Red Cell Seven (19 page)

CHAPTER 21

“W
HO SHOT
Nathan Kohler in that basement?” Travers asked directly as he scooped up a forkful of scrambled eggs. “Who was the other person down there?”

Troy shook his head even though a possibility had actually just occurred to him. “I don’t know.” He wasn’t trying to dodge Travers. It was just such a wild guess it wasn’t worth saying anything. At this point he needed to build credibility with Travers, not blow it.

“It had to have been someone on our side. Otherwise, they would have shot us.”

Once more Troy thought about suggesting who it might have been. But again he held off.

“Unless Maddux got that smoke bomb off before whoever it was had a chance to take out the rest of us, too.” Travers hesitated. “And wasn’t necessarily on either of our sides.”

Troy wanted to make sure of something before this conversation went any further. “You know Maddux defected, right?”

Travers nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

“How’d you find out?”

“And I know he and Ryan O’Hara tried to kill President Dorn a few weeks ago in Los Angeles,” Travers kept going without answering. “O’Hara’s the one who tried to kill me in Delaware.”

Troy glanced up. He was aware that Travers had dodged the question, and he wanted an answer. But he’d get to it later. “What?”

“O’Hara and another young gun were the ones who ambushed Harry Boyd and me in Wilmington two days ago.”

That didn’t make sense to Troy. “But they aren’t the ones who brought you down here to the farm. I thought that was Kohler.”

“It
was
Kohler,” Travers confirmed. “I took out O’Hara and the other guy after they got Harry. Kohler got me later, at my place in the Appalachian Mountains.” He stopped gulping down food for a moment. “Hey, you think you got Maddux when you shot the basement up?”

“I doubt it.”

“Me too. I always heard that guy basically survives everything.”

Something else occurred to Troy. “You know, I don’t think O’Hara was trying to kill you in Delaware. I think he was trying to do the same thing Kohler actually did. Maddux wanted you under his control. He didn’t want you dead. He made that clear in the basement. I think O’Hara was trying to bring you to Maddux, not kill you.”

Travers had been about to eat a mouthful of hash browns, but he stopped the fork’s progress in front of his mouth for a moment. “Maybe.” He shrugged then ate the bite hungrily. “How was I supposed to know? I didn’t even know who they were when they killed Harry. I was just trying to survive at that point. And they were shooting while they were chasing me.”

“From what I’ve heard about Ryan O’Hara, if he was trying to hit you he would have, even if you were a moving target.”

“He missed the president in Los Angeles.”

“Well—”

“He didn’t kill him. That’s what I meant. He hit him, but he didn’t assassinate him.”

“Only because Rex Stein deflected the bullet at the last second by diving in front of Dorn on the platform.”

“How did Stein know? Who tipped him off? I never heard an explanation of that in the media.”

Troy hesitated. “My brother Jack called him on the stage.”

“Your brother’s in RCS, too?”

“No.” He quickly explained to Travers what had happened—about Jack going to Alaska and stopping the LNG attack, about his calling Stein on the stage, and then about Maddux shooting Jack.

“Now I get what you and Maddux were going back and forth about in the basement. Sorry about that.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“So who was Lisa?”

Troy gave Travers an even briefer explanation about her.

Travers shook his head. “You must really hate that guy.”

Troy glanced at the entrance. A Middle Eastern family was standing there waiting to be seated. The man and two small boys were dressed in casual pants and shirts. But the woman wore a full-length black cloak along with a traditional abaya over her head and neck, which left only a thin space for her to see.

“How’d Maddux get down into the basement?” Travers asked as he took another big bite of food. “You guys checked that place out hard. I watched you. It was like he came out of nowhere.”

“Like a ghost,” Troy agreed as the hostess led the family to a booth near the back of the restaurant. The booth was well away from where anyone else was sitting. “I don’t know, Major. There had to be a hidden access from outside or from another floor. I know there was no other stairway down there from the first floor.”

“I guess.”

“How did Kohler find you?” Troy asked. Other patrons in the restaurant were watching the Middle Eastern family closely. Troy could feel the hatred building around him. It was almost palpable. It wasn’t right; it was totally misguided. Unfortunately, it was human. “Where were you?”

“I’ve got a place in the mountains west of Washington, DC. That’s what I was telling you before. It’s where I go when I need to hole up. It’s in the middle of nowhere in the woods. It’s really just a shack.” Travers shrugged. “I don’t know how in the hell he found me there.”

Troy gestured to Travers without looking at him. He was watching two men on the far side of the restaurant who seemed to be taking more than just a passing interest in the family, which had just sat down in the booth. “Check this out.”

Travers followed Troy’s gaze. “What’s up?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe something.” A moment later the two men they were watching stood up from their table and headed toward the family. “Christ,” Troy muttered. “Here we go.”

Words had already been exchanged by the time he reached the table.

“You people ought to leave,” one of the men was saying to the family, “before one of you gets hurt.”

“And don’t ever come back,” the other man hissed. “Or one of you will definitely get hurt.”

The two little boys were terrified, and their father seemed paralyzed. The woman was holding one hand to the thin opening of the abaya.

“What’s the problem?” Troy asked evenly.

The men spun around toward Troy and stepped a few paces back, obviously surprised. But they collected themselves quickly.

“Don’t get involved, boy. This ain’t your fight.”

“Yeah, it is. When you treat someone—”

One of the men reached inside his jacket. Before Troy could react, Travers had cut in front and put the man to the ground with a single, vicious right to the jaw. Travers grabbed the pistol the man had been going for—it had clattered to the floor beside him—and leveled it at the other man, who threw his hands in the air.

“Don’t shoot!”

Troy stared at Travers for several moments, then glanced down at the man
, who lay prone on the floor, not even moving. That was impressive.

“Come on, Captain,” Travers said with a thin smile. “Let’s go.”

Troy nodded, still impressed by what he’d just witnessed. “Yeah, right.”

T
HAT AFTERNOON
Jacob Gadanz left the office at three-thirty. It was the first time he’d left his business before eight o’clock at night in three years. He was waiting for Elaina and Sophie when they got off the school bus, and he hugged each of them tightly before holding their hands as they walked on either side of him all the way back to the family’s townhouse.

Sasha knew something was wrong. If everything had been all right, he never would have come home so early this afternoon and then gone right to the bus stop after asking her where it was.

But she was too afraid to ask him what was wrong. The only reason Jacob would have come home this early was because he was scared. And that frightened her more than she could have ever anticipated. In their sixteen years together, she’d never seen Jacob Gadanz even remotely scared. He was the bravest man she’d ever known. Perhaps because of who his brother was. And what difference did it make?

But Jacob was terrified today. She’d seen it all over his face as soon as he’d walked in the door—which was why she was sobbing uncontrollably in the bathroom off the bedroom with the door locked. His terror had petrified her.

And then there was that other thing that was driving her insane and making the tears flow like rivers. She knew a little about what was going on—by accident, of course, but she knew. She’d stumbled on it so now she understood a shred of the terror she’d seen on Jacob’s face. She wished to Almighty God she didn’t, but there was no denying it.

The soft knock on the door interrupted a harsh sob, and she held her breath. Now she knew what it felt like to be hunted.

“Sasha.”

“Go away, Jacob.” She didn’t want him to see her like this. “Please.”

“The girls are wondering why you’re in here.”

She pressed a tissue to the bottom of her eyelids. “They’re wondering why you met them at the bus stop, too.”

“Please open the door, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart.
He hadn’t called her that in years. “Please go away, Jacob,” she begged through the bathroom door.
“Please.”

CHAPTER 22

I
T SEEMED
strange to Troy to have to sneak into his parents’ house in Connecticut. He never had before, but Bill was requiring it this time. He’d made them wait until nightfall, too, so they had the cover of darkness. Because Travers was with Troy, Bill had claimed—he was taking absolutely no chances on anyone seeing that.

But Troy had a feeling Bill would have been this cautious even if it had just been the two of them meeting tonight—which meant his father was worried about President Dorn monitoring everything they were doing. That was the only explanation he could think of for this intense level of stealth.

It also meant Stewart Baxter was probably operating behind the scenes on Dorn’s behalf, which made it likely that Dorn had told Baxter everything he knew about Red Cell Seven. Bill’s gamble of letting the president get his nose even farther under the cell’s tent wasn’t paying off. Bill was trying to be reasonable, but Dorn was showing his true colors, even in the face of the Holiday Mall Attacks.

Once a dove, always a dove, his father had always preached. The mantra had been drilled into Troy’s head over and over as he was growing up. Even about Jack, who always banged the liberal drum—sometimes just to irritate their father, Troy believed. Still, it begged the obvious question: Why would Bill violate his own mantra now, especially when the fight involved the president?

As ordered, Troy and Travers had taken a roundabout route to the Jensen property outside Greenwich. An hour ago they’d hopped a cab at the Westchester Airport after flying in on the Jensen plane from Raleigh. And Troy had directed the confused driver to drop them off in the middle of nowhere, in the woods on a lonely country road several miles from the house. They’d hiked the rest of the way through the forest.

Finally, they’d come through the tree line and into the open at about the spot where Troy thought Maddux had been when he’d shot Jack. Then they’d jogged the last few hundred yards across one of the pastures to a back basement door Bill had unlocked after ordering his five-member private security force to stand down for a few minutes and take a quick break from watching the perimeter.

The three of them had then gone directly to the card room of the large finished basement after Bill had resecured the door and turned the alarm back on. It was an interior room that had no windows. His father was being careful about everything. Troy had never seen him this uptight or worried. Usually, you couldn’t tell from his face what he was feeling. But the grim, stony expression was an obvious tip-off.

“What happened in North Carolina?” Bill asked as they all sat down around the six-sided table covered by soft green felt.

“We got this guy out,” Troy answered, gesturing at Travers.
“Unfortunately, we lost the two agents who went with me to rescue Major Travers.”

Bill winced. “I’ll check to see what the family situation is for both of them. We don’t have many married men in the cell, but there are a few. If they were married, I’ll take care of their families.” He drummed the felt tabletop with his fingertips. “So what happened?”

“Maddux showed up,” Travers answered for Troy. “One second he was nowhere, the next he was right in front of us. It was like he stepped out of thin air right in front of us. He shot the other agents in the head before they even knew what was happening. Real clean shots, too, dead-on-impact accurate. Then he had a knife at Troy’s throat.”

“Crazy,” Bill muttered under his breath. “That guy still amazes me even after twenty years.”

“Agents Wyoming and Idaho cased the grounds and the other buildings with me before we went down to the basement looking for Major Travers,” Troy explained. “Maddux was not around, Dad.”

“There’s no way to know for sure,” Bill said. “And it isn’t your fault you didn’t find him if he actually was there. Sometimes I don’t think Shane Maddux would show up on an infrared camera after running a marathon in the dark.”

“Maybe not even on a regular camera on a sunny day,” Travers cracked.

“Maybe not.”

Bill was preoccupied and hadn’t even come close to a smile at Travers’s remark. “He’d definitely recruited Nathan Kohler out of RCS,” Troy said. “Now Kohler’s dead, too.”

Bill looked up from a pad of paper he’d been writing on. “Oh?”

He’d been penning a note about checking on the family situations of the two dead agents, Troy saw. “Someone else showed up in that basement in North Carolina while we were down there.”

Bill put the pen down. “Who?”

“Don’t know, Dad. But whoever it was shot Kohler dead and then bolted when Maddux dropped a smoke bomb for cover. I didn’t get a look at the guy’s face. It all happened too fast.”

Father and son stared at each other for several moments across the green felt before Bill’s gaze shifted to Travers. “How did Kohler find you at your place in the mountains? How in the hell did he know you were even there, Major?”

Travers shrugged. “I have no idea, sir.”

There was a soft knock on the door. All three men sat straight up in their chairs as they glanced quickly at the door.

“Yes?” Bill called as he stood up.

“It’s me, dear.”

Troy recognized his mother’s voice as Bill pointed at Travers and then to a closet in a corner of the room. When Travers was inside with the door shut, Bill let Cheryl in. She gave him a quick kiss and moved to where Troy was standing after he’d risen from his chair as well.

“Hello, Mother.”

Cheryl Jensen was tall and slim. In her late fifties, she looked much younger than that to Troy. Every time he saw her he thought that.

“What do you have there?” he asked, pointing at the bundle in her arms.

“Someone who misses you,” she answered. As she leaned in to give Troy a kiss on the cheek, she carefully handed him the blue knit blanket and the baby wrapped inside it. “Someone you need to spend more time with.”

Troy smiled as he glanced down at Little Jack. He was damn cute even if he was only a few months old. Most babies looked the same to Troy, and not cute at all. In fact, some of them were downright ugly, even when everyone was oohing and aahing over them.

L.J. was different. He was definitely cute, even handsome already with his shock of straight black hair, distinctive features, and beautiful light-brown skin. Of course, Lisa Martinez had been a beautiful woman.

And the little guy seemed to have a glint in his eye other babies didn’t, Troy noticed. He seemed already aware of all that was going on around him. Troy chuckled softly. Of course, maybe L.J.’s father was a little biased.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said as he took the baby.

Cheryl smiled lovingly. “You’re welcome, dear.”

Jack’s death had torn her apart. She’d been a wreck at the funeral the other day. But Karen was right. Having Little Jack around seemed to have boosted her spirits. She had a glow about her when she gazed at the baby.

“I guess I can give him up for a little while,” she murmured as she touched L.J.’s chin and smiled again.

“I’ll take good care of him while he’s down here.” They couldn’t continue until she left, and Troy could see that Bill was getting impatient. “Don’t worry.”

“That’s my cue,” she said as she turned to leave. “I get it.” When she made it to the door she stopped. “See you later.” She smiled up at Bill. “Do tell whoever’s in the closet I said hello.”

“What?”

Cheryl pointed at the table and the chairs around it. “Six chairs at the table, and three of them are pulled out. I only see two of you.” She gave Bill another quick kiss. “I’ve been around you too long. I’ve learned to analyze everything. Don’t ever forget that,” she called good-naturedly as Bill closed the door after her.

As Travers emerged from the closet, Troy eased back down into his chair and gave Little Jack his finger to squeeze. The baby had a nice strong grip and a wave of pride surged through him. Then the guilt fell in behind the pride. Cheryl was right. The little guy needed a father, every little guy did. But that was going to be very tough if he stayed with RCS. Maybe trying so hard to please his father shouldn’t be as important anymore. Jack had spent his whole life doing that, and where had it gotten him? Six feet under.

“Where were we?” Bill asked when they were all seated again.

“Who’s that?” Travers asked, pointing at L.J. with a wide grin.

“We were talking about what happened in North Carolina,” Troy said, avoiding the question. “One thing you should be aware of, Dad, is that Maddux knows you’re running RCS now. He made that clear.”

“He doesn’t know. He was just guessing.”

“It didn’t sound like he was guessing,” Travers spoke up respectfully but firmly.

“It sure didn’t,” Troy seconded. “The other interesting thing about that whole deal in the basement down there was that Maddux wasn’t going to kill me. He was going to leave me locked up, but he wasn’t going to take me out.”

Bill grinned thinly for the first time. “Think he’s going soft in his old age?”

“It had nothing to do with personal loyalty, Dad. He made that very clear. He said the reason he wasn’t taking me out was that he didn’t want to piss you off. It had to do with his personal survival and nothing else.”

Troy and Travers had covered a great deal in the plane on the way up, including what had happened in Alaska; Maddux killing Lisa Martinez; and how Jack had died on the porch of this house. Troy had told Travers about Lisa but not about Little Jack. He was still getting used to being a father, and he hadn’t mentioned the baby. Well, he wouldn’t avoid the subject ever again, he promised himself as he gazed down into his son’s bright eyes. “And Maddux claimed he didn’t shoot Jack.”

Bill raised one eyebrow triumphantly. “I told you.”

“Just because Shane says he didn’t kill Jack, I don’t think we should necessarily—”

“Tell me about the young man you recently interrogated,” Bill interrupted, pointing at Travers.

Troy rolled his eyes. He hated it when Bill cut him off like that.

“I believe you told me his name was Kaashif when we spoke about him.”

Travers nodded. “Yes, sir, that’s right.”

“Did you find out anything important while you had him in custody?”

“Well, I—”

“First off, why were you suspicious? Who put you onto him?”

Travers stared at Bill steadily for several moments, then glanced at Troy. He started to say something—twice—but stopped each time.

“What’s the problem?” Bill demanded.

“I can’t give you my specific source, Mr. Jensen. I don’t want you to get angry, sir, but I won’t give my sources up to anyone. Mr. Carlson and I had an understanding on that.”

“That’s fine, Major. Just say what you’re comfortable saying.”

“Look, we all know people, right? I went into the Marines in 1991, and since then some of the guys I was in with landed on different boxes of the intel game board, you know? All the usual destinations you’d figure. CIA, NSA, ONI, and a few others I’m sure you two would suspect. Maybe one or two you wouldn’t as well.”

“Go on.”

“I keep in touch with those guys,” Travers explained. “
Like Carlson always said, work every relationship we have to find out anything we can.”

“We emphasize that from day one,” Bill agreed. “So, what did you find out?”

“Six months ago one of my guys who reports into Langley tells me about this kid, Kaashif, who’s a high school student up in Philly. Says I should check him out. That’s it, that’s all he says, just check him out. Claims he tried to get his superior up the Potomac to do the same thing, but the boss wouldn’t listen. The guy told him they don’t have time to chase down leads on teenagers because there’s too much else to do. So he begs me to do it, because he’s got a feeling something’s there, and he’s usually right. I trust this guy with my life. In fact, he saved it one time in Iraq, so why wouldn’t I?

“So I try doing some prelim back-channel work on the kid, but it all comes up empty. I don’t mean negative, I don’t mean the kid’s all innocent or anything and my guy was wrong. I mean I can’t find anything about Kaashif before he enrolled in that Philly high school last September. There’s
nothing
on him before that. It’s like footprints ending in the snow in the middle of a field. So I try getting information on his parents, but nothing comes up on them, either. It’s weird, just another trail ending in the middle of nowhere.