Against All Enemies (7 page)

“Stop!” Haynes shouted. He was way too loud because he wanted witnesses to know that this was not a fight he’d picked. “I don’t want to hurt you!”

The man stopped forward progress, but his arms moved in a blur. A stubby sawed-off pistol-grip shotgun appeared from under his coat and he swung it up toward Haynes. The attacker said nothing.

Haynes pulled the trigger—there was no squeezing the little pistol’s heavy trigger—and the pistol bucked. Blinded by the muzzle flash, he fired again, two shots in two seconds. Homeless people and pedestrians screamed and scattered, but the raggedy man in his sights just stood there.

If the shotgun had gone off, Haynes hadn’t heard it—and he didn’t feel any holes in his gut. But he also saw no holes in his attacker. The man wobbled a bit, seeming to have difficulty raising his shotgun again.

Haynes considered taking another shot, but then the attacker listed to his left and fell like a tree onto the grass.

Consumed by decades-old training, Haynes dropped his aim to the low-ready position and scanned left and right, searching for additional threats. Seeing none, he pivoted a one-eighty and scanned for threats that might be behind him. In his immediate vicinity, he saw only people on the ground or running away. In the farther vicinity, a few clueless Metro riders continued their casual stroll in his direction.

No one else seemed to be posing a threat. Instinctively aware that he had only five shots left if bad things happened, he shifted the pistol to his left hand, and with his right, he pulled his cell phone from its pocket inside his jacket.

This was going to be a long night.

Chapter Five

S
ecurity Solutions, Inc., was more than an official cover for Jonathan’s covert activities—although it was certainly that. Renowned as a high-end private investigation firm, Security Solutions operated out of the top floor of a converted firehouse in Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia—along the Northern Neck of the Potomac River—that also served as Jonathan’s home, which took up the first two floors.

Security Solutions worked miracles for some of the biggest corporate names in the world, but for the most part, those investigations bored Jonathan to tears. As owner and CEO, he had to sign the checks and sit through the update meetings, but he lived for the juice of the 0300 missions—those jobs that separated good guys from the bad guys who had taken them hostage. These missions tested skills that he had learned at great taxpayer expense during his years in the United States Army and its most secret covert Special Operations unit. Once it was in your blood, it was there to stay.

The covert side of the business had no name, and did not officially exist, though given the talent he hired for the overt side, some of those brilliant minds had to wonder what went on beyond the perpetually guarded door to The Cave, the section of the office’s footprint where Jonathan’s and Boxers’ offices were located, along with that of Venice Alexander. (It’s pronounced Ven-EE-chay, by the way, and if you don’t have time in your schedule for a long lecture, you’d best not get it wrong a second time.) Nearly nailed as a felon in her younger years for causing mischief with her computer skills, Venice was now Jonathan’s hacker-in-chief, and she’d never let him down.

At Jonathan’s request, they’d gathered this morning in the War Room, the teak conference room within The Cave that Jonathan had stuffed with every techno-toy that Venice ever requested. Jonathan didn’t even try to understand what most of it did. Venice sat at what Jonathan called the captain’s station. Located at the far end of the rectangular conference table from the massive 106-inch projection screen, her spot was adorned with multiple keyboards, computers, and monitors—and maybe even a coffeemaker, as far as Jonathan knew. He might be the boss, but only a lunatic with a death wish would touch Venice’s toys.

The other seven seats around the table had their own computers and monitors, too, but only Venice could patch them to the main screen, which currently displayed two pictures of Dylan Nasbe. The one on the left showed him kitted up for duty in Afghanistan, his face all but obscured by an uncontrolled growth of beard, while the one on the right was his formal Army portrait—the one that would have been shown on the news if he’d been off’d in combat. Universal camouflage ACUs (Army Combat Uniforms), thick neck, square jaw, tan Rangers beret set just so.

“How come you guys never smile in these photos?” Venice asked.

“Because we’re killing machines,” Jonathan said without dropping a beat. “Machines don’t smile.”

“So, that explains Boxers,” she said.

“Hey,” Big Guy said. He’d been concentrating on stirring his coffee. “Is that really how you want this meeting to start?” He flashed a ridiculous, slightly frightening pantomime of a happy face. “Is that better?”

“You said something about invading South America again,” Venice said. “Is this gentleman the reason why?”

“He is.”

“Well, at a glance, I’ve got to tell you that he looks like he can fend pretty well for himself.”

“It’s not an oh-three hundred mission,” Jonathan said. He took ten minutes to fill her in on the details she’d missed yesterday afternoon.

While she listened, Venice pulled up a map of the world and made it spin to the Western Hemisphere, and from there zoomed in until Venezuela, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba filled the screen. When Jonathan finished, she said, “So, let me get this straight. One guy is hiding out somewhere in this general area. What is that, only five percent of the world’s land mass?”

“I think that’s high,” Boxers said. “I say three percent.” This time, his smile was genuine.

“It makes the most sense that he would be in Venezuela,” Jonathan said. “I don’t see Boomer defecting to the Cubans, Jamaica is too full of tourists, and no one in their right mind would hole up in Haiti.”

“Plus, the Cubans are about to be our friends again,” Venice said.

“And there’s that,” Jonathan agreed.

“It’s easy to live like a king in Haiti,” Boxers said.

Jonathan coughed out a chuckle. They’d spent some time in Haiti a few years ago while in service to Uncle, and even the presidential palace was a dump in comparison to other such accommodations in the world—and that was before it was devastated by an earthquake. “I’m gonna trust my gut on this one,” he said. “He’s not in Cuba.”

“How are you going to narrow it down?” Venice asked. “I mean seriously, you can’t just go on a random search of the Caribbean.”

Jonathan had already thought this through overnight. “I need you to pull up what you can on Boomer’s family,” he said.

Venice’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my God, Dig. They’re going to freak out if they see you again.” Jonathan had rescued Christyne Nasbe and her son, Ryan, a while ago, in a particularly violent shootout. “Didn’t Dylan tell you himself that they were having a hard time adjusting?”

“Yes, he did,” Jonathan said. “But that was before he went rogue and started killing CIA assets. That’s kind of a rule changer.”

Venice’s shoulders sagged as the reality washed over her. “That poor boy,” she said. “How much can one family take?”

Jonathan bristled. “There’s a place up the hill that’s filled with kids who show an amazing ability to adapt to adversity,” he said. Resurrection House—the place up the hill—was a school Jonathan had founded anonymously as a residential facility for the children of incarcerated parents.

“Point taken.” A few more keystrokes. “She’s still in Fayetteville. She rents an apartment.” Fayetteville was the home of Fort Bragg, which was the home of the Unit headquarters.

“Is she working?”

Venice shot him a look. “Give me a minute.”

“Take your time,” Jonathan said. “I don’t mean to rush.”

She rattled off a few more keystrokes, and then punctuated her work with a triumphant finger-poke to the keyboard. “Time!” she said. She pointed to the big screen with her forehead. “There it is. She’s got a job at a lawyer’s office.”

“Really?” Boxers said. “She’s not with the Unit?” The elite Special Forces organizations had a long-standing tradition of protecting their own. Many an administrative job was held by a son or daughter or wife of a fallen or retired operator.

“Sad, isn’t it?” Venice said. “She moved off-post about three months ago. Ryan is in a public high school down there.”

Of all the news Jonathan had heard that contradicted his memories of Dylan Nasbe, this was the most damaging. It took a lot to reach the status of
persona non grata
within the Unit. The only cases he knew of personally were assholes who took secrets public—and with one notable exception, all of those assholes had been Navy SEALs.

“Is it a good job?” Jonathan asked.

Venice laughed. “Good Lord, I wish I had the skills you think I do,” she said. “I will send her apartment information to your GPS.”

“Thank you.”

Venice stopped typing and stared at her screen for a few seconds before giving Jonathan a scowl and leaning back in her Aeron chair.

“What?” he said.

“What makes you think she’s going to tell you anything?” Venice asked. “What motivation could she possibly have to help you close the loop on her husband?”

“We’re kind of her best bet,” Boxers said.

“Silence seems like a very viable option,” she countered.

“Only at first glance,” Jonathan said. “I believe Roleplay when he talks about the Agency wet-work yay-hoos breaking their necks to kill him. If Christyne stays silent, she only helps the killers.”

Venice wasn’t buying. “That’s what
you
say. I don’t doubt that you’re right, but how will she know that? The last time she saw you—”

“We damn near died saving her,” Boxers said.

Venice went back to her keyboard. “I’m just saying that if I were her, based on what you shared about that night in the mountains, any vision of you is going to be pretty hardwired into bad times. I don’t see that as a basis for great trust and sharing.”

“Then I just need to be convincing,” Jonathan said.

Venice looked back to him again. “I can see it now,” she said. “Hi, Christyne. Last time I saw you, I was pulling you out of a river of blood, but now I want you to help me save your husband from a different river of blood.”

“I think I’ll use different words,” Jonathan said.

“Of course you will,” Venice said. “But will she hear them? And what about that boy? How are you planning to deal with his trauma?”

Jonathan saw the precipice of his patience approaching. “You’re treating this as if it’s a social visit, Ven. It’s going to be an
awkward
visit. Our past history notwithstanding, there’s the inherent awkwardness of Boomer betraying the nation he was sworn to protect.”

“If that is, in fact, what he did,” Venice said.

Jonathan conceded that part of her point. He still could not wrap his head around the notion that Dylan would do such a thing, but neither could he ignore the evidence that had been presented to him.

“Let me throw something into the debate,” Boxers said. “Suppose Roleplay is just friggin’ lying to us? Suppose Dylan never did anything remotely like the things he says he did, and this is just some kind a witch hunt they’re wanting us to take point on?”

In all candor, Jonathan had not considered that possibility, at least not at that scale. He expected some of the details to be incomplete or misrepresented, but not the entire incident. “Why would he do that?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It wouldn’t be the first time Stanley’s lied to us.”

Without question Stanley Rollins’s association with the truth was tenuous—perhaps even adversarial. But a lie of this magnitude—involving a fellow operator—would be of a scale that Jonathan could barely comprehend. “No,” Jonathan said. “Rollins is an ass, but he’s an ass who saved our lives. He came to us on this. I don’t buy that he would be that dismissive of our safety.”

Boxers raised his eyebrows and leaned back further into his seat. “I’m just sayin’ . . .”

“And I’m just saying we made a commitment.”

“Trust, but verify,” Big Guy said.

“Always,” Jonathan conceded. “And Ven, if it helps, I’ll plan my visit to Christyne to make sure that Ryan is nowhere to be found. I’ll do it during school hours.”

Venice said nothing, but he saw the smile. It disappeared as her computer dinged, and her attention was diverted to another screen. “Huh,” she said. “Don’t you know Senator Haynes Moncrief?”

Jonathan nodded. They went way back. They were in Ranger school together, but Haynes hadn’t made the cut for the Unit. Now he was a bigwig in the United States Senate. “Yeah, why?”

“I got an alert from ICIS,” she said. Pronounced EYE-sis, the Interstate Crime Information System was a largely unknown post-9/11 system that was put in place through funds distributed by the Department of Homeland Security to keep various jurisdictions informed of criminal investigations real-time. “He was arrested last night for discharging an illegal firearm in DC.”

Jonathan recoiled. “Discharging . . . What, was he shooting at streetlights or something?”

Venice read a little more. “No, he was defending himself against an alleged attack.”

“What’s an
alleged attack?
” Boxers asked, leaning on the words. “Seems to me somebody is attacked or they’re not.”

“I’m just reading you what I see,” Venice said. “It says here that the man he killed had a sawed-off shotgun on him, but that it hadn’t been discharged. The senator shot him twice in the chest and killed him.”

“Haynes always was a good shot,” Boxers said.

“Who attacked him?” Jonathan asked. “Was it an assassination attempt like that other congressman, or a random street crime?”

Venice read some more. “The record is still new, so it may be too early to know much for sure, but it seems to be leaning toward the senator as the aggressor.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Jonathan said. “He’s the Senate minority leader. Not exactly the profile of an active street shooter.”

“Do you want to know what ICIS says or not?” Venice snapped.

Jonathan and Boxers exchanged looks.
Whoa.