Honor Unraveled (20 page)

“Nor would I want you to, my friend. One never forces a woman.”

* * *

Kit looked at the faces of the men sitting around the conference table in the middle of the bunker’s main room. Max was still with the WKB. Things had been silent from him. He was checking in as expected, but Kit wished he was here to be briefed about this latest twist.

“What have you learned about the girl?” he asked Greer.
 

“She’s part of an agrarian society known as the Friendship Community. They started as a utopian sect in the mid-nineteenth century. Their numbers had dwindled for the past century, but they seem to be on the increase recently, according to the last census. They live on a fifteen-thousand-acre parcel acquired over several decades in the second half of the 1800s by their founder Nevil Grummand. They grow their own food. Educate their young in their own schools. I haven’t been able to locate any ex-Friends. Those who leave the sect simply disappear. They retain no ties to the group.” Greer glanced around the table. “The girl told me her murder attempt on Kit was a tithe her family owed King.”
 

“Holbrook mentioned King before he died. Who is that?” Blade said.

Greer shrugged. “A shot-caller of some sort. But we’ve linked him now not only to the WKB but to the Friends as well.”

“Anybody besides me feel like there’s a wizard behind the screen pulling these things all together? My bastard stepfather’s blackmailing victims, the WKB, Amir, the Friends?” Blade asked, testing his theory out loud.

“Shiiit,” Owen growled. He leaned back in his seat, frowning.
 

Kit’s eyes narrowed when Owen’s cold blue gaze caught his. “You know him. The wizard.”

“I might.”

“Who is he?”

“I got a call last week that a former Red Teamer’s gone rogue. Didn’t put two and two together until now. He was in my class. His real name is Wendell Jacobs. Or it might have been. He’s exceptionally skilled in creating false identities.” Owen looked around the table, meeting the gaze of each man.
 

Kit eyed Owen. “Why’d they call you?”

“Managing rogue Red Teamers is one of Tremaine Industries’ primary objectives. The rest of our work we do between cases.”

Kit frowned as an unpleasant thought hit him. “How do we know you’re not this King?”

Owen laughed. “That’s very much something he would do, insert himself into the team hunting him down.” Owen looked around the table. “You don’t know I’m not King. You don’t know a goddamned thing about him. None of us does.”

“Why do you think your rogue Red Teamer is King?” Rocco asked.

“Wendell’s an anarchist who wanted to collapse the world order, starting with the US.”

“How’s he planning on doing that?” Angel asked.

“That’s for you to find out. When I knew him, we had lengthy conversations about the instability of the US infrastructure. He argued, with some conviction, that every society fails and that we were only a handful of disasters—natural or human-triggered—away from collapse. If the US falls, there’ll be a domino effect across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. We often played a mental game of ‘if this, then that.’ I believe he wants to trigger that collapse.”

“Why would he do that?” Angel asked.
 

Owen shrugged. “He felt the globalization of commerce, culture, and economies was destroying Earth and its human populations—if not physically, spiritually. Knowing him, he’d claim the recent spate of public shootings and bombings and mass protests as proof that we’re living with deadened souls—a situation for which there is only one cure. Implode our artificial and unsustainable existence.”

“So his plan was to destroy life as we know it as a gift to the world? Yeah, that’s not radical,” Angel scoffed.

“What’s Sally’s role in this?” Val asked.

“Her name’s not Sally,” Greer snapped, but no one listened.

“She’s merely a pawn.” Owen said. “I doubt King ever expected her to complete her mission. I think her attempt on Kit’s life was the mission. With her, he put the Friends on the chessboard.”

“Why?” Rocco asked.
 

Owen looked at Rocco. “That, I leave to you guys to answer.”
 

“So the fucker’s loose and sacrificing innocents.” Kit looked at Greer. “You need to get with Max. See if he knows about the Friends and King and how they tie in to the WKB.”

“Right. I will tonight. There’s something I want to show you.”
Greer tapped some screens on his tablet, pulling up a complex map of lines and image clusters on the main presentation panel in the conference room.
 

“I built a spider graph around the data that we know—the men Blade’s dad, Phillip Bladen, was blackmailing, various members of the WKB, Amir Hadad and crew.” He pressed a button and showed pics of the people he mentioned. Kit sent a quick look at Blade. The man who’d raised him had been one hell of a sick bastard. He’d pimped Blade out to his associates and videotaped their abuse of him. Years later, he’d begun blackmailing those same pedophiles. The WKB had destroyed Blade’s house looking for his father’s ledgers. King must have wanted them.

Greer made another click on his tablet, putting lines between the various images. “I wanted to see what relationships a graph like this could reveal that we haven’t recognized. I populated it with data retrieved from a bot I wrote to crawl the internet.” A final click brought up hundreds more lines and more images, showing a huge network of spidery webs, clustered in small and large groupings.

Greer looked at Kit and Owen to see if they were tracking. “These are the data items that have three or more points of intersection.” He made a quick adjustment via his tablet. The clutter thinned out a bit and few satellite nests of webs showed. “These are the ones with five points. These are with ten.”

Kit gritted his teeth. The picture became clear. But nowhere on Greer’s chart was there a person named King. “Where did you get this data?”

“Publicly available sources cross referenced with FBI resources. Social media sites, chatrooms, articles, interviews, annual reports, web sites, blogs, police reports, etc. I can also cut frequency of interactions by time. So here’s what the network looks like a year ago, two years ago, five years ago.”

Kit walked up to the touchscreen. He moved some of the clusters around, expanded others. There were state and federal legislators, judges, bankers, executives from dozens of cutting edge industries, pharmaceutical corporations.
 

“What are we looking at, Greer?” Owen asked after watching Kit’s closer examination.

“You wanted to find King.” Greer looked from Kit to Owen and back. “This is his nest.”

* * *

Greer approached Max’s A-frame cautiously. Staying in the cover of the aspens and pines, he walked around the outside of the property. Only one motorcycle was out front. The night was breezy, making the aspen leaves clatter against each other. The sound covered his approach. He’d parked about a half-mile south of the property and come on foot the rest of the way. The moon was bright, but the wind was bringing in some clouds. He waited until the moon slipped behind a cloud before approaching the house.
 

He crossed the bare stretch of yard, then climbed the steps at the side of the house. Before he got to the door, it opened. Max stood in the shadows of his house. Greer stepped inside, then shoved the hood of his hoodie back. The small A-frame was a one-room space. The bed had been pulled out on the futon. Clothes were scattered about the space. The small galley kitchen was next to a closet and a bathroom.

“You here for an inspection, Greer?”

Greer took a seat on one of the stools by the kitchen bar. “What do you know about the Friendship Community?”

“You fucking woke me up to talk knitting circles?” He closed the door behind Greer.

“The Friends aren’t knitters. Well, maybe they are. They’re a group of agrarian separatists who are doing the bidding of King. They sent a girl to kill Kit.”

Max laughed. “Bet that pissed him off.” He looked over at Greer. “He did survive the attempt, right?”

“Yeah. Owen said King’s a rogue Red Teamer.”

Max shut his eyes and shook his head. Greer knew what he was thinking. In the two decades or so the Red Team had been around, four of its former members had gone rogue. Three of them no longer pulled air.
 

“I haven’t met King yet,” Max said. “There’s some chatter that he’s coming in for the vote.” He shoved the futon cushion back into place, then plopped down on a corner of the couch.
 

“You still have a bead on Amir?”

“Yeah. He’s hanging tight with Pete and his officers. He’s playing the East against the West. It’s gonna get nasty.”

“When?”

“The vote’s coming up. Shit’s gonna hit the fan before then.” Max leaned forward and rubbed his eyes. “So where are these ‘Friends’ people?”

“They have a big spread a little west of here, in the valley south of the WKB. Their property borders six miles of the WKB compound.”

“You been out there?”

“Not yet. I want to track the girl down. She’d been drugged. Her parents came out to the clinic and fetched her back, with no regard for her condition.”

Max huffed a little laugh. Greer glared at him. There wasn’t enough light to show his expression, but he didn’t need it to know that look on Max’s face. “So the little assassin snagged your balls?”

“She was forced to do what she did. Said it was a tithe her parents owed King when she came of age.” And that it was better than her other option, which still gave him an uneasy feeling.

“Huh.” There was a pause. “I’m not doubting you, but why would King, who may be a rogue Red Teamer, think an untried, untrained female could take on Kit?”

“It doesn’t fit, I know. Owen thinks she’s King’s calling card. Kind of a ‘game on’ green light.”

“Does Owen know King?”

“If King’s who he thinks he is, yes. The guy’s a chameleon. He came through the first Red Team class with Owen. He went under the identity of Wendell Jacobs.”

“Great. Just when I thought this whole deal couldn’t get weirder, it does.”

“Hey, Kit,” Mandy said, stopping her brother before he left the kitchen and headed back down to the bunker after lunch. “I need to go over to my house and get a few things.”

Rocco was working with Zavi at the kitchen table. “I can take you after I finish here.” He held up a Dr. Seuss book they were reading. The book was in English, but Zavi was reading it aloud in Spanish.
 

“Jesus, Rocco. Do you see what he’s doing?” Kit asked, stunned at the kid’s ability.

“Yeah. He started it himself. Want to hear it in Pashto?” Rocco grinned.

Kit felt an uncomfortable thought slip through him. Now that he was being an active parent to Casey, he knew firsthand a father’s worries about his kids. Zavi’s linguistic skill might exceed Rocco’s, which made him a powerful tool to their allies and enemies alike. They were witnessing the infant days of a future warrior. He hoped Rocco and Mandy had enough time with him to give him a strong grounding for the life that awaited him. Kit wondered if Rocco was ready for the dangers his son faced.
 

It suddenly became imperative that moments like these between Rocco and Zavi not be interrupted.
 

“No worries, man. I’ll go over with her,” Kit offered. “We’ll be back before you finish.”

Kit was pensive as they took one of the big SUVs over to Mandy’s house. “What did you need here?” Kit asked her as she unlocked the front door.

“I have a couple of boxes of summer things I wanted to dig out. You know, things for the Fourth of July. Summer placemats and mugs.” She looked back at Kit. “You think Ty would mind if I brought some of my house stuff over there?”

“No. Doubt he’d even notice. Don’t think he sees anything but Eden anymore.”

Mandy gave him a sideways glance as they went down the basement stairs. “How are things working out with Ivy?” She flipped on the lights as she went into the storage area in the back hall.
 

He shrugged. “It’s complicated. Did she say anything to you?”

“Beyond ‘it’s complicated’? Not really. I’m here if you ever want to talk.”

“Thanks, sis.”

“Can I make a suggestion?”

Kit grinned at her. “If I said no, would you skip it?”

“No.”

“Then go ahead.”

“You should take her out for a date.”

“I’m not on her social schedule.”

“Yeah, but the doctor was the best of the three. He was your only real competition.”

“Huh. You know the accountant. What about bar boy, the last guy on the list?”

“Like I said, the doctor was the one to watch. Think up something fun, something none of the other guys would have done with her. Outrageous is good.”

Kit studied his sister, wondering if she knew the code that would unlock Ivy’s frozen heart. “Okay. Advice accepted.”

Mandy flashed him a smile, then maneuvered between rows of boxes. The one she needed had rotated to the bottom of the stack since she’d packed it up last autumn. Kit helped her dig through the pile. One of the boxes, which had been closed with the top flaps tucked into each other, popped open, revealing a swath of dark purple. Kit froze. And Mandy did, too.