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  He ran and shoved her toward the small apartment’s bathroom. “Go, get in the tub, go.”

  She’d just vanished into the bathroom as the apartment door burst open. Two men charged through in black police vests, holding black submachine guns. No more time for doubts, his body and brain switched on and allowed his training to take over. Tommy dove back across the bed as the room exploded with gunfire.

  The man to the left shouted something then fired again into the wall over Tommy’s head. He knew they hadn’t seen him in the dark, but more likely heard his body as it crashed to the floor. Tommy dropped and watched the muzzle flashes as he rolled to the bed. He pressed to the cold tile floor, stretched his hand under the mattress and found the Walther PPK taped to the bottom. He pulled it free, blindly returning fire through the box spring in the direction of the men. He heard a muffled grunt. The weapons paused with the yelping, then more gunfire that went wild. There were the sounds of a bolt locking on an empty weapon.

  Tommy pushed back from the bed and turned toward the door. The first shooter was against the wall, struggling to bring up his weapon with a gunshot to his right shoulder. The second foe was fumbling with a submachinegun—he took the rest of the Walther PPK’s nearly empty magazine to the neck and face. Without hesitation on the final trigger pull, Tommy rushed forward and lunged toward the first shooter. Colliding, he pressed the man against the wall.

  He saw a large fighting knife clipped vertically to the man’s armor. Tommy dropped the empty pistol and traded it for the man’s knife, pulling it free from the vest as the shooter reached for a sidearm with his good hand. Tommy pushed back and locked the man’s gun hand to the wall before driving the blade up and under his chin, twisting the handle as it sank in. He pulled back, releasing the blade, letting it stick as the body hit the floor.

  The building’s fire alarm was blaring. Lights were strobing in the room, and smoke filled the hallway.

  “Tanya,” he shouted.

  The woman crept from the bathroom, her own service pistol in her hands held at the low ready. When she saw him, her weapon went up and fired three rounds. Tommy flinched then stepped back as a third man dropped dead in the open doorway. She kept her weapon up while Tommy ran to the door and pulled the body into the room, kicking the door closed.

  “What the hell is going on?” She paused, her hands still gripping the G19 pistol. Her wide eyes locked on him. He was still in his boxers, his hands and bare chest covered in blood and gore. “My God! Are you all right?”

  Tommy clenched his teeth, ignoring the comment, and picked over the dead. They were sterile—no IDs, no badges, yet all dressed as local police. He grabbed a man’s jaw; he looked Asian, maybe Hispanic.

  “I said are you hurt?” she asked again.

  Tommy flinched as more gunfire sounded from outside. “We don’t have a lot of time.” He stopped his search and looked back at Tanya. He rolled the body to check the back pockets. “Check your phone,” he said,

  There were footsteps in the hallway. He froze and could see the white light of a flashlight through holes in the broken doorframe. Someone was coming. He exhaled and pressed back to his knees and focused on the door. His pistol was empty. The weapons belonging to the dead men lay just behind him. He looked at the balcony; he could jump, but he wouldn’t leave Tanya. He most certainly would break his legs, anyway.

  As the sounds in the hall grew closer, Tommy retrieved one of the MP5 submachine guns and moved back to the bed. Tanya held up the phone, shaking her head, on the other end of the room. He put a finger to his lips and pointed back to the bathroom. He stepped around the bed and took a knee as the first figure pressed open the door. He wanted to fire blind, but he couldn’t. He had to identify the target. He knew it could be police or a neighbor looking for help. He put the weapon to his shoulder and locked the sights on the shadow as it entered the doorframe.

  “Thomas?” the woman said quietly, the word sounding like “thom-us.”

  He immediately recognized the voice and relaxed his grip on the weapon. A flashlight passed over the bodies on the floor then scanned toward Tommy.

  “Freeze,” he said before the light could hit his face. “It’s me, Donovan.”

  “Thank God you’re okay,” the voice responded.

  Tommy stammered. He knew her, but why she was here, confused him. Before he could speak, two more men rushed into the room. One tall and Hispanic, the other black and bulking through his tactical vest. They both moved like professionals, but he didn’t know them, which concerned him. They scanned the space, ignoring Tommy.

  The Hispanic man turned to the female. “Is this him? This the guy the Colonel sent us after?”

  The woman nodded. The Hispanic man shone his barrel-mounted light over Tommy then turned back to the woman. “He doesn’t look like much; you sure this is him?”

  “Trust me, he’s plenty enough,” the woman said.

  The black man moved deeper into the room with a finger to his ear. “We have to go. There is another kill team two blocks up, headed this way.”

  She nodded and looked at Tommy. “Thomas, we have to move.”

  He stood his ground and shook his head. He turned around and looked at Tanya, still in her long nightgown, and said, “Get dressed.”

  As he spoke, he moved to his walk-in closet and pulled on a pair of khaki pants. He snatched a heavy T-shirt and grabbed a pair of boots before moving back into the bedroom. He tossed the items on the bed then grabbed a black canvas field jacket that was folded above a wardrobe. The jacket, which he never wore, had a passport and a few thousand dollars cash sewn into the liner. But these people didn’t need to know that.

  The woman began to look anxious. “Thomas, in less than five minutes this entire street will be occupied. We have to go.”

  “You think I’m going out in my skivvies, painted in that clown’s blood?” He wiped his chest with a dirty T-shirt. “Sorry, sweetheart, I don’t roll like that.”

  She shook her head. “It won’t matter how you roll, if you are dead.”

  He looked up at her with cold eyes. “You said occupied—occupied by who? The police?”

  “Does it matter?” one of the men said.

  Tommy shot him a cold glare that caused the man to turn and focus on the doorway.

  The black man was standing with a finger to his ear. He looked at the woman. “Bad guys three minutes out. If we don’t move now, we’ll be shooting our way out.”

  As if to punctuate the warning, gunfire and explosions echoed from outside.

  “Any of you want to tell me what the hell is going on?” Tommy said. “Who I just greased?”

  The woman nodded and turned toward the door. “Get dressed and meet us downstairs. I’ll explain it in the van,” she said, and the trio ran back into the hall.

  Tanya was dressed now. She had her pistol still in her right hand, her cell phone in her left. Tommy finished with his boots and stood. “Anything from the office?”

  She shook her head. “The phones are dead. Who are these people?”

  “The ones on the floor or the ones waiting for us outside?”

  He moved to one of the dead and took the man’s sidearm, a Browning high power. He placed it at the back of his belt and took as many spare mags from the dead as he could get.

  “The ones outside,” Tanya answered. “Your friends, apparently.”

  Tommy went to the hallway and checked left and right before stepping into it. “The men I’ve never seen before. The woman is from an alphabet agency that checks in on me every now and then.” He was lying. She wasn’t government—at least not with the American government. She worked for an old friend who knew how to get things done. She was a subcontractor of sorts.

  Since he’d moved here and Tanya Delgado’s employers put him on payroll, he’d been expected to do certain side jobs for them. It was nothing like his days with the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine Ground Division, but it was still work that required certain levels
of deniability. There were just some things that couldn’t be done in the light of day, and some things that couldn’t ever point back to those responsible. It was for things like that when they called Tommy.

  Three times he had been asked to perform a task since he retired to the Island, and all three times it was Natalia who had provided his transportation and papers. She was a provider, they called it, a logistician. She had a network of people who knew how to get things done. Whether it was pulling an asset from war-torn Ukraine or eliminating a known bomb-maker in Damascus. Natalia knew how to get him in and out without anyone knowing.

  Whenever he was handed an envelope from the agency, it was Natalia who put the pieces together for him. But because of the probable deniability agreement, Tanya and the agency never knew about her. In fact, even Tommy didn’t know how to directly contact her. He’d always gone through his intermediary, a mutual friend in Virginia. His mind began to scramble. Natalia didn’t know where he lived, but their mutual friend did.

  “Are you cheating on me with another agency, Tommy?” Tanya said, following him into the hall, breaking his thoughts. “Do we not pay you enough to stay exclusive? Is that why you are out doing side jobs?”

  He moved to the stairwell and held up, listening. He investigated the hall and found it clear. “I know people that know how to get things done. She is one of them. I might look like Superman, but it takes a network to do the impossible.” He stopped and turned to face Tanya. “Hey, you’re the spook that has me on retainer. Aren’t you supposed to know who she is?”

  “I’m not a spook, I’m a messenger,” Tanya snapped back. “I don’t do anything more than hand you an envelope a couple times a year.”

  “Yes, and those envelopes ask me to do things, no questions asked. Natalia and her people are one of those questions you shouldn’t ask about.” Tommy stopped and turned back. He looked her up and down and smiled. “I think you do more for me than hand over envelopes.”

  Chapter Three

  Alexander Winston parked the late-model Range Rover behind the barn and walked up the gravel drive toward the old farmhouse. Douglas, want-to-be cowboy, former Ranger sniper, then Virginia state trooper, turned gun for hire, was on the porch with his head back. The bearded man was rocking in an old chair, a Stetson on his head and a beer in his hand.

  “What are you doing drinking? You’ve got next watch,” Winston said.

  Douglas shook his head and took another pull on the blue can. “Operation is off. Entire thing is shut down. Guess they picked up that cell at the border.”

  “Border?” Winston said. “That doesn’t sound right. What border?”

  The man shook his head and scoffed. “How da hell should I know? They just said border.”

  For the last week, Winston had been added to this team of knuckleheads. The men weren’t DOD—at least not anymore. The team was shaped of all backgrounds and quickly put together to do a risk assessment. Each was supposed to be a specialist in their area—snipers, close quarters battle, demolition. Winston’s specialty was infiltration and killing everything in the room. He’d been watching the others, and his impression of any of them being experts was lacking.

  Most of the guys were burnouts, let go hard chargers looking for a payday. Sure, in Fallujah or the Korangal Valley, he’d want nobody else watching his six. But here in rural Minnesota, they just weren’t the kind of guys he would have selected. The guys were sledgehammers when they really needed scalpels.

  He hadn’t bothered to get to know the other members of the team. He wasn’t interested in their war stories and honestly didn’t want them knowing too much about him. It wasn’t personal, but in Alexander Winston’s business, being well known was a vulnerability, and if he hoped to land a big money contract job post-retirement, anonymity was an asset he was hoping to hold on to.

  Winston looked up at the man on the porch and shook his head. No, he didn’t like this assignment, but it beat the hell out of the desk he’d been riding for the last three years. Since leaving the Ground Division, or truth be told, since the Ground Division was eliminated from the books, Winston had been bounced around different departments, most having to do with more writing and planning than field action.

  From working intelligence at Guantanamo Bay, to short stints in putting together personal security details with the State Department. When he was called up to red cell this mall in the middle of Minnesota, he took the orders with grace. Well, for the most part; he was voluntold and had no choice, and being less than a year from a pension, saying no wasn’t really an option.

  He had arrived at the farm a week earlier. There was strong intelligence that an Al-Shabaab cell of Somali terrorists was looking to hit the Mall of America. Someone on the counterterror desk got the bright idea that if they could put together a team of warfighters to survey and develop multiple plans of attack, they might be able to reverse engineer the cell and find the scumbags. Winston laughed at the idea, the absurdity of it. Like always, the college kids in the airconditioned offices at Langley were overthinking shit.

  You want to find terrorists, you go to where they live, you root them out, track their phones, track their friends, read their emails. And then once you’ve done all the homework, you call a man like him, a man like Winston, to move in and kill them. Sitting on a farm, planning an attack on a shopping mall, was a waste of his skills.

  “Who gave the abort order?” Winston asked.

  The Cowboy drained the rest of his can then reached into a cooler for another. He held it out to Winston, who shook his head no. The man pulled the tab. “That FBI guy, Johnson—”

  “Johnston,” Winston corrected.

  Cowboy shook his head. “Yeah, John ston, that’s what I said.” He grinned. “Anyhow, he was just here. He said they captured the fools at the border, and he dropped off a couple coolers of beer and some steaks and gave us all an attaboy. Said we should celebrate.”

  Winston smiled from half his mouth and shook his head. “Celebrate what? So… what now? Drink beer and hang out?” Winston said.

  Cowboy laughed. “Nah, man. He said a van would be here at 0500 to take us to the airport. Like I said, the operation is off, bro.”

  Winston moved past the man, onto the stairs, and through the screen door, which was held open with a second cooler. Inside, he could see the sofas and chairs were all empty. He could hear laughing from the back porch. The kitchen table still held the maps of the mall and tactical drawings. On a table was a collection of weapons, most of them junk, but the type and style Johnston said would most likely be available to the terror cell.

  Pinned to the wall were photos the team had taken over the last week. They had painstakingly detailed entrances, security doors, cameras. Even the numbers and times police cars parked in the lot. He looked at the work product and gave a half-grin. For a bunch of dirtbags, they had put together a hell of a package. Maybe the FBI would find a use for it.

  Ignoring the noise from the back porch and the savory smells of a barbeque grill, he moved to the first bedroom on the right and picked up his bag. He’d never fully unpacked it, and as he’d always done his entire career, he repacked his bag every morning before he went. He turned and left the house without saying goodbye. Walking down the porch, he saw that Cowboy was now on the phone talking to someone named Cinnamon, promising he’d be home the next day. He laughed and moved back to the Range Rover. He wasn’t waiting around for a flight, and nobody was going to miss one vehicle.

  Chapter Four

  Jonathon Kershaw lay silent in the tall grass just outside the old house. From inside the home, he could hear shouts of laughter. He used his advance night vision optics to survey the terrain. Finding it empty, he switched to thermals that would pick up on slight variances in temperature. He squinted as he scanned the optic, looking at the structure and counting the red-and-orange blobs. They were all inside, no patrols, nobody on watch. It didn’t fit the profile he’d been given. He looked across the grass and saw another
of his teams falling into position behind a distant woodshed.

  Jonathon had spent most of his life on teams just like this one, most of it on the East Coast as part of an anti-organized-crime task force, then doing drug interdiction on the southern border after that. But this was different; he was in Minnesota, and this wasn’t his turf. Hell, it wasn’t even his investigation. He’d been sent here blind with very little intel on the guys inside or why it was so urgent they be taken out without the proper planning.

  “Four on the first floor, two on the second,” he said into a throat mic, keeping his voice low.

  “Copy,” came the reply from the command helicopter that he knew was flying high overhead, recording the entire event on its FLIR cameras. “You are go for approach.”

  He paused, unsure if he’d heard the response correctly, and spoke again. “Command, they are still up. The mission plan said to wait for them to be asleep.” He took a beat then said, “Request clarification.”

  The bird in the air was in command of the big picture, but Jonathon still had tactical control on the ground, and the mission brief said they would get into position, hold, survey, and hold again until the tangos were asleep, then hit them hard in the early hours of the morning when they were most likely to be down for the count. Taking them alive if they could, dead if not. A nighttime raid at just after midnight on an armed group that was still up and moving around would pretty much ensure a firefight.

  “We have new information; you have to hit them now,” came the reply. “You are go for approach.”

  Fuck, he mouthed to himself, no intel, no floorplan and now this. He closed his eyes and reopened them. He knew the rest of his assault team would be in position all around the building, twenty-four of them divided into fire teams of three. He’d never been with so many men before. Not since his time in the Marines had he had a platoon-sized force to raid a house. They always contingency planned for a full-on assault, and on paper, eight fire teams versus six men were good odds. But no plan survived first contact.