Greene's Calling: Seventeen Book Three (A Supernatural Action Adventure Thriller Series 3) (9 page)

Laura frowned. ‘There are three paragraphs.’

‘The third killer was the guy who died in the plane crash,’ said Conrad steadily. ‘He had calluses between his thumb and forefinger from using a sniper rifle.’

Laura turned to Woods in the taut lull that followed, her expression troubled. ‘Although I hate to admit this, Clint, Greene is right. We should abort the visit now.’

Relief flashed through Conrad at her words. She believed him.

Woods ran a hand through his receding hair and sighed. ‘You know as well as I do what he’ll say to that. He’s gonna want to see an act of God before he changes his mind.’

Laura chewed her lip and remained silent.

Conrad looked between the two agents. ‘It’s your call, isn’t it?’ he said, making no attempt to mask his surprise. ‘He shouldn’t have a say in his personal security matters.’

Woods cast Conrad a mocking look. ‘We do not order our commander-in-chief. We only advise him. We sometimes have to do it loudly and vehemently, but still, we can only recommend a course of action.’ He lowered his voice a notch. ‘I can tell you don’t know
this
president.’

Laura pulled a face. ‘He’s a stubborn bastard.’

The Maryland Lieutenant straightened, his back rigid. ‘You
are
talking about our Head of State here!’

Laura eyed him coolly. ‘I’m sorry. The president is a stubborn bastard,
sir
.’ She ignored the man’s disapproving glare and turned to Conrad. ‘You said you could decode the passages?’

‘Yes,’ he replied with a quick nod. ‘I think they might have used a stacked cipher combining a date shift and the Vigenère square. The keyword is Falcon. The date is—’

‘10-12-1962,’ Woods cut in. ‘The day of the storm.’

‘Yes,’ said Conrad.

The Maryland Lieutenant threw his hands in the air. ‘What the hell is a Vigenère square?’ he exclaimed.

‘It’s a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, Bob,’ muttered the county police Deputy Chief. She shrugged at the man’s expression. ‘So sue me. I took a course on cryptography.’

Laura got one of the techs to print out a Vigenère table while Conrad wrote out the nine encoded lines on a fresh sheet of paper. They used the table, followed by the date shift, to painstakingly recreate the original text. Five minutes later, they examined the new words he had written out.

‘That still doesn’t make any sense,’ said Laura with a frustrated sigh.

Conrad’s heart sunk as he studied the incomprehensible text; he had been certain that he was on the right track.

The Deputy Chief had been gazing at the paper as intently as the rest of them when she suddenly gasped. ‘There’s a third cipher!’

She snatched a couple of blank sheets from a printer tray and drew a different sized concentric circle on each piece of paper. She marked out sections on the circumference of the two rings and filled them in with all the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 0-9.

‘Dammit!’ swore Conrad as the policewoman grabbed a pair of scissors and started to cut out the smaller circle. ‘The Alberti disk!’

‘It’s another encryption tool, Bob,’ snapped the Deputy Chief, preempting the question hovering on the Maryland Lieutenant’s lips. ‘In fact, it was the first mechanical cipher device ever invented.’ She placed the small disk inside the large one, stuck a pin in the middle, and stared at Conrad’s partly decoded text. ‘What’s the key?’

‘Try the date,’ urged the immortal. He glanced anxiously at the clock.

The Deputy Chief started scribbling on the paper. Conrad followed the fast movements of the pencil with his eyes, his gaze occasionally skipping to the disk to double-check the decryption as she rotated the inner ring to align the ciphertext with the plaintext.

They ended up with a jumble of thirty-six numbers and six letters. The Deputy Chief’s eyes grew round at the same time that Conrad’s heart plummeted. The answer to the riddle stared him in the face.

‘Holy shit!’ whispered the policewoman, the color draining from her face.

Chapter Eight

W
oods was already barking into his radio unit.

‘Sniper teams, we have possible hostile subjects at the following locations! I repeat, we have possible hostile subjects at the following locations!’ He gave out the three sets of geographic coordinates scrawled on the paper and snapped out instructions to the agents and law enforcement agencies on the ground and in the air. ‘Get ready to abort and extract the president on my command!’ he shouted into the mouthpiece. ‘And tell him if he doesn’t do as I say, I’m walking out the door!’ he added with a growl.

Laura grabbed the sheet bearing the decoded text and shoved it in front of one of the Secret Service techs. ‘Get those numbers on the screen!’ she snarled.

Sweat beaded the guy’s forehead as he brought up the digital map of the stadium and typed in the coordinates. Three dots appeared on the display. Laura studied the monitor for a couple of beats, took out her FN Five-seveN semiautomatic pistol, and yelled out orders into her handheld microphone as she raced for the exit.

She skidded to a halt in the corridor outside and whirled around. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’

Conrad slowed, his gun in hand. He had followed her out of the room. ‘I haven’t come this far just to sit back on my ass now!’ he retorted. ‘Besides, I have a bone to pick with these guys.’

Laura opened her mouth, hesitated, and let out a snort of disgust. ‘Fine! Just don’t get in our way!’

They met up with a company of agents in the stairwell next to the lifts and divided into three groups. Laura introduced Conrad briefly and gave out his description over the agency’s coded frequency so he wouldn’t get targeted by friendly fire.

‘We’ll take the third and fourth levels,’ she commanded. Her eyes moved to Conrad and the four armed agents with him. ‘You take the first.’

Conrad led the two men and women down the steps. A long-forgotten emotion coursed through him as they raced along the main concourse in the direction of one of the three possible locations of the assassins. It felt good to be part of a team again.

They slowed when they reached one of the corner end seat sections on the lower level. Here, the sound of the crowd was almost deafening.

‘The subject will very likely be somewhere at the back,’ said Conrad. ‘Look for anyone with a bulky jacket. They’ll be on their own.’

The agents bobbed their heads. Conrad checked his gun, gripped it low in his hands, and entered the stadium. The noise almost rocked him back on his heels. He did his best to ignore it and spread out along the rows with the other agents.

The killer listened to the information streaming across the US Secret Service coded frequency through a tiny earpiece and smiled at the swarms of people strolling past on their way to their seats.

‘Good morning. Thank you for coming. Here’s a complimentary discount voucher for our concession stands for your next visit. Have a nice day.’

Most smiled back as they took the flyers the killer offered.

It was Conrad who spotted the man first. His clothes and hands gave him away.

Whereas the majority of spectators ambling and standing along the seat rows had their arms bared to the warm weather, the suspect wore a long-sleeved, quilt-lined, hooded jacket branded with the word “Staff.” His tanned skin and features suggested a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin. He was dispensing leaflets to the Redskins fans, a ready smile on his face; there were band-aids wrapped around the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

Conrad stopped fifteen feet from the suspect and studied him for a few seconds. He looked around, caught the eye of one of the female agents, and cocked his head slightly toward the man in the long-sleeved jacket. The woman lowered her head and shifted to speak discreetly in her microphone.

Conrad caught movement on the skyline to the right and saw sunlight glint on the scope of a rifle as a Secret Service sniper swung his weapon in their direction. Then, two gunshots erupted from the opposite side of the field. Had he not been listening out for the sounds, he would have mistaken them for the stick balloons filling the air with their explosive racket.

He scanned the stands on the northwest side of the stadium and saw a commotion near one of the doors on the third level. From the distance, it looked like several Secret Service agents converging on a figure on the ground. Laura and her team had caught the first killer.

The assassin heard the distant blasts of gunfire, looked around, and moved.

Conrad saw the killer glance at the disturbance on the other side of the stadium. The man turned, spotted the two agents closing in on his left, took a step back, and dashed down the aisle toward the field. He threw the stacks of brochures in his hand up in the air and reached inside his jacket. Flyers rained down like confetti on the heads of spectators as he pulled out a pale, shiny gun. Conrad bolted after him.

The man looked over his shoulder, pointed the pistol, and squeezed the trigger twice. The immortal ducked. The shots went wild and zinged off a concrete wall and a metal railing. Alarmed cries erupted across the section as the crowd started to panic. Conrad saw the guy smirk as he sprinted along one of the rows toward an exit.

‘Oh no you don’t, you bastard!’ the immortal hissed.

He shoved his gun in his waistband and slipped the staff weapon out as he ran past the fleeing fans. He bounded onto the top of a seat backrest and vaulted precariously from row to row toward the running figure. Eight feet from the killer, Conrad took a flying leap in the air.

The assassin spotted his swooping shadow and started to turn. The immortal slammed into him and took him to the ground.

The gun clattered out of the killer’s hand and was lost in the footfall of the press of people streaming toward the exit. He slipped out from under Conrad, rolled over, and flicked a pocketknife out from under the wrist of his jacket as he jumped up.

Conrad sprung to his feet and rotated the first ring on the gilded staff. The spear blades sprung out at the ends. The killer’s eyes shrunk into narrow slits. He moved, the sharp end of the knife flicking toward the immortal’s groin.

Conrad hopped back and spun the double-bladed spear in a series of rapid strikes. The first one smashed the killer’s nose. The next two broke his right wrist and shattered his left patella. The knife fell from the man’s grasp and a choked cry escaped his lips.

Conrad kicked him in the face, dropped down knee first onto his chest, and pinned him to the ground with the staff wedged against his neck. The assassin’s eyes rolled back in his head and he let out a throaty gurgle.

Running footsteps rose to his left.

‘I think you broke his jaw, Batman,’ drawled a blonde female agent as she jogged down the aisle toward them.

Conrad looked around. The Secret Service agents had cleared most of the seats in the adjacent stands on the lower level. Uniformed police stood at the exits and calmly guided the agitated crowd to safety.

‘Did Laura—?’ Conrad started to ask.

‘Yeah. Hartwell got the other killer,’ confirmed the blonde agent. Two of her colleagues rolled the assassin onto his stomach and cuffed him.

The immortal rose to his feet and twisted the ring on the staff. The spear blades disappeared with a slick, metallic noise. He gazed toward the other side of the field and let out the breath he had been holding. Incredible as it seemed, he had made it in time to avert the assassination attempt on Westwood’s life.

‘Those were quite some moves you pulled there.’ The female agent was staring at the gilded weapon in his hands. ‘I’ve never seen a spear staff like that. Where’d you get it?’

Conrad hesitated. ‘It’s...a family heirloom.’