The Asset (24 page)

“Missing links more like”—she laughed—“but that's airport services and I got no jurisdiction with those zookeepers.”

“Yeah, but you could open a few doors for me. To tell you the truth, I don't really want them to see me coming. Turn on the kitchen lights and the roaches tend to scatter, you know?”

“All right, you sneaky bastard. I'm game. But what's in it for me? Dinner out in the real world? Maybe Charles Street?”

She swirled her cocktail glass in front of his face.

“Bourbon that wasn't distilled on a Honduran chicken farm? Hot motel sex, provided the sheets are clean?”

“Most of the above.”

“Deal. I can do without the clean sheets.”

After Kennedy paid the tab, Mary gave him one of her contractor badges and her Jetway door code and sent him on his way. It was dark when Kennedy walked outside and down the stairs to the ramps. The last of the night's departures were taxiing out, and baggage handlers were dwindling to skeleton crews. Kennedy ducked into a shadowy spot under a jet bridge and dialed Nuri on his sat phone.

“Booty call?” Nuri said groggily on the phone.

“Hey, I need your help with something.”

“Doesn't everyone? What's up?”

“Remember the IP we found at Logan Airport that had been in regular communication with Lentz's Cuban IPs?”

“You over there?”

“Yeah, figured we could check it out, maybe get a bead on someone.”

“You might make a decent spook yet. I'm pushing an app to your sat
phone called Q. It's an IP sniper, like the ones the feds use, only better, because it doesn't have any of those pesky court-ordered privacy protocols.”

“Goddamned free countries. What the hell's the world coming to?”

“I know, right? Fire up the app when you get it. I've already programmed the IP in question so it will start sniffing it out right away. If the user has his special Lentz IM app open, we can deploy an API that links it to the GPS sat Langley uses to track agents and assets in the field. It's accurate to within a square meter so you buy him a cup of coffee. Cool, right?”

“Very.”

“Nervous?”

“I wasn't expecting toe-to-toe contact.”

“Just let Best handle it.”

“Great idea if he were here.”

“What? Where the hell is he? Wait, have you gone rogue?”

“Relax. He's at the safe house. I was having dinner with the TSA chief and thought, since I was here, I might as well—”

“Shit! You
have
gone rogue. I don't know if I should be impressed or send a crew to scrub you right now.”

“Calm down,” he whispered harshly. “And stop yelling in my ear.”

“Yeah, 'cause what I should be doing is slapping you upside your head. This isn't a Netflix original series about a soccer dad spy, dummy. If you flush one of Lentz's crew you might get smoked.”

“I'm not going rogue and I'm not going to get smoked. I just wanted to see if the guy is here. If I get a whiff of anything professional, I'll call it in.”

“Dude, by the time
you
get a whiff, the professionals will already have a bead
on you
. I think you need to hang back and get Best over there before you do anything.”

“What's that?” Kennedy said. “You're breaking up. I don't have any bars here.”

“Bullshit, there's a tower less than a quarter mile—”

He hung up and texted her, saying she better not dime on him or he would tell Alia she helped him. After a string of obscene text replies, she eventually let it go. But she had sufficiently freaked Kennedy out, so he proceeded more cautiously, promising himself that if it turned out the owner of the IP address was present at the airport, he would call Best and Alia and take his licks for having attempted a solo mission.

As if the heavens agreed with Nuri, it started to rain heavily. He had
gone out there without a raincoat or umbrella so he was instantly soaked. He downloaded Nuri's app and fired it up, but the interface was completely foreign to him. It was a grid with tiny flashing numbers and it reminded him of an air traffic control screen. Desperate for help, he called her back.

“You've got a lot of nerve calling me. Did you know I could kill you about thirty different ways with my bare hands?”

“I can't figure this thing out. It's completely nonintuitive.”

“Yeah, to the untrained eye.”

“Isn't that what
nonintuitive
means?”

“Okay, smart-ass—”

“Nuri, please. It's pissing rain. I just want to see if the guy is on shift. If he is, you can speed-rope in and kill him with your bare hands, okay?”

“There's an idea.”

“Please just tell me how to use this.”

“I'll do better than that. I'll mirror my app with yours so I can guide you.”

“That would be amazing.”

“Okay, I've got it open and I can see your signal,” she said.

“Can you see his IP?”

“Checking . . . Holy shit. He, or she,
is
there.”

“Really?” Kennedy whispered.

“Pretty sure, but verifying . . . Yep, definitely there.”

“Jesus, where?”

Kennedy ran under the huge steel eave of the Delta maintenance hangar to get out of the rain. The mist and heavy cloud cover made the apron pitch-dark and only the occasional flash of airplane landing lights would cut through the night and briefly illuminate everything like a massive strobe light.

“Checking,” Nuri said. “Signal sucks. Must be the rain. Hang on . . . Okay, got it. It looks like our bad guy's signal is coming from the apron near Terminal E, about a half a click from the Delta maintenance hangar.”

Kennedy's blood ran cold.

“Are you sure?” he tried to whisper. “That's exactly where I'm standing.”

“What? Yes, I'm sure.” Her voice lowered. “You better get out of there.”

An airplane landing light whipped across the apron as a plane taxied in and briefly illuminated a tall man dressed in a black raincoat and black baseball cap about a hundred yards away, jogging right toward Kennedy. The way he was dressed, he looked a lot more like an assassin than a maintenance worker.

“Oh shit,” Kennedy said and hung up.

The airplane turned to taxi to its gate and the apron was dark again. Kennedy sprinted around the side of the Delta hangar and spotted a sea of luggage trailers stored in long rows near the service road fence. He found a place to hide among the trailers and watched for the man, hoping he was just an airport official wanting to see his credentials. But another landing light flooded the area and Kennedy got a good look as the man walked slowly toward the luggage trailers. He was holding a gun with a barrel suppressor close to his side, scanning the area with a tactical LED flashlight.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” Kennedy whispered to himself.

He grabbed his sat phone and sent Nuri a 911 text. The flashlight beam blinded him and a bullet nicked the edge of the luggage trailer he was standing next to, narrowly missing his head. He ran, weaving through the labyrinth of trailers and tugs, heading for the service road fence. On the other side, there was a Dunkin' Donuts and a gas station next to one of the short-term parking lots. Bullets zipped past him, sparking off the edges of the metal trailers and bouncing with ricochet whines across the asphalt. One of them tore through his pant leg, missing his ankle by centimeters.

Kennedy could hear the man's footsteps relentlessly approaching, and the bullets kept coming. A round zipped past his ear so close he could feel its heat and he dove down under the cargo trailers and waited, his shaking hand cupped over his mouth, trying to muffle the sound of his heavy breathing. The service road fence was out. It was too high, had razor wire on the top, and was too well lit. He'd be a sitting duck up there. There was an open maintenance garage close by. It was dark inside, a good place to hide, and it had tools and equipment he might be able to use as weapons.

He heard footsteps again. The man was getting closer. How the hell was the guy finding him so quickly? He had to be tracking his sat phone, even though Kennedy wondered how he managed to lock into what was supposed to be a completely secure device. He didn't want to abandon his only connection to help but he might be able to distance himself if he ditched it. As he frantically weighed his options, he remembered something Noah Kruz had said in
The You in Universe
:

The only way to deal with aggression is with aggression. Running from someone or something perpetuates the problem because you are feeding the response the aggressor seeks. You've heard the term “feeding
on the weak”? Bullies, from the playground to the penitentiary, are nourished by fear. When you meet their aggression with your own, they have nothing to eat.

It was like walking into a prison yard on the first day and beating the shit out of the biggest guy you could find. At that point, you
defined
yourself to your enemies as something other than easy prey. The guy coming after him had defined Kennedy in his head as a runner, a frightened amateur in over his head. If Kennedy wanted to live, he had to do the exact opposite of what his aggressor expected.

And there were no more places to run.

He took off his shoes and crawled out from under the luggage trailer. He threw one shoe about thirty feet and it clattered noisily across the ground. Bullets peppered the spot where it had landed and Kennedy took that opportunity to run into the maintenance garage. When he got in there, he threw the other shoe to a different spot near where the previous one had landed and bought himself a bit more time with the diversion. Then he crossed to the darkest part of the garage and hid his phone in the seat cushion of a tug parked in one of the service bays. He searched for weapons and found a heavy three-and-a-half-foot torque wrench and a fire extinguisher. The footsteps were heading toward the garage now, so he crept into a corner near his hidden phone and waited.

The man approached the door to the garage and a landing light briefly illuminated his face, an expressionless mask with black eyes.
The point of no return
,
Kennedy thought.
Even if he had second thoughts about killing the guy, he no longer had a choice. There was only one way out. The man crept inside quietly, holding his gun in one hand and the smartphone he was using to track Kennedy in the other. He stopped short next to the baggage tug where Kennedy's phone was hidden and checked his device. A thin slit of a grin spread across his bloodless lips, and he put the device away.

Kennedy's heart was exploding in his chest. It would be a matter of seconds before he was discovered. He had to move. The man was less than ten feet away. When the man got down on a knee to look under the tugs, Kennedy knew that would be his best chance at catching him in a position of vulnerability. He ripped the pin from the fire extinguisher—a heavy industrial dry-chemical unit for oil and gas fires—and blasted the man from
behind. The assassin tried to turn and fire but the high-pressure powder mixture hit his eyes and face like a sandblaster, blinding him and knocking him down.

Kennedy ducked, anticipating the guy's instinct to fire his gun at whatever was in front of him. He emptied his mag into the back wall and was struggling to load another when Kennedy stood and swung the torque wrench as hard as he could at the man's head. The dense steel ratchet assembly struck him in the left temple and spun him around. He dropped the gun and fell hard to the floor. Blood was gushing from his head, and his feet were twitching. Then he was still. Kennedy stood there, unable to tear his eyes away from the grisly scene, unable to breathe.

A
nother flashlight beam shined in
Kennedy's eyes and he looked up, dazed. There were three men dressed in military black ops garb, with helmets, goggles, and small tactical machine guns, standing at the entrance of the maintenance garage. The one shining the light on Kennedy lifted his goggles. It was Best. Kennedy started to speak, but Best signaled him to keep his mouth shut and sat him down in a dark corner on a bucket. Kennedy watched as they wrapped the dead man, the wrench, and the man's gun in sheets of nonreflective black plastic, secured with matte-black tape.

Then they covered the blood on the garage floor with powder, which congealed it into piles of mealy black lumps, like clumped cat litter. The men swept all of that into more plastic bags, and the garage was clean, like it never happened.

The entire process took less than fifteen minutes.

A refrigerated airline catering truck pulled up with its lights off and they loaded all the plastic parcels into the back. Kennedy and Best got in front and the other men in back. The driver was wearing an airport catering company uniform. Best yanked off his helmet and top pullover, revealing the same uniform underneath. He pulled Kennedy's satellite phone from his pocket and handed it back to him as they drove slowly across the apron, headed for the terminal.