Betrayal

Chapter 34

Jet lifted the welding mask from her head and studied the result of her efforts with approval, then loosed the vise and moved to the grinder to create a smooth seam. The internal baffles had been the most difficult part, but she’d studied the physics and understood the concept of attenuation, and had dismantled enough similar devices to understand how they worked.

Once she was finished, she screwed the tube onto the barrel of the Beretta and checked it for fit. Satisfied, she turned and fired a shot at a pile of sandbags she’d placed in a corner of the workspace. The pop was loud, but no worse than any of the professionally-crafted silencers she’d used. It would do.

She had already reloaded the fifty shells so that they would be subsonic with the silencer, further reducing the sound, and she fired one more round to make sure. It would take a little adjustment for a miniscule drop in the bullet’s trajectory at greater range, but for her purposes, it was more than suitable.

After dusting the silencer with a coat of flat black primer, she checked the time and picked up her cell phone. Matt answered on the first ring.

“Bad news is nothing more on Hannah. Good news is my contact’s gotten the address of two of the other top dogs. The operational side of this is Arthur and his counterpart at the DOD, and the associate director of the CIA. If you eliminate Arthur, his DOD buddy and the associate director, you’ve hopelessly crippled their operation. By the time the underlings are able to regroup, the natural competitive pressure in the market will have flattened them, and the Russians or whoever else will have taken over the supply side. We can’t eliminate the drug trade, but we can make it so the CIA is no longer the largest trafficker.”

“Give me the info. I’ll add them to my shopping list.”

“The DOD man’s name is Briggs.” Matt gave her the details. “And here’s the director’s information.”

She scribbled a note on the back of a reloading materials brochure.

“Okay. Got it. How are you holding up?”

“Good. I’ve now got thirty men from one of the largest opium warlords in the Shan. All seasoned fighters, or at least so he claims. They look tougher than the last bunch, so that’s a positive. Lawan is doing well, settling in. I hired two women, one to cook and keep the camp presentable and the other to tutor her. Although I don’t think she’s had more than an eighth grade education herself. But it’s better than nothing.”

“I take it you’re able to recharge your phone.”

“The miracle of solar power. Even in the jungle.”

“All right. I’m about ready to move.”

“Wait another day or two. Let’s give my contact more time to see if she can dig up anything more. She’s working on blueprints and security diagrams for all three of the targets’ houses. That will come in handy, I’d imagine.”

“It will. You think I’ll have it within forty-eight hours?”

“Absolutely. She was confident. And another couple of days shouldn’t change anything.”

“It’s another two days without my daughter.”

“I know.” He paused. “Have you decided how you’re going to do this with Arthur?”

“A hybrid of plan A and B. I’ll try B first. Although I suspect you’re correct — there’s no way he’s going to give me Hannah back and let me go.”

“No, now that you know the whole story, you can see why he won’t.”

“Which is why I’ll lead with B and then be prepared to shift to a modified A. On the others, it will just be straight sanctions. All on the same night so nobody has time to figure out what’s happening.”

“All right. Figure on making your move forty-eight hours from now. Call me tomorrow, same protocol.”

“Will do.”

Waiting was like Chinese water torture, but the stakes were high, and Matt was a seasoned field agent and operational planner. If he felt her chances were best waiting, then difficult as it was for her, she would wait.

Jet moved to the sandbags, taped a piece of paper to the front one, and walked to the far end of the twenty foot space. She fired three shots in rapid succession at the black circle she had drawn on it. The grouping was within a half inch. Admittedly at twenty feet it wasn’t much of a test, but she could extrapolate. The weapon would do the job.

She spent the next two hours cleaning up every trace in the stall and moving the equipment back to her trunk. She’d get rid of it on the way back to Washington, eliminating all evidence of her preparations.

By the time she was finished dropping the gear at the dump, it was late afternoon, and she mentally ticked off another checklist item completed. The car clock reminded her that the day was winding down, so she needed to get busy on her next task.

It was time to buy some vehicles.

Muzzle flashes illuminated the night as the tribesmen’s Kalashnikovs chattered from defensive positions around the camp. The answering fire from the jungle was smaller caliber, three round bursts, cutting away at the camp defenders with precision. Matt darted to a cluster of rocks, pistol in hand, and retrieved one of the fallen guards’ rifles, then flipped Jet’s night vision goggles in place and scanned the jungle.

He saw the flares of three gunmen a hundred and fifty yards away. They were using flash suppressors, but in the verdant luminescence of the goggles they lit up like starbursts. Matt switched the AK-47 to full auto and fired a sustained burst at the first and second positions, the hot 7.62mm shell casings flying around him. When the gun was empty, he ejected the exhausted magazine and pawed another free from the dead guard and slammed it home, then peered around the rocks.

The shooting from the two gunmen he’d spotted had ceased, but there was still another out there firing at his position — no doubt also equipped with night vision gear. He leaned towards one of the pair of guards cowering behind the rocks and barked a terse command. The closest one nodded. He shouted a rough bearing to the men, and on his signal, they began laying down covering fire while he dodged to another outcropping.

Bullets pounded into the ground around his heels, and then he was behind the boulders, the tribesmen still shooting. Judging by the incoming fire, there were two more left. At least.

He popped up and fired half the clip at the position of the last gunman he’d seen, and the shooting from that position stopped.

A chunk of rock flew off near his head and grazed his cheek. He wiped away a trickle of blood as he tried to gauge where the final shooter was concealed. At the edge of his field of vision, he saw another bloom of bright light, his ears confirming that the shooter was to his left. He took two deep breaths and then emptied the rest of the clip at the hidden man, strafing the area with measured precision.

No further gunfire answered him.

He waited, thirty seconds, and when there was no more gunfire, he called to the leader of his security team, “Go get flashlights from my hut. I have three by the door. Don’t touch the bodies. I want to see them as they fell.”

The leader nodded and was back in a blink with the lights. Matt watched as his men crept into the brush searching for the attackers’ corpses. A shout from one of them confirmed a find, and then another a few yards away.

He looked around, mentally counting the number of his guards that had been killed, and spotted eleven bodies in the near vicinity. It was a bloodbath, and two more men groaned where they had fallen, wounded, not long for this world.

Matt stood, still wary, and made his way to the edge of the clearing where the flashlight beams burned bright in the gloom. One of the attackers was still breathing, gasping for breath, and Matt looked down at his Caucasian features and battle-hardened face without pity.

“Who sent you?” he demanded, but the man’s expression froze as he shuddered and then lay still. Matt was walking over to the second body when a woman’s scream pierced the night. He spun and ran back to the camp as the cook came running out of her hut, hands stained with blood, screaming into the night sky.

“Runs like a champ.” The young man patted the hood of the black Chevrolet Tahoe with seeming affection.

The bright morning sunlight exposed where the rust damage on the quarter panels had been sloppily repaired. She’d spent the evening scouring the classifieds and the internet for vehicles and had set off early to get the chore over with.

“You mind if we take it to a mechanic for a quick once-over?”

“I’ve got a lot of people who want to buy this baby. I don’t have time to take it somewhere so a mechanic can nitpick it.”

“That’s a shame. Good luck selling it.” Jet returned to her rental car and pulled away, frustrated that this was proving so difficult. She’d looked at three possible candidates, and all were garbage. Not that she particularly cared, but she couldn’t afford a vehicle to break down in the middle of an operation. She moved to the next on her list, five miles away.

The black Ford Explorer was owned by an older couple who seemed genuine and had no reservations with her taking it to a mechanic. After an hour inspecting all the basics and running a compression check, the mechanic she’d lined up gave her the thumbs-up, and she paid the couple in cash. She arranged to have the husband follow her to the rental yard so she could return her car, and paid for a taxi to take him home.

Her first hurdle had been surmounted, and she knew that the DMV system wouldn’t list the Ford as sold for days, by which point she’d be long gone.

She thought the next vehicle would be harder to acquire, but was pleasantly surprised when the first one she looked at proved to be exactly what she was looking for — a 201 °Coachmen Freelander RV with only eighteen thousand miles on it, owned by an old man who could hardly walk. The wife told her their sad story — about the dream trip they’d taken around the country before the husband endured his final battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — and tearfully told her that they’d be willing to take a beating on it because they could use the money.

Jet paid them full price and asked if she could leave the vehicle sitting in their driveway until she could come and get it. They were overjoyed to do so, eyeing the stack of hundred dollar bills as though they’d just won the lottery.

As she pulled away, she tried calling Matt, but he didn’t answer, and she resolved to try him again in three hours, as agreed.

After a late lunch, she drove through both Briggs’ and Arthur’s neighborhoods, familiarizing herself with the layouts. Briggs lived outside the city limits in Arlington, Virginia, in an estate home near the river at the end of a cul-de-sac that backed onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. She had studied the satellite images and confirmed her impression on the drive by. Relatively rural suburb for the well-heeled. Nice, but in keeping with a man who wasn’t living beyond his means.

Arthur’s townhouse was a different story. In the heart of Georgetown, a densely-populated, affluent section of Washington near the university, it would present some challenges. It was an older building that had been remodeled, she could see, and looked expensive. A security camera peeked from under the edge of the roof, another by the front door. It looked like the home had been built in the 1800s, but was immaculate. Easily worth ten million dollars these days. Unexpectedly opulent digs for a CIA career man.

She would need to look at the blueprints and the schematics, but it looked do-able for someone of her skills. Briggs’ house was child’s play.

Her final stop was a lavish nine-thousand-square-foot mansion near CIA headquarters, adjacent to Pimmit Bend Park — a faux Tudor home at the end of a long private drive. That one would require some additional research, but she was confident.

Matt’s sat phone continuously rang without response, and she spent the remainder of the day growing increasingly concerned. He didn’t strike her as the type to go dark for no reason, but there was nothing she could do but wait. Jet checked the blind e-mail account he’d had his contact send the blueprints to, and saw three large files sent from an anonymous remailer. She downloaded them to her laptop, opened them, and studied the floor plans and electrical diagrams with interest. As she had suspected, there were a number of weak areas, and she made mental notes as she pictured the layouts in three dimensions.

She tried the sat phone one last time after dinner but still got no response, and as she lay her head on the down pillow for the evening she had a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach.

Something was wrong.

She knew it.