Silent Assassin (12 page)

C
HAPTER
22

 

T
hey had prepared for the operation as much as possible given the time constraints. They had each separately scoped the place, which was a small unpretentious family-owned Vietnamese restaurant called the Lucky Noodle. It wasn’t normally too busy, they found, but hardly ever empty either. It wasn’t the ideal spot, but it had no security cameras. There were also two ways in and out, the front and the back, and the street outside was clearly visible from the main dining room inside. The tac team, however, had it all covered. There was no way they’d lose him if he went into that restaurant.

Morgan arrived early in his GTO. Diesel had parked a truck overnight across the street from the place. They timed it so that he pulled out just as Morgan arrived, leaving an ample parking space behind. Morgan was going to hang back on this one, act the lookout and wheelman so they had somewhere to usher their target when they got him, and be ready to give chase if he had to. It was a long wait, during which he sipped on hot tea from a thermos and pretended to read a newspaper he had propped up on the steering wheel, but kept an eye on the street. It was just after 11:30, late enough that the restaurant was open but early enough to miss the lunchtime crowd. Finally, he saw Rogue walk by and then enter the restaurant through the front door. A few moments later, giving no indication that they were together, Bishop did the same.

Morgan tapped his fingers against the newspaper, using the rearview mirrors to keep an eye on the streets. “Bishop,” he said, after counting a few minutes, “is your team in position?”

“Affirmative,” he said. Morgan saw him, through the window of the restaurant, sitting at a table by the door, pretending to do the
New York Times
crossword. Rogue would be seated at a table near the rear exit of the restaurant, out of Morgan’s sight, making sure no one went out that way. Morgan could see Diesel at the street corner in workman’s overalls, drinking hot coffee and making a show of rubbing himself from the cold and looking impatiently at his watch. Spartan was behind Morgan a ways, leaning against the outer wall of a convenience store pretending to have a conversation on her cell phone.

“All right, Len,” Morgan said into his comm. “Get a move on.”

“Okay, okay. I’m coming.”

“And act
natural
. Don’t speak to me unless you’ve got a gun in your face, understand?”

Two minutes later, Len Stuart turned the corner and walked down the sidewalk, carrying his briefcase full of cash. He seemed even more nervous than the first time, ambling awkwardly and looking down. He entered the restaurant and took a seat by the window. A waitress came to bring him a menu, which Stuart took without thanking her.

It took another seven minutes until their quarry appeared. “There’s our guy,” said Morgan. He had rounded the corner behind Morgan, visible in the left-side mirror. He was much like the courier had described. Thin, not very tall, unmistakably Asian, and while he was still wearing a baseball cap, this one sporting I
LOVE
NY, the bandage was just visible on his forehead. “Ten seconds to visual contact.”

“Copy that,” said Bishop.

Morgan watched as the man approached the restaurant and peeked inside through the front windows. He examined suspiciously all the people on the street and the restaurant, including the members of the tac team, but must have either been satisfied by what he saw, or been desperate enough to risk it, because he went inside.

“Visual,” said Bishop in a whisper. “Waiting for the trade.” There were a few seconds of silence, then Bishop spoke again. “He’s getting up. Front exit.”

Diesel and Spartan began converging toward the restaurant to intercept him. They reached the door almost simultaneously, just as it opened. Their quarry, who walked out holding Stuart’s briefcase, seemed to notice what was happening almost immediately. He tried to back up into the restaurant, but bumped right into Bishop, who grabbed him by the arm. He seemed to reach into his pocket with his free hand, but Bishop took his wrist before he managed to grab whatever he was reaching for.

“There’s nowhere to go,” Morgan heard Bishop say over the comm. “We know you’re desperate. If you come with us and cooperate, we can protect you.”

There was a moment of hesitation, and then Morgan heard the man’s voice in his earpiece. It was hushed and filled with terror. “No one can protect me.”

“I guarantee you’re better off with us than alone,” said Bishop. Then he said, in a markedly less friendly tone, “Do you really need more enemies at this point?

“Who are you?” he asked.

“The good guys,” Bishop said. “The guys who are willing to offer you protection if you cooperate.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You
really
don’t want to refuse,” Spartan said, and the way she said it almost gave Morgan chills. She could be very convincing when she wanted to be.

There was a moment of hesitation, and the man, apparently weighing his options, said, “Okay. I’ll come.” His voice sounded small and defeated.

They began walking out of the restaurant together. However, at that moment, a silver Mercedes blocked Morgan’s view. It seemed to slow down, and for some reason that set off alarm bells in Morgan’s mind. Not fast enough.

Four shots sounded, and the Mercedes peeled out. As it sped away, Morgan saw the man they had come to collect on the ground, his face a bloody mess, legs twitching on the pavement. Rogue had staggered back, clutching his chest, but there was no blood on his shirt—the vest had caught it. He’d be fine. But the Asian man, the one they had come to take in, was dead, and with him died their last lead. Except—

Morgan turned his head just in time to see the Mercedes turn the corner.

They had one chance to catch the killer.

Morgan turned the key in the ignition, and the engine rumbled like the low growl of an angry lion. He stepped on the accelerator, maneuvering hastily out of his space, and then stepped on it. The GTO lunged, doing zero to sixty in just under five seconds.

C
HAPTER
23

 

M
organ wove through traffic as he followed the Mercedes SLK around the corner. He drifted on the turn, narrowly avoiding a car on his left, and then floored the accelerator.

The Mercedes had already reached the next corner, and Morgan saw it just as it disappeared, turning left. Not that he needed to see the car to know where it was going. The guy in the Mercedes could drive, and he wasn’t going to put those fancy skills to use in Manhattan traffic. There was only one direction he could be going where he could use his skills behind the wheel to get away. He was going toward the West Side Highway.

Morgan dodged traffic, trying to shave off precious seconds from his lag behind his quarry. Four city blocks went by in a blur. He turned screeching onto the West Side Highway, and saw the Mercedes speeding, about ten cars ahead. Morgan weaved through the intervening cars, horns blaring as he cut drivers off. But the Mercedes was doing the same, widening the gap between them. Morgan gripped the wheel and floored the accelerator, and the GTO’s engine roared.

As he drove furiously, dodging cars as they came at him in a deadly game of tag, Morgan couldn’t help but feel this heightened awareness, the rush of the chase. This was his inner predator taking over. It was Cobra asserting himself over Morgan. It was thrilling beyond anything else. The speed got his adrenaline pumping and made him hyper-aware of what has happening in front of him. This was driving. This is how this car was meant to be used.

“Cobra, come in,” said Bishop through the comm. “What’s your position?”

“I’m on his tail,” said Morgan. “West Side Highway. Can’t talk.”

He was closing in now, but keeping up while avoiding collisions was getting trickier by the second. The driver in the Mercedes was leaving a mess of cars in his wake, slowing down and veering unpredictably as he cut them off. Morgan almost crashed twice, and then was almost sent into the guardrail by an errant sedan.

Then, ahead, he saw that a heavy red SUV was slowing down warily after the Mercedes passed him, slowly closing the gap between it and a truck in the next lane. Morgan was going too fast to brake, and hitting the SUV or the truck at his speed wouldn’t be too different from hitting a brick wall head-on. There was only one way to go. He accelerated harder toward the narrowing gap. Scraping paint against the truck’s back fender, he made it through. But immediately, he saw a car that was braking hard, tires screeching, just up ahead. He cleared the truck with inches to spare. Immediately he was faced with a compact car that had spun out, and he banked hard to the left, nearly losing traction himself.

At that point, Morgan noticed that all this chaos wasn’t accidental. The driver in the Mercedes wasn’t just cutting it close trying to get ahead. The bastard was trying to cause an accident by getting as many cars as he could to brake, spin out, or crash.

Morgan followed, dodging car after car. They covered ground astonishingly fast. They passed a policeman who started giving chase, but was trapped almost immediately behind two slow-moving vehicles and was left far behind, siren fading in the distance. Morgan turned his attention back to the Mercedes, and noticed the highway was nearly over, feeding into the George Washington Bridge, a long, curving on-ramp with nowhere else to turn.

Morgan’s tires squealed as he drifted the entire length of the on-ramp onto the bridge, not a hundred feet behind his quarry.

He made it almost halfway across when the Mercedes narrowly cut off a car that was pulling a trailer. The car tried stopping, skidded sideways, and with the trailer, blocked Morgan’s passage altogether.

Morgan pulled the handbrake, but too late: he smashed sideways into the trailer, which caused him to spin counterclockwise. Moving too fast to regain control, he spun, until Morgan felt the jerk of a hard impact and blacked out.

He opened his eyes again, disoriented, not knowing how much time had passed and feeling like he was on a boat. He looked out ahead, and saw no road, just the sky. Suddenly, he realized why: the GTO was hanging over the edge of the bridge, teetering uncertainly over the abyss.

Morgan was groggy, but even in this state he understood the need to get the hell out of there. He undid his seat belt with far less care than was necessary, and the car rocked a little farther forward. From his perspective it seemed as though the whole world tilted, giving him a clear view of certain death below. Slowly and carefully, Morgan began to move to his right, keeping his weight as far back as he could, until he was holding himself above the handbrake. He slowly pushed himself backward, squeezing between the two front seats and onto the backseat. The car seemed to stabilize as he did this, resting more comfortably on solid ground. The back window had shattered at some point, and the glass on the seat bit into his hands. Struggling to focus, he climbed out the window, and pulled himself clumsily onto the trunk lid, feeling the broken glass making a thousand shallow cuts on his side. He then rolled off the trunk and onto the hard asphalt, crying out in pain at the impact.

Without Morgan’s weight to hold it back, the car tilted forward to its tipping point. With a loud moan, it tumbled off the bridge, disappearing from sight and smashing into the Hudson River below with a distant
crash
.

Bruised and beaten, Morgan slowly got up, then looked down the length of the George Washington Bridge. Traffic had stopped completely behind him, and a crowd of people, having left their cars, began to form around him. He looked to the far side, trying to spot the Mercedes, but there was no sign of it. Wherever it had gone, it was far out of sight by now.

C
HAPTER
24

 

C
hapman walked out into the National Mall again, this time by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It was midafternoon. The temperature was dropping fast, and the reddening sky made the water seem like it was on fire. He stood there for hardly two minutes, feeling his limbs grow slightly numb from the cold, before he spotted Smith walking toward him in his precise and controlled gait, wearing a discreetly tailored black trench coat. The mysterious man had left him with a promise last time and nothing more. Since then, the Emergency Task Force’s investigations remained perfectly stalled. They had scrupulously analyzed all the evidence relating to the Paris bombing, including security video, interrogation transcripts and forensic reports, but they had yielded nothing. The handful of promising leads had only led to dead ends. Every other source had dried up, and Chapman clung to the hope that Smith would deliver something.

“Hello, Mr. Chapman,” said Smith, in his enigmatically blank tone. In his gloved hand was a paper shopping bag with the name of a bookstore on it.

There was something about this Smith that made Chapman nervous. Frightened even. The way that he was calm and pleasant unnerved him. Here was a man who worked behind the scenes in a seat of global power, and he seemed perfectly tranquil and at ease. Chapman had the sense that Smith could be facing an armed terrorist or the President of the United States, and he would still maintain the same placid demeanor.

“Okay,” said Chapman. “I got your message. I’m here. Now tell me why.”

“As it happens,” said Smith, looking into his eyes, “I have something for you, Mr. Chapman.”

“Tell me it’s good.”

“You’ve been impatient,” Smith said, noting his tone. This ticked Chapman off.

“No shit, I’ve been impatient. We’re after a goddamn
mass murderer
here. Probably more than one. Time is somewhat of the essence.”

“I’ve been holding nothing back, I assure you,” said Smith. “I’ve come to you with this now because I did not have it before.”

“And what
do
you have for me, Mr. Smith?” All this cryptic talk was seriously getting on Chapman’s nerves.

“Motive. It seems someone has been profiting from these attacks. Profiting a great deal, I might add.”

Chapman furrowed his brow. “How?”

“Someone has found a way to beat the stock market, after all,” he said.

“Are you saying that someone is doing this to game the financial markets? That’s what all this death is about?”

“Some might call it an investment strategy.”

“Surely there are easier ways to make money,” said Chapman, turning sideways in disbelief.

“We are talking about a truly staggering sum,” Smith said flatly.

“Right,” said Chapman. “I’ll take your word for it, provisionally.”

“There’s no need. All the proof you will need is in this dossier.” Smith lifted the shopping bag and offered it to Chapman, who took it. Its contents were heavy, and he felt in his hands that there was a book in it.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll look through it. But you can’t be giving this to me for no reason.”

“You’re right about that,” said Smith. “Although I assure you that at least part of the reason is that you have the resources to properly look into this. I have no interest in seeing this violence go on.”

“I see,” said Chapman, thin-lipped. “But you still want something in return”

“Why, yes,” said Smith, with a subtle smile.

“And what is that?”

“Information. A first look into whatever you find.”

“Suppose you don’t get it,” said Chapman. “Suppose I use this, and give you nothing in return. What happens then?”

“I trust you will see the mutual gain to be had from our relationship, Mr. Chapman.”

Chapman sighed audibly. “What’s your game, Mr. Smith?” he asked. “Who do you work with?”

“As soon as we start using a name, Mr. Chapman, we give people a way to talk about us.”

At that, Smith turned to go. As Smith took his first steps away toward the Lincoln Memorial, Chapman said, “Mr. Smith, what is the Aegis Initiative?”

Smith turned around. He showed barely any sign of having been stirred, but Chapman saw a slight tension around his lips and eyes that gave him away. Still, with the calmest and most self-assured tone of voice, he said, “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Chapman.” He turned again and walked away.

Chapman, left alone, did not move, but instead looked in the bag. He pulled out the book that had been stuffed into the bag to give it volume, along with the much thinner dossier. He looked at its cover. It was titled,
An Illustrated Guide to Conspiracy Theories.

Cute
, thought Chapman as he turned his back to the Memorial and walked away.