36: A Novel Read online

  “Remember,” Johnson said, stepping close and clapping a big paw on my shoulder. “You’re not allowed to leave the safe house. Agent Kirkpatrick knows this and will stop you if you try. You don’t want to spend your free time in restraints.”

  “Fuck you, Johnson,” I smiled what I hoped was a dangerous looking smile.

  He was unfazed, squeezing my arm hard enough to hurt before moving back. Turning, I stepped onto the waiting dais and watched him leave as the glass door rolled shut. Johnson appeared on the other side of the windows, in the ops center, a few moments later.

  “Ready, Mr. Whitman?”

  One of the technicians spoke over the intercom. I nodded and gave a thumbs up, noting a faint tingling on the surface of my skin. There was a blink and I was suddenly standing in a starkly appointed living room. Several feet away, a barrel chested man with shockingly red hair stared at me in surprise.

  I looked around, then down, noticing I was standing on a large circle of heavy plastic that covered the carpet. Landing pad? It made sense. They apparently had the spot precisely located, and the target I’d arrived on was most likely there so no one in the safe house would accidentally be standing at the same place I arrived. I had no idea what the impact of that would be, and didn’t want to find out.

  The man quickly got over his surprise, lifting an iPad and tapping a couple of buttons. His eyes flicked from my face to the screen, then back. He was verifying who I was.

  “Hello, Mr. Whitman. I’m Agent Kirkpatrick,” he said after satisfying himself that I matched the photo on the tablet. “Why are you here?”

  I reached into my pocket and retrieved the flash drive, holding it out and taking a step towards him.

  “Director Patterson sent me back. This is to be transmitted to him immediately,” I said.

  “Very unusual,” Kirkpatrick said after looking at the object in my hand for several moments. “What is it?”

  “It’s a message for the Director,” I said, a little surprised that I was being questioned by a baby sitter for a safe house.

  After another long pause, he came forward and took the drive from me. Turning it in his hand, he examined it like he’d never seen one before. Eventually he nodded, turning away and taking a seat at a small table with a laptop resting on it. He plugged the drive into a USB port, inserted a pair of ear buds connected to the computer and clicked the mouse three times.

  The screen was angled away from me and I couldn’t see what was displayed. While he worked on the computer, I took the opportunity to walk around and get an idea of the layout of the house. One of Ray’s lessons had rubbed off on me.

  It was a small, single story home with low ceilings. There was a cramped kitchen and small dining room adjacent to the living room I’d arrived in. Opposite, a narrow hall led to three doors, each of them closed. I suspected two bedrooms and a single bath.

  There was a heavy looking door in the front wall of the main living area, a large set of windows to its side. The door was equipped with two deadbolts and a stout, iron rod ran at an angle from the floor to the midpoint of the unhinged edge. It might be battered down, but it would take a concerted effort and enough time for the occupants to be ready to defend themselves.

  The windows were covered with heavy curtains, no sunlight visible around the edges of the fabric. This seemed odd, and I took a moment to do the math in my head. No, it should be daytime. Well, I paused, that depended on exactly where on the globe this house was located.

  I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Kirkpatrick was still absorbed with the laptop. He wasn’t paying any attention to me, so I stepped to the drapes and pulled one to the side. Steel shutters completely sealed the opening. It could have been high noon outside and no light would have made it through. With a sigh, I let the curtain fall back in place. There was a soft step behind me and I turned to see Kirkpatrick aiming a pistol at my head.

  At any point in my previous life, I would have frozen in place after coming face to face with the muzzle of a weapon. But this was one of many scenarios that Ray had drilled me on, tirelessly. He’d brought in the former Israeli Defense Force commando that taught unarmed combat, and together they’d beaten the crap out of me. Over and over, as they taught me how to deal with an armed assailant.

  During the training, I’d thought several times how unnecessary it was. It had taken quite a while for the concept of me not having a weapon in my hand to fully sink in. That happened once I began to gain a degree of competence in responding to exactly this kind of situation.

  Now, the instant I saw the weapon, I reacted. Lunging forward and to the side, I thrust a hand up and locked onto his wrist. The weapon fired, but I was already safely below it, continuing the movement. Maintaining my grip, I swiveled and whipped my left leg around, sweeping Kirkpatrick’s feet out from under him.

  He crashed to the floor and I rolled with him. The pistol fired again and I applied leverage to bend his arm as I began punching him in the side of the face as hard and fast as I could. He struggled, finally dropping the weapon when a bone in his wrist snapped.

  His other arm was pinned beneath me and I hit him two more times before twisting around and wrapping my right arm around his throat. Squeezing for all I was worth, I held on as he tried to buck me off. When that didn’t work he flailed at me, desperately trying to free himself from the pressure of my hold. But I’d cut off his air and most of the blood supply to his brain and he was weakening fast.

  I maintained the hold until he went still, carefully relaxing my grip in case he was faking. He wasn’t. He was out, or dead. I didn’t much care which at the moment. Releasing the man, I pressed two fingers against his neck and felt a pulse. He was still alive.

  Rolling him onto his front, I looked for and found the pair of handcuffs I’d expected to be holstered at the small of his back. Pulling his arms behind him, I slapped them on his wrists and left him lying facedown. Checking his pockets, I removed two sets of keys, his FBI ID case and his wallet. Looking around, I spotted the pistol, an FBI issue Glock, and scooped it up. Two spare magazines were on his belt and I grabbed those as well.

  Standing over him, breathing hard, I stuck the pistol into my waistband and a spare magazine in each hip pocket. I glanced at his badge and ID before shoving it in a pocket, then checked the wallet. Drivers license, half a dozen credit cards and twenty-two dollars in cash. Now, what the fuck was going on?

  I moved to the table and looked at the laptop screen. He’d been watching a video on the flash drive and it was still paused where he’d stopped it. I didn’t understand why I was looking at Agent Johnson’s face instead of Patterson’s.

  34

  I unplugged the ear buds, placed my hand on the mouse, rewound the clip and let it play. Agent Johnson stared into the camera, leaning close and speaking in a low, steady voice. I didn’t recognize the location visible in the background, but I’d not been in well over half of the spaces in the oil rig. It could have been anywhere.

  “Agent Kirkpatrick. If you are viewing this file, the asset, Mr. Whitman, has become a liability. He will have arrived at your assigned location and told you to transmit the contents of this flash drive to Director Patterson. If this were the drive he believes it to be, it would contain a virus designed to seize control of the Athena Project’s computers and cause irreparable damage.

  “Mr. Whitman is to be immediately terminated. He must not be allowed to communicate with anyone. Once he is down, contact Mr. Carpenter on the secure circuit. I shall be unavailable for the foreseeable future. Do NOT speak with anyone other than him, personally. Terminate Mr. Whitman immediately.”

  The video automatically paused as it reached the end of the recording. To say I was stunned would have been an understatement. I sat there, frozen, staring at the screen. After nearly a minute, I reached out with a trembling hand and started the short video over. Watched it a second time. Then a third.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said aloud. “Son of a fucking bitch!”
r />   Ray was right. There was a fucking conspiracy, and Agent Johnson was part of it! But how had his recording gotten onto this drive? I’d personally witnessed Carpenter hand it to Patterson, who had kept it in his possession until he handed it directly to me. Johnson never touched it.

  Was Carpenter in on this? Was the Johnson recording already there? No. I shook my head. That would have been too great of a risk. What if Patterson had viewed the file and seen it? So how had Johnson pulled it off?

  The physical contact in the transport room! Like any good pickpocket, Agent Johnson had distracted me with a hand on my shoulder and arm while he substituted the drive. That had to be it. Unless Patterson was involved as well and Johnson was just the face giving the orders.

  I rolled that around in my head for a bit, but didn’t like it. No. If Patterson didn’t want a warning sent back, he had all the authority in the world to just stay silent. He wouldn’t need to have me taken out. But what the hell were the conspirators thinking?

  Thirty-six hours from now, if they’d succeeded, my corpse would have appeared in the transport room. That would set off alarm bells and start a frenzied investigation. I was supposed to be in a project safe house.

  So, they weren’t worried about a dead asset coming back. But how could they hide my body from Patterson? There didn’t seem to be anything that happened within the facility that he wasn’t aware of. Unless he wasn’t going to be alive to ask questions!

  The thought spurred me to action. I yanked the drive out of the USB port and stood up. That’s as far as I got. I had no idea what to do next. Standing there, I thought about everything that had happened since I’d arrived. Remembering the order for Kirkpatrick to contact Carpenter, I sat back down and began clicking through the laptop.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for, but had seen a couple of people using their iPads to make video calls. Maybe there was some program on the computer that would allow me to call Director Patterson. After five minutes I gave up. There was nothing on the device that hadn’t come with Windows.

  That gave me another idea and I opened the internet browser. Things had changed a lot since before I’d gone to prison, but at least there was still a way to review browsing history. It took a few false starts, but I finally pulled up a screen with a very long list of websites that Kirkpatrick had visited.

  “You’re a naughty boy,” I said to the unconscious agent.

  I scrolled through literally hundreds of links to sites with titles like Rock Hard Studs, Muscle Butts and He Likes Them Big. Nothing but gay porn. Closing the browser, I slammed the lid in frustration and stood up. Maybe a phone.

  I walked over to Kirkpatrick and checked all his pockets. I’d already done this once and didn’t think I’d missed anything as large as a cell phone, but it was worth checking again. Finding nothing, I straightened and stared down at him. He was wearing slacks and a dress shirt with a tie. Where was his jacket?

  Looking around, I didn’t see it. Heading down the hall, I paused to open a small closet. Empty. I searched the first bedroom I came to which held nothing more than a twin sized bed and a cheap, particle board dresser. The dresser had a set of sheets for the bed and a single towel and washcloth.

  Next was the bathroom, and as soon as I opened the door I could see everything and tell it was empty. As I was pulling the door shut, I glanced up at the mirror over the sink and stopped. A dark blue suit coat was hanging on a small hook on the inside of the door.

  Reaching around, I grabbed it and carried it back to the table with the laptop. A type of cell phone I’d never seen before was in an inside pocket. It had an exposed screen with a small keyboard beneath it. The display lit up when I pushed a button, and I cursed. It was asking for a passcode.

  Moving to the unconscious agent, I knelt and shook his shoulder, shouting his name. He didn’t respond, and I didn’t like the way his body felt so loose. Rolling him onto his side, I checked his neck and didn’t find a pulse. Placing my hand over his nose and mouth, I couldn’t detect any air movement. Fuck!

  What now? I had no idea how to contact Patterson. And other than him, who the hell was going to believe my crazy story? They’d lock me away in a rubber room after shooting me full of Thorazine. Anger getting the best of me, I threw the locked phone against the wall where it shattered into half a dozen pieces.

  Breathing hard, I fought to get myself under control. Slowly I succeeded, then walked over to a sofa and sat down. I had to think this through. Figure out what to do and how to accomplish it. Should I find a way to contact the Secret Service and warn them? Would they even listen? How many crank calls and threats against the President did they receive on an average day? I was willing to bet it was at least one.

  No, that wouldn’t be worth the effort. Without the warning coming from a trusted source, like Patterson, it would just get filed away and ignored. What about the FBI? No, I immediately thought. I knew Johnson was dirty and had no way of knowing who else was. If I called, or walked in, and told my story, he’d get a call. And tell them I was a terrorist or a rogue agent, and I’d wind up in a dank, dark cell. Or worse.

  What about the media? I immediately dismissed the idea. No reporter, at least no reputable reporter that would be listened to, would run with my wild story unless it could be confirmed by another source. Shit! What options did that leave?

  None, I acknowledged. I didn’t even know where the Athena Project facility was located. If I did, I’d try to reach the coast closest to the rig. Steal a boat, if necessary. But I had no clue where to go. The California coast? The Gulf of Mexico? About all I was sure I knew was that it wasn’t in the Alaskan oil fields. I’d been outside a lot and it had been way too warm. While I suspected it was located in US territorial waters, that didn’t help. The country has a hell of a lot of coastline.

  That left one option, I grudgingly admitted to myself. I had to go to DC. Somewhere close to the restaurant would be a man with a laser designator, painting the target for the Hellfire missile. If I could find him and stop him, the attack would be prevented. At worst, they might still fire the missile. But without a laser to home in on, the chances of it missing were fairly good.

  With a plan, I realized that I had a time crunch. I’d been sent back thirty-six hours. Twelve hours had elapsed in real time before I was transported. That meant I had arrived twenty-four hours before the event. Over twenty minutes had already gone by, I noted after checking my watch. I pushed a couple of buttons and set a countdown clock running. Twenty-three hours and thirty-eight minutes remaining until the President and the Speaker of the House were assassinated.

  35

  The first step was to figure out where the hell I was. Hopefully I was in North America. Examining the front door, I checked the brace and saw that it was locked into a bracket integrated into the door’s surface. A key hole was set a few inches above the rod. Flipping through one of the rings I’d removed from the dead agent, I found a small, brass key that looked like it would fit.

  It did, turning easily. There was a click and the brace shifted slightly as it was released. Removing it, I placed it on the floor beneath the windows and reached for the first deadbolt. Before I disengaged it, I remembered the review of my assault on the terrorists with Ray. The peephole I’d overlooked.

  There wasn’t one in this door, but a device that looked like a small tablet was mounted to the surface at eye level. I tapped it and the screen came on, displaying an image of the other side. My breath caught when I saw a black and white police cruiser sitting at the curb on the far side of a neatly mown lawn. As I watched, two cops stepped out, looked around and began walking towards the driveway.

  What the hell? Then I remembered. Kirkpatrick had fired two shots while we were fighting. One gunshot might go unnoticed, or passed off as something else. But two, in fairly quick succession, will probably spur someone to pick up the phone and call the police.

  Looking around, I dashed to the body of the dead FBI agent. Grabbing it by the ankles
I dragged it across the floor into the kitchen, then raced back to the front door. I unlocked the two deadbolts and pulled the door open.

  Stepping out into bright sunshine, I held his FBI ID badge at arm’s length in front of me, my thumb carefully covering the photo. The two uniformed cops froze, both of them placing their hands on their weapons. Fortunately, they hadn’t drawn them. Yet.

  “FBI,” I said in a loud, confident voice.

  I pulled the door closed behind me and took two steps towards the driveway where they stood, spaced well apart. The older, and probably senior, of the two squinted at the ID, but didn’t relax.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” I asked, slapping the case closed and shoving it in my hip pocket.

  “You live here?” The older cop asked.

  My eyes were adjusting to the change in light and I was able to see his name plate. Tompkins. I also saw all the hash marks along the lower sleeve of his uniform shirt. This guy had been doing the job for a long time and wasn’t going to be easy to bullshit. Remembering my training with the con-man, I decided how to handle him.

  “That’s not something I can discuss. Tompkins, is it?”

  My tone wasn’t friendly. I sounded like a condescending asshole. Probably about like a local cop expected a Fed to sound.

  “What can you discuss? Sir?”

  The sir was laced with heavy sarcasm.

  “You need to get back in your car and move on, Officer Tompkins. You’re drawing unwanted attention to this house.”

  I knew I’d sold my role when he grimaced and removed his hand from the pistol holstered on his belt. His partner noticed and visibly relaxed, moving his hand as well.

  “We had a report of gun fire. Everything OK inside?”

  We all looked towards the street as another cruiser pulled to a stop, nose to nose with their police car. Two more cops got out and walked up the driveway, the older of the two moving to stand next to Tompkins.