Deadly Intent: An Action Thriller (Adrian Hell Series Book 4) (26 page)

“Are we safe here?” I ask Josh.

He looks over his shoulder to reply. “As far as I know, the military don’t give a shit about what the government-funded acronyms are doing,” he says. “I don’t think they’re on our side, but they definitely aren’t on theirs, so this is neutral ground and safe enough.”

The driver stops outside the main office building in the center of the compound, and we all get out of the Jeep without a word. The building is low and wide—only two stories high, but it takes up most of the road. It’s a basic, low-cost structure, which is typical for the army. Cheap, simple, effective—should be their motto.

We follow Josh inside, and he leads us down a corridor, past the guard on the front desk on the right hand side, and into a conference room, which is the last door on the left. Inside, sitting around a rectangular table is Sheriff Raynor, Bob Clark, and Agent Tom Wallis of the FBI. They all stand as we enter. Raynor’s the first to approach us, and Tori throws her arms around him, giving him no choice but to awkwardly pat her back.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” he says. She lets him go and steps aside, and he extends his hand to me, which I shake gladly. “Glad you’re home safe too.”

“Thanks, John. I’m sorry I’ve roped you into all this.”

He waves his hand dismissively. “I’m about due for some action—nothing’s happened in Devil’s Spring for ten years, not since someone stole Hoops’ sign from outside his shop.”

I smile regretfully. “Well, taking out the NSA is one thing,” I say, before turning to the rest of the room. “But what we’re up against now is something else entirely. You might wanna sit down for this.”

Everyone exchanges looks of concern and take their seats, except Wallis, who walks over to me. He’s looking good—new suit, slightly more weathered complexion than the last time I saw him, but then, I do tend to have that effect on people. Life’s always a bit more stressful after I’ve been in town, sadly.

“I know you’re reluctant about my involvement,” he says. “But I can help you, and Josh trusts me, so I hope you will too.”

I nod and pat his arm. “It’s good to see you, Tom. And yes, I trust you. Frankly, right now, I need all the help I can get.”

He nods back and takes his seat. I walk to the head of the table on the left of the room and look at everyone. Josh and Clark are on my left; Raynor and Wallis are on my right. Tori is at the opposite end to me, looking very out of place.

I drop the files I took from Clara on the table in front of me.

“Guys, we have a big fucking problem.”

32.

22:16 CDT

The room is silent with anticipation—a morbid curiosity to know the full extent of the threat we face. I gesture to the documents in front of me.

“I took these from the underground facility in Pripyat,” I begin. “Clara Fox had these in her possession. She also had a detailed presentation on a big screen showing blueprints of the Cerberus satellite. Tom, are you up to speed on what we all know so far?”

Wallis nods. “Pretty much,” he says. “I wasn’t really any help, as you guys knew everything I did, and filled in most of my blanks for me.”

“To be honest, I thought that might be the case. But I just want to say I’m very grateful for your help here—having a government agency on our side is a luxury we didn’t expect to have, and it’ll make a big difference, if you can make sure your people, and your bosses, understand that everyone in this room is trying to help.”

“We do,” he says, nodding.

“Good. So here’s the story so far: back in New York, when I first took Yalafi Hussein’s laptop, he was meeting someone dressed in a four-star general’s outfit that had protection from guys in dark glasses and earpieces. He was almost certainly American, but remained an unknown factor. My flight out of New York was hijacked by a CIA black ops unit called D.E.A.D, who re-directed my plane to Colombia and tried to kill me. I escaped and linked up with a local outfit that turned out to be a cartel, run by one Carlos Vega. In keeping with tradition, after an hour or so in my company, they too tried to kill me. I escaped again, but not before torturing Vega and getting some information out of him.”

“Hang on, I thought the cartels were extinct?” asks Wallis. “Since President Cunningham’s reforms on the world drug trade, they can’t make any money?”

“That was our initial thought, too,” I reply. “But it turns out he was running guns for someone in the U.S. who uses the codename Ares. He shipped weapons all over the world for him, in return for a large paycheck. We already knew from GlobaTech’s investigations that this Armageddon Initiative was on a recruitment drive. We then found out their interest in the Cerberus satellite from the laptop I stole. Hamaad El-Zurak is the guy we all think is running things. We found out Clara Fox had taken Tori, and tracked them to a base in Ukraine. Our intel also said Hussein and El-Zurak had fled to Afghanistan, following my intervention in New York. With me so far?”

Everyone nods and mutters, so I continue.

“But then, we have the CIA black ops unit trying to kill me, saying the laptop I stole was government property, and we have the NSA raiding GlobaTech, then my bar, before sending a team in to kill us at a safe house in Arkansas.”

“This is the worrying thing,” adds Josh. “We know the information these guys have is bogus, because we’re not the bad guys. We can only assume that the terrorists have operatives inside these organizations, controlling what intel is distributed, making it look like we’re the enemy here.”

“Exactly,” I continue. “But thanks to these papers, I think I’ve got the missing links. The only thing we need to find out now, assuming I’m right, is the reasons
why
, and what the endgame really is.”

I sort through papers, pulling out two files. One is a classified file outlining the proposal for the Cerberus project. The other is a redacted personnel file. I throw them to the center of the table.

“The first shows the initial outline of what Cerberus was to be used for. The White House submitted the proposal to a Senate subcommittee three months after Cunningham took office. It mentions everything GlobaTech eventually did to it—as well as saying the plan was to advertise it to the public as a weapon against terrorism, to be used to safeguard our own nuclear arsenal and state secrets. The subcommittee’s response is also there. It details how they rejected the idea, saying it was too open to corruption, and that the methods intended were a violation of the public’s right to privacy.”

Wallis takes the file and skims through it. Raynor frowns and looks at me.

“Forgive the stupid question,” he says. “But if this satellite still does all of those things, how did they get the Senate to approve it?”

“That’s a perfectly fair question, John,” I say. “And that’s something I’ve not figured out yet.”

I turn to Josh, who’s already produced his laptop and is looking at me, smiling.

“On it, Boss,” he says; before I get chance to ask. He buries himself in the keyboard and starts tapping away.

“So what’s in the personnel file?” asks Clark, who’s been silent so far.

I let out a heavy sigh. “That would be our mystery four-star general from New York,” I say.

Josh looks up from his work, and the tension in the room visibly heightens as people hold their breath. I lean over and open the file, revealing a large color picture of the man I saw in Hussein’s apartment.

“Folks, meet General Thomas Jack Matthews.”

Everyone seems to frown at the anti-climax. Everyone except Wallis, which is what I expected.

“You must mean another General Matthews, right?” he asks.

“Another?” queries Tori. “Who’s the first one?”

Wallis looks at me, and I raise an eyebrow and sigh. “I’m afraid not, Tom. There’s only one, and he’s currently the director of the CIA.”

The heavy silence that descends is palpable. No one knows what to say, or where to look, which brings them to where I’ve been for the last few hours. The man in charge of the Central Intelligence Agency was meeting with a known terrorist, discussing a top-secret government satellite that can control the world’s nuclear arsenal… So many things aren’t right about that, I don’t know where to start.

Josh stands and begins pacing up and down the left side of the room. I find myself doing the same thing opposite. Now every piece of information we have is out in the open, we need to fit them together and try to stop whatever’s really going on here.

I glance over at Josh, who is muttering to himself, working through every theory he comes up with before deciding whether to voice it to the rest of us.

Working at GlobaTech, away from me, I think has been good for him. It’ll have given him a renewed purpose; a fresh challenge to apply himself to—which is exactly what he needed after watching my back for half his life. But looking at him now, I see him step back into his old role so easily, it’s like he never stopped.

“So, we all think Matthews is Ares, right?” he says.

Everyone at the table exchanges the type of look that says not one of them had made it that far as to start thinking that much about it yet.

“Yes,” I reply, having come to the same conclusion myself a couple of hours ago.

“So it’s fairly safe to assume that he’s the one behind the CIA’s attempt to kill you in Colombia, as well as the source of information that the NSA’s been working with…”

“I agree.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. That’s one of the problems we have—finding out what all this leads to.”

“What’s the other problem?” asks Raynor.

“Stopping them when we’ve got the entire CIA trying to kill us.”

He sighs. “Yeah, that’ll do it…” he mutters.

I look at Clark. “Bob, get on Josh’s laptop—background check on Matthews. Any history of extremist beliefs—anything that could explain why he’d work with a group of people like the Armageddon Initiative and betray his country.”

“On it,” he says, sliding across into Josh’s seat and tapping away on the keyboard.

“Josh, tell me how El-Zurak is going to take control of Cerberus.”

He shrugs. “I don’t see how he can,” he says. “Even if he had some tech out in the mountains, there’s no way he’ll have anything like the level of sophistication needed to hack a government satellite from there.”

I click my fingers, remembering the one piece of information I’ve not told them.

Whoops.

“Oh, shit, yeah… he’s not in Afghanistan. Hussein and El-Zurak are in the U.S. Clara told me.”

“And you believe her?” questions Wallis.

I look over at him and nod. “Yes, I do.”

“So where is he?” asks Josh.

“I don’t know, but I know how to find him.”

“How?”

“Tell me how he’d take control of Cerberus.”

He nods slowly, seeing what I’m getting at. If we know
how
they’d do it, then there’s a good chance we’ll be able to figure out
where
they need to be to do it. I imagine there aren’t too many locations where you can find the hardware capable of taking down a satellite.

“They’d need to access the servers first of all,” explains Josh. “They’d need to hack in past the firewalls, and then upload codes to give them control over each function.”

“Let’s assume they won’t be content with just our nukes,” I say. “How easily could they steal other peoples?”

“End of the day, that’s what Cerberus was built for,” he says with a shrug. “I obviously wasn’t involved in designing that particular feature, but there would almost certainly be an interface for doing it.”

“Where do these codes come from? Are they military?”

“Do you mean, can the CIA provide them? No, I don’t think they can.”

“So they have to hack those codes, presumably? Is that easy?”

Josh shakes his head. “It’s virtually impossible. It’s beyond my capabilities, certainly.”

“Do you know anyone who could do it?”

“That would be a very short list… but no, I can’t think of anyone.”

“So, could El-Zurak have someone who could do that?”

“It’s possible, but unlikely.”

“Okay, so that means he already has access to the codes. If he didn’t get them from Matthews, we need to find out how he got them, and fast. With Clara dead, they won’t be hanging around.”

Clark interrupts us by slamming his fist on the desk. “Goddammit!” he yells.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing on General Matthews. The guy’s a Boy Scout. A patriot, through and through. Decorated military career, worked as a consultant for years before being given the position of CIA director by President Cunningham. If I wasn’t involved in this mess, I’d swear blind there’s no way he’d be working against his country with terrorists.”

“Okay, so that’s not the way to go... Josh, keep working the Cerberus angle. Where would El-Zurak need to be if he was going to hijack the satellite?”

He resumes his pacing, and I let the room fall silent. I walk over to Tori and sit on the desk in front of her. She smiles at me.

“How you doing?” she asks.

“I’m alright,” I say. “Just tired of not knowing what we’re meant to be doing, y’know?”

“You’ll sort it, don’t worry.”

“How are you anyway? You’ve been through some crazy shit recently. How you holdin’ up?”

She throws me a salute and winks. “I can deal, it’s fine.”

I know she’s lying. I see in her eyes that she’s accepting everything that’s happening because her mind isn’t allowing her to believe it’s all real. When all this is over, she’ll sit down one day and it’ll hit her like a freight train, and she’ll really struggle. And when that happens, I’ll wrap my arms around her and tell her it’ll all be okay. But for now, I’m happy to let her show me she’s strong. What’s that saying? Fake it ’til you make it…

“Sonofabitch!” yells Josh behind me. I turn and everyone else looks up at him.

“What?” I ask.

“I’m an idiot! I’m really sorry, Boss—it didn’t occur to me before… Cerberus, like any other satellite, has to be monitored from the ground. Most things like this are run from NASA. We have our own site in Santa Clarita that tracks the satellite network we run. Cerberus is a NASA-funded project, but was outsourced to a few different companies—including GlobaTech. Consequently, the main servers and control hub were housed in an outsourced location.”

I stand, hoping I know where this is going, and failing to contain my excitement.

“Where, Josh?”

He ushers Clark out of his seat and takes his place in front of his laptop once more. A few moments later, he spins the screen round to show the room.

“ComForce Securities, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Looks just like any other office, but there’s a team there who monitor the satellite. They won’t have the codes, but they process the data and feed it back to the CIA if something is flagged up as a potential threat to national security.”

“That’s where El-Zurak is going to hijack the satellite from,” I say. I turn to Wallis. “Tom, take all this information and give it to your superior—someone you trust.”

He’s already on his feet, gathering the files together. “I’m on it,” he says.

“And Tom, make sure you
can
trust them. I’m not suggesting this is the case, but if the director of the CIA is involved, and he’s been leading the NSA astray to help him assist the terrorists and take us out, there’s no reason why he can’t have compromised another agency as well. Just watch your back.”

He nods. “I’ve got to make some calls, right away.”