Guardians of the Portals (35 page)

He settled her on the cushions and moved to sit in the chair, but she grasped his leg and urged him to join her. So much of the last months had been a pirouette of non-verbal communication that it seemed natural to continue. The link burned hot and strong, comforting, and he wondered if she felt the same.

Wolf collapsed onto the cushion and pulled Caitlin into his lap as she gagged dry heaves, tearless, so swamped with shock and pain and dismay that she teetered on the edge of a breakdown.

She wrapped her arms around his chest and keened her agony as he gently rocked her quaking body. Death was never easy, no matter how often he saw it.

Murmuring, "It will be all right," he fervently wished it were true.

––––––––

J
ake watched the stocky man push through the sea of bodies clustered ten deep—impatience, boredom and distraction with a side of fries. He balanced a tray, stopping for napkins, a handful of ketchup packets and a straw. Ordinary. At odds with his reputation. Merciless. Soul-less. A demon-devil they called him, both within and without the strange circle of combatants he'd fallen into. And his last hope.

"Trey." Jake inclined his head and motioned for his companion to sit opposite in the booth. Crossing paths with the Falcon was always a dicey proposition. Most of Greyfalcon, including himself, avoided it whenever possible.

"O'Brien." Equally terse with an edge. Annoyance? Caution, perhaps. He was a difficult read, even for him, even after twenty-five years of hard core and bad-ass. There was that, in spades, but something more. He'd need to tread carefully.

Jake took a sip of coffee and poked at his salad. He envied the younger man the freedom of artery-clogging red meat and salt-laden fries, though 'younger' seemed not quite right either. There was no way to gauge age when time and all he thought he understood about his world turned topsy-turvy, leaving him with bad decisions and regrets and impossible choices.

Trey ignored him and dug in, inhaling his meal as his eyes darted nervously to the door and back. Did the devil have one of his own in hot pursuit?

Jake shoved the salad to the side and dug out a pack of cigarettes. He arched a brow in a 'do you mind' as he lit the smoke and took a deep drag, exhaling on a long sigh. The woman across from them glared, clearly displeased. Jake noted the 'no smoking' sign and watched with satisfaction as the irate patron gathered her tray and stalked off. Privacy with a smoke screen.

Trey wiped his mouth and grinned. "I'll have to remember that." He crumbled the wrappers and swiped at the table top with a napkin, then moved the tray aside, centering his drink, giving Jake his full attention. "I'm here."

Jake nodded and cut to the chase. "I need your help." Trey stared, impassive. "We have a situation.
I
have a situation."

"I'm listening."

"It's Kieran." He had the man's undivided attention. There was something there. A bond, maybe. Comradeship, definitely. It, like death, came with the territory. Even enemies recognized and paid lip service to it.

Jake took another drag and flicked the ash onto the tray, buying time. He needed to move the anxiety aside and let reason through.

"He's gone."

"Gone. How can he be gone? I thought you had him..."

"Yeah, I did, maximum security. Best money could buy."

"And?"

"Gunnarr. Signed him out."

"What the hell for? When I found him, he had tracks up and down his gods-damned arm, laying in his own shit. What the hell was Gunnarr thinking?"

Jake held back tears. Trey had called him that night and between the two of them, they'd driven Kieran to a secure rehab center in the middle of nowhere. Jake had used Greyfalcon resources to pull strings and get his son admitted with no questions asked. That had been a scant two weeks ago. Just enough time to detox, not nearly enough to expel the demons consuming his boy from the inside out.

Jake decided to play the guilt card and said, not bothering to hide the accusation, "Because you went walkabout." He held up a hand as Trey hunched forward, anger and remorse and disdain doing an odd mambo across his features. "Gunnarr has his panties in a wad over Knutr. He's looking for," Jake did the finger-quote, "closure." It took a minute while he decided how much he should share with the man. Deciding full disclosure was best, he continued, "He found his cousin holed up in Miami, making nice with the Marcos brothers. He needed someone he could trust to see to the resolution of our problem."

"The Marcos brothers? Who are they?" Trey smoothly slid past the 'where did you get to' implied in the 'walkabout' barb.

"Small time. Arms mostly but also drugs and a bit of white slavery on the side. They funnel talent up and down the coast, mostly out of the former republics. Some go through Dubai, others through Istanbul. Gunnarr's brain trust only monitors the crap that's in direct competition with his interests."

"Shit. The Russians."

"Yeah, the Red Mafiya. Gunnarr figures they organized the intercept on you and the shipment. Planned to help themselves to a piece of the action, especially when they found out that Knutr had tactical nukes in the stream."

"About that..."

"I didn't know. And I can assure you that Gunnarr didn't either. Your father may be many things, but stupid isn't one of them. He's made it his mission to take out everyone involved in that cluster fuck."

"Starting with Knutr."

"Yeah. He needed to make a statement to the others. Show he's willing to clean house, even if it is family."

"And I should have been the one...?"

"Maybe, but you weren't here. Kieran was. Even doped up, he's one of the best marksmen in the country."

"Damn it. So where is he now?"

"Well, that's the question. Nobody's seen or heard from Knutr, but that's expected. He might have been moved out of the country, or the Mafiya might see him as a liability now that the shipment's gone. He may have outlived his usefulness."

"That leaves Kieran out there with, I assume, no backup and no intel."

"Basically that's it in a nutshell."

"I assume you have a plan."

Jake chugged the rest of his coffee and flipped the cup onto the tray. He added his picked over salad and pulled everything to the edge of the table. Sliding across the plastic seat he stood with difficulty. Trey followed suit.

"You might not like what I have to say." The man simply shrugged with an
I don't give a shit
look on his face. "I don't want innocent people around. I've seen you..." Jake let that comment trail off. The man's reputation for being shoot-from-the-hip cold-blooded and single-minded was legion, even outside the close-knit Althing group.

Trey led the way out of the crowded restaurant. Jake noted the pronounced limp and residual tension bunching the enforcer's shoulders. The man stood a hair's breadth shorter than him and out-massed him by twenty-five pounds or better, all of it solid muscle.

Jake muttered, "This way," and cut across the parking lot to a decrepit tan minivan. He got in the driver side and waited for Trey to join him. His radar told him they were being watched but it was impossible to tell from which quadrant. They were in a strip mall, with flat-topped roofs and ventilation units churning out a background din. He pulled out into traffic, his passenger content to let it play out at Jake's pace.

They drove in silence down Route 2. Jake kept an anxious eye for a tail. When Trey said, "I'll watch," he settled into negotiating the shore-bound traffic, blending onto Route 50 and creeping bumper-to-bumper over the Bay Bridge.

"Two cars back, black Honda, jumping with the blue SUV. Smart."

Jake spied the Honda, three cars back, not one he recognized. He asked, "One of ours?" The other man shrugged, the answer either a no or indifference. He pressed, "Any ideas?"

"No, but we've got a fucking parade. What's your play?"

"South. Towards Crisfield."

"What's down there?"

"Chickens."

Trey muttered, "Huh," but he didn't have a good comeback for that one so he tilted his head toward the side mirror and watched the ballet unfolding behind them.

Jake swung onto the ramp at the 301/50 split and crawled behind an RV towing a bass boat, content to bide his time. He'd expected Gunnar's people to be shadowing him, maybe even the Althings, but another player in the mix? He wasn't sure why that was a surprise. He had a bad feeling that Kieran had stirred up a hornet's nest down in Miami. If another group had him, and offered the right incentives, who knew what he might do or say? He'd never spoken about Zack, the shipment, or about the scarring on his once handsome face. Instead he dove into a black hole where no one could reach him. If only Caitlin were still alive. She was the only one who managed to keep a rein on him, even when he'd gone off with his flunkies in school.

His passenger muttered, "More than one."

Jake asked, "Althings?"

"Maybe, they could have picked up chatter on what went down. Your people weren't exactly keeping it quiet. One problem, though."

"What's that?"

"They're spread too thin. This is coordinated. Focused. Eirik is more about diplomacy, behind-the-scenes, maximizing resources."

Jake gunned it past the RV and settled in the passing lane to give Trey a better look at the line behind them.

"One moved, one didn't. Another, four cars back. Mob?"

Jake snorted. "Russkies? Possible, but they'd have done a drive-by with AK's blazing. This seems way too subtle for them."

Trey said, "Maybe," then switched gears and asked, "You think they have Kier? The Althings, I mean."

"It crossed my mind but I'm not completely sold on it." The possibility of mob involvement seemed more likely the more he thought about it.

Out of the blue, Trey said with a hitch in his voice, "Did my father ask you to...?" letting the question hang.

It took Jake a minute to figure out what the man meant. He was fishing to see if they had even a small measure of Gunnarr's support. Just the suggestion that they might need it told him they were treading in very deep water. With no definitive answer to the unasked question, he said simply, "He didn't have to. He's my son. He didn't tell me not to."

The men lapsed into silence as Jake negotiated the business section of Cambridge, finally swinging to the east and picking up speed as the highway entered a more rural setting with fewer lights and merging traffic. At Salisbury, the scent of salt air and a crab boil would reel the winter weekend caravan due east. Jake hooked a right and sped south on Route 13 across a flat landscape of wide open fields and periodic behemoth pole buildings, the land of Perdue and an empire built on fowl.

Trey searched the glove box and extracted a Maryland map. He unfolded and refolded the paper, marqueeing their destination. He didn't like what he saw.

"You're boxing us in. Water on three sides. Hardly any roads."

"Uh-huh. They still back there?"

"Yeah. Two of them anyway. Bunched up now."

"Two lane, nowhere to hide."

"You got a hidey hole I should know about?"

"You'll see when we get there."

Trey let the map drop onto his lap. He finally asked the question Jake had been waiting for.

"Why me?"

"Because you're the only one who can help me do it."

"It. Exactly what do you mean by 'it'?"

"I want to take them down. Both of them."

Jake drove on, biding his time, hoping the man would put it together. He wasn't cryptic by nature but too many years with Greyfalcon had taught him to be cagey, to watch his words and not say enough to damn himself or others. Trey had been raised in that same environment. He could almost hear the gears turning in the man's head.

His cell chimed, startling loud in the charged silence. Jake fumbled at his belt, extracted the phone from the holder and flipped it open. He checked caller ID, swearing when he recognized the number, then said, "Yo."

Trey listened stony-faced, able to catch snippets of conversation as Gunnarr's voice boomed through the receiver. He would certainly recognize his father's voice, and it didn't take a genius to figure out something was very wrong. There would be questions.

Jake continued to mutter, "Uh-huh, yeah. I understand. Alright."

He carefully placed the cell phone back in its case and ignored the man sitting next to him, unsure how to proceed. Braking for the turn onto Route 413, he slowed marginally before gunning it as the road angled south and east. Ahead, the blankness of the horizon and a wavery mist told him the Bay was close. He pulled off onto the feeder road for Jane's State Park and drove past the picnic area to a boat ramp and a set of floating docks.

"Are they still back there?" Unfortunately, Gunnarr had confirmed who 'they' were. The pieces were falling into place. Not that it would matter. He'd set a course. They had no option but to move forward.

Trey scanned the road behind them. "Can't see them, but I'd say yeah."

"This is where we get out." Jake exited the van and walked quickly to the back of the vehicle and popped the doors open. He lifted a milk crate and handed it off to Trey who kept one eye peeled for their tails. "Come on, we don't have much time. We have to load these crates."

Trey looked around at the empty parking lot. "Load where?"

"The boat."

Jake took off at a trot toward the dock on the near side. He set the milk crate down and motioned for Trey to get on board. He handed off the boxes and returned to the van for the last load. Carefully setting the charges, he gave one quick sweep of the area to make sure no campers or day-hikers were in the vicinity. As soon as they left, whoever tailed them would come snooping. He'd rigged it to give them warning and time to back off. It would keep them busy while he ran the saltmarsh maze. With thirty miles of water trail, it wasn't likely they'd be tracked any time soon.

Trey stood at the stern, watchful. He looked like he had a thousand questions but knew it wasn't the time to ask. Jake moved with quiet efficiency, stowing the small crates and long wooden boxes in the cuddy cabin. He directed, "Get the lines," as he muscled Trey out of the way and started the outboard. He waited while the man moved stiffly but efficiently, freeing the lines, and coiling them neatly. Apparently he was no stranger to boats.