Drawpoint (Blake Brier Thrillers Book 4) Read online

  DRAWPOINT

  Blake Brier Book Four

  L.T. Ryan

  with

  Gregory Scott

  Copyright © 2021 by L.T. Ryan, Gregory Scott, and Liquid Mind Media, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book. This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.

  For information contact:

  [email protected]

  https://LTRyan.com

  https://www.facebook.com/JackNobleBooks

  Contents

  The Blake Brier Series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  CONTRAIL

  CONTRAIL PROLOGUE

  CONTRAIL CHAPTER 1

  CONTRAIL CHAPTER 2

  CONTRAIL CHAPTER 3

  Also by L.T. Ryan

  About the Author

  The Blake Brier Series

  Blake Brier Series

  Unmasked

  Unleashed

  Uncharted

  Drawpoint

  Contrail (Coming October, 2021)

  1

  By the time Blake reached the bottom step, his resolve had hardened.

  His fingers punched in the code with focused accuracy. The familiar thunk of the steel bolts preceded the equally familiar whir of the cooling fans.

  The positive pressure, created by the hefty air conditioning units sitting behind the townhouse, sent a puff of icy air through the stairwell. It was enough to rustle a lock of fiery red hair across his right eye. He swept it back and pushed his way inside.

  Déjà vu.

  After everything that Blake had been through over the past week alone, one would think there would be nothing left in the world that could surprise him. Then, there was the note.

  A few minutes earlier, he had returned home with a head full of vivid images. A romanticized version of a life that would begin the moment he crossed the threshold of the Alexandria townhouse. He and Haeli. The way it should have been from the beginning.

  But with a simple paragraph, written in Haeli’s own hand, he would again have to come to terms with the disaster he often facetiously referred to as his “charmed life.”

  Although he had left the piece of lined notebook paper on the kitchen counter, he could still see the words as clearly as if they were hanging by a thread in front of him.

  One statement pulsed in his mind.

  I need to go away for a while. There are some things I need to do.

  The sentence he should have fixated on was the one where she explicitly asked him not to try to find her. But that specific sentiment had been deleted from his memory the moment he decided to disregard the request.

  What things do you have to do, Haeli? What is it that we can’t do together?

  The thought had occurred to him that there wasn’t actually a thing at all. That the fictitious task had been invented to spare his feelings. The truth was, a week ago, Blake wasn’t sure he possessed such a thing as feelings. Not the way he imagined normal people did. But his experience with Christa, Gwyn, and Lucy had caused him to reevaluate that notion. Allowing himself to be vulnerable was no easy transition. Still, the result was good even if the timing had turned out to be less than optimal.

  Blake circled the perimeter of the subterranean room. He ran his fingers along the racks of processors mounted to the wall. He could feel the heat radiating from behind the blinking red and blue LED indicator lights.

  In a way, the state-of-the-art computer equipment seemed a pathetic character. Built to churn complex code-breaking algorithms, the system was not unlike a greyhound kept in a cupboard. Its powerful legs atrophying with lack of use.

  It had been some time since Blake had utilized the full capability of the system he had so meticulously built—if he had ever used its full capability at all.

  Before his dust-up with the Cryptocurrency Evangelist Army, he had spent many hours a day in this room. Locating, exploiting, and cataloging vulnerabilities in supposedly secure networks. Maintaining classified software that he had built for the Central Intelligence Agency while he was still under their employ. Building software for clients as a freelance developer after retirement. But since then, he had done little of it.

  This day would be no different. Except, while he had no intention of using the system to thwart a nefarious foreign government or to infiltrate a global communications network, he would be using it to find something much simpler and far more elusive. The truth.

  Blake moved to the center of the room. He lowered himself into the seat of the Herman Miller chair with a sigh and spun himself toward the desk. With a press of a switch, the terminal came to life.

  It was deceiving, really. The single station, situated in the center of the room, looked no different than one might find in any office. A few screens, a keyboard, a mouse. But it was merely an interface. An abstraction. Just as the buttons and levers of a fighter jet’s cockpit enabled the pilot to unleash the beast’s fury with the twitch of a muscle, it connected Blake’s fingers to the awesome power of the system.

  I need to go away for a while. There are some things I need to do.

  At first glance, the note seemed a mystery. But in Blake’s experience, there was no such thing as a mystery. Only an unsolved equation. Haeli left Blake’s home and his life, that much was a given. But where was she going? Where was her trajectory taking her? If he were going to solve for x, he would first need to define y.

  Of the list of traits he would have used to describe himself, the one he’d most recently embraced was pragmatism. It was a peculiar approach in his circles. Most preferred to skip the shovel and go straight to the dynamite. While the dynamite might be effective, it draws a lot of attention.

  Blake withdrew his hands from the keyboard and pulled his phone from his pocket. He tapped the icon for the text messaging app and again on the thread entitled ‘Haeli.’ He brought up the ‘info’ tab. An image of a map flashed on the screen, then faded to gray. ‘Location not found.’

  It was worth a shot.

  The callous message meant Haeli had either turned her phone off or switched off the ability for Blake to see her location. It also meant he would need to employ less conventional methods after all.

  Back on the keyboard, Blake entered the command to list the tools and scripts he had installed. The green text scrolled over a black screen. The command was on the tip of his tongue but, for the sake
of time, he welcomed a quick reminder. Three quarters of the way down, he found what he was looking for.

  He typed.

  CTST.

  Talk about déjà vu.

  During his time with the Agency, Blake had used this command line interface, or CLI, on a daily basis. With the forced cooperation of all United States based communication providers, federal agencies such as the CIA, NSA, and to a limited extent, the FBI, were provided access to real-time cell tower data. Blake had built the CLI to simplify the process of downloading and interpreting it.

  The CTST tool, short for Cell Tower Signal Triangulation, took two parameters: The provider and the cellular phone number. The software gathered the raw data from any tower with which the cellular device was communicating and used it to derive a location. By measuring the time delay between the device and each tower, and the direction from which the signal was originating, or azimuth, the position of the device was triangulated using a basic mathematical formula. While its level of accuracy often fluctuated based on signal strength and other environmental factors, it would be accurate enough for his purposes.

  Blake input Haeli’s number. The blinking cursor froze for a moment, then spit out the result. Instead of a set of coordinates, as he had hoped, the software balked.

  No signal detected.

  The phone was off. And if she was serious about not wanting to be found, she had probably already discarded it in the Potomac. The words she wrote weren’t just idle talk. No, she was taking steps to disappear.

  Blake could have easily pulled her data from iCloud and obtained full backups of her device, but it wouldn’t have done any good. She knew enough to turn the phone off before she ever left the house. What he needed was a totally different vector.

  There was one other option. A script that Blake had not used since becoming a civilian. But if the previous options had been the shovel and the excavator, he would be reaching for the dynamite.

  Although the public was probably not aware that their cellular provider was streaming their usage data to the federal government—unless they made it a habit of reading the thirty-seven pages of fine print—it was legally given and readily available. Its use was so commonplace that it carried little oversight. Access to the Transportation Security Administration database, on the other hand, was highly scrutinized.

  Before committing to his new plan of attack, Blake ran a traceroute to be sure the proxies and tunnels were sufficiently obfuscating his Internet Protocol Address. Satisfied, he typed the name of the script and hit enter.

  An ‘Authorized Use’ warning popped onto the screen. Below it, a prompt. He had half-expected the old script to have been obsolete in its method of gaining entry. But, just like that, he was in.

  Fingers flying across the keys, Blake entered names and dates of birth for each of the aliases Griff had set up for Haeli when she arrived in Virginia.

  Haeli Becher.

  As expected, there was nothing.

  Jessica Ruben.

  Nada.

  Cynthia Brook.

  Nope.

  Allison Gaudet.

  Bingo!

  There it was. As plain as day.

  British Airways. IAD (Dulles-Washington) to TLV (Ben Gurion - Tel Aviv).

  She had gone home.

  It hit him in the gut. He told himself he understood. That he didn’t blame her. Haeli had left behind everything and everyone she had ever known and traded it for him. It was too much to ask. Too much to expect.

  As the pit in his stomach dissolved, a sense of relief replaced it. Not because she was gone, but because for once, he wasn’t an impediment. She knew what she needed, and she acted.

  With the kind of sincerity one can only have within the confines of their own thoughts, he wished her well. He wished her happiness. Still, he couldn’t help but worry about her safety. She was supposed to be dead. And Blake had no doubt Levi Farr continued to harbor a burning desire for a second crack at her. By returning to Israel, she was flying dangerously close to the flame.

  He reminded himself that she could take care of herself. More than anyone else he had ever met. She would make her way. A new life, loosely modeled after the old. A reimagining of an early version of herself, perhaps. It was what he had risked his life to make possible. As selfish as it felt, he hoped she remembered it that way.

  Such regression wasn’t an option for Blake. There was but one path for him. Forward. He was on the starting blocks again. Pointed in an arbitrary direction.

  He pressed the glowing button. The monitors went dormant.

  Ready. Set…

  Sigh.

  2

  One Week Ago. Pavel Nikitin tightened his core, shifted his weight, and drove his fist deep into Adam Goldmann’s liver.

  Goldmann wheezed and hunched over, as far as his restraints would allow. By now the pain was numbing. Despite Nikitin’s fist carrying a disturbing amount of force—as if it were a concrete pendulum dropping from the highest rafter of the old warehouse building—Goldmann was content to receive the blows. It was what would come next that frightened him. He had no delusions that it would get worse. Much worse.

  Pavel Nikitin was an artist. A master of administering pain. Goldmann had seen his work in the past. At the time, he felt pity for the poor soul in the chair. He remembered praying that he would never find himself on the receiving end. But he knew his time would come. No one can run forever.

  Nikitin had honed his skills over a lifetime. Anyone who set eyes on him could see that his education came from personal experience. The scars on his face, arms, and hands were a roadmap through a brutal past. His large stature, square jaw, and piercing eyes may have been a prerequisite for someone in his profession, but there was one feature that set him apart—a mound of scar tissue where his left ear had once been.

  It was his calling card. A main tenant of his folklore.

  There were many stories about how Pavel Nikitin lost his ear. Passed around the seedy corners of the underworld, each iteration morphed into something further from the truth.

  It was generally believed that Nikitin was born in the gulag. A product of rape, he was delivered in secret and kept hidden in sewage tunnels under the camp. It was there that the rats gnawed off his ear.

  As he grew, he would emerge under the cover of darkness to prey on unsuspecting prisoners. Legend had it he would drag his victims underground and feed on their blood to acquire their strength.

  Through the early nineteen-eighties in the Soviet Union, many families lost loved ones to the prison camps. Dozens of men and women disappeared, never to be heard from again. There was no explanation. No recourse. The Kremlin routinely denied that the Stalin era camps still existed, never mind acknowledging maleficence within them. For many, the idea of a soul-sucking demon child was as good an explanation as any.

  While Nikitin reveled in the absurdity of his reputation, there was some truth to it. He was, in fact, born in the gulag. His mother, the wife of a mid-level mafia boss named Stan Nikitin, was imprisoned after her husband was killed for violating a postulate of the organization’s code. Forbidden from marrying or having a family, the couple married in secret. The priest promptly turned them in.

  The assassination of Nikitin’s father fell to an ambitious, young KGB officer named Olezka Sokolov, who himself was rising through the ranks of the crime syndicate. After Nikitin was born, Sokolov took him in.

  Separating from the KGB under less than amiable circumstances, Sokolov was forced underground. He devoted himself to the acquisition of power. And it wouldn’t take long.

  Through extreme brutality, Sokolov rose to the head of the organization. But he didn’t stop there. To send a message to all who might oppose him, Sokolov murdered the heads of the ten most powerful criminal organizations. Not only in the USSR, but throughout the world. China. Columbia. The United States. It was a bold move that would make him one of the most feared men on the planet.

  Sokolov had a knack for sending messages tha
t were never dared forgotten. Nikitin knew this better than anyone.

  As Nikitin matured, he became invaluable to Sokolov. An exceptional student driven by an insatiable bloodlust, Nikitin’s own brutality surpassed even that of his guardian. It was the reason Sokolov took his ear. A lesson in humility, he called it, but Nikitin knew it was a warning.

  The truth was, Sokolov’s fear of challenge was unfounded. Nikitin was as loyal as they came. He lived by the thieves’ law. He believed in it. Especially when it came to Sokolov.

  But he didn’t begrudge Sokolov his assertion of dominance. Just the opposite. Nikitin relished it. It was what spawned his own habit of collecting the ears of his victims. And the collection was extensive.

  The practice wasn’t rooted in some emotional hang-up. It was just fun. Sure, maybe the first time was motivated by a subliminal need to even the score. But it became a deliberate tactic to strike fear into those who would consider crossing them. Each time a body washed onto shore or was pulled from a shallow grave, the missing left ear would tell the world all they needed to know. Pavel was here. After all, every artist must sign his work.

  Goldmann knew all of this. It was what fueled his fear. Death, he thought, was inevitable. Whether by the hand of Nikitin, Sokolov, or old age. But the thought of being mutilated, before or after, didn’t sit well with him.