Fade (2005) (12 page)

"The mysterious Strand .. ."

She shrugged. "That's who he wanted information on."

"We've run the name through every database in the country and come u p with nothing. No one in the drug trade, no one involved in terrorism , no one he was involved with in the military .. ."

"Maybe it's someone the DEA doesn't know about. Maybe it's an alias.

Where did you get the tip? Are you talking to your informant?"

Ken just frowned and looked away.

"I'm serious," she said, leaning across the desk and trying to get hi m to look at her. "When you start putting all this together, it gets a hell of a lot more complicated than some paranoid ex-soldier blowing a "

"Oh, so you've "

"I hate being interrupted, Ken!"

He actually stopped talking, more out of surprise than anything else.

"First, I don't think he had anything to do with killing the Ramire z brothers."

"So we're going to just take his word for that?" Ken managed to ge t in.

"After wiping out a bunch of cops, why would he bother to lie abou t killing a couple of drug dealers?" She paused for a moment to take a breath. "Second, I believe that al Fayed was expecting someone name d Strand to attack him. If he knew that we were cops from the beginning , why let me go?"

"Because you're going to help him keep ahead of our investigation?"

She leaned back in her chair. "Come on, Ken .. . Are we going to tal k seriously or not? Where did we get our information on this guy? Som e kind of tip, right? From who?"

He ignored the question as he had every other time she'd posed it.

Clearly it was something that either he didn't know or didn't want t o tell her.

"That's where I'd be looking, if I was you," she continued. "What i f this informant knew al Fayed was ready for him and decided to call u s and let us do his dirty work for him?"

"Shut the hell up!" Captain Pickering shouted, finally un stickin g himself from the wall. "Just shut your mouth. You completely fuck u p this operation and get your entire team killed and now what? It's m y fault? Based on a bunch of half-assed theories, you've got the forc e being manipulated into doing the cartel's wet work? All I asked you t o do was go in and arrest this son of a bitch so we could talk to him.

But you couldn't handle it. You can sit there and try to deflect th e blame all you want but it just looks pathetic."

"Pathetic?" she shouted back. "Who told you that it wasn't exactly a stroke of genius to go in there with guns blazing and no intelligence?

Who told you that we should just pick him up on a traffic violation?

And who told you that it seemed a little strange that some big sho t cartel enforcer was living in a falling-down house building furniture?

Maybe you ought to focus a little less on making sure none of thi s sticks to you and a little more on trying to find this guy! Becaus e I'll tell you that standing around here waiting for me to remember tha t he gave me his address and phone number isn't going to get u s anywhere."

Pickering just stood there for a moment and then motioned for Ken t o follow him outside. When the door closed, Karen slammed a fist down o n the table and jumped up from her chair. She walked over to the window , curling her fingers through the chicken wire and leaning her forehea d on the sill.

Stupid. Why the hell couldn't she learn to keep her goddamn mout h shut? What was it al Fayed had said to her? That her temper would ge t her in trouble someday? That psycho was just full of astut e observations.

Nothing good was going to come of any of this. Her men were dead an d there was nothing that could be done about that. The best Pickerin g could hope for was to assign blame and exact revenge. On the firs t count, they had a pretty strong hand. Pickering would stay away fro m the question of who had provided the tip and why, concentrating instea d on the indisputable fact that al Fayed had killed a bunch of cops.

Then he'd imply that he'd been under political pressure to put her i n charge of the SWAT team and that she had always been a disaster waitin g to happen. The fact that she'd done everything by the book would b e carefully obscured. No one wanted to hear it anyway. They just wante d someone to blame.

Hell, maybe they were right. The book notwithstanding, it had been he r plan, her team. She could have done more than make a few weak protest s and then allow herself to be bullied into charging in like an idiot.

She could have demanded more intelligence or insisted on waiting unti l he was isolated and unarmed. But she hadn't.

Even worse was the manhunt that was gearing up. There was little doub t that given enough time, they would turn up al Fayed the police had a way of raising the level of their game when it came to dealing wit h people who killed their own. And that meant another showdown. Th e problem was that she wasn't sure if they'd do any better in roun d Chapter Two.

Chapter
Fourteen.

The dress shirt Matt Egan was carefully folding into his suitcase wa s purely for the benefit of his wife in case she walked in. The onl y realistic use for it he could think of was making his body presentabl e at the funeral home. Now that was cheerful, wasn't it?

He carried the half-full suitcase into the bathroom and swept hi s things into it, turning away before he could catch his reflection i n the mirror. No point in reminding himself of his slightly shaggy hai r or the wire-rimmed glasses or the inevitable re proportioning of hi s thirty-eight-year-old body into something a little narrower at th e shoulder and wider at the waist. Not that he was what most peopl e would call soft. He ran five miles at a reasonable clip three days a week and spent an hour in the weight room on the other four days.

Sometimes, though, it seemed like a losing battle. He latched the to p of his suitcase and walked down the hall toward his den, remindin g himself that his slow physical decline wasn't all that relevant. Seve n years ago, Fade had singlehandedly taken out him and his entire team i n a training exercise in the North Carolina back country.

Elise was nowhere to be seen as he padded through the kitchen; probabl y entangled in the ever-lengthening process of putting Kali to bed. H
e stopped in the hallway, considering going to help, but for some reaso n he suddenly felt like an outsider like he didn't belong with the m anymore. It was more than just the lies, it was the fact that h e shouldn't have allowed himself to be put in this situation. It wasn'
t his right anymore.

Egan closed the door behind him and sat at his desk, dropping th e suitcase on top. It took almost a minute of flipping through hi s overstuffed key ring in the semidarkness to find the one that fit t o his lower right drawer. If Elise had ever noticed the drawer bein g locked and she almost certainly had she'd never mentioned it. I t seemed likely that she didn't want to know what was inside.

The pistol that he extracted seemed kind of pathetic compared to th e arsenal he imagined Fade had amassed. It was more a memento than a weapon, really. In fact, it was the only reminder of his militar y career that hadn't made its way to the attic. His den had evolved int o more of a shrine to his wife's accomplishments than his own: frame d CDs, concert posters, magazine articles, reviews. She'd protested, o f course, but the truth was he didn't really want to dwell on his past.

While it was true that the army had done a lot for him, he couldn'
t exactly say he had fond memories of it.

The Egans could only be described as coming from solid poor white tras h stock. The family tradition was to barely graduate from high school , enlist in the Marines, spend a few years getting harassed by th e military police, then get a job as a mechanic or factory worker.

Bowling every Wednesday night, a drunken brawl every other Saturday.

Once a month, slap the wife around.

And for a long time he managed to convince himself that he would follo w that same path. He'd thrown classes on purpose, only to sneak off an d bury himself in books when his father thought he was practicing sports.

Despite his best effort to the contrary, he'd actually graduated hig h school with a B average. Of course, no one not even he himself sa w that achievement as anything other than a mildly amusing fluke and i t had certainly never occurred to him that there were directions in lif e that had never been taken by his relatives before him.

Despite his admitted lack of imagination, he'd shown a small glimmer o f independent thought when, much to the disappointment of his father , he'd joined the Army instead of the Marines after graduation. He'
d really wanted to go for the even more cushy Air Force, but had figure d the ensuing family scandal would be too much to bear.

After showing up for basic training, it had taken only about thirt y seconds for him to begin to loathe the restrictions and relentles s structure of military life. And after a few months of it, he'd bee n almost ready to shoot himself. Then, one day, he'd been drowning hi s sorrows at a local bar and gotten to talking to a Green Beret wh o painted a fairly attractive picture of the Special Forces intelligenc e gathering, the encouragement of intellectual pursuits, and most of all , the fact that they were left alone as much as an enlisted man coul d hope.

Egan made it through the rigorous training program by sheer force o f will. After that, it had turned out to be a pretty good gig all aroun d his success had closed the rift between him and his father to th e degree it could be closed, and the learning opportunities wer e incredible. While he was never going to be the strongest or fastest o n the team, he'd shown a real aptitude for foreign cultures, languages , and analysis.

Everything was going along just fine when the Army suddenly decided t o ask him to actually do something for his paycheck. They'd sent him t o Jordan and he'd been forced to kill a man. Six, actually. And tha t marked the end of his love affair with the Special Forces. As soon a s he landed back in the States, he'd typed up a resignation letter. Hi s commanding officer promptly tore it up and told him to come back in tw o days. When he'd returned, exactly forty-eight hours later, there was a guy from West Point waiting for him. Suddenly, he was in college.

Not having much of a work ethic when it came to things he wasn'
t interested in, he hadn't much cared for the university atmosphere. He'
d quickly developed a bad habit of looking at issues from too many angle s and then arguing vehemently with his professors something that hadn'
t exactly endeared him to the faculty. The whole idea of having someon e stand at the head of a class and tell him what to think just never sa t well with him.

The bottom line was that he had a problem with authority figures an d that wasn't a great trait in a soldier. So he was floored whe n Military Intelligence had come sniffing around at the recommendation o f a number of his instructors.

Suddenly, he was a spook. And a pretty good one. Still, though, hi s personal life had remained kind of a mess. His wife probably woul d have called it an identity crisis. A little touchy-feely, but more o r less accurate.

There had been so much cultural baggage to unload before he could se e the possibilities that his West Point friends took for granted.

It had all come together when he'd finally gone over to the mor e liberal CIA and then met Elise. It wasn't until then that he figure d out that he was being driven slowly crazy by a life of trying to stuf f his square peg into other people's round hole.

And now here he was, a thirty-eight-year-old man finally at peace wit h himself. He had everything he'd grown up not even knowing that h e wanted. And now he was going to lose it all.

Chapter
Fifteen.

The car was a little beat up and pulled hard to the left, but in s o many other ways it was perfect. How far wrong could you go with a sky-blue '65 Cadillac Deville convertible? It was spacious, had snapp y acceleration, and offered almost infinite opportunities to let the win d blow through his newly sheared hair. Fade pulled the beer from a drin k holder hanging on the door and checked the speedometer to make sure h e was hovering just below the speed limit as he aimed the car north o n 1-95.

For a reason that he couldn't seem to put his finger on, he was feelin g a bit down. The sky was cloudless, the trunk of his sweet new ride wa s full of cash, guns, and liquor, and his problems were so insurmountabl e that there was no point in even worrying about them. So what was th e rub? A little more consideration and the answer came to him: Mat t Egan.

Even after everything that had happened, there was no way he coul d completely turn his back on their history. Egan had saved his ass o n more than one occasion not by doing anything as showy as dragging hi s injured body through a minefield, but his efforts were just as real.

Matt always put the safety of his men at the top of the list and hi s intelligence almost never failed to be impeccable. When things go t hairy, there was nothing like hearing his voice come over the radio.

You knew if you did exactly what he said, you were going to make it.

And then there was Mary Jane.

Fade had been working with Egan for about a year when word got aroun d that his father was dying. The other rumor was that he wasn't going t o see him because of some bad blood. By then, Fade and he had gotte n pretty close and it seemed obvious that this was going to be a decisio n that his friend would regret. So, one morning Fade had stacked th e back seat of his piece of shit Corvette with four cases of beer, drive n to Matt Egan's house, and under serious protest taken him t o Kentucky.