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Brandon sped away from the house as fast as he could go while still being able to see through the rain without headlights, his truck’s wipers barely able to keep up with the deluge. The entire time, he remained braced for the thud of a bullet hitting the truck, his mind racing.
This was the only road to and from the house. If anyone was out there wanting to take a shot at him, this drive was like running a lethal gauntlet.
He felt way too exposed, but there was no other way, and he wasn’t sticking around to see whether the woman had been telling him the truth. He needed help. Rather than calling 911, he dialed Sheriff Buchanan directly instead, who answered on the fourth ring. He didn’t want a record of this call on official channels.
“Hey, Brandon.”
“I just got a call saying a hit team was coming for me,” he blurted, scanning the surrounding grassy areas on either side of the road. Beyond them, thick, dense forest obscured everything else in shadow. A sniper could easily be set up there right now, watching him through the scope. Shit.
“What? Where are you?” The sheriff’s voice was urgent.
“In the truck heading toward town. I don’t know who called me, but she said I had to get out because a hit team was en route to the house. She knew my name and address.”
“What the hell,” Noah muttered, and the voices that had been in the background faded, as though he’d stepped out of a crowded room. “Did you see anything?”
His skin was crawling, the sense of exposure acute. He couldn’t stop. Had to keep going and get past this bottleneck to the upcoming network of roads. “No, but the power went out the moment she hung up, and I wasn’t sticking around to see if she was right.”
“Yeah, no doubt. I’ll get a team together and head over there right now. Although the power did go out in your area a few minutes ago. I just got a call about it before your number popped up.” A door shut in the background, followed by rapid footsteps. “I’m on the way now.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you armed?”
“Yes.” Not that a pistol was gonna help much if a professional hit team was out here somewhere.
“Where are you headed?”
A heavy weight settled in the center of his chest. “I don’t know. But I gotta warn Travis and my sister in case they were headed back here. I’ll call you as soon as I’m in a safe location.”
“Copy that. Keep your head on a swivel.”
“I will.” He ended the call, immediately dialed Travis. “You still at your dad’s place?” he demanded the instant his buddy picked up.
“Yeah, why?” Travis asked, sounding puzzled.
“Stay there and whatever you do, don’t head home.”
“Why, what the hell’s going on?”
His jaw clenched as he kept scanning all around him. Almost to the turnoff now. “Noah’s deploying a team to the house because I just got a random call warning me that a hit team was on the way.”
“What?”
All conversation in the background ceased abruptly. “I don’t know if it’s legit or not, but—”
“Where are you?”
“Almost at the turnoff to town.”
“Come straight here.”
He’d known Travis would say that. “Nope. Not putting you all at risk too.” Everyone there had gone through enough trauma and shit of their own without him adding more drama and danger.
“Fuck you, Whit, get your ass up here right now or my dad and I’ll come looking for you.”
Shit. Travis and Boyd would do it too, putting themselves in more danger for his sake. “I...”
“Are you being followed?”
“I don’t know yet.” The back of his neck was prickling like hell though.
“I mean it, get up here.”
He hedged. “Only if I feel like it’s safe for you guys.” He wouldn’t get a sense of that until he was certain no one was trying to follow him. “Look, I gotta go. Just...”
“Like I said, either you show up or we come after you ourselves and drag you here. I’ll give you twenty minutes. We’ll be waiting. Hear me?”
“I hear you.” He still wasn’t going up there unless he was sure they would be safe.
The prickling at his nape subsided a bit once he reached the turnoff. Instead of going through town he turned left at the bottom of the hill, heading west up another one toward the coastal highway that linked the string of little seaside towns along the coast together.
Not seeing anyone behind him, he turned into a residential neighborhood and wound his way up and down the streets, exiting on the far side before heading for the highway. Still no sign of a tail.
He exhaled in a rush, allowing himself to relax a fraction, still trying to process everything and unable to shake the feeling that he’d just made a narrow escape. Although, depending on who he was dealing with here, there was a chance they could be tracking his cell phone.
At the highway he turned right and headed south on the ridge above Crimson Point. Two miles down the road, he turned off and started weaving his way up into the hills to the southeast of town, watching around him every moment.
Civilization began to thin out quickly the higher his truck climbed. Subdivisions and neatly trimmed lawns gave way to wide swaths of thick forest on either side of the road, the narrow asphalt strip turning to gravel.
Only when he was certain no one was following did he make the final turn. A minute later, to the left he spotted the lights of Boyd’s place filtering through the trees, and pulled into the long, curving driveway. Warm, golden light made the windows along the front of the two-story wooden house glow, slanting over the floor of the wraparound verandah.
Expelling a deep breath, he passed by the house and drove around back to park it out of view, just in case. Travis and Boyd were both striding toward him across the neatly cut lawn as he climbed out of the truck. Boyd was moving really well considering he’d nearly died after being shot just a few weeks ago.
“You all right?” Travis asked.
He nodded, still shaken. “My tail was clear.” Both men stopped part way across the lawn and watched him for a long moment with practically identical expressions. It was eerie, how much they looked alike. Similar features, almost the same height and builds.
“Come inside, son,” Boyd said, the low command full of the authority he radiated after spending decades serving as a Delta Force operator.
Not knowing where else to go, he did as he was told. His sister met him at the door with a big hug. “Oh my god, I’m so glad you’re okay.”
He stiffened for an instant, the tension of it all still humming through him, then he softened and squeezed her tight. He and Ker had always been pretty close, but even more so the past few weeks. Ever since she had nearly been killed and he’d been scared at how close he’d come to losing his only sibling.
“Glad you’re okay too.” It terrified him to think of what would have happened if the threat was real and he hadn’t been able to warn them in time.
“Come sit,” Boyd’s girlfriend Ember urged, ushering them into the living room portion of the great room where two massive leather couches were positioned in front of the floor-to-ceiling river rock fireplace. A wood fire blazed inside it, casting a warm, cozy feeling over everything that he desperately needed right now.
He dropped into the corner of one couch. Kerrigan immediately sat next to him, curling her legs up beneath her to watch him with a worried look in her eyes. Travis sat on her other side, while Boyd and Ember took the other couch across from them.
Boyd held a tablet on his lap. “I’m watching the security feeds on this. If anyone comes onto the property, we’ll know.”
“Good.”
“What’s going on, Whit?” Travis asked in a low voice, a hint of annoyance in his tone. “Tell us everything, straight up.”
Brandon mentally groaned. But Travis was right to be annoyed at him. Brandon had been hiding a lot of things about this building situation, thinking he was protecting the people he loved. He’d never imagined things getting so out of control so suddenly.
“Everything I say stays in this room,” he began. There were things he couldn’t say for security reasons, since the military had deemed many of the details of his captivity in Yemen as classified. “And if you’d rather not hear it, I won’t blame anyone for leaving the room now, before I start.”
No one moved. Four pairs of eyes remained riveted to him as they waited.
Taking a deep breath, he reluctantly told them everything he could, hoping he wasn’t making yet another mistake. “The people who captured me were interested in a company named Graystone. I’d never heard of it, but they knew details, and showed me what they claimed to be evidence of criminal activity committed by Graystone contractors over there.”
He’d never forget those images as long as he lived. No amount of mental bleach could ever get rid of them. “They kept hammering me for intel I didn’t have.”
Beating him hadn’t made him talk, because he hadn’t known anything. Same with sleep deprivation, hunger and cold. “Eventually they got frustrated and gave up. And I knew that if I didn’t escape right then, it was over for me.”
Without a doubt they would have killed him that night. To prevent him from telling anyone about what he’d seen and heard. And because they’d believed he was a lying piece of American shit, involved with the crimes they’d shown him photographs of.
He swallowed, the sound loud in the silent room, the quiet broken only by the soothing crackle of the fire in the hearth and the sound of the rain on the roof. “I disclosed everything I knew at the debriefing at base when I first arrived back Stateside, and no one said a damn thing about Graystone. But people in that room knew that name and what it meant. I could tell.”
Military officials, CIA officers and government personnel. They’d known. And yet they had remained silent, leaving him to wonder if any of what he’d seen and heard was real.
Or worse, that it might all be true.
“They didn’t say anything, not even when I asked them point blank. But I couldn’t let it go. So I started doing my own digging once I got home. Except none of the guys I contacted wanted to talk to me. They all stonewalled me. And that made me even more convinced there was some kind of cover-up. Then, out of the blue right after Kerrigan was released from the hospital, I got an email from an anonymous source.”
He paused, looked at his sister. “Containing a document confirming that your law firm was representing Graystone, specifically involving an incident from January 17th of this year. An incident that alleged the company was responsible for crimes against civilians in Yemen. Including murder.” Maybe even mass murder.
Kerrigan drew in a sharp breath. “Why didn’t you say anything?” she demanded, frustration and hurt burning in her turquoise eyes.
“Because I was afraid it might put you in more danger. You know the FBI found files relating to it on Beth Ayer’s computer, but obviously they didn’t tell us what they contained.” It was infuriating. He’d been captured and beaten, would have been killed because of whatever Graystone had done, and yet all he got in return was a wall of silence.
“And what about the call tonight?” Travis prompted, wrapping his arm around Kerrigan’s shoulders.
“Again, totally out of the blue. Florida area code. I wasn’t going to answer, but then texts started coming in, warning me that it was an emergency, and that the caller had sent me that file. I only picked up to see if I could find out who it was.”
“And do you have any idea?”
“No, but it was a woman. Hint of a British accent maybe. She didn’t say much, so it was hard to tell. Only that there was a hit team on the way, and I needed to get the hell out. I bugged out and called Noah, then came here.”
“So this is definitely connected to Graystone,” Ember said.
“Has to be.”
Next to her, Boyd’s expression hardened. “Couple of my guys did stints for Graystone a few years ago when they first got out of the military.” His eyes shifted to Kerrigan. “Including Callum.”
“I love Callum, he’s one of the best guys we have at the firm,” she said, referring to Crimson Point Security, a personal protection and security company here in town that she’d just started with as an HR manager. She shook her head, her expression adamant. “No way he would have been involved in anything illegal.”
“No,” Boyd agreed. “But he’ll know things about the company and the guys who might have been potentially involved.”
“Think he’d talk to me?” Brandon asked. “Because no one else I’ve tried will.”
Boyd dipped his chin. “I’ll call him.”
“Thanks.” He ran a hand over his face. “Then I guess for now I sit back and wait to hear from Noah.” He couldn’t go back to the house now. None of them could.
“The FBI’s gonna get involved as soon as he reports this,” Travis said, saying what Brandon had already been thinking.
He nodded. He was concerned about government corruption that might include people within the intelligence community and possibly the FBI, but he was in over his head and needed help from a powerful law enforcement agency. The FBI was his best shot.
“In the meantime,” Ember said, getting up to retrieve the laptop sitting on the kitchen table. “Let’s do a little more homework on our own.”
She came back to perch on the edge of the couch closest to him, all her attention on the screen as she typed something, then pushed her dark-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose. She was an experienced, highly sought-after software designer and coder, and general tech wizard.
The look in her eyes was absolutely savage as she met his gaze over the top rims of her glasses. “Give me the Florida number that called you. We need to figure out who this mystery woman is.”
****
Crouched on the forest floor deep in the woods above the target house, Val watched the screen in front of him, and the scene unfolding over a mile away.
Cops. At least five of them. Patrol cars blocked the road leading to the house, lights flashing.
The op was officially dead.
“Someone tipped him off,” Matthias growled beside him.
Val didn’t respond. But yeah, someone had warned the target that they were coming. Which meant it had to be an insider. That surprised him. At the same time, he couldn’t deny a measure of relief at knowing the target had escaped before they’d arrived.
“Who the fuck was it? No way it was Lawrence. You think it was Chris?”
“Dunno.” And it didn’t really matter at this point. “Let’s go.”
They both hoisted their packs onto their backs and started northwest. Val used the toggles on the controller to pilot the little drone back. It was small and quiet, with a powerful camera and infrared imaging. On a still day it would have been hard for anyone at the target house to hear or see it. In this storm, there was no way anyone would have noticed it.
Rain fell between the towering cedars and firs as they moved, dripping off their gear. Minutes later Val heard the faint hum of a motor. He glanced up, the thermal imaging on his NVGs picking up a faint heat signature over the trees above them.
He flew the drone through a gap between the branches, retrieved it and packed it away for next time.
“You gonna report it?” Matthias asked.
“Not yet.” Not until they were safely away.
Soon he could hear the roar of the sea mixing with the howl of the wind as it gusted between the thick tree trunks. A few minutes later they reached the end of the trail, found the ropes they’d anchored into the cliff. Their inflatable boat sat on the rocks where they’d left it eighty feet below.
They hooked their harnesses to the rope and rappelled their way down, the wind and slippery conditions making it even more dangerous. But a water insertion and extraction point was their only option to avoid detection.
They cut the rope, got the boat into the water and fought to paddle it free of the rocks. Huge waves crashed over them, sluicing them with icy water as they struggled out into the surf. Finally, they were far enough out to start the motor.
Val moved to the middle of the boat while Matthias sat at the stern and steered southwest to where they’d left their vehicle. He pulled out his satellite phone and called the emergency contact number. When the digitized voicemail picked up, he left a brief message.
“Target burned. Mission aborted.” He ended the call and put the phone away as they raced over the rough water.
Hunching deeper into his jacket to ward off the freezing wind and rain, he thought of his son. Of how he would do anything to protect him. Including taking out his boss to get himself out of this mess.
He already knew what the response to his message would be. This mission wasn’t over. His hunt had only just begun.
