“Jeri, please… don’t fight it.”
Jeri ignored him, grunting in effort as she slowly dragged herself forward. Seconds later, the numbness swept through her shoulders and crept mercilessly down her arms. She tried doubling her efforts but her body simply stalled and stopped. After one last desperate try, she sighed loudly and collapsed onto the floor.
Behind her, the old wooden floor creaked softly as someone walked towards her. She felt him kneel down beside her, his hand gently brushing away the hair on her neck before checking her pulse. “It’s going to be okay, Jeri,” Chilly’s baritone voice said calmly. Out of the corner of her eye Jeri saw the flash of a small syringe and needle. A moment later, a calming warmth began to circulate through her body. Her panic evaporated as an overpowering feeling of drowsiness blurred her senses. As she drifted out of consciousness, Chilly’s final words echoed through her mind.
The first act of your new life, Jeri,
is to completely kill your old one.
57.
“How much longer?” Alex asked impatiently as he leaned into the open cockpit
of the jet.
“About two more hours, sir,” the pilot replied matter-of-factly. “Maybe a little less. We’ll be over Kansas in a few minutes.”
“Can we go any faster?”
The pilot shook his head. “No sir. We’re already at maximum cruising speed.”
Alex grunted in response and sat back down in the soft leather seat at the front of the passenger cabin. He reached into his thin briefcase and pulled out the case file given to him by the Deputy Secretary. Once again the growing sense of apprehension that had haunted him since their meeting that morning gripped him. He quickly thumbed through the pages he’d already read, pausing briefly on the photograph of the box with the Joe’s Last Stand Saloon t-shirt and the note addressed to him.
For Agent Alex Murstead –
Sorry we missed each other in Amsterdam.
Alex shook his head and slapped the file closed before angrily tossing it on the seat next to him. The reason for his uneasiness was obvious. His career now depended on solving this case, and yet nothing about it seemed to make any sense. Just who were these terrorists? What was their reason for the Petronus killings? And what did a goddamn bartender in Flagstaff have to do with any of this?
Alex grabbed the small MP3 player containing the recording of Preston’s conversation with their terrorist from his briefcase and put on his headphones before hitting the play button. He listened carefully to the low, calm voice of his target as he deftly picked away at the director’s composure. Sergeant Kearney’s slow, slurred description of Agent Martin’s death only further worsened matters. Two minutes into the recording, it was clear that Preston was painfully outmatched. The certainty of it brought a fleeting smile to Alex’s face – until the thought of his failed operation in Amsterdam led him to wonder if the same was true for him. He shook the thought from his mind as the audio recording continued.
“Why are you doing this?”
“You see, Director, therein lies the problem. You ask me why I’m doing this, and you don’t even know what I’m doing.”
“Then what exactly are you doing?”
“Exposing weaknesses.”
“In what?”
“In you.”
Alex suddenly yanked out the earbud and tossed the MP3 player back into his briefcase. Across from him, his two SOG team members sat patiently, both men staring out at the monotonous, snow-covered landscape beneath them. One of the men reached down and pulled his .40 caliber Glock from his belt holster, quickly inspecting it before glancing up at Alex.
“Think we’ll bag some terrorists today, sir?”
Alex stared absently at the lethal weapon in his colleague’s hand and shrugged. “We’ll know soon enough.”
He pulled another folder from his briefcase and opened it. After reading the brief summary on deceased former NSA Agent Robert Shafer, Alex turned to the accident report. He absently flipped through a series of black and white photos, all of them gruesomely depicting the charred remains of two men sitting in the front seats of a burned out sedan. He then turned to the coroner’s report. As expected, the cause of death listed on the official autopsy report for Robert Shafer read ‘thermal burns due to fire’. Alex was about to close the report when he noticed something strange. In the box under ‘Identified by’, the coroner had
simply typed ‘n/a’.
Not available.
The small jet banked gently south towards the mountains as Alex sighed and closed the file. He stared out at the thin, crystalline air, his uneasiness steadily growing.