The Rogue Agent (The Agent Series) Read online

  He wasn’t overly fond of downtime, either, but a sympathetic physician close to his family had provided him with the pills necessary to reach and hold on to unconsciousness whenever he had trouble sleeping.

  He had come to rely on those too much, but that was a problem for another time.

  Standby status—the lingering space between his two escapes—was something that he was required to endure.

  It was during these hours—long hours, lately—that his disciplined mind would fail him, and he’d find himself thinking of her, remembering everything about her, every detail of her face and body, her voice, the feel of her.

  These precious details, unfortunately, also included how she had died.

  How he had gotten her killed.

  Had he not loved her, had he never met Erica, she would still be alive.

  A simple and painful truth he often couldn’t comprehend.

  Of course, Cahill had seen men and women die before—combatants and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places.

  He’d seen mutilated bodies—those torn by weapons of war as well as those upon which unspeakable acts of torture had been inflicted.

  Dead men hanging from ceilings by meat hooks, their naked torsos bound with heavy chains, hacked-off limbs scattered on the blood-drenched floor below them.

  Children and women, too.

  He had managed to shake off all the effects of those images within moments of witnessing them, choosing instead to focus only on the resolve they stirred in him, the dogged determination to hunt those responsible.

  Cahill knew that in war it was emotions—any and all emotions—that more often than not made casualties of men.

  Though he had years ago hunted down and killed the men who’d murdered Erica, the memory of her death was like a parasite he could not expel. Or ignore.

  So during these hours, as he waited for the call that would at last send him into motion, he did the only thing he could do. He spoke to her, sometimes aloud, other times by writing her a note.

  It was for him the only way through.

  Listening to the hard April rain, he felt the need tonight to put his words down on paper.

  Pour out his regret and grief and anger in a way that was tangible. He was close enough to crazy these days that he didn’t want to add talking to himself to the list of warning signs.

  Tearing a page from a notepad, he placed it out of habit on a hard surface and began his nightly purge.

  He checked his watch when he was done.

  Twenty minutes had passed, and the rain had stopped without his having noticed.

  He was surrounded by silence.

  He read over what he had written—raw and rambling, but that was the point.

  No one would ever read it or know he had even written it.

  Just another in a long line of private correspondence with the cherished dead.

  Correspondence in which he’d begged forgiveness from the only woman he had ever loved.

  He didn’t bother to reread the letter, simply signed his name and then folded it by thirds.

  Neatly, precisely.

  Rising from the table, he stepped into his small kitchen and, removing the Zippo lighter from his pocket, lit the note on fire.

  At the sink, he held the paper with one hand, turning it so the flame always had something to consume.

  He continued to hold it until the fire touched his fingertips, then dropped it into the drain.

  Only when nothing but ash remained did he open the faucet and wash all traces away.

  He stood there for a while afterward, wanting to scream, to burst, but that wasn’t him.

  All that he could do was endure this storm of emotion until the call came.

  He was in the darkened kitchen, standing silent and motionless, the Zippo still in his hand, when it finally did.

  Cahill returned to the living room and answered the burner phone just as the fourth ring had begun. “Yeah.”

  The voice on the other end was the one he expected to hear.

  “You’re needed,” Raveis said.

  Cahill knew the procedure.

  Specific details would be sent by text following this call.

  Still, he wanted to know what awaited him tonight. “Medical?”

  “Exfil, too.”

  Cahill had recently been cross-trained as a medic, could handle everything from a simple field dressing to minor surgery.

  But secreting assets out of the city was still his specialty.

  “The old tavern?” he said.

  The code name for a safe house seventy-five miles northeast of the city.

  With full med facilities and a staff doctor, someone whom Cahill had known most of his life and trusted as he trusted no other.

  The very place, in fact, where Cahill had spent three months receiving his extensive medical training.

  Raveis answered, “For now, yes.”

  “Copy that.”

  “Our overseas friend has the asset,” Raveis added. “He’ll provide any assistance you need. And just to be safe, I have two airlift crews on standby.” He hesitated for a moment, then added, “It seems we may have a breach somewhere.”

  By saying that, Raveis had broken his own cardinal rule regarding cell phone communications, what could and couldn’t be said, and Cahill wondered whether that meant the man was rattled.

  All Cahill knew for certain was that emergency medical assistance, followed by an exfil to Connecticut, would be considered a worst-case scenario.

  Something big was going down.

  Big enough to possibly distress Sam Raveis—a man Cahill had never before seen distressed.

  Cahill responded in the only manner protocol allowed. “Copy that,” he said again.

  The text came through thirty seconds after the call had been terminated. The secure app installed on the burner phone gave Cahill five seconds to read the information before the text would self-delete.

  It wasn’t an address but rather a single word: DUMBO. Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass—an acronym for a neighborhood in Brooklyn.

  Cahill knew exactly where he was headed.

  With luck, he’d be across the river in a half hour.

  That text disappeared, and a second immediately followed, this one containing the number of the burner cell currently being used by Hammerton, their “overseas friend.”

  There were few men that Cahill trusted implicitly, but John Hammerton was one.

  Cahill wrote the number on the palm of his left hand, purposely jumbling the last four digits in case he was somehow intercepted along the way.

  It seems we might have a breach somewhere, Raveis had said.

  Now more than ever, Cahill needed to follow any and all protocols.

  Powering down and pocketing his phone, he hurriedly gathered together his things.

  A biometric safe hidden in a cabinet contained several clean burner phones as well as his firearm of choice and a half dozen loaded magazines.

  A Kimber Ultra Raptor II—a compact .45-caliber 1911 with a three-inch barrel—went into a neoprene holster on the inside of his left ankle.

  Two seven-round mags went into a similar holster on the inside of his right.

  Secured on the outside of his right boot was a leather sheath housing a KA-BAR knife.

  Seven-inch blade of sintered, 1095 carbon steel.

  His Carhartt jeans had been modified to allow him fast access to his firearm.

  The inner seams of the pant legs had been unstitched, starting at the bottom cuff and extending up to midcalf. Strips of noiseless Velcro had then been sewn into the thick denim and the seams reclosed.

  All it took was for him to drop to his right knee and pull the Velcro apart with his left hand, and the grip of his Kimber was there for him to grasp with his right.

  The same motion to his right pant leg would allow him access to both his spare magazines and the KA-BAR.

  These were movements he had practiced daily till they
had become second nature.

  He still practiced them, devoting several minutes of every day until the mechanics were fluid.

  Even though he had two spare mags on his left ankle, Cahill slid a third one into his left hip pocket so that he could quickly acquire it should the ones at his ankle for any reason be out of easy reach.

  He’d learned the hard way the need to carry as many mags as possible.

  Taking two burner phones from the safe, he swung the heavy door closed and locked it, then grabbed his fully stocked medic’s rucksack and headed out the door.

  His small apartment was one of four on the top floor of a building in Harlem, the ownership of which could never be traced to him.

  Such precautions were essential.

  The property was held in a land trust that was controlled by an attorney who had been hired by a businessman with no known ties to the Cahill family.

  A wealthy and prominent family, the Cahills had real estate holdings in numerous parts of the world, a handful of which had been acquired for the sole purpose of providing a well-stocked place for their only son to lay low in when necessary.

  Cahill had recently taken up residence in the five-story structure.

  He was, in fact, the building’s only occupant, which no doubt added to his feelings of grief and separateness.

  But his isolation kept others safe, and so living disconnected from people was a burden he stoically bore.

  We learn from our mistakes, he told himself often.

  Because if we don’t, people die.

  He rode the freight elevator down to the enclosed loading dock where two vehicles waited—his twenty-plus-year-old Mustang GT and a GMC panel van, both parked with their noses facing the garage door.

  Heading toward the vehicles, Cahill removed the phone he’d used to communicate with Raveis from his pocket and dropped it through a small opening cut into the lid of a 55-gallon steel oil drum.

  The drum was filled with a mixture of paint stripper and methylene chloride.

  By the time Cahill had reached the white panel van parked mere feet away, the device and all the information stored within it had been destroyed beyond recovery.

  Climbing in behind the wheel, he turned the ignition and pressed the automatic garage door opener clipped to the sun visor.

  He listened to the engine as the wide door rose.

  The van was a decoy vehicle, a mock-up of a contractor’s truck, but its V-6 engine was finely tuned, its tires and suspension the best that money could buy.

  Blending in was important, but so was getting away, should the attempt at camouflage fail.

  Steering out of the garage, Cahill pressed the opener again and watched in the rearview mirror as the overhead door lowered behind him.

  Once it was down, he tucked the opener into his medic bag and headed east along 125th Street.

  He had crossed Third Avenue and was approaching Second when the downpour resumed, the heavy drops drumming the roof of the van like flak.

  Three

  Hammerton guarded the locked door, listening as he stood beside it for any indication of activity in the hallway beyond.

  He’d quickly rigged the fire exit at the end of the hall with a simple makeshift alarm—a glass bottle of sparkling water that he had balanced on the door’s lever-style handle.

  Pushing the lever downward to open the door would send the bottle crashing to the linoleum floor.

  The long and narrow corridor, its walls made of heavy prewar plaster, would easily carry down to him the sound of glass shattering.

  The elevator reaching this floor, its heavy doors parting automatically, he would certainly hear as well.

  An industrial warehouse that had been converted during the real estate boom two decades ago into a mix of offices and artist studios and storage space, the building was likely empty at this hour, or close enough to it, and this made his job just a little easier.

  The arrival of anyone on this floor would be something he would need to pay close attention to.

  The simplicity of this was appealing.

  But that simple act was made considerably more difficult by the sharp and persistent ringing that blared in his ears like an alarm.

  The source of the steady, shrill pitch—gunshots that were like cupped hands repeatedly slapping his ears—had occurred an hour before.

  The discharging of firearms, both small and large, was something he had encountered many times in his life, first during his stint in the British SAS and then in the decades of private-sector work that followed. But tonight’s shots had been fired in a confined space—one right after the other—and that, combined with the lack of any ear protection, had proved to be the critical difference.

  The damage caused to his inner ear—the drums as well as the sensitive cilia that vibrated with every sound wave—was likely irreversible.

  The ringing itself would fade sooner or later, but the loss in his hearing, no matter how minor, was not something he could afford.

  Closing in on sixty years old, Hammerton was all too aware of the fact that his abilities were waning. He still had the hardened body of the trooper he had once been, but he also woke each morning to aching joints that could not be attributed to strenuous activity.

  His eyes, though still good at long distance, could no longer focus on anything within the distance of two feet. Add another foot or so to that handicap and the front sight of his SIG P226 would be nothing more than a blur.

  And then where would he be?

  He knew that he wasn’t at that point yet—he remained capable and effective, and tonight had proved that.

  The wounded man he was now guarding would certainly be dead had Hammerton not still possessed much of his vigor and skill.

  But the armor was showing cracks, there was no ignoring that, and one day—sooner than he had assumed—he would need to find another way to earn his living.

  Or maybe somehow land some major score so that he wouldn’t have to work.

  This wasn’t the time for those concerns, though.

  All that mattered now was whether or not someone entered the hallway.

  That and keeping the man whose life was in his hands safe until Cahill arrived.

  After that, all that would remain was for the three of them to make it out of the city alive.

  “You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?” the wounded man said.

  Hammerton turned to look at him but remained by the door.

  He was uncertain how far he could step away from it before any sounds coming from beyond it would be drowned out by the ringing.

  The room was a storage area but large—larger by double than Hammerton’s Lower East Side apartment.

  Despite its size, it had just two windows, each one a foot tall by three feet wide and located high up on only one wall.

  With the overhead fluorescent lights off, the only available illumination came from what spilled in through those two small windows.

  Street light from eight stories below muted by a curtain of heavy rain.

  Hammerton could see the outline of Ballentine, who was seated on the floor, his back flat against the wall.

  With his right hand, Ballentine held a blood-soaked rag to his left shoulder. His left arm hung limp, his left hand resting in his lap.

  Despite the ringing in his ears, Hammerton could hear the man’s excited breathing.

  Young, maybe twenty-five, tops. A good-looking kid. Fit, so the fast breathing was likely from lingering panic rather than the exertion of getting him to this safe location.

  Hammerton had all but dragged the kid along.

  “I asked if you had a smoke,” Ballentine said.

  Hammerton hesitated before finally approaching the kid, removing his waxed canvas shoulder bag as he knelt beside him. He reached into one of the bag’s outer pockets and produced a pack of Marlboros.

  Digging out one of the remaining cigarettes, he placed the filtered tip between Ballentine’s lips and lit the end
with a Zippo lighter. “I’m told these things will kill you.”

  Ballentine took a breath, held it, and let out a plume of blue smoke. “No kidding. As good as aspirin, if you ask me.”

  “Cahill will be here soon.”

  Ballentine nodded. “You don’t happen to have another bottle of water in that bag of yours, do you?”

  Hammerton shook his head. “Sorry, mate. You’ll be all right, though. The bullet missed the bone. Meat heals fast, trust me.”

  “It still fucking hurts.”

  “Always does.”

  “You’ve been shot?”

  Hammerton didn’t answer.

  Ballentine drew on the cigarette several times before speaking again. “They came out of fucking nowhere.”

  “Yeah, they tend to do that.”

  Seated in his watch car, Hammerton had seen their vehicle—a late-model Ford sedan, likely stolen, with plates that had been stolen from yet another vehicle—pull to a stop and double-park outside the brownstone in which Ballentine lived.

  Just as Ballentine had been climbing the steep stoop.

  It was a borrowed apartment, one that Ballentine had claimed was a well-kept secret and was certain would remain so.

  Hammerton’s first impression when he had met the kid was that he was, at best, overly confident.

  And anyway, Raveis didn’t believe in well-kept secrets, thus Hammerton’s presence.

  The Ford hadn’t screeched to a halt, nor had its four doors been flung open suddenly, its occupants rushing out.

  It had pulled up slowly, almost silently, cruising to a gentle stop, as if the driver had been intent on looking like someone innocently searching for a specific address.

  But the vehicle had appeared just as Ballentine arrived, and this had triggered a reaction in Hammerton’s gut, one he knew not to ignore.

  He had quickly memorized everything he could about the vehicle’s physical appearance and was writing the marker numbers down in the notebook he always kept open and ready when the doors finally opened.

  Three of them, not four.

  One man emerging from each opened door, leaving the driver behind the wheel.

  A small squad, relatively speaking, but small squads were better suited to getting in and out quickly.

  Whoever had sent them was unaware that Ballentine had been assigned protection. Not that more men would have been sent, necessarily, but it was likely those that had been would have acted differently as they emerged.