Don't Order Dog (37 page)

∞

Sergeant Andrew Kearney scanned the top floor corridor of building 847 one final time before engaging the safety on his sniper rifle and rolling quickly out of view. The body of his target lying conspicuously in the entryway of the apartment would have to be dealt with, but that wasn’t what concerned him at the moment. He reached into his tactical vest and pulled out the small satellite phone that had been provided to him for the assignment. After tapping in the phone’s security code, the sergeant immediately opened the COMLINK application that enabled real-time communication between field grunts like himself operating anywhere in the world and the tactical commanders who authorized their missions.
It’s like text-messaging god himself
Kearney thought morosely as his fingers navigated through another authentication screen and punched in his message.

Identify Kearney 50473095
First target NEUTRALIZED at site
NO VISUAL on second target
> CONFIRM SITE INSPECTION

Less than a minute later, the response flashed onto his screen.

Kearney 50473095 confirmed
AFFIRMATIVE on request for site inspection
Proceed with caution
Assume second target in area
KILL ORDER STILL IN EFFECT
Authenticated 0091245

Kearney stared at the authentication code in the last line of the response and raised his wide brow in surprise. A four-month assignment as a liaison for a Colonel in Army Intelligence two years earlier had required him to be intimately familiar with authentication codes – particularly the first three digits that indicated the military division or government agency providing the order. Kearney knew a directive from authentication code 009 could have only come from one source – but this was the first time he’d seen one from this agency.
And a kill order no less
.

He shook his head at the strangeness of it.

The sergeant shoved the phone back into his vest and rolled his muscular, five-foot ten-inch frame back onto his stomach. Looking through his binoculars, he briefly noted the unchanged position of his first target, the body lying unceremoniously against the entryway wall. He’d been a far easier target than Kearney was expecting, especially considering the intelligence briefing that warned him of a highly trained terrorist.

In truth, the man had looked more like a rank amateur
, wandering the corridor of the target location in plain sight and hardly studying his surroundings before pulling out that tiny pistol –
what the hell was that thing?
– and kicking in the door of his intended victim. Kearney could still see the look on the man’s face after the first fatal shot, the way he had turned around and stared across the distance at him with that look of utter shock and… innocence? It was almost convincing.

Almost.  

But again, that wasn’t what concerned him. As the intel briefing and the last COMLINK message confirmed, the man wasn’t working alone. Somewhere in the area, if not quietly hidden away in the apartment across from him, was the second target – a tall, blonde-haired man who by all accounts should stick out like a sore thumb in this miserable complex full of underpaid Chinese workers. Sergeant Kearney hadn’t seen anyone even remotely matching that description since arriving on scene an hour earlier. As he scanned the building through the magnified field of his binoculars, the obvious question was repeating in his head.

Where the fuck is he?

Certain that his second target wasn’t going to make the same mistake as the first, the sergeant dismantled his sniper rifle, packed it in a small nylon case, and tucked it beneath an air vent on the roof of the building before quietly crouch-walking to the stairwell access door. Once in the stairwell, he paused briefly to make sure the magazine of his .40 caliber handgun was full before quickly moving down the stairs. Time was now a serious factor. He needed to secure the body of the first target before it was noticed by a passing tenant, while also staying fully alert for the second target. This, plus the fact that he didn’t have a teammate to act as a spotter while he was “moving blind” meant he needed to haul his ass up to the fifteenth floor of building 847 as quickly as possible. All while drawing as little attention to himself as possible.

He arrived at the ground floor and stepped purposefully out through the central corridor and across the small courtyard towards building 847. Luckily, with the factories
’ morning work shift now well underway, the massive compound of dormitories appeared as deserted as a ghost town. Seeing no one, Kearney double-timed it through the lower corridor of building 847 before moving quickly up the stairs.
 

∞
 

“You better start making so
me goddamn sense, Agent Coleman,” Director Preston said indignantly, dismissing the red-headed assistant that escorted Tom into his office with a petulant wave of his hand.

Tom nodded his head as he walked over to the Directo
r and dropped the letter he’d ripped from the wall of the saloon onto the desk in front of him.
“I think this guy has been playing us all along, sir,” he said as he reached down and pointed to the reference in the letter that had caused him to drive so recklessly back to the ICE offices. As the Director studied the page in front of him, Tom shoved his hands into his pockets and paced silently next to the large desk. His right hand found the small bottle of anti-bacterial lotion in his pocket, and he could barely resist the urge to stop and thoroughly disinfect his hands. 

Preston looked up and fixed his green eyes on Tom, his f
reckled face flush with anger. “So this guy makes a reference to a fucking movie with the words
Ice Man
Cometh
in the title, and you take that to mean he knows we’re after him?”

“Yes sir. It’s the title of a play, sir.”

“Jesus Christ,” Preston replied angrily as he shoved the letter back at Tom. “I don’t care if it’s a verse from the Koran. Your directive was to investigate the bartender, not the letters. Your first day back in the Department and you’re already ignoring my orders?”

“The bartender is nothing but a dead-end!” Tom shouted, snatching the letter from the Preston’s desk. “Look Director, if there’s anything I can say with confidence after studying these letters, it’s that this guy isn’t just writing love letters to a bartender in Flagstaff – he’s sending mess
ages to someone inside his team!” He held the letter in the air and slapped it irritably. “And as of right now, I’m absolutely convinced they know we’re after them!”

Preston spun his chair around and gazed through the window at the landscape of snow-covered cars in the parking lot. “That’s ridiculous,” he replied
flatly.

“What makes you so sure?”

Preston ignored Tom’s question as he stared out the window, the corners of his mouth twitching as he thought. Watching him, Tom had the growing sense the Director had information he was keeping from him. He decided to test his hunch.

“With all due respect, I’ve been doing this long enough to know when someone is withholding information from me, Director. Is there something you
need to tell me, sir?”

Preston spun around and faced Tom with a cold stare.

“Alright, Tom. You want full disclosure? How about this – we’ve been following a member of this terrorist organization since your brother-in-law’s little operation in Amsterdam.”

“Wait…
what
?”

“Did you really think I was just going to sit back and watch while one of my own agents helped the Langley boys win another victory? Not a chance, Tom. I placed an agent at the bar where your
friend Jeri sent her package in the hopes that someone just might show up to claim it.” He paused and folded his arms. “And guess what? Someone did.”

Tom blinked at the Director in confusion. “But how did you know about that package in the first place?”

Preston’s mouth curled into a tight frown. “I had you under surveillance,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Of course, that was several days ago when I was convinced you’d forsaken this department for the CIA. I’m sure you can understand.”

Tom held the Director’s stare
.
Of course!
he thought angrily.
You clever son of a bitch. You had that little teenage fucker following me from the moment I stonewalled you in my office.
He had the sudden urge to reach across the desk and punch the Director in the jaw. Then the full weight of the information struck him.

“Wait… someone picked up the package? Who was it?” 

The Director glanced up at Tom with a fleeting look of relief before grabbing a folder on his desk and flipping it open. “A tall, blonde-haired man – presumably American – between twenty-five and thirty years old. We have almost no information on him… not even a photo. Apparently he walked right up to the bar in Amsterdam after the package arrived and told the bartender every item that was inside the box. The bartender handed it over and moments later he was out the door.”

“Then what happened?” Tom asked.

“My agent tailed him to the airport and managed to follow him onto a plane to China. Unfortunately, we lost him in Beijing. I was just about to give up on this whole fucking mess until you walked into my office this morning with that address. And now you want me to believe they know we’re after them?”

Tom walked over and sat down wearily in one of the cha
irs in front of Preston’s desk. “Four nights ago, I watched a man run into a hotel in Amsterdam that was surrounded by the best trained men in the CIA and blow himself into a million little pieces – only to find out a few days later he’s alive and well in China. Alex Murstead refused to believe me when I called him last night and told him. But of course you already knew this since you were listening to my phone conversations, correct?”

Jack Preston shifted uncomfortably in his chair before nodding.

“Whoever this guy is –
whoever these guys are
– they’re unlike anything we’ve ever seen or gone up against.” Tom leaned forward and looked at Preston with a thin smile. “I don’t know who you sent to find these guys, but unless he’s one brilliant fucking agent, my guess is that he has no chance.”

Preston flipped the folder closed and leaned back in his chair. “And what do you suggest I do, Tom
? Pull him out? Let these guys kill another Petronus employee and then walk off into the sunset? This is probably the
only
chance we’re going to get for Chrissake! I gave him the address nearly eight hours ago. He checked in from the Dongying train station over an hour ago. He’s already on-site.”

To
m nodded his head reluctantly. “Which is all the more reason to give your agent a heads-up. It wouldn’t hurt for him to take extra precautions, would it sir?”

“Perhaps,” Preston replied. “A
ssuming he hasn’t found them already.”

Tom stood up
to leave. “Don’t take this the wrong way Director, but I hope for his sake he hasn’t. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some more letter reading to do.” He walked to the door, then turned and looked back at Preston sitting sullenly in his chair. “By the way, sir – do I know the agent you sent?”

Preston looked at him absently for a moment before giving him a smug smile. “I can’t say that you would, Tom.”

Tom nodded his head. “Right. Good afternoon, Director.”

Jack Preston waited patiently for Tom to walk out of his office before grabbing his cell phone and quickly dialing a number.
 

Sergeant Kearney moved cautiously down the fifteenth floor
corridor of building 847, the pistol in his right hand concealed under his tactical vest. Like the courtyard below, the building was eerily quiet; its tenant now absorbed by the surrounding factories. Reaching apartment 1556, the sergeant paused next to the open door and brought his handgun to his chest. He stood silently, listening intently for any noise within the dark interior. Hearing nothing, he stepped back, raised his handgun into position and stepped inside.

As a trained sniper with over forty successful special-ops missions under his belt and twenty-eight confirmed kills, Sergeant Kearney was familiar with nearly every form of tactical situation imaginable. His resume contained a wide range of expertly neutralized targets – a political figure enjoying his final course at a fine Italian restaurant, a vacationing drug czar playing on a jet-ski with his boyfriend in Thailand, a Congolese warlord raping a young girl in central Africa – all of them completed without so much as a scratch or a close call. The nearest he had ever come to a mission failure was an assignment two years earlier to neutralize an informant for a terrorist cell operating in the Philippines. The informant had been a beautiful twenty-something girl. Upon targeting her in his riflescope, Kearney had made a brief but nearly disastrous error – he’d looked at her as human. Had it been a short target window, he woul
d have likely blown the mission. Luckily he’d had just enough time to regain his composure and complete the shot. Regardless of the diversity among them, the sergeant’s victims had one thing in common –

None of them had ever seen him coming.

But as he stepped inside the dark interior of apartment 1556 with his handgun raised in front of him, Sergeant Kearney suddenly realized with the certainty of gut instinct that his luck was about to change.

He had barely leveled his gun on a man seated in front of him when a piercing, high-pitched scream erupted from the
nearby corner of the room. Kearney instinctively turned to his right, his eyes straining to see clearly in the dim light. A small black box that appeared to be a speaker stood on a table. Kearney began to move towards it when a sudden flicker of light coming from the seated man caught his attention. Unable to hear and barely able to see, the sergeant dropped to one knee and aimed his gun at the man’s chest. The muzzle of the handgun flashed to life as he placed four rounds through the man’s heart with lethal precision before rising to his feet and retreating backwards towards the safety of the door. Once there, he slowly swept the room with his handgun.

At that same moment, the high-pitched tone stopped.

Disoriented and nearly deaf from the noise, Kearney crouched in the entry of the apartment, watching intently for any other signs of movement. The body of the first target lay motionless next to him, a pool of dark blood collecting around the man’s ash-colored face. Even without clearly seeing the damage he’d inflicted, the sergeant knew the silhouetted man seated in front of him must also be dead.

So who was controlling the speaker?
   

Kearney had barely considered the question when a blow to the back of his head sent him tumbling forward into the apartment. An explosion of light filled his vision as his left temple slammed
violently against an unseen object in front of him. Stunned, the sergeant dropped his handgun and threw out his arms as he fell heavily to the floor. At that moment his training took over. Kearney rolled onto his side and quickly scrambled to his knees just as another direct blow – this time to his forehead – spun him painfully onto his back. As he struggled to get up, his assailant dropped his foot onto Kearney’s chest and pressed him hard against the ground. He groaned and opened his eyes to see a smiling, dark-haired man standing over him.

“Lie still,” the man said calmly in a clear American accent. He kneeled down and quickly wrapped a small plastic strap around the sergeant’s wrists and bound them tightly together, then fastened the strap to the
Kevlar collar of Kearney’s tactical vest.  

“Who the fuck are you?” Kearney replied, straining angrily against his bindings. Every movement of his body caused an explosion of pain in his head, and he could feel the warmth of his own blood running in a thick stream down his temple. The man leaned forward and pressed his foot harder against his chest until Kearney was unable to breathe.

“I said lie still.”

Realizing there was no chance of escape, Kearney finally conceded and dropped his head exhaustedly to the floor. He gasped for breath as the man finally removed his foot from his chest.

“That’s better,” the man responded. He pulled a small, pen-sized flashlight from his pocket and alternately shined the light into both of Kearney’s eyes. “I’m afraid I’m not in a position to answer your question right now, but I doubt it even matters. You’ve suffered enough blows to your skull to produce a really nice concussion. You’ll be lucky to remember anything I say.”

He put the flashlight away and leaned over the sergeant with a curious stare. “However, we do have some questions for you.”

Kearney watched in surprise as another man suddenly appeared from behind the man’s shoulder and flashed him a wide grin. Even in the dim light he could see that the second man was tall and muscular, with bright blue eyes and a tousle of short, blonde hair. As the two men gazed down at him, Kearney realized with a dreaded sense of certainty that his smiling captors were his two intended targets.

The blonde-haired man looked over at the body slumped against the wall next to him. “God, what a bloody mess
,” he said with an Australian accent as he turned and walked to the entry. Kearney listened as the front door was closed and locked. A second later the sergeant heard the click of a light switch and winced in agony as the interior was suddenly filled with bright light.

The dark-haired American removed a backpack from his shoulder before sitting down on the floor next to him. The sergeant tried once again to rise up, but the effects of the blows instantly brought on a nause
ating wave of disorientation. He gently laid his head back onto the cold concrete as the Australian walked past him and sat down on what Kearney could now see was a bright red couch in the center of the room. Strangely, the man completely ignored the chair next to him where the lifeless body of Kearney’s second victim still sat.

“Why are you here?” the American asked him as he reached into his backpack.

“Do you really expect me to answer that?” Kearney replied.

“Eventually, yes.” The American paused and smiled at something concealed in his bag. “Ah, here it is.”

“Fuck you. I’m not giving you
anything
… no matter what you have tucked away in that fucking backpack.”

“They always say that,” the Australian
man said in a flat, bored tone. “They always say ‘I’m not going to talk’. And then, about two minutes after the injection, they start weeping and carrying on as if you were their mother and they hadn’t seen you in twenty years.” He looked down at Sergeant Kearney and grinned dolefully at him with perfect white teeth. “But who knows? Maybe this one will end differently.”

“No,” his colleague replied. “It won’t.”

The sergeant barely had time to notice the small syringe pulled from the bag before the needle was plunged into his neck. The American watched Kearney with a cold, detached stare as he quickly depressed the plunger.

“I admit
, I’ve never injected sodium thiopental into a person suffering from a concussion or brain trauma, so it’ll be interesting to see what we end up with.” He removed the needle and pressed a piece of cotton firmly against the sergeant’s skin.

Kearney looked up into the dark eyes of the American and slowly shook his head. A
calming sensation immediately began to ripple outward from his neck across his body, erasing all pain in its wake. His skin tingled, his thoughts began to evaporate. As the American looked at his watch, Kearney dimly realized the sensation he was experiencing was not unlike being drunk and floating in a warm, still lake.

He looked up at the friendly-looking American man and smiled.
 

∞

He glanced again at his watch. “Two minutes.”

“How does he look?” Tall Tommy asked half-heartedly.

“Clinically speaking, he looks highly chemically induced.”

Tall Tommy leaned over and glanced at the serene face of the drugged sergeant sprawled acros
s the floor. “Nice work. I think you may have just discovered the cure for the common assassin.”

“You might be right
,” he replied, looking down at the sergeant.
“Okay, are we ready to play?”

The sergeant gazed up at him with glassy, dilated eyes.
“What are we playing?” he asked slowly.

“Twenty questions,” he replied, “starting with your name.”

“Okay.”

“
No, that was the first question. What is your name?”

“Oh,” the sergeant responded, blinking slowly. “My name is Sergeant Andrew Kearney
. United States Army, 2
nd
Division.”

“And why are you here, Sergeant Kearney?”

“My assignment was to… to neutralize two terrorists believed to be operating in this location.”

“Did you kill that man?” he asked, pointing towards the body slumped against
the wall.

“Yes,
” the sergeant replied.

“So he was one of your targets?”

“I thought he was, but… but now I’m not so sure. I think... I think
you
might be the intended target. You both look somewhat alike, and I didn’t have any… any pictures, you know?” The sergeant turned his head towards the couch and pointed his finger at Tall Tommy. “That man is definitely the second target. I was looking for him when I entered the apartment.”

The American suddenly grabbed the sergeant’s face and twisted it roughly towards the body on the floor. Kearney winced in pain.

“Did you know that man was an agent for the US Department of Homeland Security?”

“No… of course not,
” the sergeant replied slowly, his face contorting into a strange grimace. “I didn’t have any idea.”

From his seat on the couch, Tall Tommy leaned forward and let out a low whistle. “Now it’s getting interesting.”  

The American nodded his head. “Sergeant, I want to know who–”

The ring of a cell phone suddenly interrupted him. He looked inquiringly at the sergeant before realizing the sound was coming from somewhere else. Both he and Tall Tommy glanced over at the wall by the entry.

The cell phone rang again.

He immediately rushed over to the body of the slain agent and began feeling along his chest and legs. He found the phone inside the
man’s heavy jacket and pulled it free as it rang again. The small screen illuminated a single word as the caller’s identity.

DIRECTOR    

“Who is it?” Tall Tommy asked.

He turned and looked at his blonde-haired colleague, a slight grin on his face. 

“What?” Tall Tommy asked.

“I have an idea.”

“Alright, let’s hear it.”

He held a finger to his lips for silence before clicking the answer button on the phone.