Patriots Betrayed (8 page)

One test involved walking a narrow beam between two buildings one hundred feet above the ground. Only two other children would attempt it, and one of them fell to his death just before it was his turn. The one girl who had the nerve to try turned back after only two steps. The government suits watched closely as he stood at the edge of the roof, and he knew they were wondering if he had the balls after seeing his fellow classmate die. No one would make a coward of him. There was no hesitation as he stepped off into empty space and walked the three-inch wide beam as casually as if he were on solid ground. When he stepped onto the other roof and turned, the suits were nodding and muttering something to each other. It was then he knew they had chosen him, and only him out of eighty children. But for what? The next thing he knew, he was saying good-bye to his cruel parents and the crueler world of a peasant. The years that followed entailed grueling training that turned him into an efficient killer and one of the best espionage agents Russia had ever produced.

Janowski paused from his reminiscing to savor the taste of American whiskey, appreciating the burn. After another drag of smoke, he turned and retired to the custom-made brown leather chair he always sat in and no one else, bringing the bottle with him. Such luxuries were part of being one of the most powerful and wealthy men in Russia. His empire spanned the globe. Shipping, export and import of both legal and illegal products, such as weapons of war out of Russia and drugs into Russia. One of his most lucrative export items was girls for the sex slave trade. Many of the women and teen girls went to parts of Europe and the U.S., but some wound up in obscure, far-flung reaches where blue-eyed blonds were sold to oil-rich sheikhs at a premium. With connections at the highest levels of the KGB’s successors, the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), his background, connections, power, and ruthlessness had ensured his good fortune once the wall came down. Everyone (except the younger upstarts) running the country was ex-KGB, so the coveted opportunities naturally had landed in the laps of the powerful in government.

He punched a button on a remote with a thick finger on a fat hand, and a flat screen television lit up. After hesitating, his finger seemed to hit start on its own volition. An image of the street just outside the walls of his compound filled the screen. The color footage was clear. There was no sound. At the far edge of the field of vision, he saw motion, a man falling backwards into view, thirty yards from the camera, which was mounted twelve feet off the ground. The man was one of his security guards, ex-Spetsnaz and not a man to be snuck up on. Yet on that night someone had gotten close enough to cut his throat as he stood watch over Janowski’s home.

A spray of blood was visible in the glow of the street light when the guard’s jugular was sliced, but he wasn’t interested in the guard or his fate. His eyes grew intense as he waited for the delicious second the image he knew would appear for a disappointingly brief time.
There.
As he had seen so many times before. A man, in black from head to toe, moving with the confidence of a high-speed operator – U.S. Special Forces. Though he learned later the assassin was not Special Forces, but CIA. One moment, the area was empty, the next a streak of movement as the figure threw a hook over the wall and climbed up a rope so fast he was over the lip and gone in one fluid motion. A second later, the rope snaked up and over the wall. Even he had not been that agile back in his prime, when he was young and thin.

Then the final scene from a different camera. The scene that Janowski both savored and dreaded. He had watched it at least a hundred times.

The view of a hallway inside his home. A man in black again. He opened a bedroom door and entered. His twenty-seven-year-old son was sleeping inside, staying with his parents that week on vacation from his work at the SVR, (Russia’s External Intelligence Service) where he spent much of his time collecting valuable information for his father to use in his business. Seconds later, the bedroom door opened again, and the black-clad figure stepped out, a streak of blood across its torso, the head masked in a balaclava. The figure moved down the hall closer to the camera, a pistol gripped in his right hand. And then the man looked up, as if he knew the camera was there. Janowski’s blood chilled. Every time he saw those eyes, he felt death stalking him. He froze the image and forced himself to stare back until his blood warmed, then began to boil from the special hate he reserved for the man who killed his son.

He understood fully that there was no profit in hate, and profit had always been his main motivator — that is, after he had clawed his way up from the bottom and survival was no longer on his mind twenty-four-seven. And yet he couldn’t stop himself from hating. He had even wasted much money discovering the name and background of this killing machine from America, then wasted more money searching for him. By then the assassin had left the CIA and disappeared. Even the U.S. Government was looking for him without success. Then a break. Information fell into his hands when an informant told him the CIA had located his son’s killer and had his new alias and address. No further action had taken place, as higher-ups had not decided whether this Raylan Maddox, AKA, David Sutton, was really a security risk after all. He had been gone more than a year, yet there was zero evidence he had talked to anyone about what he knew of CIA activities during his work there. Perhaps it was safer to let this sleeping lion alone.

He reminded himself that this American had come to kill him on that night, creeping into his bedroom right rafter killing his son, finding his wife asleep and leaving her bound and gagged. That was why he had to hunt this American bastard down. He lived that night only because he had been called away on business: the execution of a rival thug who had been digging into Janowski’s profits a little too much. You don’t leave someone as dangerous as that American alive, he told himself. Bullshit. He wanted this Raylan Maddox dead for murdering his only child. There was no need for excuses. He didn’t need an excuse to kill an enemy of his business, his family, and his country.

Janowski swallowed another drink in three gulps. He had been so close, but this American bastard had escaped, taking out nearly every man in America he had in his employ, and several CIA operatives in the process. The Director of the CIA was in his pocket, and the operatives were following the Director’s orders, not knowing they were actually working for an international crime boss. But this Maddox was crazy. All Americans are crazy, he told himself. Killing machines, the bastards are. He had made many phone calls to the States and his people there had managed to build another team of thugs to hunt Raylan Maddox down. Only Maddox had managed to kill many of them, too. Damn him! He was costing Janowski a fortune and still lived. When would this be over? Until it was, he couldn’t sleep well or have any peace of mind. At least now, with the cooperation of a few U.S. senators, and the help of certain people in the CIA, including the Director, his men were closing in on Maddox. It was just a matter of time, he told himself, not really believing it.

Later, he would stagger to his empty bedroom where his wife should have been. She had died of a heart attack the month before, still grieving over the murder of their son. Fortunately, he had an eighteen-year-old slave waiting that he planned to keep for a while before shipping her off to the highest bidder. Too bad he was too old to really enjoy her. Viagra helped, but a man his age just couldn’t turn back time and become twenty again; the blood loses its vigor, and there was no cure for that.

His thoughts turned back to Raylan Maddox as he staggered down the hall to his bedroom, feeling the excess poundage on his body more than usual in his inebriated state, and he reminded himself not to vent his rage on the girl like he did last week. Her face was still bruised, and that wasn’t very sexy. He might even accidently knock out a tooth or two, reducing her value when the time came to sell her.

Chapter 5

The east glowed with a blue haze as Raylan pulled the pilfered blue Cadillac into the parking lot of a shopping mall. They had to lose the Crown Vic. It had obviously been burned someway, perhaps satellite surveillance or traffic cameras. It may have been a security camera at the restaurant where Carla broke into the deputy’s car to use his computer. Maybe a drone got the temporary tag number off the car when they were leaving the Wally World the day she called her ex-handler. Who could say? Certainly, the company was utilizing every trick they had. To be safe, they would have to assume their aliases had been burned and therefore their credit cards flagged. They would use cash from then on, until they started using one of their other aliases.

He hated to wake Carla, who sat sleeping on the passenger side, but there was work to do. He nudged her shoulder. “We’re not far from McLean, Virginia.”

She opened her eyes, right hand holding the H&K MP5 that she hid under a newspaper in her lap. “My turn to drive again?”

“No,” Raylan said. “But I think it’s time to load our little autobiographies onto the flash drives I bought, so we can send them to major newspapers.”

She rubbed sleep from her eyes and looked at him, examining his face. “Know what I’m thinking of?”

He smiled. “I better not guess. I have a dirty mind, especially when a woman looks at me like that.”

“Well, in that case you’re probably not far off.” She reached over the back of the seat to grab the laptop. “I was thinking of screwing some people royally.”

“Hmm,” Raylan said. “I’m not enough for you?”

She smiled and opened the laptop. “It’s crooked politicians I’m thinking of screwing. Every crooked politician in Washington.” She smiled mischievously. “I’ve added more names to the list that have used the CIA as their personal Killers-For-Hire.”

“I admire your ambition, but that’s a bit much for one woman.”

She laughed. “We’re going to need more flash drives.”

“We’ll also need those padded shipping envelops. I’ll wait until you’ve used what flash drives we have, so I can keep an eye out for trouble while your mind’s on the computer.”

Suddenly somber, she said, “One of the names is President Preston Riley.”

He blinked. “What, did the company have you take someone out on his behest?” He wasn’t serious and expected her to say no.

She nodded, tears streamed down her face. “I was told she was a terrorist purposely infected with a deadly plague and she was going to carry it into the U.S. The plan was to kill her while she was still in Italy. I found out later she had been lured to Italy by the president. She wasn’t on any terrorist mission, but went there to have a rendezvous with him and plan how he was going to leave his wife and announce to the press that he was in love with her and going to marry her. God was she naïve. But she wasn’t as bad as me, believing anything I was told. After all, it was the CIA, the U.S. Government. They would never have me kill an innocent American.”

Carla’s face revealed shame and hurt. “She was two months pregnant with the president’s baby and had refused to quietly abort it.” Carla turned away. “She was twenty years old. Just an innocent girl who had been used by a powerful man that didn’t want anyone to know he had cheated on his wife.” She smeared her face. “I doubt it would have cost him a second term, the way things are nowadays. Most voters don’t care about a politician’s love life. When I joined up, I thought I was going to protect Americans, not murder them for sleeping with a politician.”

He held her. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I was ashamed. Why do you think I quit before you did? When I learned I had murdered an innocent woman just to save a president’s career and reputation, I could no longer dance to their tune. It’s a shock to your belief system to learn the U.S. Government is the biggest, most powerful, and deadliest street gang in the world. Killing enemies of our country out of self-defense is a sickening job that I reluctantly signed on to do, but murder for political favors that have nothing to do with protecting over three hundred million Americans is inexcusable. I refuse to be a part of that.” She looked down in shame. “I wasn’t sure how you would react. It took me this long to get the nerve to tell you.” She summoned the courage to look at him for a second and then diverted her eyes. “You’re a Boy Scout with your own set of morals that you don’t ever violate. Like never harming innocents.” She raised an eyebrow and gave him a wintry smile. “Of course you don’t think twice about killing assholes that violate your rules. Well, I violated your rules.”

Raylan gently held her chin up and looked her in the eyes. “What? You thought I would blame you for being used? They use people. That’s what they do. The fact you feel so bad about it proves you would never have killed her if you had known the truth. They use people like tools and fools, Carla, pulling our strings, using our desire to serve the American people to get what they want. We both quit for the same reasons.”

She kissed his cheek. “Going after the boss doesn’t scare you?”

“All they can do is kill us.” He held her face in both hands. “If they want to see the show, they first have to buy the ticket. I plan to make that ticket as costly as possible. Hanging their dirty laundry out for the public to gawk at is part of it.”

~~~

It was mid morning when Raylan stepped out of the car and disappeared into the store. He came back with a couple subs and drinks, as well as two dozen more flash drives, all they had on display. He ate while she worked. “After we’re through here, we’ll need another car. This one will probably be burned by security cameras. Driving a stolen car around is asking for trouble, anyway. We’re bound to be pulled over by a cop sooner or later.”

She inserted another flash drive into the computer. “Then they’ll know we’re in town when the police find the ditched car.”

“They’ll know in a few days when our packages are delivered to newspapers and politicians.”