It all falls down, p.6
It All Falls Down, page 6
part #1 of Birth of Heavy Metal Series
“Huh.” Anderson grunted. “There goes my plausible deniability about that.”
“How much did you really have in the first place?” he asked, and the man shrugged with a chuckle. “If it makes you feel better, I do feel like trash for putting all Monroe’s work at risk because I felt impulsive and antsy one day, as much as I hate to admit it. You could have told me what you two had planned, and that would have meant I’d have put it off, despite having some very good reasons for our little meeting. But…yeah, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry for being an impulsive ass.”
The former colonel nodded. “Don’t worry about it. I can handle Courtney. It’s not like there was any real damage done, and to be fair, knowing who’s coming for us might be worth the trouble. She might not feel that way right now, but she knows you’ve been more than worth your salt, as they say.”
“Worth your salt…where the fuck does that come from?” he asked.
“I think it had something to do with the Roman soldiers back in the day. They used to get paid in salt instead of money.”
“Because salt was worth more than money back then?” He sounded as disbelieving as he felt.
“How the fuck should I know?” His companion shrugged as the town car came up to the front. “Remember, we’re all coming at five for the game. We’ll bring drinks and food, but you might want to stock up on some of that on your own. You know how Sam gets when her boys start losing.”
“She wouldn’t need to get like that if she knew how to pick a winning team.” Savage chuckled and stepped into the car. “All she really knows is based on her Australian Football League, and that’s nothing like the NFL.”
“You’re telling me,” Anderson concurred. “Have a nice drive home. I’ll see you at five.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, closed the door, and leaned back as the driver pulled away from the Pegasus building. He liked having a team to come over to watch a game with. They would make a mess of his apartment, of course, and Sam would probably start to get drunk when the team that she chose—usually against Savage, Terry, and Anderson—started to lose. It was still better than getting drunk on his own to watch the game.
Besides, the place had been a mess yesterday anyway.
It was a short ride to his apartment when they didn’t have to negotiate the morning traffic. He had a few hours to kill before the crew arrived, which allowed him to step out and collect supplies for his contribution as well as make sure the place was as ready as it could be. That wasn’t really saying much. He had the big TV and there were enough couches to make sure the four of them would be seated comfortably. Aside from that and the kitchen, there wasn’t much else to prepare. He still had enough booze left over from his binge the week before, so he was able to sit with a beer as he turned the TV on and waited for them to arrive.
“Hey, Savage,” Anja said. He startled when she came alive in the earbud he still wore, for some reason. “How did the presentation go?”
He shrugged. “About as well as it could have, considering that it was merely a show of trust for the rest of the board. But then you already knew that, didn’t you?”
“Of course I knew, but I wanted to know if you would tell me the truth,” she replied as he took a sip of his beer.
“Truth about what?” he asked, his eyes narrowed.
“Well, I did see that you went into Monroe’s office with Anderson, but I made sure nobody would be able to listen in on what happens in that office while Monroe is in there, not even me,” the hacker explained. The familiar squeak told him she had leaned back in her still loud chair. “So, tell me the truth. Did you or did you not engage in a threesome with her and Anderson?”
Savage blinked. “What the actual fuck, dude?”
“I’m…mostly kidding.” She chuckled. “She has some interesting bedfellows, if you know what I mean. Call me crazy, but I’m curious about what she does when she’s away from the Zoo.”
“You’re weird,” Savage protested. “She laid into me for going after Carlson when I did, since it meant she needed to come back to Philly to deal with a stock sale or whatever. She didn’t like it since it interfered with some master plan she had for the company or something. Which begs the question, of course, of why the fuck you didn’t tell me there was a plan when we plotted our way into Carlson’s prison?”
“If there was any plotting and planning, she didn’t fill me in,” the Russian said. “There are some things that even I’m not aware of, sadly. Thanks, by the way, for not selling me out in there.”
“Hey, I ain’t no snitch.” He chuckled and took another sip of his beer. “They do want us to start tracking this Elena Molina chick as soon as possible, though, since she is the one who’s working on taking us out of the picture.”
“Right, and I’ve worked on that since we got the name. There’s a small problem with that, though. This woman is as good at covering her tracks as I am at covering yours. Seriously, I don’t doubt that she has someone like me on her payroll. I found a couple of birth certificates in the US and Monaco, but aside from that, she’s a fucking ghost.”
“Well, if you have a location and you have the names of at least two of her known associates, may they rest in peace, wouldn’t that be enough for you to triangulate some kind of location for her?” Savage asked. It wasn’t like he knew anything about that, but he had heard her talking enough to be able to predict where her mind would go.
“Well, true, I could do that,” she mused aloud. “It’ll still be difficult, though. There’s no real confirmation that she even met with Banks or Carlson, but it is something to work with, anyway.”
“You’re the best, Anja.” He chuckled. “I believe in you.”
“Well, yes, I am, but your faith is appreciated.” She sounded like she was smiling broadly. “Anyway, I won’t keep you since it would appear that your visitors have begun to arrive. I’ll let you know if I find something.”
“Appreciate it.” Savage leaned back in his lounger as the pre-game program started.
Sam was the first to arrive and stepped inside without so much as a greeting and looked around the apartment. She toted a six-pack from a local brewery as well as a bag with what looked like chips, salsa mix, and a bottle of scotch.
“Well, don’t you clean up nice?” she said, and her tone clearly suggested that she’d arrived early to make sure he was ready to entertain.
“I thought you didn’t like people talking to you like that.”
“Well, it’s not anyone talking to me but rather someone talking to you,” she replied and punched him gently on the shoulder. “You never told me that you minded someone talking to you like that. Do you? Because I’ll respect the hell out of it since you did the same for me.”
“I don’t mind, no.” He chuckled, shook his head, and offered her a cold beer before he took the supplies she had brought off of her hands. “I was poking a little fun at you, is all.”
“Good to know.” She grinned at him, accepted the beer, and took a long swig from it.
“Who are you cheering for today, then?” he asked as he put her beers in the fridge and started mixing the salsa.
“Well, you’re a Seahawks man, right?” Sam asked with a sly glance at him.
Savage shrugged. “I don’t really have a team but yeah, I tend to lean toward the Seattle teams.”
“Ah, good. Since you always choose badly, I’ll cheer for the Patriots today.” She grinned as he rolled his eyes.
“You’re only saying that to piss me off,” he grumbled.
“What is she saying to piss you off?” Anderson asked as he stepped inside. He’d arrived with Terry and brought wings and more beer, as well as gin.
“She’s cheering for the Pats today,” Savage explained, and their boss laughed.
“Well, at least she won’t be all depressed when her team loses,” Terry said. He seemed in an uncharacteristically good mood, complete with his version of trash talking.
Savage grimaced. “You’re only trying to get on my nerves. I know it.”
“Nope, I did my research,” Sam said, took her phone out, and showed that most of the pundits talking about the game believed the Patriots would win it.
“What, do you actually listen to the experts?” He shook his head. “They’re wrong like…seventy-five percent of the time. You’d be better off simply closing your eyes and pointing at one of the two teams to pick.”
“Well, I did that too.” She took another long swig from her beer.
He laughed and she grinned in response as Anderson came over to the kitchen to help him to prepare the food. Terry caught the beer Savage tossed him and moved to take a seat with Sam. The sniper had loosened up somewhat on his stern lifestyle since he’d joined their little team. Whether that had something to do with his time with Sam or with Anderson’s family, Savage didn’t really care. He looked like he was having a good time, anyway, while Sam celebrated the fact that they were both on the same side of something for once.
“Do you really think Sam is doing this simply to piss you off?” Anderson asked with a chuckle, and he shook his head. He carried the dip and chips out to the coffee table and dropped onto his favorite seat. Anderson left the wings to stay warm in the oven until the game started and joined them with a scotch and soda instead of a beer in his hand.
“What do you think, Savage? Do you want to put money on this?” Sam asked. She’d apparently decided to continue with her ribbing.
“Say…fifty bucks?” he proposed. “That the Seahawks take the game.”
“I could do with more drinking money,” she said and leaned back in her seat.
“We can all agree that you have more than enough drinking money, Sam,” Anderson pointed out.
“Are you trying to say something about me, James?” she asked and raised an eyebrow.
“I’m not trying to say anything,” he responded smartly.
It was way too cold to do this shit. There had to be enough people in their line of work who smoked, even in this day and age. They were in a business in which many would consider dying of lung cancer a win—although of course, with the medical advances being made, death by smoking wasn’t really a problem anymore.
But no. They had stuck him with a group that didn’t smoke, which meant that if he needed to indulge in his particular vice, he would have to do it outside and freeze his ass off while he sucked on the little white cylinder.
It wasn’t that he thought everyone should smoke. Marvin Frost merely wished he didn’t need to be out of the toasty-warm SUV to enjoy a nice drag. Or maybe some company. Nicotine hits were always better done in company.
But there he was, standing on his own out in the sub-freezing temperatures while he kept an eye on the Pegasus building and waited for one of the high rollers inside to leave.
He finished the cigarette, dropped it, and ground it under his heel as he cursed softly and popped chewing gum into his mouth before he entered the vehicle again. The other four men in the SUV looked at him in disapproval. They could obviously still pick up the inevitable stench that followed his habit.
Fuck them. He ignored the silent criticism and continued to chew his gum.
“Are there any updates from the building?” he asked, accustomed to their scowls by now.
“People are leaving,” the man in the driver’s seat grumbled. He toyed with his cell phone and left the surveillance of the location to his teammates. “Our target is still in the building, though.”
Frost sighed and shook his head. With modern technology being what it was, there really was no reason to have to wait out there. The days of old-school spying should have ended by now. They had tried to access the building’s security to at least obtain an idea of their target’s schedule, but whoever had set the system up in Pegasus was the kind of good that was paid seven figures a year. They could have hacked it if they’d had a couple of months to prepare, but all their IT specialist had managed to achieve with the two-day notice they’d had for the job was to locate a blind spot for the SUV from where they be able to keep an eye on the entrance without raising suspicions.
The marginal advantage wasn’t much benefit at all. If their target decided to simply use another exit, take a town car instead of her usual vehicle, or leave with someone else, they would be forced to wait yet again. She had to be in a position where she could be approached without hundreds of police officers descending on them from all around the city. Despite the fact that she once again scorned to make use of any bodyguards worked to their advantage, of course, but they still needed her to be in a situation where she was both alone and vulnerable.
Frost checked his phone to refresh the details of their target in his mind. She looked a little young to be a de facto head of a Fortune Five-Hundred company like Pegasus. The word was that a former colonel worked as her second in command, who in turn had a spook—special forces or CIA—working as an enforcer for them. All that probably meant she got the job because she had the right connections. The bio they had been sent didn’t include any personal details. All it contained were Dr. Courtney Monroe’s habits and a picture of her, clear enough that she could be recognized even from this distance. It was a difficult mission, but he assumed the team had been through worse.
Then again, he really would have preferred to have had more time to plot and plan for this kind of operation. Unfortunately, the word from the client was that Monroe was only in Philly for a limited window, after which she would leave the country for parts unknown. This literally would be their one and only chance.
He shook his head. The timetable still didn’t work. The client should have hired a long-range specialist, someone with a rifle who could position themselves safely a mile away, ready to knock her head off and disappear once the deed was done.
Vaguely, he recalled the client mentioning something about a show of force, but he had admittedly been entranced by the seven-million-dollar bounty on the woman’s head—per operative. For that much money, he would have been willing to kill her with his bare hands if that was what the client wanted. He would still have bitched and complained about it, but that was neither here nor there.
“Heads up. We have another group on their way out.” The man in the shotgun seat of the SUV alerted them, and Frost trained a pair of digital binoculars on the entrance. He enhanced the image until he could focus on the group that slowly exited the building.
Sure enough, their target was there. She looked tired and annoyed while she answered questions from the folks in expensive suits around her. A valet pulled her car up to the entrance and she pointed at it and shook her head, perhaps telling these people that she would answer more questions later.
Frost doubted it. She had the look of someone who had no intention to indulge anyone.
“Get ready to move out,” he commanded as he retrieved the duffel bag that carried their small arsenal of firearms. He alerted their support that the team was on the move and the operation now officially in progress.
Chapter Six
The Zoo
“Well, Gregor,” Sal said and looked at the glass in his hand still half full of clear liquid, “I have to say I’m a little disappointed that you’ve held out on the good stuff. Why haven’t we moved this to bars around the Zoo? You would make a killing.”
“I wish I could, my friend,” the Russian said with a chuckle and leaned over to refill Sal’s, Madigan’s and his own glass with a few more fingers of the vodka before he took another sip and sighed with satisfaction. “But this is my personal stash, passed on to me by my grandfather for special occasions. They don’t make vodka like this anymore. I don’t know the science behind it, but the truth is, this vodka is limited edition. I only share it because the two of you are good friends who come to my aid when I ask.”
Davis looked up from his glass. “Well, Gregor, I wouldn’t say we know each other well enough to be called friends, but if you connect your friends with alcohol of this quality, I wouldn’t mind.”
Gregor chuckled. “Well, you came to my aid in time of need as well. If that isn’t what friends are, I don’t know what is.”
Sal smiled and leaned back in the seat he had improvised from pieces of his suit as well as his pack, which he’d hardened to help with that idea in mind. It had been a long day of trudging through the Zoo, but as the night began to fall, it appeared they wouldn’t reach the coordinates anyway. The group of twenty-eight decided to set up camp and resume their trek in the morning. It didn’t need to be said that everyone hoped the researchers they were tracking merely had a bad case of technical difficulties.
The odds of that, though, were even more astronomical than those of them still being alive. Sal didn’t want to bring that up with Gregor, of course, since the man’s reputation—and possibly even his life—relied on them finding something, however miniscule, from the researchers to bring back to his FSB overlords. He knew he needed to talk to the man about not mentioning to them that Heavy Metal had been involved in the mission at all. They didn’t need Russian intelligence breathing down their neck for any reason, especially with Anja still at the base.
That was something to focus his mind on, of course, something to worry about that would distract him from the fact that the Zoo was still a little too quiet for his comfort.
“So,” Gregor said and turned to face him. “What have you been up to since we got you out of the Zoo?”
He noted that Madigan’s immediate reaction was to look away and avoid the topic of conversation. She didn’t like the fact that he’d been scientist-napped on her watch, even though she had been the one to lead the team in there to get him back out again. He didn’t like seeing her like this, so he decided to keep his answer on the topic short and to the point.
