The Last Spymaster (5 page)

No birds sang. No small animals made scurrying sounds of retreat. The forest was silent, shocked by the violent intrusion. Tice focused and spun the box’s lock again, working quickly. He tugged. The lock opened, and he lifted the lid. His hand went straight to the 9mm Browning wrapped in a chamois that lay on top. He flipped off the cloth, eased in a magazine, and jacked a round into the chamber. Automatically, he slipped the clip out again, inserted an extra round to replace the one in the chamber, and pushed the clip home.

Now he was the hunter. He yanked off his reading glasses and stood up, his back flat against the boulder, ready to ease out. As he returned his glasses to his pocket, he listened. Patience was key. Few of his enemies had been able to wait as long as he. The woodland would tell him what he needed to know.

Still, the quiet stretched. Finally, a few animals rustled off. Birds flew in fast bursts to test the absence of danger. When a pebble rattled, he frowned, straining for its location. The next noise was muted, like a rubber sole on stone. When it repeated, adrenaline flooded him—the janitor was on the other side of his sheltering boulder.

Tice stuck the pistol into his waistband and grabbed a stony ledge and pulled himself to the boulder’s crown. Lying flat, he stared down the other side—directly at the top of the janitor’s black helmet. Breathing slowly, he watched.

The man was standing on a dusty slab of sandstone a good fifteen feet below. His 9mm SIG Sauer was still in both hands, finger on the trigger, as he gracefully continued his deadly ballet, swiveling while advancing one careful step at a time.

Inwardly, Tice swore. His Browning was still in his waistband, trapped between his belly and the boulder. There was no room to roll to the side. As sweat dripped from his face, he thought about it. Finally, he filled his lungs with air, exhaled, and in a single motion pushed his torso up with one hand while the other drew the gun. The barrel cleared, but the tip glanced on the rock with an audible
clink
.

The janitor reacted instantly. Like a soccer player making a scissor kick, he threw himself up and back, his shoulders parallel to the ground, the front of his helmet facing the boulder’s top. At the same time, his SIG Sauer fixed on Tice.

Tice had a split second. The two weapons fired in unison. The janitor’s suppressed pistol made little noise, but the Browning’s explosion was thunderous.

A bullet blistered past Tice’s cheek and ripped off his baseball cap. At the same time, blood fountained up from the janitor’s bullet-shattered helmet. As the reverberations of the shot faded through the timber, the man toppled, one leg twisted grotesquely beneath, gun still in hand.

When the killer did not move, and the forest’s hush seemed to stretch into infinity, Tice slid down and kicked away the gun. Again he waited. At last he dropped to his heels and shoved his fingers under the helmet to the hot, wet throat.

No pulse. Frowning, he pulled off the helmet and studied the plain features, the thin mouth, the broad nose. He did not recognize the janitor. A search produced only a motorcycle key, extra ammo, and a flat wallet with cash but no credit cards or driver’s license. The man had been sent out almost completely clean. No surprise.

Tice tossed the wallet deep into the trees and pocketed everything else. With the corpse unable to tell him more, he piled brush and leaves over it. As he worked, he tried to figure out how he had been found. No one knew about this place, and he was damn certain no one had followed him.

He finished hiding the body then patted himself down, looking for a tracker. Nothing. He scooped up the janitor’s SIG Sauer. As he stripped off his shirt, he jogged back around the boulder to his metal lockbox, wet the shirt on dewy grass, and used it to clean himself. Waiting in the box was his holster and the rest of his “pocket litter”—cash, IDs, business cards, credit cards—plus navy trousers and a tan-colored shirt. He strapped the holster under his arm, slid in the SIG Sauer then dressed in the new clothes. The shirt pulled across his chest, reflecting his larger muscles, a result of working out at the penitentiary.

Moving quickly, he stuffed the IDs and other tradecraft items into his
pockets and locked his bloodied prison clothes inside the box. Browning in one hand, box in the other, he doubled back to the road and hid inside the treeline. The sunny tableau was as he had left it: His car was still parked near the Civil War memorial. The blue jay was still dining on its mouse. Two cars and a pickup passed, their engines fading into the distance. None even slowed, telling him his assailant was likely alone.

He returned the lockbox to the monument’s secret drawer and hurried to the Geo, checking up and down the road. The only sound was a fresh wind rising through the trees. At last he opened the trunk. A stench of blood and death drifted out. Frank Theosopholis lay in a fetal position on his left side, his knees pulled up, his arms crossed loosely at his chest, his nose pressed down into the old carpet. A stiletto protruded from his throat. Twenty years younger than Tice, he had carrot-red hair and a wrestler’s build. With time for only a cursory search, Tice had found cash and the usual prison ID. Maybe he had missed something. He stared.

The wristwatch. He grabbed the hand. Rigor mortis had frozen the muscles. The shoulders and face were stiff, too. In a few more hours, the progressive rigidity would reach the feet. He worked the watch off—a digital Timex. He flipped it over twice and opened the battery compartment. Anger shot through him.

Inside the well was a highly miniaturized GPS tracker, no larger than the head of a finishing nail. So this was how he had been found. Furious, he wanted to grind the damn thing under his heel, destroy it.

Instead, he flicked the tracker onto his palm, closed the watch, and peered around. His gaze settled on the hungry blue jay, still eating. With a cold smile, he advanced. Shrieking, the bird flew off. He crouched. Where the bird had been pecking looked liked hamburger. He pressed the tracker into it.

“Think of it as dessert,” he told the jay. As he backed off, the bird landed again, cocked its head, and hopped back to its meal.

Tice trotted to the Geo. There was a rutted fire-control track ahead. He would conceal the car there and return on foot for the motorcycle. As he climbed in, he weighed the situation. Since the tracker was on Theosopholis, the logical deduction was that Theosopholis was the target.
But as soon as the janitor saw Tice, he would have known he had the wrong man and should have withdrawn or attempted a live capture to find out where Theosopholis was. Instead, everything about his style announced wet job. He was assigned to liquidate Tice, and maybe only Tice.

Uneasily, Tice gunned the engine and accelerated away. Whoever had sent the bastard had impressive resources to have ferreted out the unknowable—while Tice still had too much to hide.

Maricopa County, Arizona

From the cab of the big 18-wheeler, Jerry Angelides surveyed the Sonoran Desert. It spread in all directions like a sea of powdered bones. The morning was cold, and the sunlight thin and uncertain. He tried to shake off a bad feeling. Something was going to happen. Brakes huffing, the truck turned and backed up to the warehouse. No other buildings were in sight, but then this area off Interstate 10 boasted far more Gila monsters and rattlesnakes than it did humans. All part of Mr. G’s plan.

As he climbed out of the cab, he told his wheelman, “All you drivers stay put. Everybody else gets out but waits until I check around. Radio them.”

“You got it, Jerry.”

Jerry Angelides was a burly man with a bristle haircut and flat, steely eyes. He wore a sports jacket and dark trousers like always. As he headed for the warehouse, the two men who had been riding in the rear seat jumped out after him, carrying fully loaded Remington 870 pump-action shotguns. Other 18-wheelers backed up, and more men leaped out, cradling 870s. The sides of all of the trucks displayed big blue globes of the world with
CROSS-GLOBAL TRANSPORTATION
arched above in blue and gold letters.

Angelides walked around the corner of the warehouse, head rotating, looking for anything unusual. He continued on over the hard-packed desert sand, past the cacti and the sun-baked rocks, past the rear of the warehouse, and around to the other side. That was when he saw Mr. Lockyear’s fancy white Cadillac. Mr. Lockyear himself was leaving the warehouse’s
side door. He was not supposed to be here unless invited. That was the agreement.

“It’s real early for you, ain’t it?” Mr. Lockyear was fat and sweating.

“I told you to stay away, Mr. Lockyear. You’ve been getting your monthlies, haven’t you?” He sent the rent on the first of the month, FedEx, a thousand dollars cash, which FedEx would not like if they knew.

“Folks around here mind their own business, Jerry, but there’re lines. Real lines. I take ownership seriously.” Lockyear wore a straw hat. His sunglasses had metal frames that sat squarely on his bulging nose. “I think you maybe got things going on here that’re a little fishy. That’s why you don’t mind paying more than usual. Shit, Jerry, it don’t look good.”

“You opened the crates?” Angelides reached inside his sports jacket.

“Well, now, just one crate. I had to, you see—” He froze as he saw the gun in Angelides’s hand. “Wait a minute. I was just going to ask for more change each month. Maybe five hundred. Okay, three. I wasn’t going to tell anyone—”

“Damn right you’re not.” Angelides stepped back and pulled the trigger. The sound of the gunshot was percussive. The big 10mm bullet drilled a red hole right in the bridge of Mr. Lockyear’s sunglasses. The dead man’s face collapsed. There was a rattle in his throat, and he stepped back and fell like one of those carnival dolls.

Angelides sighed. He remembered he had not had a good feeling about this day. He hated it when people broke agreements. He leaned down and wiped blood from his gun hand onto Lockyear’s white shirt. Then he returned the Colt to his shoulder holster. It was his favorite—just a little more than two pounds and only eight and a half inches long, still small enough to be concealable. It was also rechambered for serious 10mm bullets. People who knew anything knew he carried a good weapon.

His men tore around the corner, their shotguns ready. They stared.

“You okay?” one asked, peering at Angelides.

“Sure. Right as rain. That’s the former Mr. Lockyear.” Angelides pointed.

Another chuckled. “You’re cold, Jerry. Real cold.”

“It’s not that I like it,” Angelides explained. “It’s necessary. You say to yourself, is this necessary? And if you have to say yes, then you do it. He won’t cook for a while ’cause he’s in the shade. When you finish loading, put him in his Cadillac and drive him over into that ravine. Now get on round front and open up the trucks.”

He unlocked the side door and went inside to the power panel, where he pushed buttons. The mammoth doors rolled. He hurried out to watch the boys. They stood in a line, staring pizza-eyed at what seemed to be small lightweight dune buggies packed nose-to-tail deep into the shadows. Though they were accustomed to moving stolen goods of all sorts, especially arms and drugs, this was a new one. Two whistled in appreciation.

“They’re called LandFlyers,” Angelides explained, smiling. Each had a skinny little frame on top of four big wheels, plus seats and a cargo platform and a gun mount.

“Jesus,” one said.

“No shit, Jerry. We’re damn far away for a day at the beach!”

As the others laughed, a third man decided, “They must be military.”

“That they are,” Angelides confirmed. “But Uncle Sam hasn’t got anything but prototypes yet. This is the first real shipment.”

“Hey, there’s gun mounts!” said a fourth man. “What do they shoot, Jerry?”

“Fifty-caliber,” he told them. Now they were really impressed.

The man standing next to Angelides shook his head. “There’s too many. No way we can pack that many into the trucks.”

“LandFlyers stack,” Angelides told him. “Like LEGO blocks. That’s why there are truck lifts. See ’em? You’re gonna use the lifts to stack ’em. Now look off to the side—those wood crates. That’s where the fifty-calibers are. Everything goes into the trucks, including the lifts. We leave nothing behind. Got it?
Nothing.
”

“Except the dead man.”

Angelides’s head whipped around. “Who said that?”

The men laughed. Angelides shrugged. “Load ’em and weep. You’ve got a long ways to drive, and you gotta keep to the schedule. Keys are in the ignitions.”

Several of the LandFlyers’ diesel engines fired up, and Angelides watched as they glided toward the ramps that led up into the big rigs. Land-Flyers could blast across a desert at sixty-five miles an hour, hump over chongo rocks at thirty without going ass over teakettle, and do hairpin turns so sharp they would topple any other all-terrain vehicle. They could even keep running on three wheels if the fourth got shot off. LandFlyers weighed half as much as big-ass Humvees and were a lot shorter and narrower, too, but they carried just as much cargo. They were what the military called light-strike vehicles. He loved American engineering.

Angelides walked away from the noise and dialed his cell. Mr. G was a busy man, so it rang a few times. “Hello, Mr. Ghranditti,” he said respectfully. “The buggies and weapons will be on the road soon. A smooth operation. Like silk.” No point in worrying the boss about the little detail of Mr. Lockyear’s demise. It was handled.