One Last Scent of Jasmine (Boone's File Book 3) (22 page)

Without comment, Yameen complied, knowing well the consequences should he not. Afterward, their will would be imposed on him regardless of his struggle. They grabbed his arms, and he marched with them. The five headed toward the perimeter of the yard, nearest to where the firefighting vehicles were now parked. Their crews were in motion deploying lengths of hose toward the buildings.

Another prisoner stepped out of the smoke, appearing disheveled and confused. He was pushed forward by two more men, dressed as guards.

His eyes are shining … he is drugged!
Al-Khobar noticed—as a black bag was being pulled over his own head—the other man to be also of Middle Eastern descent, shaved bald as well, and nearly of an identical height and weight as himself.
What is—?

“Prisoner! Halt!” A voice called loudly. There followed the racking sound of a shotgun being loaded, and shortly afterward, the sound of a weapon discharging.

What are they doing?
Even through the silk bag, al-Khobar found it difficult to breathe. He was being half carried now, moving fast. Soon, he felt himself thrown, and he landed face down on a rough surface of carpeting. An engine started immediately, and Yameen realized he was now in a vehicle under way, and the men in the guard uniforms had climbed inside with him.

“What is happening?” the Saudi demanded.

“
Silence!
Keep your head down. Most of all, keep quiet,” a voice advised in German.
But accented with French.

The vehicle took two turns and accelerated onto what sounded to Yameen like a paved roadway. He then heard the sounds of gas masks being shed.

“Gentlemen, you appeared to have earned your pay with perhaps a bonus. Congratulations.”

“Craziness. It is all insanity,” another voice grumbled.

“Textbook insanity,
mon ami
,” the first voice corrected. “Just as we planned.”

Chapter 13 - Family Business

InterLynk Home Offices

Geneva, Switzerland

Monday morning

It was 0900 hours in McAllen’s office, and as usual, his executive officer, Bernard Schuster, had appeared in time for the morning briefing. Less routine was the attendance of Daniel Sean Ritter, the General knew. Curiosity reflected in the Colonel’s eyes, contrasting with Bernie’s expectant expression.
Yeah, men … something’s up.
“Morning, Colonel,” InterLynk’s President greeted the only man in the room not nursing a cup of caffeinated cheer.

“General,” Ritter responded, his hand on the open door.

McAllen raised a finger. “Not yet, son. Expecting one more. Not to worry, I asked her to come in a little late this morning.” The sound of a confident stride out in the reception area seemed to validate his announcement.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Boone said from behind the tall, retired Air Force officer. Dressed to the nines in white silk and heels, and sporting her maximum complement of gold and jade, she also wore the identification hanger of an InterLynk employee, configured as part of the executive team. Her smile seemed to result from genuine satisfaction as much as from the looks on the faces of her new colleagues.

“Boone,” Ritter replied easily, having been trained long ago to accommodate the unexpected.

Less able to contain his surprise, Schuster appeared to be momentarily at a loss. “
Boone?
Well … hello again.”

Ritter let her inside. Unslinging her handbag and tossing it and a coat on the nearby sectional, she grabbed a seat at her father’s left side, leaving Bernie his usual place at the General’s right.

Nice move, kid,
her father thought. “Go ahead and get the door, Colonel,” McAllen advised. “We’re all here.”

Ritter closed them in, and the first meeting of InterLynk’s new executive team could begin. McAllen cleared his throat.

“Becky here,” the General stated, “has decided to join the family business. Sean, I hope you’ll get her settled into place as your Assistant Director. Load her up with enough work to do. She’s little, but she’s tough.”

“I’ve known it since before Russia, sir,” the man acknowledged. “Boone, let me welcome you aboard.”

“Sean, thank you. What my father said goes for me, too. I’m here to learn,” she encouraged her new boss.

“Sudden change of direction on the old career path?” Schuster inquired.

“Sudden, certainly. Dad can explain.”

Raising his iPad, McAllen’s eyebrow followed suit. “Nice segue into the first item on our agenda, Becky. It looks like the United States government is offering us all a chance to become affiliated bureaucrats.”

“Hot dog,” Schuster muttered into his coffee.

Ritter’s face remained impassive. True to form, he merely waited for an explanation.

Continuing, McAllen referenced his tablet. “A new Presidential Determination has been born, gentlemen. All intelligence operations contributing to the data sets of the United States will become wholly incorporated entities under the oversight of the United States Intelligence Community … sez them.” His Apple device dropped a few degrees. “I ain’t terribly worried. I got the legal team on it already, and since Becky is present I ain’t gonna call it what I would usually. Needless to say, I’m not interested in the offer, and we’ll explain that to the Feds in any terms we need to. This brings us, I reckon, to the story of how we happened to acquire our latest junior executive.”

“Related?” Schuster guessed.

Boone nodded. “ODNI tasked me with accomplishing your transition. As you can imagine, my Director’s announcing the assignment didn’t go well.”

“And here we are, with a dandy heads-up as to what’s on the White House Christmas wish list this year. Bad little girls and boys … every damned one of ‘em.” McAllen let his electronic organizer rest on the conference table.

“It sounds like just another day on the cutting edge of private intelligence,” Schuster quipped. Even Ritter smirked at the idea, albeit only slightly.

McAllen nodded. “We’ll take it one day at a time, gentlemen … and
Boone
.”

“
Thank you,
Dad,” his daughter said with a smile in acknowledging his effort.

“Item two. Bernie?” McAllen gave the meeting over to the usual agenda.

Picking up his own tablet, Schuster opened his list. “News of a former associate. There was a fire and prison riot in Thonex over the weekend. Looks like not all the population made it through the excitement.”

“Anyone we know?” Ritter asked with expectation.

A grim look took over Schuster’s face. “Yameen was taken off the count. The report makes it sound like he made a break for it in the confusion, and ran into a guard with a 12-gauge riot gun.”

“Damn,” Ritter intoned, otherwise unreadable.

“The stories mention any other inmates hurt?” McAllen asked his XO.

“Not a one,” Schuster confirmed.

“Then I don’t want to just read about the slippery little Arab son of a bitch being dead. We better go see for ourselves. Sean—are you up to making a definitive identification?” The tone of McAllen’s question prompted its answer.

“Kind of curious myself, sir.”

McAllen looked at his daughter. “You’re on Mister Ritter for your probationary period, Doctor. It’ll be a good chance to meet some of the Canton officials, in any case.” Her expression, he saw, was unwavering.
Dead bodies don’t faze her at all anymore, do they?

“Yes, sir,” was her composed reply.

The General sighed.
My little girl. Never would I have imagined what you’ve grown into, baby doll.
He glanced at Schuster. “Item three, then.” InterLynk, his from the beginning, was now truly a family business.

Boone, as assigned, accompanied Sean Ritter to the Geneva Canton’s morgue after clearing the visit through her professional acquaintance, Isabel Rousseau, the Director of the Swiss Federal Office of Police. Ritter’s French was nonexistent, and only marginally better was the Coroner’s English. Largely, she and the tall, pale man sporting a surgical gown had conversed thus far in French though he was making every effort to speak to their presumed level of comprehension.

This morgue had the same smell of death and chemical disinfectant as every other one she had visited. Decomposition, though refrigerated and sanitized, still dominated the atmosphere here. While respectful of the professionalism she had always encountered from morgue personnel, Boone could not comprehend what made a person aspire to work in the field.
But then again, the Coroner would probably not understand why a person would choose to work in a field which regularly arranges for new arrivals to be delivered to facilities just like this one.
At least in this instance, she had not been the one to pull the trigger.

“This … Mister al-Khobar. I warn … trauma …
significant,
” the Coroner cautioned in English as they arrived at the numbered compartment.

“Understood,
monsieur,
” Boone answered. Ritter, she thought, looked more curious than apprehensive.

The official unlatched the door and slid out the drawer to the cooler, some vapor escaping into the dry winter’s air of Geneva. He pulled back the treated sheet, folding it down to hip level to expose the corpse.

Yeah, he was right.
Boone inferred it to be a load of buckshot which had taken the Arab in the face, at a range close enough to open up quite a wound across the front of the cranium. There was no blood, the corpse having been hosed down thoroughly in postmortem. The remains of the face, only marginally recognizable, had been pushed back together at some point to allow the decedent a modicum of presentability. Having earned her doctorate in physiology, Boone found herself awash in old memories.
Shotgun … at close range and dead center. And after all that, he still looks better than the cadavers I worked on in my anatomy classes.

Ritter, motioning first to obtain the Coroner’s permission, received a pair of blue nitrile gloves as a response. Her colleague donned the hand protection before lifting the arm of the corpse, then the sheet covering the man’s lower body—
only far enough to view the man’s leg, and not his junk,
Boone noticed. The Coroner did not seem to object.

“Boone, can you ask the man how the deceased was identified?” Ritter inquired.

She translated the request and likewise the answer. “He says it was the prison officials who provided the identification, through a head count, as well as the identifying numbering on his prison uniform.”

Stripping off the protective gloves, Ritter nodded. “Please thank the man in the most polite terms. I believe we are finished here.”

She did so. The official nodded, covering the corpse once more before sliding the drawer back into place and sealing the refrigerator-like access door. She watched Ritter deposit his gloves in a dedicated biohazard bin and wait for the morgue official to escort them back to the public area. Her supervisor's face betrayed nothing of what he was thinking, and she was not about to ask.
Not here, anyway.

They soon were back in Ritter’s Lexus SUV. The man was putting the vehicle into gear, and she was habitually fastening her seat belt, by the time Boone felt secure enough to breach the subject. “Well? Any conclusions?” she asked.

“It wasn’t him,” Ritter stated.

“You’re certain,” Boone observed.

“I’m sure. I watched him get shot in two different places where the corpse on display showed no scarring. Whoever it was, it sure as hell wasn’t Yameen.” Ritter steered them on a bearing back toward her father’s home offices.

He’s right. There should have been a scar from the Earwig atop his left shoulder. We apparently should have capped his ass when we had the chance,
her old mind thought
.
The better angel of her nature, however, defended the choice she—as well as the remainder of the InterLynk executive team—had made that night.
One of the most significant of my life.
Shame, Boone. There are more men in your history than just Yameen al-Khobar whom you should have allowed to live.
“And yet, the man is no longer in prison,” she mused, half to herself.

“Also true,” Ritter agreed, snapping her back to the present. “It really makes a person pay more attention to the rearview mirror, somehow, doesn’t it?” the Director of Field Operations confessed.

As if to confirm his intuition, Boone found herself concurrently listening and using the outside rearview.
Yes, doesn’t it, though?

Once back at InterLynk, Boone noticed Ritter took not even the opportunity to shed his topcoat before proceeding to the company’s Presidential office. McAllen was there, working, and looked up in anticipation of his Director’s report.

“Well, Colonel? Did they off the little son of a bitch or didn’t they?” the man asked.

Ritter motioned to Boone, who closed the door behind them. Her tall, fit colleague waited until it was secure to answer. He turned back toward her father. “They killed someone, sir. I can say with one hundred percent certainty, however, it was no one I had ever seen before.”

“Well, that’s good enough for me,” McAllen growled. His finger jabbed at the desk phone by his right hand.

“Yes, sir,” Bernie's voice answered.

“Bern, you want to come over here?”

“Right away, General.”

Schuster took less than thirty seconds to appear, obviously noticing from their outerwear Boone and Ritter had only just returned from their field trip to cold storage. “So?”

“We’re not mourning Yameen yet,” Ritter said matter-of-factly. “No old bullet wounds where they should have been. We can assume he’s been sprung … by whom and for what purpose ought to be our next questions.”

“And we better keep ‘em to ourselves,” McAllen added. “Considering the state-sponsored animus we seem to be facing, there ain’t any utility in tipping off the opposing force as to what we know and what we don’t.”

Boone, as well as the others on his team, waited for the General’s directions. Typically, it was not a long interval.