Silent Threat Read online

  On a normal day, one where he hadn’t been shot in the leg or punctured a lung with a broken rib, Scott could hold his breath for four minutes easy. If he had time to prepare with breathing exercises to oxygenate his blood, he could get that up to six. But with the raging pain in his leg and with his right lung slowly filling with blood, the serenity prayer did little to keep him from blowing through his air in less than two minutes. He fought it hard, gulping and swallowing the air in his mouth, before giving in and raising his head as slowly as possible.

  No one shot him in the head the second he broke the surface, so that was positive. He drew in a sharp breath and opened his eyes. It was hard to see because he couldn’t risk the movement of wiping the muddy water from his face, but he got his bearings. And he liked what he saw. He was almost to the bend in the waterway. He was going to make it.

  Then a man shouted in Arabic behind him, and all hell broke loose.

  The water sprayed around him with gunfire. A second voice shouted at him. Scott pushed off the grassy bank and swam for the bend. The pain in his side was so intense that it blocked the pain in his calf. Without the adrenaline rushing into his system, he might have passed out. But he wasn’t going to let some two-bit protective detail take him out. Especially one that obviously sucked at their jobs since their protectee was a blob on the Twenty-ninth Street sidewalk.

  Digging deep, he splashed his way downriver and by some miracle made it around the bend. The river was wider here and had some current because it was joined by Rock Creek. He kept swimming even though his body begged him to stop. But he knew he wasn’t out of it yet. The sirens were getting close, but the gunmen seemed to be the motivated type. Scott hated those, much preferring the low-level goons who liked to hide as soon as the bullets started flying.

  He pulled out his phone from his pocket, knowing it was waterproofed and would be fine even though it’d been submerged in the C&O cesspool. He was unsanctioned, so there weren’t very many people he could call for help. The one person he could was also the one person he most wanted to avoid asking. But he was a realist, and things just weren’t going his way that day. She picked up the phone on the first ring.

  “Mind if I drop by?” he said.

  * * *

  The building he was looking for loomed up ahead, downstream on his right. It was four stories of beautiful design, clean lines, and glass walls that seamlessly integrated into the river’s edge. Even though this was the back of the building, there was a large blue flag with a yellow cross shifted to the hoist side and a sign announcing that it was the Embassy of Sweden.

  A small knot of security left the lower level of the building and took positions at the river’s edge, guns pointed directly at him. He held his hands in the air the best he could to show he was unarmed. A line was thrown out. He grabbed it and was dragged to shore and half carried into the building. The men, military by the way they moved, put him down in what looked like a maintenance room filled with cleaning supplies. An older man with gray hair and a neatly kept beard was there waiting for him. Scott knew him as Dr. Peter Gurtz, although he wondered if that was his real name. Dr. Gurtz removed his suit jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves.

  “Welcome back to Sweden, Mr. Roberts,” he said. “Last time I saw you we were both in tuxedos and drinking champagne.”

  He tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace. “You were drinking champagne. I was drinking bourbon.”

  “Yes, I remember now,” he said, cutting away Scott’s pant leg to expose the gunshot wound as if everything happening was just another typical day at the office. “A pleasant evening.” He made a tut-tut sound as he looked at the bullet wound. “This will not go over well.”

  “How about you stitch me up and we don’t tell her about it,” Scott said. “Say I tore it on a metal post or something.”

  Without looking up, Dr. Gurtz raised his voice slightly. “Would you accept that explanation, Wendy? That this gunshot wound came from, what did you say, a metal post or something?”

  Scott cringed and turned. Maybe it was because he’d just had a near-death experience, or maybe it was because she was dressed in his favorite yellow dress with her blond hair pulled back into a simple ponytail, or maybe it was because she was simply a drop-dead gorgeous, brilliant woman, but Scott had never felt so happy to see his wife.

  He couldn’t say the same for her. She looked about ready to slap him around.

  “No, Dr. Gurtz,” she said. “I don’t think I would believe that.” She softened when Scott flinched from the doc poking around in his leg, and leaned over him. “But then again, you’re hard to believe under the best of circumstances, aren’t you?”

  “How’s your day going?” he asked.

  “Good,” she said, willing to play the game with him. “Yours?”

  “Same ol’, same ol’.”

  She leaned down to his ear. “Did you get what you were after?”

  He shook his head. “Not enough. He gave me a name. . . .” His voice trailed off. It was the first minute he’d had to think about what Al-Saib had told him. Jim Hawthorn. The man was like a father to Scott. There was no chance he was involved. He looked at Wendy. “It was nothing. Just misdirection.”

  “Who was it?”

  Scott glanced down at the good doctor. She caught his meaning. She always did.

  “How is he, Dr. Gurtz?” she asked.

  “The leg will be fine. Bullet passed through the muscle. No damage to the bone. Very fortunate.”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly how it feels,” Scott said.

  Wendy nudged him on his side and he grunted in pain.

  “Oh shush, you big baby.”

  “I want an X-ray of the ribs,” Dr. Gurtz said. “As soon as possible.”

  “We’re arranging transport,” she said.

  “Good.” Dr. Gurtz felt around Scott’s rib cage. “Let me take a look. Let me know if this hurts.”

  He pressed down, not hard, but hard enough so that lightning bolts of pain raced up his side.

  Scott cried out and . . .

  CHAPTER 5

  Mara stepped back as her dad pushed her hand away.

  “Damn, that hurts,” he said.

  “Oh shush, you big baby,” Mara said. She was almost done suturing the opening. It’d been a lot easier while he’d been passed out from the blood loss. She noticed an odd look had come across her dad’s face. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Forget about it.”

  She took a step back and stood in the middle of the barn. It was old and had a definite lean to one side. An old tractor that was more rust than metal hunkered down in the back corner. The whole place smelled of dust and machine oil. The most interesting find was an old Chevy pickup truck parked next to the tractor. There was only a thin coat of dust on it, so it hadn’t been in the barn for long. There weren’t any keys in it, but that wasn’t going to be a problem. If they could get it going it was their ride out of there. A little less conspicuous than a Range Rover riddled with bullet holes. She held the suturing kit out to him. “Do you want to do it yourself? You’re more than welcome.”

  “No, I’m sorry. Please finish.” He peered down at her handiwork. “Looks like you’ve done this before.”

  Mara doused the area a second time with antiseptic. “Yeah, on Marines. Only they didn’t whine about it.” She went back to stitching.

  “I heard about your tour in Iraq,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

  A long silence strung out between them; the only sounds were the rustling of some kind of small animal in the moldering hay piled in the back of the barn. Mara focused on suturing the flesh in front of her, willing the memories from her last mission to stay sleeping in the corner of her mind, where she’d pushed them. Four years later and it was impossible to think about it without hearing the gunfire in her head. Not to mention the screams.

  “Who told you about that?” was all she managed. “Same person who told you they were going to take Joey?”


  Scott remained silent.

  “You need to tell me who your contact is,” Mara said.

  Scott winced as she pulled the stitch tight, cinching his flesh back together. “We went over this. I’m not telling you that. Not yet anyway.”

  She poked the needle back through his skin with a little more force than necessary. “If you get killed, then I’m left not knowing who to trust.”

  “Let me make it easy for you,” he said. “Trust no one.”

  She tied off the last stitch and took out the scissors to snip the ends of the sutures. “Don’t worry. I’ve got that part down. It’s one of the side benefits when your larger-than-life hero of a dad kills your mom and betrays his country. You learn that lesson real quick.”

  She threw the scissors back into the med kit and took out two large area bandages. She put one over the entrance wound and another over the exit, then wrapped tape around his torso to hold it in place. She felt him staring at her, but she purposefully avoided his eyes as she finished the last touches. She cut the tape and pressed the dressing into place. “We’re done here.”

  Scott held on to her arm. It startled her and she had to fight the urge to retaliate, but his grip was soft and nonthreatening. She turned to him and was surprised to see tears in the big man’s eyes.

  “I loved your mother. From the first second I saw her until the night she died right in front of me. I loved her more than you could possibly imagine. The idea that I could ever hurt her is . . . is . . .”

  “Is what you admitted on your video confession,” she said, yanking her arm back. “I saw it. Not the transcript. Not someone telling me what you said. I saw the actual video of you admitting it.”

  “There’s a reason that I said those things.”

  “I know the words,” she said. “I memorized them. Not because I wanted to, but because I watched it so many times.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “The questioner asks, ‘Are you responsible for the death of Wendy Roberts.’ You look down at the table for a second, then back up with these big crocodile tears in your eyes and say, ‘Yes, I killed her. It was the hardest thing I ever did, but it had to be done.’” She choked up as she said the words, mad that she was giving Scott the satisfaction of seeing her so vulnerable. “It had to be done?”

  “That was just theater,” he said. “Your mom’s death was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. Still is. There’s not a day that I—”

  “Don’t say it,” she said, cutting him off. “I don’t want to hear you talking about her. You don’t deserve to.”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Try me,” she said, crossing her arms.

  Scott stood and stretched gingerly. “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “That’s such bullshit,” she said. “I’m just supposed to trust you?”

  “You don’t have to trust me. You just need to stay out of my way.”

  Mara let out a short laugh. “Oh really?”

  “What’s your second option for getting Joey back?”

  “Kill you and go in for a full debrief,” she said. “Take every lie detector test they can think of to prove you didn’t tell me this mysterious information you say they’re worried about.”

  “You mean those lie detector tests you’ve been trained to fool?” Scott asked, walking over to the pickup and opening the door. “They’d do that just to see if they could get a positive out of you. If they did, then they’d bring in the real heavy hitters. Even if you passed all the tests, and they’ll hook you up to more than just lie detector machines, you’d still be a loose end. What they do then is just a measure of how paranoid they are. Maybe they stop there. But maybe they don’t.”

  “That’s why you’re not giving me any details,” she said, suddenly realizing his motive. “I don’t just have plausible deniability, I have actual deniability. You’re trying to leave this option open in case I need it.”

  “See?” Scott said as he climbed into the truck. “It’s not because I’m just an asshole.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Mara said, half to herself. She had to admit, there was a ring of truth to the idea. It didn’t make it any less frustrating. Seconds later, the engine slowly turned over, then fired up. The old man could still hot-wire a car. “I’ll drive,” she said. “It’ll be hours before you’re not feeling the effects of the blood loss.”

  He held up his hands. “No complaints here. She’s all yours.”

  Minutes later, they were headed north on a rural gravel road, nothing but hundreds of acres of corn in every direction. There was a helicopter to the west toward the prison, but it never came toward them.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Chicago.”

  “Chicago?” she said, pumping the brakes. “No way. They have to be holding Joey somewhere in DC. I need to—”

  “If you want to get him back, we go to Chicago. Trust me.”

  She laughed. “Trust me? Really? That’s where we’re at now?”

  “There’s an old friend in Chicago I need to talk to. He has information that will lead us to who’s really behind all this.”

  “In case you were wondering, the Agency is who sent me here. They’re behind this. You’re not getting senile on me, are you?”

  “Nothing’s as simple as it seems. It may have been the Agency, but there’s someone else pulling the strings. There has been for a while now.” He must have noticed her skeptical look because he turned away. “You’ll see. Once we talk to this guy, you’ll understand better what’s going on here. How far it reaches.”

  “You sound like one of those conspiracy nutjobs. Who is this guy? This friend of yours? Please don’t tell me he’s some tinfoil hat–wearing, black helicopter–fearing guy you met online.”

  “More of an acquaintance. I need to ask him a few questions.”

  “I’m not driving to Chicago when Joey’s in DC unless I know who it is,” she said. “If you can’t—”

  “Preston Townsend,” he said.

  She took a second to process the name, thinking at first he was playing with her. But his tone was dead serious. “You mean President Preston Townsend?”

  “Ex-president, I think. Unless they changed the Fourteenth Amendment while I was locked up.”

  “We’re going to go just chat with the president?” she said, exasperated.

  “It might need to be more of an interrogation, but yeah. That’s the general idea.”

  “That should be easy enough. I can write the newspaper headline: RENEGADE CIA OPERATIVE APPROACHES EX-PRESIDENT. SECRET SERVICE SHOOTS HIM ON SIGHT.”

  “Are you always this much of a Debbie downer?” Scott asked, closing his eyes and leaning his seat back so that he was almost horizontal. “I don’t remember that about you.”

  “You don’t know me at all,” she said. “Remember that.”

  “Used to be nice. Smiling all the time. Saying nice things,” he mumbled, drifting off to sleep. “Just like your mom. Nice . . . so nice . . . to everyone.”

  His voice trailed off and his breathing grew deeper. Soon a soft snore filled the cab.

  Mara saw a turn up ahead that would take them east. Toward DC. Toward Joey. She felt the battle rage inside of her, trying to make the best decision possible with the limited facts. The turn east came and went. She took a deep breath and settled in for the long drive north.

  * * *

  Mara drove, alone with her thoughts, watching the sun descend in the sky and sink down beyond the sea of green leaves. She worked through everything that’d happened over the past day. Replaying every conversation, considering the implications of her dad’s claims. What if he really had been framed? What if he hadn’t killed her mom? What kind of daughter did that make her?

  But it wasn’t possible. She’d watched his video confession. Read through the classified field report. Pored through the notes from the at
tempts by body recovery teams for even more clues. She’d even had a meeting with the DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, Jim Hawthorn himself to go over the circumstances. He’d been a family friend and even with all of his resources, he hadn’t seen a way out as the evidence piled up against his top agent. It was one of the reasons Hawthorn was an ex-director who now ran his sphere of influence out of a small shop inside the Special Activities Division.

  She wondered what her dad would think if he knew it’d been Jim Hawthorn who’d personally recruited her for this assignment.

  As she drove north into the darkening sky, she considered all of her options. Every fiber of her being still told her to get to DC as fast as she could to look for Joey. But on that count, her dad was right. Joey was a lever to get her to act. But a lever only worked when direct force was applied. When that force came it would be in the form of a deadline to perform a specific action or suffer some consequence to Joey. By not opening the dialogue, whoever was holding him couldn’t threaten her or give her a deadline. It was brilliant in its simplicity, but it was driving her crazy.

  The idea that Joey was being held by strangers filled her with rage. She was used to taking action, not sitting and waiting for things to develop around her. Her insides twisted around themselves, and she felt for a moment that she might need to pull over and throw up. She clenched her fist and punched the steering wheel. Over and over again. It wasn’t like her to lose control; it was a weakness she rarely allowed herself. But they had her baby and he was her responsibility. Nothing in her training prepared her for the way it made her feel.

  What her training did give her was complete certainty that if anyone were to actually hurt Joey, she would make every single person involved pay for it. She thought of her dead sister and felt sick all over again at what she would say about how Mara had taken care of her son.