Final Target: Six Assassins Book 6 Read online

  He gave a rueful smile. “You make it sound like we’re in a competition, like we’re trying to win the roller skating contest so we can save the rec center.”

  “Well, in a way, yeah. That’s exactly what it’s like. I know that’s how your boss Thomas sees it. We’re not human beings to these people, we’re chess pieces. Just a plus or a minus on their accounting sheets, to either help or hinder them on the way to their goals. If you think of it that way, it’s easier to not take it personally.”

  Now he laughed outright. “Not take it personally? They tried to kill us, baby. Thomas planted child pornography in my apartment. He scared the shit out of my roommate so bad that he moved out, and won’t even talk to me now.”

  “Right. Well, if you want to get technical about it…”

  “I’m ready now,” Zach said.

  “Ready to go?”

  “No. Ready to hear the rest of your story. When you told me about the Assassins Club, you said there was more. You said you would tell me when I was ready to hear it.”

  Ember flashed her eyes to the lab door. “Do we have to do this now? Like, here? We should probably go somewhere else.”

  A strange gravity appeared in his eyes as he stared at her. “Not yet. I already know your birth name, and I want to hear the rest of it. Talk fast.”

  “Okay. Fair enough. I’ll make it quick. A few weeks ago, when we were hiking, I told you my little brother was killed in a mistaken identity drive-by shooting. That was true. The part I didn’t tell you is that I discovered who those punks were. There were three of them. For weeks, I thought about going to their houses and killing them all. Bullets to the head, just like they did to my brother. It’s what they deserved.”

  Zach frowned, and Ember didn’t like the way he was looking at her. She had to remember he’d only known her DAC life and about her past for a short amount of time. He wasn’t used to the world of professional contract killers. Most normal people weren’t.

  “But, that didn’t happen,” she said, popping the balloon of tension in the room. “I was young. Too young to know how to do anything like that. So what I did instead was to follow them. I took notes of their comings and goings. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was building a case against these criminals. Through a little investigation, I found out about a meeting spot they liked to frequent. Wasn't even that hard. One night, when they were there, meeting some Mexicans about a super-sized drug deal, I called the cops on them. All three went to jail. Not for my brother’s murder, because there was no proof of that, but for a host of other things. And I had to learn to be okay with the outcome.”

  “You did that?” Zach said, and didn’t offer any further comment.

  “Yes. But it did something to me. It wasn’t exactly like justice for my brother, but it felt good to put them away. I found out I liked catching bad guys. So, after college, it inspired me to join the FBI. Or, it inspired Allison Campbell to join the FBI.”

  Zach's mouth dropped open. “You were in the FBI?”

  She sighed, looking up at the ceiling. “Technically, I still am. I think. I received an assignment to come out to Boulder three years ago to infiltrate the DAC. ‘Allison Campbell’ became ‘Ember Clarke,’ I joined the Club, and I started building a case that would link the DAC to international terrorism. But the way I see it now — my assignment, my role in the FBI — it was all a pile of crap. Truthfully, I think that I was sent out here to die by a megalomaniacal asshole at the FBI, and that any evidence I’ve given him so far has just been dumped into a paper shredder. I think he doesn’t care at all about the DAC’s crimes; he was only trying to get rid of me.”

  “Wow,” Zach said, his eyes wide, his face pale. “I — I don’t even know what to say to all that.”

  Ember crossed the room and took his face in her hands, then planted a kiss on his lips. “You know my real name, you know what I do for a living, and you know my sordid and twisted past. Do you still want me?”

  She couldn’t bring herself to say the real word she was thinking. The one she wanted to ask him about. But it hovered on her lips.

  He hesitated for a split-second. A little longer than Ember would have liked, but she knew to be patient. She had dropped a lot of bombshells on her boyfriend over the last few days. And she knew they weren’t the sort of bombshells that could be understood and grappled with in the span of a few seconds.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “I want to be with you.”

  She kissed him again. “Good. We need to go then, before anyone shows up. And then, we’ll make a plan to get you out of this mess. I promise.”

  Before she left, she walked over to a tall cabinet hanging open. She looked inside for a moment, then pulled out her prize and folded it over her arm before returning to Zach’s side.

  A lab coat.

  Chapter Three

  WELLNER

  David Wellner’s head pounded like a kick drum at a classic rock concert. Again and again it thumped, over and over — not at a regular rhythm he could grow to tolerate, but randomly. It came and went in bits and flashes, changing time signatures and tempos each iteration, never settling into something normal. Late in the morning, he seemed particularly sensitive to light. His eyes hadn’t been open more than slits since he’d crawled out of bed.

  He stumbled down the hall toward the kitchen cabinet to the left of the stovetop. There, he shook out two aspirin from a bottle and dry swallowed them. That turned out to be a mistake, as one stuck in his throat. He hacked, but couldn’t dislodge it. He turned around to sip water directly from the faucet to wash them down. But he knew he would have a phantom pill feeling in his throat for the next several hours.

  Wellner leaned back to stretch, which made his terrycloth robe fall open and a wash of cold air tickle his exposed belly. He closed the robe and leaned over the sink for a few beats to breathe through the hangover. It wasn’t working. Alcohol had not cured his troubles, only moved them back on the calendar. He couldn’t continue to push snooze on all of these problems indefinitely.

  A knock came at the front door. He shook his head to clear out the cobwebs, double-checked the knot on the front of his robe, and let his house shoes shuffle along the tile toward the door. He already knew who he would find standing there. Heart thumping, he checked his receding hairline in the mirror next to the front door and smoothed a couple of wayward chunks. It wouldn’t do any good; his penchant for vanity had long since become disassociated from reality.

  Wellner pulled back the door to see a smiling — and perfectly put-together — Marcus Lonsdale, holding a paper bag in his hand, similar to the one he had brought over yesterday. He was dressed in a sharp suit, looking like he’d come from a gala benefit dinner. Not long ago, Wellner and Marcus wouldn’t have cut strikingly different impressions. That era had passed.

  “Not ribs again,” Wellner said. He had a brief flash of insight that he had forgotten what time it was. Early morning? Late? Afternoon already?

  “Nope. Bagels. Your people eat bagels, right?”

  “Yes, Marcus, my people eat bagels.”

  “Then I nailed it,” Marcus said as he entered the house. He paused and squinted at Wellner. “You look like shit. Let me guess: after I left here yesterday morning, you spent all day hiding out and sipping from a bottle, not looking at your phone or email.”

  “That sounds about right. I went to see a movie yesterday, too.”

  “Oh, how nice for you. Which one?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Marcus gave him a pitying shake of the head. “With everything we have going on, do you think wallowing in an extended drunken state is the best way to spend your time?”

  Wellner wanted to lash out, to blame Marcus for all of this, to at least fight back and defend his honor. Surely this man, of all people, understood weaknesses and vices.

  But Wellner couldn’t fight the fog of war. He’d lost the battle to the bottle, and all he wanted to do now was compress himself into a fetal position a
nd pray for sleep. “No,” he said. “I know it’s not the best way to spend my time, Marcus, and I know I’ve messed it all up. I’m going to get my head right. Then I’m going to figure this out and we’ll get back to normal. We’ll be back on track in no time.”

  Marcus took a step closer and pointed a finger into Wellner’s chest, pushing cigarette-smoke-laden breath into his face. “You’ve gone off the deep end, man. It’s going to take a miracle from above to make you pull your head out of your ass.”

  Wellner felt so beaten down, he didn’t even bother to swipe away Marcus’ finger, still lingering there, pushing into the flesh under his collarbone. “I can do this. I can make it right.”

  Marcus held up the bag. “I need a knife. The bagel place didn’t think I would want them sliced, I guess.”

  Wellner led him through the house and back to the kitchen, where Marcus plucked a steak knife from a wooden block on the counter, then he went to work, cutting through a bagel.

  “This isn’t how it was supposed to go,” Wellner said. “With Ember, I mean.”

  “You’re sure-as-shit right about that. If you’d done what I suggested three years ago, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. But, you just had to keep that conniving bitch around, letting her make contacts and gain popularity, making it impossible to kill her outright. You wouldn’t think a bunch of assassins would be so loyal to each other and so damned community-driven, but I guess that’s why you’ve been the guy on the inside, not me. Managing a team of two-hundred lethal and unpredictable contract killers was supposed to be your job.”

  Wellner gritted his teeth. Marcus had a point. Ember had been sent to Denver at the FBI’s request to investigate a spurious lead that the DAC was tied to international terrorism. All very top-secret and hush-hush, even to most in the Bureau.

  She was supposed to wash out and die during her Club training. But no one had anticipated how damn good she would be at it. She collected evidence and sent it to Washington, where Marcus would make sure it ended up in a black hole.

  And then, not long after becoming a member, she had saved Wellner’s life by being in the right place at the right time when someone with a grudge came at him. He couldn’t just kill her in some casual manner after that, because people began to learn about that life-saving incident. It was the worst-kept secret in the Club.

  But he should have done it, anyway. Ember was a threat to their entire business model. Every day she drew breath was another day she came closer to unraveling the whole conspiracy.

  Marcus had used his network of D.C. insiders to identify potential clients for the Club. People who had been wronged by the justice system, mostly. He would send them to Wellner as referrals, which then went into the message board, to be taken on as contracts by DAC members.

  Of course, Marcus earned a hefty commission on each one. And he used his extensive D.C. leverage to make sure the Assassins Club never received too much attention from Washington. For years, this had operated with little fanfare, and little problems. Contracts to keep the DAC running, and for a small percentage of the fees, near-full protection by the man behind the curtain.

  But then Ember had entered the picture. And Wellner didn’t believe Marcus was blameless in this situation. After all, he was the one who had sent Ember to Denver because Marcus’ marriage had ended over their silly little fling. He had let his personal emotions get in the way, and then he’d decided to make it Wellner’s problem. It had screwed up the entire deal. Ember was supposed to die here, then the FBI would learn she had gone rogue out in Denver and become an independent contractor who killed for money. That way, they could — if needed — pin some of the Club’s activities specifically on her, making it seem like she was the entire Club, but still operating solo. The intelligence-gathering operation would have failed because of Ember, letting Marcus and the FBI off the hook.

  Plausible deniability — the true American form of government.

  But Wellner had persuaded Marcus to give it some space. He’d told Marcus that she could be managed. That she had committed to the DAC life and wasn’t going to be a threat to him any longer.

  Marcus hadn’t been happy with Wellner’s promises and had pushed for a more permanent solution.

  Ember’s FBI handler had died of a natural heart attack, so Marcus assigned the inexperienced and unimaginative Agent Isabel Yang to become her handler. Not surprisingly, not even that seemed to do much to keep Ember at bay. Isabel had failed, just as Marcus had thought she would. Wellner knew it was all a ploy, anyway — Marcus would have things done his way, no matter what. Having the woefully under-prepared Isabel on Ember was just a case of giving her enough rope to hang herself with.

  Now Isabel was dead, and her killer had shot himself in the head to prevent capture, closing that loop.

  The conflict in Rocky Mountain National Park almost six weeks before had been Marcus’ idea. To send Ember plus one more assassin on the same contract, thinking she would die as a result. But she hadn’t, so Wellner had used a trial by combat to finish the job… at Ember’s own suggestion, no less. Wellner thought the black spot was the only diplomatic solution to the problem.

  But somehow that hadn’t succeeded, either. Now, they had spent time and resources to ineffectively pluck a thorn from their side, and that thorn had only grown bigger and stickier the longer the problem remained.

  “You’re right,” Wellner said, sighing. The rhythmic pounding in his head returned with a vengeance. “I’ve handled this whole thing in the worst way possible. Now, my members are in open revolt. Dozens and dozens are dead, just in the last couple weeks. Five Points Branch is almost completely gone. It’s a mess unlike anything I coulda dreamed up. And it’s one I don’t know how to escape.”

  Marcus stopped slicing bagels and eyed Wellner. “Can you correct the course? Can you get us back on track? I mean, I just bought a boat, so I’m not looking to have my income take a dive right now.”

  “I can fix it.”

  Marcus squinted. “You don’t seem sure. I need you to be sure, David. I have plenty of foot soldiers I can point at someone to go bang, but I don’t have anyone else who’s management material. If this gets fixed, it’s you and me. If we don’t, it’s still you and me. We don’t have any backup or people above us to pass the buck to, you get it?”

  Wellner rolled his head around his neck, listening to it crack. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves and gave Marcus the most confident nod he could manage in his infirm state. It still felt shaky, and his vision blurred as he did it.

  “Yes. I understand. I’m going to clean myself up, and I’m going to fix this.”

  Chapter Four

  EMBER

  She parked in front of Fagan’s small house in North Boulder. Tired arms reached up to the car’s ceiling to stretch in the seat, pushing her palms against the fabric until she could feel the tension in her back. Her mom had always told her not to do that, that pressing the cloth lining would ruin the glue or something like that. Ember didn’t care. There was more at stake now than the resale value of her car.

  Stretching hurt, and it also felt good. Funny how that worked. She performed two more reps and then yawned.

  She checked her step count on her watch. Not bad for a day of driving around, running errands, breaking into corporate labs. Everything in her life had been so unpredictable lately. A daily 10K steps goal acted a normalizer to keep her on track, to keep her sanity within sight. Also, looking at her hands reminded her she needed a manicure. She hadn’t had one of those in a long time.

  Ember had been waiting all day for Serena to put together an incident report on the sniping of Isabel Yang, so Ember could reconstruct the deceased killer’s movements in the last few days before. There had to be a way to tie that man to Marcus Lonsdale and bring down Marcus in a legit way.

  Because if Ember put a bullet in Marcus without proof that he had ordered the hit and was behind some of the grief she’d been dealt of late, then there was no justice for anyo
ne. Charlie, Gabe, Isabel… and Ember was beginning to suspect she herself would be lumped in with that list. If Marcus could find a way to smear her, he would. If he could find a way to kill her… he would.

  Ember sighed as she took her Custom Nighthawk Enforcer pistols from the glove box and inserted them into the back of her waistband as she left the car. She was done leaving her prized weapons behind. They were a gift from her mentor, and Ember had been caught off-guard too often in the past five weeks.

  It was a cold, crisp late afternoon in Boulder, mostly sunny but with a few clouds hovering over the mountains, threatening to descend and bring more snow. Ember had never seen so much of the white stuff in Colorado before wintertime. But there was no such thing as “normal” weather here. In some ways, she enjoyed the unpredictability. But it was challenging to put together an outfit on a daily basis.

  She opened Fagan’s front door, and as soon as she had closed it behind her, she heard her mentor’s rough voice say, “I made tea,” from the kitchen.

  No invitation to enter, just a simple statement of fact. Quite on-brand for the old curmudgeonly lady. Ember smiled.

  She swept through the living room to see her mentor clad in a silk robe, sitting at the table in the kitchen with a mug and an open bag of potato chips in front of her. The burned half of her face glistened with moisturizer. A steaming mug sat on the other side, in front of a chair.

  “You okay?” Fagan asked.

  Ember tossed her head from side to side.

  “That’s a relative term,” she said as she took a seat. She touched the tea mug, but it was still way too hot.

  “Just poured,” Fagan said as she reached a hand into the bag and pulled out a couple of chips. “Sorry about that. This tea’s label said it’s best served piping hot, but that still doesn’t mean you can drink it any faster.”

  Ember let her shoulders slump, and she slid her butt forward, then rubbed her hands down her face. “Since when do you eat potato chips?”