as you just saw. The worst part is that someone new will rise into his place. Nature abhors a vacuum. The only positive is that the new person won’t be as smooth and tends to get offed by the competition. We keep them fighting each other and they veer away from the decent folk.”

I couldn’t argue with his logic. I’d done the same thing. The dealers were a different breed, as well as the suppliers. I was okay with them in a civil war that reduced their impact on middle America.

“Do you know who the drug lord was meeting down there?” I nodded toward the street.

“A distributor.” He leaned against the window. The street remained empty except for the bodies and the Escalade with the driver’s door still open.

“We should probably go,” I suggested. “We’ll debrief when Devin appears at the recovery point.”

“I think we did pretty well tonight, don’t you, Mister Bragg?” Bob fished for a compliment.

“Call me Ian. We’ll save the accolades and demerits for the debrief.” It was odd to watch a hit take place. It was rare to be around other operators, but the training session in Arizona revealed the good and bad, making the operators better. Our success rate went to a cool one hundred percent clean sanctions. Because of that, we picked up a multitude of new contracts. The western region was killing it.

We headed out the front door, which was on the opposite block from the action, and climbed into a nondescript rental car that had been picked up from an off-brand agency using fake credentials that were then dumped after a single use. There was no history, no record, no links to anything. Even the credit card used to pay it was a one-off and purchased in a way to hide who bought it. All links to the car would be a dead end if anyone was so astute as to check the vehicle leaving after the drug violence.

Which the police probably wouldn’t. We had no relationship to the parties involved. But “probably” wasn’t good enough. We couldn’t leave anything to chance.

The obscured trail? It cost about ten thousand dollars to disappear into the unknown during the simple act of renting a car that would get returned early to the place of the original rental.

“The Peace Archive takes the fewest risks possible to satisfy our clients,” I stated.

Bob simply nodded. He was driving carefully. No sense speeding away. A cruiser with lights flashing passed us going the opposite direction.

“This hit rubbed me the wrong way. We weren’t paid to take out the other four people. We’re not a brute force tool. A grenade is less than precise.” I hated seeing the collateral damage. Maybe they all deserved to die, but I wasn’t comfortable not knowing for sure. We only hit bad people. It’s the only way I could reconcile myself with the killing.

“They were all scum, even the bodyguards because they made it possible for that punk to do what he was doing.” There was an edge to Bob’s voice.

“What’s your personal stake in this?” I wondered.

“What do you mean? We had a contract. A cool two mil to take that guy out. That’s it, nothing more.”

“Just checking. Getting too emotionally invested makes you question good decisions. I personally don’t want to see us embrace killing groups of people like that. Our contracts are for individuals. Collateral damage doesn’t work for me, even if they are bad people who need their own comeuppance. We are the judges of the original contract. We’re not the judges of anyone else involved.”

I was lecturing myself as much as Bob. This was the hardest part of doing what we did. Being completely emotionless wasn’t good either. That reminded me of Jack Palance, who’d enjoyed the killing a little too much. Brutal, beautiful, and efficient. Psychotic, too. She was dead and buried because she tried to kill my wife.

“Let me think about it,” Bob replied.

It was the best I could ask for. I didn’t need a “yes” man. I needed someone who would think. He had to understand the reasons behind what I was demanding of him. And there was to be no misinterpretation. It wasn’t a question. “Thanks, Bob. We need you on board to keep marrying up contracts with operators. Deliver and then deliver some more without getting too deep within yourself. Not letting the operators get too deep. I look forward to hearing Devin’s take on why he selected the method he did, but I have to admit, he was smooth getting under the SUV to deliver the ordinance.”

Bob smiled. “I never guessed that’s what he would do, and I like to think of myself as a pro.”

CHAPTER TWO

“Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.” –

Devin strolled into the apartment without the hint of a limp. I looked at his leg for evidence of the gunshot wound.

He grinned, knowing that he’d pulled off his deception. “If they chase someone who’s been shot, they take their time thinking about a wounded animal backed into a corner when I’m hoofing it at high speed to get somewhere else as quickly as possible. After the engagement, it’s best not to be anywhere nearby.”

“A good rule to live by.” I bowed my head in admiration.

Jenny strolled forward. I could have been the worst husband on the planet as I failed to introduce her once again.

“I’m Jenny Bragg.” She held out her hand to the operator, and he took it.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am,” he said with a slight Southern drawl.

He offered his hand to me, and we shook.

“What’d you think?” he asked without waiting.

I took a sip of my sparkling water. “You were incredible getting from the wall to under the SUV. It was a high-risk maneuver, but it paid off. It put you in position for the group kill. Did you know about the driver?”

He nodded. “He was a calculated unknown. I had a pistol if he exited the vehicle too quickly.” He looked closely at me. “You’re not saying something.”

“What was your contract for?”

“That young drug lord.”

“But you took out five people.” I challenged him but kept my voice even. It was an accusation, but it didn’t have to sound like it.

He hung his head and blew out his breath before taking a fresh one, thinking before speaking. I liked that he didn’t get immediately defensive.

“I’ve been tracking this guy for a month. He never goes anywhere without his posse, if that’s what it’s called. He meets other bad guys on backstreets. When I got the hint of this meetup, I knew how it would shape up and who would be there. Those guys were all scumbags, and better, the hit now turns two potential allies into rivals. Neither will trust the other.”

I had a hard time refuting his logic.

“This is a hard one for me,” I said. “I’ll admit that I’ve done the same thing. We’ve killed soldiers to get at the general.” My thoughts turned toward the compound in Idaho. We did a lot of damage, even though I never had the opportunity to fire the fifty-caliber sniper rifle that I lugged through the hills and valleys. “Thank you. I have to trust that you knew the situation much better than I ever will.” I looked at Bob and nodded.

Devin tipped his head at me in appreciation of my revelation. I didn’t have time to second-guess the operators in the field. If he’d been following the mark for a month, he had all the information he needed to make an informed decision.

“How did you get a heads-up on the meeting?” Jenny asked. I also wanted to know since we were there to conduct training for the southeast region’s operators. If he was doing something others weren’t, they could learn.

He looked around conspiratorially. “An informant in the police department.”

I could feel my face fall. Like Jenny and my interactions with the vice president, dealing with officials carried a great deal of risk. They weren’t going to provide any cover for us. If we were caught, we’d be hung out to dry. Plausible deniability.

“He’s cool. He’s never seen me. We communicate through bogus email addresses. I only access mine through VPN while cloaked in anonymity. It was a fluke that I ran across him, but he was looking for an unofficial way to do what needed to be done. His words, not mine.”

“We exploit any assets we can while holding them at arm’s length,” Bob said.

“You two are going to make me a believer. What’s that old saying? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I chuckled lightly. “Let me give my general guidance, which you’ve already heard and already know, but I’m obligated to repeat it because that’s what executives do. Do not compromise the Peace Archive. Share none of it with anyone who is not an employee. Second, don’t compromise our people. The less they know about each other, the better off we’ll be. Third, fulfill contracts to the best of your abilities without violating the first or second rules. Easy day, and, Devin MacGregor, well done tonight. You’ve made me a believer. Bob, thanks for hooking me up with the chance to see an operator in action.”

“Me, too, Ian. It’s the first one I’ve seen where I wasn’t pulling the trigger, so to speak.”

We didn’t always use firearms. Like tonight’s hit where a grenade was the weapon of choice.

Bob raised one finger. “There’s another op going down tonight.”

I glanced at Jenny before looking at Bob. “Are we going?”

Bob shook his head. “We’re on the outside looking in on this one. Devin, go on home and relax. I appreciate the quality work.”

Devin knew he was being dismissed so we could talk about the other operator. He didn’t want or need to know about the operator or the op. He waved on his way out.

Once he was gone and the door closed, I said, “Tell me about tonight’s contract.”

Jay Weatherfall had two successful hits under his belt. This was his third contract. Each had been different, and that’s what he loved about it. It was unique. The ultimate mental chess match. He had a line on where his target was going to be.

Trevor Binswager was a slimy thing. He had defrauded one too many people. He tried to disappear after the last, but Mrs. Livenst was a person of means. She’d tagged him and had private investigators find him. Now, she wanted to have him eliminated. She had asked friends, who had negotiated the contract in an exclusive rich person’s gathering at a place called the Club in North Chicago.

Ian and Jenny owned the Club as a front for the Peace Archive. It was where most of the contracts were negotiated within an electromagnetically silenced lounge. The Peace Archive farmed out the contracts geographically to where the target was located. Sometimes, the targets moved around and the operators followed them. Once an operator was assigned a contract, it was theirs to execute.

Jay had won this contract with a bid of $900,000. He figured he needed to keep his bids under a million because of his low number of successful hits.

Operators bid on contracts hidden on the dark web within a multi-layer encrypted bulletin board area. Jay had studied the contact thoroughly, and that’s how he came up with the nickname of Slippery Swager for this guy.

He was quick to disappear as soon as he raised his head where he could be seen. Then he slipped beneath the waves and was gone, only to reappear a while later trying to scam someone new.

Jay had given Slippery Swager the idea that Jay was a lottery winner looking at how he could double his winnings. Binswager was right there with a perfect sales pitch, and it would only take half of his forty-million-dollar fortune that Swager would invest and turn into eighty million.

Not greedy at all, Jay thought, shaking his head at his own sarcasm.

The challenge of finding the right way to make a hit on someone as slippery as Swager sent Jay on wild goose chase after wild goose chase. Until he finally made the connection. The guy was never available for an in-person meetup until Jay told him he wouldn’t invest through his company if he couldn’t shake his hand.

Slippery Swager called the day prior with a meeting place and time.

That gave Jay no slack to do things the right way. He couldn’t run through the identification sausage grinder to hide his real name. He needed a car right now.

Jay went to a major grocery store and trolled the lot until he found one of the older Hyundais with turnkey locks and the full start hack on YouTube. He had it started in under a minute and was driving away at a casual pace. He avoided any of the major roadways heading west to the far side of town. That took two hours and set him up to arrive at the meeting site only an hour early.

Jay had done a map study looking for ingress and egress routes. He had no idea about Swager’s size or physique, so a hand-to-hand kill became a tertiary option. It could never be primary because it was difficult not to leave evidence at the scene of a scuffle, no matter how much the target was surprised or how quickly they were dispatched.

Jay didn’t know these things firsthand. He watched true crime shows on television. He knew that wasn’t the best way to learn his trade, but he had nothing else if he wanted to keep a low profile.

Operators who didn’t learn quickly weren’t around long enough to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

He wanted to be around a long time. Two years in, one contract a year, and he was already wealthy by most measures. He even paid taxes on his “consulting” money.

The meeting location was remote, which was outside what Jay would have used to hide in plain sight. He would have selected a busy place like a mall parking lot. But Swager wanted no cameras whatsoever. Jay didn’t mind the lack of video evidence.

Slippery Swager probably had his own approach, but he hadn’t been violent, only persuasive, and then disappeared after he bilked the victim out of whatever he could.

The parking area for the mostly abandoned factory was massive. There were a few cars parked near outbuildings that indubitably rented for pennies on the dollar. Like a starter home, they were starter businesses. Jay silently clapped for them. Everyone had to start somewhere, like the big tech companies that started in garages.

Jay casually drove around the perimeter to confirm three routes out of the area. He wore a scarf over his face, just in case the small businesses had cameras. Two of the egress routes were on foot and one was down a side road. No matter what, Jay was going to cover a lot of distance on foot to get out of here. He’d ditch the car and walk or walk from the outset. It all depended on his assessment of whether he’d be followed or not.

He parked away from the middle of the empty lot, but not too close to any of the occupied buildings. He figured Slippery would appreciate the stand-off distance.

It worked in Jay’s favor, too. He took his scarf off so he wouldn’t alarm his target. He turned the music down while keeping the car running. He had ideas on how the hit was going to go down. Two of them involved the car. One involved the small-caliber pistol in the center console. Another involved the bottle of drain cleaner he’d pour down his throat after clubbing him unconscious. The final was a knife.

He couldn’t get intercepted with the tools of his trade. His egress was planned to give him places to ditch the items, one by one, in a variety of ways to avoid having them grouped together. He’d already wiped everything down.

Twice.

He waited and waited. Slippery Swager didn’t arrive on time, or even ten minutes late. Atlanta traffic was notoriously hit-or-miss, so Jay waited. He had nothing else to do but was losing faith.

A month of his life was spent in setting up his target and once gone, he’d have a hard time reeling him back in. Jay didn’t want to start from square one again, but what could he do? He took hold of the gear shift and started moving it out of park, but a new vehicle entered the lot and made a slow circuit, just like Jay had done. He pushed the gear shift back into park and took his foot off the brake.

He rolled down the window and hung his arm out in an effort to look nonchalant. He was anything but calm. His external appearance was nothing more than a façade.

The vehicle completed its loop and turned toward him.

“Now is the time for good men to rise in the defense of a great nation. May our enemies fall before us until only the righteous remain. We fight for the greater good,” he mumbled to himself in his own manufactured silent prayer. Thinking of himself as illuminati gave him the right attitude in the final moments before taking another person’s life.

It was never easy. To Jay, it was far more than a job. It was a calling.

Slippery Swager casually approached and stopped with two car lengths separating them. He was driving a new Chevy Suburban with darkened windows, even the windshield making it impossible for Jay to confirm if it was Slippery Swager himself.

Jay leaned out the window and waved. The driver’s door opened, and the man himself stepped out.

Blond-haired, blue-eyed, a million-dollar smile, and tall. He looked like a linebacker who moonlighted doing underwear commercials.

Jay saw how he could be effective as an elite scammer. He was one of the beautiful people with a special magnetism that made people instantly believe him.

More importantly for Jay, he was bigger and looked to be in better shape. Jay started opening his own door to make it look like he was getting out, while simultaneously dropping the car into gear. He accelerated slowly at first and then jammed the pedal to the floor. The tires spun for a second before taking hold.

Slippery Swager assumed everyone else was trying to get one over on him, but he counted on his natural gifts to react quickly to trouble. He dodged to his right but didn’t want to get sandwiched between the grills of the two vehicles, so he jumped left and tried to get back into the driver’s seat.

Jay jerked the wheel to the right, then back left to sideswipe Binswager, crushing him between the two fenders. Jay flinched away from his open window where Slippery Swager’s scream was cut off as he was nearly split in two. Jay let off the gas and slowed so he could check the rearview mirror since the one on the side was gone.

The growing pool of blood and gore confirmed what Jay had thought in the instant he’d been within inches of the scam artist.

Jay turned casually toward the exit and followed the map in his mind to leave the area by an inconspicuous route, taking side streets to steer clear of any main thoroughfares where the police were more likely to be found. Jay turned the music on, leaning his arm out the window while ignoring his slightly crumpled fender.

At a stop sign, he took his bandana and wrapped it around his head, trying to look like a good redneck driving a beater. Or at least his idea of what a redneck would look like. He realized he wasn’t sure. He hoped it wouldn’t give him away.

The daylight meant most people in the residential area were at work. No prying eyes. It didn’t take long to put a mile then two between him and the hit. He veered toward a mall and parked away from the main building. He wiped down the vehicle, then put the pistol in one pocket and the knife in the other. He had no identification on him, but he did have cash.

He stepped out and splashed the drain cleaner on the steering wheel, the gear shift, the door, and lastly, the seat. He tossed the bottle inside after a quick wipe with his bandana-turned-rag.

Jay strolled through the parking lot, making a beeline toward the mall. No one gave a second thought to anyone going to the mall, but for someone wandering aimlessly between the cars? Suspicion would reign supreme.

Jay walked into the mall, bought new clothes, changed in the bathroom, and walked out the other side. He waited for the bus in a short line of older ladies. They all stared.

“I hate driving, what can I say?”

“At least you didn’t lose your license because your family thought you were too old,” one of the women said. The others grumbled their agreement. Jay fought off the desire to laugh. It was a ridiculous situation for an operator who was about to collect the other half of his nine hundred thousand dollars.

“That sucks. I would never do that to my grandma.”

The woman bristled. “Do I look that old?” She shuffled toward him.

“Well, yeah,” he admitted.

The other old ladies laughed.

She laughed. “It’s because I am! You sit next to me, young fella, and tell me about your meemaw.”

CHAPTER THREE

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” –Benjamin Franklin

I paced in our suite at the Hilton. Miss Jenny watched me as she was wont to do.

“What’s eating at you?”

“Collateral damage,” I replied. “I don’t know where we draw the line.”

“How much do you control the operators’ actions once they win the contract?” She held her fingers up showing zero.

“Do we need to have more control?” I asked.

“Can we get any more control without compromising everyone in the organization?”

“That’s what I was wrestling with. I don’t see any way we can do it. We’re just going to have to trust the regional directors and their people.” Jenny led me where I’d already gone without admitting it. I was looking for a different way, but sometimes the obvious answer was the only answer.

“As you’ve said, hire good people and let them do their jobs.”

“That was somebody else, but I quoted them because they were smart.” I smiled to reinforce my position.

Jenny shook her head at me. She covered her face with her hand so I couldn’t see she was smiling.

“Moving on.” I twirled my finger in the air. “Have we done everything we need to conduct the training?”

“We’ve had Harper’s Dude Ranch locked on for the past year. Exclusive to our group, although they call every couple weeks to see if they can squeeze a couple people on the side of our event. I don’t know how many times I have to tell them no. For what we paid, you’d think they’d be less intrusive.”

“They’re trying to make money. I can’t fault them. We’ll stop out there tomorrow, nice and early, and make sure they understand our desire for privacy.”

“You know we’re going to have to do something with the horses every day. They are pretty excited about it.”

I grimaced. “Riding a horse,” I grumbled. “Take one for the team, right?” The only other time we’d conducted a training retreat was at a remote horse ranch. The environment was conducive to what we wanted to talk about, and the old man who ran the ranch was someone I would call a friend. If he needed anything, we’d drop it all and run to him, but there was only one problem with that. He had no way of contacting us. We hadn’t given him one scrap of information that he could use to find us.

We learned a great deal during that event, but most importantly, it made us a more professional organization.

Just like last time, we’d put out the call in the nether regions of our dark web bulletin board where we posted the potential contracts. It was difficult to get to, even with all the passwords to go deeper and deeper, but it was nothing any casual browser or professional surfer could find. It was the absolute best system money could buy.

It was necessary to protect our business which, by extension, protected our people.

“Do you think the made-up superhero names is going to work?” Jenny asked.

Last time, we used western movie stars. I needed something different to keep the people straight in my mind. The fewer real names I knew, the better off we were. I couldn’t spill what I didn’t know. I could fight off the rest of it, but one could never predict the machinations of an overzealous prosecutor. We had a great lawyer on retainer at the Club. She’d make the legal magic happen as long as we could get in touch with her. We would only have to stay silent until she arrived.

I could do that. Jenny could, too. Saying nothing was the best defense to interrogation. That’s what I’d heard. I’d never been on the wrong side of the table before.

“We’ll see what kind of ingenuity they have or how warped their minds are. I wonder if we have any on board who don’t know anything about the superhero fad? How about we do the regular names of superheroes and their superpower?”

Jenny shrugged. She stood and stretched.

“It’s that time,” I said, agreeing with her implication. “Hit the weight room then light sparring.”

“Practice elbow strikes following a block?” she asked.

“No!” I rubbed my jaw at the remembered pain from the last time. She tried to pull the upward elbow to the chin after blocking my right hook. It didn’t lay me out cold, but it had put me on my back. “Not without pads.”

She threw her t-shirt aside and worked her way into a sports bra. At one time, Jenny had been a curvy girl, even a little bit soft, which I was good with. She made me happy. But we’d been married for a few years and worked out almost every day because of the job. She was still curvy, thank goodness, but strong and hard.

And sexy as hell. I had a tendency to stare.

“How many thousands of times have you seen me naked?”

I threw my hands up. “I didn’t know there were limits. Every time is the first time to me. I don’t ever want your naked body to be anything short of spectacular for me. It’s like fireworks exploding in my mind.”

She rolled her lips between her teeth to keep from smiling and encouraging me to skip the workout for more physical pleasures. Then again, we controlled our schedule. Why not both?

“Workout and then we’ll see what the day brings,” I suggested. I was already in my shorts and workout shirt, which changed from week to week. I didn’t maintain much of a wardrobe. We were on the road a great deal and tended to buy what we needed whenever we arrived at a new place, even if it was only for a short while.

Part of not providing anyone a thread to pull on to lead them back to us. We paid cash as often as possible or used a special Gold Card that didn’t contain identifying data except that it was a bank in the Cayman Islands. It also had an unlimited credit line.

Those were benefits owing to maintaining a vast fortune in the Cayman bank. Nearly two hundred and fifty million dollars. Killing bad people was a lucrative business, and we could have made more if we were less scrupulous, but our rule and the rule of those who founded the company was only bad people. At the end of the day, the operators had to live with what they did.

They knew it only too well.

Our workouts lasted anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours. For this one, we concentrated on weight training and stretching. I was a fan of the advantages of muscle mass over being lean through high reps followed by cardio. We got our cardio and stretching during sparring. We were our own best challengers. On occasion, we’d train at a dojo where we would find others to match with. That kept us sharp.

Strong and sharp. Muscle helped us shoot straight, too. There were multiple schools of thought regarding muscle mass and shooting efficiency, but the one thing I found to be true was that practice superseded every physical advantage or limitation. Practice in all things. That was half our day, every day. But we worked every single day, even if only for an hour or two.

When we returned to the room after ninety minutes, I felt tight. Jenny would beat the crap out of me if we tried to spar. Then again, she looked how I felt.

“Skip it?” I suggested.

She nodded. “Shower time.” She struggled to get out of her sports bra. I was no help since I knew better than to get mixed up in that tangled mess. When it finally came free, Jenny sighed in relief. She stripped the rest of the way, tossing her sweaty panties at my face.

I deftly knocked them out of the way. She took off running, and I chased her. It was our way. It was the spice that made life worth living.

I pressed the accelerator on our rental, a Jeep Grand Cherokee. We got the same thing no matter where we were because that was our vehicle in Chicago. We had one at our home in the Hamptons, too. It’s what we liked.

“Don’t get a ticket,” Jenny warned, leaning sideways to glance at the speedometer. I slowed from ten miles an hour over the speed limit to five. That was the magic number where I’d never gotten a ticket. Especially with traffic regularly passing us. There were plenty of other targets for the state patrol. They might have needed my money, but they weren’t about to get it.

“We started out later than I wanted,” I complained.

“You got what you wanted, and it cost you an early start. In my mind, we’re right on time.” Jenny looked out the window, softly drumming the window ledge with her fingertips.

I turned up the music. Rush. I rarely listened to anything else. It was my thing. It provided the anchor in an otherwise chaotic life. Jenny put up with it. I think she was starting to like the three-member band out of Toronto. I was surprised at those who didn’t like Rush, but then again, everyone had different tastes.

They were wrong, clearly, but so be it.

We continued to Madison, Georgia, where there were numerous equestrian centers. A mile outside of town, Harper’s Dude Ranch waited. It was the most secluded and the only one we could get exclusively for our own group. It was closer to other properties than I was comfortable with, but it was the best we could do in this area. Trooping to North Carolina where there was better was too far away.

We rolled into the parking lot to find it half-full.

I was not amused and expressed my dissatisfaction with a series of invectives. Jenny wasn’t pleased. Not with me, not with Harper’s, but she knew that making a scene wouldn’t go over well to help us maintain a low profile.

“Shall we check out the facility, honey-bumpkins?” I tried to look happy.

“Sure, sweetums, my fluffy sugar plum.”

“The cute names have to go.” I gave Jenny the side eye.

Jenny agreed. “You can call me Arctic because there’s ice water in my veins.”

“I like that!” I hadn’t picked a name yet.

Jenny raised an eyebrow at me. She was far more patient than I was.

Why hadn’t I picked my name for the event? I had, but I didn’t like it. I simply hadn’t shared it because I was hoping I’d think of something better. I hadn’t. “Call me Gorgon.”

“Why?” Jenny dragged the word out.

“Because I can gorge on too many hot dogs in too short a time. Gorge on. Get it?”

“You’re not embarrassed by that?” Jenny pressed.

“A little. I thought about it with my funny brain and not my serious brain and then my serious brain got lost doing serious work and forgot about it.”

Jenny snorted. She opened her door and got out.

The sound of the woods and nickering of horses established a pleasant ambience. It gave me pause. Jenny’s presence always served to calm me down. A little banter, a smile, and we were back on track.

We walked toward the check-in, a door with a sign over it in a building that looked like it may have been a house at one point. A group of people walked out. They talked loudly and laughed often. We stepped aside to let them pass.

“Hey!” one of them called to us. “Are you guys next?”

“I reckon,” I replied. “Did y’all have a good time?” I didn’t attempt a Southern accent. I only said the words in my Midwestern way.

“The best! You’re going to have a blast.” They cheered and pumped their fists at us before continuing to their cars. We waited until they were gone and only our Jeep remained.

“Patience is a bitter cup from which only the strong may drink,” Jenny reminded me.

I gave her a one-armed hug. We walked with our arms around each other, a loving couple, which we were, but the show also helped to stave off uncomfortable questions.

Inside, we found a rustic lounge with leather everything.

The desk was all wood, heavily lacquered for preservation and protection. There was a pleasant young woman at the counter, dressed in a checkered shirt that shouted, ‘I’m a country girl!’

“Good morning, I’m with Security Ventures, nice to meet you. We have the facility starting this afternoon for the next four days, I believe?”

“Yes, exclusive to you. Everything is pre-paid. All we need are names for the rooms and you’ll be set.”

I glanced at Jenny. She tipped her chin toward the young lady behind the registration desk.

“You can call me Gorgon. And my wife is Arctic.” I couldn’t look at her when I told her the names.

“Fine. Makes no difference to me,” she said as she cued her machine to churn out two keycards for us. “Do you have the names of the others?”

“Not yet. They’ll give them to us when they check in. We’ll meet them over there—” I pointed at a couch. “—and pass them off to you when we account for everyone on the team.”

She looked at Jenny. “Arctic? That’s so cool.” She looked at me for too long and then back to Jenny. “Not sure about Gorgon, though.”

“Me neither, sister.”

We took our cards and headed for the room, which was in a different building. According to my watch, we were two hours ahead of the rest of the arrivals. We had something far different planned for this evolution. We wouldn’t be playing with Nerf guns.

We dumped our minimal stuff in the room. I secured my laptop in the safe. Jenny put hers in there, too. We’d taken to two computers because the workload was so great. We weren’t surprised. The Peace Archive generated a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue each year and that was growing. We had grown to forty-nine operators thanks to the inclusion of the groups that tried to kill Jenny and me.

They were professionals, but not as good as us. Thank goodness because that was a close one. We had to fight other operators. That wasn’t how we wanted to conduct business, but we were given no choice. And the guy that set it up? I took out a personal contract on him.

Jenny studied a map of the facility that was on the one small desk.

“Anything we need to watch out for?” I wondered.

“Like Jack Palance?” The operator who tried to kill Jenny. We’d had too many close calls, but we came out on top each time. We were young enough to thrive on the adrenaline rush but old enough to know it wasn’t sustainable. How to retire before we lost? That was the question we constantly struggled with.

“Let’s take a walk. Jack isn’t here. And if we find someone like her, we’ll shut them down quicker than you can say John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.”

I looked at my wife. “I’m not sure I’d ever say that.” I winked at her for no reason. A hitman in love. It was crazy, but even worse for her. She had been a schoolteacher. I whisked her into the dark world of my life, and she willingly joined me, even after finding out what I did.

It hadn’t been easy.

And that was the whole purpose of the training. Make it easier on those we were responsible for. Train to execute the contract successfully. Do what we were paid to do, after one final check on target viability. Were they as bad as the client made out?

We had those who solicited our services to take out a rival. We weren’t going to do that. Just because they were a rival didn’t mean that was a capital crime. We ended the lives of a lot of fraudsters, drug dealers, murderers, and abusers.

There were a lot of bad people out there. Too many to count. That’s why our company was growing.

The open areas of the dude ranch were dusty with wisps of hay and horse droppings that I thought of as road apples. The smell was musky, pungent even, but we grew used to it.

The stables. The training area. The white, wood fences. The power of the animals.

A young woman rode by on a lean stallion. She waved at us. Her vest read Harper’s Instructor. She’d probably been riding horses her whole life. She was small on the great animal but was completely in control. She brought the stallion around to face us.

“Are you waiting on a lesson?”

I shook my head.

Jenny answered. “We’re just scoping the grounds for our group which arrives in a little while. Thank you. We’ll see you later, I’m sure.”

She waved and turned the horse around using only her knees. The horse trotted away with her riding as if an extension of the animal.

“Don’t you want to be able to ride like that?” Jenny asked.

“No.” I didn’t need to explain further. Jenny was trying to goad me into a long tirade about the vast gulf of understanding and tolerance between me and horses.

She laughed softly. We held hands and walked on. Two other horses with riders passed. They both wore Harper’s colors.

We returned to the administration building, where the bubbly youngster greeted us. “The owners would like to meet you. Mr. and Mrs. Harper.” She disappeared into a room behind the desk.

“This all looks and sounds eerily familiar,” I whispered.

Jenny nudged me, but she wasn’t smiling. We had great memories from Arizona, but they were interlaced with events that were less than savory.

“Do you have a pad of paper?”

Jenny unfolded two sheets she’d been carrying in her pocket. She snagged a pen off the counter. “I like traveling light.”

I beamed at her. “I taught you that.”

“And I embraced it. Don’t lug more stuff than you have to. It’s less to clean up afterward.”

“Look at my honey, being an—” I looked around and changed my volume to a whisper. “—operator. A cutting-edge one.”

“I learned from the best.” Jenny turned toward the door when the regional director walked in.

Bob Casey strolled across the open area, and we shook hands. He said in a hushed tone, “Ian. And you must be Jenny.”

“I’m Gorgon for this and my wife, Arctic,” I said.

“You got the short end of that stick,” Bob told her. “What is my super secret name?”

I pointed at him. “You choose it yourself. That’s part of the game.”

He thought for a moment. “Fine. I’m Scott, a giant rock man. I crush everything in my path.”

“Subtle,” I replied and clapped him on the shoulder. “Get yourself checked in under the name of Scott.”

“Can I pick something else?” Bob, now Scott, countered.

“No. The image of the destroyer has been chosen,” I said as ominously as I could. “Go!” I stood straight and pointed at the registration desk with my outstretched arm.

He ambled away.

“Aren’t you having fun, Mister Droopy.”

I gave her my best side-eye. “The exciting stuff is coming,” I promised.

She dutifully wrote the three names on her paper—Arctic, Gorgon, and Scott. “Sometimes, my job keeping track is so taxing.” She waved the paper at me.

“You’re teaching the session on relationships. How to convince the love of your life that it’s okay to do what we do.”

“That wasn’t on the schedule,” she countered.

“It could be.” I nodded, wide-eyed.

She shook her head.

Scott waved as he passed.

I wondered where the owners were. The registration clerk had come out to check Scott in, but then returned to the backroom.

We sat and waited for the rest of the southeast region’s operators to arrive since we were alone.

Fifteen minutes later, the young woman returned with a couple that wasn’t much older than Jenny and me.

“We’re the Harpers,” the man said by way of introduction. “Jim and Billi. Nice to meet you.” They were pleasant but prying. “What’s your retreat for?”

“Teambuilding and training,” I replied.

“What kind of training?” Billi pressed.

“The kind where you need a clearance and have to sign an NDA to attend. And we don’t have any NDA forms with us.” It was my way of shutting down the questions.

Jim raised his hands in surrender. “I understand. Corporate secrets. I started off in that world, earned enough to buy this place, and left the corporate world behind. What do you know about horses?”

“Not a whole lot. They don’t like me, and I’m not a fan of them, either.”

“That’s a tall mountain to climb. Why’d you choose us, then?” Jim wanted answers to hard questions.

“Because we’ve had good experiences with dude ranches. The people running them generally keep to themselves. Our business is private, and we hope to keep it that way. You’ve been very accommodating. I ask that you continue to do so. We probably won’t be availing ourselves of what you have available besides the training room and the individual quarters. We paid extra for exclusivity and privacy.”

Jim raised his hands once again. “I’m sorry. It’s the Southerner in me. Need to know everything about all the neighbors so we can gossip over biscuits and gravy.” He smiled.

“It’s all good. I believe we have dinner tonight at seven?”

“Six. It’ll be set up in the dining hall. Traditional Southern fare—fried chicken, green bean casserole, mac and cheese, sweet potato mash, and blueberry muffins.”

I looked at Jenny. She made a confused face at me.

“That doesn’t sound Southern.”

“Call it Southern fusion,” Billi drawled. “I’m from here, but he’s not.”

“Sounds great, and thanks again for your hospitality. We’ll let you know if we need anything else.” We shook hands, and they returned to their office.

I hadn’t wanted to be as short as I was, but I wasn’t about to tell them what we did for a living. Not this bunch. He’d claimed being Southern while his wife said he wasn’t from there. Maybe he was Southern, just not from Georgia. In any case, they hadn’t earned my trust. To them, I was Gorgon of Security Ventures, nothing more. The contact phone number was from a burner that I was getting ready to toss.

When we walked away from Harper’s Dude Ranch after four days, we’d scrub everything that had ever existed that related to the retreat. Another thing that I liked about Harper’s? No security cameras. There wouldn’t be any pictures of our people.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” –Steve Jobs

The large Black man had an infectious grin. “They call me Jerry because of my uncanny strength.” He flexed a bicep for us.

“Jerry,” I said to clarify. “I’m Gorgon and this is Arctic. We’re your hosts for this event. Thank you for coming.”

He leaned close. “I’m sorry, but it was easy money. Show up and train for four days and get paid a hundred grand? Thank you. I’m all in.”

I nodded to him. Jenny directed him to the registration counter.

“We’re paying a hundred grand each to the attendees?” I asked.

“Yes. You approved it.”

“I did?” I didn’t remember that, but the preparation for the retreat was a whole different set of requests. We’d been busy lately. Jenny remembered everything. “You approved it, didn’t you?”

She smiled. “We are co-owners.”

I caressed her arm. “No, no! Don’t take that as an accusation or condemnation or any other whatever-ation. I only want to be sure my memory’s not going. I am older than my young, hot-babe wife.”

“By a year?” Jenny laughed, and I became lost in the joy of it. It was the little things that made all the difference.

Someone cleared their throat. I automatically reached out my hand. “Gorgon, damn glad to meet you. And my boss, Arctic.”

The nondescript middle-aged man remained stoic, either refusing to smile or not being amused.

“You can call me Matt. My superpower is that I’m a thousand times faster than any other martial artist,” he deadpanned.

“Monk Matt it is. Welcome to the training. Get your room and we’ll see you at the training room at five.” He moseyed off.

“He could have gone with Eeyore and no one would bat an eye,” Jenny whispered.

I steeled myself to avoid smirking as the next operator joined us. “Call me Erik.” He crossed his arms and leaned back. He looked like a weightlifting surfer with spiky blond hair and blue eyes. It was Devin MacGregor, the one who’d killed the drug lord, his three security guards, and the buyer. Devin stopped to look Jenny up and down. He licked his lips. I almost came over the small table at him, but Jenny had it handled.

She swung fast enough that he couldn’t get his hands out of his pockets in time to block it. A hard slap wiped the smile off his face and left a neon-flashing handprint on his cheek.

“I’m just having some fun,” he said with a hand covering his cheek and pride.

I closed on him. “That’s not fun. It’s not low profile. And it’s not how we do business. You get yourself under control or a lot worse than a slap will be coming your way.”

He started to bristle at the implication but thought better of it, deflating quickly. He bowed his head to Jenny. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I hope you’ll be able to accept my apology.”

“You can call me Arctic.” She crossed her arms to mirror his earlier pose.

“Don’t do that again,” I said as a final warning. “To anyone.”

I wanted to beat him senseless, but Jenny wouldn’t like that. She’d handled it. She was eminently capable of protecting herself. I’d still keep my eye on that one. I wished I didn’t know his name because I was inclined to hard block him from getting any more contracts, and eventually, his access to the site would stop working. I’d have to wrestle with that, because he was an effective operator.

I stared at the wall while Jenny nudged me. “You were going to fight him, weren’t you?” she whispered in a sultry voice.

“I can neither confirm nor deny my previous intentions or desires that have been overtaken by events, OBE. I shall bask in the radiance of my beloved.”

She nudged again and leaned close for a kiss but stopped at the movement before us.

“Adorbs,” a woman in her twenties said. Next to her were two more women who looked just like her.

I stared in confusion before it dawned on me. They were sisters operating independently but still together. It was the twin bait-and-switch but with triplets. How could she be there when she was clearly in a mini mart using her credit card at the same time? Video proves it was her.

“I’m Gorgon and this is Arctic. We’re your hosts for this event.”

“You’re married, aren’t you, but newlyweds?” Triplet #2 asked.

“We are. Three years now, or is it four? She seduced me, and that was it. I was smitten.”

“Closer to four,” Jenny replied. “Thank you, you’re very kind, and he caught me when I was weak. What names will you use for this?”

The youngest-looking of the three took Melissa, with her superpower of the ability to learn any language. The second said she was Brandi, because she sparkled. In a way, she did, but all three of them did. They were classy but not flashy. The oldest went with Joni, saying that she could turn any body part into a cutting edge or she was cutting edge. I got lost in a meandering explanation of her non-superpower.

Jenny took them to the registration desk, chatting the whole time.

Bob reappeared.

“Mister Bob, you have my respect bringing those ladies on board. I can see how they could be wildly effective.”

“They are. All three operate under one name, by the way. They work together.”

“I agree with that, as long as they don’t write down passwords or anything.” I looked at Bob to confirm, and he nodded. “Make sure everyone knows to meet at five in the training room.”

“I’ve been passing it along,” Scott replied.

“How many women operators do you have?”

“Most of them,” Bob said matter-of-factly.

“I like the hell out of that,” Jenny said, having returned without me noticing.

“We’ve found that women can get into areas where men have problems. They’re not seen as a threat to powerful men,” I added.

Scott stepped aside as the next operator appeared. “Call me—” The dainty older woman paused for dramatic effect. “—Davida, because I stay in the shadows.” She shrugged. “No one notices an old woman.”

“You have my vote for most valuable employee.” I bowed my head to her.

Jenny wrote the name down and showed her to registration.

The next person to registration was a nerdy-looking college refugee. He held up two fingers in the peace sign. “This is a groovy place, man.” He smiled at us, showing he was missing a tooth. “Call me Heath. Because I’m good at math, and I also love pie, key lime, specifically. Well, chocolate cream, too. There are more.”

“I got you, Pi. Get your room and we’ll meet up in the training room at five.”

He gave us the hang loose sign. “Right on, dudes.”

“Dude,” I replied. He high-fived Jenny.

“I like him,” Jenny told me.

“Hard not to. I like people who are unapologetically cultural, even though he’s a few decades late.”

Jenny waved dismissively. “He fits right in.”

“And that’s what we’re all about.”

Two people waited.

“Next!” I called, even though they were only three feet away.

The average man stood there. Average height. Average weight and build. Average look with nondescript glasses. He looked like what I thought of as an effective operator. The older lady, too. People who were eminently forgettable were the best.

“Call me Cooper,” he said. “A dude who is totally a bro and makes friends easily.” His smile canted and looked almost cartoonish.

“You’re kidding, right?” I blurted before Jenny could elbow me back to reality.

“Yes, because I’m neither of those things.”

“Cooper it is,” I told him. “You can be anything you want, so be the bro, bro.” I hammered my chest.

He tried it, but it made him cough. He waved and left to check in.

The last two waited for us. Brenda, because she was only mostly dead, looked like a homemaker. She wore a wedding ring, although she wasn’t married. And finally Henrietta, who claimed the ability to control nuclear reactions. Another woman, Black and middle-aged. She wore a suit and looked like an executive.

Everyone had a different approach to the trade. Every operator was unique.

Twelve operators, including their regional director, sat at the U-shaped table. Jenny and I sat on the head table. Seven women. Seven men. Deadly.

“Who are the tech gurus in this group?” I asked. Half of them raised their hands. “Please sweep this room for any recording devices or microphones. If you find any, disable them.” I held a finger to my lips, and the rest remained silently while six operators meticulously checked the room.

“Clean,” Monk Matt announced. The others agreed. I had a hard time not hanging my head in shame.

No one had addressed the microphone on the head table. I disconnected it and handed it to Matt. “Give this to the nice lady at registration, please.”

His face fell. “Crap.”

Once he was gone, I spoke. “This wasn’t a test so much as an interview that’s conducted every single day of your lives as operators. Every conversation is an interview that’s recorded and will be replayed in court. Every message. Every email. Every phone call. Ambiguity is your friend, along with the ability to blend in while being in plain sight the whole time.”

Monk Matt returned and took his seat. He didn’t look like he wanted to talk since he was still embarrassed at taking the lead on the security sweep and failing.

“Starting with you, Matt. Your superhero name and your superpower, please.”

Heath. Davida. Jerry, Brenda, Cooper, Joni, Matt aka Monk Matt, Brandi, Melissa, Erik, and Henrietta.

“It’s best that no one knows your real names or ours. We’ve learned over the years that what matters is your drive to successfully fulfill your contracts. Success is defined as you eliminate the target with zero collateral damage and you escape without leaving a trace back to you or the Peace Archive. A name that you don’t need to repeat, although you won’t find it listed on the Better Business Bureau’s list of top companies to work for.”

“It is!” Scott exclaimed. “You work one day a year for a princely sum, ha!” He waved his hand. “Your work for the whole year culminates in that final event. Monk Matt resolved a contract yesterday, to our satisfaction.”

That wasn’t the lead-in I expected, but talking about hits with people who understood and would keep your secret was important. Success demanded to be articulated. “Tell us about it, but most importantly, the workup.”

“A fraudster, scammer who bilked one too many people. This guy was slippery. He’d only appear at the endgame, to close the deal and complete the scam, then he’d disappear. It took me two months to find him and another month to convince him that I won the lottery. I wanted to double or triple my fortune. He asked for twenty million. It took a while to arrange a meet. Money talks, or so it was. A remote lot. I didn’t have time to dead drop a vehicle so I stole one, the most commonly stolen car in America. Sorry about that. Then I ran him over when he popped out of his vehicle. I dropped the car in a packed parking lot, wiped it down, doused the inside with bleach, and took the bus home.”

The group slowly and softly clapped. He looked at the table in front of him while raising his hand to acknowledge the applause.

“The workup. How did you contact him?” I wondered.

“I built an M.O. on him, modus operandi, and exploited his one weakness. High-end money people who were looking for investment help. I posted where he was known to troll. I had to wade through hundreds of other wannabes, but when he popped up, it was clear that I had my man. There was a lot of weeding out. It took a month.” He maintained his neutral expression.

“That’s what I’m talking about. The hard work to make the hard work easy. You helped him to set himself up. What about backup plans if he hadn’t accidentally walked in front of your car?”

“Knife, bleach, pistol, club. I preferred none of those. I’m glad the car worked out. I didn’t want to try to beat him in hand-to-hand since he looked bigger and stronger than me, by a lot.”

He flexed his bicep while glancing furtively at Jerry. The large man laughed.

“There you go, people. A contract executed with diligence. A month of prep for an hour of high anxiety followed by ten seconds to make a final decision and pull it off. Is that about right?”

“Exactly right,” Monk Matt confirmed.

“Two nights ago, we had another contract fulfillment. Erik, we’ll just call you Pid-X. Walk us through it.”

Devin MacGregor stared at me for a moment and then nodded slightly. He stood because that’s what gregarious people did and walked us through the setup and payoff.

“How does one acquire a grenade?” Brandi asked. I couldn’t see her using one, but that’s what made it a perfect weapon for her. No one would expect a cheerleader to toss a grenade at them.

“Made it myself from one found in an Army surplus store. It took a bit for the fuse, but anything can be made from instructions on the internet and a local hardware store. Gunpowder is gunpowder, which I could have used, but it wasn’t as good as C4, which I acquired on the black market.”

The hackles on my neck rose. The Peace Archive might have been a criminal organization, but that was only one kind of crime. Here, we had one vehicle theft and one black market C4 purchase. Both of those could have gone sideways and brought our people into the light.

Then again, hacking into emails and putting trackers on vehicles and more… It made me question my lofty ideals and morals. It also knocked me down a few steps off my pedestal.

Jenny nudged me. When I looked up, everyone was staring at me.

I’d have to reconcile myself with the morally gray area in which we worked, but later. I judged myself on my intentions, but I was judging others on their actions.

“Sounds great,” I said. I stood to walk in the middle of the U-shaped setup. “We’re going to do some boring classroom stuff. We’re going to have a couple roundtables where we can talk amongst ourselves, and also, we’re going to conduct one, maybe two, live-fire exercises.”

“Are we going to the range, man? Far out!” Heath exclaimed.

I shook my head. “We’re going downtown and we’re going to conduct multiple hits, doing everything except pulling the trigger.”

Heath’s mouth fell open.

Bob, I mean Scott, was surprised. I probably should have told him, but my reasoning was that I didn’t want to chance anything getting out. Jenny and I had been in town for a week, scoping areas for the exercise. We didn’t want any distractions or foreknowledge from the people we were there to train.

Maybe I should have brought him on board, but he was there to be trained as much as anyone.

“Dinner’s at six.” I checked my watch. “Ten minutes. Take care of your ablutions or whatever else you need. Confine all conversations about our business or ourselves to this room or outside when no one is near. The privacy of our business is paramount. I cannot stress that enough. All of you have been vouched for along with you’ve proven yourselves trustworthy and effective as operators. We can help you be more effective while maintaining the lowest profile possible. If you learn nothing this week, then you’re already near the top of your game. May you stay that way. I think there is something for everyone, no matter your experience.”

Davida raised her hand. I nodded toward her. “How many,” she hushed her voice and spoke barely above a whisper, “kills,” she continued in a normal voice, “do you have?”

That was a hard question. I had made my first kill during the Iraq War. In this job? I’d lost count because my jobs tended to go sideways. Maybe it was me, but I comforted myself by thinking that I took the hardest assignments for a client who was less than forthcoming with information. It was never pretty working for the government. And no one here needed to know that we did that.

“Dozens. None of them pretty. None of them easy. All carried a great deal of risk. Let me leave you with that. These contracts are never without risk, and that’s why the pay is so good. Acceptance of the money is acceptance of the risk, both inherent and unexpected. We can try to plan for every contingency, but there’s a certain chaos that happens around the sanction itself. There are things that we can only react to. Experience helps. Knowledge and practice are better. That’s why we’re giving you a live-fire exercise. That’s enough for now. I’ll see you all at dinner.”

I locked eyes with Bob and gestured for him to stay back with me and Jenny.

“You’re getting the training, too,” I started. “Otherwise, we would have told you we were here and scoping your digs.”

“I wondered. What’s my role since I’m not taking any contracts? I have hungry operators who need the work. And, while we’re here, what will it take to get a few more contracts?”

“Your role is damage control. Keeping your people out of trouble and also soliciting new work. Sidesaddle with Miss…I mean, Arctic. She’ll learn you up goodly on the contract stuff.”

Jenny gave me the side-eye.

“I’ll do that.” He nodded to Miss Jenny before looking back at me. “Damage control? I’ve helped when my people have asked, but I haven’t had the displeasure of a failure to address.”

“I hope you never do.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Success is dependent on effort.” –Sophocles

I collapsed into bed after dinner and a single beer. The full day was enough to tire me out.

Jenny found me on the computer first thing in the morning. I tolerated the coffee and drank it for its therapeutical properties in this case. I’d buy a designer brew when we were downtown.

“You were no fun last night. I thought we might celebrate the nice room and the big bed…” She let the thought hang.

I had missed out when I never wanted to miss out on our private time. “Well now, I guess I’m going to have to make it up to you.”

“When?” Jenny asked and let her robe slip open, showing that she wore nothing underneath.

“I’m saying now and later. My terms are open for negotiation.” I moved in closely to find that there was no rebuttal to my proposal. We lost ourselves in each other for a while before showering and getting ready to go downtown.

Each of the operators had been tasked with bringing their weapon of choice to an empty, downtown apartment. We’d rented it for the week. It wasn’t in the best part of town, but that was part of the challenge—how to fit in when you don’t.

We took our own vehicle and parked in an underground garage a block away. We didn’t take the stairs but walked up one ramp to the main entrance. We kept our heads down going through the turnstile and onto the street.

It was a casual walk, and we went hand-in-hand. It was early in the workday but after the morning rush hour, so there were few cars and few people. Still, we were in an area that wasn’t for tourists or where casual visitors ended up.

We passed a seemingly homeless man. He straightened and slid one hand inside a ratty, long coat he wore despite the heat.

“Don’t even. We’re not lost. I’ll end up with your knife, and you’ll have a broken wrist. Choose wisely.” I angled away.

Jenny let go of my hand and presented a smaller target to him by turning forty-five degrees. She raised her hands, ready to fight. I did the same.

He thought better of trying to roll us. He raised his hands and scurried away.

“Makes me wonder why. Do we look easy?” I asked.

“No. Maybe that one is desperate.”

I called after him. He turned. I pulled a $20 from my pocket and waved it in the air. “This is for thinking better of it.” I walked toward him. “Maybe you can do me a solid and watch out for shady types, you know, people who look like us but aren’t upstanding citizens.”

He moved forward with a speed I didn’t think natural and snatched the bill from my hand. I stood my ground.

“I can do that,” he grunted. He backed away.

“There’s more cash if you let us know when you see some shady people. We’ll be right down there.” I pointed at the building where we’d rented the apartment.

He nodded once and shuffled away, scanning the area as he went.

I rejoined Jenny, and we continued to the apartment.

“I’m glad we didn’t have to fight him,” she whispered.

“Me, too. That wouldn’t have been a good way to blend in.”

Inside the apartment, we found the most basic of furniture. It wasn’t enough to house a dozen people, but we wouldn’t be there for long. The live-fire exercise targeted a foreman in a neighboring factory. We had paid the plant superintendent a thousand dollars to let us play. He didn’t tell anyone we were coming. He would evaluate his people’s response at the same time as our exercise.

We would go in early to check in with the superintendent before any of our operators tried to infiltrate. We’d send them four at a time to do whatever they were going to do. Recover at lunchtime and then finalize the hit in the afternoon.

It was going to be a good day.

Bob wasn’t first to show. It was Erik, the man that Jenny had slapped the previous day. He arrived a lot humbler than when he showed up previously.

“I wanted to apologize again,” he started. He no longer looked like the easygoing man who got his way. He seemed sincere.

“The thing about the best operators is that they are great actors,” I said. “Are you trying to put one over on us or are you sincere?”

He smiled. “I can put a good face on anything, but I know you’re in control of contracts. I love this job and feel like I screwed it up. Can I be a better man? Sure. There’s a lot of room for improvement. Most importantly, I need to be.” He looked me up and down. “You can take me, can’t you?”

I wasn’t up for high school games. “Let’s make sure it never comes to finding out.”

“You can,” he replied, confident in his assessment. “It won’t come to that. You have my word as an operator.”

I nodded and was saved from further conversation by the next arrivals. The triplets, or rather, the three sisters.

“This isn’t the best part of town,” the oldest said. “We had to park right out front of the building to avoid walking around.”

“That’s part of the exercise,” I replied. Jenny waved to them. They had an instant connection being close in age. Jenny had no intention of spending any time with the alpha male who really wasn’t.

The rest arrived in short order. They looked like they’d been run through a carwash. “Raining,” the old woman going by Davida said. No one had to elaborate further.

I looked out the window to find the first rays of sunlight peeking through. Cloudy to downpour to clear in the span of fifteen minutes.

I counted heads to find that we had everyone. Bob had snuck in with the bulk of the arrivals.

“Break yourselves into groups of four,” I instructed. I wanted to see how they handled the mundane task of group dynamics, although we didn’t need to work as a group. Could they coordinate with each other? Sometimes we had to use people to help achieve our goals. We had to lie. What we didn’t need to do was put innocent people at risk.

Erik looked like he wanted to join the three sisters. One look from me sent him the other way. Davida joined the three. A four-woman team.

Bob did me a favor and joined Erik, then steered them toward the two middle-aged, average-looking people.

The last four high-fived and proclaimed themselves as the last ones to be picked.

“Listen up.” The twelve immediately quieted. I produced a picture from my pocket. It looked like a passport image castoff. It wasn’t. It was the second picture taken as part of a pair for his employee identification card, thanks to coopting the superintendent.

“Here’s your mission. The foreman is a bad guy. Doesn’t matter what he’s done. You’ve just seen a picture of him. He’s at work right now in the factory next door. They produce, quote, hand-made, unquote, souvenirs. The labor force is paid enough to keep them from walking out after one day, but not enough to keep them on after six months. That gives you perspective into the general attitude. The foreman’s routine is identical for the morning and for the afternoon. Case the factory, find the foreman, and figure out a plan to make the hit. Solo. Although you’re in teams now, I don’t expect you to work as a team. You’ll make the simulated hit in the afternoon without pulling the trigger, so to speak. Understand that this is an exercise. You will not be killing anyone today. If for some reason you’ve been made, then get out of there. If you’re caught, ask to see Windy Storm, the superintendent. Questions?”

“How do we get into the factory?” Matt asked.

“You’ll figure that out. Although this is a condensed timeline, it is eminently doable.” I scanned the faces. Everyone was thinking, and they all had questions, but the answers were out the door and down the street. “Off you go. Reassemble here at twelve-thirty for a quick debrief. We’ll have lunch waiting and then you’re back on the job by one. You’ll be finished by three.”

I waved for them to go away, and they trundled off.

When they were gone, Jenny turned to me. “Should we follow them?”

“Probably, but let’s give them a head-start.”

We looked at each other wondering how long was sufficient. Neither of us had an answer. We were stuck twiddling our thumbs.

“Fifteen minutes?” Jenny finally suggested, making it sound like a question.

I could do nothing but agree. We were accomplishing nothing in the apartment. It was mostly empty, and we liked it that way. We didn’t have our computers or any electronics besides a couple burner phones with data plans and my untraceable satellite phone. We had the GPS turned off on them, even though we’d trash the phones when this event was over.

“Let me check in with Gladys,” I said as a way to kill more time. I dialed her number from memory and waited. It was an hour earlier in Chicago, but she’d be at work.

She answered on the first ring with a single word. “Ian.” My phone showed up as unlisted. I couldn’t be the only one who called Gladys from an unlisted number.

Maybe she was clairvoyant.

“Exercise is swell. It just started. Thanks for helping us make the arrangements.”

“I fear for the world if you were left to your own devices,” Gladys snarked.

“I love you, too, hot mama. We’ll wrap this today and then we’ll do the second one tomorrow. Two days of debriefs and general info and we’ll call it a wrap. I’m starting to rethink the superpowers thing. Maybe we should have gone with favorite fur trappers or something like that.”

“Who knows the names of fur trappers?” Gladys wondered.

“Exactly. Anything pressing that you need Jenny or me for? That’s a loaded question as there usually isn’t anything. Is Anastasia settling in?”

“Stacy is just fine. She’s working on something that you’ll need to address when you get back but not before then.”

“Ominous,” I told Gladys.

“Maybe, but you won’t know until you get back, so ignore it and get back to work. Make sure that pretty wife of yours doesn’t get hurt, because someone has to manage this chaos.”

“You’ve always been a straight shooter, Gladys. I’m happy to have you at the helm.”

Jenny chuckled because she could hear every word. Her hearing was beyond anything I could imagine. She loved it when Gladys gave me a hard time, but it was in good spirit. Gladys was the one who ran everything. Despite her title as secretary, she was paid like a CEO. She knew more of what went on than we did, but there was that incident at her home with her teenaged children that required our special talents. She would be forever loyal to us as we were to her.

The line went dead. Gladys wasn’t one for small talk. She would always hang up on me when there wasn’t anything else to say. I looked at the phone to find that we were disconnected.

“I hate it when she does that,” I grumbled.

“She does it every time you call her. She only tells you what you need to know and nothing more. She doesn’t have time to waste, unlike the other party to those conversations.” Jenny raised her eyebrows at me.

I wanted to think I was busy but calculated was probably a better term. I offered my arm. “Shall we? It’s been fifteen minutes.” I was curious how the target preparation would go.

“It’s been five minutes, but so be it. At least it’s not raining.”

We walked casually toward the factory. We found six operators milling about outside, looking conspicuous. Jenny and I ignored them and entered through the main door. We asked the first worker we came across for directions to the superintendent’s office, even though we already knew the way.

He pointed. “It’s up there, but he’s not in today.”

I had counted on him being there. It wasn’t a showstopper, so we’d continue the exercise. It would take longer if someone were detained, but we’d still be able to get them free. I hoped no one would be arrested.

A shadow drifted from a deep area of the factory where there shouldn’t have been movement. This side was more like a warehouse than a factory. I didn’t hear any noise that suggested tools of any sort. It was oddly quiet for a working production facility. I avoided staring into the recesses to see who was attempting an infiltration. I had to applaud them since they moved when the worker’s back was turned.

“Me and Stormy are old pals. I was hoping to catch him, but no loss. I’ll call his worthless ass at home.” I waved and nudged Jenny toward the door.

He returned to what he was doing, prepping stock for placement on a pallet. This part of the factory looked to focus on shipping.

While on our way out, Erik walked past us. He nodded and made a beeline for the worker, who had less patience getting interrupted a second time.

We could hear Erik’s pitch. He was allegedly looking for a job and had heard this was a great place to work.

Not bad, I thought. But it could fail spectacularly and then he’d lose access. It was a good point to debrief, and someone had to try it. With more time, the operators could have researched employment options, turnover, and other points to make the pitch more convincing.

We had observation, covert infiltration, an attempt at overt infiltration, and I expected someone was climbing the outside of the building, too.

I felt good that we’d have a quality debrief about methodologies, those things we did that we didn’t share with anyone. This retreat gave everyone an opportunity to talk about their work.

Outside, only two remained. They lurked like stalkers. I glanced their way. They weren’t convincing to anyone who might be drawn to how out of place they were. It was Mr. and Mrs. Middle Aged and Average. Perfect cover as no one would give them a second look.

Davida—the old, Black woman—walked into the factory. She waved at a worker as she passed. She looked like someone’s grandmother coming to drag him out of an illicit poker game, slapping him on the head the whole time she was frog-marching him out of the building.

The worker looked like he wanted to say something but thought better of it.

She continued through the building, looking beyond the warehousing. She grew skeptical of the facility’s stated use and thought that was a trick perpetrated as part of the four-day training retreat. It made sense to her that the operators would be tested at the highest level.

She made it to a door that looked like it led to the building’s central section, where she was stopped by a security guard.

“My grandson is in there, and he’s in trouble with his girlfriend, which means he’s in trouble with me because I like her,” Davida said. “Now, kindly let me through to retrieve him so I can knock some sense into him.”

“Although that sounds like fun, grandma, you’re not getting inside.”

“Are you going to find yourself on my ass-whooping list, too?”

He threw his head back and laughed. The pistol in a shoulder holster was hard to miss. “I don’t want to be on your list, but you can’t go through. What’s his name? I’ll find someone to bring him here.”

“Billy Jones,” she said without hesitation.

“Doesn’t sound familiar. We don’t have very many people who work here.”

“Why’s that, young man? Are you looking for a surrogate grandmother? I could use a few more strapping young men to take care of my lawn.” She smiled innocently at him.

“If you’ll excuse me. That’s a very kind offer, but no gran knows how to cook a brisket like mine. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”

“Shame,” Davida conceded. She waited while the man eased through the door and closed it behind him. The sound of a deadbolt ramming home followed his departure. She checked the door, and it was double-locked—both the knob and the deadbolt.

She waited patiently although she knew what his answer would be when he returned.

The young man eased through the door while two others behind him moved a cart piled with plastic packets of something white, like diced-up onions.

“We don’t have a Billy Jones here, grandma. You have the wrong place. Are you sure he wasn’t lying to you about where he works?”

“I think I’m going to bring you some of my homemade cornbread, because he’s cut off.”

“I won’t turn it down. I work every day, Monday through Friday,” the man offered helpfully.

Davida nodded and ambled away. She wasn’t sure what she’d seen, but the factory wasn’t what they said it was. She straightened to walk with a purpose, straight out the front door just like she’d walked in.

The activity in the locked area of the building suggested she wasn’t going to participate. She headed straight for the apartment.

CHAPTER SIX

“The cautious seldom err.” –Confucius

Scott climbed up the outside ladder with Erik right behind him. When he reached the top, he peeked over to find an armed man hiding up there. The man’s back was turned so Scott ducked and motioned for Erik to descend.

Erik—aka Devin MacGregor—looked confused, but Scott’s motions grew more frantic. He finally conceded and climbed down.

Scott followed, but his eyes were on the ledge above. They reached the bottom and hugged the side of the building, where Erik wanted an explanation.

“There’s a man up there armed with a short rifle hiding under small canopy. Climbing onto the roof wouldn’t have been a good move,” Scott explained.

“What would they need him for?” Erik looked toward the top of the building.

“I have a drone in my car.” Scott walked briskly down the street and around the corner to where he’d parked. They waited for a pair of young men to walk by before popping the trunk and digging out the tiny drone.

Bob had come prepared.

“What else do you have in there?” Erik looked back and forth across the trunk.

Scott scanned the street for anyone who might have been watching. Once comfortable that they were alone, he pointed out a variety of bags. “A tracker. Remote cameras. Binoculars. Telescope. A second drone. You know, the usual.”

“I’ll take the telescope.”

“No bigger than a cigar,” Bob said proudly.

“We have to have our toys, don’t we?” Erik took the telescope and tested it out. “Small field of view.”

“It’s not optimal, but it is small.” Scott closed the trunk.

The two walked casually to the corner and looked around it to make sure the street was clear, but more importantly, that their watcher on the roof wasn’t in sight.

“Up you go, little friend.” Using his phone to control the drone, the four propellors started spinning then accelerated with a high-pitched whine until the drone was airborne. It climbed quickly, straight up, then veered toward the center of the street. Scott slowed the climb once it was above the level of the factory’s roof. He eased it toward his target, slewing the camera to focus on the rooftop. The small tent was easy to see. It was next to an air handler that wasn’t running, which made it look like a maintenance tent.

But it wasn’t for maintenance.

Bob lowered the drone until he could see under the canopy. The man was standing, craning his neck to listen. He turned toward the drone and walked into the open.

“What’s he carrying?” Erik asked.

“MP5, maybe?” Scott guessed. “We’ve been made.”

The man stared at the drone. He raised his weapon, but the drone was already dropping like a stone, out of sight, and Scott brought it through the street and around the corner, setting it down next to them.

“That was exciting,” Erik deadpanned.

A voice from behind startled them. “That’s a mighty nice drone you have. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

The two young men from earlier. They’d circled around the block.

“That wouldn’t be your best choice,” Bob said with an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before.

As if they’d always worked together, Erik angled away to present two targets for two enemies. One-on-one was much better than dividing and conquering. The two had done this before by the easy way they adjusted, but that also gave them the experience of knowing it might not be worth it.

One stomped on the drone, then they both turned and ran.

“Pansies!” Erik called after them. “I could have taught him a lesson, but I’m glad we didn’t have to fight. We’re supposed to be low profile.”

Scott tapped his trouser pocket, highlighting a bulge that Erik hadn’t noticed.

“Are you packing?”

Scott nodded. “This isn’t a good part of town.” He pointed down. “Look what they did to my drone!”

“They were A-holes, but what’s done is done. It’ll give you an excuse to buy a new and better one.” Erik clapped the older man on the back. “Stuff that thing in the trunk and let’s get back on the job.”

Scott felt like he should have been the one to encourage a return to the task at hand. Maybe Devin wasn’t as carefree and loose with the rules as he had thought. It was refreshing. “Right.” He did exactly that, tossing the snapped wings and cracked body of his drone into the trunk. He locked it up and set the alarm. “What do we know?”

“Armed guard on the roof of a factory that makes souvenirs for tourists,” Erik said without hesitation. “That makes no sense.”

“None at all. We’re supposed to be playing this as if it’s real, but I’m thinking that guy has to be a plant. There’s no reason to justify the expense of an additional body to guard useless trinkets.”

“You sound like a corporate weenie,” Erik said with a soft chuckle. “You guys and your MBA language.” He smirked at Scott.

“It was a living until I found something better.” Scott returned to the corner to observe the factory. “Watch for those toads trying to creep up on us.”

Erik turned his back to Scott and watched the empty sidewalks. The streets carried a modicum of traffic, but none of it stuck around long enough to invest time in the two men on the corner.

There was no traffic into or out of the factory. “Shouldn’t there be trucks coming and going? Selling trinkets and junk to tourists should be a fairly robust business.” Bob sounded like he was talking to himself. He mumbled unintelligibly.

“We play to win, coach!” Erik called over his shoulder.

“Stop it.” Scott wasn’t amused. The morning was burning away, and they were no closer to the foreman than when they started. The old woman who called herself Davida walked out of the building. She made a beeline for the apartment building where the group had met earlier.

“What does she know that we don’t?” Scott asked no one in particular. A side door popped open, and an individual popped out. She hurried away. One of the sisters. Scott couldn’t tell them apart at this distance. “I haven’t seen any of the others.”

“Are you going to keep watching?” Erik wondered.

“For a little bit and then we’ll walk past the front on our way back to the apartment. See if there’s anything happening on that side. We have to be missing something.”

“Time, my good man,” Erik answered. “We need a lot more time to surveil this properly, determine routines. I haven’t laid eyes on any employees, let alone the foreman in question. I’m sure the others have information that will be of use so we can shortcut the process, but just us? We need more time.”

“I hear you. Let’s go. We can hurry things up.” Scott strode around the corner and down the street to get past the side of the factory and to the front. He slow-walked past, rubbernecking to see everything that could be seen through the front. The double-doors were closed, but they had windows. Still, there wasn’t much to see. After they passed, they went round a corner on an indirect route back to the apartment.

The groups were already filtering in. I hadn’t called in the order for lunch yet. Maybe I’d send runners instead with the infamous call of “You fly, I’ll buy.”

Davida had penetrated the deepest into the warehouse and even her information regarding the foreman was nonexistent, but it was the rest of the story that was the most compelling.

“Bags of stuff that looked like chopped onions?” Only one thing came to mind, and it wasn’t local-made Atlanta mementos. “Are they cooking meth?”

“They wouldn’t let me past the locked door leading to the interior, but I suspect they have a meth lab in there,” Davida said.

“Jenny and I toured the factory with the superintendent. There weren’t any armed guards or excluded areas. We went through the entire facility, but arguably, that was almost two weeks ago. Could they have replaced the workers and retooled the factory in that short of a time?” I looked to Jenny for confirmation. It was both confusing and alarming. “Putting our people against a meth lab when we think it’s just an exercise is all risk and no reward. This could get someone killed, and what if the DEA is watching? We could get way too many uncomfortable questions. We need to abort.”

“How?” Jenny asked. We didn’t have everyone’s number. There was a certain level of security in not knowing names or contact information, but it left us lacking in case of an emergency like this.

“Pray that they make it to lunchtime.” I wasn’t optimistic. My insides twisted into a knot.

Brandi came through the door, gasping and panting for a handful of seconds before blurting, “They’ve taken my sisters!”

I didn’t even have time to worry before the worst case was foisted on us.

“Slow down and tell us the whole story.” I took her by the shoulders to get her to focus.

“We snuck in through the side door and worked our way through the back while Davida went in the front. She confronted the man controlling access, but he never gave in to her. She left. We thought we could get in through a second door, but it was locked hard. The one you know as Melissa was grabbed. I don’t know where they came from. Then they took Joni. There were four of them. They didn’t see me. My sisters put up enough of a fight for me to hide. They opened the locked door and took them through, then locked it up behind them again.” Her eyes pleaded with me. “We have to do something!”

There was no choice. “Of course we’re going to do something. We’re going in there to get our people back. This is now a live-fire event. We remove those people who are in our way, and then we rescue your sisters.”

Scott and Erik arrived. We brought them up to speed, and they added information about the shooter on the roof.

“If we take him out, we gain an MP5.” That was my first thought, and then we gained an alternate access point. “How hard is it to get to the roof?”

“Easy breezy. Climb the outside ladder and you’re there,” Erik replied.

“Two punks killed my drone, though. We’ve lost our eyes in the sky.”

“You had a second drone, a much smaller one.”

“It’s short range and the image isn’t great, but if it’s the only one we have, then we’ll make it work.” Scott made a face, somewhere between anger and frustration. “We should have beat those two into next week.”

Erik wrapped an arm over his shoulder. “Those two were going to be trouble from the second we saw them, and there was nothing we could do except keep the drone out of their reach.”

“You’re right.” Scott looked at me. “What’s the plan, boss?”

“As soon as we have everyone, we’ll marshal our assets and decide what we can do, and then we’ll figure out how to do it.”

“I have a pistol,” Scott offered.

“Looks like you two will probably get a second chance to go up that ladder. Either of you shoot an MP5 before?”

They both nodded.

That was a relief. Not all operators were familiar with a wider variety of firearms. Some didn’t use a pistol or a rifle.

Brandi was shaking and glancing back and forth between the door and me. She was more than terrified. Her patience was gone. “What are they doing to my sisters?”

“Getting ourselves killed isn’t going to help them.” I tried to be soothing, but my head was spinning. How could we have let this happen? It was one hundred percent on me, and I felt the full weight of a dozen people’s lives on my shoulders, far more than awarding contracts where the operators exercised a reasonable amount of control.

I looked toward Jenny. She was as nonplussed as I was.

“What other information did you collect?” I asked. The group stared. They were still in shock. An operator’s life was deliberate, extremely so. The unknowns in this threw everyone for a loop, but we were going to do a job, an unpaid job, to rescue our own. “Let’s start with people. How many did you see in the outer area where we can readily access?”

“The stocker who was working on pallets,” Davida answered.

“Was he armed?” I needed clarification on every point. We had to build a complete profile and had no time to do it. Every minute was one more minute the drug gang could be doing awful things to the sisters.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” The old woman looked distraught in not knowing whether he was armed or not. The one at the door carried a substantial weapon, although Davida didn’t know the nomenclature.

Brandi didn’t know what the weapon was either. I guess it was another MP5. The thing with all of them carrying the same weapons eased the stress on providing ammunition. One nine-millimeter round served them all.

“How do you think they saw you?” I asked Brandi.

“They didn’t see me, just my sisters while they were trying to pick the lock.”

“And you got away without any problem. They didn’t sweep the area after they grabbed your sisters?”

She shook her head and looked ready to cry. Jenny moved quickly to comfort her. I wasn’t the guy when it came to empathy. My first thoughts were to avenge the wronged. I would have told her that I’d be sure to punch those guys in the face, maybe even kick them in the groin. In my mind, we were going to free our people. Then again, we needed to make sure they stayed where they were.

“Scott, you have your car, don’t you?” When he confirmed, I continued. “You and Erik get down there and watch the building to see if any vehicles leave. If they take the sisters out of the building, we’ll lose any advantage we may have.”

“Got it. You have my phone number. Call me when you have your plan.” The two hurried from the apartment.

I had his number because he was the regional director. One of the ten numbers I had memorized. I couldn’t write those down. And when he changed numbers, I’d memorize the new one using a mnemonic that worked for me.

It was like the old days before address books were stored on devices. Now, no one had to remember anything except where they put their phone.

“We’ll go as soon as we have everything we need to break into the place. We’ll consolidate our positions as we go. Do you know what that means?”

Everyone shook their head.

“When we take ground, we keep it and firm up our position before moving on. If you just move through an area, you lose the ground you took as the enemy fills in behind you. We’re not going to let them do that. We’re going to lock down our gains as we move.”

“You have a plan, then,” Brandi said.

“I’m developing one. There are some basics that will apply. We only need to wait on Cooper and Jerry. I hope they have additional information that we can use.”

Ten minutes later, the two joined the rest of the group.

I filled them in quickly on where we were and what was next. “Can you fill in any gaps in our knowledge?”

“Nothing. We stayed around the other side of the building where there are no doors, only windows. There’s an emergency exit with a ladder from the second floor, but it doesn’t look like anything I’d want to use in an emergency. Outside of that, we learned nothing. We couldn’t see anyone through the windows. They’re too high to see in. They’re more for light and air.”

“That tells me something,” I told them. “It says they won’t be thinking of that side of the building as an escape route. Maybe from the second story, but not from ground level or the basement. I think the basement is the key, and the only way down there is from the first floor inside.”

I chewed on my lip while I visualized the interior of the building with the exits leading up, down, and outside.

“There has to be another exit from the basement. That’s in the building code and has probably been in the code for decades,” Jenny suggested.

“Have we looked at all four sides of the building? Where were they taking the meth if they didn’t drive it out?” I wondered.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Iam not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep. I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” –Alexander the Great

“Is there a sewer system under these streets?” Jenny wondered.

“It’s deplorable. They’ve had issues for years and get fined with great frequency for their sewage miscues. I’m not sure it’s healthy to go down there or safe,” Davida replied.

“These guys only had two weeks. Maybe there’s a bootlegger tunnel to another building. Do we have anyone here who can dig into the city planning commission, sometime long ago, to see if there’s a diagram of this building to verify if a tunnel is known?”

“I can do that,” Heath said, “but I don’t have a computer with me.” The group shook their collective heads.

“Is there an internet café near here?” I asked.

“What century are you living in?” Heath asked. “You can’t rent a computer anymore. I have this. Give me a few.” He waved his phone. He sat on the couch and hunched into himself as he focused one hundred percent of his attention on the small screen.

“Check each of the neighboring buildings for basement exits or, more likely, an armed guard where it doesn’t seem like a guard should be. If it’s a way out, it’s a way in. We can’t let them take the sisters out of that building,” I declared. “If the sewer system is that bad and the rains frequent enough to block any storm drains, then we’ll check where a tunnel would connect with those last. That means the building on the same block is first to check. And the one on the narrow side street. Those two need to be checked right now.” I pointed at Jerry and Henrietta. “Pick a person to go with you and get into those basements. Find if there’s a door in an outer wall or something that shouldn’t be there. Call Arctic if you find anything.”

Jenny gave them her burner phone number. “Good luck,” she wished them.

“What can we do?” Brandi asked, seeing a modicum of hope.

“We’re doing it. Once we get more information from Scott and we find out if there’s a tunnel or not, we’re going to establish teams to penetrate the building from the top, side, and front. If there is a tunnel, we’re going to secure that before we do anything else. We have to block them in. Once we do that, please understand that they’ll become extremely dangerous. This won’t be a normal hit. It’ll be a war. I understand if someone wants to back out, but I hope you don’t. We’re going to need every single one of you if we want to free our people. We also might shut down a meth lab, which is a good thing. The authorities won’t look too closely at who did it if it rids the city of scumbags.”

“Not everyone working in the lab will be a drug dealer,” Jenny offered. “From what I’ve seen, they need people who work. They might even be slaves, people in the United States without a visa. They don’t deserve to die.”

I hadn’t considered that. “My plan looks at the concentric rings of security surrounding the operation. Isolate the battlefield and then incrementally destroy the enemy until the objective is achieved. It’s a way for a two-dimensional battle if one wants to win. Neither of us have air power or missiles or anything other than a drone and a man on the roof. This is what we have to work with. We’ll close the noose, one knot at a time, until we’ve secured the sisters, then we’re out. If we’re effective, they’ll retreat until they surround their money-maker, which should be the lab. They’ll trade their hostages to avoid getting their lab destroyed, no matter how many people they think they’ve lost to that point.”

“I see the wisdom in your planning,” Brenda said. “Is there any other way it could play out?”

“They put the women in a van and race out through the main doors, but I didn’t see a van or any vehicle inside the warehouse section of the factory. We’ll secure those doors as soon as we know if there’s a tunnel.”

Jerry took the building on the same block as the one most likely to be connected with the factory through an illicit tunnel.

He walked inside like he owned the place, waving to the one person sitting in the lobby. There was an elevator next to a display board listing the offices within. He checked for the basement, but there was nothing. He summoned the elevator, but it didn’t have a button for the basement, so he backed out of it without taking it anywhere.

The individual in the lobby asked, “Are you lost?”

“Looking for the stairs. I’m supposed to check the basement for a radon leak.” He waved his cellphone at the man as if it were a radon detector. Jerry stuffed it back in his pocket before the man could get a close look.

He pointed down the short hallway. “At the end.” He picked up a newspaper in the chair next to his and opened it.

“Much obliged,” Jerry said and walked casually to the door, which he found locked. The door had a lot of play and rattled while he checked the knob. He backed away half a step and hit it with a lunge, driving his shoulder low, near the lock. With an ugly screech, the lock tore through the frame and the door burst open. Jerry called down the hallway, “Sorry.”

The top stair was immediately through the door. There was no landing. It took Jerry a second to see clearly enough to step through. He closed the door behind him after twisting the frame enough to hold it shut. The knob still didn’t turn, but the basement was no longer off limits to anyone who cared to push on the door.

Jerry headed down the stairs into the dimly lit interior. The building was brick and concrete but was damp and smelled of rotting wood.

At the bottom, he discovered a series of chain-link fence enclosures for storage. Some had furniture, others had mildewed boxes. One had military gear that had seen better days.

A noise stopped Jerry in his tracks. He shifted into a gap between the cages, but he was hardly out of sight. The cages on either side of him were empty. It wasn’t even as effective as hiding behind a telephone pole.

An older woman shuffled by carrying a box while smoking a cigarette. She had been down there the whole time Jerry had been exploring. He hadn’t seen her and she didn’t see anything through her rheumy eyes. She headed up the stairs, wrestled briefly with the door, uttered a curse, and pulled it open. After the screech to pull it free of the frame, she left it open.

Jerry listened carefully. He couldn’t hear street noises. Not down there through the brick and concrete. When he was sure he was alone, he continued.

He stepped into the main walkway. A small puddle ahead suggested the basement would flood on occasion. Anyone who stored any of their personal belongings down here didn’t have much respect for their stuff. He tore his attention away from the ridiculous distraction of personal storage.

There were far more important things to think about.

He hurried to the south wall that faced the factory next door. He scoured the area from one end to the other and back again. He paced out the dimensions of the wall in case there was a fake wall, but the numbers seemed to match what he’d seen outside the building.

He climbed the stairs two at a time to get to the first floor where he could make a phone call.

Jerry tapped out the number.

Jenny answered on the first ring. “Nothing from my end. No joy,” he told her. She thanked him and hung up.

Henrietta entered the building and looked around as if lost. This was another manufacturing facility, but it was for pre-packaged foods. The floor was filled with pallets of items that would be repacked into new containers for vending machines.

It was a streamlined operation with many machines and few people.

Henrietta stopped the first person she met. “Where’s the basement?”

The woman shrugged. “I been here two days. I don’t even know where the bathroom is, not that they let us take breaks.” She shuffled away.

Henrietta decided a systematic search was in order. She strolled around the inside of the outer walls looking for the stairs. She found a few closets and offices that were obviously offices. No one challenged her. That made her wonder how many strangers walked through the building. She believed the lack of engagement portended something much darker.

The outer wall didn’t have the stairs attached. She headed inward and found the steps among a set of offices in the middle of the floor that acted as a support stanchion for the roof.

Henrietta descended slowly. The steps were made of wood, wide and open with handrails on either side. There were no turns. It was a simple but robust staircase that went straight to the basement.

Halfway down, she had her answer. On the east wall, the one closest to the factory next door, a man stood with a weapon, short, like a submachinegun. An arch behind him highlighted a brick-walled tunnel leading into the darkness.

“Sorry,” she called to him. “I got turned around looking for the lunchroom. Is it down here?”

“Go away.” He motioned for her to return up the stairs.

She took one last look at the area. The steps had no cover or concealment. The boxes and items scattered across the basement floor were sparse. It was mostly empty space.

“Sorry,” Henrietta repeated, hurrying up the stairs and out of the building.

She called Jenny. “I have bad news. The tunnel is here, and there’s an armed man guarding it. There’s no easy way to get to it. Well, that’s not true. It’s easy to get to, but you’d be in the open the whole time.”

“I understand. Come back to the apartment. We have work to do.”

“Seal the tunnel at the same time we secure the factory, that includes removing the guard on the roof. Have we heard from Scott and Erik?”

Jenny shook her head. She immediately started dialing her phone.

I was happy to see that she had also memorized important numbers.

“Status,” she requested the second he answered and put him on speaker.

“No change. The man is still on the roof, but there’s something at the top of the ladder. Concertina wire or something to prevent people from climbing over the top.”

“So not a barrier for a determined man,” Jenny replied.

“I guess not. I have leather gloves in the car. I can get them. Do you have the plan?”

“The plan,” I said, inserting myself into the conversation. “Yes. As we thought, you’ll need to secure the roof and acquire that MP5. Then descend as far as you can while still controlling the access to the rooftop. We’ll need Erik to move into place with the MP5, ready to storm the first level as soon as I give the word while stopping anyone who tries to escape to the roof.”

“Got it, boss man.”

“Head up the ladder in ten minutes,” I directed.

Jenny ended the call after Scott confirmed the order.

“I’ll do it,” Davida said.

“Scott will cover the roof. He has a pistol, which won’t be loud enough to alarm anyone on the ground.”

“I’ll take out the guard in the basement,” Davida said. “He is Black, right?”

Henrietta nodded.

“I can get to him. No matter how big they are, they respect their grandmothers down here. I’m not sure how you Northerners are.” She looked straight at me.

“About the same. No one messes with a determined old lady about to knock some sense into an errant grandchild,” I replied with my hands up. I wouldn’t have wanted to go up against Davida. She had a way about her. “Do you have a weapon?”

She opened her purse to show me a Derringer, a palm-sized .22 caliber pistol with two barrels. Both were loaded. She had two shots to bring the guard down. “There’s only the one guard, right? Is there a door that can be locked?”

“I didn’t see that far,” Henrietta admitted.

“Then I’ll need someone with me who can handle an MP5.” I looked around the group. “Who can do that?”

No one raised their hand.

Heath continued tapping away on his phone. “Hey, Pi! We know where the tunnel is. You can stop looking for building schematics.”

“Oh.” He stood and stuffed his phone into his pocket. “Where were we?”

“Can you handle an MP5?”

“Of course.”

Davida pointed at him, then changed to point at the oversized Jerry. “I’ll take you with me, but you stay out of sight until you hear the shot, then hurry down.” She turned to me. “Are we to enter the factory through the tunnel?”

“I’d rather you just block the tunnel and keep anyone from using it to escape. It all depends on who might be trying to go that way. Was there an elevator or some way to get product from the basement to a truck or van?”

“I wasn’t down there very long.” Henrietta held her hands up. “Sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll assume they’re using the tunnel to move their product and maybe even people. The sooner we can control that egress, the better. Our timing hinges on you, but I don’t know if you’ll be able to get a signal from down there, so it’s on you, Heath, to relay that we control the tunnel.”

“I understand. I’ll call the second the guard is down,” Heath promised.

Assuming the tunnel and the roof were secured, we could work on the main floor. “Who else here is armed?” Half the remaining group raised their hands. My mouth fell open.

“First day in Atlanta?” Matt said, heavy with sarcasm.

It made me laugh despite the gravity of the situation. “We have eight people remaining to take the building. Four will go through the side door to position themselves where the sisters were captured. The other four will enter through the main door, making sure no one can leave. You’ll neutralize any workers you see up front, but understand that they may not be willing members of the group running the lab. Arctic and I will be with the six. We’ll take down the guard at the door.”

Cooper raised his hand. “I’ll take the group in the front door.” He tapped his hip. “The guard won’t know what hit him.”

I had just said that I had the guard. “Do you know something I don’t?” I wondered.

“I mean we’ll back you up,” he clarified. “A single envelopment, in Marine parlance.”

“Semper Fi,” I said automatically. “Are you carrying?”

“Always.”

The weapon wasn’t on his hip. I stared.

“Back of waistband,” he explained.

“Cooper leads the parade through the front door. My six—” I pointed them out. “—come with me and we’ll get into place before you come through the front door. As soon as we get the calls that the roof and tunnel are secured, you move in. If we don’t get the calls, then we’ll readjust.”

“Readjust?” Cooper asked.

“You’ll take your team to secure that basement and close off the tunnel unless you see a tactical advantage moving through it,” I replied.

Cooper nodded in his unpresuming way. The closer I looked at him, the more competent and fit he appeared. The middle-aged, lower-middle-class lackey look had been cultivated and practiced to give him an edge over those who would underestimate him. I was happy to have another Marine on board. I’d talk to him later about it, assuming we came through the recovery effort intact.

We were going to fight a combat action against a determined enemy dug in within a building. If we could get through this without anyone getting hurt, that would be a miracle. I scanned the small group, the last eight of us, thinking about who wouldn’t be going home tonight.

That made my stomach tighten. We had to defeat this enemy! For the sisters and for the good of the country. No one was paying us to eliminate this lab, so we were doing it for free. Maybe we weren’t. The Peace Archive had paid these individuals a hundred grand each to attend. It was a low price, but there was a certain amount of loyalty that could be bought.

The looks on their faces suggested that this wasn’t about being paid. This was about doing what was right.

“You’re good people. We couldn’t ask for better. My team with me. Give us five minutes and then you move out and be ready to go in through the front door. I’d prefer if you didn’t kick it down or make any excess noise. We’ll try to keep this as quiet as possible to maintain our advantage for as long as possible. Wait for Arctic’s text that the roof and tunnels are secured.”

“We’ll do what we can to help you out. We could act as a distraction so you can close with the enemy.”

“That’s what I expect. I’ll move the second I can.” I took Cooper’s hand and shook it while squeezing hard in the Marine way.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” –Winston Churchill

We opened the side door that the sisters had unlocked. I waited with the door cracked, looking for movement. Jenny crouched as well, keeping her hand on my back to let me know she was there and would move the second I moved.

Behind her, Brandi held on. She was a bundle of nerves and worry. She’d be a liability if she couldn’t calm down. Cold and calculated was what this operation called for, but she was too emotionally involved. Jenny was keeping an eye on her.

Matt hunched behind Brandi, acting as a buttress and additional support for her. The entirety of this operation hinged on me securing the guard holding the door to the area where they took Joni and Melissa.

Once I was sure it was clear, I hurried through, ducking behind the first of many crates stacked in this area. I followed the route the sisters had taken earlier, stopping when I spotted the doorway to the inner area. A hundred feet away was another door, the one under guard. The one that Davida had attempted to breach and would attempt in the building next door.

I glanced at the man in front of the door a hundred feet away.

That was a long way to run when the guard held an MP5 at the ready. I knew I couldn’t make it.

Jenny held her phone close, waiting for it to vibrate with an update from Bob Casey or Cooper. She kept her other hand on Brandi to help keep her calm.

Everyone was on hold until we received word that the alternate exits were secure.

Scott and Erik stared at the small screen as the tiny drone projected a less-than-stellar image. It was burning through its battery too quickly. They could see the canopy on the roof, but not into the darkness beneath, even though it wasn’t that dark. The contrast was too much for the tiny camera to manage.

“We can confirm that he’s not roaming around the roof,” Erik said. “Shall we?”

Scott wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but he was hoping that the roof was completely clear, giving them an opportunity to get to the access door without firing any shots or being shot at.

“I guess so. We can’t hold up the rest of the plan.”

Erik nodded. “You’re the friendly artillery. You go first.”

“Thanks for that. You don’t happen to have a grenade on you?”

“I only arm for specific jobs. I was expecting a less hands-on day of training today. So, no. I don’t even have a pocketknife.” He held up his fists. “I have these, though, but we have to get closer than the edge of the roof.”

“You’ve brought fists to a gunfight…” Scott let the thought hang. Erik had brought fists to a training session. The gunfight was unplanned. “Stay behind me.” He showed his hands as he shrugged on his leather driving gloves.

“As you wish, boss,” Erik agreed. He put on a pair of purple nitrile gloves, something most operators carried regardless of whether they were doing a job or not. Sometimes, it was best not to leave any prints. The only problem with the nitrile gloves was that they didn’t breathe, so one’s hands grew sweaty and created other problems.

The two jogged across the street. Scott jumped up and grabbed the ladder on the side of the building. He headed up first with Erik close behind. They hurried upward to minimize their exposure. Three rungs from the top, the concertina wire started. Above the ledge, cans perched precariously, ready to fall with the slightest movement.

The wire was loose enough that Scott could reach through and grasp the next rung. He maneuvered his body to keep from catching his clothes on the barbs.

“How’s your hand-eye coordination?” Scott asked in a soft voice.

“Great. I used to play field hockey,” Erik whispered harshly.

“I don’t care. Don’t drop any of these cans.” Scott stretched upward and flicked a can off the wire. It dropped past his shoulder.

“What the hell!” Erik almost fell off the ladder in his effort to catch the falling can. “Don’t do that again.”

“Twice more, you big baby. Toughen up and get ready. Next one’s coming, past my left shoulder.” Scott stretched up and flicked off the second can.

“Got it,” Erik said without elaboration.

“You’d think they could afford something more than seventies-style boobytraps,” Scott mumbled. “Last one, straight overtop.”

Erik backed down a rung to give himself more room. Scott flicked the last can off and ducked toward the wire to let it pass over his head. His shirt caught on one barb and that pulled into another. Soon, he was snagged on three different spots. Scott froze to keep from jangling the wire.

Erik tucked the third can into his shirt. He’d deposit them as soon as humanly possible, somewhere, anywhere other than inside his shirt.

Scott worked to extricate himself while Erik waited impatiently. The wire moved far more than if it had been disturbed by the wind. “Be careful!” Erik whispered.

A crunch on the rooftop above signaled the guard’s approach.

Scott reached behind him and pulled his pistol at the same time the short barrel of an MP5 appeared over the ledge and shoved down into his face. He kept his hand behind him with his body between the pistol and the guard above. He dropped it, knowing that he would never be able to get a shot off before his head was blown apart.

“Hang on a second there, you big hunky man, you. You’ve succeeded in defending against the penetration exercise ordered by your bosses. I ask that you don’t shoot me. You weren’t supposed to have real bullets, but for some reason, I suspect you do. We should have taken a little more control to assure your people that no one would get by you, even if we did manage to get past your security. I didn’t think we would. And I haven’t, not here on the roof access. We’ll see how the tunnel to next door and the two doors on the main floor here do. But congratulations! You passed with flying colors.”

Scott beamed his best smile at the man above.

“Say what?”

“Exercise. Always testing the perimeter because there cannot be a gap or even a weakness. Nothing can interfere with the operation below.”

“No kidding. You almost had me before. We haven’t been here long enough to get the wire up, but they sent it up after you last appeared.”

He slung the MP5 over his shoulder and reached down to help Scott up. He dragged him bodily over the wire.

Scott howled in pain. The man body-slammed him on the roof.

A single report from the small pistol sounded sharp and quick. It didn’t even echo. The bullet entered through the man’s jaw and ripped upward through the soft cartilage and into his brain. It didn’t have enough energy to exit the skull so there was no great burst of gore to fountain over the rooftop. The guard dropped like a load of bricks.

“Clear that wire away so I can get up,” Erik called.

Scott was bleeding profusely from the cuts from his chest to his stomach, but he managed to stand, totter to the ledge, and unhook the wire from pins on the roof side of the wall. He flopped back to the roof and folded in on himself, cradling the damage to his body.

Erik cleared the wall and dropped to the roof. “Holy Hell! What happened to you?”

“Concertina wire bad,” Scott muttered.

“Let’s get you bandaged up.” Erik removed the guard’s shirt and gave it to Scott to put pressure on the worst of the cuts down his chest to his abdomen while he hurried across the roof to the canopy and nest the guard had made for himself. He didn’t find duct tape or a medical kit, but he found a length of rope. It would have to do.

When he returned, he found Scott tapping a short text with one hand. He was getting blood on the screen.

“Let me do it.” Erik frowned at the bloody mess on the phone. He wiped it with his shirt, leaving a smear, but he could read the word “Roof.” He added “Secure” and pressed send. “We won’t let them know that you have an ouchie.”

Scott looked up at him, his face contorted in pain. “An ouchie?”

“Let me wrap you up.” Erik took the shirt away. It was wet with blood but not sopping. He rolled it to make a tighter bandage and put it back on the laceration. He wrapped the rope around Scott’s body three times and tied a knot on top of the bundle. “Is it tight enough?”

“I can barely breathe, if that’s what you mean.”

“Better than bleeding out.” He handed the .380 to Scott and picked up the MP5. “You know what they say. Don’t bring a BB gun to a gunfight.”

“It did the job. Thanks, by the way. Nice shot.”

Erik looked at the bloody mess on the rooftop with very little of it belonging to the guard. “That’s going to be hard to clean up.”

“Did I see a generator?” Scott asked.

“There’s one under that canopy along with a coffeemaker.” Erik helped Scott up. “Make sure you’re not dripping, otherwise I won’t be able to get it all.”

Scott nodded and draped an arm over Erik’s shoulder, but the stretch made him cry out. He pulled his arm back and hunched forward, walking without assistance.

Erik hurried across the roof to the spare gas can feeding the generator. He used it to douse the blood splatters, washing most of it into a puddle. There wasn’t more than a cup or two of gasoline. He produced a lighter, touched the flame to the gas, and jumped back. It roared into a quick flame with a burst of black smoke but quickly settled down. Erik let it burn for a short while before stamping it out.

He wiped the top of the ladder down. He used more gasoline to clean the barbs that had cut into Scott. He double-checked the scene and returned to the canopy where Scott was leaning against the wall, looking paler than when they started.

He handed Scott’s leather gloves back to him. “Don’t lose these.” He kept his nitrile gloves on. He’d left no DNA or prints anywhere and was happy with that. “Are you going to make it?”

“I’m your backup. Don’t get yourself into a position where I have to do anything, and I’ll be fine,” Scott quipped. “But I’ll be there, just in case.”

Davida walked confidently through the repackaging operation to the central area where the stairs were located. Jerry walked behind her like a child who had gotten in trouble. He waited at the top of the stairs while the older lady acquired a limp for her descent. She made it to the bottom before getting challenged.

Jerry listened carefully.

Davida stared into the darkness until her eyes adjusted.

“We’ll have none of your guff. Does your mother know you’re here?” She put her hands on her hips and walked with a pronounced limp, weaving left and right as she moved mostly in the guard’s direction.

“I said stop!” he bellowed.

“And I asked if your mother knew you were here,” she shouted at him. “She would be appalled! A gun-carrying thug. Why did we work so hard to bring you kids up if the second after you left home, you turned into jailbait? Tell me why!”

He refused to be deterred. “Do I know you? How do you know my mother? And no, she doesn’t know where I am because I’m a grown-ass man and don’t have to answer to her no more.”

“Maybe you should,” Davida shot back.

“I don’t think so. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will. Don’t come any closer.”

“I have cornbread and honey,” Davida said in a soft voice, tapping her purse.

“Please, stop, grandma. I don’t want to shoot you.”

She huffed so loudly that Jerry could hear her from the top of the steps.

“Your poor mother. I need to pray for her soul.” Davida stopped and worked her way to the floor where she kneeled and held her hands together as she mumbled something that sounded like it could have been a prayer, shouting “Lord Jesus!” at various points.

“I’m not a disappointment. I send her money,” the man argued from his position by the tunnel.

“This calls for more,” Davida said in a voice too loud for her body. She threw herself face-first on the floor and began to wail.

“Would you stop?” the guard called. He closed on her. With his weapon in one hand, held away from the old woman on the floor, he pulled her to her feet with his other. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“You used to be such a good boy,” she said with tears in her eyes. She smoothly reached into her purse and pulled out the small pistol. She jammed it into his abdomen, pointed upward, and pulled the trigger. The explosion of the small caliber round was muffled by his body.

The guard froze with a look of surprise on his face.

Davida stuck the pistol against his throat, again pointed upward, and discharged the second round into his head.

Jerry was down the stairs at the sound of the first report. He sprinted forward as the big man toppled slowly, like a redwood falling in the forest. He crashed to the floor, never moving a muscle from the second Davida pumped the second round into him. He didn’t bleed and at first glance, it was hard to see that he’d been shot, but both rounds had been delivered for maximum effectiveness.

The MP5 lay next to the body. Jerry picked it up, checked it, and then looked for more magazines. He found one tucked into an inner pocket.

“Small mags, fifteen rounds each. I have thirty rounds, and I hope to God we don’t need more.”

Davida took a wipe from her purse and cleaned her hands. Her expression hadn’t changed from before she started down the stairs.

“Pretty cold,” Jerry said, watching the tunnel beyond. “But you make a convincing grandmother.”

“I’m not. No kids. Husband was a worthless drunk. He was my first.”

“Lover?” Jerry ventured, but he suspected she meant something different.

“Victim.” She changed the subject. “I used to be an actress. I think I’m still pretty good.”

“You had me convinced. I’m still wondering if you have any cornbread in your purse,” he said.

She laughed. “Not right now, young man. I need to send a text.” She removed her phone and typed in the number that Jenny had given her. “Tunnel is secure,” she sent.

She deleted the message and put her phone away. She dropped the .22LR casings into her purse and reloaded her small weapon.

“I think we should see what there is to see,” Jerry said.

“Did you get a case of big gonads now that you got that rifle?” She raised her eyebrows at him.

“I only want to see what we’re up against.” He moved slowly into the tunnel, walking toe to heel to avoid making noise. The concrete floor was noiseless under his basketball shoes. The tunnel turned fifty feet in. Jerry peeked around the corner to find a door at the end, less than fifty feet farther on.

“Door,” he whispered. “We can hold here. No one is getting by us.”

CHAPTER NINE

“Aman always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.” –J.P. Morgan

Jenny smiled and showed me the text. I couldn’t believe that we’d secured both exit points. That gave me some confidence. It also told me that if the sisters had not been moved out of the building already, we had them. We could close the noose tighter and tighter until they were freed.

She sent a short note to Cooper. “Exits secured. Come on in.”

I watched the entrance, looking for anything that would look like a distraction to hold the guard’s attention while I reduced the distance between him and me. Until then, I’d watch and gauge my chance of success.

Cooper strolled in with the other three lined out behind him. He meandered through the factory looking for anyone on shift so they could incrementally remove them from the equation. Sanction was beyond the last resort unless it was confirmed they were with the meth lab.

And then still, only the bad guys.

Cooper wasn’t feeling any undue pressure. He had been doing this for three years and had five successful contracts under his belt. It did get easier the more you did it, and this was just another operation for him.

His target carried an MP5. He was fifty yards away through the semi-cluttered warehouse section of the factory. There were no other people in the area. The previous group had met one worker but none now. That meant they were missing one that should have been accounted for. Cooper mentally added a checkbox. Find the warehouse guy.

Cooper continued to meander between the crates and boxes, working his way ever closer to the door leading to the inner area of the building. It was the key. With the other access points secured, that meant this door was the last one standing between the operators and their sister operators within.

The guard watched them closely, slowly raising his MP5 the closer they got. Cooper turned into the main walkway that led to the door and faced the business end of the MP5, which was at least twenty feet away. Too far to do anything and far too close for the guard to miss.

Cooper stopped. He raised one hand, very slowly, and waved. “What’s up?” he said.

“Go away, right now,” the man ordered.

“Sorry. I’m looking for the foreman. He’s supposed to meet me. We’re looking at a new trucking company to move your products. Costs, you know?”

“Nothing to do with me. Go wait by the front door.”

“Why can’t we wait here?” Cooper shrugged and held his arms out.

“Because I said so. Go away!” He surged forward, stabbing the business end of his MP5 in their direction. “I will shoot you, and you know what’s cool? They’ll never find your bodies.” He forced a throaty laugh.

“Have it your myopic way.” Cooper turned away. He reached inside of his light jacket to pull his narrow-frame Glock.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” a voice said from ten feet away. The guard had closed on them. His finger was on the trigger, and the rifle was aimed at Cooper’s head.

“Just pulling out a Franklin in the hopes that you might change your mind.” Cooper removed his wallet instead of the pistol. He held a one-hundred-dollar bill over his head. He waved it after a few seconds when no one took it from him.

He kept his hands up to turn around and face the guard.

“You’re kind of mean,” Cooper said. He exaggerated waving the bill in front of the man’s face.

The guard turned red, and his hand started shaking. Cooper backed away.

I had already covered half the distance to him and hurried, walking step after step, close together to keep from smacking my heels or slapping the soles. I had my hands up with a knife cupped in the palm of my right hand. I crouched as I reached the door and maneuvered to come in directly behind him, from a direction where his peripheral vision couldn’t pick up the movement.

“We don’t want any hassle. We’ll wait at the front entrance for somebody to come by who we can ask to get the foreman for us. You’re not going to do that for us, are you?”

“Get out,” the guard growled.

Cooper backed away, maintaining eye contact to hold the guard’s attention.

I would have stabbed him, but we couldn’t leave a mess like that out front in the warehouse. The carotid had a tendency to spray blood everywhere. I reached around his neck before he could react, leaving his windpipe in the crook of my arm while I pulled with my other hand in an attempt to break his neck, but the man was like a bull. He held fast and tried to flip me over his back. I leaned away while wrapping my legs around his waist to keep from going over his head.

I wanted to drag him to the floor, but he was having none of that. He looked for the nearest crate to slam me into.

The operators in front of him dove out of the way and crawled behind anything that would protect them in case he spasmed and unleashed the fury of his automatic MP5. He couldn’t bring it up enough to shoot me. He tried to aim at my foot. I didn’t need a bullet through my toe, so I pressed on his neck with my bicep to cut off the blood flow to his brain.

He started to stagger. I could feel his heart racing while he struggled for air. I couldn’t get as much pressure on his windpipe as I wanted. I was doing everything I could just to hang on. He slammed me sideways into a nearby crate. I grunted from the impact.

A fist appeared out of nowhere and popped him in the temple. He went slack in my arms, and we started going down.

Jenny caught us both, but the momentum took all three of us to the floor. Jenny crabbed away.

Cooper appeared and helped me up. He added a kick into the side of the guard’s head. I had to look down my nose at him. Where had he been during the fight?

I looked to Miss Jenny. “Thanks, babe.”

I picked up the MP5 and instantly felt like the king of the world where before, I’d felt naked. This was going to be a gunfight, which meant we needed weapons that were more substantial than our fists.

We didn’t have any zip ties, and I couldn’t kill an unconscious man. “How do we secure him?”

“Take all his clothes and tie him up in a corner,” Brandi suggested. “Naked men are less vocal about their captivity.”

I didn’t want to know how she knew that, but it made sense.

Rope, tape, and an extension cord. Brandi and Cooper tied him up, taped him up, and used the extension cord as a special intimidator by stripping sections of the wire and plugging it in. Anyone touching those sections would get a 110-volt wakeup call. It was generally useless, but for a man who was tied up while naked, getting juiced was an additional motivator not to thrash about.

They made short work of the task.

In his pockets, we found his wallet, a knife, keys, and one extra magazine for the MP5 filled with hollow points. I was surprised to see that he didn’t have a cell phone or a radio. That meant a personal level of security.

Someone would be checking on him or he would verbally check in through the door. We had no idea what that schedule was.

The door was locked but the keys fit. I didn’t unlock it. Not yet. We had some coordination to take care of first.

“Let the roof and basement know we’ve secured the inside door. We’ll send another text when we’re getting ready to enter.”

“What are we waiting for?” Jenny asked.

I pointed over the door and waved up and down the wall. “No cameras. I need to gather my wits before we go full Rambo.”

“The sooner the better,” Jenny said. “While we have them on their heels.”

I nodded. I couldn’t visualize what was on the other side of that door. I needed to have some idea what we were up against before I tossed the eight people in my charge to the wolves. I didn’t want to lose anyone, and that meant I needed better information.

I lined the operators up, out of sight on either side of the door, steeled myself, and slowly turned the handle.

It caught and I froze. Was it boobytrapped?

I pushed a little bit harder while leaning back, and it turned the rest of the way. The building was old and so was the door latch. It opened toward me. I looked through the crack. It appeared to be more warehouse with crates standing at the end of a material-handling system, conveyors and roller racks that were idle. Beyond that was an area that had been cordoned off.

That seemed like the main floor where local workers took an artisan’s object and duplicated it a thousand times at a factory in China, where the product only needed a couple splashes of paint or other minor modifications to claim that it was made by local artisans.

I opened the door more and more, looking for the people that had to be there. When it was open enough to stick my head through, I leaned through and then pulled back. All I needed was a quick look. I didn’t need to keep my head there as a target.

Another person, but this one to the left. The other was to the right. Neither appeared to be armed. Neither appeared to notice me, either.

“What’s the plan?” Jenny asked.

I closed the door and brought the others into a tight circle around me.

“Two people, distant, one right, one left. Neither carrying serious hardware. These might be regular workers or they could be carrying concealed.” Briefing the overview before getting into the plan. I also wanted to reiterate the mission objective. “Our goal is to find the sisters. Nothing else matters except a clear egress. We find them, extricate them, and leave. We don’t kill anyone we don’t have to kill.”

“I can go in, do my thing to disarm the unwitting,” Cooper offered.

He had been the diversion I needed to get to the guard without any shots being fired, which was nothing short of a miracle. Then again, maybe the guards weren’t the sharpest. Or maybe they were more humane and less likely to shoot first.

I could relate. I just wanted the sisters back. This whole thing had been a huge mistake, but judging by the assembly line, it had indeed been a factory that just happened to be taken over by a meth gang—even if only temporarily. Our timing couldn’t have been worse.

They were probably panicking, which put the guards on edge. With that in mind, I applauded their willingness to hesitate in shooting our people. It made me wonder what happened to the guards on the roof and in the basement. I couldn’t dwell on it. They had kidnapped our people while running an illegal operation, compounding their crimes.

I wasn’t law enforcement. I shook those thoughts out of my head.

“Arctic and I will go left. Cooper and Brenda to the right. Matt, you and the others are in reserve. If someone needs help, go help them. We’re looking for where they’re holding the sisters.” I looked them in the eyes. They were ready. “Let’s go.”

I slung the MP5 behind my back and strolled through the door. Jenny walked beside me. Matt and Brenda followed us through but took a hard right to engage the person I’d seen in that direction.

The person to the left looked like a warehouse employee. She wore a high-visibility vest and moved small amounts of product to a different bench where another employee, who had been hidden behind a crate, worked on bundling items. It seemed like it would be mundane at the best of times.

I sized up both of them as we approached. Neither was a shooter, I was sure of it, but my weapon was less than a second from being in my hand and ready to fire.

“Hey there,” I called to the employee I had seen from the doorway. “My name is Gorgon. We’re looking for two sisters, blonde. They were brought through here.”

“I don’t know anything,” the woman said. The man behind the workbench wouldn’t look up.

“Then you don’t want any part of this. I think it’s time you went home for the day, don’t you?” I stared at her without blinking.

She looked away before nodding. “I just need to grab my stuff from the employee breakroom.”

“She’ll go with you.” I nodded toward Jenny. “And I’ll talk to this young man.”

He was probably older than me, but I wanted to establish a certain level of hierarchical dominance. I didn’t need the employees to go home as much as I needed them to tell me what I wanted to know.

“So, where are they?” I tapped the tabletop with the barrel of the MP5 to get his attention while glancing at the breakroom off to the side of the main floor where the woman was leading Jenny. She could take care of herself. If they had gone somewhere else, I would have stopped them. I didn’t want to split our groups more than we already were.

“I don’t know anything.”

“You see, I’m having a hard time believing that. You’re here with a view over the whole floor. You know what’s going on around here, and I need you to tell me what it is. Besides the meth lab, that is. I know about that.”

“I have nothing to do with any of that. I’m just trying to make a decent living. My normal wage plus fifty percent to sit up here and do my job. How am I supposed to turn that down?”

“Because what they’re doing is illegal. The money’s not worth it when you’re in jail. Where are the two women?”

“Are you the cops?” He finally looked up at me from under heavy brows. He didn’t seem to have the stomach for what he was doing. It was wearing him down.

“What do you think? There are so many crimes here that we could bring in four different agencies and we’d still need more officers to process the site. Which crimes are we going to pin on you?”

“None. I’m going home. I can take a hint.” He stood.

I walked around the table to block his way out. “I asked you where they took the women. Once we secure them, we can shut this place down and weed out the perps from the innocents. Which group will you be sorted into?”

“Neither. I’m leaving, and I won’t be back.” He tried to sidestep me, but I wouldn’t have it.

“You haven’t answered my very simple question. As soon as you do, you can be on your way.”

“You don’t have anything on me. You can’t arrest me.”

“Of course you can be arrested. You’re working in a building with a meth lab, and you’re covering for them. Conspiracy to cook meth. That’s not a big sentence nowadays, two to four years, I think is what they’re giving people.” I had no idea what the sentences were, and I didn’t care. This guy was ready to crack. I could feel it.

“I just want to leave.”

“Nod your head in the direction they went. That’s all I need. Then you can be on your way.”

He looked at me, turned his head slightly, and tipped his chin upward. Finally, I could see the fear in his eyes. There was no doubt those who had taken over the factory held an iron fist over the heads of those they kept to maintain appearances.

I stepped aside and waved the man past.

He nearly ran toward the door where Matt waited with the rest of the team. I gave Matt the thumbs-up to let the employee leave.

At the far end of the floor, Cooper walked with the person he’d confronted.

None of these people were working with the ones running the drug operation. That bothered me. I hurried toward the breakroom, where Jenny emerged without the woman. I could feel my heart rate increase.

A second later, the woman walked out. With a smile for Jenny, she continued toward me, looking at the floor as she hurried by. Matt let her pass without interference.

In my mind, it was better if innocent people weren’t in the impact area when rounds started landing. Back in Iraq, we’d been too close to an artillery barrage. You never knew if the next round had your name on it. They whistled as they went by, as if violently ripping their way through the air. Getting to their target by brute force alone. I didn’t wish that on anyone, let alone the innocent bystanders.

Jenny joined me. “The whole operation is in the basement,” she said.

I looked in the direction where the young man had pointed.

A staircase that went up to the roof and down to the basement.

CHAPTER TEN

“Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.” –Agatha Christie

I tossed the keys to Brenda to lock the door behind us. The factory smell was unique. Oil for the machinery, wood shavings, even though there wasn’t any we could see, and age. The building was older and as was their way, they smelled unique. Maybe it was a mustiness or rot or mold. I didn’t know and would be happy when we could leave it all behind.

“It’s a one-way lock, keeps people out, not in,” she said when she returned.

“That’s a safety feature. OSHA would be proud,” I replied. “Keeping people out will work for now. We’ll deal with those on the inside.”

We spread out across the floor and worked our way to the stairs. “Exits?” I asked.

“Only the second door in this same wall and that one is deadbolted along with key-locked,” Matt replied. He had checked it earlier. It was the door the sisters had tried to pick.

“Next steps. We secure the stairs and bring our people from the roof. This will be the new hard stop to keep rats from abandoning the sinking ship.”

“There’s an elevator over there,” Henrietta pointed. “For freight. Only one stop, the basement.”

“We’ll have to keep an eye on that, too.”

We moved as a group, eight of us, to the top of the staircase. I held a finger to my lips.

We had an MP5. Three, if I counted the tunnel and the roof since those were both secured. Davida and Scott had pistols, too.

“Matt, take a short trip up the stairs and make sure it only leads to the roof. Don’t go out unless you want to get yourself shot.”

Matt took off up the stairs, stepping lightly but moving fast.

“Text Scott and tell them to come down. Hit send as soon as Matt gets back.”

Brandi shifted anxiously. “We should probably hurry,” she pleaded.

I took her by the shoulders and whispered, “In a building we don’t know with an armed and determined enemy, the last thing we want to do is hurry. We’re getting there, step by deliberate step. They can’t escape. We’ll close this noose around their necks, and then we’ll yank it tight.”

Her lips turned white from clenching her jaw. She nodded, just once, to let me know she understood, even if she didn’t agree.

Matt reappeared and confirmed the only other stop was the roof.

I thought it odd, but the factory had a vast ceiling. The overhead lattice of I-beams suggested that heavy machinery had been installed at one time with cranes to move raw materials to final products, but no more. There was nothing left of that industry in this part of town. The rent had to be cheap and the floor space enough to accommodate the trinket factory. What it had once been to what it was now and what it would be in the future.

Jenny sent the text.

I waved Matt to me. “Don’t let anything happen to those who are unarmed.”

Jenny nudged me. “Are you trying to protect me? Because you know I can protect myself.”

“I know you can, in any kind of fist fight. That’s not this. If there weren’t any guns involved, you’d be right beside me. As it is, stay behind me. Please.”

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“Besides naked hot tub?” I widened my eyes to show my sincerity. She slowly shook her head. “I’m incorrigible and in love, what can I say.”

Footsteps sounded down the stairs. Slow and deliberate. Quiet like they were wearing tennis shoes.

First out was Erik carrying the MP5. Then Scott appeared, and he was a hot mess. He was pale, and there was a bundle strapped to his mid-section.

“Ran into a rather intransigent guard who wanted to make an example of me,” Scott muttered.

I held a finger to my lips before whispering, “You secure the stairs. Right here. Do you have your pistol?”

He tapped his pocket. “I have it. Thanks for the consideration. I don’t think I’d be much help in a fight.”

“Henrietta, can you stay with him?” I hoped she wouldn’t argue.

She nodded. “I’ll do my best to keep him from dying.”

“That wasn’t what I was looking for, but I’ll take it.” I clapped her on the shoulder.

She leaned close. “What’s this naked hot tub, you were talking about?”

The shock almost stopped my heart. Did everyone around me have bionic ears? It made me wonder.

“It’s something we do back home. Not here, though. We have a couple people to extricate from the unwashed hands of evildoers.” I pointed at the stairs. “Right now.”

I glanced over the group. Brandi was ready to go. Matt had a narrow-frame nine millimeter pistol. I brought the MP5 around to my front. Erik hoisted his MP5 and tapped the extra magazine in his pocket.

“Erik, beside me. We have to see what’s happening before we go in. I’d prefer if we didn’t shoot first, but we have to be ready. We’re not sure what we’re going to find down there. Our goal is to free the sisters.”

“I’ll send a text to Davida and Jerry to be ready. We’re going in,” Jenny offered. She tapped the message and pressed send.

This wasn’t the live-fire exercise I had in mind, but it was the one that developed. Everyone had a role to play, some more active than others. We needed to get Bob Casey medical help. We needed the sisters back.

Every time I dwelled on it, it made me angry. This shouldn’t have happened. It made me question my own competence. The Vice President of the United States had complete confidence in me and my wife. How could we have made such a monumental mistake?

Because we didn’t. Circumstances had changed between setup and execution.

“We’re going to make this right,” I growled. “Let’s go.”

Erik and I headed down the stairs, slowly and carefully, attempting to make as little noise as possible. The smell of acetone grew more intense with each step. The sound of a high-volume air handler hissed from below.

The others filed in behind us, led by those with pistols. The unarmed stayed a few stair steps back in case a firefight broke out. They didn’t need to get hit by any shots intended for those in the front.

Jenny led this group, and no one complained that it was all women. Davida, the oldest, was the only one to bring a pistol. The others had followed my instructions when I told them weapons weren’t required for this exercise since it wasn’t live fire.

I now appreciated those who came with their weapons because we needed everything we had and then some.

At the bottom of the stairs, I leaned under the overhang to see what lay ahead. I raised my fist so the others would stop and remain silent.

There was a clean room of sorts, encased in translucent plastic where bodies moved within. I could make out four shadows active under the bright lights.

In the other part of the dimly lit basement, I counted six individuals. They were engaged in packaging and moving their product, even though they were armed like guards.

What I didn’t see were the sisters. The space seemed smaller than it should have been, which suggested there were corridors on the sides that I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see beyond the clean room. Maybe they were over there.

In any case, we had a hard question to answer. Did we go in blasting to take out the six guards? Who was in the clean room? Where was the tunnel to the building next door?

I backed slowly up the stairs, which confused those behind me.

“Send a text to Davida and Jerry. Tell them to come in through the tunnel. Shoot the first armed person they see and then take cover.”

Jenny typed while I eased back into position.

Erik and I had MP5s. With three of us shooting at targets in the open, we should make short work of them. Then we would collapse the circle even more. These were hardened drug dealers. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense what Devin MacGregor had done. Kill everyone involved. That would reduce the overall risk of retaliation.

I wished it weren’t that way, but we had to deal with the world the way it was, not the way we wanted it to be.

I noted that my MP5 was capable of fully automatic fire. I whispered a caution to Erik. “Don’t use full-auto. We don’t have enough ammunition.”

He nodded. He was already aware.

That didn’t mean the guards below wouldn’t. We needed to be accurate and quick.

It reminded me of the immortal words of Wyatt Earp. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Two shots sounded over the droning of the air handler. I waited, pressed up against the wall on the last step, watching the guards react. They dropped what they were doing and headed for a place I couldn’t see. The last passed beyond the edge of the clean room, where the workers inside continued doing what they were doing without an increased sense of urgency.

Cooking meth was dangerous. If they were out of control, they could poison everyone inside the room. The air handler would stave off the worst of the fumes in case of a spill. Still, it was best not to trust one’s health to the air handler.

An MP5 pounded away using full-auto.

I moved quickly across the floor to the corner of the clean room and peeked around. Four of the guards were aiming. Two of them were firing.

I gestured to Erik to go around the other side.

Erik took the cue and stepped cautiously around the plastic sheeting. Two guards carrying MP5s were on the other side, one crouching behind a stack of boxes and the other lying behind a metal desk. Erik walked forward, aiming down the barrel as he closed the distance to the greater threat—the man behind the boxes who could turn far more easily than the prone shooter.

They fired where Erik wasn’t looking. He risked a glance. A closed door. What did they think they were going to hit?

He tried to time his first shots to coincide with when they were shooting, but they stopped. Shooters on the other side were blasting away at the shut door.

A shot sounded from the far side of the clean room. From where Erik stood, he could tell the difference.

I gave him five seconds before I took my first shot. That ended the guard closest to me. I hoped that the others wouldn’t see him fall or hear the round. I re-aimed and took down the next.

The clean room provided no cover. The plastic sheeting wouldn’t stop a round. And I didn’t know if the people inside were armed. I dove across the open area and scrambled for the nearest cover—a pile of boxes. I didn’t know what was inside. It could have been chemicals for the drug-manufacturing process. It wouldn’t be good if a guard fired through them.

Erik double-tapped the guard closest to him. He had no idea if the weapon was zeroed or that his aim was anywhere near where the bullet would strike.

As he lined up on the other guard, the ones to Erik’s right side sprayed fire at him. He dove away from the plastic sheeting toward something a little more substantial, firing wildly at the prone guard on his way down. The man jerked from at least one impact.

When dealing with a concrete floor, fire low and ricochets will work in your favor.

More shots sounded from the other side of the clean room. The guards turned and unleashed their fury on Erik. I fired twice, quickly. Not a double-tap, but shots to injure or kill the ones I could see firing. Both hit home. Neither was a kill-shot. The next two finished them.

I ran forward.

Loud, echoing shots came through an open door.

“Clear!” Erik shouted. “Clear!” He scrambled to his feet.

It wasn’t clear, by any means. The six guards were down, but we were missing the sisters, and we hadn’t seen what was going on in the clean room.

“Not clear!” I bellowed. I walked around the outside of the clean room, rifle at the ready while double-checking the dead. There were seven bodies. The first that Davida and Jerry had killed and the other six that Erik and I had taken care of.

The door to the tunnel creaked open. I whirled and brought my weapon up.

Jerry peeked around the doorframe. “Safe to come in?”

I gestured for him to join us but turned my attention to the clean room.

“Cover me,” I told Erik.

I pulled aside the plastic sheet that acted as a door, started to step inside, and immediately backed out again, letting the sheet cover the opening. I coughed violently.

“Even with the air handler, you can’t breathe in there. I saw four workers.” I pointed at Erik. “Get them out of there, please.”

“I was hoping you’d ask, boss man.” Erik took a deep breath, stuck his head inside, shouted orders, and pulled out before he needed to take another breath.

I waited on one side and Erik on the other. While standing there, a door in the wall caught my eye. Jenny brought the rest of the operators into the area. “Collect the weapons and magazines.”

She acknowledged my request by picking up the first MP5, clearing it, popping the magazine in, cycling a round into the chamber, and slinging the weapon over her back. She moved to the next and did the same thing with the other six weapons. We had enough for everyone to be armed.

“Get out!” Erik shouted, standing back from the rear entrance to the clean room. He gestured with his weapon.

Cowed, the workers ambled out and removed their respirators once they were in the open area. They didn’t seem surprised to find their former guards scattered across the floor.

“Is everything turned off in there? We’re not going to die in a fireball, are we?” Erik asked harshly. One of the workers put her respirator on. Erik held the door flap to watch as she turned off three different processes. The air handler stayed running.

The other operators watched the workers as if studying them. The three didn’t try anything while the fourth was in the room. They stood with heads bowed. “Are you immigrants of the illegal variety?” Erik asked. “Not that I’m judging as my parents weren’t born here, but is that what they have on you?”

One shook her head. “I have a passport, but they took,” she said in halting English. She looked Asian, but in modern society, was it possible to figure out where a person was from based on looks alone?

No. It was a waste of time to try.

“What’s your cut of this stuff?” Erik asked.

“Hang on, Erik. You and Brenda watch them,” I said, pointing at the workers from the clean room. I waved my arm to the others. “The rest of you, grab a weapon and be ready.”

I motioned for Jenny to join me. A corridor was a confined space, and it was best to have two people who could work seamlessly. That was us. We trained and practiced. Jenny now had an MP5, too. We were the best choice to check out what lay beyond the door.

Davida declined the MP5 and held out her Derringer. “I’m better with this—” Then she pointed at her face. “—and this.”

“She was magnificent and ruthless,” Jerry said softly. He moved in right behind Jenny and me. Brandi elbowed her way next to him.

“I need to go, too.” She patted her MP5.

“Be careful you don’t shoot our people,” Jerry warned.

We headed for the door. It had no window. I wondered if it was just a closet but took care opening it while Jenny dropped to one knee and aimed her MP5 at the area beyond. It reminded me of our door-kicking adventure in the Chicago tower. That was a nightmare, too, just like this.

I pulled the door open slowly and then closed it.

“It’s a corridor. I didn’t see anyone,” Jenny stated.

I opened the door quickly, the rest of the way, and we both aimed our weapons down the hall. There were three doors.

“Why does this look like a cell block?” I wondered. It had been a factory. If this was for storage, it was hard to get to. If this was for offices, who in their right mind wanted to work in a dank basement?

We moved slowly down the short corridor, keeping our weapons up and aimed at each doorway.

We stopped at the first door—a normal one, wood and plain. The knob wouldn’t turn. I gestured to Jenny that I’d kick it open.

She braced herself to the side of the frame. I reared back and kicked at a spot beside the knob, and the dampness-weakened wood busted away from it. My foot almost got stuck. I fell as I pulled back. I kicked the door open from the floor. Jenny swept the closet with her weapon. It couldn’t have been more than four feet wide and eight feet deep.

“Nothing.”

I peered into the door crack to see if someone was hiding in the tiny space behind it, but that area was empty.

The second door was metal and in better shape. It opened into the hallway. The knob turned easily. I pulled the door open a crack. Jenny ducked her head past and pulled back. “They’re in there. Two men with guns holding the sisters.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.” –Ray Kroc

Brandi tried to get past, but Jerry held her back. “Let them.”

I moved to the side and opened the door just a crack, holding it open with the barrel of my MP5. If they shot through the door, no one and no body parts were in the line of fire.

“Hello in there, happy people,” I started. Jenny stared at me. I winked back. She rubbed my shoulder. It might have been out of place, but what better time to show you care about someone when it was the most dangerous? Lives were on the line. It was almost certain someone was going to die.

I preferred it to be the men holding the hostages. I knew that I wouldn’t kill the sisters, but I most definitely would kill the two men if they did.

“You need to leave while you still have a chance. A dozen more guards are coming and another dozen after that,” a young voice called from inside.

“Is that you, Billy Jones?” Davida called in her unmistakable grandmother’s voice.

“Who the hell is Billy Jones?” the voice replied.

“My grandson who got in with the wrong crowd, just like you two idiots. They don’t serve home-cooked meals in prison.” She leaned against the wall with her arms crossed.

It was hard not to smile at her. She was most effective in her approach.

“Ain’t had home cookin’ in a decade, old woman. I eat out because I can, in more ways than one, because I can.”

“Your local fried chicken place isn’t eating out. That stuff will kill you.”

“You’re making me hungry,” I interjected. “We have a situation that needs to be resolved. You have friends of ours. We just killed about ten of your people to get us to this point. We have no qualms about killing you, too. Let them go, and we’ll be out of your hair. All we want is our people.”

“It ain’t gonna work that way. Y’all put your weapons down. We decide if we shoot you on our way out, but probably not.”

I opened the door the rest of the way but slowly. I didn’t want to alarm them into taking potshots at me. I peeked in to find them holding pistols to sisters’ heads. No one else had pistols. They all had submachine guns, which made me think these two were different. Maybe they weren’t guards but leaders in the drug organization. I stepped into the doorway, but I had my hand on the MP5.

“You can call me Gorgon,” I said. “We’re not the feds and we’re not local cops, either. You see, we kill people for a living. There are a dozen of us out here, and we determine who lives or dies, not you.”

Both men snorted. “I’m sure you tell that to all the ladies and you still don’t get laid.”

“You need to let them go.” I waved to my side. “Arctic and Jerry, if you would be so kind as to aim at their foreheads, I’d appreciate it.”

Jenny adopted a low kneeling stance, bracing her MP5 on the door frame. Jerry towered over her, standing beside me and bracing near the top.

“They are very good shots. They know exactly where to shoot through your hostages to cause the least amount of damage to them while killing you. Or they could just nip you through the eyeball to cause no harm to our people.” I locked eyes with the sisters, first one and then the other. “Joni, Melissa, we’ll have you out of here shortly.”

The men lost their derision. Concern crept into their faces. It wasn’t fear, and I wanted them to be afraid. Fear would drive them to make a mistake.

Brandi leaned around the big man going by Jerry. “Hey you. Trust Gorgon. He’ll get you out. He got us this far without anyone getting hurt.”

I gently pushed her back. She was a distraction. I assumed she would panic and flake out if she saw anything happen to her sisters. I couldn’t let her foil our aim. If we started to shoot, there could be nothing in our way.

“Let them go, one at a time, and we’ll leave you here, alive. We don’t want your drugs or your equipment. We only want our people.”

“How can I trust you?”

“You can’t, but what you can trust is that your bodies will be riddled with bullets if you don’t. If you hurt those women, then we’ll cause you as much pain as humanly possible. You think you can tolerate it because you’re tough guys, but you can’t, not when the skin is being peeled from your body, inch by inch. Your nerve endings will be on fire like you’re burning up in Hell itself. You’ll be begging for death. You’ll be crying like babies for your mamas. You think you’re bad because you’re running drugs in a seedy world. You have no idea what’s really out here. Now, let them go.”

“And lose the only leverage we have over you? No,” the first speaker said. The second man was starting to crack. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He licked his lips every couple seconds. His mouth had gone dry.

“We don’t have much time. Neither of us. There are too many bodies lying around for someone not to notice.” I turned my head to the side. “Get Scott and Henrietta down here. We’ll be leaving shortly.”

I didn’t see who left to recover them from the floor above. Escaping through the tunnel seemed the best option since we’d left dead people in our wake. I also had one additional surprise for the operation.

“You be leaving without these two, then,” the one who did all the talking said.

“Can you shoot them through their fingers? That would be a great shot, I think.” I angled my head toward Jenny and Jerry but didn’t take my eyes off the two men.

The one on the left dropped his hand with the gun. Having it behind Joni was worse than keeping it where I could see it. “If they leave the product, then we good. We have to move the operation, but that’s business as usual.”

“Don’t give up! We almost had ‘em,” the first speaker said, but his partner had made the decision for them.

The second pushed Joni toward the door. He held his pistol loosely. He wasn’t going to give that up, and I didn’t need him to. I only needed him to do what he did.

“And Melissa, if you don’t mind,” I said, nodding to Joni as she walked through our lines of fire and through the door. I leaned aside to let her past. Brandi dove in, bumping Jerry and Jenny. “Leave!” I snarled at them. Brandi was an operator. She needed to tighten up.

We’d be talking when this was over, because her inability to control her emotions would compromise all three of them.

“Whatever,” the first speaker said and let go. He scratched the side of his head with his pistol.

“You’ll see that I’m true to my word. We’ll leave in peace. Don’t try to follow us. That wouldn’t be good for your life expectancy.”

Jenny ordered the group behind her to return to the lab area. She withdrew first while Jerry and I kept our weapons trained on the two drug dealers.

“You can bet that we’ll be coming for you,” the first speaker said. “You should probably kill us, but I trust that you won’t. Big mistake.”

“We make mistakes,” I told him, “but we rectify them when they raise their ugly heads. Now, you both have a pleasant day. I hope we never cross paths again.”

Jerry backed away so I could close the door. I slammed it shut, and we ran. Jenny covered us aiming down the left side while we ran down the right. She backed through after we passed and closed that door, too.

Jerry stuffed a chair under the handle.

Davida was already leading the way out the tunnel.

“Turn those four loose,” I told Erik. “Run for your lives. You have a chance to be free.”

The four didn’t look like they would enjoy their freedom. They ducked their heads and walked like they were headed to a funeral.

We worked our way to the door.

“Hey, boss man, we probably left a lot of evidence around here,” Erik said.

“There’s a way to take care of that.” When we reached the door, I looked for the keys. Davida jangled them from ahead. “Thank you.” I fired a short burst through the plastic sheeting. A spark rose into a small flame. It burned brighter and brighter as the chemicals fueled its release.

The door rattled until the chair fell.

There was no way they’d be able to put out the fire. I backed through the door, and Davida locked it. She wiped the key down as we jogged, tossing it into a dark corner of the neighboring building’s basement. We were carrying major hardware with ten MP5s while a heavily wounded man limped along with us.

“I’ve got them,” Jerry said. He was a large man with a big jacket. We stacked the weapons inside, and he folded the coat around them. It mostly covered them. Davida tossed a shawl at him to wrap over the top. “We’re good.”

Erik was on one side to help Scott and Matt was on the other.

The three sisters hugged each other as they walked. There were more tears than I would have thought.

“Are you three okay?” Jenny asked, taking the lead with women her age as opposed to the gruff man who had barked at them earlier. Necessity dictated my actions. I wouldn’t apologize for that.

“We’re better now. How long did they hold us? I expected it to be dark,” Joni said.

“It’s just after lunchtime,” Jenny replied. “Looks like we may be done early.” She touched each of the women on the arm or shoulder. It was the sisterly approach to life. I think it helped.

I failed at touchy-feely school. As soon as Jenny said something, I knew that I should have been the one to give them a quick once-over, but in my mind, we were still in the middle of the operation. We were getting out of there. Once we were back in the apartment, we could take a breath, but we couldn’t breathe easy until we were back at the ranch. At least we were well-armed if anything came up.

We never did see that foreman. The drug organization must have kicked the regulars out. I wondered if they were even alive.

We’d already declared war on the operation. What if they declared war on us?

We moved up the stairs and through the ground floor of the building next to the factory. We strolled into the street like we belonged there. Matt and Erik continued to help Scott.

The group crossed the street opposite the factory to stay out of sight. We hurried toward the apartment, taking a roundabout route. The size of our group was sufficient to chase away anyone who had untoward ideas about approaching us. I stayed up front, point man, so to speak. I watched for police entering the area or a drug gang coming to avenge the assault on the lab.

I had to admit that I didn’t know what that looked like, but I hoped I would recognize it when I saw it. I wanted to get to the apartment without any interference from ahead or behind, and I was surprised when we made it into the building without any problems.

Now I could start doing post-operation cleanup.

“How are you doing, Bob?” I asked, not using his fake name. The southeast region operators knew who he was.

He was reclining on the cheap couch, taking pressure off the cuts on his stomach and chest. His face twisted in the torment of pain.

“I’d love to tell you that I was feeling better, but I’m not. I have a nurse on call…”

He had told me about that before. “I think it’s about time you called her. Maybe Erik can drive you in your car.”

Erik nodded. He’d caught a ride from the retreat site with one of the others.

Bob held out his keys. “I’d appreciate a pickup.”

“I’m driving the Bimmer!” Erik clapped him on the shoulder. He helped himself to one of the MP5s, stuffed it under his light jacket, and hurried out.

Bob removed his phone from a pocket and tapped a number from memory.

“We could use your tender mercies. I might have some lacerations,” he told the person at the other end of the conversation. “Meet you at the clinic? Not any gunshots, no. Not a knife, either. It was from a fence. Clinic. Not reportable. Got it. See you there.”

Had it been a gunshot, any formal medical facility had a requirement to report it to law enforcement. That’s why she was on retainer. She could address many gunshot wounds without involving other medical professionals. But for a cut? No one would care. People cut themselves all the time in the most innocuous ways. It wouldn’t be a trigger for anyone to be alarmed. And the care would be better, cleaner.

With Bob on a better road, I turned my attention to the sisters.

“Do we need to exact vengeance on those men?” I asked, trying to keep it light. Jenny gave me a look that suggested my attempt at humor had fallen flat.

Sirens filled the street outside as they raced by. Firetrucks. I wondered if the factory was their target. No one would dig too deeply if they found a meth lab had started the fire.

Back to the debrief.

The sisters tried to hide the bruises on their wrists. I suspected they had them on their arms, too. They’d been grabbed and shaken, maybe slammed into the wall, but their clothes weren’t torn, suggesting they hadn’t been subjected to more personal levels of extreme violence.

“They wanted to know what we were doing there,” Melissa said. “We told him we’d gotten lost and only wanted to find the bathroom. That we weren’t trying to pick the lock. He didn’t believe us, but he made and received a bunch of calls. They thought we were checking the place for the police.”

“They didn’t look like they were bugging out. I’m not sure they thought you were cops. A rival gang, maybe?”

Melissa shrugged. “It was unpleasant,” she admitted without further explanation.

I didn’t need to know any more. “It’s time to return to the ranch. Get out of here in the least conspicuous way possible. You three—” I pointed at the sisters. “—need to split up. You stand out when you’re together.”

“I’ll drive,” Joni said, but stopped. “He took my keys and phone. I had nothing else on me.”

“Leave it. You can pick it up later using your spare keys—after things have calmed down, of course.” Another siren sounded outside the building on its way to a destination nearby. We knew exactly where they were going. The smoke from the fire two blocks away billowed into the sky.

“Time to leave,” I told everyone. The operators broke into groups of two and three. I tapped Brandi on the shoulder. “Why don’t you ride with us.”

It wasn’t a question.

She nodded tightly and hugged both of her sisters before they left.

Jerry rolled up his coat with the MP5s. I let him take them all. We’d talk about their disposal later. That wasn’t for me to control, but I was curious, and I wanted to make sure they didn’t fall into gang hands. The weapons were lethal and illegal.

Matt and Brenda helped Scott. He looked like he’d be okay but was going to suffer until then. Suffering was good for the soul, if you asked me.

I didn’t bother with any more instructions. They were all on their own and in their element. Extricating themselves from the hot zone following a hit.

I closed the door after them. Brandi was standing and ready to go.

She held up her hand. “I know what you’re going to say,” she said.

“Tell me what you think I’m going to say,” I countered.

“I was a hindrance to the operation to rescue my sisters. I was in the way. I made demands that would have put us and my sisters at risk. I’m sorry. I’ve never had to deal with anything like that before.”

I looked to Jenny. That was what I was going to say. “How are you going to fix it?” I asked.

“What is there to fix besides making sure that my sisters don’t get kidnapped?”

“How you react. Can you take the emotion out of it and think clinically? As an operator, you have to be able to remove your emotional self from the equation. It’s better if you think tactically, take into account as many variables as are in play. Emotions cloud your judgment.” I felt like I was lecturing.

Jenny nodded and gave me a tight smile.

“Emotions are my superpower,” she said. “They allow me to do things I can’t do when I only use my brain. My sisters and I are a team. We complement each other. I’m nothing without them. With them? We’re unstoppable.”

I paced because I didn’t know how to respond. I had to think through it. Everyone had their own unique approach. Maybe the sisters only took jobs that involved men with delusions of power over women. There were plenty of those targets. Jack Palance had made a short and lucrative career with that plan. She’d been ruthlessly efficient.

Which reminded me. I wanted to ask Jerry what he meant when he said Davida had been ruthless. She had killed the guard, not Jerry? I didn’t understand. She was this frail-looking grandmother.

Looks could be deceiving. Our most effective operators weren’t what they looked like. This group was far less lethal-looking than the western group who had looked fit and sharp-eyed.

I had much to think about. “Let’s wipe this place down and head back to the house. I’m hungry.” With three of us, it made the wipe-down go that much more quickly. I tossed the clean keys on the dining room table and the door locked behind me as the last one out.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” –Alexander Graham Bell

The local news complimented the fire crews for keeping the massive blaze from spreading to nearby buildings. The factory had been gutted, and one of the outer walls had collapsed.

The bodies inside would be buried and would be unrecognizable when they were found. Any evidence that we left inside would be nothing but ash. They’d find the shell casings and the chemicals. They would suspect a rival drug gang, and we could wash our hands of it.

I wondered if the two men who held the sisters, or the technicians, had escaped. Maybe even the naked man, although I’d have thought the news would have said something about a naked man running down the street.

“No naked guy?” Jenny asked as if hearing my thoughts.

“You’d think they’d mention that. Nothing about the technicians or any loss of life. There should have been eight bodies, I believe, and quite a few shell casings.”

“Don’t dwell on it. You’ll second-guess yourself and get angry.” She hugged me from behind. I caressed her arm. She was right, of course.

“We got everyone out. That’s what matters.”

“We could have never guessed that the factory would get turned into a meth lab. It was a fluke. Bad luck. And the world is a safer place because their product burned up in the fire. They were armed and ready for battle, but they weren’t ready for real professionals. The operators acquitted themselves quite well, from what I saw.”

I pulled Jenny around to sit on my lap so I could hold her close. “They did. We went in carrying almost nothing and left with an arsenal and our people. You are right. That’s why I let you seduce me, so I could keep you around.”

She batted at my face.

We both laughed. Ours was a hard business. We had only ourselves to enjoy the madness and chaos of it all. It wasn’t something we could share with family or friends, so we didn’t keep any family or friends close. We were friends and lovers. It was the best of both worlds. I squeezed Jenny’s butt.

“We have ten minutes before the afternoon meetup you called.”

I delivered my best shocked face. “One appreciative squeeze isn’t a call to arms, so to speak. Raise your sword in triumph!” I chuckled at her look. “We should probably get going before you start ripping my clothes off. I am the cat’s meow.”

“I’ve been thinking we should probably get a cat,” Jenny suggested out of the blue.

“A what? We’re young and free. We can travel on a whim. A cat? We’d be tied down, slaves to the merciless feline overlord. Next thing you know, it’ll claim my pillow, and even worse than that, you’ll let it.”

“I would,” Jenny confessed. She stood and pulled me to my feet.

I cupped her cheek in my hand. “I love you, Miss Jenny. I wouldn’t be what I am without you.” Before I descended to further shmoopiness, I turned to go. “Time to put on our work hats and get back out there. We need to earn our keep.”

Jenny pinched my behind. Payback. “You earned their loyalty today. That has a value that cannot be calculated. You’ve earned your wages for today, too. Oh, that’s right, you paid them for the pleasure of today. As the Dalai Lama said, there will be no money, but on your deathbed, you shall achieve total consciousness. Which is good. Maybe that was Bill Murray and not the Dalai.”

“Nice reference. Well done. I’ve succeeded in turning you into an eighties dweeb where you don’t relate to most people on the planet, a cultural reprobate, so to speak. And no cat, if I get a vote.”

“At least I don’t listen to Rush when I’m by myself,” Jenny countered as we walked out the door of our room at Harper’s Dude Ranch.

“Sacrilege! I vow not to leave you by yourself so I can save you from your misguided musical choices,” I declared, complete with my pointer finger held high.

We helped ourselves into our conference room and found the sisters already there. I sat on the table by them to draw their attention. I wanted to look into their eyes. They met my gaze and held it. I smiled. “I needed to see for myself. What we tell others is usually different from what we feel inside. You look okay. Can I see your arms?”

With a sigh, they both pulled up their sleeves to show the bruises.

“But this is the worst of it,” Melissa said. “Except for being in the room with no escape wondering if you were coming. I guess I should say, wondering when you’d be coming. They were going to move us to a different location but didn’t want to do that until they were sure we weren’t cops so both locations wouldn’t be compromised.”

It made sense. “I’m happy that it was only a few bruises.” They rolled their sleeves down. “You guys stayed tough for as long as we needed you to hold on.”

“Brandi told us everything you did. Calculated, maybe even cold, but what operators should aspire to. Thank you for leading by example.”

I wasn’t comfortable with public accolades. “Sounds like you’ve had some bad bosses in the past. Do as I say, not as I do. Arctic and I do as we say. It’s the only way to build and maintain trust.”

The sisters nodded.

“Do you three work together on single contracts?” Jenny asked the question I already had the answer to.

“We do,” Joni replied. “I know there are some lone wolves out there, but it makes sense to work together.”

Jenny and I looked at each other. I made eyes at her, waggling my eyebrows.

“We get it,” she started, “but you are the only operators who do that. Every other one of our contractors is solo. Everyone except for us.” Jenny pointed at me and then at herself.

“I think they’d be better with a partner,” Melissa added.

The operators made their own decisions. Even those who were married kept their real job separate from their families. It brought us back to the nature of what we did.

“It’s a hard business and not for everyone. We don’t need reluctant co-operators. We need only the fully committed and responsible. Less exposure for the company. Sorry. Like I said, it’s a hard business.”

“What he means to say—” Jenny looked at me. “—is that if it works for you, that’s great. If it works for others, then we encourage it. Every operator needs to be comfortable doing what they do and how they do it.”

“That’s what I said.” I stared at the floor as I thought through what Jenny said compared to what I said. I didn’t see the difference, but there must have been one because the sisters nodded their approval at Jenny’s rephrasing.

I was forced to admit that sometimes I didn’t understand people.

The others filtered in. I greeted each one by their chosen name.

Bob/Scott walked stiffly into the room and sat down quickly. Erik was right behind him, ready to catch him if he fell.

We all needed someone to watch over us like that. Maybe that was the sisters’ point.

“I thought you might have opted to stay in your room and rest. You lost a lot of blood if that shirt was anything to go by.”

“They stitched me up and gave me an IV. I feel right as rain,” Scott said in the most unconvincing way.

“Rain helps the crops grow, but we always enjoy a sunny day. Right is the balance between the two.” I was never a fan of the saying. I didn’t bother learning where it had come from. There were too many idioms to keep track of in modern life, and most had roots that predated me, my parents, and maybe even my grandparents.

Dress to the nines?

I did know where that one came from. It no longer applied. We didn’t dress up like that anymore. Here we were in professional training, and I wore khaki trousers and a nondescript polo shirt. Everyone was dressed in similar light clothes. It was warmer here than what we were used to, but I still dressed up—for me, anyway. I would have preferred gym clothes, but I had some sense of professional pride. I should have let Jenny dress me. Then I’d be in a dashing suit every day or maybe a vest paired with a button-down shirt and silk slacks.

That was a step too far. I didn’t even wear a suit when we saw the vice president or even the president. I was dressed as I was now. Maybe this was my vibe. I hadn’t bought anything I was wearing.

Jenny was dressing me.

I laughed to myself, which made everyone look at me. My train of thought had gone off the tracks, and I’d lost my way.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” I told Scott before nodding toward the sisters. “And you, too.”

We had an hour. I wanted to demonstrate how they needed to debrief during or after a contract, even if it was only with themselves.

“The bottom line is that the contract to recover our people was a success. Although there was significant loss of life from the other side, it was limited to those carrying guns in service to the crime operation running out of the factory basement. One injury among our people, but relatively minor in the big scheme of things. And most importantly, we didn’t compromise the organization or our fellow operators because we burned the evidence of our participation. I regret that we burned down the factory, but it served a few purposes, all of them good for us. What could we have done better?”

Melissa raised her hand. “Not get captured in the first place.”

The group snickered their approval.

“But then we wouldn’t have been able to conduct a live-fire exercise,” I replied. “Getting ourselves into a pickle during a reconnaissance is for tomorrow. We’ll focus on what we can learn.”

“I learned that standing out isn’t something one wants. I need to be more discreet.” Erik had washed the styling gel from his hair, turning it from standing up to lying flat.

“Hear, hear!” Jerry replied. “I can’t change my size, but damn if Davida didn’t show me how it’s done.”

“My compliments to you all for keeping it together while working as a team, something you had never practiced before. And no matter what, remember, there’s no one better than us. When it came time to pull the trigger, none of us hesitated. The first time you do it, it puts a lump in your throat. It gets easier, but no less painful. We’re ready for the pain, and we deal with it in our own way.”

“It’s not just me, then?” Davida said. “I may make it look easy, but it is most certainly not.”

Jerry nodded to her in a sign of respect.

The operators’ minds were working. We’d given them a topic that was too deep. I didn’t want them to go away like that or still be drooping come dinner.

“What else are we going to talk about over the next few days?” They needed to look forward, not back. It wasn’t much of a debrief, but they’d descend even deeper into a dark pit. Training for a group hit like that wasn’t something I ever wanted to do again.

I opened my mouth, and my satellite phone vibrated. I pulled it out to turn it off, but the number showed a 202 area code. Washington D.C. I winced.

Jenny saw it and frowned.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have to take this.” I turned my back to the group and pressed the green button. “Jimmy.” Vice President Jimmy Tripplethorn.

“Ian Bragg! In all my days, it always amazes me when you answer my calls so cheerfully.”

“What can I do you out of, and I’ll start that we’re not available for a little while. We’re kind of in the middle of something.”

“I know,” Jimmy replied.

I froze because my blood turned cold. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You’re in Atlanta. The DEA just briefed me on a suspected drug gang attack that left six dead in a now-burned-out factory. I know you were there. I have your phone tracked.”

I was instantly furious. That’s how he always knew where we were. “I’m getting a new phone, you know.”

“I figured, but don’t worry. No one knows what it is but me. Please tell me that you’re not involved with a drug gang.”

“Would I do you like that, Jimmy? It hurts me that you’d think that. The answer is absolutely not. That was wrong place, wrong time, and they tried to flex their muscles and take a couple of my people. They paid for their hubris.”

“I never thought you would go to the dark side, Ian. Thank you for that. You’re one of the few people I can trust. Strange that, but it is what it is. What I haven’t told you is that the kingpin who goes by Stone Chisel is coming for you. He put a tracker on a car that was with you before, near the factory that burned down, and now seems to be co-located with you again at some horse ranch.”

“Holy Jesus, Jimmy! Here I was fat, dumb, and happy thinking we worked in the shadows.”

“Sorry, Ian. I’m looking out for my friends. Consider this a favor. You know I don’t get to do many for you. Everyone wants something, but you want nothing from me. That makes you a unicorn.”

“You pay us well,” I replied softly.

“You save the government money. It’s not a favor. It’s just good business.”

“Thanks for the heads-up. It seems like we’ve got some work to do. Is there any way I can get a sympathetic DEA ear, one who doesn’t ask too many questions?”

“I don’t think so, because they would ask too many questions. This is just between me and you. I’ll have them keep me updated. Don’t destroy your phone just yet in case I get more information you can use.”

“Like when the DEA is going to conduct a raid on Harper’s Dude Ranch? If you can, give us more than a five-minute head-start.” I ended the call.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Never spend your money before you have earned it.” –Thomas Jefferson

“The drug gang put a tracker on your car, Scott. You need to take it away from here and ditch it unless you can find the tracker, but they’ve already made our position.”

“How do you know that?” Scott asked, but he was already standing, albeit shakily. Erik stood, too.

“Because Jenny and I have done a favor for people in high places. They look out for us.” I turned to Jerry. “We’re going to need those MP5s.”

“In the trunk of my car, my man. I was contemplating how to get rid of them.”

“They’re on their way, which means we need to get our heads together and get ready. I have no idea how many are coming, but I’ll assume all of them, whatever that means. I’ll assume worst-case scenario—that they’ll storm the ranch from multiple directions simultaneously. Get the weapons and get rid of that tracker, drive it away from here. Maybe that will buy us some time as they chase it down.”

Scott limped away, until Erik caught him and nearly carried him as they rushed out. Scott cried out in pain at the sudden movement.

Jerry hurried after them to the parking lot.

“This sucks a whole lot.” I wanted to scream in frustration. “We don’t have a sympathetic host like we did last time. We’re going to war, but this time, we’re on the defense. Heath, you’re my tech whiz. I need everything you can find regarding an individual known as Stone Chisel. He’s the one running the group that we interfered with.”

“Got it,” Heath replied and opened the computer that he brought with him to the conference room. He tapped furiously using a series of gateways to hide where he was coming from, what he was doing, and who he was. He disappeared into the dark web, surfing for any information he could find on the local drug kingpin.

“Jenny, can you get us a map of this place?”

“I’ll check with the desk.” She left the room. That left me to give orders to nine foot-soldiers. We looked less than intimidating. I had to turn that into a strength.

“Ideas on how we can address bad guys coming here to teach us a lesson.” I looked from face to face, but no one had anything to say.

I continued, “What if we joined the ranch’s workforce and tended the fence, the weeds, the grass, and the pathways? Hide in plain sight. I cannot believe they’ll come here and kill everyone. They’ll be looking for Scott and Erik. They had the run-in with the punks who were probably providing eyes and ears for the meth lab. That’s why they destroyed the drone.” Scott had shared what happened. The new information made a lot more sense than a random theft.

I tried to envision how the engagement would shape up. Concentric circles of engagement with us retreating inside each smaller ring until we were trapped in a small room. We’d lose people as we withdrew until there was no one left. We needed to counterpunch, or our end was inevitable.

Scott and Erik were driving somewhere looking for a place to dump the vehicle where it would be reasonable to believe they’d gone to hide. I could see the BMW skidding around corners as they sought to put as much distance between us and them. We needed the time.

I was happy with the intelligence the vice president had given us, but if we were to survive this, we’d need more, a lot more, or a great deal of luck.

Maybe both.

Jenny returned with Jerry. Once the door was closed, he opened his jacket to show the MP5s. I took one and checked it, left a round in the chamber, and put it on safe. I put it on the table next to me. The others helped themselves, except for the sisters. They held their hands up as if allergic to firearms.

We didn’t have enough for everyone anyway, although with the personally owned pistols, we did. Still, I doubted the sisters used firearms for any of their contracts. I expected they poisoned their targets.

Jenny came in, saw the submachine guns, and helped herself to one. She ran it through the same checks as I had done before slinging it over her shoulder.

I took two spare magazines and tossed one to Jenny. She caught it easily and stuffed it into a pocket.

There should have been two magazines for each weapon, but we’d discharged a fair number of rounds in the basement battle. The extra magazines were mostly empty. We were running on fumes, and the battle had not yet begun.

“Any chance at getting more nine-millimeter ammunition? Like a crate of it, maybe…” I said with some hope.

“There’s no wait time to buy ammunition in Georgia. I expect there’s a shop in town since even this small town will have one. It’s the rural Georgia way.”

“Who can get us some ammo?” I asked, looking at the sisters.

“I guess we can. We have a car.”

“Nine by nineteen Parabellum. Got it? A thousand rounds, if possible.”

“That’s a lot,” Joni said.

“And it’ll be heavy. Get going. Let GPS guide you to the nearest store and please, hurry.” I waved them away, and they ran off. Davida closed the door after them.

Jenny spread the overview map of Harper Dude Ranch on the table. She made me move my gun. I slung it over my shoulder. I’d throw my jacket over top when we went into public, but going anywhere without my weapon was a non-starter. Not from this point until Chiselhead was dead.

That’s what it was going to take, I had no doubt, and the vice president was going to get this one for free.

“He played us,” I said, looking at Jenny.

“Who played what?” she asked.

There were too many people around to explain. I leaned close and whispered, “Jimmy gets us to take out this kingpin at no cost.”

She shrugged off her lack of concern about the implication of political subterfuge. “He gave us the chance to save our own lives. That has more value than any contract. No naked hot tub if we’re dead.”

“I remember a time when your attitude was far more serious yet naïve. I like the new you even better. Truth bomb delivered at the speed of heat!”

She bowed her head in appreciation.

We turned our attention to the overhead view of the ranch. We had selected it because the main building and the outbuilding with the rooms were nestled within a pine forest. Horse trails meandered throughout the woods. A nearby break in the woods on the west side opened to a narrow strip of grassland that led to a broader pasture.

The entry road came in from the south as a turnoff from a country lane that looped around the outside of the entire property. Any vehicles would have to use this road. The good news was that this one lane connected to a highway at two points, both west of the greater pasture. There were no other connecting roads.

“Does anyone have a remote camera or something like that?”

Bob had said he had that stuff, but it was in the trunk of the car speeding away from the compound. I hadn’t thought about how they would get back. That was their concern, and they’d handle it. I trusted operators to think three-dimensionally.

Burner phones. “Who has a burner with a camera and a full charge?”

Many did, Jenny included.

“Setup a bogus Facebook profile and livestream the video from the entry road. Friend a few of us so we can access the livestream.”

I maintained a couple different anonymous profiles. A quick flurry of activity added Cooper, Jerry, Brenda, and Matt to the feed. Jenny and I looked for the optimal location to put the phone. I tapped a finger on the map. “You think here?”

Jenny nodded and ran from the room. We’d place it looking down the road from the entry road toward the highway. We’d get a heads-up from anyone coming to the entrance of the place.

Would they be so bold as to drive right in? I expected not. We’d need a second camera looking the other way.

“Henrietta?” I asked.

“I don’t do those teenage sites,” she said. “I’d have no idea where to start.”

“Just give me your phone. I’ll set it up, and we’ll put it in place. We need a second view from here.” I pointed to the map. “It has to be put into place a bit farther away. We’ll need a runner to head through the woods, due east, and place it looking down the long road. Someone stopping here could walk a horse trail and be in our backyard before we know it. Jenny is putting hers here, at the bend with the approach, but there are a couple trails that lead to the pasture. They could park and come in that way, too. Or they could drive past. In either case, we’ll get a heads-up that they’re coming. Without that info, we’re in reaction mode, and that tends to get people killed.”

Henrietta handed over her phone. It was two generations out of date and only had half a charge. I hoped it was enough. I downloaded the app, set up a page, added the same people Jenny had, and then gave the phone to Cooper.

“Run like the wind,” I told him with a smile.

“Are you always this calm?” he asked.

“No sense getting spun up now. I’ll save that for when we’re engaged. Can’t be mainlining adrenaline all the time. Hurry up, Cooper. Make us proud.”

He ran from the room. I had seven people out on missions. That left seven of us behind.

“Heath, any luck finding information on that Chisel guy?” It was easy to forget he was there since he was completely embedded in his computer.

“Little bits and pieces. Not enough to build a profile, but I’ll get there. I assume you’re looking for a current address so you can take the fight to him?”

“If he’s not personally coordinating this operation against us, then yes. If we survive, I’m going to pay him a visit. Until then, I need everyone to pay attention. Here’s the MP5 and everything you need to know to use it.”

Erik drove since Scott was well under the weather. They hurried out of the dirt parking lot and onto the tight country lane, good for one car, tricky for two. But no one came their way as they headed to the highway.

They checked for traffic and then sped out, racing away from Atlanta. He figured the bad guys would be coming from that direction and didn’t want to cross them on the way.

“Slow down,” Scott recommended. “They have a tracker on us so they need to think I’m on a casual drive to a place where they can corner us and our buddies.”

Erik let up on the accelerator and dropped the speed to five miles-per-hour over the limit. It was the most unobtrusive way to drive. Too slow and it would look like something was wrong. They also didn’t want to get caught in the open by a drug gang. Erik tapped the MP5 under his jacket. At least they weren’t toothless. If they did get into a firefight, they wouldn’t go down easily.

Erik had burned through one magazine, so he only had the second with fifteen rounds available. It wasn’t a lot, but they were in the weapon and there was a round in the chamber.

“Where are we going?” Erik asked. “I’m not familiar with this area.”

“Through town and then north. We can pick up a little speed. Then we’ll take the second exit after about ten miles, loop east until we get to an outlet mall. We’ll dump the car there and look for a ride back to the ranch. I have cash, but I don’t want a record of it on Uber or Lyft.” Scott pulled the money from his pocket and counted it. “Only five hundred. I hope it’s enough.”

“It’ll have to be,” Erik replied. “I don’t have any cash on me. Just one credit card that’s for a fake personality.”

“Let’s not use that,” Scott mumbled. He pointed at the turn in town for the direction to the highway. They moved through the town streets with too many stop signs and traffic lights. Every time they had to wait, Erik stared at the rearview mirror, expecting to see a black Cadillac Escalade with heavily tinted windows closing on them.

But the vehicle didn’t appear and soon enough, they were headed north on a split-lane highway. Erik accelerated to keep up with traffic. Ten miles later, he eased into the exit lane and followed the new road east.

Fifteen miles and they’d be able to dump the car.

Scott started wiping it down, anything and everything he may have touched. “We’ll have to clean up the stuff in the trunk, too.

“I bet they could use those remote cameras,” Erik guessed.

Scott hung his head. “I didn’t think…” He groaned in pain and added anguish.

“Hang on, buddy. We’ll be fine.” Erik tried to sound encouraging but after losing a lot of blood, the last thing anyone needed was to continue actively fighting. Scott’s body needed time to repair itself, not to be on the run.

Erik compulsively checked the rearview mirror. Scott was unable to turn without incurring a great deal of pain from his new stitches. He had pain pills but wasn’t going to take any more with the new threat. He needed to be clear-headed, which he wasn’t necessarily at the moment. The pain medication had mostly worn off, leaving his head feeling thick while still experiencing the pain of his injuries. It was the worst of both worlds.

“They don’t have to come from behind us, you know,” Scott announced.

“Dammit!” Erik hadn’t thought that with the tracker, they could intercept them anywhere. “We can’t get into that parking lot soon enough. How long have we been on the road?”

“When did we leave?” Scott asked.

“That’s no help. If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to ask the question.”

“Twenty-five minutes?” Scott guessed.

“Will they think we’re making a run from the ranch by coming here?” A sign in the distance marked the outlet mall. “Almost there. Do you see a hotel?”

Scott squinted into the distance, looking for anything that might indicate a long-term stay as opposed to a brief shopping trip.

“There’s a place to the right of the highway, across from the mall.”

“We’ll park there.” Erik sped up but stopped himself from passing the car ahead. There was no reason to highlight themselves. They were almost there.

Erik frenetically looked ahead and behind for the dark-windows SUV. He was convinced the kingpin and his army would appear at any moment.

“I think we’re ahead of them,” Scott said, more from hope than knowledge. He didn’t know anything beyond the information they already had, which wasn’t much.

He turned into the hotel parking lot and selected a spot between two other cars. Scott and Erik both wiped down their sides of the car before going to the trunk. Inside, they wiped everything quickly, just enough to smear any prints. Scott took as many of the video cameras as he could fit in his pockets. A total of four.

With Erik’s help, they strolled to the road and crossed, half-jogging to get through the intersection, which oddly didn’t contain a crosswalk or a light.

They waited for the next gap in cars and hurried as quickly as they could into the mall parking lot. They meandered, looking for a man who was by himself. Women would naturally be leery of two men trying to pay for a ride.

Scott had to stop every hundred feet and catch his breath. Expanding his chest to get more air aggravated his cuts. Three different lacerations had needed stitches, and all of them ached. The tape on the other wounds pulled at his hair and skin.

“I should have shot that guard before he dragged me over the wire,” Scott complained.

“No way. He would have shot you first and then you would have fallen on me. Your pain saved my life. Way to go, team!” Erik chuckled.

Scott grimaced. “You should never laugh at another man’s misery.”

Erik shrugged. “It smells nice out here. A little warm for my jacket, but I can’t take it off, for obvious reasons.”

“I’ve got my guard slayer in my pocket.” The .380 was a little small for a firefight, but it was better than nothing. It was the same situation that they found themselves in before.

Erik helped Scott along when they spotted a man in the next row over.

“Wait here.” Erik walked tall between two cars so he wouldn’t surprise the guy, who looked to be a blue-collar worker, based on his jeans and high-visibility vest. “Hey there! Any way you can give us a ride to a horse ranch nearby?”

“What? No.”

“We’ll make it worth your while. Five hundred cash. And no, I’m not calling a ride share. I used to work for one and I’d rather pay you than any of those companies.”

“Five hundred, you say? Show me.”

Scott walked over stiffly, while attempting to look normal.

He held out the cash.

“I’ll take that, but I’m not giving you a ride.” He pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt.

Erik laughed as he unzipped his jacket and showed the MP5. “I tell you what. Since you tried to roll us, we’re going to take your vehicle, but we’ll take you with us. You can have your vehicle back after we drop you off. I’ll give you a hundred bucks for your troubles and a stern talking-to about your life choices. Don’t be an idiot. I could kill you right here for being a moron, but we’ll give you a second chance. Put the knife away, and let’s go.”

Erik glared at the man.

Scott showed the small pistol in the hand that didn’t hold the cash. “You lost out on four hundred dollars. You’re going to be thinking about that all day. Should have played it straight.” Scott shoved the money back in his pocket and pulled out his phone. “And we have it all recorded.” He shook the phone at the man to make his point.

They hadn’t recorded anything, but that was insurance for later to keep him from reporting them. Scott had no desire to talk with the police, or anyone else for that matter.

The man shoved his knife back in the sheath. His expression cavitated between anger and disappointment.

“I’ll drive. Give me your keys.” Erik held a hand out, crooking his fingers. “Come on. We don’t have all day. You need to get on with your business and so do we.”

“What is your business that you need to go to a horse ranch?” the man asked, making no move for his keys.

“We would have told you if we were friends, but friends don’t pull knives on each other. Gimme your keys.”

Scott moved behind the man. He shifted to keep Erik in view while not letting Scott get behind him. Scott took a quick step, and the man turned around and tried to back into the space Scott had just vacated, but he was too slow. Erik hammered a right-cross into the side of his head, and he went down.

Erik picked him up so they didn’t draw attention. Scott checked his pockets and found the keys. He clicked the remote lock, looking for a vehicle’s lights to flash.

He saw it about ten cars away. It wasn’t a truck, and Scott was instantly disappointed. “It’s a Mini Cooper. You couldn’t drive anything a little more substantial?”

“It’s a good commuter car into the city,” the man mumbled. Scott jammed his pistol into the man’s back while Erik half-carried him to his car. At least it was the four-door Clubman model. Scott squeezed into the back seat, covering the man with his pistol.

“You not only lost four hundred dollars, you got yourself punched in the head. It’s making me wonder about giving you the hundred. You’re being difficult. Here’s a new tack. Stop it or we’ll leave your dead body in a ditch somewhere. You have no leverage with us, not anymore. I can’t believe you tried to roll us!” He turned his head to make a face at Scott. “You could be the dumbest guy we’ve ever met.”

“I took my chance. It’s paid off more times than it hasn’t.”

Erik started the car, put it in gear, and pulled out. He knew the way back. Thirty minutes. He hoped it would be enough time.

“I can’t believe people usually offer you five hundred for a ride.”

“Not that but running across people in the outer parking area. No one in their right mind parks out there.”

“And you found us, who aren’t in our right minds. Shut up while I drive.” Erik focused on the road ahead but coming from the same direction that they originally had, three large, black SUVs raced down the road together.

Erik slowed down. He wanted to see where they were going. “You see that?” he asked Scott.

“I did, and I don’t like it.” Scott pressed his pistol against the man’s neck. The cold steel was a constant reminder that the man was a captive in his own car. Scott had neither sympathy nor mercy.

Erik adjusted the door mirror to see the SUVs turn into the hotel parking lot. It was good enough for him. “Send a text,” Erik told Scott, removing his MP5 and holding it across his chest aimed at their involuntary passenger.

Scott quickly tapped out a message to Jenny telling her that three SUVs of thugs were going to be a half-hour at least before they arrived at the ranch. It was some good news for the stalwart defenders, as he thought of them. It wouldn’t do to consider them a motley crew. Erik and Scott would join them as soon as they could get there.

Erik accelerated to match the speed of the faster cars on the road. “We better hurry.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.” –Roy E. Disney

Jenny rushed back in, not quite breathless because she was in good shape. Sweat ran down her temples.

“I got a text from Scott,” she said and read it to the group. “We have twenty minutes left before that half-hour is up.”

“I take it that Scott and Erik will be back with us about then.”

“Scott confirmed they are on their way and will be here ahead of them. They’ll brief us at that time.”

“We’ll meet them in the parking lot. Is everyone packing?” I asked, tapping my MP5 for emphasis.

The group showed their weapons. Davida held her little pistol up, leaving one MP5 on the table. I ran down the list in my head. The three sisters didn’t have one, nor Davida or Scott.

“This one is for Scott.”

The three sisters entered the conference room, carrying two bags with a minimal number of ammunition boxes. “They only had five boxes of fifty rounds each,” Melissa apologized. “We thought it best to take that rather than look for more.”

“Having two fifty now is better than a thousand later. Good job, ladies, and thank you.” They opened the boxes, and each operator counted out the rounds they needed to fill their second magazine. It left us more than two full boxes of ammunition. I took a handful of extra rounds and shoved them into my pocket. The others did the same. I held back half a box for Erik. If they were going to arrive in time, they could be integral to the defense and could use more ammunition.

With the two camera phones in place and broadcasting, we had full coverage of each approach but nothing at the main entrance.

I counted our numbers again. Fourteen. Three wouldn’t carry a firearm. One had a Derringer.

“I need you to be our eyes and ears,” I told the sisters and Davida. “One of you will need to watch the main entrance. The other two need to watch the live feeds from our phones.”

Jenny jumped in to help them access the profiles. She joined the three sisters to her feed and then to my fake profile, which I’d delete once this operation was done.

The feeds popped up on their phones.

“Text any changes to me, Erik, and Jerry. Erik and Jerry will be in a static defense while I’ll lead a reaction team based on which direction they’re coming from. If they work their way across open fields, we’ll have to figure that out when they don’t appear from the other directions. Right now, we have enough people and firepower to cover about two routes into the compound. Our fallback position is this building. Leave yourself a way to get here. Don’t overcommit. We’re covering the route to the southeast and the one to the north. The reaction team will cover the entry road which is in between the other groups.

“It would be optimal for us if they bulled their way into the parking lot thinking they were invincible. We’ll hit them the second they exit their vehicles. Get down under a car and shoot their feet if you have to. A bullet in the ankle will take a soldier out of the fight as quick as anything. They’ll still be able to shoot, but they aren’t moving. We can kill them at our convenience after that. Everything is about acting on our terms. If we let them dictate how this fight goes, we will surely lose. Keep that in mind when you get into position. Let them come to you. Then do them ugly.”

The middle-aged members of the group were distinctly uncomfortable. They were used to hiding in the open and making a quick strike using an unlikely weapon and disappearing back into the crowd. Unremarkable people watching events that your average person can’t understand. No one expects a person to get murdered in broad daylight or behind closed doors in the safety of their own home.

But that’s where most of our targets died—in places where they least expected it.

“I’d watch the open pastures, but I don’t have a phone,” Davida said, holding her hands up.

“One of you three, give her a phone since you’ll be working together with me.” I pointed at the sisters. There could be no other way. “All of you, dial this number.” I gave them my burner phone number. They called in and hung up after one ring. I added them all to a group text. I added Scott’s number because I already had it, plus Erik’s once Jenny gave it to me. “I’ll send everyone an update once I get the information regarding vehicles and numbers from Scott. Questions?”

“We’re just going to get into a gunfight in the open? Won’t someone call the police?” Brandi asked in a small voice. This wasn’t adding up. It wasn’t at all what her life had been as an operator. The looks on the sisters’ faces suggested none of them were comfortable with getting drafted into the Peace Archive army.

“You’re absolutely right, but I’ll make a phone call and see if we can get the DEA to take jurisdiction.” I might have to give Jimmy a call if we couldn’t wrap this up quickly. “I better talk with the owners and workers.”

I hurried to the front desk to find the bubbly young woman waiting.

“Get your people and get out of here. There’s a drug kingpin’s army on their way to kill us.”

She looked skeptical. “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

“We are DEA, and you’ll see that we’re armed. They found out where our group was and came after us before we could hit them. In any case, we have about fifteen minutes before all hell breaks loose. It would be best if none of you are here, or if you do stay, you better be somewhere safe.”

“What about the horses?”

“Take them into the pasture. Put them in the barn. Just get them away from the central compound, the road, or the parking lot. Make the call and be convincing. You now have fourteen minutes.”

Her initial doubt was replaced by near-terror. I couldn’t let them go on the roads. “New plan. Get everyone who works here into the barn and out of sight. Get the horses inside. When you hear the first shot, that means you better hurry if you’re not already there.”

I didn’t like the new plan. The barn was adjacent to the main building and the sleeping quarters. It was most likely going to see stray bullets. We’d be firing away from the buildings, but the incoming crew would be unconcerned with collateral damage. The drug dealer’s mob would probably spray the whole compound if they could. If they had explosives, it would be even worse.

One by one, the group hurried past. Jenny stopped by me.

The young woman at the counter was finally galvanized into action. She ran out the back door shouting for someone.

“Keep your heads down!” I called toward the group. “Think like operators and you’ll be fine, even though usually, our targets don’t shoot back. That’s not the case this time.” I’d run up against more than one target that shot back, many who shot first.

I had to trust they’d do their jobs individually while also being a part of the group.

Jerry led the way around the buildings to the riding trails on the compound’s north side. He followed them the short distance through the woods until they reached the lane around the property and then backed into the woods.

“We need to set up along this track. Both sides. In the brush.” They backtracked.

Jerry didn’t want to point out specific ambush points. Each operator needed to own their selection.

Brenda took a place behind the base of a tree surrounded by a heavy bush. It was between two riding trails.

Cooper picked a better spot to the side of both trails. He was to Brenda’s side. That left the far side for Jerry, where there was little cover. Jerry chose a pine tree and climbed up one limb off the ground. He was above head height. His first shot would probably be clear, but after that, he’d be mostly in the open, depending on how far the enemy made it down the trail.

He pulled up the feed from the camera phone. The road was deserted. He watched nothing happening for a moment, checked the side areas of the video to see that nothing was parked and there were no people. The baseline was an empty road. He closed his phone and adjusted his position. If this went on too long, he’d have to move. Standing on the tree branch was uncomfortable, to say the least. He wasn’t as young as he appeared, and he could feel the cramps starting in the arches of his feet. He hopped to the ground, slung his MP5 over his shoulder, and carried his phone in his hand, compulsively checking the video feed.

He went to Brenda first. “Cooper, stand up so I can see you. Quick check to put my mind at ease.” He waited for the other operator to stand. Brenda followed suit and stood, happy to be out of the bush. “Brenda, what’s your line of fire and where does it overlap with Cooper’s?”

She looked around. “I don’t think like that. I figured I’d shoot people who come up either of these two trails.” She pointed at the trails that wrapped around the tree and bush where she was set up.

“Cooper?” Jerry asked.

He held his arms out in a cone. “Anyone in this area, but only after they pass that tree with the weird limb sticking out the side.”

Jerry nodded, checked his phone to see that the road was still barren, and turned to Brenda. “I suggest you refine your lane to this area, providing an overlap in the middle and coverage on the right side because that’s where Cooper will be blocked. I’ll overlap your right side. All of us will cover that middle area because that’s the most open and most likely avenue of approach. If they were good, they wouldn’t use it for that very reason, and that’s why we need to cover a much wider approach.”

“I think I understand.” She held her arms out to replicate the cone that Jerry had showed her.

“And let them get closer, past that crazy tree, before we open fire. Let them fill the kill-box. With three of us shooting, we can take out a whole bunch before they shoot back.” Jerry waved for Cooper to get back under cover. “Back into position.” Jerry checked his phone and moved to his tree where he stood behind it, waiting until the last minute to get into it so he wouldn’t cramp up and limit his ability to aim and shoot.

A Mini Cooper raced into the parking lot and stopped. Erik climbed out of the driver’s seat while

Jenny and I intercepted him and Scott as they exited the vehicle.

A man in a working outfit got out and walked around to the driver’s door. Scott peeled off five twenty-dollar bills and handed them over in conjunction with delivering an F-bomb heavy tirade at the man, demeaning his lineage for the past five generations all the way through his own life choices. He delivered one final barrage before stepping away from the door so the man could get in.

The Mini backed out and spun the tires, throwing gravel on the other cars in the lot and the people standing there. Erik raised his MP5 and aimed at the small car. He let it leave without shooting.

“We shoulda killed him,” Erik said.

“He won’t make any waves. He’ll be long gone in no time,” Scott added.

“I’ll figure out later what that was all about, but for now, what did you see?”

“Three black SUVs, probably Escalades, maybe Suburbans, big, though, with heavily tinted windows. I don’t think there were any other vehicles with them. I only saw the three driving into the parking lot where we dumped Scott’s Bimmer.”

“How many people? That’s the big question.”

Erik grimaced. “I don’t know.”

Scott shook his head.

“I’m glad you made it back here in one piece and that you bought us more time. We’re mostly setup. Three up north covering that ingress route. I want Erik with Matt and Henrietta to cover the short trail there that leads to the road around the property. Davida is watching the pastures to the south and west to see if they come at us the hard way, which I doubt. Scott will stay here with Arctic and me. We’re the quick reaction force. Also, give Arctic your phone, Erik.”

He didn’t hesitate.

Jenny tapped him into the Facebook live video showing the approach to his area. She handed the phone back.

“That’s groovy,” he said.

“Go. Hurry and set up. We need to be ready since they could be here any time. We’re playing defense just until we can counterattack. They won’t know what hit them.”

“With me,” Erik called and ran toward the horse trail leading south. It was the shortest route to the compound from the lane. The entrance looped around from the east and would take more time to get into the compound and on a restricted drive. If they entered this way, we could collapse our defenses, bringing in the group to the north and south while Jenny, Scott, and I took them face-first.

I had no hope for a negotiation.

They were coming for blood.

“Type up what we know and text it to everyone, if you’d be so kind. I’m going to check on Erik’s position.” I looked at Scott. “You stay here with Miss Jenny and mind the fort.”

“I have no intention of gallivanting, waltzing, or even slow-dancing. I think I’ll sit right here and do nothing. Oh hey! I have a few remote cameras.” He pulled them from his pocket.

“We’re good. No time to get anything else set up.” I waved and jogged across the small parking lot and into the woods. I pulled up the video feeds, happy to see nothing. Jenny would be watching. She’d put Scott on it, too, in case she needed to become a shooter.

Erik and the others stood in an area talking animatedly.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“I’ve asked what they think about the best course of action for this team.” He tried to stretch tall.

“No. There’s no time for committees.” I scanned the area. “Come with me.” I waved for them to follow and walked ten yards closer to the parking lot. “Matt here, Henrietta there, and you’re over there. Shoot that way, cover your neighbor without shooting them. Any questions? Erik, keep your eyes on that video feed. If those three SUVs show up and pass you to get to the main entrance, prepare to bug out and attack from this side. You’ll hit them in their flank or from behind. If they do enter the parking lot, look for a text from Arctic.”

“We’ll watch for it,” Erik said and moved into position along with the other two.

I checked the video feed on my phone. A black SUV approached down the lane.

“They’re coming,” I shouted with everything I had. I turned and ran toward the lot. The sisters were on the other side of the entry road from where Erik and his team were. That wasn’t going to work. “You three, get to the parking lot, right now!”

I burst into the open with a final sprint toward the parked vehicles. Jenny was off to the side, and Scott was in the middle. I took the far side and checked my phone. A text arrived from Jenny announcing the arrival of at least one SUV.

I wanted to believe this was the only one, but the camera angle wasn’t optimal. There could have been more. I jumped back and forth between the eastern feed and the feed that showed the road coming from around the west side of the facility that continued along the northern fence line.

The sisters loped across the open area. I pointed them toward the check-in building. “Go inside.” They hurried by.

The first SUV passed the phone camera, then the second and the third. Two cars were close behind.

“They got my Bimmer!” Scott called out.

Five vehicles, not three, but to bring Scott’s car, they’d have to use people who were already with them. Total of twenty, I guesstimated.

I typed a quick message to the group chat. “Est 20 shooters.”

I’d revise the estimate if more information presented itself.

Until then…

I checked my MP5. One in the chamber. Two full magazines and fifteen extra rounds in my pocket. I was ready to go head-to-head with these clowns. We could catch them in a crossfire and that would be it for them. It all depended on everything.

They passed the phone, and we lost sight of them. It was a tense twenty seconds until the first SUV appeared moving slowly down the road connecting the lane to the parking lot. The first SUV stopped before it entered.

We were too far away to catch them in any kind of effective crossfire. My mind raced with the challenges now that we had the setup.

Or did we. The cars backed out of the way, and one SUV reversed down the lane. That reduced the impact on us, but not by enough. A second SUV backed down the lane.

I glanced back and forth between my phone and the stopped vehicle. No one exited. With the darkened rear window, I couldn’t see the outlines of anyone inside. There could have been one person or ten in there. I couldn’t tell.

The doors popped open, all but the driver’s door. The front passenger exited first. He stood without a weapon, where the two men who climbed out the back doors carried MP5s like we did. I had to assume that theirs were capable of fully automatic fire.

The man walked forward, stopping in front of his vehicle. He glanced from one side of the parking lot to the other and turned when Scott stood up.

“Can I help you good people?” Scott called.

“Were you the one who burned down our facility?” A Southern accent that sounded more like a politician than a drug lord.

“Do I look like someone with that kind of energy?” Scott shot back. “I’m one step away from being an invalid.”

“You don’t look like him. Who else is here with you?”

I checked my phone. The other two SUVs had parked in front of the camera on the northern perimeter. Eight men departed the vehicles, readied their weapons, and tromped toward the horse trails that led directly to the compound.

Jenny was ahead of me and texted. Eight coming in from north.

I added, South group converge on entry road. Stay down. Prepare to fire. I looked up between each couple of words to make sure I didn’t miss something. When I finished, I shoved my burner phone in my pocket with my satellite phone, which I had previously thought was untraceable. I didn’t need the distraction. My focus had to be one hundred percent dedicated to this part of the fight.

I had to trust the operators to do the right thing even though we were fighting a soldier’s battle and not conducting a single-person hit. The principles and tactics were completely different.

I caught the scent of something in the air. Twisting through the smell of the pine trees and the bitterness of adrenaline was something else, something light. Jenny’s anti-perspirant. I wondered if it was working overtime as the outside temperatures competed with the heat from the tension that rose within.

Miss Jenny. I loved the thought of her along with everything else. It made me angry that we were crouched in a parking lot, the target of a drug gang. They obviously didn’t know who we were.

The man crossed his arms and leaned against the hood of his vehicle. He wore dress slacks, not jeans or other more rugged clothing. In my mind, he was a lieutenant where the others were soldiers. He wouldn’t get his hands dirty. I couldn’t see what the men behind him were doing or those from the cars.

“Cough him up and we’ll let the rest of you go,” the man offered.

Scott leaned against the car next to us. “That’s not much of a deal. How many of us do you think there are?”

The man laughed.

Tactics. Maybe they weren’t different. Surprise. Finish the hit cleanly. Extricate yourself from the engagement zone.

“You have enough that we brought more, but half of yours are women. You need to give him up—and those girls you took from us—now would be a good time before you get yourselves killed.”

From the north side of the compound, beyond buildings that blocked our view, a single shot rang out, followed quickly by numerous answering shots, and then a barrage.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Amateurs make it look effortful, Professionals make it look effortless..” –Sahil Bloom

Jerry watched the eight men move toward them. They were taking the path of least resistance, confident in their approach that they were alone.

Raid too many unsuspecting victims? Jerry thought. He moved slowly, bringing the barrel of his weapon to his eyesight. His heart hammered in his chest.

He glanced to his left, where Brenda was in the middle and Cooper was to the side. They had a good view of the approaching drug soldiers, each in their line of fire, but the incoming men weren’t spread out. They needed to let them get close so the last of them would be in the kill-zone before the three started shooting.

Surprise was as great a weapon as the MP5. Aim, fire, re-aim, fire again. Each of the operators needed to kill three of the incoming. That could be done in under two seconds. The approaching soldiers wouldn’t know what hit them.

They wore khakis as if they were some sort of paramilitary and loose-fitting shirts with vests that appeared to be load bearing. Jerry couldn’t determine if they wore body armor or not. It wouldn’t surprise him. His first shot was going to be a head shot. After that, he intended to double-tap the bodies. The fallacy of body armor was that it protected the wearer. It kept the wearer from getting killed, but the energy of the impact hitting the vest still transferred to the body, just not through penetration. It was like getting hit in the chest by a sledgehammer. Two hits like that and the target wouldn’t be running away. They’d be flat on their back, gasping for air.

It comforted Jerry knowing that he had operators on his team. People who were unafraid to engage others in a struggle for life and death. Had these druggies killed people before? Maybe. Maybe not. But they’d probably never faced professionals.

The first three passed the tree with the funny branch. When the fourth reached it, a shot rang out from Jerry’s left.

Brenda had fired. Jerry didn’t look at her or wait. He took the second man through the head as he intended the instant the first fell.

Cooper fired as well, hitting the second man. They fired together into the soldiers they could see. The third went down, but everyone behind him scrambled for cover.

Three down. That left five men against three. The enemy’s MP5s barked and chattered as they were fired on fully automatic. They raced through their magazines after the full barrage. Brenda’s tree and Cooper’s position were taking all the incoming. No one had realized Jerry was in the tree. He’d only fired twice and from above the enemy’s line of sight.

He pointed his weapon around the tree, looking for any target in the brush. He saw a leg, took careful aim, and squeezed off two rounds in quick succession. The target yelped and rolled out of sight.

A rustle and shouts. The men were up and running. Some to the east and others to the west. They were going to flank Jerry’s team. Jerry jumped from the branch and headed east to cut them off. He couldn’t let them get around him.

He glanced over his shoulder to see Brenda running toward the compound. She had seen him run and thought he was abandoning his position. Cooper was on the move, too, but west to cut off those who had gone into the woods.

Jerry had no more time to think about the other two. He was now in a fight for his life. One on two, maybe one on three. He hadn’t seen exactly how many had come this way. One should be limping pretty heavily with a bullet in his leg.

But they were moving quickly. At least two. Tearing through the brush with no pretension of stealth.

Jerry accelerated to keep up with them. The men had heavier brush to run through. Jerry was able to zigzag along a horse trail until he stopped seeing movement and there was no sound of the men tearing through the foliage. He dropped prone and crawled under a nearby low pine. The sap was sticky on his jacket sleeves, but it was better than the alternative of standing in the open. The pine needles jabbed into his midriff with his coat open.

He aimed his MP5 at where he thought the men might be.

What if they got around me? he wondered. What if they went back? No, I would have heard them.

Jerry waited, as painful as that was with the gremlins of doubt tearing at his mind. He had to believe that they were doing exactly what he was doing. Trying not to get killed. All other priorities were out the window. There was nothing left but men fighting to stay alive.

Cooper had seen the men break both ways, heading east and west as they tried to get away from the ambush area. Three had gone down hard. That left five. Two came this way, one limping badly. Cooper only had to keep the healthy one from getting past him. He focused solely on that man as the target.

The limping man would remain in the back of his mind until he had to be dealt with. The running man was putting distance between the two.

Can’t let him get away, Cooper thought. He angled toward the man, firing poorly aimed shots while he ran. He wanted to slow the druggie down so he could intercept him.

The man disappeared. Cooper took one more step and dove hard to his right. A burst of bullets ripped through the space where he’d just been. He low-crawled quickly to get behind the man, try to get a clear shot.

Another burst savaged the bush he’d jumped behind. By crawling, he couldn’t see where the shooter was and now, he was in between the runner and the limper. He turned and crawled toward the ambush site, turning his back to the man who had been running.

Take out the injured man first, he thought.

The man limped hard toward him, gasping and grunting with the effort. His dark skin had turned ashen from the loss of blood. He stopped and leaned against a tree.

Cooper aimed through the bush and fired three times in rapid succession before diving behind the nearest tree. The body hitting the ground was all Cooper needed to confirm a hit. He circled the tree to put it between him and the healthy man. A burst of full-auto hit the pine’s trunk. Cooper was thankful to be in shape enough that no part of his body stuck out.

“Give up!” a voice cried from the other side of the tree. He sounded like he was thirty yards away, give or take. An easy shot, if Cooper could get it. At least he was no longer a threat to get by him and into the compound where the others weren’t expecting someone coming from this direction.

It had been Jerry, Cooper, and Brenda’s job to keep them from getting by.

But there had been too many and they didn’t present a good target. They’d fired too soon. There were too many recriminations to count. It had broken down into a battle of individual shooters pairing off and fighting it out.

Cooper reached the weapon around the tree without looking and sprayed half a magazine in the direction the voice had come from.

A grunt suggested he might have hit his target. He wasn’t about to stick his head out. But he did have something that could give him an edge. There was an MP5 lying on the ground by the limping man’s body.

Cooper pushed off the tree to increase his speed, kept it between him and the shooter for as long as he could and then dodged past the man with two blood stains on his shirt and vest. Cooper didn’t push his good luck by looking for extra magazines. They were undoubtedly there, but he didn’t have time. He ducked behind the nearest tree, surprised that no rounds chased after him. Not a single shot had been fired.

He dropped to the ground and low-crawled to the next tree. He popped up and looked around it to find his enemy.

He pulled back and dodged around the other side for a longer scan of the woods.

Fear crept into the back of his throat and threatened to choke him. There was a man intent on killing him, somewhere out there, and Cooper didn’t know where.

The three sisters rushed into the conference room and found Heath still at his computer. His MP5 rested on the table next to him.

“What are you doing?”

“Finding out who this Stone Chisel is and where he lives. How’s it going out there?” His phone was on the table with a number of unread text messages waiting for his attention.

“Could be better,” Joni suggested. “They’re getting ready to throw down out there. And you’re in here hiding.”

With an exasperated sigh, he articulated his status. “I think I have something, but wanted to cross-reference a couple data points to verify I have the right address, and then I’ll go outside into the middle of a firefight?” He didn’t sound confident. Shooting sounded outside the building. They looked up together, but they couldn’t see anything since there was only one window in the room and it had a curtain pulled over it.

“I better hurry,” Heath suggested.

The sisters nodded in unison. Brandi went into the corridor to watch for intruders.

Heath tapped a quick text, closed his computer, and picked up his weapon. “I better get out there. Who knows how effective one more well-aimed round could be?”

“May you hit what you aim at,” Melissa said. She kissed Heath on the cheek.

He nodded tightly and squeezed past Joni on his way to the front door. He stopped, turned around, and headed for the rear exit, which he hadn’t seen but assumed was there. They had to have more than one exit from the public building.

Heath stepped outside, surprised by the waning light. It wouldn’t be long before darkness would consume them. After that, it would be a free-for-all. They needed to hurry. The firing stopped to the north, so he headed that way, moving quickly but not running.

Someone ran toward him. He stopped by the edge of the barn and took aim.

The operator who called herself Brenda.

“Hey!” he called and waved her over. She sprinted to him and planted herself against the barn.

“Is anyone coming?” she asked.

“No. It’s just you. What happened to Jerry and Cooper?”

“I was trying to draw the men into following me so they’d be in a crossfire. Did they get them?”

Heath threw his hands up and shook his head. He had no choice. “We have to check it out.” He ran from the barn to the tack shed without waiting to see if Brenda would follow, but she did.

They moved into the trees alongside the horse trail. Heath slowed considerably from their previous pace. Death lurked in the growing shadows unless Jerry and Cooper were successful in bringing down the rest of the drug lord’s soldiers.

They stalked to the engagement area. Brenda pointed to the tree and bush where she’d previously hidden.

Three bodies were on the ground thirty yards ahead. Heath motioned for Brenda to stay where she was. He slunk forward, moving from tree to tree until he was beyond the dead to where the rest of the gang had survived. There were signs they’d gone both east and west based on the footprints in the soft dirt. There was also a blood trail.

He ignored the blood trail and went the other way. He reasoned that if someone was injured, they were less of a threat to attack the compound.

Heath slowed. He wasn’t an outdoors type despite putting on a good act. Brenda followed along blindly. Working in the woods wasn’t her forte either. He studied the ground. “Looks like they’re running,” he said.

She nodded, not because she knew but because she thought it made sense.

“I don’t think we should try to track them,” she suggested.

Heath looked ahead and couldn’t see anything. “You’re probably right. Let’s go back to the compound.”

Brenda was off like a shot. Heath hurried after her.

A single round fired from nearby.

Heath dove to the ground, but Brenda kept running. He thought it came from behind him.

More shots. Definitely to the west. He crawled behind a tree and peeked out from behind it toward the sound of the gunfire. Then he had a better thought. The men he was following were behind him. He dropped to the dirt and crawled hard sideways to get away from where he’d exposed himself.

He admitted he wasn’t good at outdoor tactics. That was never his shtick. He had electrocuted two of his targets while engineering a high-speed car crash for the third. He wasn’t a shooter, and he wasn’t an outdoors type.

He listened to the sound of the woods. Bugs zipping here and there. The sigh of a light breeze. Trees brushing against each other.

And the crack of branch breaking as if someone had stepped on it.

Heath moved quickly, ready to fire. He couldn’t shoot at the sound. Jerry and Cooper were both out here. Friendly fire was never friendly.

He had to wait and see who approached before he could take them on.

A face appeared in an opening between two trees growing closely together. Not one of the operators. Heath didn’t risk missing. He clicked the MP5 to full-auto and sprayed the man, blasting him backward.

Heath sat still and waited.

The pain of the impacts arrived at the same time as the sound. A weapon from behind tree branches and brush, also on full-auto, stitched rounds across his chest. His arms went numb, and he dropped his MP5. There were no other sounds as peace returned to the woods. His vision blurred to darkness.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” –Bill Gates

Jerry heard a single burst of gunfire. It was farther away than he suspected. He’d been waiting in the wrong area, unless these were the kingpin’s soldiers that had gone the other way. He didn’t know, and it chafed on his very soul.

He lay hidden under a bush. If he was spotted, they could shoot right through it, but without having a direction from which an enemy would approach, he was best camouflaged within the foliage.

The shadows were growing. Too soon, they’d be maneuvering through the darkness in an attempt to kill each other. That would add a level of difficulty through confusion that Jerry wanted no part of.

It was now or never. He backed out of the bush and rose into a low crouch. He was young enough that his knees protested slightly but responded to his call to action. He moved forward, freezing with the second burst that sounded closer. He stretched upward slowly, staring into the abyss of shadows without blinking in a superhuman effort to see what could be seen.

Movement across a sunbeam. A man. He also crouched, but he was moving away, toward the sound of the first burst.

Jerry aimed and fired rapidly, single-shot mode, sending three rounds at the shadow of a man who wasn’t one of his fellow operators.

Jerry dropped to the ground and crawled away. He waited and listened as intently as he could, but his ears were still ringing.

After two full minutes, he stood in a crouch and moved quickly forward, ready to fire again if the man wasn’t dead.

But he was, with three bullets in his chest in a fairly close pattern. Jerry felt a quick sense of pride in the tight grouping. Not far away, another druggie was dead. Jerry liberated their MP5s and spare magazines. He continued to where they’d fired to find Heath.

Most of the impacts weren’t life-threatening, but one had hit him center of the chest, just to the side of his sternum. A clean shot through the heart. Heath wasn’t even supposed to be there.

Jerry closed Heath’s eyes and took the dead man’s MP5 and spare magazine as well. Jerry now carried four weapons and six spare magazines. It was more to deny the enemy the ability to rearm and reload than to stock up for himself. All their people who wanted weapons had them.

Jerry took one last look at the man and headed into the woods, searching for any of the other kingpin’s soldiers. As the tally stood, they’d seen eight approach and killed three, wounded a fourth, then killed two more. That meant there was probably two healthy targets running around and one injured man.

Jerry hurried to the initial ambush site, where he found no new evidence. The blood trail of the man he shot in the leg, but nothing more. He followed the trail to the west and found Cooper standing over two bodies.

“Five that way.” Jerry pointed with his head. “Two here. Where’s the last one?”

“I heard a vehicle start up and speed away, surprising since my ears are still ringing. I usually wear muffs when I’m on the range.”

Jerry hung his head. “Heath is dead. Brenda ran off.”

Cooper’s jaw tightened with the revelation.

Jerry pulled out his phone and texted the info to the group chat.

The kingpin’s soldiers glanced in the direction of the shooting but made no move to join them. They held their positions around the vehicles. Besides the two from the SUV, only two more appeared from the cars. Four soldiers, the lieutenant, and the driver of the SUV, who continued to sit behind the wheel.

Only four. We had them outnumbered.

“Your people are dying off rather quickly,” I said, standing. I raised my voice. “Erik, assume firing positions behind cover.”

The lieutenant snapped his fingers. His soldiers aimed at me.

Behind them, a second SUV rolled down the entry road and stopped beside the cars. A man jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran forward. He stopped when he was next to the lieutenant and whispered into his ear.

The lieutenant never uncrossed his arms. He continued his look of indifference.

I was starting to contemplate what it would mean to let them go, but quickly shoved that thought out of my mind. These men sealed their fate when they came after us to reclaim the sisters that they had kidnapped. It was nothing more than saving face after having their ego bruised. They wouldn’t let go even if we let them go. They’d keep coming until there were none left.

I leaned across the roof of the car and aimed my MP5 at the lieutenant. “Now would be a good time to give yourselves up. There’s no escape.”

“Nothing has changed,” the man said, waving away the driver of the other SUV.

Jenny got up and walked to me. She leaned close. “Jerry texted. Seven dead on the north side. One escaped by SUV, but he’s here. These few are all that’s left. Davida hasn’t seen anything.”

“Four shooters, two drivers, and the big man in charge,” I confirmed. The numbers were critical. “Ask Jerry to join us, please.” I gave Jenny a quick hug.

One never knew the last time it would happen. Especially not in our line of work. Here we were, lined up against people with little concern for their own safety. If they ran, their boss would do far worse to them than we would if they stayed. With reasoning like that, how could they do anything other than do what they were sent to do?

Then again, they were hesitating. They should have already attacked us rather than wait on the group that tried to penetrate the northern perimeter.

Jenny moved away, hurrying down the line of cars to the one on the end.

“Heath is dead,” I mumbled. The anger and self-flagellation began afresh. From what was supposed to be a training exercise. I spoke up so the lieutenant could hear me. “What are you waiting for? Your boy just told you that your people that went the other way are all dead. He left them behind. That’s not what real soldiers do. You’re a bunch of people playing dress-up.”

I wanted to get under his skin. I was mad and wanted to put him out of my misery. I casually adjusted my aim. I wanted to find out why he was waiting. Maybe the kingpin himself was coming.

“You need to bring those two women out here. I want them. I’m willing to pay.”

That was different. A man used to getting his way. Couldn’t get it by force so he was trying an alternate method. It would be equally ineffective.

I aimed as best I could while leaning on the car’s roof. I ducked to look down the sights and make one final adjustment. I squeezed the trigger and prepared to take a second shot, but the first one exploded through his face.

Some wouldn’t kill an unarmed man, but this wasn’t a friendly joust at a renaissance faire. They’d come to kill us. He led a group of the kingpin’s soldiers. He was a valid target. All of them were.

“Attack!” I shouted. Erik’s group unleashed a brutal barrage that blasted the drivers and two of the soldiers. The other two dove into the trees on the north side of the drive, away from Erik and his gang, but they didn’t go without Scott firing his small pistol at them and Jenny delivering withering fire.

Erik ran his group to the vehicles, using the cars as cover. Henrietta assumed a prone position to look under the SUV for targets.

A bush moved. She unloaded the rest of her magazine into it, starting at the ground and letting the barrel jump up. A man tumbled forward, dropping his weapon and sprawling on the ground.

With that death, only one remained. Erik ran down the line of vehicles and turned past the last to run into the woods on the same side as where the last soldier disappeared. Erik fired into the underbrush. He emptied a magazine then burned through the second.

“More fire!”

Matt tracked his barrel back and forth across the woods. Swapped magazines and did it again. Henrietta was furiously reloading a magazine with her spare rounds. She stopped halfway through and slapped the mag home so she could continue firing.

I added my firepower to theirs in short bursts. I ran out from behind the vehicle, across the opening, and crouched behind the SUV’s hood where I had a clear view of the woods. I looked as deep in as I could see, looking for movement of an escaping enemy, but there was none. Erik swapped his spent magazine with his freshly refilled one and renewed firing at the bushes.

I saw a movement. The last soldier stood. He still had his MP5, but it dangled loosely from his hand. He’d been hit.

I brought my MP5 up, but Erik was there first. He emptied the rest of his magazine into the man. I would have done it with one shot, kill him and be done with it.

There wasn’t any mercy. As soon as it was over, something tugged at my stomach. Then again, we’d lost one of our own. I guess I should have been satisfied that it was only one. Jenny joined me, wrapping her arm around my waist.

“Heath texted Stone Chisel’s address,” Jenny said. “It’s a crappy consolation prize, but now we can cut the head off the snake.”

“Not only is she beautiful, she’s smart too, with a genius level of emotional intelligence.” I kissed her. “Now we have the cleanup. I don’t even know where to start.”

“Jimmy?” she suggested.

It was exactly what I was thinking. I dialed the number I had for him. He answered on the first ring. “Who am I talking to?”

“Jimmy. It’s Ian. I can’t thank you enough for the heads-up. We’ve dealt with the issue, but there’s a bit of a mess. I’m not sure we’ll be able to clean it up ourselves. I need your help.”

“I figured. That’s why I answered. I can’t ghost you, Ian. Not after what you’ve done for me and my family. My next call is to the head of the DEA.”

“You know where I am. I’d be pleased to see the feds roll in and take charge of this mess without asking too many questions. If you want, I’ll meet them and talk to them without giving away my role.”

“It doesn’t have to be you, but they’ll need somebody. I might call you back or I might not. You probably want to pull your people out of there.”

“We’ll be gone in ten minutes. We have a location on Stone Chisel. You can consider him sanctioned. No cost. Thanks for everything, Jimmy.”

Jenny started tapping on her phone. “Pack your trash. We’re leaving. Meet in the parking lot in nine minutes.”

“I’ll bring Heath,” Jerry volunteered.

Brenda appeared with the sisters. I wondered why she wasn’t with her team. “Where’s Jerry and Cooper?”

She shook her head and shrugged. “I tried to get them to follow me,” she pleaded. “Heath and I went back, and Heath…” Her voice trailed off with the pain of doubt. Her body posture suggested she had branded herself a coward.

I didn’t want to look at her. She’d run out on her teammates twice, but this wasn’t what we did or who we were. She could kill people, but it had to be on her terms. “We had to eliminate fifteen people. If they had caught us in the conference room, we would all be dead. They didn’t, we’re not, and they are. You have nothing to be ashamed of. This style of fighting is ugly and brutal. I don’t begrudge anyone for not wanting to be a part of it.”

She hung her head. “I got one in the ambush. The first one.”

“You’re fine. Forgive yourself, because I hold nothing against you. Get loaded up and ready to go.” I clapped her on the shoulder. “Matt! Move this SUV out of the way. Henrietta, get that second one out of there. Watch the glass.” Shattered glass covered the inside of the first SUV. The other vehicles were mostly untouched but for a stray round here or there.

“I’m taking my car,” Scott declared.

“Not if you can’t remove the tracking device within the next six minutes.” It would be best if he didn’t leave his car there. We couldn’t leave any of our cars. Even with Jimmy’s help, we didn’t need to leave any easy clues for the DEA to find. If they dug deeply enough, they’d find something, but how hard would they look with a drug gang fight that helped them in their war on drugs? Their efforts would be best spent on continuing to dismantle Stone Chisel’s organization rather than look for those who eliminated the assets, both personnel and material.

I had to trust that our operational security measures held solid under the scrutiny of the federal government. We covered our tracks well. Harper’s Dude Ranch had nothing that tied our receipts to us. The finances would dead-end in the Cayman Islands.

The ranch. The employees were still in the barn.

“Get our stuff. I’ll let the employees know that they’re safe and can tend to the horses.”

Davida jogged up. She waved since she was out of breath and couldn’t speak.

“Get your stuff and find your ride. We’re out of here,” I told her. I ran for the barn while Jenny bolted for the bunk house.

The SUV rolled into the parking lot and took an empty spot. The other moved off to the side of the entry road, clearing the way for the southeast region’s operators to escape.

Ten minutes was an arbitrary timeframe. I had no idea how long the DEA was going to take, but they hadn’t showed up with the kingpin’s troops, knowing that they would be in a vicious firefight if they had. In their minds, there had to be no value in getting between rival gangs.

Even though we weren’t a gang, we didn’t need an innocent third party getting themselves shot.

It would take every crime scene investigator in the area to process the scene. The ranch would be non-operational for weeks.

I’d send another payment to cover their losses so the horses could be taken care of along with the employees. None of this was their fault.

I shouted once I reached the barn. “It’s all clear! You can come out.”

The receptionist from the front desk was the first who showed her face. “There was a lot of shooting,” she started. “What happened?”

“Bad men tried to steal our lives and your business. We stopped them, but I’m afraid we aren’t going to deal with the authorities. Find your horses and calm them down. Take them to the south and west pastures, but don’t go north or leave the parking lot because you’ll see stuff you don’t want to see.”

She looked like she didn’t believe me.

“When the feds arrive, just tell them the truth. You’ll realize that you know nothing about us, any of us. Let’s keep it that way. Just know that you’re safe. I have to go. I appreciate the accommodations and wish we could have availed ourselves of more. I’ll make an additional payment in a week or so to cover any losses from the DEA closing this place down while they conduct their investigation.”

“Wait, what? We’re going to be closed?” someone asked from behind the receptionist.

“I have no doubt, but you’ll not lose any revenue during that time. I’ll make sure of that. It’s business as usual for you without any annoying customers riling up the horses. Just you guys taking care of the animals. Ride and enjoy life. You’ve been given a new lease.” I held up my hand to forestall more questions. I turned away and hurried from the barn.

Jerry walked by with Heath’s body over his shoulder. “What are we going to do with him?”

I didn’t have a good answer. We couldn’t be caught carrying a body around. Our fingerprints were on shell casings scattered across the compound.

It was a mess. But being out of there was more important than smudging every print.

“Put him in the back of the SUV. Let the feds find him and try to figure out who he was or why he got killed.”

“He’ll get a crap burial. An unknown, little better than a faceless, nameless vagrant,” Jerry said softly.

“That’s the life we lead, and this is the suckiest part of our job. The only thing that would be worse is if we lost this fight and all of our bodies were scattered around these grounds.”

Jerry nodded and strode toward the parking lot, keeping his head up as he fought with emotions he wasn’t supposed to have.

That was good. We didn’t need cold-hearted killers. They had to believe in ridding the world of bad people. They were paid well to be nameless, faceless vagrants in that pursuit.

We didn’t have to like it, however, when things didn’t go our way.

I went to the conference room to see if we left anything behind. Heath’s computer sat on the table. I took it, but he had sent us the most important information. His work had not gone for naught.

I wiped the bottles and the tables, but quickly. I was sure I missed things, but selfishly, I made sure anything Jenny or I had touched was all the way clean. No one needed to know that Ian and Jenny Bragg had been anywhere around there. No one except the vice president and the tracker he had on my phone.

It made me wonder when he put it there. Probably one of the times we met with him or the president and weren’t allowed any electronics. I had ditched anything else we left behind, but not my untraceable phone. I had such faith in it that I didn’t check to see if it had been tampered with.

It made me want to punch Jimmy in the face. He had records of everywhere I’d been, which would tie me to too many murders. That would make Jimmy complicit in that he did nothing about it, unless the connection was made from his records that he was the one who contracted with me. Then again, if administrations changed, the next one could take him down for working outside the legal system to remove enemies of the state, and they’d take me with him.

All those records needed to be destroyed. The tracker on my phone needed to be removed. And if a hostile administration came into power, then Jenny and I would have to leave the country. We’d join Vinny in the Caymans, a non-extradition country.

All because Jimmy put a tracker on my phone. There could be no record of our interactions except based on donations to the party. I hated politics. I mentally added that to the list of things needed to help clean up this mess. I sprinted out the front door, heading for our rental Jeep. Jenny was in the driver’s seat with the engine running.

The others were loading into their vehicles.

Scott was behind the wheel of his BMW grinding back and forth on the entry road. He must have found the tracker.

When I climbed into the passenger seat, Jenny explained, “Removing fingerprints by grinding the shell casings.”

It was better than nothing.

“Stop on the exit road,” I told Jenny. “We need to get rid of this hardware.”

“Already ahead of you. We’re dumping them in the back of the SUV where Jerry put Heath.”

I nodded. Jenny’s foresight deserved more than that, but I was spent. I wiped my thunderstick down, quickly, removing the magazine and keeping it. There were too many bullets inside that I’d touched. I handed the weapon to Jerry, who tossed it in the back.

“Before you ask, I took everything out of his pockets.” Jerry didn’t look happy.

“Thanks, man. Take care of yourself.” I nodded to him as men do.

Jerry tipped his chin back at me. His face was tight as he clenched his teeth.

Jenny drove down the road, making sure to drive over any shell casings she saw even though with the evening twilight, it was inevitable that we’d miss something.

We’d have to wait for the repercussions and hope that we’d done everything right hiding our identities and mitigating our presence. I’d be a nervous wreck for a long time, waiting for a bang on the door from a US Marshal carrying a warrant for my arrest.

The others followed us out. We took a left and went the long way around the compound. Anyone coming in would use the shortest route, I reasoned, the one to the right. The one that the kingpin’s soldiers had used.

It’s what the GPS recommended, and we were all slaves to technology.

The small parade of vehicles accounted for everyone. I tapped on my burner phone to send a text to the group. “Disappear for the next few weeks. I’m sorry how things turned out. I didn’t plan for any of this to happen, but you acquitted yourselves well. All of you, doing what had to be done to save each other.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Action is the foundational key to all success.” –Pablo Picasso

Jenny drove while I navigated us closer to the kingpin’s house. I wanted to be within a mile so I could conduct a reconnaissance before we took action. Go by on foot. Watch it from a distance under the anonymity of a lone stranger on the street.

This was going to be a standard hit, if there ever was such a thing.

We’d taken down people before who had security whose sole purpose was to keep us from doing what we were going to do.

This was personal, like the hit on the individual who killed Chaz.

How long before the kingpin could move more security into place? The loss of fourteen had to be a heavy blow that would drive him into a rage.

Good. Angry people made mistakes, as I well knew. That’s why I wouldn’t take any action until the cold edge returned.

The closest we could get was two miles away. Rich people weren’t surrounded by hotels and businesses. They were surrounded by similar palatial estates. I’d have to wear my best jogging clothes, which meant we’d be going to the store.

We pulled up to a boutique hotel and parked in the back, away from prying eyes casually driving by.

We strolled in and went straight to the concierge. “Is the honeymoon suite available?” I asked. He looked me over. I wasn’t dirty like some of the others from our group who’d been crawling through the trees to outmaneuver the enemies they faced. I’d given myself the easiest assignment, but not on purpose. I thought the battle in the parking lot would be grim and fierce.

It was anything but. I wasn’t sure they’d even taken a shot. They went down under the withering file of a well-laid trap. They weren’t used to real tactics by a prepared enemy. That was their loss, and they died because of it. Soldiers, they weren’t.

And definitely not Marines. Then again, neither were most of my people. They were operators and weren’t squeamish about killing people.

“I’m sorry, it is not available. We have the presidential suite, which is nicer, if you’d like that, but this is the peak season, so it’s fairly high-priced,” the pleasant young man said from behind the registration desk.

“If it’s peak season, why is it available without having reservations?” I asked, smiling. He opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. I cut him off before he could fabricate an answer. “Just making a point. We’ll take it for three nights, if that’s okay.”

He smirked. “It’s available all three nights. I’ll cut a hundred dollars off the price since you caught me. It’s not the peak season. That’s Christmastime. People love Georgia in the winter.” He typed the entire time he talked. “Name?”

“Ian Bragg.” I gave him the Chicago address. We’d stopped by a building for sale so we could justify the trip as Club expansion research. We were always looking to expand as far as the public was concerned, even though we had no need for that. The business was going as well as it needed to provide revenue supporting our cover of a jet-setting lifestyle.

Living like the rich and famous, to coin a phrase.

All the while doing a very hard job.

We finished checking in and took our meager bags to the room. I wanted to flop down and go to sleep. Today had been one of the longest days of my life, even with everything I’d done. We had two people taken and burned up a factory after killing ten men and recovering them. Then they sent fifteen more after us, and we killed them too, but in the process, we lost one of our own.

That was the hardest part. Trying to turn operators into Marines conducting military operations on urban terrain. I’d gone through training courses on it. I’d done it for real. I didn’t like it because there were too many unknowns when clearing a building.

Forced into not one but two firefights. I was afraid it would derail the Peace Archive. I was afraid for our operators. Risks were high in this business, but I did this to them. I came up with the training scenario that spiraled so far out of control, we were hanging on by our fingernails.

Thank God Jimmy put a tracker on my phone. It answered the question of when was a bad deal a good deal.

Jenny rubbed my shoulders. She knew exactly what I was thinking. “It’s not your fault. There’s one person at fault, and we’re going to make him pay.”

“I know, but it wasn’t Heath’s fault.”

“No, but we’re going to avenge his death. I’m usually not this passionate about executing a contract, but in this case, Stone Chisel needs to not share the same existence with decent people—or any people, for that matter.”

I sighed. This day wasn’t over. It was time for the reconnaissance to begin. “I better get going. Two miles there and back, according to the map. A couple hours watching and then back here.”

“I’ll drop you off a half-mile away and pick you up there, too. There’s a park with a turn-off that’s surrounded by trees. Quick in, quick out.”

“I like that plan, Miss Jenny. I’m bone tired. That’ll save me an hour. That’s a lot of beauty sleep that I definitely need.” I stood, stretched, and headed toward the door.

Jenny grabbed a bottle of water from the stocked mini-fridge and handed it to me. “It’s been a hot day.”

“Drink water as the cure-all. Yes, ma’am.” I turned away from the door and filled a glass at the small kitchen area of the suite. I downed it and then another. I hadn’t had anything to drink all day. I was setting my body up to fail. I saluted Jenny with my water glass.

She saluted back with the one she’d taken for herself.

Jenny didn’t even stop the vehicle completely to drop me off. She swooped close to a tree that overhung the lot and I jumped out, running a few steps to slow down while staying within the tree’s shadow. I stood against the trunk while Jenny drove away.

I wrapped my fingers around the burner phone in my pocket. I’d left my satellite phone in the hotel room. It was a new way to think about being tracked. I had grown complacent. Success had not made me wiser.

Going to the area around Chisel’s home, I took the path of least resistance. I headed for the sidewalk and walked like I owned the place, dispensing with my previous thought of wearing my best jogging clothes since we never made it to the store. I wore my slacks and a polo shirt, the consummate professional, out for an evening stroll. I ducked my head when I walked under streetlights and followed the roads using the map in my mind. It wasn’t difficult. Each home sat on five to ten acres. They were all mansions. Every property was gated in some way. Some with long driveways and others with short drives and massive homes.

It was a walk past designers delivering Southern charm, Greek revival, art nouveau, or modern exceptionalism known as contemporary. Every home had to have been custom built. They weren’t built from off-the-shelf plans. Intricately designed for the original home buyer’s exacting details.

The next buyer would add their own panache. They were all lit up to show off their splendor. This wasn’t a shy neighborhood. The flaunting of wealth seemed to be the primary purpose. It made me wonder how many people lived there, raised their kids in that neighborhood. The park was just outside the area but probably used exclusively by the neighborhood’s residents, which probably meant not at all. Their estates had more land than the park.

A half-mile went quickly as I was lost in my thoughts about getting back to the operator I once was, the one who didn’t have a massive support network.

Solo operations were difficult. I had to sharpen my wits for my sake, for the sake of the Peace Archive, and for Heath’s sake.

Up ahead on the right was the home that Heath said belonged to Stone Chisel, a kingpin’s street name. I stopped across the street so I could tie my shoe. I made a quick visual survey of the front of the house. It was built in the style of a Southern plantation with soaring columns in front of wraparound porches on the first and second floors.

The one major shortcoming in my reconnaissance was that I didn’t know what Chisel looked like. Heath may have found a picture, but he hadn’t shared that, and it would take a serious, trusted tech team to get into his computer. That would require too much time. I’d have to do it the hard way. Or call Jimmy and ask for another favor.

No. I didn’t need to involve him any more in this operation. I’d take care of it. I’d build my own target package. I had confidence in my abilities to figure it out. Heath had found answers on the dark web, which meant that I could find them.

Chisel’s supposed home had the full spectrum of floodlights outside showing a central fountain that reminded me of a European courtyard. It was dwarfed by the house beyond and the eight-bay parking garage to the left side. The yard was immense and freshly groomed, at least from what I could see under the lights.

The home had lights on in the entry way, a room upstairs, and one to the right, maybe a living room or entertainment room. It appeared to be a house that was lived in as opposed to a show house that the owner visited on rare occasions.

A glimmer caught my eye from a vehicle parked in the shadow of the garage. An SUV, identical to the ones that had visited us at the ranch.

I couldn’t see if anyone was inside. I had to assume somebody was. It was the safer bet. I kept to the shadow under a tree and watched. Time was on my side because I didn’t know any better. There was no constraint to get it done this night because he was leaving for Colombia tomorrow, never to return.

Maybe he was, but he probably wasn’t. Then again, his organization had taken two major hits within a single day. Was he the type to cut and run, or would he stay to put a strong face on the organization, to keep it viable and regrow it?

He probably saved a couple million in salaries from the men who had been killed, but he lost it all when the lab was destroyed. From a business perspective, it was a wash. From an ego perspective, it was a huge blow.

I stared at the house, thinking that the worst was yet to come for the kingpin.

I hadn’t checked the time, but I was starting to fade. The comedown from the adrenaline rushes of the day was taking its toll. But the lights were on, and a shadow confirmed there was a person inside. They weren’t going to bed yet, so neither could I.

The SUV’s lights came on, and it drove slowly around the fountain to stop at the house. A man stepped out, Black, tall, bald. He strolled down the wide stair to the driveway, where someone on the passenger side jumped out and opened the rear door for him. It was impossible to see any details because I was a long ways away and on the driver side. The bald man ducked to get in, and the door closed behind him.

The SUV moved slowly toward the gate. I maneuvered around the tree before the headlights fell on me. I hid completely behind it, watching the lights as they turned and headed down the street, the way that I had come from.

It turned a corner in the distance and disappeared.

I wanted to take a look inside the compound to see where there might be vulnerabilities, maybe even inside the house itself, but I was too tired and hadn’t checked the building in the daylight to see what kind of security systems were in place. There would be no exploitation without more information.

I’d only just begun building the target package. I was unarmed, so I couldn’t even shoot him upon his return. Shooting him with one of his gang’s weapons would have been sweet revenge, but no, I couldn’t risk being caught with one of those. They were tainted.

I was thinking myself in circles. It was time to go. I walked down the street, waiting to call until I was a sufficient distance from Chisel’s home. Jenny answered right away and confirmed she would meet me at the park in less than ten minutes. I picked up my pace. I didn’t want either of us to wait, although I could stay out of sight. She couldn’t with the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

That was something we needed to change as well. Renting the same thing each time was a pattern. Patterns were good in our business when they applied to our targets, not to us. Having a signature move would get us caught.

We needed to not stay in the best suite in hotels. Then again, we were jet-setting club owners. Maybe we could keep getting the Jeeps.

I was too tired to refute any of my own counter-counter-arguments. Jenny angled through the lot, and I ran the last few steps to jump in. I don’t remember getting back to the hotel or going to sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Iam always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” –Pablo Picasso

When I woke up, the sun was already up. Jenny was out cold. She’d thrown off the covers sometime during the night as it was warm in our room. I turned the air conditioner up and covered her, but slowly because she slept in the buff. Who was I not to take a long and appreciative look at my wife?

I liked what I saw, but I didn’t attack her. I had stuff to do. She had stayed up later than me to make sure I fell asleep.

Jenny had played a key role in yesterday’s events, and she remained stalwart through all of them, anticipating what needed to be done outside of the shooting and killing. And she did some of that, too. The least I could do is let her sleep, although I wanted to do much more. It was amazing the amount of energy I derived from a single night’s sleep.

I opened my computer and got to work. VPN, incognito browser, then to the dark web where casual netizens could never get. I looked to unravel threads that would give me greater insight into the daily life of one Stone Chisel. I’d try to find out his real name, although I’d only make fun of it, like I always did. It was important to dehumanize the target. He was bad and didn’t deserve to be called by his given name. His mother had higher hopes for him, didn’t she?

He deserved my scorn and ridicule and to ultimately die by my hand. He made me that angry. He’d crossed the line by a long way.

The information was intermittent and sparse. He maintained a low profile when it came to the public eye, but he wasn’t nonexistent. There were wisps of references here and there. I backed out to the regular net and did a property search on the address. It wouldn’t be registered to his street name but to a real name.

One Clarice Everington. I was sure that wasn’t him. A boy named Clarice? About as likely as Sue. I searched her name and was rewarded with a wealth of information. How had Heath found the house without knowing her name? He’d be missed. He brought a rare skillset to the Peace Archive.

The bald man with Clarice. His name was Clarence. Clarence Everington. Clarence and Clarice. They had to be fake names, too, but it gave me a lot more to go on. I drilled into the lives of those two. Upstanding citizens. Members of the local PTA even though they didn’t have children of their own. Ardent supporters of youth sports.

All-American types. It made me question the information. Was this our man?

“Dammit!” I snapped.

“Huh?” Jenny said from the doorway to the bedroom.

“I’m lamenting the lack of a single page of information on bad guys. It’s like the comic universe is completely made up! Where’s the Bat Computer to give me a one-page printout detailing the villain’s lair?” I threw up my hands and scoffed at the screen.

“Lair?” Jenny repeated sleepily. Her hair was messed, and a pillow crease crossed her cheek. She hadn’t bothered with a robe. She smiled, and my troubles faded. For only a moment, but that’s what life was. A series of moments that turned into a day. Repeated actions became habits, some good, some bad. Habits defined who we were based around the actions we consistently took. I never wanted to make a habit of turning down my wife when she gave me that look.

Well, any look. I was quite smitten.

I closed my computer. We lived for moments like this, or we weren’t living at all.

We ordered room service for breakfast because I needed to satisfy my curiosity regarding the Everingtons. How did he make his money? How much did he spend?

My sat phone rang, showing a D.C. area code.

“Jimmy,” I answered.

“I’ve got one minute and then I have to go,” Vice President Jimmy Tripplethorn talked fast to squeeze in the information he wanted to share with me. “I just had my morning briefing from the DEA. They’re focusing their investigation on the rival gangs despite finding someone who didn’t fit the gang profile in the back of one of the drug runner SUVs. They might find out who he is, but I don’t see them working too hard on it. They want to pin this on the gang that would move into the vacuum left in Stone Chisel’s organization. Thanks for turning in all the MP5s. The DEA wondered where the weapons had gone from the meth lab battle and also why they were given up. Now, they seem to be accounted for. The DEA is probably going to brush this under the rug because it removed some twenty-five submachine guns from the hands of these criminals along with the criminals themselves. It was a good day for you, Ian, except for the loss of one of your own. I’m sorry about that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jimmy. I’m just happy no one is banging on my door with a warrant. Please assure me that won’t happen.”

“I can’t do that because I don’t have that level of control, and I won’t lie to you.”

“You make a strange politician. What happens if the other side wins the next election? Will they come after you and then by extension, me and Miss Jenny?”

“Any records related to you are in the to-be-destroyed pile. They’ll be the first to go the day after a lost election. You know that we don’t plan to lose, right?”

“No one plans to lose, Jimmy, but sometimes, you can do everything right and still not win. Who knows what the whims of the voters will be when they look at the ballot?”

“You and your hard truths. Have a good day, Ian. And good luck.” Jimmy ended the call.

I envisioned someone knocking on his door and chasing him to his next meeting.

“It still boggles my mind that the VP will steal a minute from his packed schedule to tell us things he’s not supposed to share.”

“Because you’re a good man doing hard things on behalf of the country?” she ventured.

“I’m sure not all of those lost in the drug gang yesterday were bad people.”

“They were trying to kill us to keep meth labs open, producing and distributing their bile to an unwitting public. You can’t convince me that they didn’t sell a part of their soul when they got that job. They accepted the risk of gang warfare. They were armed with machine guns and were there to take the sisters. They were willing to kill us to get them.”

I nodded. It would bother me, but Jenny was right. They chose the wrong side. There was enough honest work out there for people to do without having to resort to joining a drug gang, no matter how bad their life was wherever they grew up. I refused to believe that someone who wanted out couldn’t get out.

Maybe there were individuals who couldn’t, and I could lament their unresolvable challenges, but when they brought their problems to me and mine by way of a gun, that was the end of it. I would fix their problems in the easiest way I knew.

My lip curled of its own accord. They came up against the wrong person in the wrong way.

I had gotten enough sleep, had quality private time with Jenny, had coffee and a light breakfast, and I was still thinking myself around in circles.

But the circle ended. I could live with the final decision that was taken out of my hands. We hadn’t started this. It was Chisel’s work, if the DEA was to be believed. If Jimmy was to be believed.

I leaned back in the uncomfortable chair and stared at the most uninformative information on the screen.

“Have another mini muffin,” Jenny mumbled with her mouth full while tapping away on her computer.

“Why aren’t we working out?” I knew I was missing something but hadn’t put my finger on it. “Maybe throw some iron around? What do you think, hot mama?”

“I thought we got in a good workout this morning along with a robust shower.” She grinned at me.

“I know about first shower, but what about second shower? This is a humid part of the world.”

“Clarence Everington has gone to Miami to open a new boutique salon where Clarice had spent the last month setting up,” Jenny said.

“He went to Miami?” My shoulders drooped. The strength drained from me.

“Wait a minute. He’ll only be there two days before returning to Atlanta for business meetings and a surprise announcement,” Jenny added.

I straightened. “We have two days to get ourselves together and ready to go. A couple day visits to his estate to see what there is to see, one in the Jeep and you take the other one, so we don’t give the impression that his house is under surveillance.”

Jenny nodded and made a show of licking her fingers.

“I know what you’re doing.” I stabbed a finger at her. “You’re trying to make me feel good.”

Jenny snorted and started coughing as her muffin went down the wrong pipe. When she finished, she lifted her chin. “Heaven forbid. How will you ever overcome this vast hurdle I’ve cast before you?”

“Hurdle? No. It’s like a river float where you sit in an innertube and be lazy while the current carries you along. I’m just here for the ride.”

She smiled at me and reached for the last muffin on the tray. She stopped and thought better of it. “Maybe we should go lift weights. These carbs are too enticing.”

I closed my computer and stood. I was already in my workout clothes, as if my subconscious mind had dictated what I needed to do. I checked myself in the mirror. “Would you look at that? I’m ready to go.”

Jenny opened her robe to show that she wore tights and a sports bra. “Would you look at that? Me, too.”

She closed her computer but kept her robe on for the trip to the second floor where the small gym was located.

“Thanks,” I whispered in her ear while we walked to the elevator. I kissed the side of her head, and she leaned into me.

She made a hard job tolerable and even enjoyable.

While going for a lower number of repetitions with higher weights on their universal machine, I contemplated how Clarence needed to leave this world. Clarice hadn’t been in town so it was less likely she was behind it, although her participation was not out of the realm of possibilities. If she was in charge or played a senior role in the organization, we’d come back and get her, but her husband had been here when the retaliatory hit was ordered on us.

It was him. I could feel it with the clarity of a new day. Sometimes, we didn’t have all the information and had to do the best we could with what there was. I also trusted Jimmy, and in his briefings, Chisel was a man. We had our target.

Clarence Everington was going to meet his maker.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“To make no mistakes is not in the power of man, but from the errors and mistakes, the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.” –Plutarch

We hopped in the Jeep for a casual drive past the rich people’s houses. I figured that’s what casual visitors thought about our home and community in the Hamptons along with our home in North Chicago. We didn’t own any others. We had business in both areas, significant business that brought a great deal of money into the company.

We weren’t real estate moguls and had no intention of getting into that business. The Club and all it entailed was enough, especially with Jimmy asking us to do odd jobs for the government. We could have to leave on a moment’s notice. The last time, it was for nearly two weeks. We were paid well, but we couldn’t manage a business or properties like that.

Thank God for Gladys.

Which reminded me. I needed to call her.

I dialed her number. It rang five times, and I was about to hang up when Glady answered.

“Ian Bragg, in all my years, I never thought you’d remember my birthday!” she exclaimed.

I looked at Jenny. She shook her head.

“You think that I don’t know today is not your birthday? Shame!” I declared. Jenny’s eyebrows shot upward.

“But it is my birthday, Ian. You forgot, didn’t you.”

“Time is relative, Gladys. You remain perpetually twenty-nine to me. I’m sure we sent you something.”

Jenny nodded. I wonder what she shook her head for earlier. I didn’t read that signal very well.

“Do you mean did I send me something on your behalf like I do with all our employees?”

“I’m pretty sure I didn’t mean that.” As usual, Gladys had me on my heels. No wonder I’d conveniently forgotten to call her. I covered the receiver. “Did we send her something?”

Jenny waved for me to give her the phone.

“Hang on. I can’t be trusted with important stuff. I’m putting the boss on the line.”

It was a satellite phone. There was no line. I was a slave to an era I was born into but never lived.

Jenny lost her smile quickly at something Gladys said. Jenny replied with something equally sobering.

“We lost one of ours yesterday. We’ll get his operator name from Bob. If he has nothing designated for his account, you know what to do. And it sucks, bad. Training is canceled. It never really started, for that matter. Something happened that took us out of the game into a trial far more serious. No, we won’t be doing any more training sessions. Both were good until we lost people. We don’t want to lose anyone in training.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” I whispered. I caressed Jenny’s arm. She nodded intermittently while Gladys talked.

“Thanks, G. And happy birthday. You make us all proud to do what we do.” Jenny handed the phone back to me. Gladys had already hung up.

“Are we square with the home office?” I asked.

Jenny nodded. I waited to hear what Gladys had said that caused her grief.

“Prince Markle has given his notice. He met someone, and they’re going to travel the world for the next year.”

“Your efforts to make me happy are crushing my soul.” I raised one eyebrow at her. Prince Markle was our private room bartender. He knew more about everything and everyone than anyone I’d ever met. He helped me understand the people I was getting contracts from.

Jenny tried to smile.

I continued, “Sometimes it’s hard to maintain the façade. It’s okay to be sad, but we’ll temper it. I’ll start the clock. We have fifteen minutes for the sads, then we get back to work. We have a target package to build.”

Jenny stood and stretched. “Designer coffee in the lobby,” she suggested after ten seconds, inching her way toward the door. How could I turn that offer down? I closed my computer and joined her. We walked hand-in-hand, taking the stairs this time to get back to the old days when we never took the elevator. It was too easy to get trapped by technology, but we often looked out of the norm, highlighting ourselves when taking the steps. We had to balance our efforts, but right now, I wanted to err on the side of our safety by leaving the happy-go-lucky personas behind.

No one used the steps. They were clean with a slight layer of undisturbed dust. We walked slowly down so we didn’t throw dust into the air. There was no reason to breathe in that stuff.

The lobby was bustling. It was checkout time, and a line extended from the counter to the center of the lobby. Anxious travelers checking out at the last minute while suddenly being in a hurry, checking their watches while shifting from one foot to the other impatiently.

We only wanted a cup of coffee before heading out to surveil the Chisel house. We were two miles away. We could do what we needed in fifteen or twenty minutes. We were not in a hurry. There was far more research we could conduct online. Our suite was nice as well as our ride. We’d get coffee and relax in the cool of the air-conditioned lobby. There was much to be said about stopping to watch the world go by.

We’d also had about enough of the Georgia humidity. Being outside in it brought no comfort. I was ready to go home. We only had to do one last thing, and I had no idea how to accomplish it.

But the coffee was good. I took mine straight up and added cream. Jenny went with a pumpkin spice latte. I gave her my best side-eye. “When did you start drinking those?”

“I drink these,” she countered as if that was a factual assertion that discounted my years of observation.

We grabbed a couch by the front window where there was separation from the madness at the counter.

I sipped my coffee and stared out the window. We weren’t going to talk business in public, so we didn’t, until we did.

“What’s bothering you?” Jenny asked.

“Besides the obvious?” I shook my head. “I’ve grown too lax.” I met her eyes. “I’ve lost my edge. I’m an executive piece of trash and not an operator.”

Jenny snickered and looked out the window while she shaped her response. I needed to hear what she had to say.

“We are executives. We run a company that earns a couple hundred million a year. But you’re still an operator. You know what needs to be done.” She looked over her shoulder to make sure we didn’t have company. “And you don’t act paranoid when there’s no need for it. When’s the last time someone got the best of you?”

“Well, never.” I didn’t have to think about the answer, but the premise required more thought. “They only have to be good once. I have to be good all the time. There will come a day…”

She cut me off. “There won’t, because we’re two people watching for one threat. We just found out we have someone watching our back who we were holding at arm’s length. Maybe we need to keep him more involved since he seems to have inserted himself into our business anyway. It’s far more exciting than his day-to-day gig.”

I laughed. “That’s no lie. I can’t imagine putting on a happy face with a parade of lightweights and pudknockers seeking favors or venting their spleens at him for some perceived slight that portends the end of all life as we know it. Maybe he can live a little vicariously through us.”

Jenny spoke in a deep voice, “So let it be said. So let it be written. So let it be done.”

“Shall we go for a drive?” I stood and helped Jenny to her feet. “I’m driving, and tomorrow, you walk.” I let my hand linger on her hip. It was a perfect fit for my hand.

We made short work of the trip to the Everingtons’ house, slowing as we passed with Jenny filming the place on her phone. She’d held her phone against the window for the entirety of the pass through the neighborhood. If anyone asked, she was taking pictures of every designer home on both sides of the street. It allowed us to drive by twice.

We headed into the nearest area where there were restaurants to get ourselves a late lunch or even an early dinner. I didn’t need to eat three meals a day. If we got hungry later, there was always room service.

Jenny kept her phone in her pocket rather than review the video while we were in the booth. We sat there looking at each other because everything we wanted to talk about wasn’t fodder for public consumption. I started to make faces at her. She kicked me under the table before rubbing her foot up my thigh.

“Is that it? When you want to distract me, you default to sexy times?”

She pulled her foot back. “Fine.”

That was a danger word. It never meant fine. She knew that I knew that. I knew that she knew that I knew. I was being pulled into a vortex of confusion that could only be perpetrated by the female of the species. I didn’t have an answer, good or otherwise.

“I like your hair,” I managed to mutter. “When’s that pizza coming?”

“What are you mumbling about?”

“I’m saying that we should have kept one of those special tools we had acquired instead of leaving them with Heath. One of those would come in real handy in about two days.”

“Nah.” Jenny frowned. “Not enough range. You’ll need something else or a different plan.”

It came to me in a flash of inspiration. “I need to call Devin MacGregor.”

We met Devin in the parking lot of a mall that was a mile away. I had told him what we wanted over the phone, but in a roundabout way. “That tool you used during the demonstration a few days ago.”

He strolled up, bowing his head briefly to Jenny without the creepy he-man woman-haters approach. Maybe he had learned his lesson. I was still willing to pummel him in case he returned to his sordid old ways.

“Gorgon, Arctic,” he said with a smirk. “Or should I say, Ian and Jenny.”

“That’s who we are. Executive entrepreneurs who provide a place for the rich and powerful to relax among their own,” I repeated my shtick. “We have a project that requires a grenade.”

“You’re going after the guy that ordered the hit on us?” Devin asked candidly.

“We might be. He crossed the wrong people. He cost us one of our own. That’s unacceptable, but it also makes me realize how mafia wars can go on for generations. Then again, we’re going to cut the head off his entire organization, and he has no idea who we are. We don’t want a slice of his action. We don’t want his turf. We don’t want anything to do with his business.”

“You want me to do him?” Devin asked. He seemed to have a personal dislike for those who dealt drugs.

“This one is a freebie, and I’m not going to ask or accept outside help. We’ll do it ourselves. What’s your issue with the dealers?”

“My older brother was a user. He looked good, like me.” The corner of his mouth twitched up, not with arrogance but with humility. “Drugs took everything from him and eventually his life. You pay me a lot to do what I would probably do anyway. I won’t rest until all these blood-sucking oxygen thieves are removed from existence.”

“All I can say is, good luck, and please, don’t get caught.”

“That won’t happen. Unlike the caped crusader, I don’t get in a hurry, plus the cops don’t go overboard in trying to solve what they think are drug gangs killing their fellow gangbangers. They wait to deal with the winner, but the fallacy of that is that the ultimate winner will be too powerful for the cops to confront. So they’ll end up with a shaky truce, until someone like me gets the turf battles started anew.” He grinned sheepishly, but the underlying pain of the loss of his brother was obvious, once we knew to look for it.

He was hiding it beneath the mask of a vigilante. A nameless, faceless superhero. I offered my hand. “Carry on, young man.”

Even Jenny shook his hand, but quickly, nothing more. She still wanted to slap him, even though she understood more about why he was the way he was.

That’s what the retreat was supposed to bring out, not the shortcomings of operators ill-trained to fight as a unit using ground combat techniques. Understand and move forward.

Devin gave me an insulated bag with a heavy weight inside. “There you go. Once you release the spool, it goes boom in five seconds, or maybe seven, possibly three.”

I tried to determine if he was kidding. He didn’t seem to be. “You aren’t positive?”

“These aftermarket knockoffs are alarmingly unreliable,” he replied. With a wave over his shoulder, he returned to his car and left.

“What do you think?”

“I think that I can’t throw this thing through a vehicle’s closed window, which means I’d be screwed. There has to be a way to get it near him and keep him there for three to seven seconds.”

“That is a long time to count on someone to standby while a grenade is fixing to explode,” Jenny suggested.

I frowned at the complications, but I now had a weapon. There were ways to employ it that improved our chance of success. I just had to think of what those were.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today.” –H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

In the suite, I sipped on a beer from the mini bar while Jenny had poured herself a glass of wine from the small bottle that had been near my Heineken. We watched the video from our drive-by over and over. Jenny had transferred the video to her computer and then hooked it to the flat-screen television. The pillars supporting a wrought-iron fence, painted in a traditional gloss black.

Cameras were obvious on the house, but nothing was on the fence, at least not from what was visible in the video.

The inside of the fence? I expected there were motion sensors, even if we couldn’t see them. The hardest problem with the property was the lack of vegetation. There was no cover from the fence all the way to the house.

Targets were most vulnerable while on the move between places of relative security. Just like the power broker in New York who succumbed just outside his own gate. His hubris ended up getting the best of him.

But Stone Chisel rode in the back like a limousine. He had people to stop me from doing what I did in New York. Was it better to separate the man from his guards or take them all, as Devin had done with the drug deal only a few days ago?

“I wish I had video of him leaving,” I groused.

Jenny tapped me on the arm. “Talk me through everything you saw from start to finish.”

I closed my eyes and replayed it in my mind. “SUV parked beside the garage. No lights, no idea that there were two people inside. Lights come on and it drives around the fountain very slowly, sweeping the whole area with its headlights. It stops at the bottom of the steps. Baldenshizzle comes out the front door and walks down to the vehicle. Dude hops out of the passenger seat and holds the door for him. He gets in. Passenger closes door and returns to his seat. I couldn’t see much of that because they were on the opposite side of the vehicle. It slowly comes around the fountain and comes toward the gate, which starts to open well before they get close. Must have a remote of some sort. They come through the gate without slowing. It was dark and easy to see that no cars were coming, but a dogwalker would have been mowed down. SUV accelerates down the street.”

“Baldenshizzle?” Jenny shook her head. “How long after they left before the gate closed?”

“It was closing the second they drove through. They were a block away by the time it stopped. Spotlights on the pedestals highlighted the area around the gate. Any cameras would pick up someone and their picture, my picture, would be in high resolution, and they’d be sending someone to meet me, although I didn’t see anyone else. It looked like he might have been alone in the house. We saw on the news that his wife was in Miami.” That made me think. Maybe getting to the house was an option. What would I do once there?

If he was alone, I could take him out with any on-hand items like a lamp or a trophy, if I wanted to do it Agatha Christie style.

The grenade would make a statement, but it would also draw attention. All eyes would be drawn to the big ugly noise. Unless it exploded inside the vehicle. How would I manage the four-second unreliability?

“When I go in tomorrow, what do you want me to look for?” Jenny studied the big screen on the zillionth run-through.

“Is there anyone else around? Is there a reaction force or other guards? I think his security team is dead, everyone beside the two who took him to the airport. I couldn’t see if they were armed.”

“Was the vehicle armored?” Jenny returned to the SUV. He was most vulnerable between his home and the airport.

“I don’t think so.” It was the best answer I had, but I understood what Jenny was thinking. Attach the grenade to the outside of the SUV. The blast would send additional shrapnel from the door into the interior, but it would only be half the blast as the rest would blow away from the vehicle. “Drop it on the roof using a drone.”

“Less reaction time. Better blast downward. I think you have your plan. We need to buy a drone, take it apart to remove identifying numbers, and then test it. Can it carry two pounds?” Jenny wondered.

“At least two pounds with a big magnet duct-taped to the grenade, but then how do we set it off? We remove the pin before it flies, with a piece holding the spoon in place. When the grenade attaches to the roof, the drone rips away, tearing the spoon free. Three to seven seconds later, kaboom.”

Jenny tapped away on her burner phone, getting her money’s worth on the data usage. “Would you look at that? We can buy a high-end drone in Chattanooga. I assume we don’t want to shop locally.”

“You assume correctly. Looks like we’re going to Cha-town.”

“Is that what they call it?” Jenny asked.

“I don’t know. This will be my first time.”

I thought of Chattanooga as a big small town, but it was busy with highways and traffic. After a short two-hour drive, we found ourselves in the big city. We didn’t do any touring, opting to go straight to the electronics store to buy the biggest drone they had.

They carried some stock but preferred to special order the units. Still, they had one with blades substantial enough to get off the ground while hauling a load. I hoped. Hope was a lousy plan, but this hope was good enough to check that it would work before finding an alternative, or two, or three.

Counting on a single plan to work was a losing strategy. There had to be multiple approaches with backups. Once a target was alerted, then they’d be orders of magnitude harder to catch up with the next time.

I preferred that he be caught unaware the first and only time.

Fifteen hundred dollars later, we walked out with the display model that they even fired up to show us that it worked. I felt like a proud father carrying his new baby bald eagle. I nodded to people as Jenny and I left the store.

“Is this your idea of low-profile?”

“If we do this right, no one will know for sure it was a drone. And even if they did, no one will relate it back to the nice man who smiled at them.”

“We better find a place to test this, and then we need magnetic strips and duct tape.” Jenny wasn’t buying my explanation. Instead, she chose to focus on the primary plan. “It’d be nice to have a gun, too.”

“I like the idea of a backup, like a nice .45 or something.”

“No waiting period to buy a gun here, but they do a background check,” Jenny advised.

I wasn’t sure I wanted my name out there as having a pistol, but then again, I was a wealthy executive. Hiding in plain sight. “Let’s do it.”

“I’ll put it in my name. I have a driver’s license in my maiden name that’s still valid thanks to our marriage license.”

“Damn! I need to renew my Nevada license in the name of Ian Lawless. In the interim, you’re on. You’re the buyer. We’ll get a case, too, with locks, so we can check it through, but where can we fly in the northeast where they won’t flip out with us bringing a pistol in? You don’t have a New York City license for a handgun and will probably get arrested. Let me think…” I ran through some options and only one made sense. “If we don’t use it, we return it and get our money back. If we do use it, then we’ll be driving home.”

Jenny nodded and found the nearest gun store. She knew which weapon I liked. She also knew that the store would try to push something that was overpriced but would fit her hand better. To maintain our cover, she’d had to balance the competing interests.

The store had the typical display case for handguns. The entire wall behind the long counter had long guns, rifles, and shotguns from waist high to ten feet. A rolling ladder was on standby, just in case someone wanted to look at a weapon in the top rows.

Jenny went straight to the pistols and browsed through until she found the big guns, but they had a narrow body .45 that would be better for concealment. I’d be out in the open with the drone that was half the size of a full-grown eagle and didn’t want to look like I was carrying a pistol, too.

“May I look at that one, please?” She pointed to a Glock 36.

I had to walk away so they didn’t see me beaming with pride. I looked through the store for .45 ACP ammunition and selected a box of fifty rounds along with a travel case and two locks. One never knew whether we were going to need them or not.

When I returned to the counter, Jenny was filling out the background check paperwork. The pistol had been moved to a counter under the rifles to wait for the check to come back clean. I wasn’t sure whether it would or not because that name had fallen off the face of the Earth over three years ago.

That turned out to not be a bar to passing the check. When it came back, the man behind the counter gave Jenny a thumbs-up and placed the pistol in front of her.

“Do you have any extra magazines for it? Just one,” I requested.

“No, sorry. Those are hard to come by, but you get one with it.”

The fact that it only held six rounds was somewhat constraining, but I could live with it. As a backup plan, I had no need to spray rounds everywhere. I only needed one to hit home. It was the two security guards that weren’t likely to get themselves killed at the cost of only two rounds each. I figured they were the best he had, not sending them with the others to deal with us but instead keeping them close.

Six rounds.

Made me want to say a prayer that the grenade would work as planned.

We left the store, twelve hundred dollars lighter, but we had a backup plan. “Did you check on the return policy?”

“I knew I was forgetting something, but he was flirting and knocked a hundred dollars off the price for me. The least I could do was bat my lashes at him.”

There was a time when that would have made me angry to the point of returning to the store and possibly even offering to beat the man up. But no longer. That was the benefit of maturity. I couldn’t blame the man since Jenny was a dish and knowledgeable about weapons.

“I’m impressed and pleased. A Glock 36. That’ll do nicely.” It was a little small in my hand, but not enough to make a difference. I wondered if we could find a place to sight it in, but then we wouldn’t be able to return it. I would have to trust the sights as they were. “There are a lot of shortcomings in this plan.”

“Imagine if it goes right,” Jenny said, holding her hand out for the keys. I gave them to her without hesitation. I searched my phone for a park where we could test-fly our drone, but first, we needed to hit a hardware store to pick up magnets and duct tape.

It wasn’t as easy as whip in, whip out. We had to ask three different customer service agents before we found ourselves in the right section. They would work with enough duct tape holding them together and holding the magnetic contraption to the grenade. Top it off with a pair of box cutters and we had our ridiculous-looking device. I wondered how an engineer would make it.

We didn’t have one of those in the Jeep with us, so it was just me and my design. I climbed into the back seat where I could work with the tape and magnets.

Gravity pulls down, mass times velocity equals momentum, and mass times acceleration equals force. I didn’t care how many Newtons my drone generated when dropping down and ripping upward. Would the magnets help hold the grenade in place as the acceleration helped the box cutters to slice through the duct tape?

I figured a sane person would tell me to give it up.

Jenny accelerated smoothly into southbound traffic on I-75. She stayed in the right lane because she would take the third exit that led to an area with a cluster of parks. We’d pick the one that was the least busy.

I taped and eyeballed and taped some more. I put the magnets together and tested them on the top of the door to find there was almost no metal on the inside. The frame behind the door had exposed metal. I touched the magnet set to it, and it was nearly jerked out of my grip as it latched on.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” I beamed at the taped mess stuck to the vehicle’s frame. I looked for Jenny’s approval, but her eyes were on the road. I peeled it free and put it in the back seat. The grenade was still in the bag. It wasn’t time to set that in place.

Jenny pulled into a parking lot next to a vast array of soccer fields. Only one had a match going, which left enough open space for us to send our drone on a couple test flights. We didn’t need to fly it far or high. We only need to drop it onto a moving vehicle and then jerk it away. Simple.

We pulled the drone out and read the instructions, ignoring everything related to slewing the camera around and taking pictures. It was going to be as vanilla a flight as there could be.

The four rotors spun quickly almost instantly, but they had a lot of RPMs remaining and increasing their speed jumped the drone off the ground. It rose too fast, and I overcompensated, barely getting it under control before I crashed it into the ground. The drone gyrated back and forth, rising and falling as I improved my feel for the controls. Slight pressure here and there gave me the control I needed.

I flew it across the soccer field and back, increased the altitude to about fifty feet, and then brought it back down. It responded well. “You try.”

Jenny took over and flew it around more easily than I had.

I pulled the magnets from the Jeep and motioned for Jenny to send the drone my way. She dropped it right in front of me and powered down the rotors. I slapped the magnets on the underside. She restarted the rotors and increased the speed until the drone lumbered into the air, shaking and twisting.

“That’s not good,” I noted.

“You only have to balance the load. It doesn’t handle too badly,” Jenny said while twisting her mouth in a vain attempt to get the drone to respond to the force of her will.

The drone jerked back and forth while falling and rising at random intervals.

Jenny handed the controller to me.

She headed for the Jeep. “Follow me.”

I redirected the drone to a point about ten feet over the roof of the rental. Jenny slowly drove around the parking lot while I tried to keep the Jeep in the middle of the drone’s slightly forward view. I dropped it down to the roof. The magnets connected and wouldn’t let go. I tried everything I could to jerk it free, but it wouldn’t budge. That meant I had to get the box cutters in the right place to cut the drone free of the grenade and by extension, releasing the spoon to activate the grenade’s short timer.

The concept made sense, but would the execution work? It was the difference between theory and application. I was satisfied it would work.

It definitely wasn’t going to be pretty. This was going to be ugly, like the razor-infested drone hit. That was uglier, but this was vying to be the new number one.

I didn’t care, as long as it worked.

Jenny stopped the Jeep, and I unhooked the drone from the roof, removed the magnets, and brought the entire thing inside the vehicle. I joined Jenny in the front seat. “Take us home, beautiful. Dinner is calling my name.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“The lion does not turn around when the small dog barks.” – African Proverb

We ordered room service and then went to bed early, although we didn’t go to sleep early. We considered ourselves perpetual newlyweds. We hadn’t tired of enjoying each other’s company yet, and I hoped we never would.

I still woke up early to check the dark web, search everything I could find to get Stone Chisel’s itinerary. We needed to know his flight if we were going to get into place before he rolled up. I assumed he’d be picked up by the SUV with his guards if they hadn’t gone with him. We’d find out when Jenny walked by the property today.

I reasoned that the time the vehicle was between the gate and the house would be sufficient to keep everyone inside the vehicle until the grenade exploded. That meant the prime target time to deliver the device was when they pulled up to the gate. They would open it while they were down the street, not stopping in front of it, but they would slow to make the turn. That was when the drone needed to land.

My role was simple. Drop Jenny off at the park where she had let me off. Unlike her plan where we did a rolling pass, I would stay there and read a book. I usually bought one at the airport on the way out of town. I’d drop it off for someone else to enjoy after having read only a few chapters, but this one held my attention, so I kept it. The past few days didn’t lend themselves to free reading time, but today was different.

We rolled into the parking area of the relatively unused park. I stopped, kissed Jenny good-bye, and turned up the music. Rush’s Signals album with the first and most appropriate track, Subdivisions. I watched Jenny put in earbuds even though she wouldn’t stream any music or podcasts or even an audiobook. She needed to hear everything that was going on. The earbuds were only for appearances, because that’s what people did when they exercised.

I stared at her backside, and she caught me as she always did when she glanced over her shoulder. I remained unapologetic.

I didn’t lose myself in my book, looking up often to check the area to see if anyone was watching me. A man walked into the park with his dog. He unhooked the leash and let the pup run free. The good boy bolted away and then made a wide turn, racing back to its human who produced a ball and launched it. The dog chased after it, running it down and returning. That’s when the wrestling match started to get the ball for another toss.

Dog logic. Throw the ball and I’ll chase it. But you’ll need a second ball because I’m not giving you this one after I just ran it down. It’s mine. This went on for fifteen minutes. Throw, wrestle, and throw again.

The man hooked the leash on and the two walked away, the dog with his tail held high and the ball still in his mouth. The dogwalker saw me. I waved, smiling at the respite from the issues of my day. He nodded back and then was gone.

I returned to my book, but I’d lost momentum. I closed it. The view of the world going by was serene. I could feel my heartbeat, slow and steady. That was the benefit of the extreme fitness regimen that Jenny and I put ourselves through. It was necessary. Our job demanded that we be in better shape and physically able to do things well beyond the norm, which included being faster, reacting more quickly to events that too often spiraled quickly out of control.

I checked my watch. It had been nearly an hour. Jenny should be back any time. I started to worry, thinking that she should have been back a long time ago. I started the engine and prepared to go looking but then spotted her in the distance. She walked at a measured pace, quick and steady, lifting her knees with each step in an exaggerated movement. The full workout for someone who had to maximize the impact of the short time they had to run their body through its paces. The only thing she didn’t have were hand weights to complete the image.

She strolled up to the Jeep, winked at me, and stretched as if she’d just run competitively. She climbed in, and I handed her a bottle of water as the dutiful husband was supposed to.

“I think someone’s home,” she said. “There was movement, and the good news is that the SUV is parked there, but I couldn’t see if there was anyone inside.”

I sighed. “It would be nice to have one of Bob Casey’s remote cameras.”

Jenny tapped her phone. “Should I call him?”

“It’s time we checked on his health and well-being, don’t you think? He was looking pretty pale when we last saw him. When was that, a month ago?” I quipped.

“Three days.” She tapped out his number and activated the speaker.

It took five rings before he answered without speaking.

“Bob, Jenny here.”

“Whew! I thought it was my ex-wife wanting more money. Thank God!” he exclaimed in a rush with a slight slur.

“Are you taking pain pills?”

“It’s the only way I can get any sleep,” he replied. “My body stitching itself back together is like lava flowing through each and every cut.”

“But are you mending?” I asked.

“Ian, is that you? I thought your lady friend was trying to make time with me.” He laughed until he grunted in pain.

“I’ll get down to it. We need one of your remote video cameras.” The delay made me think he passed out.

“Jenny? Are you still there?” Bob asked.

“Bob, focus,” Jenny stated. “We need one of your remote video cameras.”

That reminded me that we’d left two burner phones in trees at the dude ranch. Chances were remote that they’d be found, but more importantly, there was nothing we could do about it now.

“Why didn’t you say that?” Bob replied. “I can meet you, although I shouldn’t be driving.”

“Don’t you dare get into a car. We’ll come to you. Text your address and we’ll head straight there.”

“Bring some whiskey, would you? I seem to be out. And barbecue potato chips. I have a hankering, if you know what I mean.”

I stared at the phone. “We’ll see what we can do, Bob. Get some rest. We’ll be there soon. Don’t forget. Text us your address.” I had to reiterate it as he was off in la-la-land.

But he sent the text shortly after we ended the call. Jenny plugged it into the map program. “It says forty-five minutes.”

“I hope he’s awake.” I avoided pain pills when I was injured. I never wanted to be without my wits. Physical fitness could never overcome the power of the mind. That was our secret weapon. Between Jenny and I, we stayed ahead of the bad guys.

Although, if I were smart, I would have snagged one of the cameras before we left Harper’s Dude Ranch and recovered the two phones we used for video streaming.

We were rectifying issues one by one.

Bob lived in the heart of middle-class suburbia. Homes that were mostly cookie cutter, but big and stately. Two-car garages throughout the neighborhood. No wrecks parked in driveways and no oil stains, which suggested a homeowner’s association, an HOA that rode herd on the residents to keep them ostensibly from lowering property values. No wild-colored houses, either. Everything was built according to approved plans with approved color schemes and fences with approved wood and grass not to exceed an approved length.

Good for Bob joining that madness. I had proudly never been under the jackboot of an HOA. I was too poor until I was too rich. It worked for many people. It must have worked for Bob, given his home was in the older section of the new subdivision.

We parked in the empty driveway and strolled to the front door.

Bob yanked the door open as I raised my hand to knock. The motion was startling, but not so much that I punched Bob in his ashen face.

He held out the camera. Jenny took it.

“You look like hell,” I told him.

“I feel like a dream,” Bob replied. He ushered us in, and we went inside but never left the entryway.

“We can’t stay. We’re on the home stretch of this project.”

He took me by both shoulders and looked up from under half-lidded eyes. “Do him, Ian. Do him ugly. Make him pay for what they did.”

“You get some rest, Bob. We’ll take care of things, okay? Don’t you worry about that. Get yourself better. You have contracts to sort out and get going.”

“I do?” he asked. He was instantly confused. I wondered about the last time he logged all the way through the Peace Archive’s site.

“Don’t worry about it. When you’re yourself again. We have to go. You better sit down before you fall down.” I helped him to his couch. A seventies gameshow was playing. It reminded me of when I got to stay home sick from school. There weren’t a bazillion stations like there were today or heaven forbid, streaming where kids can watch anything they want, anytime they want. “You should probably spring for a streaming service.”

“This is streaming. What can I say? I like the thrill of old gameshows.” He flopped onto the couch, breathing heavily from his exertions of walking to the front door and back.

I punched the door button lock so it would lock behind us. It wasn’t the most secure, but it would keep the honest people honest.

Jenny raised her eyebrows and just looked at me. Neither one of us had to say anything.

“What do you say we whip by the ranch and recover those two phones. It’s been three days. Do you think anyone is still there?”

Jenny shook her head. She plugged in the address, and we were off.

We never bothered turning off the highway as police cars blocked both roads leading to the ranch. We had to take an alternate route to the hotel, so we didn’t pass the law enforcement professionals coming and going.

“I guess that answers that question,” Jenny muttered.

We drove to the Chisel’s neighborhood in silence. Jenny worked on the video feed that linked to an app. She downloaded the app into my burner phone using one of our fake accounts.

It was my turn to take a walk, but Jenny stopped me.

“I’m less conspicuous, no matter that I just power-walked through there. I saw more than a few women watching out the windows.”

I rubbed my chin in thought. “I think your observations run counter to your conclusions. Those looking out the windows are telling themselves stories for everything they see. For you, they’re wondering who you’re sneaking in to see. Me? Same thing, but with more fervor as I’m sure they all know who’s cheating with whom, even if it’s not true.”

Jenny nodded. “Looks like you’re going.” She let go of my arm.

I left the keys in the ignition and kissed her as I always did when we parted, even if it was only for a brief time. Down the street toward Chisel’s home, thinking the entire time about a nickname that I had not given him. Stone Chisel was already ridiculous. He didn’t need further belittlement.

I intended to put the camera down the street. It had a spring-like metal band for wrapping around a post, and there was a ‘children playing’ sign a hundred yards away from the Everington house.

It would do. I’d put the camera just below the yellow sign where it wouldn’t stand out. It only took me four minutes to cover the distance. I sidled up next to the sign without looking around and leaned against it to retie my shoe. I finished, wrapped the band around the post with the camera aiming down the street toward our target’s house, and strolled back the way I’d come. We only needed to see the entrance to the home and when the SUV left.

I hurried back to the park, looking for a house that was obviously empty, but none of them appeared to be.

Thirty to forty-five minutes to the airport, an indeterminate amount of time to wait, and then a return trip. It gave us a window in which to operate. It would have to be good enough. In the interim, we’d keep searching the dark web. The initial report said he wouldn’t return until tomorrow.

That could be a smokescreen. We wanted the real itinerary.

And we needed a place from which to launch the drone. A site that was within a couple hundred yards to minimize flight time since we wouldn’t see the SUV coming until the last minute.

Seconds counted.

“What if we launch it out the back and then recover it into the back?” I asked Miss Jenny.

“You think you can fly that thing into the back of the Jeep?”

“If flies pretty well without a grenade hanging off it,” I countered.

“You have a point. Can you drop it on the roof of a moving vehicle as clunky as it is?”

I threw my hands up. “I’m looking for a confidence booster. No doubts! That’s what I’m looking for.”

“That’s what I meant,” Jenny replied. “You’ll stab that grenade home and then spank that monkey.”

I looked at my wife. “What do you think that means?”

“Declare victory. Take a victory lap. Do a victory dance. Why?”

“It doesn’t mean that. We will declare victory!” I watched the camera, and it looked almost like a still until the SUV departed. We hadn’t even reached the hotel. “Another question. How do we make sure he’s in the vehicle?”

Jenny pulled over. Good thing we left the drone in the Jeep, but the contraption wasn’t ready yet. I needed to tape the grenade to the underside with the spoon barely held in place, waiting for the drop to the vehicle’s roof and rapid lift to yank the box cutters across the tape holding the spoon in place, freeing the drone so we could recover it. I wanted to leave no evidence. The magnets were clean, and the grenade was clean. One last wipe over the tape and we’d be ready.

I took out my satellite phone and dialed Jimmy’s number.

He answered, “I’m in the middle of something. Can you call back?”

“No. We need to know within the next hour if Stone Chisel, aka Clarence Everington, is on a flight into Atlanta today, not tomorrow as his wife’s press release stated.”

“I’ll look into it and call you back.”

Jenny pursed her lips. “He’s going to last-minute us.”

“And we’ll take it like champs because we can’t hit a vehicle that doesn’t have him inside. At least they don’t have any kids to get in the way.”

“That would be the worst.” Jenny continued driving to the hotel.

The clock was running. Time was thirty minutes there, a quick pickup of maybe five minutes, and then thirty minutes back. We had a little over an hour if the stars were in alignment for the Chisel. If not, then maybe three hours, but no more if he was on today’s flight to Atlanta.

My heart raced. We had too many unknowns. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to pull the trigger on this.”

Jenny rested her hand on my leg. “We’ll hit the restroom, grab a coffee, and head back out. We’ll wait in the park. When we have to, we’ll move closer and park under a tree in the neighborhood. Be ready to launch that drone. If we can’t confirm ol’ baldy is inside, then we recover the drone, very carefully, and look for another way.”

That’s exactly what I had figured.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation, there is sure to be failure.” –Confucius

Fifteen minutes before our hour was up, the SUV returned to the house. We were two miles and ten minutes away.

“There’s no way they went out to pick up the boss. They couldn’t have made it there and back in that short a time,” I noted. “This wasn’t the window. They’re preparing for his return.”

It was a guess. I had no idea what they were doing. They could have gone to a Whataburger, for all I knew.

“They didn’t go to the airport and pick him up,” Jenny stated confidently. “False alarm, Ian.”

“And Jimmy hasn’t called us back,” I grumbled my disappointment. It was the unknowns of surveillance and an operation like this. We often had disappointments when we thought we knew someone’s routine and they varied it. When we thought we were one step ahead but found ourselves running to catch up.

It was the nature of our business. As one of my old bosses used to say, if you want it bad, you get it bad. We needed time and information to do things right.

Exactly one hour after I called Jimmy, he called me back.

“Confirmed that he’s on tomorrow’s flight, arriving at 2:22 PM on Southeast Air. He’s checked in for that flight.”

“Thanks, Jimmy. We’re still on track. False alarm.”

“The Administrator of the DEA would like to talk with you, Ian.”

“What, right now?” I was instantly shocked.

“When you’ve finished what you’re there to do. We’ll fly you to D.C. as soon as possible.”

“That sounds ominous, and I don’t like it at all.” I glared at the phone.

“I have your back, Ian. This isn’t a bad thing at all. Could be more work. A lot more work.”

“I doubt I want to do that. I do work for you because I didn’t kill you. I don’t owe the DEA anything except a shared disdain for drug dealers and their ilk. Get me out of this one, Jimmy. I don’t want to meet with the DEA, and whatever you do, don’t try to blackmail me into doing so. I won’t take kindly to that.”

“You have my word.” Jimmy laughed. “A politician and his word. It’s funny because with you, I will keep my word, one hundred percent. You’ve helped me and you’ve helped the president. We owe you, not the other way around. Please consider meeting with her.”

“I don’t think so. Thanks for the confirmation on Clarence’s flight. I’ll talk to you soon about something else completely, like what we’re getting your kids for Christmas. I’m thinking dinosaur coloring books.” I ended the call.

Jenny looked concerned. We sat in the hotel’s parking lot doing nothing. We needed time to think, time to contemplate life.

“That’s a turn of events that I expected. We made things too easy for Jimmy. We solved problems that he couldn’t solve using normal channels. The DEA? If we had the information available to the drug enforcer, there would be a culling, the likes of which would rock the free world and start to restore order to the inner cities. Would we get free rein? Probably not. One contract at a time for vast sums. The Peace Archive would take the entire budget for the DEA, but we’d solve a lot of problems. No. Not playing their game. No one but Jimmy.”

Jenny understood. “I’ll support whatever you decide.”

“I want to know what you think. You know which way I’m leaning, since I already told Jimmy no.”

“I don’t want it either. We’d overextend the company, and we’d be putting our operators in the middle of gang wars. We just lost Heath because of a drug gang. He would be the first of many to come. I think the company is in a good position for slow growth, not the meteoric race to the stars that would come with anything we’d do for the DEA. You know what happens to those who stick their neck out too far.”

“It’s unanimous. I won’t tell Jimmy to get bent, but the answer will still be no.” I undid my seatbelt. I reached in the back to check on the drone and, more specifically, the grenade. I covered our device with a large bag that we’d been given when we bought it, even though it didn’t come with a box. “It looks like we have some time off before we have to engage. Another early night with room service?”

“We’re turning into old people. We find we prefer going to bed early. Remember when we’d stay up half the night?”

“We never stayed up half the night, except when we were, well, doing other stuff.”

Jenny laughed lightly. It was more than a giggle, but appreciative of good humor and my sometimes naivete when talking about our most personal relations. I wasn’t good talking about my emotions. I guess that made me your average man who stopped maturing at twelve. I could deal that humor, and Jenny tolerated it.

We headed to the room to kill time. I had more questions than answers, and every element of our plan was based on circumstantial evidence and speculation filling gaps between sparse facts.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I mumbled.

The next morning came, and we worked out harder than we normally would. We weren’t worried that we’d be stiff. A hard workout lubricated the muscles, and it took our minds away from what was in store for us later.

We killed time by doing business-related work, checking contracts, vetting contracts, paying people, checking in with Gladys…

“Are you coming home any time soon?” Gladys asked.

“‘Soon’ is a relative construct embraced by those who are slaves to the concept of linear time,” I replied.

“Time is linear, Ian. We’re not traveling at lightspeed, so the only conclusion I can draw is you aren’t. You’re goofing off where it’s warm and you’re in a hotel enjoying room service.”

“For the record, it’s hot and humid, although I have to admit we are getting room service. It’s nice. I believe we’ll be finished today and then head back either later today or first thing tomorrow. We’ll come to Chicago rather than go to the Hamptons. We have some things to work out from this debacle of a training retreat.”

“We look forward to having you back, Jenny. Bring Ian with you, if you must,” Gladys replied.

“You’re not talking to Jenny,” I replied.

“I know she can hear me, Ian. Is there anything else?”

“I always feel like I get the better of our conversations, don’t you?” I told Gladys. “Bye, darling, miss you already. Mwah.” I ended the call.

“You two.” Jenny laughed at me.

I was glad we kept it light. This business could be a killer. And Gladys fit right in. We could never take ourselves too seriously or have an inflated ego. Little did Gladys know, this operation was the opposite. We were as far from overconfident as we could be.

We parked the Jeep where the rear hatch was under a tree so I could dig into the drone and triple-check that it was ready to go. The batteries were charged. The fingerprints wiped off. The twin straps holding the spoon down that would be cut when the drone jerked away from the magnetically attached grenade. That the magnets didn’t interfere with the downward blast.

I was sure we had it worked out, but it was untested. We only had one grenade and no safe space to test the drop attachment.

We sat in the hotel’s parking lot and waited, watching a publicly available tracking program that followed all commercial flights. The Chisel’s flight was going to land five minutes early.

Jenny stared at the camera feed showing the front gate and roadway in front of the Everington house. Twenty minutes before Chisel’s plane was due to land, the SUV left.

“Start the clock.” We both looked at the time. “We leave in a half-hour. Expect the SUV coming home sometime fifteen to forty-five minutes later.”

We followed the flight track until it reported the plane as having landed.

“I’ll check the traffic,” Jenny said.

I switched my burner phone to watch the live feed, even though we shouldn’t see anything for a while. Jenny ran the map app that showed the estimated time to the airport and back. Traffic was light, and it calculated thirty-seven minutes out and thirty-five back.

We tried to relax, but this was the hardest part of an operator’s life—waiting for the culmination of the planning and setup to deliver the hit on an unwitting, unwilling target.

Seventy-two minutes plus however long it took Chisel to get from the plane to the curb.

The clock ticked slowly down, taking forever while we watched it.

We talked through the plan once more. Jenny was driving. We’d get into the neighborhood, not far from the house. I’d already smeared mud on the license plate to make the numbers unreadable and covered up the rental company’s sticker on the back window. Someone would see us, that was guaranteed, but would they see anything of value?

We would make it hard for them. We were already packed. If the hit was successful, then we’d drive straight to the airport and catch the next flight to Chicago. The best place to be when the authorities were checking the crime scene was as far away as possible. Another state was best.

That was the plan.

As agonizing as it was to wait, it was best not to get to the neighborhood too early. The clock finally cooperated, and we could begin the execution phase.

Jenny drove the speed limit, checking her mirrors and blind spots often. She drove defensively. There were no accidents in our future. The risk wasn’t worth it, and we weren’t in a hurry.

We made it to the park to kill fifteen more minutes. After that, we headed into the neighborhood. We stopped short of the house. I opened the rear hatch and took out the jack and mini spare. I popped the tire cover off and put the hand-crank under the Jeep to make it look like I was changing the tire. I’d toss the donut spare and jack into the back the second we recovered the drone.

People would be less in our business if we were doing normal people stuff. At least that’s what we reasoned.

An innocuous couple taking care of business. I took the drone out, shielding it with my body, and put it on the grass near the front of the Jeep. I guessed it had a twenty-second flight time to the gate, maybe less. It would have to be airborne the second we spotted the SUV.

I turned it on but didn’t spin up the rotors. I carefully removed the pin from the grenade and put it in my pocket, just in case. I leaned on the Jeep, shielding the flight controller, and waited for Jenny to give me the word.

“There they are,” she said in a normal voice. I spun up the drone and lifted it carefully off the ground. It took two tries to get it up without jerking it straight into the tree. It lumbered upward. I took it over the fence and flew it low, behind shrubs, fences, and the wrought iron, taking it past the gate, clearing just before the SUV turned in.

With the greatest care, I took it to an altitude of twenty feet, no more, and angled it into the street as the SUV was turning into the driveway. I lined it up to fly down the path the SUV traveled and descended to the top of the vehicle until all I could see from the camera was the roof.

The drone jerked sideways. I could hear the clunk from where we were. I pushed the controls hard for the drone to ascend. It tipped, and the rotor guard kissed the roof before the drone straightened and lifted. It jerked when the box cutters separated the duct-tape straps from the magnetically attached grenade. The device affixed tightly to the roof of the SUV. The drone shot upward, nearly out of control. I let off the controls so it could self-level.

I turned it toward us and sent it racing for the Jeep.

The SUV’s momentum took it through the gate, but it stopped. The front passenger hopped up to look at the roof, see what hit them.

We could only see the back of him from the remote video. The passenger door started to open, and a bald head appeared. The man from the front seat reached for the grenade just as it exploded. Flames, shrapnel, and smoke belched through the open doors.

I angled the drone to the back of the Jeep and dropped it on the ground. I powered it down as I tossed it into the back. I followed with the donut and the jack. Punched the button for the rear hatch to close itself and hopped in the passenger side.

Jenny made a casual three-point turn and headed away from the hit and out of the neighborhood.

As soon as she could, Jenny accelerated to the highway and caught an on-ramp north to Chattanooga, where we’d return the pistol and turn in our Jeep—at a substantial penalty since we were supposed to turn it in at Atlanta-Hartsfield Airport.

I reached into the back to dismantle the drone so we could dump it in the trash somewhere between here and Tennessee. I stuffed the donut of a spare tire into the space below the rear deck along with the jack and handle.

Cleanup was as important as the hit itself.

I leaned on the back of the front passenger seat. The rush of the action made my heart pound in my ears. I needed to calm down before we reached the airport. I had two hours.

“That went better than expected,” Jenny said. She reached around the seat and squeezed my arm.

“That’s not one we ever need to talk about again.” I leaned back and breathed deeply. I closed my eyes rather than compulsively look around. There was no reason to look as guilty as we were. Jenny changed the radio station to pop music.

I didn’t bother opening my eyes. “What’s that all about?”

“I’m driving, and shotgun shuts their piehole,” Jenny said.

“You sound like me.”

“I may have heard that more than once, Mr. Bragg.”

“Touché, Mrs. Bragg. Off to Chicago. Take us to the rental car facility. We’ll get rid of this trash.” I broke the body of the drone. It was expensive, but to save weight, many of the parts were plastic. It came apart easier than I would have thought. I was happy that it still flew after clipping the rotor guard on the SUV’s roof. It had escaped to a safe distance by the time the grenade went off.

It was a short drive, less than an hour and a half. The gun store was still open. I unloaded the pistol and returned the wiped-down bullets to the box. I cleaned the pistol and put it in the case. Jenny had her receipt and walked into the store without me.

I had no idea what story she was going to tell them, but fifteen minutes later, she returned to the Jeep without the pistol. She found me in the driver’s seat with Rush blaring from the sound system.

She smiled at me. “Don’t say it. We didn’t get all our money back. Seems there’s a restock fee and check fee and handling fee and something about a fee fee.”

“Wouldn’t that be a dog?” I asked. I didn’t care about the money. I only wanted to be rid of the weapon and not have it attached to our names in any way, even though we hadn’t used it. “You didn’t have to pay them to take it back, did you?”

“No. He took pity on little ole me and gave us a full refund, although they usually didn’t.”

“I’ve created a monster,” I said, slowly driving away from the store.

“Maybe the monster was always within, and you only opened the gate to let her run free,” Jenny suggested.

We reached the airport by driving with traffic, avoiding any erratic maneuvers. Straight to the rental car return, where we stopped well short of the return line to clean out the back and straighten the spare and jack so the deck cover could close.

We jumped in the front and drove forward to the return crew.

“Sorry,” Jenny told the clerk. “We were supposed to return it in Atlanta, but we were in Chattanooga, and well, here we are. We’ll pay the penalty.”

The clerk shrugged. Tapped a couple buttons. A mini printer spit out a receipt, and he handed it to Jenny.

We walked toward the terminal, where we didn’t have tickets. I expected we’d be in the middle seats in coach, and I was okay with that. I wanted to put more distance between us and the hit on Stone Chisel, aka Clarence Everington.

My sat phone rang before we reached the counter to get a flight to O’Hare.

I hung my head and let it ring. No matter how much I didn’t want to believe it, Jimmy had leverage over us. We had some on him, but no one would believe us. Would he use it? I’d like to think he wouldn’t, but that wasn’t the same as knowing for a fact that he wouldn’t betray us, or that someone hadn’t gotten to him to turn us over.

“Jimmy,” I said, barely above a whisper.

“Get on the plane to Reagan. It leaves in thirty minutes,” Jimmy said without preamble.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present.” –Denis Waitley

“I think Jimmy has overstayed his welcome,” I groused. He had made us rich. He had kept us alive during tricky contracts. And he just saved our lives again on something that he had no need to involve himself in. But here we were. I was complaining to complain. I wanted to sleep in our own bed in Chicago. I’d had my heart set on it, but it looked like one more night in a hotel.

“You still like him. I know I do,” Jenny replied.

“And I hate myself for it, so it’s a love-hate relationship. All we can do is see what he has to say.”

“I thought it was odd how he was waiting for us at the end of each contract, but now we know that your phone is the culprit. We probably need to make that go away.”

“Or store it in a Faraday cage, but then it would be unusable. I’ll ask Gladys to get me another one.”

The plane landed at Washington National Airport, right on the Potomac River.

We headed out to the same place where our federal escorts usually waited for us. To no one’s surprise, they were there, at the end of the arrivals curb in a no-parking area. We strolled up. The agent in the passenger seat, who we hadn’t met before, took our carry-ons and placed them in the rear of the government Suburban. He held the door for us, and we climbed in without anyone saying a word.

I wasn’t in the mood for my usual banter. Jenny gave me the side-eye.

“Fine.” I cracked my knuckles and took a deep breath. “Hey guys, watcha doin’? Playin’ cards?”

They didn’t budge. I needed to dig deeper into my bag of tricks.

“There was this guy who knocked on a door. The resident said come in and completely ruined the joke.”

Jenny bit her lip.

“There once was a man from Nantucket?” Jenny elbowed me in the ribs before I could say any more. “You guys do your service credit. Did you have your funny boners removed—I mean bones. Sorry.”

They remained stalwart and stone-faced.

“You guys are as hard as woodpecker lips. Do you not get paid by the word? I do, so I’m going to keep talking. Your worst nightmare!” I laughed maniacally.

The agent in the passenger’s seat turned around as far as his thick neck would allow. “They told us about you. You don’t have any food you’re going to hide under the seat, do you?”

“No. I haven’t done anything like that in, what, two, three weeks?” I looked to Jenny for confirmation.

“About that,” she said.

“Relax. We’ll be there shortly.” He faced the front again, and that was the end of any conversation.

“I tried.” I took Jenny’s hand, and we watched the landmarks of our nation’s capital go by.

The agent was correct. It didn’t take long before we were ushered through the gate to the vice president’s home. I wondered if he avoided Capitol Hill. I would, if I were him, but then again, I would never be him. I detested politicians, and Jimmy’s veritable kidnapping of us lost him a bevy of cool points. I wouldn’t give him my new number after I destroyed my current phone.

The agent held the door for us so we could get out. Unlike previous visits where Jimmy met us outside, a valet greeted us and beckoned for us to follow him in.

We found Jimmy in the room where he met guests. It was his version of the Oval Office, the place where he conducted official meetings but unofficially.

“What the hell, Jimmy?” I blurted.

His smile widened, and he veritably beamed with joy.

Jenny pushed me out of the way and moved in for a hug.

“No Twizzlers?” Jimmy asked her.

She shook her head. “I swear, I thought it was you with the sweet tooth.”

“Ian, my friend, I think you misunderstand what’s going on here. We had a narrow window to do what we wanted to do.”

“Meet with the DEA to get strong-armed into doing their dirty work for them?” I asked. The vice president’s demeanor didn’t change my bad attitude.

“We’re not going to strong-arm you into doing anything you don’t want to do. I don’t have any work for you right now. This meeting is something completely different.”

I was taken aback, so much so that I took a step away from Jimmy. “Say what?”

Jimmy walked to a side door and opened it. He stepped aside to let the president and the administrator of the DEA through. They crossed the room to shake my hand and then Jenny’s.

“I still feel like I’ve been sent to the principal’s office,” I said, much less confrontationally.

The president spoke first. “I know we’ve paid for your invaluable services in the past, but this time, we did not. What you did on the Stone Chisel gang helped us break the back of that organization. We’ve just been told that the man who led the organization has been killed in an engine fire that resulted in an accidental explosion.”

“Cars aren’t made like they used to be,” I suggested.

“So I hear,” the president agreed.

The president nodded to the administrator. “I have been read-in to what you do for the government.” At my look, she held up her hands to allay my obvious concerns. “Your secret is safe with me. If you go down, we all go down with you, and I have no intention of going down when my sole focus is making this country safer from the blight that is the illegal drug trade. I wish I could turn you loose on every single kingpin and dealer out there. Kill them all!” Her face took on a nearly fanatical fervor. She held her fist in front of her chest before forcing herself to relax. “I can be myself with you. Those people are wearing me down, but you’ve given me hope that we might be able to win this war, even though it might take some extra-governmental work to accomplish.”

The president rested a hand on the administrator’s shoulder. He looked at me and then Miss Jenny. “The reason you’re here in this way is because I wanted to give you the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This will be completely secret. No one will know why as the citation will be buried behind codewords and vault doors. But your names will be forever attached to it.”

Jimmy produced two medals that the president ceremoniously draped around our necks.

“I don’t know what to say.” I glanced at Jenny, but she was as surprised as I was.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Jenny managed.

“Indeed,” I said. “May I say that your hugeness knows no bounds?”

He looked at me. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been told that.”

“I don’t really mean it, if you’re wondering,” I added.

“That’s more like it. If only everyone were so honest with me. Thank you for what you do for this country, Ian. Off the record, of course.”

The Administrator of the DEA raised her hand. “If we were to let contracts with your organization, how many could you reasonably handle?”

That was more like what I was expecting from this meeting. “The issue is when you cut the head off a hydra, another grows in its place. In Atlanta, we removed a number of the soldiers first, and then removed their leadership. Without troops to lead and no general, no one was moving in. Making the business too dangerous is what needs to happen. They won’t get good people—or any people, for that matter.”

“How many dealers have you removed, as you say?” the administrator asked.

“That’s not something I’m willing to discuss,” I dodged. “Inner cities are extremely dangerous for the work we do, but the good news is the heads of those organizations don’t live in the inner cities. They exploit those who do. I expect a two-tiered approach. Outreach of viable employment inside the city while removing the leadership and distribution. It takes a great deal of intelligence work and preparation. Despite appearances, we can’t pull these things off in five days like you just witnessed. That’s the anomaly and not the paradigm.”

“I understand,” the administrator conceded.

“Go through Jimmy for any contracts so he can meter them out. We can’t be doing government work weekly. We’ll be found out. You’ll be found out. And we’ll completely destroy your budget since we don’t come cheaply. You want it bad, you get it bad. You want it good, you have to be patient and pay well.”

The administrator nodded.

“It’s in my lap. Got it,” Jimmy interjected. “Make sure you give me your new number after you destroy that phone, unless you believe we’re some of your biggest fans and will protect you as much as we can, then hang onto it. We’ll be watching out for you.”

“Dammit, Jimmy.” I changed gears. “How’s your wife and the bambinos?”

“You’ll see them at dinner. You and Jenny will be staying here tonight and will fly out first thing in the morning to Chicago. Or would you rather go to New York?”

“Chicago,” I answered. I could see the president struggling not to check his watch. “Thank you for your time, Mr. President, Ms. Administrator.”

He looked relieved. We shook hands, and the two of them were out the door.

“We’re staying in the Lincoln Bedroom?” I grinned.

Jenny pushed me. “That’s in the White House.”

“Dammit, Jimmy!” I blurted.

He laughed like someone who had no worries and no cares. Maybe for that brief moment in time, he didn’t. He could be himself with us because we weren’t going to share any of his secrets like he wouldn’t share ours. It was the dark underbelly of running a great country. People slept better in their beds not knowing the violence people like me would do on their behalf, even though it was patently illegal.

It was a sobering thought.

And I was spent. The rush of the last few days came crashing down on my shoulders like a ton of bricks, making me glad that we weren’t flying out that evening. Bags appeared under Jenny’s beautiful green eyes. I felt horrible for putting her through that.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

She didn’t know what I was sorry for but accepted it.

“You two look like you could use a sauna, a massage, and maybe a day or two of sleep,” Jimmy said. “Sorry for hijacking you. I’ll do better next time.”

“Don’t let there be a next time, Jimmy. You’ll give me heart failure. And yes, we’ll take you up on a sauna, maybe a jetted tub. No massage for me, those things give me the willies, but Miss Jenny might want one.”

She nodded. “I have knots on top of knots.”

“I’ll turn you over to the valet. We’ll see you at dinner.”

One call to Gladys was all it took to make sure our ride was waiting for us when we landed at O’Hare. We had them stop by White Castle on the way to the Club. I had to concede that we had White Castles in New York City, but there was something about getting a few sliders and fries for the trip through Chicago. Maybe we needed to do the same thing in New York. I’d have to think about that.

On the trip, we vegged. Nothing like a few gut bombs to bring on the tireds, even though we’d had a full night’s sleep. The bed was glorious. Of course we broke it in, as newlyweds are supposed to. I hoped they didn’t have cameras in the room. If they did, it would be a treat for whoever watched. Pervs.

We perked up at the front door to the Club. The doorman was there as usual, greeting us as he always did. I shook his hand and asked how his day was because I legitimately cared. I waited for an answer rather than rush into the building. He shared a story about his son’s first soccer match. His boy was four, and soccer consisted of two mobs of kids going after the ball, possibly looking more like rugby than soccer.

We shook hands again, and I slipped him a one-hundred-dollar bill. I liked taking care of the good people who worked for us.

Instead of going upstairs, we went to the members’ private bar and lounge. I hoped to catch Prince Markle, but he wasn’t there.

“Mr. and Mrs. Bragg,” the fresh, young-faced woman said. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Did Prince give you the special recipes for our coffees?” I asked.

“He did. He’ll be in this afternoon. It’s his last shift, but I expect you already knew that.”

Jenny and I nodded. “Alas, what we do for love is personal and as his friends, we wish him the best. If he ever wants to return, he’s more than welcome. We don’t burn any bridges here.”

“I know that. He’s torn up about leaving. I think he’ll spend the next year convincing his lady love to come back home to North Chicago.” She turned to the espresso machine and ginned up our drinks. A light roast for me with plenty of cream and a mocha latte for Miss Jenny.

“I didn’t get your name,” I told her when she put our drinks on the counter.

“Alexandra Kishnova, but I go by Lexi.”

“And so it shall be. Thanks, Lexi. We better check in with Gladys so we don’t get our butts kicked.” We waved and headed upstairs.

I took a deep breath outside the door to our office suite as if psyching myself up. Then, I pushed it open and threw my arms wide. “Hi, honey. I’m home!”

Gladys finished typing something before looking over the top of her glasses at me.

“Miss Jenny,” she said with a smile and walked over to give her a hug.

“I’m going to start taking things personally,” I told her. She winked at me. “As long as you take care of this fine lady, me and you will get along just fine.”

The door closed behind us and clicked as it locked.

“We’ve had an inquiry, and I think you might want to handle this one yourselves,” she said with reservation, as if we’d rebut her claim.

I rolled my finger to hear the rest of it. I wanted to tell her that we chose which contracts we handled, but I trusted her judgment and knew she’d be right.

“There’s a group of parents who are well off, but not rich by any measure. They’ve pooled their money to take out a contract on one Essoe Cavindish.”

I didn’t have to ask who that was. He was one of the top ten richest people in the world.

“You’re right in holding that one for us, Gladys. We’ll check the details and then decide.” I frowned.

Jenny said, “Welcome home.”

“And that’s why we can’t get a cat,” I added.

“I’ll watch it while you’re away,” Gladys offered.

“Don’t be an instigator.” I brushed my finger of shame at her. Jenny looked at me, but she wasn’t thinking about a cat. She was worried what we might do about taking a contract on one of the highest profile people in the world.

The End of Live Fire

Ian Bragg will return in Contract on a Billionaire.

While you’re waiting for the next story, if you would be so kind as to leave a review for this book, that would be great. I appreciate the feedback and support. Reviews buoy my spirits and stoke the fires of creativity. In the interim, maybe you’ll want to check out Rick Banik…

If you follow me on Amazon, they’ll let you know when my next book is released.

Don’t stop now! Keep turning the pages as I talk about my thoughts on this book and the overall project called the Ian Bragg Thrillers.

https://geni.us/IanBragg

Author Notes - Craig Martelle

Written August 29, 2024

I can’t thank you enough for reading this story to the very end! I hope you liked it as much as I did. And we press on with more Ian Bragg as he evolves.

Where did I get those superhero names? I asked you, fans and readers, and you came through.

Son of a gun! I started with superhero names, but those didn’t work for me. Halfway through, I changed it. This was a huge time sink as I not only had to do a massive find/replace (that was quick), but then I had to go back through to clarify those superpowers.

Pi Guy – the human calculator (Heather Carson) – hippy. Changed to Heath, killed in the battle of the ranch.

Gorgon – able to gorge 56 hot dogs in ten minutes (that’s mine)

Shadowstep – able to hide in shadows (David Nix) – old woman. Changed to Davida

Forklift – uncanny strength (Jerry Shepard) – large Black man. Changed to Jerry.

Stone – only mostly dead (Brandon Keever) – housewife looking (and acting) woman. Changed to Brenda.

Arctic – ice water in her veins (Jessyca Barney) – Miss Jenny

Bromigo – A bro who’s good at making friends (Harmon Cooper) – average guy. Cooper

Interpreeda – instantly speaks any language (or just tongues) (Melissa Mule) – youngest of the three sisters. Melissa

Sparkler – because she sparkles (Brad Werner) – second of the three. Changed to Brandi.

The Edge – can make any part of his body an edged weapon (Jon Peterson) – third of the three. Changed to Joni.

Giga Monk – a thousand times faster martial artist (Matthew Sylvester) - nondescript middle-aged man, Monk Matt (Jay Weatherall). Changed to Matt.

Intrepid X – gangs up with nanobots (Erik Garland) – surfer guy (Devin MacGregor). Changed to Erik.

Boulderon – Giant rockman (Andrew Scott Perry) – Bob Casey. Changed to Scott.

The Buca – controls nuclear fusion (Henrik Sætre) Executive looking, middle-aged Black woman. Changed to Henrietta.

Of course, Rush! If you haven’t already, Ian’s Rush playlist is on Spotify. Drop by and listen in.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2JdhUojL1sK8wOm76OHsfr

I like BrainyQuote. They do me right when I’m looking for the quote that matches the chapter.

This book rolled quickly for me. I wrote it over the course of twenty-nine days, which harkens to my pace of the past. I had unusual clarity on this story. I also needed the escape that Ian Bragg brings. My mom passed away in January of 2023. My dad had a hard time being without her after sixty-eight years of marriage, so he only made it a little more than a year before he rapidly declined and passed away in May of 2024. I wrote the majority of this book in the last ten days before his celebration of life and funeral. I finished the story on the plane from Alaska back to Iowa, where he and Mom will be buried together.

He was my biggest fan. He read everything that I wrote, no matter the genre. He enjoyed my Alaska post-apocalyptic novels—the End Times Alaska series—the best. And I think next was the Ian Bragg and Rick Banik thrillers. So I’ll keep writing Ian Bragg, and next up is another post-apocalyptic novel set in Alaska. It’ll be called Defiant. I hope you like that one. I’ll dedicate it to my old man and the great person he was.

What’s up for Ian and Jenny Bragg? A special contract for a game of cat and mouse that is unrivaled. Contract on a Billionaire, coming late spring 2025.

That’s it for now. Miles to go before I sleep.

Peace, fellow humans.

If you liked this story, you might like some of my other books. You can join my mailing list by dropping by my website https://craigmartelle.com or if you have any comments, shoot me a note at craig@craigmartelle.com. I am always happy to hear from people who’ve read my work. I try to answer every email I receive.

If you liked the story, please write a short review for me on Amazon. I greatly appreciate any kind words; even one or two sentences go a long way. The number of reviews an ebook receives greatly improves how well it does on Amazon.

Amazon—www.amazon.com/author/craigmartelle
Facebook—www.facebook.com/authorcraigmartelle
BookBub—https://www.bookbub.com/authors/craig-martelle
My web page—https://craigmartelle.com

Thank you for joining me on this incredible journey.

Other Series by Craig Martelle

# - available in audio, too

(#) (co-written with Michael Anderle)—a post-apocalyptic paranormal adventure

Gateway to the Universe (#) (co-written with Justin Sloan & Michael Anderle)—this book transitions the characters from the Terry Henry Walton Chronicles to The Bad Company

The Bad Company (#) (co-written with Michael Anderle)—a military science fiction space opera

Judge, Jury, & Executioner (#)—a space opera adventure legal thriller

Shadow Vanguard—a Tom Dublin space adventure series

Superdreadnought (#)—an AI military space opera

Metal Legion (#)—a military space opera

Starship Lost (#) – a military space opera published by Aethon Books

Battleship Leviathan (#) – military science fiction published by Aethon Books

The Free Trader (#)—a young adult science fiction action-adventure

Cygnus Space Opera (#)—a young adult space opera (set in the Free Trader universe)

Darklanding (#) (co-written with Scott Moon)—a space western

Mystically Engineered (co-written with Valerie Emerson)—mystics, dragons, & spaceships

Metamorphosis Alpha—stories from the world’s first science fiction RPG

The Expanding Universe—science fiction anthologies

Krimson Empire (co-written with Julia Huni)—a galactic race for justice

Zenophobia (#) (co-written with Brad Torgersen)—a space archaeological adventure

Battleship Leviathan (#)– a military sci-fi spectacle published by Aethon Books

Glory (co-written with Ira Heinichen) – hard-hitting military sci-fi

Black Heart of the Dragon God (co-written with Jean Rabe) – a sword & sorcery novel

End Times Alaska (#)—a post-apocalyptic survivalist adventure published by Permuted Press

Nightwalker (a Frank Roderus series)—A post-apocalyptic western adventure

End Days (#) (co-written with E.E. Isherwood)—a post-apocalyptic adventure

Successful Indie Author (#)—a non-fiction series to help self-published authors

Monster Case Files (co-written with Kathryn Hearst)—A Warner twins mystery adventure

Rick Banik (#)—Spy & terrorism action adventure

Ian Bragg Thrillers (#)—a hitman with a conscience

Not Enough (co-written with Eden Wolfe) – A coming of age contemporary fantasy

Published exclusively by Craig Martelle, Inc

The Call by Angelique Anderson & Craig A. Price, Jr.—an epic fantasy quest

A Couples Travels—a non-fiction travel series

Love-Haight Case Files by Jean Rabe & Donald J. Bingle – the dead/undead have rights, too, a supernatural legal thriller

Loki Redeemed by Bruce Nesmith – the creator of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim brings you Loki in the modern day, staying true to Norse Mythology (not a superhero version)

For a complete list of Craig’s books, stop by his website—