Hell on Wheels (5 page)

It didn’t surprise him. Nope, not here in Washing-
sin
DC. There were more secrets and more secret obsessions in the U.S.’s great capital than anywhere else in the world. And it was the possibility of having one of
his
secrets revealed that had him flipping open his ringing cell phone. “What?”

“She’s stopped in Chicago.”

“Hmm,” he ran a hand over his face, then hastily checked his reflection in the rearview mirror to make sure he hadn’t disheveled his hair.

Good. Not a single follicle out of place. The twin gray streaks at his temples were pristine as always. He dyed them, of course. At fifty-five, most men would crow over still having a thick head of sable brown hair, but in his position, the silver added a reassuring touch of maturity. It led people to think he harbored some secret wisdom beyond the norm.

He liked to believe they were right.

He
did
have an uncanny ability to see what needed to be done and then do it, no hesitation, no wavering. He considered himself a man of action, leaving the doubting Thomases of the world to stew and hash out every little thing. Whole countries could rise to power and fall before some of the world’s leaders ever finished spell-checking their dossiers.

He’d come to realize nothing would ever change the snail-like pace of the U.S. government, so he’d decided his only course of action was to work around it.

The irony of that stance given his position wasn’t lost on him. But they could debate and harangue and review and debate some more. While those sluggish wheels turned, he took it upon himself to implement solutions.

Of course, there were those who wouldn’t understand that and many who certainly wouldn’t condone it. But who were they to judge him? Complacent fools living safe and sound inside their pretty little homes, cocooned from the rank evil that hung like a slimy, black cloud over so much of the world.

They were all idiots.

But powerful idiots, capable of toppling the pristine image he’d so carefully and scrupulously built over the years. An image he fancied would eventually have him sitting pretty at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

He shot his cuffs with their ivory-and-platinum links and tapped an impatient finger on the steering wheel.

Alisa Morgan was proving to be problematic. She had the files, whether she knew she had them or not. Grigg Morgan had mailed them to her;
that
much they’d been able to determine soon after Morgan’s death. But all the searches of Ms. Morgan’s home and work had come up empty—which could mean only one of two things. She was either carrying the files on her person, or she’d squirreled them away somewhere. The solution to either scenario was simple, a quick snatch and grab. Kidnap the woman, shake her down, and obtain the files. Easy as one, two, three.

Or at least it should’ve been. Unfortunately, his man in the field had a little problem with that scenario.

Aldus could
not
abide a strictly moral man, and ex-CIA agent Dagan Zoelner was turning out to be just that. Unfortunately, Zoelner was also the absolute best at what he did. So Aldus had gone along with Zoelner’s plan to simply watch Ms. Morgan until Zoelner could determine a way to obtain the information from her without resorting to strong-arm tactics.

At least he’d gone along with Zoelner’s plan for a little while. Then, he’d become impatient…

Now he regretted his eagerness to end this thing once and for all.

The botched mugging had caused her to flee to Chicago, which was a goddamn pain in the ass.

Not that he thought Nathan Weller knew anything. If he did, Weller certainly would’ve cracked under the hellish torture of those Hezbollah militants, because nobody knew how to wring the truth out of a man better than the bloody Lebanese.

Of course, he thought with gnawing unease, those Hezbollah boys hadn’t been able obtain the whereabouts of the files from Grigg Morgan, and they’d had him in their clutches for three whole days, so perhaps they weren’t as proficient at extracting information as they claimed.

That thought was more than a bit disconcerting. The only reason he’d allowed Weller to live after he escaped the hard death Aldus had planned for him, was Aldus’s certainty that Weller knew nothing.

Could he have been wrong?

But, no. If Weller had been in on it, he would have already gone to the authorities with his information.

No
one
knows
about
the
deal
, he assured himself and heaved a calming breath. The people who had known were all dead…which brought him back to his current predicament. Namely, getting those pain-in-the-ass files from Alisa Morgan.

“I’m tired of waiting for you to befriend the woman, Z. Now we’re going to do this
my
way,” he instructed firmly. “Wait until she leaves and then take her. Find those files.”

Christ, this was turning into a bigger mess day by day, and he was quickly becoming sick and tired of dealing with it.

It would probably be easier and certainly more expedient to just get rid of her, he thought as he rolled up his window to block out the fumes from the gas pumps. Instead of hiring Johnny and his boys, those three ham-handed guys out of Las Vegas he liked to employ to take care of his more…violent needs, to mug Ms. Morgan, he could have them contrive a fatal car crash like the one that’d befallen that FBI agent who’d gotten too curious.

It was certainly tempting…

But in situations like this, it never paid to be hasty. And killing American citizens on American soil could be tricky, particularly when he wasn’t sure her death would result in the destruction of the files.

So…he’d just keep that contingency in his back pocket.

For now.

“Sir,” Zoelner sounded restless, “I’ve got a question.”

“What is it?” he growled, growing more and more impatient with Dagan Zoelner each passing day.

“Did you authorize yesterday’s mugging?”

“What?” he sputtered, feigning incredulity. “I can’t believe you’d accuse me of such a thing. I never condone violence. You know that.”

“Then what do you call your idea to kidnap Ms. Morgan?”

“I call it necessary, Z. Plus, I trust you to handle her with kid gloves.”

The silence coming through the receiver was telling. Zoelner wasn’t comfortable with the plan, the aggravatingly high-minded bastard.

Well, tough. He was finished waiting for Zoelner to come around to his way of thinking.

“Look, Z” he spat into the phone, blood rushing to his face to make his ears and cheeks tingle with rage. “I pay you quite an exorbitant amount to do this fucking job. I would think that much money would buy me the benefit of having you choke down your misgivings. Am I wrong? Shall I find someone else who shows a little more gumption, a little more intestinal fortitude?”

“No, sir.”

Zoelner’s response was immediate, but the tone coming through the receiver didn’t sound particularly conciliatory, and that had Aldus’s already frayed nerves screaming. He was one of the most powerful men in the whole goddamned country, and no one took that tone with him. He wanted very badly to reach through the phone and strangle the impertinent little prick.

Perhaps when this was all over, when he was president, he could have the fool deleted. The thought was gratifying enough to decrease his blood pressure from a rapid boil to a slow simmer.

“Good,” he sniffed and adjusted his silk Brioni necktie. “Keep me informed.”

***

“…But I know the neighborhoooood, and talk is cheap when the story is goooood…”

The place was a madhouse.

There was just no other way to describe the scene playing out around Ali as she stood by the railing on the second story of the warehouse with its cacophony of sights, sounds, and smells.

She’d learned from the handsome man currently going through her luggage with some strange, black wand thing—while singing along to the pounding beats of REO Speedwagon—that the place used to be a Spud Menthol Cigarette Factory. Which accounted for the slightly minty, alcohol aroma still lingering in the air despite the more overpowering smells of oil, grease, and coffee strong enough to burn all the hair from one’s nostrils.

She could account for this last observation personally, having been immediately given a cup of said coffee by a cute, slightly matronly shaped woman named Patti.

In his correspondence, Grigg described Patti as Black Knights Inc.’s receptionist/secretary extraordinaire. The woman certainly showed superwoman promptness with the beverage cart, appearing from out of nowhere before Ali even had the opportunity to set down her purse. Unfortunately, what Patti gained in hostessing prowess, she obviously lacked in the culinary arts, because after one sip of the toxic waste that passed as coffee at Black Knights Inc., Ali was forced to set her cup aside in order to concentrate on keeping her eyes from tearing up.

Luckily, before Patti could witness her struggle, someone yelled, “Patti! We’re out of alpha whiskey in the head,” and Patti disappeared down the hall, presumably to replace the bathroom’s alpha whiskey—otherwise known as ass wipe or the much-less-colorful toilet paper in the civilian world.

The things Ali learned having Grigg as an older brother…

“Take it on the run, baby!” The man going through her things—he’d introduced himself as Ethan Sykes, but Grigg had always referred to him as Ozzie—belted out in a surprisingly clear tenor. “If that’s the way you want it, baby, then I don’t want you around!”

The guy was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Mr. Spock’s favorite hand gesture and the slogan 100% TREKKIE, which was slightly incongruous when compared to the shoulder holster and the mean-looking, matte-black gun secured to his side. He looked like some strange combination of geek and warrior. The man you’d call if you needed to invade a small country or translate a message written in Klingon.

Unaware of her observation, he continued to methodically go through her clothes, stopping only occasionally to play some air guitar or air drums.

The whole scene was insane, surreal, she felt sure Ashton Kutcher was going to pop out from behind that sweeping bank of computers and yell, “You’ve been punk’d!”

And that was another thing…those computers. The place looked like it was retrofitted to operate as a tertiary NORAD base if Cheyenne Mountain and Peterson Air Force Base ever simultaneously disappeared from the map.

Totally surreal.

But then Ethan prepared to open the separate little case she kept her delicates in, and the reality of the situation suddenly clicked into Technicolor focus. Oh, yes. She figured now would be the perfect time to excuse herself from this little exercise.

“Cripes,” she muttered.

“What?” Nate asked. He was watching the entire process, strong arms crossed, big-booted feet planted shoulder width apart, taking in every minute detail and cataloging it away in that inscrutable brain of his.

“Nothing,” she said, forcing what she hoped was a nonchalant smile. She was already nervous enough after the way she apparently set off some alarm when she first entered the building, which resulted in Nate turning and scowling at her. Of course that had made her start to blabber uncontrollably about the lack of governmental restrictions on off-shore drilling.

Yeah,
what?

Off-shore drilling? Had she really gone there?

She nearly groaned while recollecting the inane, one-sided conversation—not that that was atypical when it came to the two of them. One-sided conversations, that is. What was typical was the way her ability to instantly contract the linguistic version of the trots made his face blank, his eyes glaze over, and that little tick start to work in his jaw.

Of course in about two seconds, when Ozzie/Ethan dumped out her panty case, she figured Nate’s eyes would be anything but glazed.

Crapola.

If she hadn’t already begun to regret her decision to make this trip, the forthcoming episode of abject mortification would no doubt do the trick. To use one of Grigg’s favorite sayings,
it’s either shit or go blind
.

Since neither of those was a particularly pleasant sounding option, it was best just to turn her back on the entire scene, walk a few yards down the way, and try her best to disappear into the floor.

“You’re an adult. They’re both adults. It’s certainly not the first time they’ve come into contact with women’s underwear. Just act like it’s no big deal,” she coached herself as she started to inch along the railing.

“What didja say?” Nate asked, and she spun around to find him eyeing her like maybe she was growing a second head.

She
really
needed to get the talking to herself thing under control.

“Nothing,” she assured him again and realized from the hard look he sent her that response wasn’t going fly a second time. “Okay, you’re about to dig into my panty case and,
sheesh
, having a stranger paw through my underwear is a bit disconcerting. So I’m just gonna take myself over there.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate the far corner where the second story railing connected with the wall.