Chapter 8
chapter
eight
Drake
I parked the Escalade along the sidewalk of a small stretch of commercial buildings.
Exiting the vehicle, I walked up to a nondescript gray building a few blocks from where I’d parked.
From the outside, it looked abandoned and a big sign on several entrances stated that the building was condemned by the city.
It was a front, because I’d been here the night before. A rust-colored iron door sealed the back exit, and a metal mailbox was mounted on the wall at around chest level. The contraption was not used for mail.
I inserted a security card through the fake slot.
Rotors whirred, and a shield slid down to expose a one-inch by six-inch display with a keypad beneath it.
I entered a nine-digit code and bent down for a retinal scan.
The shield slid closed, followed by gears and tumblers moving.
The tight seal slackened and spit out my security card.
The mechanism would have destroyed the access card if the retinal scan and code hadn’t matched up.
I pushed down on a lever and pulled open the door.
Motion sensors triggered the lights, illuminating a drab hallway.
The ancient interior was spotless. Vinyl tiles covered the floors and fluorescent fixtures hanging from equally clinical ceiling tiles gave the illusion of an underground operation.
Camera spheres mounted at every corner recorded my arrival.
My footsteps were conspicuous echoes in the hallway's silence. I turned and entered the last room. A collapsible table and several folding chairs littered an otherwise empty space. A huge cabinet sat near the wall. Except it wasn’t a cabinet.
Hidden buttons along a side panel activated rollers to move the fixture enough for a man of my size to move into a space in the wall and enter the car of a hidden elevator.
With the scissor gates closed, the lights along the edges of the interior activated. Flipping open an access panel, I entered a code and the floor below me moved as the elevator descended below ground.
The basement had been a bomb shelter in the sixties.
Unlike the rest of the building, it was completely renovated and tricked out with the latest technology, including a holographic map and glass projector screen at the center of the room.
A stack of servers hummed in the corner with a direct link to the CIA, NSA, and other federal databases. Wi-Fi connection was highly encrypted.
Castle Rock—our task force’s base.
Our analyst, Tim, was in one corner, processing data. Edmunds and Brick were sitting around a conference table. Viktor stood at the head of the table, poring over some documents and, without looking at me, said, “Glad you could join us, Maddox.”
Fuck you, Viktor . I didn’t regret my tardiness.
I’d discovered something in Izabel’s office at home that had gutted me.
The temptation to blow off this meeting and confront Izabel at once was strong, but I reminded myself that the sooner we closed the loop on the task force’s mission, the sooner I could return to my life with her.
My chest spasmed at the idea that I could be too late, that my wife had truly moved on.
Or she didn’t want to go back to being my wife.
I nodded at the other two men in the room, who returned my greeting with chin lifts.
The grin on Brick’s face told me he was enjoying whatever anti-bromance I was having with Viktor.
Finally, the man in question glanced up, studying my face.
The slight narrowing of his ice-blue eyes felt like a blade scraping layers off my skin.
“You okay, Maddox?”
Why deny this shit was okay? “Feeling a bit raw.”
“Something happen with Izabel?”
I clenched my jaw and shook my head, hating the drilling stare from the other man. “No. Can we get this meeting started? Got shit to do.”
“Oh, definitely…” Viktor replied. He looked at Edmunds and Brick. “Give us five minutes.”
A look of surprise came from the other two men when Viktor headed to the back room, tipping his chin at me to follow him.
Blowing out a breath, I trudged after him.
Whatever Viktor had to say couldn’t bring me down any lower.
Maybe he’d kick me off the team, although the look on his face was far from irritated. I would even say it was almost…pitying.
Which was worse.
When we reached the far corner, Viktor faced me. He was an inch taller than my six-three, so we were more or less eye-to-eye.
“Kept you guys waiting…sorry.” I grimaced. “I needed time to sort myself out.”
“Can you do your job?”
“What exactly is my job?” I derided. “What the hell am I working for if I’ve lost everything I want to live for?”
“Groveling not working, I take it?”
“Fuck you,” I growled. “Cut this shit and get to the point.”
“We will, but we need to sort out your ass.”
“Got a headshrinker for that.”
“Maybe Izabel needs to see Carter, too?”
Dr. Gina Carter was a good friend of Viktor’s and a retired agency shrink.
Somehow, he had convinced the doctor to fly over to Germany during my recovery from back surgery.
Viktor didn’t believe in wasting time and wanted me to work on my mental, as well as physical, recovery.
Basically, ensuring I didn’t break down and return to Izabel before the mission was complete.
“What? Like couple’s counseling?”
“You make it sound like a bad thing.”
“Doc G would do that?”
“She’s retired,” Viktor said dryly. “Gina has nothing else to do but play golf.”
“Izabel’s having second thoughts about staying married to me.” Bile rose up my throat as I looked away from the older man and brushed the cold sweat from my upper lip.
“Give her time to adjust to you.”
“How long?” I fidgeted in place. Thinking about staying away from Izabel was making it hard to keep the panic from crawling out of my skin.
“Jesus, Maddox, I don’t fucking know.”
“Not giving her space.” Especially with that damn architect sniffing at her heels.
“Somehow, I’m not surprised,” the other man drawled. “Underneath your perceived betrayal, she’ll realize that you made the best and most logical decision for the both of you.”
I emitted a bitter laugh. “She’s also come to her senses that I’m a bad bet.”
“Stop whining.”
“Fuck you.”
A few seconds of testosterone-charged air hung between us.
Until Viktor’s brow shot up. “You good?”
“Yeah...” Surprisingly, using him as a sounding board to release my frustration was very helpful.
“Good. Because I ain’t talking about feelings.” Viktor moved past me to walk back to the conference table.
“You started it,” I muttered.
A brief chuckle escaped Viktor’s lips. “Just wanted you to know that Carter is available to you.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Out of our task force, only Edmunds and Brick returned to the East Coast. The rest of the men disbanded to retire or pursue other things.
Though most of our team were handpicked because of skill set, each one had a personal stake whether to avenge our fallen brothers or to end Youssef Hamza.
At this stage, we were more dependent on spy craft to determine the leak of operational information that compromised the JSOC mission.
Their deaths had scored my soul and bringing all the people responsible to justice was the only way the scar wouldn’t blister and bleed.
Viktor grabbed the glass display controller and clicked several times to show a list of numbers and several overlapping circles, which I interpreted as cell phone triangulation.
“We recovered a list of cell phone numbers from Hamza’s files,” Viktor said.
“Most of them are burners and scattered around Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, but we’ve shut down most of those cells over the past three years.
” He clicked and changed the screen to what looked like a map of the eastern seaboard centering on Virginia.
“With the list of numbers from Hamza’s files, we were able to isolate these cell phone clouds.
Tim’s algorithm along with archived data from the NSA plotted two clouds over DC and Virginia Beach at around the timeframe of the joint Fire Team and Delta Force mission. ”
“Are you saying we had a blatant breach of operational security?” Brick asked incredulously.
“Yes,” Viktor clipped, magnifying the cell phone clouds. “The one over DC was active two hours before that mission. Someone was feeding Hamza real-time information.”
Curses erupted between Brick and Edmunds, but my attention zeroed in on a particular spot on the display.
“That date over the VA Beach cloud…that was four days before we shipped out,” I speculated.
Viktor nodded grimly. “Multiple transmissions between Hamza and that number have been confirmed on the days leading to your team’s deployment and we’ve identified who was at the location.”
The look on the task force chief twisted a knot of apprehension in my gut. “You have a name?”
It was more a statement than a question.
Again, Viktor nodded. “Guardians are keeping an eye on him, but we received a ninety-nine percent confirmation from Tim’s app this morning.”
“Do we know where he is?”
“We’re ready to bring him in.”
“Great!” I sprang from the chair, a devil of a purpose driving my actions. “Let’s smoke the motherfucker.”
“You’re sitting this one out.”
“What the fuck, Baran?” I growled, but the other man’s expression sent my thoughts into a wild trajectory, a path my brain did its best to reject, but the truth was written all over Viktor’s face.
Slowly, I approached the area where Viktor stood, and picked up the display controller from the table and clicked. Anger and betrayal burned a hole in my chest.
“Son of a bitch!”