Once Dead Page 7

  Wiping his bloody face on his shirt sleeve, Jack slid into the driver’s seat, adjusted it and the mirrors to his liking, and then pressed the engine START button. The powerful vehicle rumbled to life and he backed out of the parking space, letting the headlight beams lead the way out of the garage and into Berlin’s predawn darkness.

  Sloppy.

  His quest for self-control had caused him to ignore his intuition and had damn near gotten him killed. He’d been so busy fighting his amped up feelings he’d failed to pay attention to little details, like the smell of liquor as he’d approached Carlo’s car, an indication Carlo had been drunk when he’d pulled into the parking spot and had passed out behind the wheel. Jack had assumed that the car was empty instead of going with his gut.

  Right now he wanted to drop Carlo’s car where it would have the most impact, but first he had a couple more errands to run. Before that, he needed some rest.

  Back in his tiny apartment, Jack scrubbed his face, watching the counterclockwise swirl of red water make its way over scratched white porcelain and down the drain. As Tori Amos sang her haunting “Me and a Gun” from his laptop’s speakers, he found himself wishing he’d been there to help her. But he hadn’t been there. He hadn’t been there for his own brother, either. Hell, he couldn’t erase his own violation.

  Looking at his reflection in the scratched bathroom mirror, the truth stared back at him through the red glint in his dark brown eyes. Jack Gregory wasn’t anyone’s hero.

  He was just a dead man walking.

  CHAPTER 19

  Closing the bathroom door, Jacob Knox made his way back to his seat in the private jet. The luxurious leather seats faced each other separated by tables that facilitated mission planning. But tonight Jacob was the jet’s only passenger. Sitting down, he pulled his specially equipped tablet from its pouch, propping it upright in its cover as he woke it up. He waited fifteen seconds while the camera performed the facial recognition that would grant him the opportunity to speak his private security phrase. There was another short wait as the computer validated his voice print before the primary display replaced the security screen.

  Seeing that he had two messages waiting, both of them from Deputy Director Nolan Trent, Jacob activated the secure video chat session. Within seconds, Nolan’s face filled the screen. Without bothering with a hello, Nolan got right to the point.

  “There’ve been complications. This morning, in an alley between two of his Berlin warehouses, Roskov’s people found a car with four bodies in the trunk, three men and a woman.”

  “Gregory?”

  “Looks like his work. These four, plus the man killed in the Berlin train station made up the team Roskov sent to kill Gregory. Three of them had their throats cut. Carlo Veniti, the hit team leader, was laid out on top of the others. His body was face down, but his head was face up.”

  “So what did Roskov think of The Ripper’s message?”

  “You know I don’t like that name.”

  “Gregory’s then.”

  “He’s not taking it well. It took me a half-hour of jawboning to convince him to stay focused on the Koenig job and leave Gregory to us. In the meantime he’s doubling his personal security detail.”

  “Good idea.”

  “How far out are you?”

  “A couple hours. I should be on the ground by 4 a.m. local time.”

  “Good. You’ll find a diplomatic vehicle and the mission package waiting for you as planned. Let me know as soon as the job’s done.”

  “Won’t be a problem.”

  “That’s why I sent you.”

  After signing off, Jacob leaned back in his chair to catch some sleep, a fog delay turning two hours into three. That was good. He didn’t expect to sleep again until he finished what he’d come to do.

  As Jacob stepped off the jet onto the Berlin airport tarmac, he patted the Sig Sauer in his left shoulder holster. Looking at the fog swirling around the hanger lights, he set his jaw.

  Amateur hour was over.

  CHAPTER 20

  Releasing the aircraft door-locking lever, Janet Price opened the hatch and lowered the steps that would release her from the NSA Gulfstream G650 onto the fog-shrouded tarmac of Berlin’s main airport. Clad in black jeans, a navy blue pullover, leather boots and polarizing Ray-Bans, she grabbed her duffel bag and headed toward the terminal building and Customs. Although it would have been possible for her to have arranged diplomatic transportation that would have allowed her to get her personal firearms around Customs, she didn’t want that kind of attention, nor did she desire to announce her presence to the U.S. diplomatic corps. U.S. embassies were State Department and CIA territory, and right now it was possible they were part of the problem. At least that was what Janet was here to find out.

  She’d always felt Berlin’s airports provided a traveler-friendly customs experience when compared to the nightmares in Paris and Frankfurt. Today proved no exception and within an hour she found herself stepping into the cab that would ferry her to the Kempinski Hotel, where her room and mission package waited. By the time she tipped the cabbie and handed her bag to the bellboy, it was ten a.m. and she was ready to strip out of the wrinkled jeans and T-shirt to slide into a hot bath. After that she’d be ready for a full day of wading through the Jack Gregory mission briefing materials.

  By noon, she felt she knew the man. By six p.m. she knew she didn’t.

  The information available in the thick electronic dossier Levi Elias had delivered was multi-layered but fragmentary. The deeper she dug into Jack Gregory’s past, the more self-contradictory the mental profile she was erecting became. On the surface, he was the classic overachiever gone rogue, an Old-West gunfighter, hiring out to the highest bidder, but beneath that thin epidermal layer squirmed something far more complex.

  Like all CIA field operatives trained in the last few decades, Jack Gregory had been administered the Myers-Briggs Jungian Type Indicator Test. His personality profile indicated that he was an Extroverted-iNtuitive-Feeling-Perceptive, or ENFP, commonly called the Champion personality. Marked by a highly developed intuition combined with great people skills and a love of adventure, those with Jack’s personality type tended to be leaders and risk takers. Above all else, they hated to be controlled by others. They also tended to exhibit unpredictable behavior, following their inspiration wherever it might lead.

  Janet had been familiar with Jack Gregory’s legend since her training days at CIA. Garfield Kromly had practically worshipped the man—at least, that was how it had felt whenever he’d compared her efforts to that ultimate standard. It was the reason she’d been so happy to break Jack’s thousand-meter marksmanship record. Stupid, really. She’d been more proud of that than of being the first woman to graduate from the U.S. Army Ranger School. Now that she thought about it, Jack had always been in her head, all because of Kromly.

  As she paged through the dossier, that specter grew to new proportions. While the CIA killed hundreds of America’s enemies using drones, it was a fraction of the targeted killings inflicted by a small group of special assets. And though some had more credited kills than Jack, through a unique combination of martial skills, charisma, and intuition, he had come to be regarded as the agency’s deadliest assassin, something that failed to endear him to many of his compatriots.

  Although it hadn’t been proven, Janet believed that jealousy had led to the betrayal and killing of Jack’s brother, Robert. That had been the tipping point that had sent Jack spiraling off mission. It had gotten him killed, or so most of the world’s intelligence community still thought.

  For the fifth time, Janet read Levi’s summary of his visit with Garfield Kromly. Within the larger context of that report she’d glossed over a subtle comment that now acquired greater significance. Garfield Kromly had alluded to Jack’s uncanny anticipation. Having spent the last several hours huddled with her laptop, reviewing everything known about Jack’s classified operations, that description seemed understated. Jan
et didn’t believe in extrasensory perception, but there was no doubt that Jack had always had a nose for finding trouble and the instincts to find his way through it.

  But there was the incident that had led to his death in that Calcutta alley. That path hadn’t been a particularly gifted choice. Then again, maybe Jack hadn’t planned to walk out of that alley alive. However, if he had been suicidal, why was she looking at a picture of him inside Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof? Why was he still alive?

  Janet stood, ran her fingers through her dark brown hair, and stretched, rolling her neck in a slow circle that popped her vertebrae. Walking to the coffee pot, she poured herself a cup, held it just below her nose and inhaled, letting the stout aroma clear her head. Even more than beer, the Germans knew how to make coffee. The Turks did too, but she’d always felt she was straining Turkish coffee through her teeth, an unappealing image.

  Walking to the window, Janet looked out her seventh-story window as evening descended on Berlin. She sipped the hot beverage, and shifted her thoughts to the year that separated Jack’s death from the present. Denise Jennings had run a query through Big John and the computer had delivered all the high-correlation Ripper rumors for that time period.

  If Big John’s data could be believed, The Ripper had been busy. Although there was nothing solid linking Jack to any specific act, the wealthy and politically connected persons on Big John’s Ripper client list had each experienced a noted decrease in serious problems plaguing them during the period in question. Another interesting pattern Big John had uncovered linked those clients to large payments to offshore corporations that ceased to exist shortly after taking payment. While Janet lacked Denise’s faith in Big John’s arcane abilities, if even half of this list was accurate, Jack had acquired substantial financial resources over the last year.

  Another troubling indicator was how dramatically Jack’s patterns had changed since his reported death. Some of the incidents with the highest probability of involving The Ripper had nothing to do with money, power, or any logical client.

  Right now she found herself staring at a police report of the killing of Ignacio Gomez, a two-bit pimp who got his girls from the misery of Cartagena’s slums. A dark, pixelated security photo showed a man who could have been Gregory shooting a pistol at someone off camera. According to Elena Esteves, a hooker in Gomez’s stable, Ignacio had been beating her with a stick in that dark alley when a man had stepped around the side of the liquor store, shot Ignacio in the head, and then disappeared into the night. Despite police attempts to get the woman to provide a description of the shooter, she had refused, claiming that it had been a ghost.

  While that superstitious nonsense meant nothing to Janet, the pixelated low-resolution picture sure looked like Gregory. As she zoomed in on his face, she noticed the distinct red-eye shine produced by a camera flash. There was only one problem. There hadn’t been any flash. This was a single still-frame from security camera video footage. If this was indeed Gregory, his eyes must have been reflecting some distant street light. Perhaps that reflection was what had made the hooker believe she’d seen a ghost. Or maybe she had lied to the police in order to protect the man who had come to her aid.

  That wasn’t what bothered Janet about the incident. It didn’t fit Gregory’s profile and it wasn’t an isolated occurrence. Big John’s data included three other recent instances of Jack involving himself in activities that violated his profile, all of them resulting in someone’s violent death. The net effect of these aberrations was to cause Big John to lower its own correlation probability, thereby casting doubt on the conclusion that Jack had been associated with any of these killings.

  Rubbing her eyes, Janet glanced at the clock on her computer desktop: 9:12 p.m. Rising from her seat, she decided it was time for room service, a hot bath, and bed. Maybe a good night’s sleep would help her find some common thread that would give her a better sense of the man she was hunting. She hoped so. Because, without that understanding, she might as well be pursuing The Ripper through a pea-soup London fog.

  CHAPTER 21

  The thunder of horses’ hooves shakes the ground beneath me as I lead the great wedge of the Companions into my enemy’s left flank, the battleground awash in the screams of the wounded and dying as they fall before us. At the point of the wedge I lean forward, bracing for impact as my xyston pierces the nearest defender’s chest. The wooden shaft twists in my sweaty grip and the muscles in my right arm knot with effort as I pull the spear free. My ragged breathing echoes in my ears, almost drowning out the cacophony of the battle that rages all around me.

  As I select my next target, my warhorse stumbles, then lurches erect, as though, through sheer force of will, it can disregard the pike embedded in its heaving chest. When it falls, I feel myself launched from its back directly at the broad-chested soldier who just killed it. In slow motion I see the beginning of a triumphant grin crease his lips and the rage that rises up within me knows no bounds. I may die here today on this foreign field of battle, but it won’t be at the hands of this grinning Persian bastard.

  Meeting the ground with my left shoulder, I let my momentum propel me forward, coming out of the roll with my sword in hand. My gauntleted left arm deflects my enemy’s thrust as I drive the tip of my sharp blade into the soft spot at the base of his throat. And as his hot, slick blood splashes my face, it is nothing compared to the battle heat that pulses through my veins.

  For today, as I fight at the head of this mighty Greek army, truly, I am a god.

  Jack sat bolt upright in bed, his naked body bathed in sweat, his labored breath still panting from his lungs. Tossing away the damp sheet, he rose to his feet, struggling to remember where he was and why he was here.

  “Shit.”

  How long had it been since he’d awakened from a peaceful sleep? Jack couldn’t remember. Always different, the dreams were so vivid they seemed more than memories, a past reexperienced. In his sleep, his inner demon worked overtime. Whatever dying had done to him, Jack couldn’t recommend it.

  He turned on the shower and stepped in, letting the cold water shock his system into full wakefulness. Without switching it to warm, Jack lathered up, leisurely rinsing away the night sweat as his mind focused on only one thought.

  Discipline.

  When all else failed, it was the one thing that might reestablish his sense of self-control. It was the one thing that might keep him sane.

  Toweling himself dry, Jack tied the towel around his waist, walked to the kitchen table, awakened his laptop from its hibernation, and seated himself before it. Logging in, he glanced at the warning message box.

  Virus definitions out of date. Press OK to update.

  Jack pressed the OK button to allow the antivirus package to do its thing and began composing his next information request to Rita Chavez, knowing full well that, even more than his last request, this one was going to cost him.

  CHAPTER 22

  The warbling ring tone of her encrypted cell phone brought Janet Price from sleep to full alertness in a fraction of a second and identified the caller as Levi Elias. She touched the answer button and lifted the black device to her ear.

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve found Gregory.”

  Janet felt her pulse quicken. “How?”

  “Big John identified him in a laptop camera image embedded in one of the Denise Jennings antivirus feeds. He’s online right now.”

  Janet moved to her own laptop, put the cellphone on speaker, and logged in.

  “Have you sent the location?”

  “You should already have it.”

  “What about the video? Can you tie me in to his laptop?”

  “I’ve embedded a link. Don’t watch long though. Gregory might notice the increased bandwidth usage.”

  “Just want a quick look at what I’m about to step into.”

  “Fine. Elias out.”

  As Levi disconnected the call, Janet popped up the encrypted email, entered her unique key, a
nd clicked the link. A small video window appeared in the upper right quarter of her screen. Janet maximized it and adjusted the video quality to the lowest frame rate, an action that gave her a sequence of freeze-frame images that changed once every second.

  Although grainy, a semi-naked Jack Gregory appeared to stare directly out of the video window into her eyes as he typed on his own keyboard. Although she’d seen him in several photographs, they clearly hadn’t done him justice. Short cropped, newly blond hair framed a lean, powerful face. Knife scars crisscrossed his naked upper torso that exhibited so little body fat that his muscles seemed to crawl beneath his skin with each slight movement. She turned her attention to his deep brown eyes. As she expected, they showed no hint of the red she’d seen in the Columbian photo.

  Jack’s image blocked most of her view of the room in which he sat, but she gathered it was a cheap hotel room or perhaps an apartment, the kind of place you’d rent if you weren’t planning on a lengthy stay.

  Switching off the video feed, Janet looked at the address provided in Levi’s email, pulled up a satellite app to get a look at the building and the neighborhood, and then shut down the laptop. Twisting her long hair into a tight knot on the back of her head, Janet shoved the icepick-sharp metal hairpin through, securing it in place.

  It didn’t take her long to slide into a pair of jeans and a black pullover with the gun pocket that would secure the H&K subcompact beneath her left arm. Shrugging into a black leather jacket, Janet walked from the room, letting the door snick closed behind her. She took the elevator directly to the parking garage, clicked the horn button on her key fob and followed the sound and flashing headlights to the jet-black BMW Z4 the NSA had arranged for her.

  Sliding behind the wheel, Janet took a moment to adjust the seat and mirrors, and then let the roadster propel her into the night.