Shadow of Betrayal - Brett Battles

“My men are trained for all sorts of situations. They’ll be okay.”

“If she says she can handle it on her own, then we should let her,” Chercover said. He leaned toward the microphone in Peter’s hand. “Agent Douglas, do you feel you need assistance?”

“No, sir,” Agent Douglas replied. “The first sign of a problem, I’ll pull myself out.”

“You may proceed then,” Chercover said. He straightened back up and looked at Peter. “Your concern is noted, but this is a special circumstance.”

“It’s always a special circumstance,” Peter said, knowing very well he’d used the same excuse himself several times in the past.

“Of course it is,” Furuta said.

All three men watched as Agent Douglas pushed the door open. The room beyond showed up as pitch-black on the monitor. Whatever light there was filtering in from the hallway didn’t make a dent in the abyss.

“Can you see anything?” Peter asked.

“Hold on,” she said.

A few seconds later a bright light swept across the wall next to the doorway, then a flashlight came into view in Agent Douglas’s hand. She aimed it through the new opening. At first it seemed to have no effect, then the camera moved closer to the threshold and tilted downward.

“Can you see it?” she asked.

There was a short landing, then five or six steps descending into the darkness.

“A stairway?” Peter said.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “Appears to be pretty solid. Made of wood, I think.”

“Can you see how far down it goes?”

The image from the camera moved through the doorway, then tilted downward with the slope of the staircase. Even then, the optics and the compression caused by the satellite transmission kept most of the room’s details in darkness.

“It goes pretty far. Definitely more than one story.”

“What do you mean?” Peter asked, trying to imagine what she was describing in his mind.

“The floor of the room is a good one and a half to two stories down. The stairs double back halfway down so they can fit.”

“Can you make out anything on the floor below?”

“Not really,” Agent Douglas said, then paused. The view on the camera swung methodically from side to side and up and down as she examined her surroundings. “Okay. I’m heading down.”

The camera bobbed upward once, then angled down as Agent Douglas moved her right foot onto the top step.

“So far so good,” she said.

Her left foot came into view, then settled on the next step down. Peter could hear her breathing, deep but steady.

Another step down.

Then another.

Then, “Shit!”

Before Peter had even registered what she had said, a bright flash and loud explosion overpowered the monitors, turning the image on the screen into a blur of whipping shapes and colors. There was nothing recognizable or coherent.

“Agent Douglas!”

The roar from the speakers became a series of booms and crashes.

Then, just as suddenly as the incident began, it stopped, the image from the camera now as still as those on monitors one, two, and three. And the only noise was an occasional creaking or muffled thud.

“Agent Douglas?” Peter repeated into the mic.

There was no response.

“Tasha,” he said, using her first name. “Can you hear me?”

She remained silent.

CHAPTER

6

“I’M SENDING IN THE STRIKE TEAM,” PETER SAID.

“Hold on,” Chercover said. “We need to think about this for a moment.”

“For God’s sake, she might still be alive. I don’t give a damn what you want to do. I will not leave an agent down.”

Peter snatched up his cell phone from where he’d left it earlier, next to monitor three. He had prepped it for just such an emergency, and only had to touch the screen once to connect the call.

The strike leader answered after a single ring.

“Situation’s gone critical,” Peter said. “Move in fast. Agent down, condition unknown. Booby-trapped, but no hostiles have been spotted. Go. Now.” Once he was off the phone, he looked back at his clients. “Next time maybe you’ll listen to me when I have concerns about an operation.”

Furuta turned toward Peter, slow and deliberate. There was no concern at all in the man’s eyes for the situation. “Risks are part of the job. Agent Douglas has always been aware of that. We would assume you would be, too. But if you are unwilling to take those risks, maybe we need to rethink our working relationship.”

As Peter was about to respond, a movement on one of the monitors caught his attention. He turned to get a better look.

“What is it?” Chercover asked, looking at Peter.

“I thought I saw something.”

He was pretty sure it had been monitor three, the hallway view. But it was empty now, like it had been before. Perhaps it had just been a glitch in the transmission, some digital artifact that had appeared on the screen for a split second, drawing his attention.

He had almost convinced himself that was it, when a man appeared on monitor two. He was thin, and was dressed neat enough that Peter guessed he wasn’t homeless. But with the low light, making out facial features was out of the question, as was detecting skin tone or hair color. He was a shadow in clothes.

“Who the hell is that?” Chercover asked.

Peter didn’t answer.

The man ran into the lobby, then pulled the door open just enough to peek through and make sure there was no one on the stoop waiting for him. Once he saw that it was clear, he jerked it open the rest of the way and stepped outside.

Peter switched his attention to the exterior shot of the building. The man closed the door behind him, then ran down the steps and took off west on the sidewalk. Within seconds, he was no longer visible.

“Who the hell was that?” Chercover repeated.

Again, Peter said nothing. They’d all been watching the same feeds, so they all had the same amount of information.

Peter gritted his teeth. If Chercover had only waited for him to get a team in place, like he wanted, then maybe the explosion could have been prevented.

Peter glanced at his two guests. They were both staring at the monitors, no emotion on either of their faces. Real pros. Undoubtedly each had witnessed agent-down situations before. Peter had, too, countless times it seemed. And while he also tried to keep his emotions suppressed, he was only partially successful. He could feel a tick under his right eyebrow, a twitch that only flared up when things got out of control.

He raised the microphone back to his mouth. “Agent Douglas?” he said.

If she could hear him, she wasn’t responding. Chances were, during the fall, her earpiece had been dislodged, and she wouldn’t have been able to hear him no matter what.

“Agent Douglas,” he said again.

“Leave it alone,” Chercover said. “She’s probably dead.”

Peter looked over at the old man, then raised the mic to his mouth again, his eyes locked on Chercover’s. “Agent Douglas?”

“Is that your strike team?” Furuta asked.

He was pointing toward monitor one. On it, a dark van had pulled up in front of the abandoned building.

The phone Peter had used to call the team began to vibrate. He picked it up and pressed Accept.

“We’re here,” Perkins, the team leader, said.

“You’re looking for a room in the basement. There was an explosion, so there’ll probably be some damage in the hallway. But it should also lead you to the right room. Be careful. The staircase that was just inside the door is damaged, and the floor is nearly two stories below.”

“Copy that,” Perkins said.

“Agent Douglas is down there somewhere. Find her, and get her out.”

“Anything else?”

“A man left the scene about two minutes ago. I don’t expect him to come back, but there might be others. If you find someone, take them alive. I want to talk to them.”

“Got it.”

Peter gave him the signal settings he’d been using with Agent Douglas so they could communicate by radio, then hung up.

“They should search the building,” Furuta said. “This is obviously the place we’ve been looking for. There’s got to be something there. Something that will help us identify Primus.”

“Seems to me, Agent Douglas might have already found it.”

“Found where it is, perhaps,” Chercover said. “But what exactly did she find?”

“That’s not this team’s job,” Peter said. “They’ll get Agent Douglas out, then we’ll figure out our next move.”

“We need to figure that out now,” Furuta said. “We don’t have a lot of time on this. The man who got away could be informing his contacts about what happened right now.”

“We’ll get Agent Douglas out first,” Peter said, his tone telling the others that this was non-negotiable.

On the monitors, the team had already begun to move into place. On number one, two men dressed in dark clothing stood near the front door watching the street. Though there were no weapons in sight, Peter knew they were each armed and ready to jump into action if needed. The interior shot on two showed one man standing in the small lobby. But unlike his friends outside, he had his weapon out and ready. Number three still showed an empty hallway, and on number four, several dark, unidentifiable objects, but no movement at all.

Peter brought the mic up near his mouth. “Perkins, you’re out of our camera range. What do you see?”

“Just a dark hallway.” Perkins’s voice came over monitor three’s speaker. “The door Agent Douglas entered should be down the next corridor.”

“Do you hear anything?”

“Nothing. Dead quiet.” There was a moment of silence. Then in a whisper, “We’re at the intersection now. Hold while we check.” More silence. “All clear. We’re approaching the doorway now. There’s a lot of dust and smoke in the air. Visibility down thirty percent. Okay, just like you thought. Damage to the floor outside the doorway. The door itself is gone.” Pause. “I’m looking in now. Damn. You said there was a staircase, right?”

“Yes,” Peter said.

“Not now. Morgan, fire up the spot.”

Five seconds later there was a flare of light on monitor four, the one that displayed the feed from the camera Agent Douglas had been carrying. The dark shapes that had been filling the screen suddenly became bits of concrete and pieces of wood. But there was no sign of the agent.

“Sir, it’s a mess down there,” Perkins said. “Looks like the whole stairway has collapsed.”

“Do you see Agent Douglas?”

“If she’s there, she’s buried. I’ll take one of my guys down with me.”

There was a few minutes’ delay while the gear was prepared.

“Rappelling down now,” Perkins said. For several seconds there was only the muffled sound of someone sliding down a rope. Then, “Okay, we’re on the ground.”

“Watch your step,” Peter said. “There could be other traps.”

“Copy that.”

Light ebbed and flowed on monitor four as the team searched the debris.

“Stop!” Peter yelled.

A foot had just passed within view of the image on the monitor.

“One of you is near her camera. Both of you take one step back.”

The foot reentered the frame.

“Okay, hold there for a second,” Peter said. “Perkins, you move your foot first.”

“Copy.”

The foot in the screen remained stationary.

“Anything?” Perkins asked.

“Have your man move now.”

There was a second delay, then the foot began to rise.

“That’s it,” Peter said. “About three feet to your man’s right.”

The image remained stable for half a minute, then it rose into the air and whipped around the room until it stopped on the face of a man with short brown hair.

“Must have gotten dislodged as she fell.” Perkins’s lips moved on monitor four, but his voice still came out of the speaker on monitor three.

“Chances are she’s in that same general area,” Peter said.

Perkins set the camera down on something elevated, giving the three men back in the hotel suite a broad view of the room. It seemed to be some sort of old machine room. Unfinished cement walls and floors, and to the left the edge of a rusty furnace. But the dominant feature was the pile of rubble in the center of the room. The majority of debris appeared to be the wood that had made up the staircase, but there was a good bit of concrete mixed in. It must have been dislodged from the ceiling and walls by the blast.

Perkins and his man worked their way through the pile, pulling away planks and chunks of concrete. After several minutes, Perkins’s partner stopped and bent down.

“I’ve got a hand,” he called out, his voice distant over Perkins’s microphone.

The two men began working together to move everything surrounding the spot. Soon Peter thought he could see an arm, then a shoulder. Perkins leaned down and placed his fingers on the exposed wrist.

“Pulse?” Peter asked.

“Faint, but she’s alive,” Perkins said.

Obviously listening in on the conversation, Perkins’s men on monitor one jumped into action. They moved over to the van and pulled a stretcher out of the back. One of them then stayed on the stoop while the other took the stretcher inside the building.

“Stretcher on its way to you,” Peter said. “I’ll call ahead to get medical set up.”

“Copy that,” Perkins said.

For the next several minutes the team worked quickly and efficiently. Soon Agent Douglas was in the van, heading for medical attention. Thankfully, for the moment at least, she was still breathing.

The images on the monitors were now still and quiet.

“We can’t let this opportunity slip out of our hands,” Furuta said, his voice rising. It was the first emotion Peter had seen from the man.

“I agree,” Chercover said. He looked at Peter. “You need to get someone in there tonight. You can do that, can’t you?”

Peter was silent for a moment, then nodded. “Yes.”

“So you have someone in mind? Someone close?” Furuta asked.

“Yes.”

“Who?” Furuta said.

“That is something you don’t need to know,” Peter said.

Furuta was about to respond when his boss put a hand on his shoulder. “I think we’re done here,” Chercover said.

Reluctantly, Furuta nodded. “Keep us posted on what you find,” he said.

“What about Agent Douglas?” Peter asked as the other two began walking toward the door. It was an unnecessary question, but Peter couldn’t help pushing.

Chercover stopped and looked back at Peter. “Of course,” he said. “Keep us informed on her condition also. We’re not exactly heartless, but this is much bigger than her life, or even any one of ours.”

Peter stared at them as they turned and left, his lips now closed.

The truth was Chercover was right.

CHAPTER

7

QUINN AND NATE HAD NOT RETURNED TO LOS Angeles after Ireland. They were in the States, but still thousands of miles from home. After handing off the envelope to Peter’s contact at the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, they boarded a flight north instead of west, landing several hours later in Boston.