part0018

C arlson didn’t like this town. Admittedly, this was where most of the larger weapons developers situated their labs since the testing laws in this state were significantly laxer than they were in the rest of the country. That, sadly, still didn’t alter the fact that there was far too much of a small-town vibe to the capital. Most of the restaurants—even the higher-end ones—all had something they called a “She-Crab” Bisque. Honestly, it seemed like the kind of thing he would try when he was drunk, hungry, and rocking some low standards. At any other time, he would prefer his crab to be served in a ceviche, paired with some white wine, and followed by a medium-rare steak.

Regrettably, he had to play the politician around there, and honestly, when it came down to it, he didn’t mind. These people were impossibly easy to please. He simply made sure they realized that the man who used to run the company had come down there to ensure that everyone who had been in the company for a while received raises and had their grievances heard. This detail guaranteed that they would agree to help him rather than the faceless woman and military man who had forced their way in.

He would never be caught dead trashing his new bosses, but he didn’t need to. It really was a simple matter of hinting at their ineptitude before the rain of IRS inquiries and congressional hearings began to make the company’s stock plummet. They would clamor for someone to save them from their woes, and now that he had a couple of scapegoats to feed to anyone who came looking for guilt, he could walk away from all of this like it was a bad dream.

That said, he wasn’t only there for the politics of it. While he did need these people on his side when push came to shove, he also needed to oversee the way his people covered his tracks. They needed to be reminded that it was their tracks that they covered, too. He needed to remind them that all the money they’d made over the past decade or so of prosperity had a paper trail that would point a finger at them as much as it would at him. All the research had to be pushed to new locations that he had control over, not Dr. Monroe. Most important, that locale needed to be far, far away from the people who tried to break him.

Carlson took another sip from his fifth scotch of the day and paused before he swallowed. It wasn’t even mid-afternoon yet. He needed to get a grip on his drinking if he wanted to trust his own judgment in all this. Shaking his head, he muttered, “I’m not an alcoholic.” He was fully aware that he’d had the same discussion countless times with a wide variety of people, ranging from ex-wives and friends to business partners. “I merely need to take the edge off.”

He wasn’t wrong. At any other time, he only drank socially. He’d take a sip of champagne for a toast and order water for the rest of the evening. True, he had suffered from drinking problems in the past, but a couple of months of therapy had helped him kick the worst parts of the habit. These only resurfaced in times of great stress like the past few months had been.

The executive looked up from the almost obsessive twirling of his glass and saw his driver looking at him. He recognized the man’s face. It was one of his men, a hardened combat veteran a few years out of the service and who now made more money than he ever had while wearing a uniform.

Well, he still wore a uniform, if you could call a mid-range suit, sunglasses, and a sub-machine gun a uniform. Carlson could. He liked to think that there was something a good deal more terrifying about a faceless horde of men in suits than a man in military dress. Men in the military weren’t supposed to instill fear in the people they encountered. Not the kind of fear that came with a suit, at least. The shock of civility mixed with the barbarity of violence was so much more powerful, he mused.

“Call in the teams,” he said and rubbed his temple as he took a sip from his glass. “We’ll head out to the compound. No more delays. We need this shit done now.”

He had been in this town for the past three days, and all the assurances that the compound would be evacuated before the weekend had been dashed after a call he’d received from one of the managers of the location. He’d told him that there was still a lot that had to be done, and they wouldn’t be finished with it by closing time on Friday. And considering that most of the people who worked on site kept regular hours, that meant that anything that wasn’t done would have to be finished on Monday.

And that was simply un-fucking-acceptable. He needed everything around there to be wrapped up in a pretty little bow before he returned to Philly and Dr. Monroe’s conditions for his surrender. Anything that hadn’t been resolved before then would be a vulnerability. He was not a man who dealt in vulnerabilities—unless, of course, they belonged to his opponents. In which case, he thought with a hard smile, they were useful.

With this in mind, he headed out to the damned location and hoped that his presence would help to streamline the process. As a last resort, he could probably authorize overtime to make sure that the people stayed for as long as it took. That was what he would have to do if it came down to it, but he would rather keep all trace of what was happening there off the books. There would be a huge influx of cash for the IRS to track down, of course, but that was intentional and could be traced back to Monroe, not him. An overtime authorization would point a finger directly at his chest.

No, he would prefer it if he could tell people to keep working until the job was done without any questions asked regarding exactly what the hell he was doing in North Carolina.

“Step on it, Linus,” Carlson said, knocked back the remaining scotch in a single gulp, and refilled the glass without even thinking. He was a functioning alcoholic, at worst. Nothing he couldn’t handle.

“So, do you have any idea what they’re actually doing in there?” Savage asked and plucked his shirt irritably away from his chest. It was warm, although fall had already officially begun, and trees had started to change colors. Ads for Halloween mingled with Thanksgiving and even Christmas. But still, the weather remained unseasonably warm. Not unbearably so, but enough to be uncomfortable. He lay out in the middle of what looked like nowhere but was actually some seven hundred yards from a facility with fences, a significant number of armed guards, and considerable movement. No logos were displayed on the side of the windowless building.

“Well, the building is owned by Pegasus,” Anja said and actually sounded interested. “And a good chunk of money went into a lot of high-end security and transport. Carlson pinched pennies back in the central building by hiring second-rate companies to run security and IT, but he didn’t spare any kind of expense here. Yggdrasil SSY was appointed to provide the armored car services, and they brought in a hell of a lot of muscle. Obviously, someone wants to make sure that whatever they’re moving out of that place gets out without anyone trying to mess with it.”

“Yeah,” he agreed and squinted into his binoculars. “These guys are all armed to the teeth. There are some hints of power armor in the stuff they’re wearing. Nothing compared to what the military uses these days, but still similar.”

“Take them out? What, like…kill them, take them out? I could if I had a team of fifteen men, equally armed to the teeth, and a couple of weeks to plan an operation. All of which we lack from what I’ve been able to see.”

“Yep.” She sounded almost disappointed. “Just you in there by your lonesome. I would have thought it was how people like you preferred to work. Lone-wolf types who only work alone and don’t take no partners.”

Savage couldn’t help but smirk. It was funny how she seemed to be able to drop her Russian accent to take on the stereotypical gruff loner voice. He still wasn’t sure where that particular stereotype had come from, but it really didn’t matter. So many people these days made assumptions about what kind of guy he was supposed to be, all without even bothering to ask what kind of guy he actually was.

People liked to throw the lone wolf idea around when it came to military men and somehow forgot that men and women in the service were all drilled and trained to work best when they were in a group. Military tactics were all about coordination and precision in groups, with each individual cog performing what they were brought in to do with the utmost professionalism. That was what made military operations a success. Lone wolf characters wouldn’t make it past boot camp, but there was no real need to clarify the situation for Anja.

What was interesting was how well-coordinated the men on the ground were. He knew that they couldn’t anticipate that anyone would come in to try to identify what they were moving, but they were all ready, anyway. Head comms would make it more difficult than the last time, as well as the fact that they always moved in groups of two, three, or more men to cover the perimeter. The precision and alertness as they watched the armored cars arrive and leave told Savage that security had truly been stepped up.

Anderson and Monroe would want to know this as well as where all the shit was being moved to, but at the moment, there wasn’t any point in trying to stop the process. There was only one road leading in and out of the facility as far as he could see. If anyone could actively trail them, it would be Anja. She had mentioned that she had access to a satellite, so maybe she could use it to track them?

He couldn’t actually recall when she’d dropped that nugget of useful information. It had been at some time over the past couple of days of watching and studying Carlson’s every movement while in Raleigh. He’d monitored the man through the various hotels he’d visited, Pegasus’ headquarters at the location, and a group of high-end restaurants.

They said that the age of actually physically following someone to keep track of their movements was at an end, which possibly explained why Jeremiah couldn’t identify a single time that he’d been made. The men who drove him around simply didn’t think to check to make sure that nobody was following them.

Obviously, he’d done his part to stay off the radar too. He’d parked the first rental in a shady corner of the motel parking lot and rented a second vehicle to use in his surveillance work. Not only that, he’d deliberately selected a car that was almost more invisible than a Taurus. The Prius was the kind of car that people seemed to actively ignore in these parts. From the number of them in the lot of the rental car agency, he had to assume that they were a popular choice around there. That boded well for him too.

He hadn’t had much training in actually following people in traffic, but the rule of thumb from a quick search on the web had told him that alternating your distance was more important than keeping it. People noticed patterns better than they noticed randomness, one site had noted.

It was fun, learning on the job like this. Of course, all that had been canceled when Anja noted a sudden change to Carlson’s calendar that indicated that he would pay the facility a visit in person. While they had kept tabs on what moved in and out before, the fact that the man himself would make a physical appearance at the location was important. If he planned to tie Monroe and Anderson to the place, it was the least that they could do to tie him to it as well—if only for the kind of leverage they would need.

Jeremiah blinked and realized that Anja had been talking the whole time that he’d been lost in thought. She seemed like the kind of woman who would be shy and not say much more than a couple of sentences if he met her in person. That notwithstanding, she made up for it by talking his solitary ear off since they weren’t actually standing face-to-face.

“Do you have an ETA on when Carlson will arrive here?” he asked when he sensed a lull in the barrage of words that she tossed his way. She might have even simply inhaled to keep going, but after his question, she paused to quickly check her computer.

“I have his limo service leaving the company building fifteen minutes ago,” she said after a quick pause. “The GPS indicates that they are heading your way. I guess we have to wait to see if it’s actually Carlson himself and not him throwing up more red herrings. And speaking of which, how come you didn’t pick up some of the binoculars in the shop that had a Bluetooth connection that would let me see what you’re looking at?”

As it turned out, his prevarication was a futile gesture in the end. “I found the store’s online outlet. Everything’s online these days, Jer, and I found that they have one of those in the store, waiting for pickup.”

“You didn’t want me to see what you’re looking at, right?” Anja accused. “You’re not ogling the asses of the lady guards in there, are you? Need I remind you that we’re on company time here?”

“Firstly, I’m not hourly, so that’s not how all this works,” he retorted. “Secondly, they didn’t have anything of the kind when I went in there. Besides, you were the one who told me to be frugal with the spending from this point forward.”

Before she could say anything else, though, he cut in. “It looks like we have a convoy moving in.” He squinted for better focus. “Not armored cars. A couple of SUVs sandwiching a limo. I’d say that’s our boy.”

Jeremiah nodded and abandoned the binoculars to use the sight of the rifle he’d bought from Max. The scope on it wasn’t as powerful as the binoculars, but it was a lot more target-focused. Unfortunately, the windows were tinted to an illegal degree, which made it difficult to actually see who was in the vehicles.

“There’s movement from the compound, though,” he said as he returned to his binoculars. “It looks like they’re expecting the convoy.”

“Oh, fuck, sorry. I didn’t know,” he said softly. He’d been told that he had a morbid sense of humor sometimes, and most of those times, he simply leaned into the skid, as the term went, and accepted it. But there was a time and a place for humor like that, and he’d misjudged the situation.

“Still, though, I shouldn’t have been that flippant about it…” His voice trailed off as the convoy entered the facility. The gate closed quickly behind them, and a group of guards exited the SUVs. The ten men wore uniforms that were painfully distinct from what the men already on site wore, which was interesting. An idea began to hatch in his mind, one that required Carlson to actually make an appearance.

The ten new arrivals did a quick security sweep that collided with the men and women of the original teams who were doing exactly the same thing. A quick argument ensued as two of what looked like the men in charge clashed over who would have jurisdiction over the site before they parted ways. Neither seemed to have had a clear victory.

At that moment, a man stepped out of the limo. He demanded attention with perfectly cut salt-and-pepper hair and an expensive suit. His demeanor was confident as he looked around before he retrieved a pair of sunglasses from his coat and put them on.

“Silver Fox alert,” Savage said with a small smile. “It looks like our target is in the area. Carlson is making a personal appearance here, folks!”

“How is that supposed to happen?” she demanded. “We were able to get you in and out of the Pegasus building back in Philly due to the fact that your bosses have some pull in how those buildings are run. You have no such advantage here.”