The Collective (48 page)

“You’re wrong about this,” Jordan said softly.

Cait knelt on the other side of the blanket and bent to kiss Leyla’s forehead. She let the baby clutch at her fingers and swung her hand back and forth.

“What else can I do?” she asked, the question nearly breaking her.

“I don’t mean the plan. You’re right about that. They haven’t left you any other options. Even if it works, you’ll still have the jihadists to deal with. But all right, deal with that if you get the luxury. I’m talking about me.” He gazed at her, and this time he didn’t look away. “You shouldn’t be leaving me behind.”

She leaned over and kissed his cheek, then hugged him close, the two of them like a bridge over Leyla.

“I know you’d like to keep me safe. It means a lot to me. But I can’t do what needs doing if I have Leyla along, if I have to worry about her, and you’re the only person I can trust with her right now. The only person.”

She withdrew, sliding her hands along his arms before letting go. Jordan had the pain of unspoken words in his eyes, but he nodded.

“You know I’ll take care of her.”

“I know,” Cait said. She reached out and touched his face, then stood up. “I’ll say good-bye to you both before I leave.”

Jordan started playing with Leyla again. As Cait walked away, she felt a hook in her, trying to drag her back. How perfect a day could the three of them have had together, if only they’d had the freedom to leave this place without the fear of bloodthirsty men?

She passed by Lynch’s cubicle. The computer was on, but abandoned. The chairs in front of the TV array, where they had spent a little time this morning, were empty. Then she came around the last cubicle and saw him standing in front of one of the whiteboards, studying the new photographs he had taped up—his new targets.

For a moment she just stood and took it in, this display of his work in progress. If what he had told her was true, Matthew Lynch was the last surviving War Child of the Second World
War. He had been involved in this fight his entire life, first surviving the killers who would have murdered him just for being born, then trying and mostly failing to save so many of the children of other wars, before finally giving in and becoming a killer himself.

Cait walked along the first two whiteboards, surveying the photographs of the men and women Lynch had marked for death—people he had confirmed were involved with the murder of War’s Children. Many races were represented, but the overwhelming majority were photos of men who looked like Muslim jihadists.

“Why not more Americans?” she asked.

Lynch glanced at her, took in her appearance, and nodded in what she presumed was approval.

“The members of the Collective are harder to find,” he said.

“That’s a little difficult to believe,” she said. “You’re trying to tell me it’s easier to track down radical jihadists who’ve infiltrated the country to murder children than it is to figure out who the Herods are in our own country?”

Lynch pointed to a photo on the board in front of him. “This guy? Saudi-born, living in Pakistan. Affiliated with loads of terrorist groups, wanted in Egypt for questioning in the beating death of a three-year-old girl. He’s been in the United States a dozen times in the past five years that I know of, and if the information I have about his movements is accurate, you can trace the death of certain children to his presence. I know this because I have access to federal government databases that I should not have access to. Those same databases are not going to tell me who the Collective are using for similar jobs here. Those kinds of secrets are too well hidden. So, yes, I’ve caught up with a number of the American conspirators over the years, but the jihadists are easier for me to hunt. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to track down any of the masters of the conspiracy on either side of this war. During Vietnam, we caught up to half a dozen American industrialists and politicians who were a part of it.”

“You killed them?”

Lynch nodded, fixing her with a hard look. “And the war ended. Ugly, but it ended. Make of that what you will.”

Cait shook her head and blew out a breath. “It hurts my head to even think about it.”

“Unfortunately, it’s your life now,” Lynch told her.

“Not for long,” she said. “I won’t let Leyla grow up in the middle of this insanity.”

Lynch smiled. Handsome as he was, somehow the effect was chilling. “Like me, you mean? You think I’m insane.”

Cait considered lying. “With the life you’ve had, I don’t think anyone would hold you to the usual standard for sanity.”

The old man actually smiled. “Very diplomatic of you, Sergeant.” He went back to looking at the photos. “In any case, things have changed. They got sloppy with you. Maybe they didn’t understand how formidable a target you would be. However it happened, they’ve made a mess of things.”

The photo Lynch had just taped up was of Dwight Hollenbach. Now he put up another, this one a blurry image of a dapper, dark-suited man wearing round glasses, and labeled it
Leonard Shelby
.

“Not as much as they will,” Cait whispered.

Lynch nodded in agreement, and then turned to meet her gaze fully. “The Middle Eastern men we killed on your property last night were on my list of targets. As you know, I caught up to Gharib al-Din yesterday. Another of them was killed in a police shootout in Sarasota. That accounts for all of the jihadist Herods who were on my list for the eastern half of the country. There is another cell covering the West, but it’s going to take them a while to figure out what the hell’s going on here. And when they do, I believe they’ll stand back and wait to see if the Collective can get the job done for them.”

“So the Arabs are off the board for now,” Cait said.

“Leaving the Collective. They’re the immediate threat, obviously. And we still have no idea as to the extent of the conspiracy,” Lynch said. “These men may be at the top, or just part of the hierarchy. But I do believe they’ll be able to tell me a great deal more than the usual foot soldiers and assassins. I hope to be able to use that information.”

Cait saw him as though for the first time, understood that these whiteboards, this work, was all he lived for. His whole
life had been a tragedy caused by men like Hollenbach and Shelby.

“I hope you get the chance, Mr. Lynch,” she said. “For all our sakes. Do you have the floor plan?”

“Already in the truck.”

“And the rest of the guns?”

Lynch tore his gaze away from the whiteboard, fully focusing on her at last. “Also in the truck. We’re ready to go, Caitlin.”

“Good,” she said, her mind running ahead. She didn’t want to say good-bye to Leyla. She felt sick at the idea of leaving her baby behind. But their choices had all been taken from them. “What do you think?”

Lynch stared at her. “Oh, I think we’ll survive getting in. But it’s a terrible plan.”

Cait pulled the photo of Leonard Shelby off the whiteboard, glanced at it once, then folded it and put it into her pocket before looking back at Lynch. “Only if we expected to get out alive.”

Ed Turcotte felt like he’d been left swinging in the breeze, and he didn’t like it one little bit. Worse yet, he had no one to blame. Voss had not been telling him the truth, and his number one agent had stopped answering her phone or replying to his texts. He had kept the messages simple because if he gave Chang a direct order to call him immediately and she did not comply, there could be serious consequences for her.

No matter how frustrated he might be, Turcotte did not want that. In a relatively short time, Chang had proven to be his squad’s most valuable asset, and he could see no upside to letting her flush her career down the toilet. So he would
give her plenty of room to run—to pry into places he could not go unnoticed, and pursue lines of investigation that would draw too much attention.

For now, he could truthfully say that he had no knowledge of her whereabouts or activities and blame his ignorance on Voss and Hart and Theodora Wood, the director of ICD. Right now they were giving the orders, and Turcotte had not been made privy to all aspects of the investigation. Normally that would have burned him—even now it chafed something fierce—but he knew they were all doing it for his benefit.

How long he would be willing to let them keep him out of it was another question entirely. Terrorists and Black Ops on U.S. soil, murdered babies and American war veterans branded enemies of the state … the case had turned into a clusterfuck of epic proportions. People were keeping abominable secrets, performing hideous deeds, and the conspiracy to try to make it all disappear included SOCOM, Black Pine, and Turcotte’s own boss.

Current boss
, he thought. Dwight Hollenbach had not always been his superior. The previous SSAC of CTD Ops II, Julius Andelman, had moved into an advisory role fourteen months earlier as a stepping stone to retirement.

Turcotte had been thinking about Andelman all morning. He stood in the parking lot outside Hartford Police headquarters, where the FBI had set up an office through the Hartford P.D.’s gracious hospitality, and flipped his cell phone open and then closed, open and then closed.

Chang and the ICD were trying to keep him clear of the shit, just in case it all went bad and he had to explain his actions to Hollenbach. But as much as Turcotte knew how to behave like a political animal, he could not close his eyes to this. He wasn’t stupid—he would tread carefully—but doing nothing would haunt him.

He opened the phone, scanned the contacts list for
DR. J
, and hit
CALL
. The phone rang five times, long enough for him to second-guess himself and then reaffirm his decision. Just when he thought he would have to leave a message, Andelman answered.

“Agent Turcotte,” Andelman said. “To what do I owe the plea sure?”

“Hello, Julius.”

“My, aren’t we informal today.”

“We need to talk.”

Andelman hesitated, recognizing the tone. “Where are you?”

“Hartford. If you’re concerned about snoops listening in, let them listen. If things have gone so far that they’re not as troubled by this as I am, then there’s no hope for justice anyway.”

“That’s not like you, Ed. You were never prone to melodrama.”

Turcotte glanced around the parking lot to make sure he was alone. A pair of uniformed Hartford cops were climbing into a cruiser at the rear entrance of the building, but other than that, he saw no one.

“It’s not melodrama, Julius.”

“Go on.”

Turcotte told the story with as little editorializing as possible, sticking to the facts of the case, things he had observed himself. He kept it brief. “Agent Voss believes one of our agents was her shooter last night, and that it was no accident,” he finished.

“I see,” Andelman said. “And what do you think, Ed?”

“Given what’s happened thus far—the cover-up at the McCandless woman’s house, the way the public picture of her has been tainted—I think she might be right.”

He heard Andelman exhale.

“You realize what you’re saying?”

Turcotte glanced around again. “I called you, Julius. Hollenbach could burn my career to the ground, but I called you. Do you really think I don’t realize how big this is?”

Andelman went quiet long enough to make Turcotte nervous. He started to wonder if he had made a lethal error in judgment.

“Julius—”

“I’m still here, Ed. Just thinking.”

The purr of an engine made Turcotte turn and watch as a black Lexus slid into the parking lot, moving past the police
vehicles and toward him at a crawl. The car was too expensive to be federal or local law enforcement. He couldn’t see through the tinted glass, but the tight ball of anger forming in his gut came from intuition.

“I’ve got to go,” Turcotte said.

“Go,” Andelman replied. “I’ll ask the wrong people the right questions. In the meantime, try not to do anything foolish.”

Turcotte closed the phone without replying and pushed away from the patrol car he’d been leaning against. The Lexus rolled up to him and stopped, smooth as silk, and the passenger door opened.

Norris sat inside, staring at him. The son of a bitch didn’t even bother getting out.

“Agent Turcotte. I was told I might find you here.”

“I thought you had another consulting gig to take care of,” Turcotte said.

“A simple job,” Norris replied. “Now that it’s over, I thought I’d see what help I can still offer.”

Turcotte narrowed his eyes, knowing this guy was the enemy, or at the very least not his friend. He ought to keep his mouth shut, but he could no longer manage it.

“ ’Cause you’ve been a ton of help so far.”

Norris smiled, not even pretending to be startled or insulted. “I take it you’re continuing your investigation of the mysterious child killings as well as tracking Sergeant McCandless.”

“I’m sure you’d have heard by now if we had found her.”

Norris nodded. “I’m sure. Just as I’m aware of the BOLO you issued for Jordan Katz. One of my people pulled a file together on him … He was in McCandless’s unit in Iraq. But of course you already know that. I take it he was the one along for the ride last night with the ill-fated Private Mellace?”