offered him the brown envelope only hours ago.
Briefly, he recalled the twilight encounter in the desert. He had gone there to rendezvous with an informant inside a cell of rejectionist radical Jordanians aligned with Iraqi militants. A military Humvee sat in the distance, watching the encounter, while the shadow—a Westerner brandishing an M-16—materialized out of the lengthening dusk, putting it to him to go deaf, dumb and blind, or else.
“Forget what you have learned. Take this, await further instructions…or suffer consequences.”
No sale. He didn’t know whether it was a setup. The Company was infamous for playing head games, separating wheat from chaff, lamb from lion, but he was a patriot, loyal to only God, country and family.
With the ultimatum now come to collect, he knew there was no point, nor time to waste shredding documents, gather the latest intel on what he’d learned from informants the past two days on what his team had tagged the “great vanishing act.”
Time to fight or fly.
He marched for the double doors, briefly confounded and angry, wondering how four years of hunting down and flushing out the mystery of the weapons of mass destruction—so close but seeming like light-years away—was swirling in the bowl. The attempted bribery confirmed two critical items in his mind. First, the WMD was real, it was out there. And someone, supposedly on the side of the angels, did not want it found. The latter conclusion begged the obvious question.
Why, indeed?
He hit the door when the lights blinked out. For several moments he crouched at the barrier, heart thundering in his ears, as he silently urged the generator to kick in. Nothing. He freed the Beretta and twisted the door handle, wondering why the others were not scrambling down the hall, barreling into the study. He was out the door, weapon extended, listening to the silence, peering into the darkness in both directions down the hall when the auxiliary generator flashed on the emergency overhead lights. Heart pounding, aware he was exposed in the sudden glow, he flung himself against the wall, Beretta whipping, twelve and six. The corridor was empty, but he sensed a presence, his combat instincts torqued up, warning him the invader was close.
And the faint acrid stink bit his nose.
Ahead, he saw the pneumatic door to the Command and Control Room open. Sliding on, checking the gloomy murk to his rear, the coppery taint clawed deeper into his senses. That the door was open, however, the red light on the keypad blinking, confirmed the identity of the opposition.
Only the five men had access to the Storm Tracking Central.
Taking a deep breath, Dutton threw himself into the doorway, charged three steps in, angling hard left for the deep shadows of the corner, the Beretta sweeping the room. His stomach cramped. Peevy was slumped over his monitor, blood pooling beneath his arms, a dark ragged hole in his temple. Waters and Groome were sprawled on their backs, swivel chairs dumped on the floor. Side arms holstered, they obviously never knew what hit them. But why, he thought, should they expect to be murdered by one of their own?
Dutton shoved down his rising anger over this brutal act of treachery. He vowed to the dead they would be avenged. Danger, he knew, was part and parcel of intelligence work, but they were essentially intel brokers—Storm Trackers, tagged so because they gleaned, bought, bartered or stole information on terror operations. In short, they mapped the future of operations on both sides, predicted strike patterns, stamped flashpoints well in advance of critical mass, often war-gaming terror and counterterror scenarios on computers for Langley. They were not gunslingers, steely-eyed black ops who combed the world’s hellzones for the most wanted militants, though Dutton had fired a shot in anger more than once in his day.
Retracing his path to the door, he sensed the invisible killer was nearby and closing the gap. Dead ahead, the north corridor would take him to a stairwell, which led to the subterranean garage. Trouble was, that hall bisected another corridor that circled back to his study, leaving him to wonder if the killer was laying in wait, no doubt armed with a sound-suppressed weapon.
Poised to start blasting, Dutton bolted and glimpsed the silhouette at the end of the southern hall. He saw the dark object in the killer’s hand, the assassin darting for cover at the corridor’s edge, then he tapped the Beretta’s trigger twice on the fly. A double crack sounded, the whine of bullets ricocheting off stone in the distance, and Dutton launched himself into a full-bore sprint, the tall snake-lean figure of the killer forcing the man’s name to mind like a curse word. It suddenly occurred to Dutton there could be more than one assassin under the roof, but he reached the stone door before the fear of this realization sank in. Turning the iron handle, he hauled open the massive block to the stairwell. Shooting one last look over his shoulder, he descended the narrow passageway, weapon out and ready to take down any threat as he wound his way around the first of two corners.
He hit the concrete deck running, palmed his remote box and beeped open the door locks to his GMC vehicle. Nothing unusual about the garage, as he scanned the shadows around the stone pillars, the vehicles of his dead comrades fanned out beside his ride, but there was another entrance to this underground lot, and he was sure the assassin knew of its existence. Certain he heard the faint scuffle of feet over stone toward the north exit, he flung open the door, jumped behind the wheel, scanning the garage. Determined he would shoot or bulldoze his exit out of there, he was keying the ignition when he spotted the inert figure on the shotgun seat in the corner of his eye. He was cursing himself for what might prove a fatal oversight, gun up and tracking, when he turned and faced the unmoving shape.
And felt his blood freeze.
“Oh, God, oh, God, no…”
He heard his cry trail off, feeble and distant, as he felt his heart jackhammer, believing for a moment fear and adrenaline had warped his senses, rendering the world an hallucination, spinning in his eyes, off its axis. The sound volumed into a pure bellow of animal rage, as he reached over, ready to shake her, call her name. But he had seen dead bodies, before and the blank stare and dark hole in her temple confirmed the murderous deed.
The impulse dropped over him like a wall of stone, his hand reaching for the door, ready now to fight or die, if only in the name of vengeance. But Dutton discovered he was grabbing air. The head butt shot out of nowhere. He felt his nose mashed into his face, caught his howl of agony vanishing somewhere in the blast furnace of scalding knives tearing through his brain, then number two hammer slammed him off the eyebrow. As blood stung his eyes, blinding him, he was vaguely aware of hands clawing into his shoulders like talons.
Suddenly, he was aware his own hands were empty, bell rung, reflexes for anything resembling a counterattack nearly frozen by pain. He was airborne next, wrenched from the seat, swiping at the blood in his eyes when the bastard teed off with a kick to his groin. Another grenade of white-hot pain exploded, scalp to toes, dropping him to his knees. Paralyzed, he tasted bile and blood on his lips, and strained to make out the assassin through the burning mist in his eyes.
“All you had to do was take the money and follow a few simple directions. It could have been so easy. But here we are. Me, disappointed in my fellow man. You, sucking on a final few moments of rage and grief and disillusionment.”
Dutton coughed, sucked wind, determined then not to give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing him begging for his life. Yes, he thought, here we are. He found it all so incredible; it struck him as the deluded fantasy of psychopaths. Or was there more to it? What? Greed? Power? Delusions of grandeur? He stared up at the assassin who took a step back, the Beretta held low by his side.
“What in God’s name have you done, Locklin?” Dutton asked plainly.
“Beyond
