The Hunted (7 page)

“Nope. I came here on a business assignment.”

“What do you do?”

“Sort of a corporate troubleshooting position.” He waved it away. “Not all that interesting, but it was all I could find after my sales job was eliminated. Those eleven months I spent looking for work were brutal.”

“I know. I was only out of work for four months, but those four months were miserable. I was so worried that I wouldn’t find a job, especially with all the stories out there about people being out of work for years. If it wasn’t for my son, Jack, I don’t think I would’ve made it. Jack was what kept me fighting to find something.” Her smile weakened and a moistness showed in her eyes. “I broke down and cried when Dr. Shulman offered me that job.”

Willis nodded grimly. “What did you use to do?” he asked. He already had a good idea since he had seen the textbooks when he searched her apartment, but he showed the proper amount of surprise and interest when she told him she used to do something very different.

“My degree is in biotechnology,” she said, her smile weakening even more and turning into something bleak. “Four years for my bachelor’s degree, another two years for my master’s. I was working for a lab in Cambridge doing some advanced research, but they, like a lot of the labs that used to be here, decided it would be cheaper to do their research and development in India or Russia. I’m not complaining, though. You play the cards you’re dealt. All I want now is to be able to take care of my son.”

The waitress came back with their beverages. Willis watched as the waitress walked away, then he let some anger show in his eyes as he shook his head.

“I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you did complain,” Willis said. “People have a right to be angry. Jobs being wiped out left and right and a national unemployment rate of thirteen percent, all while the top one tenth of one percent in this country getting wealthier and wealthier. When I was out of work, I had a group contact me. Real revolutionary stuff. Burning down the country so we could start over, stuff like that. I had my moments where I seriously considered joining up.” Willis looked away as he took a sip of his coffee, then gazed back to her. He asked whether anything like that had happened to her.

“No, thank God,” she said. “Not that I blame you for briefly considering it. I can understand the anger out there, but it doesn’t do any good. We need to be constructive and work together and not tear this country apart.” Her smile turned apologetic. “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be preachy. But at least things seem to be turning in the right direction. I read this morning that the unemployment rate has dropped to twelve point six percent, so at least we’re seeing some progress.”

Willis had wanted to talk with her to find out whether the insurgency had tried contacting her. He wanted to know whether the insurgency had fed The Factory inside agent Hartman’s name as Barry claimed, or whether this had been a major league screw-up on The Factory’s part. When Hartman mentioned how the unemployment rate had fallen four tenths of a percent, something clicked in his mind. Something that had been vague suddenly became clear. He understood then why the unemployment rate had fallen and what his role had been. He understood why Hartman had originally been his target, and why she was later removed.

Early on Willis didn’t consciously pay much attention to the targets he was being assigned. They were all loners; either single men or divorced, mostly all of them living in either shabby apartments or rundown houses. It made sense to Willis that these were men whose anger could lead them to joining the insurgency. Later, he started realizing that many of his targets were unemployed, and he assumed that was because that was who the insurgency were actively recruiting. Men who would be angry and depressed and would have little to lose in seeing this country go down in flames. At some point Willis started to have his doubts and was searching for proof of this insurgency and his target’s connection to it. With his last few assignments, all of this was at a conscious level, but it must have also been there at a subconscious level for a while now. Maybe even from the beginning.

Willis changed the conversation to a lighter topic, and while he maintained a pleasant exterior, in his mind’s eye he was actively clicking through all twenty-five targets that he had taken out, trying to remember everything he could about their dossiers and his surveillance of them. They all could’ve been unemployed. He couldn’t say for sure since he wasn’t paying attention to that early on, and some of his assignments were completed quickly with little surveillance. As he sat talking with Melanie Hartman his mind flipped through his assignments as if it were a rolodex and he became convinced that not only were they all unemployed, but that they had to have been that way for a while. That was why they all seemed so shabby, except maybe Foley. And that was why they were made his targets.

Their food was brought over. Willis barely tasted his hamburger as he ate it and continued his conversation with Hartman, all the while his mind racing on other issues. When their lunch reached its normal conclusion, Hartman remarked how she needed to head back to work. Willis nodded, exchanged some final pleasantries with her, and acted dense when she hinted about how she wouldn’t mind having company on the two block walk back to her office. Under different circumstances Willis would’ve taken her up on it, but with the way things were he was going to need to keep far away from her and her son. It was a shame. He liked her and found himself attracted to her.

After she left, he had a refill on his coffee and drank it while he considered his options. As far as he could see he had three choices. Keep doing his job and collecting a paycheck, go on the run, or do what he could to stop them. He finished his coffee and accepted that he had only been kidding himself. He had no choice about what he was going to do next.

Chapter 12

Willis drove back to the shack he was renting so he could pick up Bowser, then drove back to his house. He stopped about a quarter mile away so he could let the dog out. The dog took off, running straight back to the house as if this was a game while Willis crept along behind him. If there was anyone hiding out there with a rifle, the dog would’ve smelled him out and gone after him. Still, Willis was careful to keep low as he made his way to his side door so he could let himself and Bowser back in.

Once he was inside he packed up what he was going to need since he wasn’t going to be returning. Then he left a message for Barry. Twenty minutes later Barry called back and Willis told him they needed to talk.

“I believe we’re talking now,” Barry said coldly.

“Face to face,” Willis said. “You’re going to have to meet with me in person and explain to me how Melanie Hartman ended up being labeled an insurgent. I’m going to need to see the files and other documentation that led you to that decision.”

Barry’s tone turned icier as he said, “I already explained to you what happened.”

“Yeah, well, the problem is I don’t believe you.”

“I see. And what do you think happened?”

“Something very different.”

Barry went silent for a long moment, then told Willis that what he was asking for was impossible.

“It better not be. In an hour I’m going to call you from Boston. Someplace crowded where we can both be safe. When I call you I’ll give you the location and you’ll have fifteen minutes to show up. If you don’t I’ll be going to the press and I’ll be giving them everything, including copies I made of the dossiers and assignments from The Factory’s bulletin board—”

“You were forbidden from making copies of that. You took an oath!”

“Yeah, well, too bad. I’ll also be giving them a recording of all of our phone conversations, including this one.”

Willis heard Barry exhaling his breath as if he were trying to calm himself down. Then in that same icy tone from earlier, Barry said, “You’re not going to get anywhere with what you’re doing.”

“Possibly.”

“It’s doubtful that the media will do anything with whatever you give them. Not with our reach and not with the current political environment.”

“You could be right.”

“The problem, Willis, is that you shouldn’t have lied during your psychological profile examination. If you had answered the questions truthfully, we wouldn’t be having this issue now.”

Willis disconnected the call. It wasn’t worth arguing the matter.

What he was going to do next was tricky. He was going to have to bring his Factory badge with him, and they’d be able to track his location with it. It was possible that they’d try to intercept him on his way to Boston. But even with that problem, Willis couldn’t help smiling over the way Barry screwed up. Willis had no idea where Barry was located. For all he knew, Barry could’ve been operating out of Nebraska. Or Texas. Or somewhere in Southeast Asia. Willis was hoping that Barry was located near the field agents he was supervising, and he had further guessed from the hours that Barry kept that he was on the east coast, but it had been only a guess. From the way Barry responded to Willis’s demand he all but confirmed that he was within an hour’s drive of the city. Otherwise he would have tried bargaining that he needed more time for them to meet, whether or not he had any intention of them meeting.

Willis would have liked to have dropped Bowser off at the shack that he was renting, but he couldn’t do that since they’d be able to track him driving there. He considered abandoning the dog, but he couldn’t do that either. So he let Bowser in the backseat and gave him a thick rawhide bone to work on.

Willis kept to the back roads and avoided any toll highways. Given the little time they had, it was more likely that they would track him to wherever he was going and deal with him there, but if they tracked him to a toll road, they could shut down the toll booths and trap him. With the route he took, he’d keep them off balance as to where he was heading, which was an area in South Boston where he knew it would be easy to park, and more importantly, an area where people tended to look the other way when things went down.

As he expected, there was plenty of available street parking, but he parked illegally down an alley where his car wouldn’t be easily visible from the main street. Bowser looked up from his chewed-up bone and offered Willis a quizzical look. Willis got out and pointed a finger at the dog and ordered, “Stay here and be quiet.” Bowser grunted out his dissatisfaction over that, and then proceeded to demonstrate his unhappiness by tearing more vigorously at what was left of the bone. If Willis was able to come back later, he expected to see the backseat torn up also. That was okay. He wasn’t going to be keeping the car much longer.

Willis cut through the alley, then down a side street and another alley so he could enter the coffee shop from a back entrance. He dropped his Factory badge in a corner of the shop and then kept moving until he was out a side door, keeping himself low and his face hidden. He kept walking until he was positioned in a doorway of a vacant storefront where he’d be able to watch the coffee shop but still be mostly concealed unless someone flashed a light into the doorway.

It didn’t take long for his man to show up. No more than three minutes. The man was about his age, a few inches shorter, stockier, and with the hardness of a killer showing around his mouth and eyes. He wasn’t Barry, Willis was certain of that, but then again he still hadn’t made his call to Barry, and even if he had, he’d never expect Barry to show.

The man who did show up moved cautiously as he consulted a device that must have been a GPS tracker. He kept close to the buildings so he wouldn’t be seen easily from the coffee shop, and he ended up passing within two feet of Willis without realizing it. As the man moved on, he kept consulting his GPS tracker. He stopped three doors away from the coffee shop and flattened himself in another building’s doorway. Willis texted Barry providing the coffee shop’s name and address, and telling Barry he had fifteen minutes to get there. Barry must’ve immediately texted the same information to his other man because Willis could hear the buzz of a phone that had been put on vibrate. He watched as the man took a cell phone from his jacket pocket and studied it as if he were reading a text message. The man put the cell phone away, then stepped out from the doorway and continued on. Before he entered the coffee shop he slipped his hand inside his jacket. Willis knew the man was keeping his fingers inches from a gun that he had holstered. He didn’t want to take it out yet, but he wanted quick access to it.

Willis used a pair of field glasses to watch as the man moved quickly into the shop ready to start shooting if necessary. Most likely he would’ve used the gun to force Willis out of the shop so he could be taken care of someplace less public, but maybe not. Maybe the plan was to end things there and expect the witnesses to be too shocked to give the police an accurate identification of the shooter. Willis could see the man scanning the shop, his eyes narrowing and his mouth pinched. Indecision marred his expression for several heartbeats as he looked for Willis. He noticed the unisex bathroom in the corner of the shop and made his way over to it. When he tried the door handle he must’ve found it locked. A grimness tightened his mouth. He had to be figuring that Willis was hiding in there. Moving slowly to the counter he bought himself a coffee and then settled down to wait. He again reached inside his jacket as the door opened, then dejection contorted his face as a young woman stepped out of the bathroom. It was only then that the man spotted Willis’s Factory badge on the floor.

He got up from his table, walked to where the badge had been left and picked it up. After a quick look at it he brought it to the girl working behind the counter and showed it to her to see if she had seen the man in the photo. She shook her head. The man waved over the other kid working behind the counter. This kid looked at the badge and also shook his head.

The man left the coffee shop after that. He moved cautiously, not quite sure what to do next. He stood for a moment making a face as if he were caught if the middle of a sneeze, then looked up and down the street searching for Willis. He must’ve decided that Willis got spooked and bailed on the meeting because his mouth tightened into an angry slash and he moved quickly then to go back to his car. His eyes were little more than dull black dots as he strode past the doorway where Willis was hiding, too sure that Willis was gone and too absorbed in his thoughts to bother looking anywhere but straight ahead.