The Shadow Agent Page 4

  The helmet would also mask her face, rendering more or less useless the web of security cameras that covered almost the entire city—at least when it came to leaving a definitive record of her presence.

  Tom briefly imagined the freedom that would come with moving about with such anonymity.

  Thinking about freedom—any kind of freedom—served only to remind him yet again of the life that awaited Stella and him: a home where no one could find them, no need to use fake names, no reason to look over their shoulders during the day or listen for footsteps at night.

  The woman continued to stare at Tom, sizing him up. Tom simply stared back.

  Raveis broke the standoff. Nodding toward the sedan, he said, “C’mon, Tom. You know the drill. Get in. We’ve got a lot to cover.”

  Four

  The Town Car began to move, but that didn’t surprise Tom.

  Meeting in a stationary vehicle parked in a concrete garage was one way to increase privacy, but putting that vehicle into motion offered an added level of protection against eavesdropping.

  It also put Tom in the position of being a passenger along for the ride—and at the driver’s mercy.

  But just as the men in the black panel van would follow Raveis’s Town Car, Tom’s team would follow the van.

  A minor consolation, but he would take what he could get.

  Raveis and the tall woman had taken the seats facing forward, leaving Tom the seat that faced them.

  This meant he would have his back to the driver, but before Tom could say anything about that, Raveis pressed a button on the door-mounted console and raised the opaque privacy screen.

  With the windows already closed, the rear compartment of the Town Car was now sealed as tight as a tomb.

  The vehicle exited the parking garage before proceeding east on Seventy-Second Street. Tom watched through the heavily tinted rear window as the two vehicles fell into formation behind them.

  Raveis gestured to the woman. “This is Slattery. Since it’s her meeting, she’s going to start things off.”

  “It’s good to finally meet you, Tom,” Slattery said.

  Her voice was low and steady, her manner reserved and professional to the point of being abrupt.

  She spoke with an accent—or rather a mix of them—that caught Tom’s attention right away.

  There was a hint of southern lilt, with long midwestern vowels, but added to that was a slight Texas twang.

  A stew generally indicative of someone who had moved around the country frequently as a child.

  Tom had only ever encountered that mix in people whose parents had been career military.

  He glanced at her hands for rings—school ring, wedding band, engagement ring, anything that might tell him something more about who she was.

  Slattery’s fingers were bare, and they were also long. Her hands were slender, yet large for a woman.

  The last woman Raveis had introduced to Tom in a manner similar to this one had ended up trying to kill him.

  Tom looked her in the eye, nodded, and replied that it was good to meet her as well.

  Formalities complete, Slattery began. “I understand that Sarah Grunn is a close friend of yours.”

  “Yes.”

  “More than friends, no?”

  Tom wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but before he could say anything, Slattery clarified. “She’s family to you. Like a sister.”

  Tom nodded.

  “How did you meet her?” Slattery said.

  “She led a team that was assigned to provide force protection outside my residence.”

  “This was the restaurant you lived above. Up in Vermont.”

  “It wasn’t my restaurant.”

  “Your girlfriend owned it. Stella Quirk.”

  “That’s technically correct, yes.”

  “Why ‘technically’?”

  Raveis said, “Tom strives to be at least accurate if not brutally honest. Back then he was separated from us—lying low, using assumed identities, false documentation, the whole thing. Stella had used her dead mother’s identity to buy the business.”

  Slattery nodded. Tom got the sense that this information mattered to her. Then she said, “You had taken in the teenage daughter of a former Syrian intelligence officer who at the time was working for us, correct?”

  “I was asked to, yes. By the Colonel.”

  “And later that night you came under attack. Ten heavily armed men led by an Algerian assassin affiliated with the Benefactor.”

  “I’m sure Raveis has reports on all this somewhere.”

  “He does, and I’ve read them. You provided overwatch during the attack,” Slattery said.

  “Yes.”

  “During all that, how did Grunn perform?”

  “I only witnessed the initial attack, but from what I saw, she was Tier 1.”

  “But both men on her team were eventually killed.”

  “Like I said, I only witnessed the initial attack.”

  Slattery nodded. “Grunn’s troubles didn’t end with the loss of her men, though, did they? She was captured by the Algerian, roughed up by one of his men before being used as a hostage to draw you out. A knife was held to her throat.”

  “I don’t hear a question.”

  “You witnessed that part, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  “I had remained behind to cover Stella’s escape with Valena.”

  “The Syrian girl.”

  “Yes. The Algerian wanted to know where Stella was taking her. He said if I told him, Grunn would die quickly. If I didn’t, he’d have her throat opened and she’d drown in her own blood.”

  Tom recalled the fear he’d seen in Grunn’s eyes.

  He recalled, too, her moving her head from side to side, indicating that Tom wasn’t to tell the Algerian what he wanted to know.

  It was a small but unmistakable gesture of defiance.

  “Was she shaken by that experience?” Slattery said. “Losing her men, being roughed up by the Algerian, facing a particularly gruesome execution?”

  “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “A direct answer, please.”

  “We were all shaken by it.”

  “How were you able to get out of that situation alive?”

  Tom hesitated, then said, “Unknown to Stella and me, a deep-cover close-protection agent had been assigned to us.”

  “Krista MacManus.”

  “Yes. She worked as our line cook, had been with us for a year and a half.” Tom paused. “She intervened.”

  “But the Algerian got away.”

  “Correct.”

  “And Grunn was the one who ultimately killed him. Two days later, at a safe house in Connecticut.”

  “I didn’t witness that, either.”

  “According to her after-action report, she was grabbed again, this time by the Algerian himself. He held a pistol to her head.”

  “Like I said, I wasn’t there,” Tom said.

  “After the Algerian was killed, all of you—Grunn, MacManus, Valena, you and your girlfriend, and a childhood friend of Cahill’s named Sandy Montrose—shared some downtime together at the Cahill estate on Shelter Island. Was that the last time you saw Grunn?”

  “It was.”

  “No contact at all after that. Emails, texts, phone calls.”

  “None.”

  Raveis said, “Tom signed up shortly after leaving Shelter Island, was at my camps for just over three months, has been a standby asset in the field since.”

  Again, Slattery nodded as if to give what Raveis had said due deference before asking Tom, “Do you know where she went after you left the estate?”

  “She and Krista were headed to where Krista had been raised. A farm in northern Vermont. The two of them were to provide close protection to Valena until she enrolled at Taft.”

  “You were aware that Sarah Grunn and Krista MacManus had entered into a romantic relationship, yes?”


  “I was. Is that a problem?”

  “Everything we know about Grunn’s history indicates that she was strictly heterosexual.”

  “Why would that matter?”

  “Because while a sudden switch of sexual preference might be the realization of one’s true nature brought on by a life-or-death experience, it could also be something else. Nothing wrong with a preference, mind you, it’s just the suddenness of the change, and so soon after a bad episode in the field, that is a reason for concern.”

  “Are you her shrink?”

  “I’m a lot of things.”

  Tom looked at Raveis. “What’s going on?”

  Slattery was about to answer, but Raveis raised his hand—a small gesture, but it stopped her.

  Raveis took a breath, let it out, then said, “Six weeks ago, Tom, Grunn came back to work for us, said she was eager to get back into the field. After a requisite reevaluation, she was cleared and given an assignment, which she completed, then was given another, which she also completed, no problems whatsoever. Everything seemed fine; a valued operator was back where we needed her. But then three days ago she disappeared. Her teammates found her bed empty one morning, all her gear gone. The only item she’d left behind was a cell phone. There was no sign of a struggle, no data on the cell phone, nothing.”

  “What was the assignment she was on when she disappeared?”

  Slattery and Raveis glanced at each other. Raveis bowed his head, and Slattery said to Tom, “Grunn was part of a team tasked with hunting down your former commanding officer.”

  Carrington.

  “A kill squad,” Tom said.

  Raveis replied, “Yes. One of several we have on active status.”

  “Interest in that kind of work doesn’t sound like Grunn. Not the one I knew.”

  “Which is our concern as well,” Slattery said. “It’s possible that her run-in with the Algerian and his men caused a trauma that either she was able to conceal during her reevaluation or that didn’t manifest until some point after.”

  “Her sudden request for reassignment from protection to special activities didn’t set off any alarms?”

  “It was seen at the time as her simply wanting more skin in the game. That can happen to someone who goes through what she had.”

  “Also, she knew Carrington,” Raveis added. “He had recruited her, they’d obviously met on several occasions during that process, and there was always the chance their connection would prove useful at some point. As you well know, a familiar face can come in handy at times.”

  When Tom had first met Raveis three years ago—in a furtive meeting nearly identical to this one—he’d been asked to help find a former recon marine he had served with during his time as a navy Seabee.

  That recon marine was Charlie Cahill.

  When Raveis had asked for Tom’s help bringing Cahill in, the fact that Tom was unlikely to be instantly killed by the man whose team Tom had once saved, and who himself had saved Tom’s life, was stated as the reason for his having been chosen for the mission.

  It fit, then, that Raveis would want someone who’d had prior contact with Carrington on the team actively hunting him.

  A friendly face was often the best disguise.

  Tom said to Slattery, “You interviewed Grunn’s teammates, right? The people she was with before disappearing. What did they say about her frame of mind? Was she moody, prone to angry outbursts, anything like that?”

  “None of them had met her previously, so they weren’t in a position to identify any change in behavior, but the consensus was that while she did her job well, she was quiet and kept to herself during her downtime.”

  Raveis added, “You know, pretty much everything anyone says about a neighbor who snaps and goes on a rampage.”

  “Has anyone talked to Krista?”

  “I did, an hour ago. She says they were estranged. Their breakup was what sent Grunn back to us.”

  “And did she say anything about Grunn’s state of mind?”

  “She didn’t want to come out and say it, but I got the impression there were concerns.”

  Slattery reached inside her field jacket and removed a smartphone. Thumbing the display, she said, “This is the phone Grunn left behind. Shortly after her teammates handed it over to us, a message came through from a blocked number stating that the phone was to be kept powered up and that further instructions would be forthcoming. Two theories emerged right away. One is that Grunn was somehow coerced into leaving her post. Since her teammates were nearby and would have heard sounds of a struggle, coercion seems more likely than abduction. The second theory is that she left willingly.”

  Tom understood the implication. “Grunn wouldn’t turn.”

  “That’s what you used to think about Carrington,” Raveis said. “Last I knew that’s what you still thought.”

  Tom didn’t respond.

  Slattery ceased thumb-swiping, then turned the phone and held it for Tom to see. “This text came through just a few hours ago.”

  On the display was a series of digits.

  41 20 40.7

  73 04 42.9

  “I’m told you have a memory for numbers,” Slattery said. “One look at a series of numbers and you’ve memorized it. Have you ever seen those sequences before?”

  “No. But they look like map coordinates to me.”

  “Exactly,” Raveis said. “The first set is degree, minutes, and seconds north, the second is degree, minutes, and seconds west.”

  Tom saw in his mind the coordinates as they would be written out: 41◦ 20’40.7” N, 73◦ 04’42.9” W.

  Slattery swiped the display one more time before holding the phone for Tom to again see. “This text came through right after.”

  Tom read what was on the screen.

  A two-word missive written in all-capital letters.

  SEND TOM

  Five

  Raveis said, “The coordinates mark a location in a city called Ansonia. That’s up in Connecticut. I was wondering if perhaps you knew it from your travels.”

  Tom had wandered the Northeast during the five years that followed his discharge from the navy.

  He’d been all of twenty-seven years old when he began that aimless journey, had worked when he needed to, sometimes living out of his pickup, sometimes finding an apartment, spending his nights either way reading and waiting for the scars on his torso to heal and fade.

  They had all healed over time, but few had faded.

  Every step he’d taken during those years had served to bring him one step closer to his chance meeting with Stella.

  “It’s off Route 8,” Tom said. “In the Naugatuck Valley, I think.”

  Raveis pressed, “So you know it.”

  “I know of it. I’ve driven past it, but I never stopped there.”

  Slattery said, “It’s your classic failed New England industrial city. Not particularly pretty—or big, for that matter. Main Street is all of five blocks long. Scattered throughout those blocks are several shuttered factories, all currently vacant and in decay. These coordinates put you in the exact center of one of those factories.”

  Tom said to Raveis, “It’s not one of your safe houses.”

  “It’s not. Records indicate that it was purchased just prior to the real estate crash back in ’08 by a group of developers intending to convert it into a retail space with luxury condos above. But no work has been done since. And it hasn’t changed hands.”

  “We dispatched a recon team right away,” Slattery said. “The building is five stories tall, and there are no adjoining structures, so there’s no way of approaching it without being seen by anyone positioned inside. And the buildings on the nearby blocks offer numerous vantage points that could serve as roosts for spotters. Or, for that matter, shooters. The building has multiple points of entrance and egress, as does the city itself. And the Metro-North train station is one block west.”

  “I’m guessing that fact is relevant.”

>   “Those first texts were followed by another that simply said, ‘zero dark,’ which is, of course, the designation for midnight. That text was followed by yet another, this one instructing that you are to arrive by train.”

  Raveis said, “The last train from Grand Central to New Haven leaves at 9:39. Then there’s a connection at Bridgeport that arrives in Ansonia at 11:44. An 11:44 arrival would give you more than enough time to walk one block west to the factory.”

  “The sender knows I’m in New York,” Tom said.

  “That crossed my mind, too. Again, you and Grunn have had no contact. You’re sure of that.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve had no contact with Krista MacManus or Valena?” Slattery said.

  Tom shook his head. “No one knows where I am.”

  “What about Stella. Does she know where you are?”

  “No.”

  Slattery watched Tom.

  Raveis said to her, “Their emails are clean.”

  Tom asked, “Were there any other instructions?”

  Slattery answered, “You’re to come alone. No security detail. We have to assume that whoever is behind this will likely already be monitoring the area around the factory, so we can’t risk putting a watch team in place between now and midnight. We considered placing a quick-response force somewhere beyond the five-block perimeter of downtown, but the layout of those surrounding streets, combined with the time of night, means any vehicle we attempt to send in would easily come under scrutiny. With all the shops and businesses closed up except for one or two bars, there simply wouldn’t be enough traffic to hide in.” She paused. “Whoever picked this place knew what he was doing.”

  “I think we all know who that person is,” Tom said.

  Raveis and Slattery studied him.

  “You believe it’s Carrington reaching out to you,” she said finally.

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I’ve been down this road with him before. A few times.”

  Raveis said to Slattery, “Carrington has a fondness for elaborate codes and extensive precautions. He was our only means of contacting Tom for a while.” He shifted his attention to Tom. “I understand your loyalty to him; I know what he means to you, but he’s not the man you think he is. Maybe he never was.”