Poe

• Titlepage
  
• Copyright
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty-One
  
• Chapter Twenty-Two
  
• Chapter Twenty-Three
  
• Chapter Twenty-Four
  
• Chapter Twenty-Five
  
• Chapter Twenty-Six
  
• Chapter Twenty-Seven
  
• Chapter Twenty-Eight
  
• Chapter Twenty-Nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  
• Chapter Thirty-One
  
• Chapter Thirty-Two
  
• Chapter Thirty-Three
  
• Chapter Thirty-Four
  
• Chapter Thirty-Five
  
• Chapter Thirty-Six
  
• Chapter Thirty-Seven
  
• Chapter Thirty-Eight
  
• Chapter Thirty-Nine
  
• Chapter Forty
  
• Chapter Forty-One
  
• Chapter Forty-Two
  
• Epilogue
  
• About the Authors
  

POE
(
AN ALEXANDRA POE NOVEL)
BRETT BATTLES & ROBERT GREGORY BROWNE

Copyright © 2013 by Brett Battles and Robert Gregory Browne

Cover art copyright © 2013 by Browne House Creations
Cover
Photo: © Saša Prudkov | Dreamstime.com

All rights reserved.

POE is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For more information about the authors, please visit
www.brettbattles.com/
and
www.robertgregorybrowne.com
.

May 4th

Paris, France

He thought there might be a problem when they didn’t hear from Six.

It was a routine status check, each of the spotters responding as requested:

“Zeta One, clear.”

“Zeta Two, clear.”

“Zeta Three, clear.”

“Zeta Four, clear.”

“Zeta Five, clear.”

Then radio silence.

A full seven seconds of it.

McElroy’s gut clenched as he keyed his mic. “Zeta Six, report.”

More silence.

“Zeta Six?”

Three more seconds of nothing, then a sharp
pop,
followed by, “This is Six. Sorry. Was repositioning. I think I have him.”

McElroy exhaled, telling himself that these things happened, that Six was a good man and should be given a bit of slack. But that feeling of possible difficulties had not abated, and he wondered for a moment if they should abort the entire operation.

No.

He was simply letting paranoia get to him and he couldn’t give in to it. Not when they were this close.

He tapped Duncan’s shoulder. “Put Six on center screen.”

With just a few keystrokes, Duncan switched the image in the main surveillance monitor to the feed coming from Zeta Six’s camera—a shot from the top of a building on the west side of Rue Danton, showing the small plaza in front of the Saint-Michel metro station near the entrance of the Latin Quarter. It was six p.m. on a Friday evening, and the area was packed with the usual swarm—tourists out enjoying the city and locals trying to find their way home.

Not the optimum situation, but then McElroy hadn’t set the schedule.

“Zeta Six, identify subject,” he said.

“Comin’ atcha.”

A translucent gray grid appeared over the feed, then a red dot zipped across the screen and planted itself on the back of a man walking across Boulevard Saint-Michel, away from the camera.

“You sure that’s him?” McElroy asked.

“I think so. Got a quick shot of him coming out of the metro station. Sending you that now.”

A moment passed, then Duncan’s computer terminal dinged softly.

“Play it,” McElroy told him.

A smaller, unused monitor flickered to life with Six’s shot of the metro entrance. The man he had tagged was in the middle of a pack of exiting commuters.

Duncan paused the image and pushed in. Stonewell’s surveillance gear was cutting edge, compact, and ultra high-def, so little quality was lost as the image was enlarged.

The man on the screen was solidly built and had a rugged, timeworn face that McElroy had committed to memory years ago.

His pulse kicked up a notch.

“That’s him,” he said, then keyed his mic. “Raven spotted. All teams, Raven spotted. Entering on Rue de la Huchette. Six has him tagged. Zeta Five, stay alert.”

Using the digital tag, the spotters synced their systems to pick the target out of the crowd.

“Got him,” Five said. “On Huchette now.”

Duncan switched Zeta Five’s feed onto the main screen.

“Grab team, stand by,” McElroy said.

His orders from Stonewell were to snatch Raven
and
the man he was meeting. Both were wanted by the US government, and their captures would reflect well on the organization, not to mention earn it a generous bonus on top of its usual service fee.

There was only one small problem. The Latin Quarter was a warren of narrow pedestrian streets that weaved around centuries-old, multistory buildings like crooked trails through a dense forest. All were already filling up with hungry tourists. Because of the twists and turns, sight lines were a bitch, with dozens of nooks and recesses where their targets could hide from view if they even remotely suspected they were being followed.

Raven had chosen his meeting place wisely.

There was also the not insignificant fact that Stonewell’s entire operation was off the grid. The French government was kept in the dark, a decision made by Stonewell’s executive committee and passed on to McElroy.

It was one that he fully supported, however. No way the French would’ve allowed them to move forward, especially given the short time frame involved.

The radio crackled. “Zeta One to base. Hawk sighted. Exiting taxi on Rue Saint-Jacques.”

McElroy shifted his focus to Zeta One’s monitor in time to see a blond, powerfully built man walking away from a taxi at the curb. He had bleached his hair, but it was Hawk all right. Stonewell had obtained only one halfway decent picture of him, but McElroy recognized the intense eyes and that jagged pink scar on the right side of his neck.

In some circles within the US intelligence community, Hawk was considered the bigger catch. He would undoubtedly possess information about terrorist organizations throughout Europe and the Middle East that would be paying off for years.

But the real prize was Raven. It wasn’t so much because of what the man might know, but because of what he represented. His capture would be satisfying to Stonewell’s clients.

Deeply satisfying.

And to McElroy himself.

“Both targets on site,” he told everyone. “Grab team in position.”

One of the small monitor feeds was focused on the front of the restaurant where the two men were reportedly scheduled to meet. It was down a side street, deeper into the Quarter, and flanked by two other restaurants.

Within moments, the members of the grab team joined the steady stream of tourists on the cobbled walkway. Two of them, a man and a woman, approached the restaurant and paused outside the door as if they were trying to decide whether this was where they wanted to eat. They were the backup, just in case either Raven or Hawk got that far.

McElroy glanced at the monitor tracking Raven. The man’s progress had slowed because of the crowd, and he was still at least a couple minutes away from the restaurant.

Hawk’s path, on the other hand, was clearer, and it looked as if he would reach the meeting location first—if he were allowed.

“Hawk approaching from the south,” McElroy reported. “Turning your way…now.”

Hawk disappeared from Zeta Two’s monitor and reappeared on Zeta Three’s. The road went straight for about twenty-five feet, bent to the left, then sharply back to the right before passing by the restaurant.

Hawk entered the bend, and slowed as he reached the tight turn.

“Now!” McElroy commanded.

Just as Hawk made the turn, four members of the grab team closed in around him, and before he even realized what was going on, one of them stuck a needle in his arm, pumping enough Beta-Somnol into him to knock him out for hours.

The others caught him before he could fall, propped him up between two of them, and dragged him back out of the Quarter, five happy friends who had started drinking a little early.

McElroy allowed himself a smile at how seamlessly it had all gone.

But the celebration didn’t last long.

“I don’t see Raven,” one of the spotters said. McElroy wasn’t sure which.

He whipped his gaze back to the main monitor, and noted that the red dot that had been marking Raven’s position was gone.

Fuck.

“Who had him last?” he asked Zeta team. They were the spotters, while Omega team was on the ground for the grab.

“I did. Zeta Five.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t know. I had him on Huchette. He turned off and Zeta Four should have picked him up.”

“Never saw him,” Zeta Four reported.

That didn’t make sense. Once Raven had been tagged, Zeta Four’s camera should have automatically been able to pick him up.

“Everyone, eyes open! Find Raven.” McElroy grabbed Duncan’s shoulder, gripping it harder than he realized. “Replay the feeds for Zetas Five and Four. He’s got to be there somewhere.”

Duncan started with Five’s view first, picking it up fifteen seconds before Raven would make his turn. The target was walking at the same pace as before, moving around those who had stopped in the road, and getting out of the way of those moving faster than him. Then, just before he reached the intersection—

“Play that back,” McElroy said.

Duncan did as ordered and McElroy studied the screen.

“Look there,” Duncan said. “He hesitated.”

Indeed, Raven had. It had been only for a second, but it was a definite hesitation.
Why would he
…

McElroy’s breath caught in his throat as a possibility occurred to him.

It can’t be
, he thought. To Duncan, he said, “What time did he pause?”

Duncan checked his computer screen. “6:06:17.”

“And when did Hawk get taken down?”

Another check. “6:06:15.”

Shit
.

“What happens when he gets to the corner?”

Duncan started the video again. Right before Raven arrived at the corner, he reached up, grabbed the top of his jacket, and started to pull.

“What’s he doing?” McElroy asked, more to himself than anyone.

Duncan replied by switching over to the recorded footage from Zeta Four. The area that Four had been tasked to cover ranged from the corner to where the road angled slightly right about fifty feet before the restaurant. This, unfortunately, meant there was a section of dead space, about three or four feet in length, right at the corner—if one kept tucked to the wall.

Apparently Raven had.

He should have appeared immediately on screen, but there was no one there.

“Where the hell is he?” McElroy said.

Duncan seemed flustered. “I don’t know…he should be—”

Before Duncan could complete his sentence, someone appeared down near the end of the street for a fraction of a second before heading back onto the other road. Duncan stopped the video, rewound several frames, and zoomed in.