The Forgotten Soldier: A Pike Logan Thriller (26 page)

51

B
rett entered, saw Nick, then Jennifer in the bed, and his laid-back attitude finally surfaced. He said, “Well, well. Not what I expected. A threesome with the vice president’s son?”

Nick blushed furiously, saying nothing. Jennifer threw a pillow at Brett’s head, but he blocked it. I said, “Come on, people. I need some damn sleep. What do you want?”

Brett turned serious again and said, “I’ve seen some shitty things happen in my time. I’ve been
involved
in some shitty things. Bad guys we manipulated. Good guys we abandoned when the political winds shifted. People whose motivations we didn’t even understand, just using them when we could. But we never did anything like this.”

Brett had been a Recon Marine before joining the Special Activities Division of the CIA as a paramilitary case officer. He’d been involved in more dirty operations than even me.

He continued. “This mission is the worst of the worst. We need to take a look at what we’re being ordered to do. Reflect on it.”

My phone vibrated. I tapped the screen, seeing a text from Knuckles.
You awake?

I held my finger up to Brett and texted back,
Yeah.

Can I come down? We need to talk
.

I rolled my eyes and texted back,
Come on down
.

Brett said, “Who’s that?”

Then we heard a knock on the door. He’d texted from the hallway. I opened it, and Knuckles said, “Jennifer here?”

“Yeah.”

“We need to talk about this mission, and I want to do it one-on-one.”

I stepped aside and held my arm out, saying, “We’re beyond that now. Come on in.”

He entered, looking confused for a minute at the entire team assembled in my room, wondering what was going on and whether he was being left out. But he knew better than that. He opened his mouth, and I said, “They all arrived in the last two minutes. All wanting to talk about the mission. About Guy.”

Knuckles nodded, and said, “Good. Good. That’s exactly why I’m here.”

I said, “And?”

“And based on the fact that everyone came here on their own, I don’t think I need to say a word. But I will. This mission is shit.”

He was right, but I was still the team leader, with a team leader’s responsibility.

I said, “It may be. Cancel that. It
is
shit. But I can’t pick what we do. We don’t always get the James Bond mission in the Cayman Islands, Knuckles. You know that.”

Then Knuckles used my own sounding board against me.

He looked at Jennifer, sitting in the bed with her back against the headboard and the covers pulled up high. “You good with this?”

If he’d have asked Nick, he’d have gotten a wishy-washy response, the new man caught between his loyalty to the chain of command and the mission. Even Brett wouldn’t outright confront me in front of the team. But Knuckles knew Jennifer. Knew exactly why I connected with her. She had a moral compass that didn’t care about the chain of command.

She said, “No. I’m not. Nobody in the room is good with this. I’m
not good with Guy killing, and I’m not good with us killing him to stop him killing. It’s disgusting.”

She paused, catching my eye, and we were the only two people in the room. She said, “Pike’s not good with this either.”

Everyone focused on me, and I felt the pressure of disobeying an order I hadn’t even received yet. But I’d disobeyed orders before. In Istanbul. Only this time, I wouldn’t be doing it to kill. I’d be doing it to save a life, as Jennifer had done with me.

I said, “Everyone listen to me. You don’t follow the orders we’re given, and you’re done in the Taskforce. They will replace you with someone who will. They’ve done it to me before.”

I looked at Nick, the newest member. He nodded, not backing down. Comfortable with the choice. I continued, “But nobody argues with success. I’ve seen that firsthand. You can ignore an order if it makes everyone else look good in the end.”

I went eye to eye with the team, ending with Jennifer. I said, “I’m not killing Guy just because the Taskforce says so. He’s coming home.”

I looked at Knuckles. “You want to solve this problem the right way?”

He nodded, a slow smile spreading on his face. He said, “Yeah. No matter what the Council says.”

I said, “Okay, then, since all you geniuses want to keep me from sleep, how do we do that? We’re all burned for surveillance, and he’ll start shooting the moment he sees us.”

“Where do we stand with Taskforce assets?”

“He’s ditched his phone. Not surprising, since it’s the first thing any one of us would do. The Taskforce has cut off his credit cards and frozen his bank accounts under the name Sean Parnell, but we don’t know how much cash he has. With the bank problems in Greece, he probably came over here with a sizable amount. Which, I guess, is saying we don’t have a hell of a lot to track with. It was a mistake to confront him on the ferry.”

Brett said, “Aw, that’s bullshit. Don’t second-guess that. We were always only getting one shot at a meeting, and it was the perfect spot for the endgame you envisioned. Didn’t work out. What else we got?”

“Kurt’s taking my report to the Oversight Council. If we are sanctioned for Alpha against the guy on the ferry, we’ll get complete Taskforce assets for tracking, and that also might be the leverage we need to bring him in.”

Nick said, “But he’s the only one who knows who the man is. A catch-22. We can’t even identify the target without Guy pointing the way.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. That’s what I’ll tell Guy. We have Alpha to explore, but we need his intelligence. We need him
on
the team, not fighting the team.”

Knuckles said, “You think he’ll buy that?”

“Best I can do.”

Nick said, “Doesn’t fix the primary problem. We don’t know where Guy is or how to get in touch with him.”

Brett said, “Yeah, yeah, we don’t have a handle, but it wouldn’t be the first time. Something will break. You work with Pike long enough, and something always does.”

Nick looked skeptical, but was afraid to say anything as the junior member of the team.

Brett laughed at his expression and said, “Trust me. It’ll happen. Him sleeping with Jennifer is some kind of magic.”

Jennifer scowled, still under the covers, and Brett said, “Hey, babe, you got to contribute somehow.”

I grinned at the ribbing and said, “Okay, enough. What we need right now is rest. We can’t do anything until the Oversight Council meets anyway. Everyone, head on back to your rooms.”

No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I felt my phone vibrate with a text. It was from Carly, and it was succinct.

Guy just called me. We need to meet.

Knuckles saw my face and said, “What is it?”

I passed him the phone. “We aren’t getting any sleep.”

Brett looked at the text, then at Jennifer, eyes open in mock amazement. He said, “You’ve been busy.”

This time the pillow found its mark.

52

G
uy felt the cold seep into the car, the cooling engine ticking its drum of surrender to the outside air. Shoehorned between two cars on the frontage road next to Andrea Siggrou Street, he watched the front entrance to a four-story building, the bold sign outside proclaiming
THE COTTON CL
UB SEX THEATER
.

He was farther away than he wanted, with eight lanes of traffic complete with median separating him from his target, but the alternative was to park on the eastern frontage road right next to the target and risk being seen. He was forced to use optics, but he felt more secure.

He’d been in position for two hours and had seen little in the way of movement in or out of the building, but that was to be expected. The disco didn’t even open for five more hours, remaining still until the darkness came like a brood of vampires waiting to wake, but sooner or later, Nikos would show.

Carly’s information had been vague, but he was sure it was accurate. They were too close personally for her to play any silly spy games. She would have just told him no outright. She’d given him the bare minimum of what he wanted, clearly trying to help, but there was something about the call that was off, and he wondered if she was growing suspicious. She’d seemed distant during the conversation. Hesitant. He’d asked what was wrong and she’d proclaimed
work, then said she couldn’t talk about it. At one point, he thought she was about to ask a question, then she’d backed off.

It troubled him, but he knew she would never turn him in, both because of their friendship and because she didn’t even know who to report him to. The CIA was absolutely out of the question, and she didn’t know how to contact the Taskforce.

But Pike did. And that man was devious. In addition, he had Knuckles as his 2IC. Knuckles had been as close to Decoy as Guy. He was the man who’d recruited Decoy to the Taskforce in the first place, and had been the man who provided the notification of Decoy’s death to Carly. She knew him as well as she did Decoy, which was to say as well as she knew Guy. There was a chance they’d find her here and question her.

He doubted she would proactively turn him in, but Pike was a different matter. Guy had heard the stories, and seen the results. If there were a weak link—for which Carly qualified—Pike would find it. He was somewhat supernatural in that respect, but even if he did, it no longer mattered. The endgame was approaching rapidly—much quicker than Pike could decipher, even with his skills. Guy would kill the final two men soon, and it did no good to try to determine who was on who’s side. Pike, Carly, the Taskforce, Billings, Nikos—none of that mattered anymore. For him, there was only one side now.

His.

After leaving the ferry, Guy had disappeared into the crowds around the dock, moving swiftly to escape whatever net the Taskforce might have attempted. He’d considered throwing his phone into the back of the first passing Bongo truck, leaving it on and transmitting, but then thought better of it, settling for breaking it into pieces.

After moving steadily north for thirty minutes, losing himself in the concrete and cinder blocks, he’d caught a cab and asked for a cheap hotel. The man had dropped him off at a seedy establishment
crammed on a side street, between a butcher shop and an auto repair garage. With only eight rooms and a sign that proclaimed nothing more than
HOTEL
, he thought it would work.

He’d checked in using cash, leaving him about a thousand dollars in euros. He tipped the wizened man behind the counter fifty euros to forgo the passport requirement. The clerk had balked, thinking he was an illegal alien or smuggler, until Guy allowed him to inspect his US passport. Guy proclaimed he was afraid of identity theft, and the man believed him. Or, more precisely, with the troubles in the Greek economy, he believed the fifty euros.

After checking in, he’d set about replacing his phone, attempting to find an ATM that would dispense money from his credit card. His was declined. Initially, he thought it was just a function of the Greek economy, as all ATMs had a limit on the amount a local could withdraw, and thought maybe this bank was saving that limit for Greek citizens, refusing to deliver because his credit card was based in the United States.

He’d tried two more ATMs with the same results. He’d found a cell phone provider and attempted to purchase a phone directly, using the card under the name Sean Parnell—not something he wanted to do because of the linkages—and the card was declined.

So they’d frozen his bank accounts and credit cards. The Taskforce was on the move, just as Pike had said they would be. No matter. He knew their rhythms. Knew how they operated, and it was way, way too slow to interdict him. He reverted to his limited cash supply, buying two five-hundred-dollar pay-as-you-go credit cards.

By midday, he’d burned through most of one with a new cell phone and a rental car, and figured the second would last long enough. All he needed was a max of two days to complete the mission.

He saw a knot of men approaching the front door to the Cotton Club and raised his small binoculars. A scrum of guys in black leather
and denim, all sporting thick beards. One of the men resembled a face on the target package, but he was too far away for Guy to be sure.

He saw a preening man in the center, wearing a goatee and a flaming-red suede jacket.

Nikos
.

First target in Athens.