Damage Control (46 page)

Irene paused to make sure she had Jonathan’s full attention. “Wait till you get this,” she said. “Your girlfriend made it down eleven floors with those injuries.” She looked back to Gail. “One tough, tough young lady.”

Jonathan had known that since the day they’d first met. But he’d known a lot of very, very tough people who’d lost their battles against bullets.

He moved back to her bedside and threaded his way through the IV tubes to grasp her hand. As he entwined his fingers with hers, he noticed traces of blood in the crease where her manicured nails met the nail beds.

Gail stirred at his touch, and he smiled, gently raising her hand above the bed rail and bending to kiss it.

“It’s Digger,” he said. “I’m here.”

Her uncovered eye opened for just a second or two, and then closed. He sensed that the lid was just too heavy.

“Harriett,” she said.

Jonathan scowled as he scoured his memory.

“I don’t understand,” Jonathan said.

This time, Gail didn’t waste energy on her eyelid. “How is Harriett?”

Dom whispered, “Gail was trying to save her. She didn’t make it.”

“Don’t worry about her,” Jonathan said, stroking her hand with his thumb as his fingers gripped a little tighter. “You worry about getting well.”

“She was my responsibility,” Gail said. “Did she get out?” As she spoke, the rhythm of the blips on her heart monitor increased.

There were some things about which Jonathan could not allow himself to lie. “No,” he said. “She was killed.”

Gail’s chest heaved as she took a huge breath. “My fault,” she said.

Jonathan wanted to correct her, but didn’t. If Gail had not gone to the Crystal Palace, lots of people would still be alive. The fact that most of them deserved killing didn’t remove the burden of the one who didn’t.

“Digger?” Gail said.

“Right here.”

“Kiss me,” she said.

He leaned across the bed rail and did just that, pressing his lips gently against hers. She did her best to kiss him back.

As he pulled away, he stroked her hair. “I love you,” he said. It was the first time he’d ever spoken the words aloud to Gail.

Gail winced. “I wanted to quit,” she said. “You talked me out of it.”

“That’s because you’re too good at what you do,” he said. They’d had this conversation a thousand times.

“This time for real,” Gail said. “I quit. I can’t hurt anyone else.”

“This time, I won’t say a word. You do what you need to do.”

Gail nodded slightly, but even that tiny movement seemed to hurt. “More,” she said. “I need you to quit, too.”

Jonathan didn’t care all that much about the details of what became of the Crystal Palace Cathedral, but from what he’d gathered from the news, Jackie Mitchell and her executive committee would spend the rest of their lives in prison if they didn’t end up on the wrong end of a needle in the death chamber.

The government’s case against Felix Hernandez— and, by extension, their case against Trevor Munro—died with Maria Elizondo.

And without a case against him, Munro still remained poised to advance within the Agency. It was the nature of their business in Langley to cross ethical lines. Convincing people to betray their own country to provide intelligence data was a dirty business—certainly no dirtier than abetting a drug trade in return for special favors. Besides, Uncle Sam had the ATF and the DEA to take care of drugs and weapons. And occasionally the Army.

The levels of cynicism and general dysfunction within the U.S. government had sickened Jonathan for years. Over time, he’d learned to look away, wrapping himself in his own cloak of cynicism. It’s the way of politicians and bureaucrats to feed on the blood of others in order to advance their careers. He’d learned to live with it.

Until now. Until Trevor Munro. He was a peculiar brand of mass murderer who killed randomly and efficiently without ever pulling a trigger or throwing a bomb. He did it with full deniability.

His bosses in Langley had the power to stop him, but instead chose to promote him. Soon he would be the third-highest-ranking spook in the CIA, with a bloated paycheck that was financed by honest Americans. It wasn’t right.

Jonathan had never done well at managing anger. Some injustices were so out of proportion that he couldn’t live with the imbalance.

Over the years, Jonathan had seen too many of his Special Ops pals slide the slippery moral slope toward hired killer, and he’d vowed to himself and to God and to everything holy that he would never become an assassin. It would just be too easy a line to cross, and once crossed, there could be no return.

These thoughts—this rage—tormented him as he sat in Trevor Munro’s rigorously neat living room with its clean lines and right angles, awaiting the man’s arrival home from work. He told himself that justice and assassination were two different things.

Tonight would be all about justice, meted out by the subsonic rounds he’d loaded into the suppressed .22-caliber pistol in his lap.

The living room wall hummed as the garage door opened.

Jonathan waited until the overhead door rumbled closed again, and then he stood. He didn’t make his move, though, until he heard the interior garage door open and close and the sound of mail slapping down on the table.

Jonathan stepped into the foyer, and from there straight into the kitchen.

Munro actually made a yipping sound as he sensed Jonathan’s presence, and he whirled to face his attacker.

The man Munro saw was dressed all in black, and his face was covered by a black mask.

“I hear you’ve been looking for me,” Jonathan said. He smiled at the sight of the spreading stain in Munro’s trousers. “Well, here I am.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Family is always first. Thank you, Joy, for always being there, and always understanding. I love you.

Chris, you rock. I’m so proud of you.

I owe special thanks to a couple of genuine war heroes who invited me into the world of U.S. Navy SEALs for a couple of days and let me see stuff and play with toys that I would otherwise never have had access to. Steve “Dutch” Van Horn is a terrific tour guide for the SEALs compound in Virginia Beach, and the hour or two I spent on the shooting range with Stephen “Turbo” Toboz as my instructor was truly special. I shot the HK416 (Jonathan Grave’s M27), the HK417, the sweet little MP7, and the granddaddy of the day, a .300 WinMag sniper rifle. Great day. Thanks, guys.

Jackie Mitchell gave a generous donation to the American Heart Association for her name to be included in this book. Having just had dinner with the real Jackie Mitchell for the first time, I can assure you that in reality she’s a very nice lady—far nicer than her fictional namesake. Thank heaven she has a sense of humor. Thanks to her for giving to such a good cause.

Trevor Munro made a donation to the Recycling Research Foundation in return for having a character named after him. I assure the world that I borrowed only his name. The fictional Trevor Munro bears no resemblance to anything but my imagination.

Many people touch my life on a regular basis, and all of them make the journey more valuable. I can’t possibly name everyone, but I’d like to call out a few in particular: Jeffery Deaver, Pat Barney and Sam Shockley, Bob and Bert Garino (I miss you guys!), Ellen Crosby, Donna Andrews, Alan Orloff, and Art Taylor.

The folks at Kensington Publishing continue to amaze me. Michaela Hamilton is simply the best of the best when it comes to editors, and I’m sure it helps a lot to be surrounded by a terrific team. Adeola Saul is a terrific publicist whose heart and mind are always aligned on the books she manages, and Alexandra Nicolajsen is wonderfully persuasive in dragging analog writers into the digital world. None of that would work, though, without the passion of publisher Laurie Parkin, who is empowered by the great guy in the big corner office, Steve Zacharius. Thank you all for everything.

Last but Lord knows not least, thanks to my agent and great friend, Anne Hawkins of John Hawkins and Associates. She’s been there through all of it.

Turn the page for an exciting preview of John Gilstrap’s next exciting thriller starring Jonathan Grave

HIGH TREASON

Coming from Pinnacle in 2013

I
n all his seventeen years with the United States Secret Service, Special Agent Jason Knapp had never felt this out of place, this exposed. The January chill combined with his jumpy nerves to create a sense of dread that rendered every noise too loud, every odor too intense.

Rendered the night far too dark.

With his SIG Sauer P229 on his hip, and an MP5 submachine gun slung under his arm—not to mention his five teammates on Cowgirl’s protection detail—he couldn’t imagine a scenario that might get away from them, but sometimes you get that niggling voice in the back of your head that tells you that things aren’t right. Years of experience had taught Knapp to listen to that voice when it spoke.

Oh, that Mrs. Darmond would learn to listen to her protection detail. Oh, that she would listen to
anyone
.

While he himself rarely visited the White House residence, stories abounded among his colleagues that Cowgirl and Champion fought like banshees once the doors were closed. She never seemed to get the fact that image mattered to presidents, and that first ladies had a responsibility to show a certain decorum.

Clearly, she didn’t care.

These late-night party jaunts were becoming more and more routine, and Knapp was getting sick of them. He understood that she rejected the traditional role of first lady, and he got that despite her renown she wanted to have some semblance of a normal life, but the steadily increasing risks she took were flat-out irresponsible.

Tonight was the worst of the lot.

It was one thing to dash out to a bar on the spur of the moment with a reduced protection detail—first spouses and first children had done that for decades—but to insist on a place like the Wild Times bar in Southeast D.C. was a step too far. It was five steps too far.

Great disguise notwithstanding, Cowgirl was a white lady in a very dark part of town. And it was nearly one in the morning.

Knapp stood outside the main entrance to the club, shifting from foot to foot to ward away the cold. Charlie Robinson flanked the other side of the door, and together they looked like the plainclothes version of the toy soldiers that welcomed children to the FAO Schwartz toy store in Manhattan. He felt at least that conspicuous.

Twenty feet away, Cowgirl’s chariot, an armored Suburban, idled in the handicapped space at the curb, its tailpipe adding a cloud of condensation to the night. Inside, Gene Tomkin sat behind the wheel, no doubt reveling in the warmth of the cab. Bill Lansing enjoyed similar bragging rights in the follow car that idled in the alley behind the bar.

Typical of OTR movements—off the record—the detail had chosen silver Suburbans instead of the black ones that were so ubiquitous to official Washington, specifically to call less attention to themselves. They’d driven here just like any other traffic, obeying stoplights and using turn signals the whole way. On paper that meant that you remained unnoticed.

But a Suburban was a Suburban, and if you looked hard enough you could see the emergency lights behind the windows and the grille. Throw in the well-dressed white guys standing like toy soldiers, and they might as well have been holding flashing signs.

In these days of Twitter and Facebook, when rumors traveled at the speed of light, all it would take for this calm night to turn to shit would be for somebody to connect some very obvious dots. While the good citizens of the District of Columbia had more or less unanimously cast their votes to sweep Champion into office, they’d since turned against him. It didn’t stretch Knapp’s imagination even a little to envision a spontaneous protest.

Then again, Cowgirl was such a media magnet, he could just as easily envision a spontaneous TMZ feeding frenzy. Neither option was more attractive than the other in this neighborhood.

The Wild Times was doing a hell of a business. The main act on the stage was a rapper of considerable local fame—or maybe he was a hip-hopper (how do you tell the difference?)—and he was drawing hundreds of twentysomething kids. Within the last twenty minutes, the pace of arrivals had picked up—and almost nobody was leaving.

From a tactical perspective, the two agents inside with Cowgirl—Peter Campbell and Dusty Binks, the detail supervisor—must be enduring the tortures of the damned. In an alternate world where the first lady might have given a shit, no one would have been allowed to touch the protectee, but in a nightclub situation, where fans paid good money to press closer to the stage, preventing personal contact became nearly impossible.

For the most part, the arriving revelers projected a pretty benign aura. It was the nature of young men to swagger in the presence of their girlfriends, and with that came a certain tough-guy gait, but over the years Knapp had learned to trust his ability to read the real thing from the imitation. Over the course of the past hour, his warning bells hadn’t rung even once.

Until right now.

A clutch of four guys approached from the north, and everything about them screamed malevolence. It wasn’t just the gangsta gait and the gangsta clothes. In the case of the leader in particular, it was the eyes. Knapp could see the glare from twenty feet away. This guy wanted people to be afraid of him.

“Do you see this?” he asked Robinson without moving his eyes from the threat.

Robinson took up a position on Knapp’s right. “Handle it carefully,” he warned. More than a few careers had been wrecked by YouTube videos of white cops challenging black citizens.

As the kids closed to within a dozen feet, Knapp stepped forward. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “You know, it’s pretty crowded inside.”

“The fuck outta my way,” the leader said. He started to push past, but Knapp body blocked him. No hands, no violence. He just physically blocked their path.

“Look at the vehicle,” Knapp said, pointing to the Suburban. “Take a real close look.”