Viking Bay

OTHER BOOKS BY M. A. LAWSON

Rosarito Beach

(WRITING AS MIKE LAWSON)

The Inside Ring

The Second Perimeter

House Rules

House Secrets

House Justice

House Divided

House Blood

House Odds

House Reckoning

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Copyright © 2015 by M. A. Lawson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lawson, M. A.

Viking Bay : a Kay Hamilton novel / M. A. Lawson.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-62678-8

1. United States. Drug Enforcement Administration—Fiction. 2. Undercover operations—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3612.A95423V66 2015 2014017511

813'.6—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For the Sheppard sisters: Gail, Linda, and Joanne—but especially Arlyn, who once sent me an e-mail that said, “When will I get a book dedicated to MEEEE???” So here it is, Arlyn.

It began with a text message.

Alpha texted Bravo and the burner phone in Bravo's pocket vibrated. Bravo looked at the message:
Transfer complete
.

Bravo punched numbers into the same phone, calling Charlie. He let the receiving phone ring twice, then disconnected the call. No words were necessary.

The man designated as Charlie removed his phone from a leg pocket in his cargo pants, punched in five digits, and hit
CALL
—and a transformer at a substation half a kilometer away disintegrated, sending bolts of white light a hundred feet into the sky. Witnesses later said that lightning—on a clear, cloudless night—had struck the transformer.

Delta didn't need a text message or a call to tell him to perform his task: the power going out in the compound
was
his signal. He put on night vision goggles and slipped into the house. He caught the old man just as he was coming out of his bedroom to investigate the power outage, and Delta slit his throat as if the old man were a newborn lamb. He dragged the body into a closet and left the house.

Delta called Bravo's phone and it vibrated twice. Again no words were needed to tell Bravo that Delta had completed his mission.

Bravo didn't use the burner phone for his next call. He used his personal phone, because it didn't matter if his next call could be traced. He dialed a number and spoke for less than ten seconds. Then he counted slowly to sixty—sixty seconds should be plenty of time. If he was wrong, a man Bravo needed to live was going to die. At the count of sixty, he reached into his pocket and, without looking, punched the # key five times.

The package erupted inside the house. Stainless-steel ball bearings and roofing nails spread outward faster than the speed of sound, and an odorless flammable gel inside the package ignited. The people in the room, some sitting no more than two feet from the bomb, were ripped asunder in an instant. Their flesh was burning seconds after that.

Bravo was confident that no one had survived; nothing made of flesh and bone could have survived.

Bravo was wrong.

1
|
“We need a woman,” Callahan said.

As always, Callahan looked like an unmade bed: hair sticking up in tufts like small whitecaps on a gray ocean, a wrinkled blue suit, an unpressed white shirt. His ash-stained tie hung at half-mast, and his battered black loafers hadn't seen polish since the day he bought them. He was also one of the unhealthiest-looking individuals that Anna Mercer had ever known: overweight, pale because he rarely ventured out into the sun, bloodshot eyes from the booze he'd consumed the night before. He had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, was probably diabetic, and should have been on a transplant list for a new liver. He was the only person Mercer knew with an IQ over one-forty who still smoked; she doubted that he'd last much beyond sixty-five, and he was sixty now.

She couldn't believe they'd once been lovers.

“She needs to be close to Ara's age,” Callahan said, “and she can't come across as a corporate lackey. We need someone like what's-her-name, Ara's roommate at NYU.”

“Carolyn Harris,” Mercer said.

“Yeah, Harris. She needs to be like Harris. Aggressive, funny, physical. Sexually, ah . . .”

“Loose?” Mercer said.

“I was thinking
adventurous
, not loose. Ara wouldn't find a slut attractive. And blond. Blond would be good. Harris was blond. I want her to make a subconscious connection.”

“I guess I could dye my hair,” Mercer said, primping her short, dark hair.

“Nah, you're way too old.”

“Well, screw you, Thomas. That was a mean thing to say. I'm only forty-five. And I was joking.”

“Yeah, sorry. But she needs to be younger than you. Closer to thirty.”

He wasn't sorry; he was tactless.

What had attracted her to Callahan in the first place was his mind; he hadn't really looked all that much different fifteen years ago when they'd been lovers. His cynicism, his quickness, his insights, his wit—and the fact that he'd been going places and could take her with him—is what had made him attractive. The funny thing was, other women had always found him attractive, too. He'd been married four times, wife number four dropped abruptly by the wayside a few years ago. Mercer couldn't remember if he'd been married to wife two or three at the time they were sleeping together.

“If Harris was available, I'd actually try to recruit her,” Callahan said. “But since she's not, we need someone like her, somebody Ara will instantly relate to.”

As Carolyn Harris had died in a car accident a year before, Mercer saw no point in reminding Callahan that Harris had been a protest-marching liberal who would never have gone along with Callahan's plan.

“So, you got anybody in mind?” Callahan asked. “We need to get moving on this. Ara will be in New York in less than a month.”

The original plan had not been to approach Ara Khan in New York, but when Callahan found out she was coming to the United States he decided to change the plan.

“Actually, I do,” Mercer said. “And I suspect you know who it is and you've already decided she's the one, even though she hasn't completed her training. Why are we even having this conversation?”

“Maybe I just enjoy your company,” Callahan said.

He was such a bullshitter—but it was almost impossible not to like him.