Power Play (Titus Black Thriller series Book 7) Read online

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  Other titles by R.J. Patterson

  Behind Enemy Lines

  Game of Shadows

  Rogue Commander

  Line of Fire

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  Honorable Lies

  Power Play

  State of Conspiracy

  Brady Hawk series

  First Strike

  Deep Cover

  Point of Impact

  Full Blast

  Target Zero

  Fury

  State of Play

  Seige

  Seek and Destroy

  Into the Shadows

  Hard Target

  No Way Out

  Two Minutes to Midnight

  Against All Odds

  Any Means Necessary

  Vengeance

  Code Red

  A Deadly Force

  Divide and Conquer

  Extreme Measures

  Final Strike

  Cal Murphy Thriller series

  Dead Shot

  Dead Line

  Better off Dead

  Dead in the Water

  Dead Man's Curve

  Dead and Gone

  Dead Wrong

  Dead Man's Land

  Dead Drop

  Dead to Rights

  Dead End

  James Flynn Thriller series

  The Warren Omissions

  Imminent Threat

  The Cooper Affair

  Seeds of War

  POWER PLAY

  A Titus Black Thriller

  R.J. PATTERSON

  For John, for his friendship

  and his infectious kindness

  CHAPTER 1

  Vaya, Russia

  TITUS BLACK EASED HIS rental car onto the side of the road and turned off the engine. After adjusting his earbuds, he checked the long stretch of the two-lane road behind him. It was clear, unlike the sky overhead. With the late afternoon sun blocked by the gathering storm clouds, Black knew he needed to complete his objective before night fell.

  “Did I lose my tail?” Black asked over his coms. “Because I don’t see anyone.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine at this point,” said Christina Shields, Black’s partner who was sitting at the Firestorm headquarters in Washington, D.C. “Too much cloud cover for me to tell anything now.”

  “So, I’m on my own?”

  “More or less,” she said. “I can keep tabs on any heat signatures for you, but that’s about it.”

  “Good to know. Wish me luck.”

  “Since when did Titus Black need luck?”

  Black huffed a laugh through his nose and got out of the car, the snow crunching beneath his feet. A gust of wind whipped across his face, confirming the fact that he was indeed in Russia in the middle of January.

  “Remind me again why I’m not playing tennis at a club in Florida,” Black said as he crossed the quiet road.

  “Because hitting a ball back and forth over a net isn’t your kind of excitement,” she said.

  “You have a point,” Black said. “But it’s in conditions like this that I start to question my sanity.”

  “I question your sanity all the time,” Shields said with a chuckle.

  Black stopped and glanced at his phone once more, refreshing the image of his target a final time before attempting to secure him. A picture of Sergei Kozlov flashed on the screen.

  Just a few months earlier, Kozlov had been locked up at a CIA black site, enduring hours of interrogation day after day. The Russian hacker had been accused of breaching U.S. military intelligence servers, and the agency was unsure just how much he knew or how he had penetrated all the state-of-the-art firewalls. But he had managed to escape one night when the prison lost power during a storm. By the time local CCTV came back online, Kozlov had vanished into the city. The CIA worked with Interpol to figure out where he had gone, but after a few weeks of poring over footage, they decided their effort was a futile one and attempted other means to locate him.

  Kozlov was eventually spotted through facial recognition software on a hijacked feed from Russia. And that was the reason Titus Black and the Firestorm team had been engaged in the operation. Sending in a CIA operative was too risky for diplomacy reasons. But an off-the-books operation required a black ops agent with a death wish. Get caught and there would be no acknowledgment of his existence, let alone a prisoner exchange to regain freedom. Though according to everything Black had heard, death was preferable to getting locked away in Moscow’s famed Lefortovo Prison. Duty and fear shared an equal role in driving him on this mission, and he enjoyed the adrenaline rush far more than he should have.

  The house was a simple one-story izba comprised of logs and set back approximately twenty meters from the road. There weren’t any immediate neighbors to speak of, save a small bungalow kitty-corner some hundred meters away.

  “Do you have visual on the target?” Shields asked.

  “Negative,” Black said softly as he peered into a side window. “But I can verify that if this isn’t Kozlov’s place, he’s got far too many computers for a normal household.”

  “I stil
l don’t have any heat signatures other than yours.”

  “Then he’s still in there somewhere.”

  Moments later, Black heard what sounded like wood slapping against wood. He darted around the side of the house in the direction of the noise. It was quickly followed by the whine of a snowmobile engine. A rooster tail of white powder rose from the back of the vehicle as it sped away.

  Black hustled toward the garage in search of another snowmobile to give chase.

  “I’ve got a heat signature now,” Shields said.

  “That’d be Kozlov and his getaway machine,” Black said before cursing under his breath.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He glanced at the ever-darkening sky. Snow started to fall as the waning minutes of daylight faded. “I didn’t expect to track the target through the snow at night,” he said before sighing.

  “Think of it as an opportunity to brush up on your wilderness skills.”

  “Yeah, well, I could do it on foot, but not for long. Who knows where he’ll stop.”

  “What do you need?” Shields asked.

  “I left all my winter survival gear at the hotel,” he said. “I packed it in my suitcase because I didn’t want to attract too much attention when I went through customs. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d need it.”

  “You know that getting cocky will get you killed, right?”

  Black grunted. “Killed or captured, though I’m not sure there’s much difference in this country.”

  “Well, I can follow the target until he stops, while you run back to the hotel and get all the gear you need. How’s that sound?”

  “You’re a lifesaver, Shields,” he said.

  “I try,” she said.

  Black couldn’t see her, but he knew she was wearing her trademark sly smile as she responded. “The fact that I’m still alive shows that you do more than just try.”

  “Always a first time for everything.”

  “You’re not exactly instilling me with a lot of confidence right now,” Black said as he hustled back to his vehicle.

  “You have enough confidence for the both of us. But if you don’t at least have a twinge of fear that makes you pause before charging into danger, you’re probably going to end up dead sooner rather than later.”

  “More encouragement from Christina Shields,” Black said as he turned the key, igniting the car’s engine. “Tony Robbins better look out, or he’s going to have some serious competition with you spewing all this positive thinking.”

  “Not trying to get a speaking platform to tell millions of people what they already should know,” she said. “Just trying to keep you alive. And I can assure you that my job is far more difficult than Tony Robbins’ conference speaking gig ever will be.”

  Black chuckled as he wheeled the car around in the direction of his hotel. “Send Kozlov’s coordinates to me when he finally stops running.”

  “Roger that. And good luck.”

  * * *

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Black approached the rundown hotel on the outskirts of Vaya. He leaned forward on the steering wheel to get a better look at the parking lot. His car’s headlights cut through the snow now flying sideways due to the storm’s stiff wind. His first cursory glance put him at ease that he was safe from a tail by FSB agents. But to be safe, he parked his vehicle in front of a room at the far end of the building.

  The Russian secret police weren’t following him as far as he knew, but all it took was one tip from a suspicious citizen and Black’s every move would be put under a microscope. As a precautionary measure to avoid needless attention, Black used his key to enter through a side door near the stairwell. He shook off the snow and crept up the stairs. Walking casually down the hall to his room on the third floor, he surveyed the area in case he needed an escape route. Nothing stood out to him, but he did see one less-than-desirable exit.

  He eased up to the door and then froze. Earlier in the afternoon when he left his room, he had placed a small string on the door handle, forming the thread into a heart shape. It went beyond the call of duty in good tradecraft, but he couldn’t waste the trick his younger sister had taught him when they were both kids. Now, his art piece lay sloppily draped over the handle. Someone had recognized what he’d done, but only after they’d knocked it onto the carpet. And the only type of person intuitive enough to even notice the string in the first place wasn’t who he wanted to see when he walked in his room.

  Black spun on his heels before breaking into a sprint down the hall. Before he got to the end, he heard the door click open and a man shouting for him to stop in Russian.

  Black glanced over his shoulder to see the man training his gun toward him with one hand while holding a radio with the other. Veering down the stairwell, Black hustled down a few steps before he noticed another Russian agent rushing up to meet him from the first floor. Black turned around and returned to the third floor where the man from inside his room was racing toward him.

  “What’s going on?” Shields asked over the coms. “Are you in trouble?”

  Black took a deep breath. “Say a little prayer for me, will you?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Washington, D.C.

  J.D. BLUNT SHUFFLED to a spot at the far end of the counter at Lincoln’s Waffle Shop. He removed the chewed cigar from his mouth and jammed it into his pocket. After taking off his coat, he hung it on the back of his chair and settled into his seat. He leaned forward on the counter and picked up a menu.

  “Good morning, Senator Blunt,” asked Reggie, the restaurant’s head cook. “Can I interest you in a waffle?”

  “Do we really have to do this every time I come in here, Reggie?” Blunt asked. “You even asked me earlier this week. And do you remember what I said?”

  Reggie cocked his head to one side and gazed upward out of the corner of his eyes. He stroked his chin as he appeared pensive. “I believe it was something to the effect of, ‘Hell, no, Reggie. You know I hate waffles. Why do you always ask me that?’”

  Blunt rubbed his forehead and squinted before responding. “That was verbatim, Reggie. Well done. Now, if you’d actually think about what that means instead of—”

  “Sir, my number one job besides serving you the best damn breakfast food in the city is to convince you to eat one of our world-famous waffles. And I do this all day long to every single person who walks through those doors. I’m not going to stop either. These waffles are that good.”

  Blunt slowly shook his head as he eyed Reggie. “Well, if that’s what I gotta do to make you stop, why not order a waffle?”

  Reggie’s eyes brightened. “Seriously?”

  “Hell, no, Reggie. You know I hate waffles. Now, give me some of your world-famous over-easy eggs with home fries and grits.”

  Reggie pointed at Blunt and smiled. “You almost had me, Senator. And one of these days, you’re gonna order a waffle.”

  Blunt chuckled. “If you believe that, you probably believe everybody in this town is here to make this country a better place instead of leveraging their position within the government for their personal gain.”

  “I wasn’t born that long ago, Senator, but it wasn’t yesterday,” Reggie said. “I’ll never believe that. Except for you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you,” Reggie said. “I think you’re here to make a difference. Either that or you’re stupid?”

  “And what makes you think that?”

  “Because you eat here whenever you’re in town instead of at one of those fancy places. That’s not the Washington way. You’re different.”

  “I’m just broke,” Blunt said.

  Reggie shook his head as he cracked two eggs. The griddle sizzled as the eggs hit the hot surface. “Something tells me that you’re lying. A broke man doesn’t tip like you do.”

  Blunt didn’t say anything as a wry grin leaked across his face. “I save up for the best short-order cook in the city.”

  Reggie laughed and returned to cookin
g Blunt’s breakfast. Their back-and-forth banter was interrupted by the sound of a chair dragging across the floor next to Blunt. He turned to see a familiar face.

  Adrianna Dixon removed her coat and draped it around the back of her seat before sitting down next to Blunt.

  “Two high-powered elected officials in this joint on the same day,” Reggie said. “If somebody sees this, they might start thinking I’m handing out lobbyist money in here.”

  Dixon sighed and leaned forward on the counter. “He’s a former elected official who does whatever the hell he wants. And I’ve introduced three bills aimed at targeting lobbyists. So, if anyone thinks lobbyist money is getting handed out now, they’re either drunk, high, or stupid.”

  “Stop describing my competitors’ customer base,” Reggie said as the corners of his mouth curled upward. “It’s just not nice.”

  Dixon pointed at Reggie and smiled. “Always with the quick comeback, Reggie.”

  “The usual, Mrs. D?” he asked as he slid Blunt’s breakfast in front of him.

  She nodded. “You know it.”

  Blunt salted his grits before looking at Dixon. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think this was planned. Either that or you’re stalking me.”

  “J.D., I’m still happily married, but you’ll be the first person I call if that somehow changes.”

  “Just my luck that the most beautiful woman in Alabama is taken,” he said before shoving a forkful of eggs into his mouth.

  “I was Miss Magnolia Pines, not Miss Alabama,” she corrected. “And I am twenty-four years younger than you, unless you’ve been tinkering with your Wikipedia entry again.”

  “Shhh,” Blunt said. “Don’t let my secret out. Making the ladies think I’m younger than I really am is the only way I think I’ll ever get another woman to go out with me.”

  “I won’t argue with you there,” she said.

  “So, Adrianna, what can I help you with?” he asked. “I think it’s safe to assume this isn’t a social call.”

  She sighed and reached into her briefcase before producing a large envelope. “I have something you need to see.”