Sudden Threat (59 page)

“I’m not Ronnie!” Diamond proclaimed.

Matt was surprised to see how quickly Fox leapt toward Diamond, brandishing the knife as he shouted, “Double-crossing bastard.”

This was as much a lovers’ quarrel as it was a dispute about who was supporting which conspiracy. It hadn’t hurt that Matt’s sister Karen had transposed a photo of Diamond and Stone appearing intimate in conversation.

As Matt had watched Diamond respond, he thought,
Never bring a knife to a gunfight.
He didn’t even wince as Diamond’s pistol kicked back the moment Fox’s knife entered his heart. The bullet from Diamond’s gun caught Fox in the middle of the forehead, killing him instantly. The knife in Diamond’s heart let him live long enough to say, “But I know who Ronnie really is …”

Matt had closed his eyes and lowered his head. Covering his tracks from Fox’s apartment, he stole silently through the night in his old Porsche 944 and did not stop until he reached his home in Loudoun County.

“Yes,” Stone said. “Yes, we have an agreement.”

Stone’s words brought him back to the present. He released the man’s wrist, which Stone snatched back.

When Matt departed Stone’s office, he put the Pentagon in his rearview mirror and the memories of last night in the recesses of his mind as he drove along the George Washington Parkway to Langley. His thoughts turned to Zachary and the daughter who would never get to know her father now … and the brother he would never see again.

When he arrived at Langley, he walked onto the giant seal of the Central Intelligence Agency in the headquarters building and he blew past the security desk, only to be stopped by two large men in gray suits. One of them was the deputy director, Roger Houghton. They had seen him coming, or perhaps someone had been following him. Either way, Houghton was prepared for him.

“Don’t do it, Matt,” Houghton said.

“Lantini. Where’s Lantini?”

“Gone. Nobody can find him. Now go home and rest.”

“I won’t rest until he’s dead,” Matt said. Good operators always relied upon two sources, as opposed to one, to confirm intelligence. In this case Matt had three.

Matt had always wondered why he received the text to keep his ‘feet and knees together’ before Peterson’s airplane was even shot down. Once he discovered Lantini’s role as Ronnie Wood by Lantini’s photo in the file, hidden by the ruse of Diamond’s picture, Matt had developed a plausible theory. The fact that Lantini had fled served as confirmation to Matt that the CIA director had conspired with Stone and the others.

Every time I’m close, I’m moved
.

Matt’s 944 Porsche boiled smoke from the burning tires as he sped out of CIA headquarters and back onto the George Washington Parkway.

He stopped at an isolated scenic overlook, gazed across the Potomac, and leaned over the rock wall. Lifting his head, tears running down his cheeks, he shouted, “Zachary!”

Epilogue

A week later Matt stood by himself on a large rock that protruded above the South River at the north end of the 150 acres he called home in Stanardsville, Virginia. He had pushed his rehab a bit too hard, and an admonishing doctor had promised him she would order him to bed rest if he didn’t wear the sling. So, with one arm back in a sling, with his good arm he flung flat pebbles across the bubbling water giving no evidence of the shortstop he had once been.

Just a few short weeks ago he had been in the Philippines chasing Predators and finding Japanese troops and ships. The text he had sent from his Blackberry on that incident had cued Meredith to convince the National Security Advisor to have the ship interdicted. It turned out that all of his reports had either been received by Rathburn or Lantini, and discarded. Thankfully, the United States Navy had corralled the rogue vessel with a carrier battle group, F-18s circled the sky like buzzards spying road kill. The SEALs had boarded the
Shimpu
and found the skipper on the floor of the captain’s ward with a fresh bullet wound in his head.

He skipped another stone upstream, the current causing the stone to flip wildly. Not a good toss. Each time he tried to throw, the stitches in his abdomen screamed at him, pulling at healing skin.

Would the wounds that mattered ever heal?

Zachary was dead, and he wondered if he would ever be able to accept that fact. Life was never what it seemed, he understood, but the unfairness of his brother’s death in that remote corner of the world might weigh on him forever. At least he hoped so. Zachary was too great a man simply to be gone. His contributions were too substantial just to be forgotten. No, Matt
would
earn Zachary’s sacrifice. Once healed, he would be back in the field taking the fight to the enemy. In the meantime, he would serve in his new capacity as a special advisor to the director of the CIA … until his physical wounds healed.

He would go back to Afghanistan or Iraq and fight there. That was his mission.

On that thought, he wondered exactly what was happening in the world. How could Diamond and Fox be so manipulative and callous? How could Stone not see what they were doing? How could Lantini betray him?

What was in store for the world? Nine-eleven, Islamic fundamentalism, and rogue nationalism were supposedly exploiting the seams of a fractured universe. But what was real and what was manu-factured?

The ivory-tower conspiracies of the elite clouded the true heroism of the young men and women fighting so hard, who, in the eyes of the likes of Fox and Diamond, were truly nothing but cannon fodder.

He turned, carefully stepping along the rock, placing the stream to his back.

“Hi, handsome,” Meredith said. She was standing on the bank, her arms crossed, perhaps warding off the spring chill. She was wearing a dark blue Northface jacket over lighter dungarees. Her hiking boots were crossed one over the other as she leaned against a small poplar tree. New growth.

Matt nodded at her and stepped off the rock. He approached Meredith and took her in his good arm without saying a word.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, hugging him back.

Matt rested his head on her hair, the sling causing his arm to press awkwardly between them as he looked west into the churning river and the moun-tains whence it had come.

“Don’t leave me,” he caught himself saying. Why, he wasn’t sure. Maybe with Zachary’s loss he needed to fill the empty space quickly. Perhaps it would be less painful that way.

“I’m not going anywhere you’re not going,” she said softly.

He pulled away and kissed her on the lips, then said, “I’m just going to refuse to believe that he’s dead.”

Matt’s words of disbelief floated like an autumn leaf into the wind, fluttered up the hill toward the house, circled the fresh-tilled grave, and bolted skyward toward the heavens.

Want to see where Matt goes next?

Please enjoy the first two chapters of

ROGUE THREAT

And pick up book two of the THREAT

series on October 20, 2009!

CHAPTER 1

APRIL 2003, FRIDAY EVENING, 1700 HOURS,

LOUDOUN COUNTY, VIRGINIA

Matt Garrett stood and stretched, physical scars sending waves of pain through his body. He looked at the fading blue sky from the deck of his Loudoun County home, perhaps seeking a nod, guidance—anything really—from his dead brother Zachary. A paramilitary operative with the CIA, Matt had been wounded in the same fight in the Philippines last year, where his brother was killed. Coincidence, mostly, but the fact remained that Zachary was dead, and Matt had almost died.

He lowered his head and stared at his backyard, the terrain gently sloping away from his one-story brick rambler. Thoughts of Zachary had dominated him over the past year and had stymied his recovery. He knew he needed to move on, but he refused to let go.

Matt thought fondly of Zachary’s graduation from West Point, his brother’s service in Desert Storm, his agonizing decision to leave the service and work the family farm in the mid-nineties, and then, after the 9-11 attacks, his firm resolve to get into the fight. Which he had done.

Which had gotten him killed.

“If only he had stayed on the farm,” Matt muttered.

It was nearly six p.m., and despite Matt’s nearparalytic state regarding Zachary, he did sense an uncertain stir of change in the wind. Perhaps that was what kept him hanging on. The towering pine trees in his back yard bowed with the breeze, and Matt closed his eyes, trying to understand everything that had transpired. Operation Iraqi Freedom had kicked off and was an apparent success so far, but he had his doubts. With all the fanfare over Iraq, he

couldn’t help but pick at the open scab of his failure to kill Al Qaeda senior leadership when he had had the shot. Now the opportunity was lost forever. True, high ranking officials had denied his kill chain, and a JDAM bomb had struck closer to his team than to the Al Qaeda leadership, but he still blamed himself. That failure, coupled with his brother’s death and Matt’s own physical wounds, were enough to make him doubt himself. And in his business, there was no margin for doubt—no second guessing.

Since when did you start following orders, Garrett? Should have stayed, taken the shot.

He shook his head and looked to his left, where a small hill rose above the stream. There was nothing but forest for about three miles. The April evening was filled with the hum of spring in the Virginia countryside. Through the pine thickets Matt saw budding dogwoods and darting squirrels. The temperature hovered in that optimistically comfortable range where he would begin to wear Tshirts and shorts when relaxing at his home. He stared at the pieces of a fading blue sky that shone through the pine tips to the rear of his property. Then he looked down at his batting cage.

Matt walked down the deck steps, grabbed a Pete Rose 34-inch bat, and stepped into the rectangular mesh netting. He liked the thin handle and the wide barrel of the bat. Even if Charlie Hustle had been banned from baseball, it was still the best bat in the sport. Matt flipped a switch on a small post, and the machine hummed to life. Some people meditated, Matt figured; he hit baseballs.

Absently, he wondered if he entered the cage to duel with himself. Whether it was post traumatic stress or prolonged grieving, Matt was in persistent internal conflict. Sometimes he had gnawing at him the urge to get in his old Porsche, fill the gas tank, and drive dark, dangerous roads at high speeds. Other times he stepped into the batting cage.

His angst was no different, he figured, than the way some of his soldier buddies who were suffering post traumatic stress might wake up screaming, grab for their elusory weapon in the middle of the night, and move through the house, methodically clearing each room, calling “One up” to invisible partners, buddies who had been killed right next to them in combat.

Matt needed to fill that emptiness left by Zach’s absence and burn his adrenaline. The grief welled inside him, he repressed it, and then it reappeared somewhere else like a magician’s trick. One moment it was an obvious thought; the next it was a repressed memory. Post traumatic stress was tricky that way. The repressed memory went latent, seemingly forgotten, only to surge forward at the least expected time, manifesting itself as a spontaneous action, sometimes benign, often not. Only on intense reflection or therapy could the sufferer follow the byzantine trail back to the original mournful feeling.

So today, instead of a suicidal drag race in the Porsche, Matt stared down 95-mph fastballs moving with enough velocity to kill him. No helmet. That was part of the risk, the game. This way, at least, his edginess was more predictable, like Russian roulette. Which bullet, which fastball, might hit him? He never knew when one tire might catch the stitches and spit at him a left-handed curve ball hard and fast directly at his temple. Just as bad as a bullet. Maybe worse. He would see it coming. Would he duck?

Or smile and stand there, ready to join his brother?

The first ball blew past him before he could even think about swinging. With each successive pitch, his cut migrated toward what it once was. He had been an above-.300 collegiate batsman. Soon he was hitting a few frozen ropes back at the machine, which was protected by a wire mesh fence. The calm evening rang resolutely with the distinct crack of the wooden 34 against the quiet hum of the pitching machine’s spinning tires.

Matt focused, and he tried to forget about Zachary’s death. The War on Terror had claimed many casualties. The fact that Zachary had survived, even thrived, during Operation Desert Storm, only to succumb to a small-scale action in the Philippines, would forever confound Matt.

As he rifled balls into the far netting, his mind drifted to a few men that he politely referred to as
those bastards
, the upper-echelon Rolling Stones groupies who conspired to start a war in the Philippines simply to avert another war in Iraq.

A fastball came whipping at him, and there was Bart Rathburn, killed by Abu Sayyaf rebels. Swing. Crack. Rathburn, who had been an assistant secretary of defense using the pseudonym Keith Richards, was gone into the back of the net. The tires then spit him a slider, low and away: Taiku Takishi, a Japanese businessman turned rogue, also known as Charlie Watts. Smooth swing. Solid wood. Takishi, who led the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, was gone into right field. Another pitch knuckled straight at him. He swung defensively and swatted away the face of Secretary of Defense Robert Stone. Stone, using the nom de guerre, Mick Jagger, orchestrated the entire conspiracy. Following Stone’s knuckleball was a 98-mph fastball that blew past him.

Ronnie Wood.

Though not located in the year since his disappearance, CIA director Frank Lantini, Matt was convinced, played the ever elusive Ronnie Wood.

Every time I was close, he moved me.
But there were other possibilities, Matt knew. His mind briefly churned, visualizing these Beltway heroes who pulled the marionette strings of so many great Americans, using them as the fodder that they were. A bolt of anger shot through Matt when he realized that it was only those with whom you served that you could trust to be on your flank, to help you in a time of crisis. That notion brought his mind reeling back to Zachary.