The Shadow Agent Read online

  MACMANUS, KRISTA.

  Other photos showed a series of known associates, all of whom were identified by the same bold print along each photo’s bottom edge.

  CAHILL, CHARLIE.

  MONTROSE, SANDY (WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN).

  A man in his fifties—CARRINGTON, JAMES.

  And another man, maybe a few years older—HAMMERTON, JOHN (WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN).

  Four more photos remained. One was of the security detail that would be escorting their target, and of the three men in that photo, only the leader was named—LYMAN (SEAL).

  Another photo was of a woman in her midthirties—DURAND, SARAH. She was listed as support staff. The third was of another woman, TORRES, GINA, and a man, GARRICK, ANDREW. They were listed as Sexton’s close-protection team.

  The final photograph in the file was an oddity—a printout of a selfie taken by Quirk as she stood in front of a free-standing oval mirror, her cell phone held off to one side in an effort to capture her full reflection from head to toe.

  As Esa had done with the photograph of her grandmother, she compared herself to this subject.

  She saw confidence in the woman wearing a white Oxford shirt, a string of knotted pearls, and nothing else.

  The shirt was unbuttoned and parted, showing her breasts and flat stomach and hips, as well as the dark strip of pubic hair between them.

  A single word was printed on the photo.

  INTERCEPTED.

  The abundance of material—easily the most complete packet she’d ever received—supported the Benefactor’s claim that this was a critical job.

  It also confirmed that the source of all this material was someone with access to personnel files and sensitive logistics.

  When she was done studying the photo of Quirk, Esa placed it with the others, then reached for the dossier and began reading.

  Esa and the McQueen brothers met at a diner to await their instructions.

  It was just after dawn when the text came in.

  The exact time and location of the target’s departure was included in the text as well as the location of the meeting.

  A second text instructed Esa at precisely what point in the target’s journey she and her team were to strike.

  That text also included an unexpected command that altered the mission.

  Secure item and deliver.

  An all-out kill mission was one thing, but a kill-and-retrieve mission was something else entirely. It narrowed the options, eliminating outright the possibility of striking from a distance and then fleeing, which was any assassin’s first choice.

  A long-range kill was still in the mix, of course, but that would mean whatever distance there was between her team and their target would have to be traversed, after which the body of their target would have to be thoroughly searched.

  Even in the best-case scenario, these were time-consuming actions. More than that, the failure to cross the distance meant the inability to search and retrieve.

  It was better, then, to kill up close and eliminate the chance of having success in one part of the job but complete failure in the other.

  This complication wasn’t something Esa couldn’t handle, though.

  She’d done such work many times before—killed men and women, standing near them or, in some cases, lying beside them as they died, after which she’d seized what she had been sent to obtain and made her escape.

  In all those missions, the objective was something specific, so she composed a follow-up text requesting a description of the item.

  But before she could send it, another text came through.

  Flash drive.

  Esa shared the updated information with the brothers, then shut down the phone and pocketed it.

  The schedule the Benefactor had established meant that she and her team had fourteen hours to prepare.

  Driving to New Jersey to select the weaponry and obtain a vehicle would take six hours at most, leaving them eight hours of free time.

  There was, she saw, no reason to wait till after the job to celebrate.

  Two

  In a Brooklyn safe house, Tom Sexton sat up and moved to the edge of his bed.

  It was a strange bed, but he was used to that.

  He hadn’t slept in the same place twice since the completion of his training three months ago.

  Since he was even more of a threat to the Benefactor than he had been before, and therefore more of a target, it was better for all concerned if he kept moving, grabbing whatever rest he could in the places where no one would think to look.

  Should someone come looking for him, however, and should the worst then occur, his occupying these forgotten neighborhoods meant that collateral damage would be limited. An unseen escape after an attack was also at least within the realm of possibility, since witnesses would be few to none and security cameras unlikely.

  Deep in the shadows now, deeper certainly than he’d gone before or had ever thought possible, Tom was a man in hiding—a man waiting for a chance at justice.

  Or maybe it wasn’t justice at all, but vengeance. Maybe there wasn’t a difference. He’d come to consider that justice might simply be an illusion constructed to make acceptable the deepest of human impulses: the desire to punish those who have wronged us.

  And be certain they could never wrong us again.

  When he had first arrived at this safe house—a long-abandoned seven-story hotel—he’d immediately thought of his father’s last night alive.

  Though he hadn’t witnessed the events, Tom had heard enough to have a clear idea of what had transpired.

  His father had lured the four killers for hire to a hotel not unlike this one. It had taken George Sexton two years to track the team down and arrange the meeting, under the pretense that he was looking to hire them.

  But they had killed his wife and daughter in his home, and since that night he’d given up everything except his drive for revenge.

  Tom often wondered what his father had seen when he’d finally stood face-to-face with these men.

  After a long search—a costly search that all but bankrupted him—there they’d been before him, within reach.

  At some point someone had acted—either his father had made his move or one of the assassins had beaten him to it.

  In the resulting struggle, his father had killed three before the fourth had gotten him.

  The report filed by the medical examiner made clear the violence of the encounter, which had descended into vicious hand to hand.

  Eyes gouged, windpipes crushed, ears half-torn.

  Tom had been in such life-or-death struggles, so he knew full well the horror of them.

  The cause of his father’s death had been listed as strangulation, but Tom did his best to turn his mind away from that fact.

  Being in his own small room with nothing to occupy him but memory and imagination, it was impossible to keep his tired mind from wandering yet again to what he both knew and didn’t know.

  What he was sure of was that more sleep wasn’t coming, so he looked toward the room’s only window, the view beyond which was the brick wall on the other side of a narrow alleyway.

  But if he couldn’t see out, then no one could see in.

  And anyway, he wasn’t here for the view, having long ago shut himself down to any and all pleasures. Still, he allowed himself to indulge in the memories of his last days with Stella.

  Those final, precious hours he’d spent beside her, the things they had said, the sight and feel and smell of her—these were his only refuge from his current life as an operator awaiting an assignment.

  Once he’d gotten all that he could from his memories, Tom cleared his thoughts.

  There were dangers in his line of work, so he needed to remain alert.

  Thinking about Stella for too long always led him to wonder what stage of training she was in, and by his calculations, she was possibly in her final weeks now; if that was true, it meant she was currently in the hands of men task
ed with pushing her to the point of breaking.

  It was during the last weeks that candidates were instructed in survival, evasion, resistance, and escape—SERE training, a grueling indoctrination that, among other things, included simulating as realistically as possible the treatment one should expect upon being captured by an enemy.

  Brutal confinement, forced nudity, enhanced interrogation techniques.

  Degradations and deprivations—firsthand experience of these was the only way to prepare the human mind and body for the anguish one human was capable of inflicting on another.

  But Tom didn’t want to think of Stella in the midst of the collection of ordeals that Raveis’s men called training.

  She would endure; Tom knew this, trusted this. And she would be made stronger by it, just as all who had come before her had been.

  But she would also be changed by those events, just as Tom had been changed by them, exactly as he had once predicted.

  Of course, acknowledging that change was to think about what would cause it, so Tom sought out something else to think about in the remaining hours before light.

  As hard as he tried, though, nothing came to mind, because there was, really, nothing but Stella and the drive for vengeance and the freedom that came with it.

  But he caught a break after a few moments—one of the three burner phones resting on the table by the strange bed buzzed.

  Picking up the device, he turned it faceup and glanced at the text message.

  Gather your team, location echo.

  Three

  The hotel had been shuttered nearly a decade ago.

  In that time, the decay that had likely begun while it was still in business had only accelerated.

  Wallpaper peeling, floorboards rotting, ceilings water damaged.

  Tom and the two members of his close-protection team had taken three of the more habitable rooms on the top floor. Within minutes of Tom’s notification, they had packed up their gear and were on their way out.

  No member carried more than what a medium-size backpack could hold, nor was any evidence of their presence ever left behind.

  Garrick took point as they headed down the six flights of stairs, Tom behind him, and Torres behind Tom.

  In his late thirties, Garrick was a few years older than Tom. He was larger, too—taller, with a solid torso and thick limbs. Energetic, even when he was at rest, he seemed always ready to burst through any physical obstacle that might be put in his way.

  As a rule, each teammate shared as little personal information as possible, but Tom knew that Garrick, prior to signing on with Raveis, had been army infantry, served three tours of duty, one of which had delivered him to the same hellish province in Afghanistan where Tom had served his final months.

  Tom’s impression was that Garrick was dependable, coolheaded, and intelligent.

  The presence of a gold wedding band on Garrick’s left hand was, in fact, the only thing Tom didn’t like about the man, but there was nothing that could be done about that.

  No one was without some loved one somewhere.

  More than that, Tom knew too well that men with nothing to lose tended to act in accordance with that belief, sometimes bravely, though often enough foolishly, and the last thing he wanted was someone on his team with the potential for the latter.

  Perhaps having sensed Tom’s concerns, Garrick had made an offer during his final interview.

  You keep me alive, and I’ll keep you alive.

  The third team member, Torres, was thirty, tops. Only recently, Raveis had begun recruiting candidates from law enforcement, and Torres was one of the first of that class of graduates.

  Based on the little he knew about her, Tom had been reluctant to choose her until Raveis had provided him with her records and requested that Tom look them over before reaching any decision.

  You’d be lucky to have her, Raveis had said.

  By the time Tom was halfway through her academic records, he realized he’d be a fool not to want her.

  Her police academy records had only deepened his conviction.

  Torres had risen fast during her eight years in the NYPD, her final promotion placing her within the elite Critical Response Command—the first line of defense against a terror-related attack. But there was more than her bona fides that had intrigued Tom. Having been born and raised in New York City, she knew her way around the five boroughs, and the idea of a local who could serve as a scout had its appeal.

  The absence of any hint of a Bronx accent told Tom that she had both the desire and the ability for reinvention, which of course made him think of Stella, who had reinvented herself more than once.

  It was her very reinvention that had saved Tom’s life.

  So having someone around who reminded him of the reason why he had committed to this world of private-sector special operations seemed like the thing to do.

  For two months, Tom and Garrick and Torres had lived and worked together, moving from safe house to safe house, picking up the occasional close-protection assignment tossed their way by Raveis, mainly to keep them sharp while they waited for something more substantial.

  As a rule, Tom didn’t allow himself to give in to impatience, because haste was the enemy, worse even than fear.

  More than a rule, his refusal to give in to impatience was deep within his nature.

  But the sooner he got started—and his real work began—the sooner he and Stella would be free from all this.

  Free of the man who employed them, and of the man who wanted them dead.

  Perhaps this predawn order to gather and meet meant today was that day.

  Exiting the hotel, the team started toward the SUV parked halfway down the block. The street was empty, the October morning rainy.

  The team moved in formation, each member actively covering predetermined directions.

  Front, rear, left, right, and points overhead.

  Quick, expert, but also as covert as possible.

  Knickerbocker Avenue was an isolated street in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East Williamsburg, but even places such as this one weren’t undiscoverable by those charged with capturing or killing one or more of the Colonel’s private contractors.

  Tom himself had been at the top of the Benefactor’s kill list for years without even knowing it.

  He knew it now, though, and knew it well.

  After reaching the SUV, the team placed their gear packs into the rear compartment before making their way around the vehicle and climbing in—Torres behind the wheel, Garrick in the front passenger seat, Tom in the seat directly behind Torres.

  As he buckled in, Tom asked, “Time?”

  Torres started the engine and shifted into drive. “This early there shouldn’t be any traffic. We’ll be there in twenty.”

  Tom nodded, focusing on what was outside the window to his left.

  He would cover the driver’s side while Garrick covered the passenger side.

  Torres would keep a forward watch while frequently checking the rearview mirror.

  Precautions, alertness, keeping to the shadows—this was the way they lived now, existing like the occupants of a city under siege.

  Riding in silence, they crossed the East River, then headed north on the FDR Drive.

  Echo was the code name for a Raveis-owned multistory parking garage on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  Tom had been there before—had, in fact, first encountered Raveis there—so he knew all the reasons why it was considered a secure meeting place.

  He had also killed there, fighting shoulder to shoulder with Charlie Cahill, and so the idea of returning put Tom on his toes to an even greater degree.

  Torres steered the SUV onto Seventy-Second Street, then turned into the garage entrance and headed down the first of the two steep ramps that would bring them to the lowest level, a subbasement where no cell phone signal could reach and even the loudest of sounds would be muffled.

  As they reached the bottom of the second ramp, T
om saw three vehicles parked in the farthest, darkest corner: a Lincoln Town Car, a Ford panel van, and a BMW K1200R motorcycle.

  All the vehicles were painted some variation of black—glossy, flat, matte. Their surfaces glistened from the rain.

  Of the two people visible to Tom, he recognized just one.

  Sam Raveis.

  The second person, dressed in wet-weather motorcycle gear, was a woman. One of the first things Tom noted was that she was taller than Raveis by at least two inches.

  She studied Tom closely as he exited the SUV alone and started walking toward them. Twenty feet short, he stopped.

  From where he stood he could see the front of the panel van.

  The two men inside were the kind of men in whose company Sam Raveis always traveled—dark-suited professionals with neatly trimmed hair and clean-shaven faces, men who were meant to appear anonymous while also standing out as members of a security detail.

  Though Tom had recently served as a close-protection agent, the type of mission for which he’d specifically trained was deep-cover recon, so unlike Raveis’s men, he had let his hair grow long over these past months and was sporting a full beard.

  He was dressed now in the manner in which he always was: faded jeans, dark T-shirt, untucked work shirt over that to conceal his sidearm, and a billed operator’s cap to obscure his face. The weather today required a light black raincoat.

  Even before he’d been sent to Raveis’s compounds and taught the art of tradecraft, Tom had learned that men who looked as he did now—unkempt, rough, maybe even a little dangerous—were disregarded by most, sometimes even actively ignored.

  Moving unseen was more than his job.

  It was what would keep him alive.

  Tom glanced at the license plate of the motorcycle, committing it to memory, then did the same for the panel van.

  Then he looked back at Raveis and the tall woman beside him.

  The four-pocket leather field jacket she wore did little to hide her athletic build. Her dark hair hung straight, ending in a blunt cut just below her chin.

  A full-face helmet was resting on the seat of the BMW, and Tom concluded that with the helmet and motorcycle gear on, it would be difficult for any observer to recognize that the rider speeding past was a woman.