The Reaper (The Phoenix Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  Reaper nodded. “The real question is—do you?”

  “He was part of Special Forces in Afghanistan and now he’s being hunted. And he doesn’t know why.”

  “He knows why,” Reaper said. “Why do you think he ran away from you? You’re going to start asking questions and life is going to be very uncomfortable for him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Reaper chuckled. “I’m not going to do your job for you, Hawk. You have to figure that out for yourself. But he’s not innocent, not by a long stretch. And neither were the other men in that group that I eliminated.”

  “You killed them,” Hawk said. “They had wives. Whatever they’d done, it was in the past. Their lives were moving on. They were building families, legacies.”

  “Just because they’d moved on didn’t mean that justice should’ve been foregone.”

  Hawk stood. “I thought this was just about a paycheck for you, not about justice.”

  “Everyone killing has been justified in one way or another.”

  “Eddie Tyson was innocent.”

  “And he’s not dead either, at least as far as you know.”

  “Dead or rotting in a prison in North Korea—what’s the difference?”

  Reaper jerked forward, extending his arms to their tethered limit. His heart rate started to rise before he leaned back in his bed.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time—who are you working for?”

  Reaper closed his eyes, squeezing them shut. “I have a contact at The Pentagon. That’s all I know.”

  “Does he work for The Alliance?”

  Reaper opened his eyes. “What part of that’s all I know did you not understand?”

  “If you’re willing to work with me, I can help you out here.”

  Reaper shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t know how powerful these people are. They’re going to kill me just for talking to you.”

  “They didn’t kill you last time you were captured. What makes this time different?”

  “Because they told me if it happens again, they’d send someone to clean up my mess.”

  Hawk sighed and paced around the bed. “They’re not going to get to you in here.”

  Reaper looked at Hawk. “I need you to do something for me, okay?”

  “What?”

  “I have a white pickup truck parked on the lower parking deck at Pike’s Place Market,” Reaper said. “There’s a box that I want you to deliver to my son.”

  “That sounds like a trap if there ever was one.”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that to you,” Reaper said. “Like you said, if I wanted you dead, you would’ve been dead a long time ago—and vice versa. But it’s not going to matter this time. I’ll be lucky to survive the night.”

  “This place is under surveillance and there are two FBI agents outside. Everyone going in or out of here has to be vetted.”

  “They have their ways, Hawk. And the sooner I make peace with that, the sooner I can make sure that you fulfill my last request. Let Charlie know I love him and miss him. There’s account information in my wallet so he has enough for college one day or whatever he wants to do with it.”

  “Okay, I can do that for you,” Hawk said. “But I still want you to talk with the feds. We can work something out.”

  “Oh, I doubt that. You see, the truth is—”

  Reaper heaved and gasped for breath. He tried to say something, but no words came out. Hawk ran into the hallway and called for the nurses, who were already rushing toward the room. His pulse was weak and by the time the medical personnel gathered around him, Reaper had flatlined.

  A doctor came in and placed paddles on Reaper’s chest in an effort to resuscitate him. For the next three minutes, they worked frantically to revive him but failed.

  “Call it,” the doctor finally said.

  The nurse read the time of death aloud, while another nurse recorded it.

  Hawk cursed as he kicked at the chair in the corner of the room. The mood turned somber, but Hawk rushed up to one of the nurses and asked where the previous nurse was who came into the room.

  “What nurse are you talking about?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hawk said. “The one who came in here fifteen minutes ago. Shoulder-length brown hair, green eyes.”

  “I’m not sure who you’re talking about,” the woman said.

  “Denise over there was responsible for the rounds on this half of the hall. Nobody else was scheduled to come in here.”

  Hawk ran over to Denise. “Did anyone else fill in for you a few minutes ago when checking on this patient?”

  Denise shook her head. “I wasn’t scheduled to come back down here for another twenty minutes.”

  Hawk cursed under his breath as he walked away.

  How did I miss it?

  Hawk raced down to the security room and banged on the door. The hospital’s head of security listened to Hawk as he explained what had happened.

  They sat down and started to review the footage on that floor for the past hour. Just before the time Reaper coded, the cameras in the area went dark. The security head scrubbed the video ahead five minutes before the picture returned to normal.

  Hawk slammed his fist on the desk and growled in frustration.

  CHAPTER 35

  Los Angeles

  BIG EARV LEANED BACK in his chair across from Morgan’s desk. He tossed a stress ball in the air, trying to get it as close to the ceiling as possible without touching it.

  Morgan walked in and dumped a stack of documents on top of her filing cabinet.

  “Why do you always do that?” she asked.

  “It’s all about control,” Big Earv said. “It’s a good discipline.”

  “That’s not discipline. That’s muscle memory.”

  “Yes, but it’s a metaphor. How close can you go to the edge without going over?”

  “That sounds like a bad public service announcement for teenagers.”

  Big Earv chuckled. “Everybody wants to push the envelope, but you eventually get caught. Learning when to lay off is the peak of discipline. You go until you shouldn’t go any more.”

  “Does this have anything to do with what you wanted to talk about?” she asked.

  “As a matter of fact, it does.”

  “Good because I’d like to put this whole Tony Vella mess in the rearview mirror.”

  “Likewise,” Big Earv said. “However, not just yet.”

  She sat down and narrowed her gaze. “What do you mean not just yet?”

  He rubbed his freshly-shaven head and winced. “I get you. We had a mole. We thought we flushed him out. But he’s still out there. And now I want to keep this whole charade going a little while longer. You want to get back to normal operations around here. I understand.”

  “But?”

  “You see, I think it’s important that we know who we’re dealing with. There’s information we can feed them, maybe even take advantage of what’s going on here. It’s not really a but for me. It just makes sense.”

  Morgan folded her arms and sighed. “You see that mess on top of my filing cabinet over there?”

  Big Earv nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I don’t like that,” she said as she leaned forward. “I need to get back to the way things were. This is stressing me out, almost moreso than simply having a mole run around this office. I don’t like having, in essence, two different operational procedures—what we’re actually doing, recorded in analog, versus our fake missions saved on our servers.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Then I need you to understand that I don’t like working twice as hard to do the same thing as what I was doing.”

  “I’m right there with you. However—”

  “You realize that however and but are from the same grammatical family.”

  “Yet people get different feelings when they hear each of those words.”

  “Not me,” Morgan said. “I f
ind both of them as something somebody says to build a pretext to go against my orders.”

  Big Earv resumed tossing the stress ball in the air. “Wouldn’t you rather leverage this situation than simply rushing to deal with it?”

  Morgan leaned back in her chair and eyed him closely. “How long have you known me?”

  “Four, maybe five, years.”

  “And during all that time, did I ever strike you as the kind of person who would seek to leverage information over someone rather than just getting the job done as quickly as possible?”

  “Typically, people in charge never think that way.”

  “And here you are, trying to get me to agree to do this. If I’m going to play this game, I need to know if the benefits are going to outweigh the rigamarole I’ll have to ask this staff to put up with.”

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” he said. “I have a way we can test out my theory.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “In our next meeting, I’d like for you to announce to the staff that we’re sending one of our agents to Africa to meet with one of our informants, Ibrahim Kuti.”

  “Kuti is second in command with Boko Haram,” she said. “Would anybody believe that the heir apparent in that terrorist organization would be an informant for us?”

  “I’ve got Mia populating our servers with supposed intel that he’s provided for over the past year leading to strikes on Boko Haram all across Africa. If anyone were to see the evidence she’s in the process of creating, it would appear very credible.”

  “Okay, I’m still listening.”

  “We find out through intelligence sources where he’s going to be and stage a meeting. Only, we never send anyone. We convince our mole that Kuti is the problem and that he’s planning on handing over plenty of information in order to gain asylum in the United States.”

  “For that kind of betrayal, someone will take him out.”

  Big Earv grinned. “Exactly. This is what I’m talking about. We let them do the dirty work for us, destroying themselves from within. We’ll leverage their demand for unquestioned loyalty as a way to keep our agents out of harm’s way while still accomplishing some of the Magnum Group’s objectives.”

  Morgan let out a deep breath and shook her head. “You know what, Big Earv?”

  “What?”

  “You continue to surprise me,” she said. “For a former Secret Service agent, you think like some of the best CIA operatives I know of.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. However—”

  “There’s that word again.”

  He forced a smile. “Consequently, there are risks involved with this plan, starting with the fact that the mole could find out that we didn’t believe him and that we’ve been playing him.”

  “And then what? He bombs our facility? He rats us out to the press?”

  Big Earv shrugged. “Any of those, all of them—I don’t know. We’re obviously dealing with someone who has high-level skills and is a plant.”

  “You think you know who it is though, right?”

  “Think,” Big Earv emphasized. “And I must add that I thought Tony Vella was a prime candidate too. But the mole manipulated intel to cast Tony as guilty.”

  “And it was a damn good job, too.”

  “Right, so we have to be careful. But I think if we tread carefully, we can use this to our advantage.”

  “Agreed,” she said. “Let’s do it. Set up a full organizational meeting. I want everyone here to understand that Tony Vella was a traitor and that his death is the culmination of a long investigation into a supposed mole here at the Magnum Group.”

  “I’ll make it happen,” Big Earv said.

  He tossed the ball in the air again and watched it come within a hair of tapping the ceiling.

  “Whatever you do, don’t get caught,” Morgan said. “If the mole finds out what we’re up to, we might be walking into a trap.”

  “I’ll be practicing peak discipline,” Big Earv said. “That much you can count on.”

  “Have I ever told you how much I hate the word practice?” she said. “It really irks me when I hear people using that, especially in the context of actually doing something.”

  “However, but, and practice—all duly noted and will be scrubbed from my vocabulary in future conversations,” Big Earv said as he stood.

  “Add moist to that list,” she said. “I hate that word.”

  He laughed before spinning on his heels and exiting the room.

  * * *

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Nick Slavitt walked quickly to his car in the Magnum Group parking garage. He took a deep breath and smiled as he pushed the button, igniting his car’s engine. The tires on his car squealed as they rounded each turn.

  He waited until he was on the freeway to place his call.

  “It’s me,” he said when the man on the other line answered.

  “How’d it go?”

  “They bought it,” Slavitt said, adjusting his tie as he glanced in the rearview mirror. “We had an organization-wide meeting today to announce Tony Vella’s death.”

  “And?”

  “Director May expressed her condolences but also explained that he was a mole, actively seeking to undermine the efforts of the organization.”

  “How’d that go over?”

  “Mostly shock and disappointment,” Slavitt said. “Most people were stunned that he could do such a thing, but nobody questioned whether it was true or not.”

  “Excellent,” the man said. “We need you there to monitor what they’re doing.”

  “Any other assignments?”

  “For now, let’s just lay low. You walked a very fine line and pulled it off, something I’m grateful for personally. I would’ve hated to see something bad happen to one of my best undercover operatives.”

  “Of course, sir. I’ll be here when you need me.”

  “Just keep feeding us any information you feel is pertinent to our overall mission. That’s all for now.”

  Slavitt slowed to a stop, keeping a safe distance from the car in front of him as L.A. freeway traffic ground to a halt. He studied his face in the mirror. The scars were barely noticeable as he ran his fingers across his face.

  Brady Hawk gets to live another day—but it won’t be much longer now. He’s going to pay for what he did.

  CHAPTER 36

  Seattle, Washington

  AFTER DISCOVERING THAT Reaper was likely murdered by an assassin posing as a nurse, Hawk realized there were far more pressing matters than unmasking the killer. For starters, Reaper’s phone was still bagged with the rest of his personal effects in his hospital room. He rushed upstairs and found an officer from the Seattle Police Department sifting through them.

  “Excuse me,” Hawk said. “But would you mind if I take a look at that phone?”

  “Who are you?” the officer asked.

  “I’m the federal agent who was pursuing the now deceased criminal when Harbor Patrol pulled us from the water.”

  “Oh, you’re that guy. Nice work.”

  “Just doing my job, which is why I want to see that phone.”

  The officer shrugged. “It’s not gonna do you much good unless you know the password.”

  “Are you taking it into evidence?”

  The officer nodded. “We should. That man committed several crimes and if he was working with anyone, that phone will help us determine who.”

  “I hate to play the jurisdiction card on you, but—”

  “Sure man,” the officer said, handing the phone to Hawk. “Take it. Since you’re a fed, it’ll probably only take you a few days to get access to the decryption technology. It’d take us a month of Sundays.”

  Hawk held up the device and winked. “Who needs decryption technology when the perp’s face is still in the building?”

  The officer’s eyes widened as Hawk’s plan dawned on him. “Why hadn’t I thought of that?”

  “That’s why you don’t ever set your phone up for
facial recognition,” Hawk said before darting out of the room.

  He rushed to the mortuary in the basement and asked to see Reaper’s body. The attendant asked to see Hawk’s authorization before he flashed his federal agent credentials.

  “First one on the left,” the man said as he returned his attention to the clipboard in his hands. “We haven’t started processing him, so no touching.”

  Hawk approached the body covered by a white sheet and lying on a gurney. He pulled back the sheet and looked at Reaper’s face again. With the anguish gone, Doug Mitchell looked at peace. While glad that the former Navy SEAL would no longer be killing anyone, Hawk couldn’t help but feel saddened by the loss of a once good man. Before Mitchell became Reaper, he was a man with noble intentions for joining the military. Now, he was dead, his body ushered into a hospital basement likely never to be seen again by anybody who’d ever loved him. Hawk didn’t expect such a strange cocktail of emotions staring at him.

  “You can’t stand there all day,” the attendant said as he walked up next to Hawk. “We’ve got to get to work on that one soon.”

  “Of course,” Hawk said.

  He pulled out Reaper’s phone and held up the front-facing camera to his face. The screen flashed, allowing access to the phone.

  Hawk dialed Alex’s number. “How’s everything going?”

  “Reaper’s dead,” Hawk said.

  “What? How?”

  “Massive heart attack, but I don’t have time to get into that right now. I’ve got his phone unlocked and I want to download all the data. What’s the best way to do that so I can get it over to you?”

  Alex gave him instructions on how to extract everything on Reaper’s phone, which he wrote down on a scratch sheet of paper.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Still sobering to me to see someone I used to consider a friend dead. It didn’t have to be this way.”

  “We’ll talk about it soon,” she said. “Send me that data when you get it. And then hurry home. John Daniel really misses you.”

  Hawk ended the call and thanked the mortuary attendant. After downloading the information and transmitting it to Alex, Hawk hustled back upstairs to find the officer and give him the phone.