The Observer (Derek Cole Suspense Thriller Book 3) (19 page)

“Got it,” Derek said. “Anything else?”

“Remember, give me two hours to get back here.”

“If you don’t make it back here, should I assume that I’m on my own the rest of the way?”

“Cole,” Mark said, “you’re already on your own. If I don’t make it back, you need to contact the Tarry Town FBI office and give them the same story about Juan kidnapping you that you gave me. You need to get yourself clean. Tell them the same story, then get the hell out of town. Go back to Ohio and live the rest of your life as if none of this ever happened. If they buy your story, they’ll leave you alone, but will keep track of you for the rest of your life.”

“There’s still a terrorist out there. I can’t walk back to my life knowing that I didn’t finish the job.”

“It’s already over, Cole. There’s nothing that you can do to stop it from happening. I don’t know all that Juan knows, but the fact that he’s more interested in exposing the cover-up than in stopping the attack, tells me that he knows it’s too late to stop it from happening.”

“Don’t think I can just walk away. How about you just make sure that you get back here in one piece, and we’ll figure out what to do over a few beers with Juan?”

“Sounds good to me. You’re buying.”

“Deal.”

***I***

It took Mark 30 minutes of driving before he was parked in the lot in front of the hotel. Though still early, Mark could see people moving around in the lobby and in the rooms facing the parking lot. He carefully scanned the other cars in the lot as well as the entire area surrounding the hotel, looking for anything that would tell him that other agents were around. He noticed nothing. Apparently, and to his surprise and relief, the three shots he fired had not been alarming enough to force anyone to call the police or to contact the hotel desk and request that someone take a closer look at the room with the open bedroom window.

Though the early morning August sun was already making for a steamy start to the day, Mark pulled on his blue, FBI-lettered windbreaker before exiting the car. He chose to skip the lobby and to take a casual walk around the hotel and into the courtyard area. Pausing and seeing nothing of concern, he moved with intentional calmness towards the one open window. When he reached the windows of the room he had reserved, he quickly checked inside the room. Though his glances were quick, he was certain that no one was in the rooms.
 

Without hesitation, he climbed through the open window and into the room where Marissa Rica lay dead. He gazed out through the window, checking to see if any other guests were watching him from their rooms. Seeing no one, he leaned out of the window and looked for the bullet casings.

“Sonofabitch,” he mumbled.

It was then that he knew. As he turned away from the window, his eyes drawn low, he saw that Marissa’s body was exactly where he expected it to be.

“You probably don’t want to hear my side of the story?” he said out loud. “There’s a lot more to this case and this crime scene than you probably are aware of.”

“Telling me won’t help matters,” a voice said from just beyond the bedroom door. “You know it doesn’t matter. And I hope you know that this isn’t personal.”

“I know,” Mark said as he considered drawing his gun and giving himself a fighting chance. “So how will this all play out?” he asked the unseen man. “How will this story be told? I don't have a wife or kids, but I have plenty of friends who will have a hard time believing that I turned against the country. Just like Cortez. You can spin this around until the country is dizzy, but people will still question what really happened here.”

“We know.”

“What are you expecting me to do? Jump out of the window or try to take you out?” Mark said.

“Window is covered. You wouldn’t get very far. Damn good sniper has the back of your head in his sights right now.”

“Should I turn around?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I guess you were always one step ahead of me. You always knew what Cortez and I were doing,” Mark said.

“Had to be. You’re too damn good at this job. Sorry Mark.”

“Sorry about Marissa,’ Mark said as he turned around and faced the window.

“She sealed her fate when she drove out here to meet with you. She was good at her job, as far as what we've been told. Dedicated to the preservation and advancement of the United States of America.”

"That doesn't matter much to you, does it?"

"Quite the opposite, actually. We just use a different set of beliefs about what protecting means. Washington uses a more 'progressive' and inclusive definition."

“How about Cole?”

“We don't think he'll be too much of a problem, but we have options if he starts talking.”

“Be safe out there. Lot’s of bad dudes doing bad things.”

“Hope the other side is all it’s cracked up to be for you. Goodbye, Special Agent Henderson. And, thank you for your service to this country.”

“I should make you do the dirty work. Give you something to think about at night,” Mark said, taking another step closer to the window. "That could really hurt your next campaign. Imagine the guilt and worry you'd feel when kissing all those babies and making absurd promises."

“Nah,” the man beyond the door replied. “That’s not how this was planned out. And while I do appreciate your concern about my career, you should know better than that. We all just follow the script and when the script still has us in a scene, we keep playing our part. Guilt and worry? Unfortunately, my character wasn't created with those traits.”

Mark had always felt partially empty. The hours he worked and the dangerous nature of his work made the idea of settling down, getting married and raising a family seem like a selfish ideal. Still, he often wondered what it would be like to have someone to come home to. To have a son that emulated him or a daughter that would make him have tea parties and play dress up. Though he knew that the demands of his job would place a difficult strain on a marriage, he still often wished that he had found someone to fill the forever emptiness in his life.

As he stood in front of the hotel room window, not trying to see where the bullet would come from, he was, at last, at peace with his decision to never marry. To never have children who would, any second now, lose their father. He smiled knowing that a wife and kids would never have to suffer the embarrassment when the powers-that-be twisted the truth about his death into a narrative that better fit their lies. He stood straight and offered a final salute to the country that he loved and had protected.
 

There was the briefest flash of light he saw coming from an open window across the open courtyard. No sound and no time to wonder who had caused the flashing of light before his head snapped back and all went black.

He was supposed to say only “good” or “no good.” That was it. One or two words, disconnect the call, destroy the phone and then return to the case. As Derek sat alone in the diner, staring at the phone, he understood that leaving a one or two word message wouldn’t, couldn’t be enough. After checking to see if anyone was close enough to hear the message he was planning on leaving, Derek long pressed the “2” button, waited for the beep, then began talking softly into the phone.

“Juan. I know you wanted me to say ‘good’ or ‘no good,’ but those options aren’t going to be enough. You need to call me back. Henderson, I think, is on board but there’s been a rather, um, significant disruption. I’ll keep this phone on. Call me. We need another plan.”

He wasn’t sure which would happen first: Juan calling him back or Mark Henderson returning from his trip back to the hotel after he finished whatever the hell he was trying to take care of with Marissa’s body. After nearly 90 minutes, the burner cell phone sounded.

“Juan,” Derek said. “We need to talk.”

“What the hell happened with Henderson?”

“I can’t talk here. Henderson told me that if he’s not back here in two hours that I should assume he isn’t coming back. It’s been an hour and a half already.”

“Not coming back from where?” Juan questioned.

“Listen,” Derek said, his voice and head held low, “I’m at a diner in Connecticut, off of . . .”

“I know where you are and I know that I can’t drive my ass over to your location and pick you up without risking exposure. Wait till the two hours are up. If Henderson doesn’t show, call this number but just let it ring three times. No message.”

“Then what?”

“Across the street from the diner are some woods. Walk west down the road around 300 yards then cross the street and into the woods. Walk directly north for about a half mile and you’ll come to a road. Head west on that road and I’ll pick you up. Understand?”

“Wonderful. Nothing suspicious about a guy sitting in a diner alone for two hours, then walking down the road a stretch before hopping into the woods.”

“Cole, people don’t give a shit about other people once they’re out of their space. You walk out of the diner and at the same time, you walk out of every person’s
 
mind in that diner. They won’t care where you go, what you do or who you do it with. If more people realized that, the anti-depression pharmaceutical companies would go broke. People don’t think about other people nearly as often as people think.”

“Cheery thoughts. Thanks.”

“Hopeful that Henderson shows. If he doesn’t, you know what to do.”

Derek was almost resigned to the fact that Henderson wouldn’t show. After waiting an additional 15 minutes after the two hour time allotment, he left a five dollar bill on the table and then headed west. As he began crossing the street and heading towards the woods that lined the street, Derek started wondering how Juan knew where he was. He imagined that he and Henderson frequented the diner quite often, and Juan assumed that Henderson felt that the diner was a safe place to leave Derek.
 

“Or,”
Derek thought as he disappeared into the woods,
“Juan is tracking me somehow, had lied to me about everything and is the mastermind behind this whole terrorist plot. That would suck.”

***I***

Derek walked down the quiet, sinuous road for well over three miles before he began wondering what was keeping Juan. When he had walked his fourth mile, he thought either Juan told him to walk in the wrong direction or he had misunderstood Juan’s instructions. “West is west,” he said out loud. When he began hearing the thunderous roar of traffic coming from the nearby city of Greenwich, Derek knew Juan wasn’t going to be picking him up anytime soon.
 

His best estimate was that he had walked for nearly four hours, covered close to 16 miles, before he stopped, looked for a place to rest and headed towards a small strip mall that was a few hundred yards away. He found an empty bench, pulled out his cell phone and dialed Mark Henderson’s cell. Before the call connected, he quickly ended the call, thinking that if Mark didn’t make it out of the hotel safely, that whomever he was with would be expecting him to try to contact Mark.
 

“Doesn’t take much for that NSA-shared software to track me down,”
he thought as he remembered that Marissa had told him that any iPhone could be located even if the phone was shut down. He opened up the “BuryMe” app, and called Crown.
“I’m sure talking with her will cheer me up.”

“Where the hell have you been?” Crown snapped.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Well there’s a shit storm blowing your way.”

“What’s going on?” Derek asked, almost too tired to care.

“Hacked back into the FBI office’s network. Found out that your friend Special Agent Mark Henderson killed a senior agent and was then killed in a shoot-out. Bulletins flying around saying that Henderson was involved in an ISIS-backed terrorist plot, and some big wig at the FBI named Marissa Rica confronted him at some hotel. He killed her, then got into a fire fight with three other agents before taking one between the eyes.”

“That’s not what happened,” Derek said. “I can’t believe he’s dead.” There was an instant vacancy in Derek's soul. A vacuum. He hadn't known Mark Henderson well at all but Derek felt that Mark was one of the good guys left in the world. He believed Mark should still be out looking to prevent the terrorist attack and would be if he had not followed Juan's plan.

Derek explained the details to Crown, starting off from when he called Henderson from the warehouse to sitting on a park bench in a strip mall on the outskirts of Greenwich. “Read anything about Juan Cortez?”

“All quiet on the western front.”

“What the hell does that mean,” Derek said.

“It means that Cortez hasn’t been mentioned at all. Not a word about him.”

“Strange.”

“I think it’s time you pulled the plug on your involvement in that lovely case of yours. Tell me exactly where you are, and I’ll call a cab to bring you to an airport.”

“You can call a cab for me but I ain’t going to an airport. There’s still a terrorist in Manhattan, and I’m not about to let him or her kill innocent people.”

“Figured as much,” Crown replied. After a short, static filled pause, she continued, “You have any friends at the NYPD that can help you?”

“I don’t think I can trust anyone on this case. I guess Juan was right when he told me that I can’t trust him either.”

“If your head is full of enough mush to think that staying on the case is a good idea, I do have some intel that may be of use to you.”

“What do you have?”

“Pictures and names. Actually, after I filtered through, I came up with only one person I think you should check out. Young kid from Queens, named Kevin Washington. I’ll send over his picture in a minute. There’s not much on him in the bulletins except that he changed his name to Aahill a few months ago and is very tightly connected with Badr Irani. What’s interesting about Kevin or Aahill, or whatever the hell he calls himself, is that he grew up a Christian, was recruited by Badr’s mosque, dropped out of high school and has gone off the radar for the last couple of weeks. May be a long shot but all the other suspects seem too usual.”