Authors: Leo J. Maloney

Termination Orders (31 page)

BOOK: Termination Orders

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He examined the files, running the cursor over each one as he scanned it. The earliest ones dated back ten years, but the bulk of them were more recent. He clicked on the last file, from only a few days previous, labeled with the date, time, and
CIA.

He heard Natasha’s voice from the speakers. “I can do it. I can bring him down!”

“No. You failed, and now I’m sending Wagner to finish what you couldn’t.”

He stopped the recording. The voice was not Kline’s. It belonged to NCS Director Jeffrey Boyle.

Morgan sat there in shock. It was Boyle. Morgan had been played all along, from the moment Boyle had let him in on Cougar’s mission in Afghanistan. Boyle had leaked information to Nickerson and Natasha, and he must have bugged Plante, as he probably did his entire senior staff.

When he found out Plante was on to him, Boyle and his stooge, Nickerson, assigned T to take care of people who might implicate him—Plante, Cougar, Zalmay, and Morgan. It all fell neatly into place. Boyle had sent Wagner after Morgan, and when all his schemes had at last failed, he had set up Kline to take the fall.
The bastard
. But now Morgan had the evidence. Now he knew, and he’d make sure that Boyle would pay for what he did.

The phone rang, and Morgan looked at it as if it were a hissing snake. He picked up.

“I’m trying to reach Cobra.”

“That’s me,” he said.

“Mr. Cobra, please hold. It’s your daughter on the line.”

He waited a few seconds and then heard Alex’s quavering voice say, “Dad, it’s me.”

“Alex? Is something wrong? Is your mother there?”

“No. Dad, he’s got a gun.” She sounded like she was crying.

“Who has a gun? Alex, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know what he’s talking about, but he says you have to bring the chip, and that you have to come alone and not tell anyone or he’ll kill me. The ankle monitor—he says the code is 254766. He says to come to the barn at the Old Mill Road outside Arlington. Please, Daddy, please—!”

And someone hung up before she could say any more.

He heard Lowry’s footsteps, heading back into the room. Morgan stood up as he appeared at the door.

“I really needed this,” Lowry said, holding up a can of energy drink. Then he spotted the screen. “Hey, Cobra, what did you do there?”

But Morgan had already made his way behind him and deftly locked him in a sleeper hold. Lowry, whose natural response was not to struggle, was easily subdued and fell unconscious quickly.

Morgan set him down in the chair and then disconnected the chip from the computer and pocketed it.
I give it to Boyle, and then what
? he thought.
He lets me and my family go? Not likely.

But what choice did he have?

He was about to walk out when he saw Lowry’s smart phone on the desk. He had a crazy thought, and a desperate plan began to form in his mind.

He had to do it. He had to go face off against Boyle. But he wasn’t going in empty-handed.

C
HAPTER
47

M
organ spotted the grain silo first, towering above the trees, dirty white with rust peeking through the old paint. The air was quiet here, the noises of the city far behind. He stopped at the side of the road. Through the trees, he could catch glimpses of a run-down barn, and he wondered if there was a slaughterhouse here, and at what distance it was possible to hear the screaming of dying cattle. He decided to approach on foot and rolled to a stop.

Before he got out of the car, he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out his backup gun. Then he picked up Lowry’s phone from the passenger’s seat and looked at its glowing screen. God, he hoped his plan worked. He reached for the ankle monitor.
Here goes nothing
, he thought, as he reconnected the loop. It began blinking red, while emitting a high-pitched, droning buzz. Someone, somewhere now knew that he was far out of his designated perimeter.

Morgan got out of the car and zigzagged his way to the barn door, taking cover behind Boyle’s Mercedes, and then running to stand flat against the barn itself. He peered through the cracks in the decaying planks that made up the wall. Light filtering in through the crumbling roof revealed Boyle standing in the hayloft, holding a weapon in his hand, his eyes fixed nervously on the door. Alex was there, too, sitting beside him on a bale of hay and sobbing quietly. If it were anyone else, he would go in guns blazing. But not this time, not while Boyle had Alex.

He pulled the heavy barn door, and it creaked loudly. The drifting dust motes glowed in shafts of sunlight that poured inside. He walked in, hands raised. Boyle moved fast, grabbing Alex by her hair and holding his gun under her chin.

“Cobra!” said Boyle, looking down at him from the hayloft. “How nice of you to show.”

“Dad!” screamed Alex.

“Stay calm, sweetie,” said Morgan. “I’m going to take care of this. It’s going to be okay.”

“You got a gun, Cobra?”

He reached for his weapon, tucked in the rear of his pants at the base of his back, and, holding it by the muzzle, dropped it at his feet.

“Kick it away.”

Morgan did. It scraped noisily against the dirty barn floor.

“And the chip?” said Boyle.

He took the small black square from his pocket and held it up for Boyle to see.

“I’ve got a little something else, too,” said Morgan, and he took Lowry’s phone out of his shirt pocket. “Marvelous things, these phones. Did you know I can get an Internet connection all the way out here? Did you know, in fact, that I can send an e-mail to the editors of every major newspaper with the click of this one tiny little green button?”

Boyle glared at him, understanding plainly what Morgan was really telling him. Morgan went on.

“There were an awful lot of incriminating files on that chip. It would be a shame if a handful of them happened to be attached when this e-mail message goes out.”

“You’re bluffing!” said Boyle. “There were layers of encryption on that chip. There’s no way you could have broken it already.”

“No, there’s no way. Unless, of course, I happened to know the password.”

Boyle glowered, his eyes slits, and then burst into derisive laughter. “Nice try, Cobra. But you’re a rat backed into a corner. There’s nothing you wouldn’t say to escape. Do you really expect me to fall for that?”

“ ‘You failed, and now I’m sending Wagner to finish what you couldn’t do, Natasha.’ Sound familiar, Boyle?”

Boyle’s gloating expression took an apprehensive turn, and he looked at Morgan in angry, stunned silence. Then he screamed, “Drop the phone. Drop it now! Or the little bitch gets it!”

“You touch a hair on her head—”

“And what?” Boyle pulled harder on Alex’s hair, and she whimpered. The two men looked at each other in silence, furious. Then Boyle said, “You think I care about my reputation as much as you care about your daughter, Cobra?” Morgan just looked at him, concentrating to keep his anger in check. In another situation, he might try to go for his gun and shoot. But if he did, he knew Alex would be the first to die.

“See, Cobra, that’s your problem. Your attachment to your family. It stops you from going all-out. Keeps you from taking the risks that made you a great operative. Keeps you from making the hard decisions.”

“Like you did, Boyle? Betraying your country? Was that a hard decision?”

“You don’t know the first thing about patriotism, Cobra,” he fumed. “You risked your life, yes, but you hid behind your code name. You still do. And you never had to make the decision to kill a person, or twenty. You just followed orders. You were never ultimately responsible for the security of this country. You have never made a decision to kill fifty people today to save a hundred tomorrow. You don’t know what it means to make that kind of decision!” In his anger, he pulled Alex’s hair. She sobbed.

“Look, Boyle, I don’t care,” said Morgan. “You did what you did for your own reasons, and I don’t give a shit what they are. I just want my daughter back. So I’m forcing a draw. You toss away your gun, and we make the exchange. My daughter for the phone.”

“Are there any more copies?”

“This is the only one,” said Morgan.

“Suppose I believe you. How do I know that no one at the Agency has seen this?”

“Do you really think that they would let me come out here alone?” said Morgan. “This place would be swarming with Feds if I had told them.”

“How do I know it isn’t?” said Boyle.

“If it is,” said Morgan, “then you’ve already lost.”

Boyle watched him, as if mulling it over, and then said, “Okay. Come up. Slowly.”

“Lose the gun first,” said Morgan.

Boyle tossed it behind him, and it hit the wooden loft with a thud. Morgan walked to the ladder that was propped up against the loft and climbed, slowly, his eyes steadily on Boyle and his daughter, who was no longer sobbing but still shaking.

Finally, he stood on the loft, about fifteen feet away from Alex, facing Boyle. The wooden floor seemed shaky, the wood itself rotted through. Morgan took a step toward him.

“Easy now,” said Boyle. Morgan looked at the phone in his hand and then at Boyle. He had gotten close to Boyle and, more important, to Alex, But this was about as far as his plan went. Now he had to improvise.

“So what are we going to do once we make the exchange, Boyle?” It was an awkward question, but then again, they were far past social niceties.

“I should ask you the same, Cobra. How can I believe that you’ll just back off?”

“Give me my daughter, Boyle, and I disappear. I take the blame, just like you planned. The operative gone rogue. You go back to selling out your country, to being some senator’s bitch, and you never hear from me again.”

Boyle cringed in anger at his words. “And suppose I don’t believe you?”

“What do you think I’m going to do, Boyle? You control the intelligence. I give you the chip, and it’s the last bit of evidence that connects you with any of this. I disappear as a fugitive. Who’s going to believe anything I say?”

As Boyle paused, thinking, Morgan gave Alex a look that he hoped would be comforting.
It will be all right,
he wanted to say.
I’ll die before I let anything happen to you.

“So do we have an understanding?” Morgan said instead. “Give me my daughter, and we all walk out of here unscathed. After that, I disappear.”

Boyle nodded. Morgan approached him, one tiny step at a time. He extended his hand holding the cell phone and the chip. Alex was just beyond his arm’s reach.

Morgan tossed him the phone, then the chip, and Boyle shoved Alex forward into her father’s arms. Morgan’s stare never left Boyle, whose eyes went wide as he examined the phone and realized Morgan’s deception. He looked fiercely at Morgan for a split second, and then his hatred erupted in a determined lunge to recover his gun.

Morgan pushed his daughter to the side into a bale of hay. He rushed at Boyle, hitting him in his midsection. They toppled over together and hit the loft floor hard. It splintered under their weight, and they fell through the stale air.

Morgan hit the ground hard and then felt piercing, disorienting pain. His bad knee had made contact first and absorbed much of the impact. After lying for a few moments dazed and in pain, he tried to get up but stumbled, falling facedown in the dirt.

He raised his head and saw Boyle on his feet, panting, incensed. He limped to the nearest wall, where several rusty farm implements were hanging, and grabbed a large, rusty machete. Morgan tried to get up again, but again the pain was too much, and his knee buckled.

Boyle shuffled back, his fist wrapped tightly around the handle of the machete. With a great roar of triumph, he raised the machete over his head, ready to strike.

Alex’s voice pierced the air. “Stop!”

She yelled it through her tears but still sounded commanding and self-assured. Boyle froze and turned around slowly. She had come down from the hayloft and picked up Morgan’s gun, which was now in her trembling hand. Boyle took a step toward her.

“Stay back!” she screamed, no longer tearing up. She was angry. Enraged. And it seemed to give her power. “Stay back, or I’ll shoot!”

“Do you know,” said Boyle, panting, “how to use one of those?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s just point and shoot,” she said with resolute bitterness.

“There’s a little more to it than that,” Boyle told her. “Put it down, little girl, or you might hurt yourself.”

She sneered at him. “I’m not a little girl.” And she squeezed the trigger.

One shot—
BAM!
—hit Boyle squarely in the chest, and a red bloom grew on his shirt around the wound. He stammered, as if to say something, and then he fell as if the ground had shifted beneath his feet.

“Dad!” Alex exclaimed, and she ran over to him. He had crawled to the wall of the barn and was leaning against it, next to the hanging tools, trying to get up on his own. She extended her hand and helped him to his feet.

“You know something, kid?” He was half hugging, half leaning on her for support and glowing with pride. “You’re my hero.” She beamed and hugged him.

Morgan almost didn’t see him. Boyle, blood-drenched, had staggered to his feet, machete in hand. He was breathing in wheezing gasps, and his eyes were wide like a cornered animal’s. With an inhuman scream, he raised the machete and charged. Alex screamed.

Morgan, with no time to think, grabbed the first thing his hands found on the wall—a pitchfork. He swung it to parry Boyle’s attack, but the man didn’t stop. His own momentum impaled him on the rusty tines of the pitchfork. They broke through his flesh and pierced him upward, from his gut into his chest. The machete dropped to the ground. He let out a weak grunt, gurgled, and tipped over onto his side, twitching, the pitchfork still sticking out of his torso.

Crying again, Alex fell into Morgan’s arms.

“It’s okay,” he said, holding her tightly. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay now.”

“Daddy,” she said, sobbing, “can we go home now?”

“Yes, honey,” he said, as he heard distant police sirens approaching. “We can go home.”

BOOK: Termination Orders

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