Silent Threat Page 18

  She sensed her dad tense next to her, his head jerk up. Something had caught his eye. She didn’t turn to see what it was.

  “Tell me. What happened in Prague?”

  Scott stood up, tossing his beer can to the side. “I’ll tell you everything, I promise.”

  “I’m not waiting. You’ll tell me now, goddammit.”

  Scott jerked his head toward the front of the property. She finally turned and saw a black SUV hauling ass down the gravel road, a rooster tail of dust spiraling into the sky behind it.

  As charged up as she was about what she’d just learned, the operative in her compartmentalized all of it and locked it away. The threat was in front of her. And if it was in front of her, there was a chance it was coming at them from all sides. An entire platoon of Marines could be crawling through the cornfields surrounding the house and they wouldn’t know until they were right on top of them.

  “I’m guessing your farmer friend doesn’t drive a black Escalade.”

  “Nope.”

  Mara went inside for a few seconds, then came back out with a 9mm Glock in one hand and a DX-12 Punisher snub-nosed double-barrel shotgun in the other. She tossed the shotgun to her dad, who caught it with one hand. He walked to the far end of the porch, adding some distance between them. If whoever was in the SUV came out shooting, there was no reason to give them an easy shot at both of them.

  But when the Escalade stopped and the door opened so she could see who stepped out, she nearly pulled the trigger herself. It hardly seemed fair that the person she most wanted to kill just pulled up and delivered himself to her.

  The question was, how the hell had Jim Hawthorn found them?

  CHAPTER 22

  Asset watched Hawthorn exit the vehicle on the tablet screen he held in his hands. The mini-drone he’d launched had an effective range of half a mile, so he was an entire county road over from the farmhouse where Hawthorn had gone.

  He had to admit that the old man was good and that without a little bit of luck, he would have lost him at the airport. Hawthorn landed on the flight Asset had been given, but he’d taken pains to leave the airport in the most circuitous way possible, using old-fashioned craft to shake any tail he might have picked up.

  Hawthorn had started in the taxi line, waiting patiently for his turn. Once in, he rode the cab only halfway around the terminal, jumping out right next to a bus for Avis, the rental car company, and jumping onto that. Once at the remote off-site rental center, he left the shuttle and reboarded another shuttle to return to the airport. This time, he got off nearest to the subway station, quickly heading downstairs and then boarding the first train into town. Even then, he switched trains a few times, each time scanning the crowd for familiar faces.

  Asset lost him twice during all of that. Both times he’d guessed a direction and just gone with it. Both times, he’d guessed right. Every mission had an element of the unforeseen, but having so much left to chance so early had unnerved him.

  Once he’d seen Hawthorn pick up the parked Escalade with the keys in it, he’d quickly found a motorcycle and relieved it of its driver. After that, he hadn’t let the old man out of his sight.

  He wanted to see what Hawthorn did before making any kind of move. He wanted to see him enter Townsend’s house normally, so if he had to do it under duress for him, Asset would be able to tell what was normal behavior.

  He was glad he waited. Because instead of driving to Townsend’s home in the city, Hawthorn drove straight out of town to I-88 and never looked back. Once they were into Iowa and the Escalade turned north toward Dubuque, he hung back farther. Things got really difficult once he turned on the farm access roads, miles and miles of gravel cutting the farmland into massive grids.

  Fortunately, his backpack had a few tricks in it. He pulled over long enough to deploy a mini-drone, no larger than a child’s toy, but with all the highest end surveillance equipment on it that money could buy. Using a tablet to see the drone’s video feed, he sped it ahead until the Escalade appeared on the screen. He painted the target with a laser from the drone and then set it on auto-follow mode at a quarter-mile distance and 200-yard altitude. After that, he just had to stay within a half mile of his target and he was golden.

  Now the drone was serving an even greater purpose. He had a front row seat watching who Hawthorn was meeting. He toggled the controls to fly the drone closer, hoping his guess about who was at the farmhouse proved to be correct.

  CHAPTER 23

  Mara ran off the porch, gun drawn, pointed right at Hawthorn’s head. She saw her dad sprinting toward her in her peripheral vision, but she had a lead on him.

  “Where’s Joey? If he’s hurt, I’m going to shoot you right here, I swear to God.”

  She reached Hawthorn first and clocked him one right in the jaw. Hawthorn took the punch, didn’t fall, but bent over to steady himself.

  Her dad grabbed her arms and pulled her back.

  “Stop,” he said. “He’s with us.”

  She froze, her brain playing catch-up. It took several long beats for her to realize she was holding her breath. She spun around to look at her dad, his expression guilty, maybe even apologetic.

  “Hawthorn’s your guy on the inside?” she asked. “But Joey . . .”

  “He’s safe,” Hawthorn said. “They were going to take him either way, so I made sure I was the one to do it.”

  She felt a surge of relief, but it was pushed aside quickly by the rage returning. Everything was moving too quickly for her. She raised the gun again. “Tell me where he is.”

  “No matter how this turned out, I wasn’t going to let anything happen to him. Men I trust are watching him. CIA, not Omega. They’ve been told they’re on protective detail. These men will die before they let anything happen to him.”

  “Put the gun down,” her dad said.

  “Not until this asshole tells me where I can—”

  “I have a shadow,” Hawthorn said. “I thought I lost him, but I saw him across the field on the way in here, too late to stop. A half mile to the east. Maybe less.”

  “I don’t care if you have a whole SEAL team tracking you, I want to talk to Joey,” Mara said.

  “I have an extraction plan when we’re ready. Not before,” Hawthorn said.

  “Extract him now.”

  “Omega will know we’re on to them. Jim will be exposed. We need to see this all the way through.”

  “You knew this whole time,” she said, finally piecing it together. “You let me worry about him. Do you know what that’s been like? Do you have any idea? What’s wrong with you?”

  Her dad took a step back, as if worried he’d be the next one to get punched. “Jim and I have been on this since your mom died. He’s worked his way into the group, so he had to be careful. He took a big risk getting the information to me about Joey.”

  “That call to the school didn’t help,” Hawthorn said, rubbing his chin where she’d hit him. “I’m just glad you resisted the temptation to put a bullet into Townsend. That would have been a mess.”

  “You should have told me,” Mara said.

  “And if I had?”

  “He’s just a little kid. You should have—”

  “Would you have waited if I’d told you?”

  “Of course not.”

  He put up his hands. See, there you go.

  “But I wouldn’t have gone with you either. You didn’t need me to go after Townsend.”

  “But you would have gone charging after Joey, maybe killing some of the innocent men guarding him. The situation was under control.”

  “You don’t get to make that call,” she said, her voice trembling with anger. “I’m responsible for Joey. Not you. You weren’t there, remember? You lost the right to make any decisions when it comes to him.”

  “Sorry to break up the family fun, but can we focus here?” Hawthorn said.

  Her dad held her stare for a few beats, his eyes filled with both anger and hurt. Finally, he turned t
o Hawthorn. “Who’s the trail? Internal CIA or Omega?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Omega is my guess. Whoever it is, he or she is good. I used every trick I had.” For the first time, Mara took stock of Hawthorn. His face was drawn, pinched by anxiety. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. She had a good guess why.

  “Who do they have of yours?” she asked.

  His expression changed, something akin to acknowledging an equal. She’d guessed correctly. “Everyone,” he said. “If we don’t cut the head off this thing, they’ll kill every single person in my family.”

  “Oh shit,” her dad said. He indicated with his eyes without moving his head.

  Mara spotted it, too. A glint of sun off metal a hundred feet in the air, hovering over the corn. A drone.

  “We’re on TV,” she said. “A surveillance drone. Coming at us.”

  Hawthorn’s shoulders sagged forward. “I was afraid of this. I’m sorry. This changes everything.”

  He pulled out his Sig Sauer service revolver, told them one last secret, and then shot them both.

  CHAPTER 24

  The farther the car drove her out from Vienna, the more the Director realized that she may have made a mistake.

  She hadn’t been completely surprised when the phone call came. It wasn’t permitted for members of the Council to contact her directly, an internal policy designed to prevent any of them from feeling left out of the decision-making process. And yet one had broken that established protocol to not only call, but to suggest a meeting.

  The act was so brazen that she had to consider whether it was a loyalty test. Perhaps it was. But she sensed it was an opportunity. Especially given her read of the person who’d called her. As the car sped through the night, she wondered whether her instincts would prove to be correct. If they were not, and if it was a loyalty test, she entertained herself speculating what the punishment would be for taking the meeting.

  The curiosity wasn’t whether it would be death, only the manner in which the sentence would be carried out.

  But she held on to the hope that her evaluation of Marcus Ryker’s psych profile was correct. Bold, risky, ego-driven, brilliant, visionary, all accurate descriptors of the man. But she didn’t think that it told the entire story. There was more to him, something he didn’t put on show for the rest of the world to see.

  She’d combed both the public literature and the private dossiers on the man, trying to uncover his secrets. His bio was one of the most well-known on the planet. From street urchin on the streets of Rome to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to an angel investor with a Midas touch, Marcus Ryker was not only one of the wealthiest men on the planet, but one of the most respected and well-known.

  The Director hoped it wouldn’t prove necessary to kill him once the meeting was over.

  * * *

  “Were you surprised I called?” Ryker asked as she walked into the cavernous room. She was in a magnificent home on a lake, private except for a few outbuildings that blended into the pine forest, still visible in the light of the full moon rising over the mountains. Even without the light, she knew where the buildings were located. She’d done her reconnaissance on every residence Ryker owned.

  Ryker stood next to a floor-to-ceiling window that stretched across the entire room and beckoned her to him. She obliged, scanning the room for cameras, points of egress, and any sign of backup. There was nothing obvious, but she knew the man who developed autonomous cars, reusable space vehicles, and crops that could be grown in the desert could likely position a camera somewhere she wouldn’t be able to see it.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Ryker said.

  “I don’t respond to questions to which the asker already knows the answer,” she replied, trying to mark off some territory early in this interaction.

  Ryker laughed. “You give me too much credit. I don’t know the answer. I imagine you thought it was a possibility, but not a probability. If the other members of the Council knew—”

  “What makes you think they don’t?” she snapped.

  This took him by surprise and she had to suppress a grin. He was scared of the Council as much as she was. Perhaps more. After all, she had only her life to lose. He had the chance to change the world.

  “Unless you told them,” he said, “then they don’t know. And I don’t think you told them.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Curiosity,” he said, his voice echoing in the room. “You’re not the only one who can read people. Some would say that the ability to find the right people is my greatest talent. To my detractors, they would say it is my only talent. The rockets that will lift the manned mission to Mars say Ryker on the side of them, but they were designed by men more brilliant than I could ever hope to be. Men I found and funded and encouraged.”

  “I don’t design rockets,” she said. “So why am I here?”

  The grin returned, a self-satisfied look that said he knew he was back in control. He was right. Curiosity was getting the better of her.

  “Come, I want to show you something.”

  * * *

  Her ears popped as the elevator plunged down into the mountain. Ryker watched her closely, not saying a word. She locked eyes with him, refusing to look away and resisting the temptation to ask any more questions. It was clear he had a plan of how to show her what he wanted her to see. Either that, or the bottom of the elevator was where they’d dispose of her body after executing her for violating the rules of the Council.

  But she felt more confident that Ryker didn’t care about the rules. He had some other reason for her to be there.

  The elevator hissed as it slowed and then stopped. The doors opened to an immaculate white room, brightly lit with recessed lighting in the ceiling. The back wall was the exception, shrouded in darkness. Then the lights turned on in the next section, showing the room to actually be a hallway. One by one, sections came online, revealing a hallway that stretched out into the distance, curving in a wide arc.

  “Impressive,” she said. “You’ve built a hallway.”

  Ryker laughed, shaking his head. “You’re everything I’d hoped,” he said. Then his smile disappeared. “Let’s see how you handle the rest of it.”

  They walked together through the hallway, their footsteps echoing off the walls, giving the place an eerily abandoned feeling. There were doors along the hallway, each of them with a security pad next to it.

  “When I was approached to join Omega, I thought it would be fun,” Ryker said, not turning to look at her as they walked. “A billionaire’s club that got to complain about the world and use its resources to throw wrenches into the machinery when it suited our aims. But soon, I realized the full potential of the group.”

  “And its limitations,” she said.

  Ryker stopped and she did the same. He regarded her closely, as if seeing her for the first time. “I’m not sure if that sort of comment shows your value to me or shows you to be a threat.”

  “Perhaps my value to you is that I could be a threat?” she suggested.

  He cocked his head to the side. She’d seen that trait in videos she’d watched of him. He was recalculating. Absorbing new information. Processing.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But so we’re clear, in my current work, in my mission, I don’t tolerate threats. I destroy them.”

  She saw something in his eyes at that moment that made her shudder. Gone was the rational scientist, the charmer, the billionaire philanthropist as at home on the world’s fashion magazines as on serious scientific journals. For a moment, she saw the eyes of a killer. And it unnerved her.

  “You brought me here to show me something,” she said.

  He snapped back into his easygoing smile. “Yes, this way.”

  They stopped at a door that looked no different from the dozen or more they’d passed. Ryker placed his hand on the screen. The Director watched as the reader scanned Ryker’s hand. She thought it likely the device was also taking a DNA sam
ple. She committed every detail to memory in case she ever needed to infiltrate the compound. Old habits.

  The lock clicked open, but Ryker hesitated. “Why are you part of Omega?” he asked.

  “Because mankind is on a collision course with—”

  “No,” he said, holding up his hand. “Not that answer. The real one.”

  She took a deep breath, doing her own recalculation. How far down the rabbit hole was she willing to go? Judging by the elevator ride she took, she guessed she was already deep enough that there was no going back. She disassociated herself from the things she ought to say at that moment and did her best to clear the way for the truth.

  “My parents died when I was thirteen. A gas explosion and fire while I was at school. Just one of those everyday tragedies. But I had no other family. No aunts or uncles or grandparents. So the state took me in, which is where I was selected for the intelligence program and trained. But before that, before they took me away, the social worker let me visit the rubble to try to find something to remind me of my parents. But there was nothing. Not a single thing to show they’d been alive. Made an impact. Lived a life of any consequence.”

  “And that idea scared you,” Ryker said.

  “Survival isn’t good enough,” she said. “I want what I do to matter a hundred years from now.”

  “A thousand years?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Then we’re kindred spirits,” he said. “I could tell that about you. Your strength in front of those fawning prima donnas on the Council, the way you manipulate them without their knowledge. You’re meant for great things.”

  “And Omega isn’t accomplishing those things?”

  “The Council is the problem. They talk about the need to reset civilization, but it’s bluster. They still pursue short-term profit for their companies, using the group to create wins for themselves. Like this whole business with President Townsend.”

  “They don’t want to be unmasked.”

  “We could launch the reset tomorrow,” he said. “It wouldn’t matter who knew about us.”