Rogue Threat (49 page)

On that note, he turned and left Jessup standing in the foyer as he descended into the basement.

Jeremiah appeared a
few minutes later.

“What have you found out? We’ve got Rampert up in a helicopter over this ship. Is he friend or foe?”

“Sir, then-Lieutenant Colonel Rampert was a Delta Force operator in the first Gulf War. Ballantine was interrogated by several different soldiers, but it appears that Lantini and Rampert were involved somehow.” Jeremiah looked away for a moment and then back at the vice president. “And you talked to Ballantine also.”

“Of course I did. I was in charge of that whole mess. Tens of thousands of enemy prisoners of war, and this hotshot lieutenant brings in a no-shit Republican Guard enemy commander. What else was I going to do?”

“The interrogation reports you gave me show that Ballantine proved of no significant intelligence value and with his French connections, he was released rather quickly. The reports show that Lantini interviewed him twice and that Rampert was responsible for releasing him into the wild, as they say.”

“So, you think Rampert and Lantini are triangulating with Ballantine now?”

“Seems plausible.”

“Pick up that phone over there and dial me in to Dave Palmer,” Hellerman directed. When Jeremiah picked up one phone, Hellerman said, “No, not that one, the other phone.” Jeremiah replaced the one in his hand in its cradle and picked up an identical looking cordless phone. Jeremiah punched in the numbers. “On second thought,” Hellerman said, “never mind.”

“Sir?”

“Let’s get back to the command center,” Hellerman said as he walked briskly out of the office and up the steps. He called over his shoulder, “Lock up when you come up. And shut down that laptop, will you.”

He watched as Jeremiah punched a few buttons on the laptop, closed the lid with his long fingers, then grabbed the keys, moved the plastic chair into place, pulled the door closed, fumbled with it, and pulled it shut again, moved the hasp into place, touching the metal, grasped the lock, inserted the key, snapped it shut, tugged on it, leaving fingerprints over every conceivable surface.

Exactly as Hellerman wished.

Hellerman looked over his shoulder as he ascended the stairway and watched as Jeremiah pocketed the keys to the makeshift bunker.

Hellerman. Moving the pawn when he has to. Freeing up the queen to slide across the board for checkmate.

Chapter 57

Northern Virginia

Meredith Morris sat cross-legged on Jacob Olney’s guest bed with her cell phone clutched in one hand. The phone call from Colonel Rampert was welcome, and now she was wondering how this scenario would develop.

She looked down at the pictures she had taken of Hellerman’s lair and knew instinctively that some very bad people were probably going to be coming after her. Having grown up in southwestern Virginia, she was no stranger to hard times or even dangerous times. But the thought of a nameless, faceless human being with a specific mission to find her, and possibly kill her, was extraordinarily unsettling.

Rampert had been all business and not the least bit concerned about finding out where she was located, which was a good sign. He wanted the information that Matt had told him about, and that was all. He had kept the conversation short and to the point, avoiding unnecessary air time. She knew that the longer the call, the easier she would be to track using the government’s CallScan cell phone monitoring system.

She unfolded her legs and stood from the bed, walking into the guest bathroom off of her room. She closed the door to the bedroom and the door that led to the hallway, placed the manila envelope with the pictures on the back of the toilet lid, and leaned against the counter top, staring at the mirror. She could see lines of worry etched across her once-smooth and beautiful face, a face that Matt Garrett used to softly stroke as they lay in bed, solving the world’s problems and building their dreams for the future. She had abandoned all of that because of her lack of discipline and inability to resist the power and seduction of the vice president of the United States.

Hellerman was attractive, successful, powerful, and magnetic . . . but so was Matt. Why, she wondered, had she been unable to resist the pull, despite so many evident reasons to avoid the man she now considered to be the devil?

She splashed some water on her face and decided a hot shower would do her some good. She stripped naked and cranked the shower to full blast, edging the selector knob toward the fat portion of the red line. She let the hot water build and stepped gingerly into the shower, recoiling at first at the searing heat but gradually accepting its cleansing effects.

As the hot rain bore down on her, she began to weep. It was impossible to feel any worse about herself than she already did. She had destroyed her relationship with a great guy, possibly the best guy she would ever meet, and had unknowingly helped to put him and the country in harm’s way. She was a good woman, and perhaps only she would ever fully understand what had happened.

These last few hours, her bravery in pulling away from the magnetic reach of Hellerman’s black hole, taking the pictures that helped break the case, and then vectoring Rampert to the right location, were personal salvation for her. But she knew that there were not many people who would see the big picture of what she had been trying to do versus what had actually happened.

She washed her hair and rinsed the soap from her now-bright red skin. She then sat for several minutes on the shower floor, tears mixing with the water and swirling down the drain.

How appropriate
, she thought, as she watched the soapy water disappear beyond the metal sieve.
My life has long since washed away, stolen by Hellerman.
But she didn’t blame him, only herself. If she had been strong enough, she could have resisted and possibly even cracked the Predator case earlier, or figured out what was going on before thousands of Americans died. Now was as good a time as any to blame herself for everything that had happened in the past week.

Strangely, she was at peace. Somehow she had gained some momentum in at least absolving herself of her sins. She figured that nailing Hellerman to the wall with those pictures would at least pull her out of hell and put her somewhere in between there and heaven.

Yes, taking those pictures to her boss, Palmer, or even the president, would be some form of sweet justice, bringing Hellerman to his knees. She had already hoped that Rampert had the good sense to preserve as much of the
Fong Hou
as possible so that things such as radio frequencies could be retrieved and matched with those in Hellerman’s basement.

She stood and twisted off the faucet, letting the steam boil around her. Her skin felt rejuvenated. She reached a long, slender arm from the shower into the foggy steam and felt around for the towels that Jacob had pointed out earlier. Grabbing one, she patted down her skin and dried off.

She stepped from the shower into the steam, unable to see the mirror. She used the towel to wipe off a few streaks. She could barely make out her face in the haze, the worry lines soothed a bit, a fatalistic form of recognition coloring her countenance.

She pulled her jeans and sweatshirt back on and stepped into her shoes, the steam still swirling around the bathroom. And then something didn’t seem right.

She heard a noise from the hallway or the bedroom, she wasn’t sure which. It was a thud of sorts, perhaps Jacob closing his door, but more like the sound of something large dropping on something hard.

She opened the bedroom door, moving quickly, but then she stopped suddenly and moved back to the bathroom, remembering the pictures.

She reached into the dissipating steam, eyeing the toilet lid, and saw that there was nothing there. The manila envelope was gone.

A shiver crawled up her spine like a rattlesnake slithering toward its prey.

This is it
, she thought
. I’m going to die right here, right now, and get blamed for being involved in Hellerman’s conspiracy.
She steeled her resolve so she could step from her frozen state of fear.

She walked slowly into the bedroom and could see the door was slightly ajar. She looked around the room for some sort of weapon and remembered her mace, but even her purse was missing.

She opened a few drawers until she found a pair of scissors, which she clutched in her hand as if it was a Ginsu sword. More boldly, she moved toward the door, hearing another small thud coming from Jacob’s room. Her quick mind raced with possibilities, the most logical being that Hellerman’s hit man had found her using CallScan, searched a few houses, and found her car in Jacob’s garage. Because the scan system would only give a grid coordinate and could not provide a precise address, it had taken some time.

Poor Jacob.

She peered from the bedroom door down the long, dark hallway and saw that Jacob’s door was open and his room was dark. She tip-toed towards his room when she heard a noise behind her.

Blasting from the steam-filled bathroom was a man dressed in black with a ski mask covering his face and a glint of steel in his hand.

She bolted down the hallway and into Jacob’s room, slamming the door behind her. The attacker’s knife came piercing through the six-paneled, fiberglass door, inches from her face as she held the knob in place.

She locked the door and walked backward, holding the scissors with one hand, feeling her way in the darkness with the other. She found a wall and followed it away from the door until she found the back wall and a window. She frantically clawed at the window latch as a shot blew off the door handle. She hadn’t seen the gun.

She was raising the window as the light came on in the room. Stepping through the window and looking over her shoulder, she saw Jacob lying on the floor next to her, a bullet hole in his forehead.

What else can I do wrong?

A bullet smacked into her shoulder, knocking her through the open window, her head smashing into the window frame. She fell into the bushes below, barely conscious. She mustered the resolve to move away from the window and stand alongside the brick exterior of the house. She had lost her scissors in the fall but saw a jagged piece of glass about ten inches long. She retrieved it, careful not to cut herself.

She watched as a dark head protruded from the window no more than two feet from her position. She gripped the glass and brought it up hard toward the neck but found instead the shoulder of her assailant. The glass cut deep into the bone of her hands, causing her to scream a long, anguished wail, more from the pain of so many bad decisions over the past year than from the present moment.

Her attacker instinctively recoiled and fled back into the bedroom.

Meredith slid down the brick wall, bleeding heavily from the glass shards embedded in her hands.

“Come get me, you bastard. I don’t care,” she muttered.

Then she passed out in Jacob’s back yard.

Chapter 58

Aboard the Fong Hou

“Why were you expecting me, Ballantine?” Peyton O’Hara said, leveling her rifle at the men in the darkness. She could see the two of them, but they were too close together for her to have a clear shot.

“My sources tell me that you and Mr. Garrett here have become quite an item, and my research on you tells me that you’re quite the aggressive one. So it only makes sense.”

Ballantine continued backing toward the door until he found the latch for the galley stair that would lead them down to the Sherpa, where Zachary Garrett was waiting for them. As he turned the handle, the light from the stairwell silhouetted him and Matt Garrett.

The light gave her an instant where she thought she could pierce Ballantine’s eyes with one shot, but they were moving too fast for her to be safe, so she deliberately shot wide, but close, squeezing off multiple shots, suppressing Ballantine as he dragged Matt down the steps. The door closed, but not before she could get a knife wedged in between the door and the frame. She pried the knife back, opening a small slit in the door. She heard a door below her open, shut, and then lock. She waited and then backed away from the stairwell, moving to the top of the containers and stopping to think.

What is he doing?
She needed to move fast. She scampered over the top of the containers, feeling the wind and salt water spray across her face before she entered the stairwell on the opposite side from where Ballantine had taken Matt. She went up the stairs and found the door to the communications center. As she rounded the corner, she was confronted by two Chinese sailors with AK-47s.

Clean, well placed shots from Blake’s silenced AR-15 cleared them out of her way. She stopped for a brief moment before she turned the knob to the control center and saw an elderly Chinese man wearing a white naval uniform standing in the center of a communications node with televisions and radios all around him.

He lifted a pistol and fired a round, but she dove out of the way and slid along the floor, raising her rifle in time to squeeze off two shots and then feel the disheartening lock of the bolt.