Dead Shift (The Rho Agenda Inception Book 3) Read online

With the M4 trained on the slumped form of the occupant, Jack could see the man in the reflected light of the headlights. A bullet had punched through his right eye, splattering the seats with brains and blood, but the shape of the open left eye confirmed that the dead assassin was Asian, probably Chinese, something that matched the NSA intel. Jack would normally have felt little for killing someone who had tried to kill him, but having studied the crime scene photos of Jill McPherson slumped in that kitchen with a bloody second mouth gaping open below her chin, he failed to suppress the fury that raged within. This asshole probably hadn’t been her killer, but he was certainly an accomplice.

  Jack opened the car door and rapidly frisked the body. Ignoring the weapons strapped to the dead man’s side, Jack extracted a wallet and a passport. Sliding these into a pocket, he ran back toward the house and quickly searched the dead assassin sprawled facedown in the front yard.

  Then, with a clock ticking down in his head, Jack backed the Mustang out of the carport, turned south, and accelerated into the storm vortex of the Kansas City night.

  CHAPTER 18

  At 1:15 A.M., the phone beside Admiral Riles’s bed woke him from a deep sleep. Reaching for the handset in the dark, he knocked the drinking glass from his nightstand, spilling its contents onto the bedroom carpet.

  “Shit!”

  “What is it, Jonny?” Mary Beth Riles asked from the far side of the bed.

  “Just the phone. You can go back to sleep.”

  His hand found the handset and Riles pressed the “Talk” button as he climbed out of bed and lifted it to his ear. “Yes?”

  “Admiral Riles, this is Levi. We’ve got a situation.”

  “Let me throw on a robe and take this to another room.”

  Riles shrugged into his bathrobe and walked out of the bedroom into the dark drawing room beyond, closing the bedroom door behind him before he switched on a light. When Levi said they had a situation, that usually meant trouble. The admiral slid into his favorite leather chair near the bay windows and forced the grogginess from his mind.

  “Okay, Levi. Tell me about it.”

  “Yesterday afternoon, Jack Gregory met with a manager for the ISS air cargo facility at Kansas City International Airport, a man named Carl Bogati. Shortly after that meeting, we intercepted a call from Bogati to a burner cell phone in San Francisco. The call was followed by a text message that contained a short video attachment with security camera footage of Jack at the ISS front desk.”

  “Any luck running down the phone’s owner?”

  “Not yet, but we were able to identify the location of the call and the phone’s place of purchase. The customer paid cash but we’ve already acquired the store’s security video for when the purchase was made. Our people are processing it through facial recognition right now.”

  “What else have you got?”

  “At approximately 11:00 P.M. central time, Kansas City police responded to reports of multiple explosions and gunfire in a run-down district called Centropolis. Upon arriving at the scene they found a house shattered by at least two explosions. They also discovered the bodies of five men, three torn apart by shrapnel inside the house, one dead from a single gunshot wound on the front lawn, and another body inside a black Chevy Tahoe. The one in the car had been shot once in the head and three times in the throat and chest. All five victims were Asian, heavily armed, and outfitted with state-of-the-art night-vision goggles.”

  Riles had already drawn his own conclusion about this, but asked Levi anyway. “Your analysis?”

  “Jack dangled himself out there as bait to draw some high-level attention from Jamal’s kidnappers. When the assassination team arrived, Jack suckered them into a trap and killed them all.”

  “What about the local police?”

  “The investigation is just getting started, but they think some Asian gangsters tried to muscle in on local gangland turf and got their asses kicked.”

  “Has Jack contacted us?”

  “No, and I don’t expect him to.”

  Riles took some time to think about what would likely follow tonight’s Kansas City mayhem. He’d known the risks involved in unleashing Jack Gregory on American soil and had accepted them. Now wasn’t the time to get squeamish.

  “This is going to generate some bad-guy chatter,” said Riles. “Make sure we’ve got all available resources focused on identifying our target’s reaction to this news. It could be the break we need in order to identify the spot where Jamal is being held. In the meantime, have Spider’s team check out that Chinatown location.”

  “I’m on it.”

  The admiral ended the call and settled back into the armchair’s soft Italian leather. He’d sent Jack Gregory out to stir things up and, as usual, Jack was overachieving. Suddenly Riles’s thoughts shifted to the disaster in Bolivia. Had it only been three months ago? Riles believed that Janet Price was wrong in her assessment of what had happened down there.

  But if he was the one who was wrong and Jack “The Ripper” Gregory came completely off the rails, this operation could go very, very badly indeed.

  CHAPTER 19

  Standing beside his car in the dimly lit parking garage on Kearny, Qiang could barely believe what the aging courier had just told him. Five men dead at the hands of the assassin called The Ripper. Not just any men; these had been his men, top-notch agents for the Ministry of State Security of the People’s Republic of China. To lose five MSS operatives on a single mission was unheard of. It meant that Qiang’s superiors in Beijing wouldn’t be happy. But it wasn’t possible for them to be as angry as Qiang Chu was at this moment.

  The discipline of a lifetime devoted to the mastery of the martial arts was now put to the test. Qiang stored his rage in a special place, ready to be called forth at a time of need, allowing none of that anger to show in his face.

  MSS headquarters had expressed similar concerns that, in their efforts to find where Jamal Glover was being held, the NSA had penetrated electronic resources that the MSS had previously considered secure. And there were indications that at least a half dozen operatives had arrived in the Bay Area over the last two days. That, at least, was something that Qiang had planned for. What he hadn’t expected was the involvement of an international assassin for hire.

  Clearly the MSS file on The Ripper was incomplete.

  Qiang dismissed the courier and watched as the man climbed onto his motor scooter and drove it out of the garage into the Chinatown night. It appeared that Steve Grange had been right to accelerate the timeline on the Jamal Glover project. It appeared Qiang and Grange would need to shift to phase two much more quickly than they had planned.

  As Qiang stepped behind the wheel of the black BMW M4 and felt the powerful engine rumble to life, he made a decision. He was done hunting for the lone assassin. Let that one come for him. When the time came, Qiang would deal with The Ripper personally.

  CHAPTER 20

  Janet Price, with Harry Stevens riding shotgun, pulled the silver GMC Sierra pickup into the newly vacated parking spot on Grant Avenue and stepped out into the early morning fog. The chill in the damp morning breeze made her glad that she’d worn jeans, the long-sleeve black pullover, and her soft leather jacket.

  Walking around the front of the truck, Janet caught up with Harry just outside the closed front door of the Chinatown Market. Despite the CLOSED sign hanging on the inside of the glass door and the collapsible steel-barred security screen that hung all the way to the ground, Janet reached through and knocked on the glass. Although it was only 7:15 A.M. and the store wouldn’t open until eight o’clock, she knew that the owners were already inside preparing for the start of the business day.

  An older Chinese man walked up to the inside of the closed door and yelled, “Store closed. Come back later.”

  Janet flipped open her ICE credentials and held them up, giving the owner a good look at the words
engraved on the badge.

  HOMELAND SECURITY INVESTIGATIONS

  SPECIAL AGENT

  “Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Open up.”

  “You have warrant?” the man asked.

  Beside her, Harry held up the warrant in a motion that spread his windbreaker to reveal the Glock resting in his shoulder holster. Although the warrant was an NSA-produced fake, it was an extremely good one, bearing the signature of a federal judge who had just left for a big-game hunt in Wyoming and couldn’t be reached for the next several days.

  “Open the door right now.” Janet’s tone left no doubt that failure to comply wasn’t an option.

  The shop owner’s eyes narrowed, but he nodded and the security curtain began rumbling upward on its track. When it had clanked to a stop in the raised position, the old man pulled open the door, stepped back to allow them entrance, and then closed and locked the door behind them.

  When he turned to face her, Janet noted his name tag as she held up a photograph. “Mr. Ho, do you know this man?”

  “Never seen him,” Mr. Ho said, stroking his chin with his left hand.

  It didn’t take the nonverbal tell for Janet to know he was lying. She held up another photograph, this one of a man standing at the register where a packaged phone lay on the counter. Clearly visible in the security camera image was the smiling Mr. Ho accepting the cash payment.

  “Does this refresh your memory?”

  Mr. Ho frowned. “I have many customer. Impossible to know all.”

  Janet handed him several more photographs, studying his face closely as he looked through them. “That’s funny because these images were recorded by your security camera over the last two weeks.”

  “My memory isn’t what it once was.”

  “And your business isn’t going to be what it once was if we shut you down for hindering a federal investigation.”

  A sudden clatter from the back of the store brought her gun into her hand as she spun toward the sound. Beside her, Harry had his own gun out and leveled.

  “Who else is here?” Janet asked Ho.

  “Only my son.”

  “Call him. Tell him to come out where we can see him.”

  Mr. Ho didn’t hesitate. “John! These are federal agents. Come out here.”

  Nothing.

  Without being told to do so, Ho called again. “John! Please step out.”

  Again his call was met with silence.

  “Stay with Mr. Ho,” Janet told Harry. “I’ll check it out.”

  “And if you need backup?”

  “Then I’ll yell.”

  Janet moved down the nearest row of shelves, this one a grocery aisle filled with boxed and canned goods, most of which had foreign language labels. As she approached the back of the store, she slowed, letting her eyes move with the Glock’s sights. At the end of the aisle, she cleared the area just beyond the corner before stepping out into the open. Now moving perpendicular to the rows of goods, Janet paused at each corner, cleared that row, and then moved on. There was no sign of what had been knocked over to produce the sound she had heard only moments earlier.

  When she cleared the last row, a pair of swinging doors in the back wall beckoned and she moved up against the wall, just to their right. For two seconds she listened, then exploded into motion, kicking the nearest open, moving through before it swung closed behind her. Now she found herself in a dimly lit hall. The door on her left had the international symbol for a men’s and women’s restroom attached just below eye level. To her right, another door stood open into a cluttered office, lit only by the glow of a computer screen.

  Janet followed her gun just far enough inside to confirm that it had no occupants. Crossing the hall, she found the small restroom also empty. That left a matching set of swinging doors at the far end of the twenty-foot hallway and what was undoubtedly a stockroom beyond.

  Despite the soft glow filtering out of the office behind her, this end of the hall was twilight dark. Moreover, the visible gap between those swinging doors looked black, a good indication of the lack of light in the room that lay beyond. Janet knew that when she pushed her way through those doors, for the amount of time it took her to move through that opening, she would be dimly backlit. Worse, the twin doors spanned the entire width of the hallway, so there would be no kicking one of them open while she took cover behind a wall.

  Janet looked up at the ceiling, happy to see good old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs instead of fluorescents. Incandescent bulbs were bright. More importantly, they were virtually instantaneous. If she was going to have to play the part of an old Western gunfighter, she at least wanted the sun at her back. It wouldn’t be as good as what she and Jack had in Kazakhstan, but it would have to do.

  On the count of three. Standing directly in front of the leftmost swinging door, she raised her gun hand, fingered the light switch with her left hand, and rocked forward onto the balls of her feet.

  One . . . two . . . three.

  Her right foot hit the door as the hall ceiling lights blared to life behind her. Although the sudden brightness hurt her eyes, to someone lurking in the dark, looking directly into that sudden brightness, its brilliance would be dazzling. In the fraction of a second that surprise granted her, Janet tucked and rolled, saw the flash of light as the round hissed over her, accompanied by the muffled crack of a silenced weapon.

  Rolling into a shooter’s crouch, Janet felt her Glock buck in her hand as she pumped three rounds in the general direction from which the shooter had fired. Amplified by this enclosed space, the Glock was far from silent.

  Janet heard a door bang open and saw a flash of outside light filtered through shelving stacked with boxed goods. For a moment that light painted a man’s dark shadow on the floor, just before the door banged closed again. Hearing Harry’s running footsteps in the hallway behind her, she raced after the fleeing man. But by the time she reached the door and slammed it open, all she managed was a fleeting glimpse of the man’s back as he shouldered his way through the morning crowd moving along the sidewalk.

  For half a second she considered chasing after him. If she’d really been the ICE agent she was pretending to be, she would have. But in this case, she and Harry had already accomplished what they’d come here to do, and the running man only served their purpose. Right now at three different locations across Chinatown, Spider Sanchez and the other members of his team were rousting other suspected links to Jamal’s kidnappers. If all went well, the sense that the federal government was closing in would cause someone to make a mistake.

  “Janet?” Harry’s voice from the other side of the stockroom sounded trigger-finger tense.

  “I’m fine, but the shooter got away,” Janet said as she flipped on the light switches beside the back door, illuminating two rows of ceiling lights that chased the shadows from the stockroom.

  Harry stepped around one of the rows of open shelves, his gun still leveled as he made a clearing pass through the remainder of the room. Janet knew what he’d find, but Harry always followed procedure and he was right to do so. It was exactly what Janet would have done if she hadn’t come under fire, but sometimes it was important to react quickly rather than methodically.

  Harry holstered his weapon as he walked back across the room toward her. “The police will be here shortly,” he said.

  “That’s fine. Our credentials will stand up to any checks they make. Besides, I want to ask a few more questions of our Mr. Ho before they get here.”

  “They’ll want a statement.”

  “And we’ll give them the one they love to hate. This is a classified Homeland Security investigation and we thank them for staying out of our way.”

  As Janet led the way back toward the front of the store, she heard Harry’s low chuckle at her shoulder. He assumed that she enjoyed jerking local law enforcement’s chain, and she
knew that this time he was right. After all, if she had to impersonate an ICE special agent, why not throw herself into the role?

  CHAPTER 21

  Steve Grange entered the basement laboratory from the private section of the underground parking garage. The two-story building that rose above it housed one of the largest call centers on the West Coast, and the attached parking structure provided workers that chose to drive into Hayward with convenient access to a stressful job. The call center’s extensive phone and high-speed Internet service also masked the much more important underground communications network.

  The sublevel security lobby looked much like many other such lobbies at high-tech firms intent upon securing their trade secrets, a curved reception desk behind which sat two black-uniformed security guards watching the displays on a number of security monitors. But this reception desk offered no visitor sign-in sheet. If you didn’t belong here, you didn’t get in. Grange knew that on the other side of the door through which he was about to pass, a half dozen heavily armed men provided the real protection for this facility.

  Grange nodded at the guards and heard the buzz and click of the electronic bolt disengaging as he reached for the door handle. The handle felt slippery in his hand and with a start, he realized that his palms were sweating. All the preliminary work done inside his Grange Castle laboratory over these last four days had culminated in this, the day Jamal would be unleashed to reach out and touch the wide world.

  On the far side of the door, Grange passed five more uniformed security guards, all Chinese intelligence agents working for Qiang Chu. Grange felt their eyes follow him but he pretended not to notice. None of these men was as intimidating as Qiang, but they still made him uncomfortable, and the Chinese government’s goals didn’t exactly align with Steve Grange’s.

  After years of experimenting on human subjects that society would never miss, Grange would never have chosen such a high-profile subject as Jamal Glover. However, there was a price to be paid for the backing the Chinese had given him, and Jamal was a part of that price.