SAFE HAVENS: Shadow Masters (A Sean Havens Black Ops Novel Book 1) (11 page)

The real Nigel exited the airport and texted a friend. He was going to go to the market for some qat, upgrade his hotel, get some clothes and hang out with some friends new and old. Perhaps he would stay another week. He wanted to bang that pre-med girl from New Zealand who had arrived in town a couple days ago. She would be with everyone this afternoon. Perhaps he could play a sympathy card appealing to her proclivities towards helping her common man. That’s it, he thought. “I was robbed on my way to the airport and roughed up a bit.”

Nigel saw a series of stone stairs. Without giving it a thought, he hurled himself down the steps pulling his arms and knees against some of the rough edges of rock as he fell. When he landed at the bottom he admired his abrasions and the prospects of the evening.

Chapter 13

T
he cleaner located his second stashed car a few blocks away. The quiet Chicago neighborhood was quickly coming alive. He had to get moving before Donald got home.

From the trunk he grabbed a sawed off Mossberg shotgun which he had loaded earlier that day and double-checked for shells. The shotgun was placed in the rear passenger side foot well for easy retrieval. A thin blanket was tossed over it in the event of a fast visual police check.

The cleaner’s record would be spotless as his alias had been seasoned now with only the occasional parking ticket or traffic ticket that was promptly paid in full to augment the fictitious cover as true life.

He tied a blue bandana around his forehead and donned dark sunglasses before checking the GPS transmission reading from the device he had placed under the vehicle Donald was now driving.

Right on target, Donald. Keep going. Don’t slow up, homie
.

It wasn’t the cleaner’s position to ask questions but this job was nagging him a bit. He thought the killing of the teenager was overkill for a judge’s assassination. On the inside of the house there hadn’t been any legal certificates or diplomas in the den area walls. That wasn’t typical for a judge. Why would he need to take the girl’s laptop and not the judge’s computer or thumb drives? There had been a few jobs now like this that were nagging at him a bit.

He remembered being a soldier. He had liked that so much more. He even missed the work and his team in Kabul. He had to keep reminding himself that his new employer was the boss, and his boss made the Clean the Streets missions of the Silver Star program a success. They were all apparently taking out crime at levels that were typically not touched, or they were unconventionally executed to draw pressure onto other criminal elements. That part he did not like, but life was not fair.

The cleaner pulled from his wallet the one piece of cover contraband that he allowed himself. A picture of his wife and children.

How he missed them so.

It still boggled his mind how his wife, sister-in-law, and still missing brother-in-law could get involved with the drug trade and Mexican cartels while he was away in Afghanistan. He didn’t even have family in Mexico and certainly no family involved in criminal activity, to the best of his knowledge. They hardly had any Mexican friends where they had lived. Even the Mexican restaurants they frequented were national chains and not Mexican-owned. Nothing made sense about their slaughter.

The police had said his brother-in-law had “allegedly” been involved through Air Force connections overseas that transported drugs back to the states through military channels. The hit that left his family dead and sister-in-law decapitated in the basement was part of some turf battle and his brother-in-law was likely either part of it or in hiding.

Maybe his wife had just been helping her sister. He wondered how she could have let this come into his home. For God’s sake he had been hunting Taliban funded heroin traffickers in Afghanistan risking his life to fight this drug’s illicit economic expansion when he was called home. A couple years had passed, but the pain felt like it happened this morning.

He had made people pay.

His new employer had recognized him from the headlines, taken him in, got him some emotional help, and came up with a job he could hold down exacting revenge against the monsters who had butchered his family and that had let criminals out of prison to kill again. The judge was supposedly another one in the kill chain that needed to be terminated.

Once the cleaner could emotionally get through a day without breaking down, his employer had provided him with intensive, unconventional urban tactical training. He took to the training well and it complemented his previous military experience.

Upon its completion, he was handed a file identifying the murderers of his family. He was provided a small team to exact his revenge. They entered nearly ten different homes, apartments, motel rooms, and a restaurant, all the way from Chicago to St. Louis to Texas and Arizona, and just over the border in Mexico. They would burst in to each location as a killer assault team, wreaking havoc on those he was told were responsible for his own personal losses.

They had torn apart the murderers and drug traffickers with automatic weapon fire. In its final zenith, his employer had recommended beheading the dead to throw off authorities, send a message, and above all, pay back his children’s likely last wishes for their father to come to their aid. It had brought the cleaner to his knees initially, but he knew he had to do it for his family honor and final vengeance.

From that point his heart turned cold. Yet underneath that compassionless void, he would on occasion hold the photo of his beloved family, looking wantonly at their lives that once were. It had been a good day when the picture was taken.

The cleaner decided as he drove to Donald’s location that he would address these recent missions with his employer again. On one such mission, they had happened upon some Somali whores locked in a storage room strung out on heroin with only a couple soiled mattresses and a sink. No doubt they had been trafficked and held as sex slaves. Their orders were to kill them as well to paint a deceptive story of criminal rivalry. The first time the cleaner addressed his opinion on this he gained little more than a quizzical look from his handler who asked him if he was going soft. The handler had scolded him telling him to act like a soldier. To act in accordance of a man who had been given a new family and a new chance at avenging his family’s murder without fear of reprisals. Who else would be given such an opportunity in a similar situation? How could he think there could be no innocent lives taken for the greater good to get after the heads of the snake? Who else could still be doing all this good for the public and still be working for the United States government?

It shut the cleaner up for a time, but as a lifelong Marine who had done some covert ops work in the past, he knew this was not the work of the United States government. Policy would never allow it. He knew, despite not yet fully coming to terms with reality, that he was being exploited by someone in the military or intelligence apparatus who had some temporary relief from oversight and accountability. He would have to find out who that was. His boss knew he wasn’t happy. And that didn’t make the boss happy.

Donald’s car was now in sight as it pulled into the dimly lit neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The cleaner pulled up just behind and to the left next to Donald, who still looked a bit jittery walking to the trunk. He glanced up at his front porch to see under the dim lighting the bullet pock marks in the wood that had trailed to the living room window and killed little Darnell.

The cleaner lowered his glasses. “Get the trunk open and start cleaning the car.”

Not recognizing the cleaner initially from the change of hair and latex prosthetics, Donald recognized the eyes and did as he was told despite fumbling a few times for the keys. He popped the trunk.

“Huh? What is this?”

Donald reached for the brick-like plastic-wrapped bundles in the trunk. There were five of them. There were no cleaning supplies.

Donald turned towards the cleaner who was still in the car with the passenger window rolled down.

Drugs.
“Is this what I think it is?”

The impact of the shotgun pellets hitting Donald in the chest knocked him halfway into the trunk. The second impact to his torso created less dramatic movement but misted the trunk with blood. The houses would bear witness to yet another violent neighborhood fatality but would remain silent. Such was the code of this neighborhood too, but as a matter of survival.

The cleaner drove away. It was time to ditch this final car and report in. The cleaner called a number.

“Is it all taken care of now?”

The cleaner replied in the affirmative.

“Where are you heading now? Are you certain you have not been followed?”

“Yes, I’m certain,” the cleaner said smugly. “I’ll run another SDR just in case.”

“Good. Excellent work.”

“You know you have to find someone else on this block to take out?”

“Who? That was it for the assets I’m tracking and running.”

“Think. You freed Donald and shot the cop. That makes three. Finish the story. Tie up all loose ends to make the story connect to a typical pattern and end it.”

My God this doesn’t stop.
“You are right. Sorry. I should have thought of that.”

“Yes, you should have. If you want to stay a trigger puller all your life you won’t need to think like I am trying to train you to think. It is your choice. Remember, I am here for you and we have been here for you the whole time.”

“Hey, thanks for the Hallmark card. I’m a big boy.” The cleaner felt like he was being scolded by a parent. His smart ass remark received the same reaction that his father gave when he was little. Silence.

“Fine, I will take care of it now.”

It was resolved with the cleaner as if he were just told to go upstairs and clean his room.

“I have someone in my sights now. Approaching to assess viability as surrogate tie-in.”

“Good, copy.”

“One last thing. Are we still going to meet this week? I have something I would like to discuss.”

“Sure. We’d be happy to. Have you discussed it with anyone else from the team?”

“No.”

“OK. Yes. Happy to discuss whatever is on your mind. We will call with a time and location.”

The receiver hung up and the cleaner felt a sense of ease.

Another call was made unbeknownst to the cleaner.

“All is nearly completed. He has one more stop. Do you have him in sight?”

“Coming up on his location now. We had a tracker so we could stay back.”

“Roger that. Hold until after he engages new mark, then proceed.”

“WILCO. I can’t believe he was really threatening to go to the press with our unit and had pictures of us. I never saw him take them.”

Of course there are no pictures
.

“Let’s not discuss here. We really need to implement a policy on our open line communications. Myself included. Throw aways or not. Point of the matter is that he did have evidence on the team. Another team has located the photos, the notes he had made, and destroyed them. This was my bad. Turns out he really was involved in drugs. You guys are now clear. Take him out. Finish the story to paint the picture. Go back to his apartment and give his old identity back to him. The artifacts to stage the apartment with are in the bag you picked up from the shop. Then ditch your phones.”

The cleaner pulled parallel to a hooded street punk who was clearly out too late for any good, but he was alone walking down the dark sidewalk. That was good for the cleaner.

“Yo, bro,” the cleaner said.

The hooded gangster kept walking. Hands were in his hoodie stomach pocket.

“Yo, how do I get to the expressway?”

The gangster turned towards the voice. Seeing through the darkness a protruding pistol barrel bulge sticking out of the punk’s sweatshirt, the cleaner said out loud, “Perfecto!” having found the ideal candidate for surrogacy and fired the shotgun at his final mark for the mission.

Quickly getting out of the car the cleaner wiped his own 9mm that had killed the policeman earlier and Donald’s brother. He placed it in the now dead gang member’s hand, fired a shot in the unlikely event gun residue would be assessed, let the gun fall out of the dead man’s grasp to appear as it would naturally in a death fall, and with a kerchief took the gangster’s Smith & Wesson snubbie .45 as his own now.

Back in the car he had taken off his headband, glasses, and was throwing the shotgun in the rear seat now that he was at a stoplight. Hard to tell if sirens would start approaching the area. This neighborhood was a regular shooting gallery throughout the week. Before he repositioned his hips and body back to the front of the car, he noticed a brown paper bag in the rear driver side foot well.

I didn’t put this there.

The cleaner knew without opening the bag that it would have drugs in it. He saw the headlights of an SUV quickly approaching and punched it through the red light. The red Blazer coming up from behind never slowed for the light. The cleaner’s car gained speed but was no match for the vehicle now at its side.

In a flurry of glass breaking, impacts from the ammunition, and audible shots ringing about, the cleaner kept his foot on the gas pedal. Forgetting the context of tactical driving ramming situations he tried to smash into the Blazer but only drew himself closer to the guns.

Looking down at his wounds he knew they were worse than those he had sustained in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The cleaner, for the first time since his family’s death, knew his wife would not have been involved with drugs. Yet another plant. If cartels really were involved, the scene would have been different.

He was set up. His family had been set up just like he was setting others up.

The brother- and sister-in-law spin was to take the proxy cover-up two to three layers deep to throw law enforcement off in a simple and logical conclusion. It had all been orchestrated by men. Men like him now.

He felt ashamed of dishonoring his family and the Corps by his actions, emotional reactions, and naiveté. He had played right into it and allowed his rage to transform him into the assassin they needed for off-the-books targeting. Had men like him killed his family or did they involve other surrogates who were manipulated to murder?