Rise of the Beast: A Novel (The Patmos Conspiracy Book 1) Page 15

  “GET SOME SLEEP, UNCLE,” NICKY said.

  Sleep was difficult. Alexander felt restless. He liked to keep Jules near him, particularly in foreign situations. He knew he was well protected but still felt uneasy.

  He had no choice but to dispatch Jules to find Pauline and the journal. Jules was successful in retrieving the journal and her phone, which was helpful, even if he failed to capture the girl.

  The phone was rushed to Klaus in Geneva where a trusted technical specialist awaited its arrival. She tore it apart and quickly found the invisible app that forwarded the pictures Pauline took. The woman determined that Pauline had sent only six images. That would equate to between six and eleven pages. Those pages were in someone’s possession. And that someone was a threat to him and his plans.

  What form would this threat take? Most obvious, if whoever read the journal pages correctly interpreted the words to mean that Alexander had plans to strategically eliminate a sizeable portion of the world’s population, he could provide that information to governmental authorities to investigate. Alexander’s Patmos activities were laundered through a myriad of corporations, none of them linked to him. But that didn’t mean the brightest minds with unlimited resources couldn’t connect the dots.

  Even if he was too well insulated from being implicated in events that were about to unfold, the plans themselves might be discovered under intense scrutiny. That would be catastrophic. He cared about the plans themselves. Deeply. Almost as much as he cared for himself.

  A second form the threat might take, extortion, would be preferable to him. He would of course agree to pay anything on any terms when the demand for money came. But the blackmailer would make the ultimate payment. Painfully. Alexander would spend whatever it took to make it so.

  But something else teased at him. Whoever had hired Pauline to photograph the pages of his journal had to be someone he knew and someone who knew him. How else would they know about the journal and become curious about what it contained?

  Was it someone that worked for him? Klaus was digging deep into the activities of his top lieutenants this very moment, while one of those lieutenants was digging deeply into Klaus’s every activity.

  Some would be daunted or discouraged by the task of looking under every rock for an enemy. Not Alexander. What he had Klaus doing was absolutely necessary. But he also knew that among all his enemies, one man stood above. He was not easy to get to, but it helped that one of the man’s most trusted friends was also on Alexander’s payroll.

  Alexander pursed his lips and thought. He appreciated Jules’ attempt to take the blame for the Pauline fiasco when he called to let him know the driver had suffered a massive heart attack. That was kind of Jules to care about his feelings and thusly show his loyalty. But it also bothered him; even angered him. When had he ever needed coddling or encouragement? He had performed everything Jules had with his own bare hands long before Jules was but a gleam in his parents’ eyes.

  Did Jules perceive that he had become soft? Had he become soft at the precise time he needed to be hard? Was the introspection of Patmos dulling the edge of his blade?

  “Nicky, am I as strong as I used to be?”

  “I think you’re stronger than ever.”

  “Then why did I let an enemy inside my home?”

  “You couldn’t have known. She was looked at from every angle. She was clean. There was nothing suspicious about her.”

  “Who introduced her to us?”

  “I don’t know. Klaus handles that stuff.”

  “Indeed.”

  Nicky took a long draw on his cigar, let the smoke linger in his mouth without inhaling, and blew it out slowly, waiting for his uncle to speak again.

  “Nicky, what if I told you I think we have a traitor in our midst?”

  Nicky took another long pull on the cigar, then answered, “It would both surprise me and not surprise me. I don’t have any ideas who it might be, but I am on the road a lot. Uncle, you know better than most, treachery is the way of the world.”

  Alexander nodded. Good answer. Good boy.

  “Do you miss your father, Nicky?”

  That took Nicky aback.

  “Sure, I miss him. He had his troubles but he was okay. He probably never quite accepted me, but he loved me. I have no complaints.”

  “How would my son answer that same question?”

  Nicky laughed. “Probably not too different. Different reasons and circumstances. But he knows you love him—and Helena.”

  Nicky crossed himself in the Orthodox manner of touching his right shoulder first. Alexander had never seen him do that before.

  “I think his mother’s medical condition keeps him away too.”

  Nicky’s phone chirped and he hit the receive button without answering. He listened for a couple minutes and finally asked a question: “You got a name?” After a few seconds he gave a command, “Find out everything you can on this man Burke.”

  He looked at his Uncle and said: “Pauline’s phone was programmed to call a couple of numbers, including a bakery in Belgium in her phone. La Bon Bouche. The place doesn’t exist but our men found the man at the end of the line. The man, of course, claimed innocence and said he knew nothing, but after talking things over, he remembered he was working for a man.”

  “Burke.”

  “Yes. Burke.”

  Nicky held up the phone to show a picture of the mutilated body of Burke’s man in Brussels.

  “There’s also a number that goes directly to an off-the-grid bulletin board Burke uses. I think Mr. Burke should get a look at his man,” Nicky said, smiling as he sent a text to the man who had provided him the update. “We have the interrogation on video. This Mr. Burke will enjoy that even more.”

  “I was told the man who had been hired to enter our gates was Colonel Grayson,” Alexander spoke.

  “They might be working together,” Nicky responded, looking up.

  “Give Mr. Burke and Colonel Grayson your full attention, Nicky.”

  “I’m on it,” he replied, leaving the last third of his cigar in the Waterford crystal bowl. “By the way, Uncle, either Grayson or Burke have men who have been watching the Gulfstream and who have been watching us here. We’ve picked them up for questioning.”

  “You have done well, Nicky. I believe your father would be proud, even if he had another road planned out for you.”

  Nicky nodded in appreciation.

  “Before you go, there is one more thing, Nicky.”

  “Yes Uncle?”

  “Even without Pauline on the loose, the days are about to become infinitely more dangerous. I need you safe. I need you sharp. We’ll head back to Geneva in the morning. I want you to spend some time each evening with Sophia and the kids. No late nights in the bars on your way home from the office. Focus yourself. I think it best that you not visit Patmos for a period of time. Others need to stay focused on their work as well.”

  Nicky felt like a lemon was blocking his airwaves as he responded, “I understand Uncle.”

  32

  New York City

  THINGS WERE UNRAVELING FAST for Burke. First, Pauline. Then Henri, his operative in Brussels, didn’t answer the phone when Burke called him for a status update. Burke tried numerous times over the course of several hours. Then someone picked up. A woman asked who was calling and how she might be of help. In his years of working with Henri, no one else had ever picked up that line. Burke’d give ten to one odds it was a police woman.

  Henri was blown. That told Burke there was no longer a question Pauline had been captured, interrogated, and had the bakery connection twisted out of her. No doubt, painfully.

  Who got to Henri? Alexander’s forces or the police working on behalf of Alexander or the police working independently? If the it was Alexander’s soldiers, Henri was not in a good place.

  Something else was wrong and it was staring Burke in the face. When he left the street level door of the Oak Room, eschewing the path through t
he ornate lobby of the Plaza, he followed his standard operating procedure when on a dangerous assignment. Walk fast. Walk slow. Stop. Turn around and retrace steps. Use the reflections in windows to see if he was being followed. Grab a cab. Exit the cab two blocks later and grab another going the opposite direction. Be unpredictable. He followed the same arduous procedure exiting the Peninsula. He again saw nothing. He was alone. Invisible.

  But somehow he knew he wasn’t.

  He paid the driver to drop him off three blocks from his seedy motel. But half a block before arriving at the blinking neon entrance he realized he had seen the bum who appeared to be sleeping in a doorway before. Burke had a remarkable memory for faces. Where had he seen him? It had to be in Hell’s Kitchen. Was it? He snapped his fingers. He had it. The bum was in a business suit drinking a cup of coffee in the diner across from his previous motel.

  Or maybe not. But I think yes. Yes. Same man.

  Burke, thirty-seven years old, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan— always “outside the wire” on the most dangerous assignments—had stayed alive by trusting his instincts.

  In his first years of lethal assignments he had always prayed before he entered the arena of battle. When had he stopped? And why? Was it the amount of blood on his hands? He grew up as a Sunday School and church kid. He knew his Bible from start to finish. He had always loved the stories of David. Shepherd boy. Giant killer. Writer of the most beautiful words of worship ever written. King. But the man and his stories had come to mean something different to him when he became a warrior himself. Under an azure Afghan sky Burke had fully realized that David was more than a shepherd and songwriter. That was only half the picture. He was much more than the sanitized version he had been taught as a kid. David, the man after God’s heart, was a brutal mercenary; a warrior’s warrior; a stone cold killer. He was a man whose hands were covered with the blood of both the guilty and innocent. Not just his hands. He could bathe in the blood he shed. That took a toll on you, no matter how close to God you thought you were.

  As a boy David sang songs to soothe the spirit of a mad king. Burke suspected that David sang songs as an old man to soothe his own troubled memories.

  As a Special Forces soldier, Burke had followed the same bloody path. But that didn’t adequately explain why he no longer prayed. That happened in Operation Desert Scorpion on June 25, 2003.

  Burke pictured the man in the suit and compared him to the bum in the doorway again. It was a match. Houston, we have a problem. Burke knew there was a time to attack and that there were times when it was best not to let an adversary know he had been spotted. Burke never broke stride as he entered the lobby without a care in the world and hit the call button for the elevator, never looking back. He walked quietly down the threadbare-carpeted hallway. He had already been spotted so if someone was waiting for him, he already knew Burke was coming. The bum would have called ahead. He would be on high alert. There would be no surprise.

  He turned the key in his room slowly and carefully. He knew instantly it was empty.

  Time to find the tracking bug. No question, there was a tracer. Over the next two hours his hands and eyes worked every square centimeter of every item he carried with him, from briefcase to shoes to toothpaste tube to every stitch of clothing. He wasn’t gentle. It would all be thrown away anyway. He opened his iPad and studied the hardware with a magnifying glass he retracted from a Swiss Army knife. Just when he was ready to give up his eye caught a nearly imperceptible flaw in the stitching on one of the cloth handles of his duffle bag.

  He slit it carefully and found the tiny GPS transmitter, no larger than a small matchstick. Burke cursed. How long had it been secured there? From that moment on, he had never been alone. Not for the entire operation to capture the scratches and scrawls inside Alexander’s journal. Even as he wondered what his next step would be to stay alive and make someone pay for this incursion past every safeguard he thought he had constructed, he took inventory of his decisions and movements. Where had he got careless? Someone had planted a homing device on him without him having a clue. Other than Pauline, he couldn’t think of anyone else with access or any egregious errors on his part. That meant whoever was tracking him was good—probably the man who hired him who spoke through a metallic modulator. Burke looked at the small cylindrical stick that was no more than half an inch long. They had put eyes on him, like the bum, but hadn’t attempted to follow him on his street movements where they would be vulnerable to being detected by his counter surveillance. They didn’t have to. They always knew where his home base was.

  Burke suspected the flurry of phone calls from his client had nothing to do with triangulating his exact location at any given moment. It was a ruse to make him think that was what he was trying to do. That way he would be less suspicious of other tracking methods, which they already had in place to pinpoint his whereabouts. The red herring had worked.

  His mind went to the face of the one man he knew who could pull this off. He wasn’t the only man who could do it, but probably the only one he knew personally. His former commanding officer, Colonel Arnold “Arnie” Grayson, an immoral, amoral sociopath. Burke caught him with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar, elbow deep—selling sophisticated weaponry and tactical gear to the enemy. He was sure that was only the tip of the iceberg. Had he not been forced to flee and disappear after Grayson set him up to be ambushed, he was sure that Grayson was screwing the US Army in a variety of ways. After all, he was the man responsible to distribute money to informants in the Iraqi theater of operations.

  Burke stole a jeep in Tikrit and drove like a madman to the hill city of Aqrah. His escape over the border into the town of Batman, Turkey, included shooting his way out of an abandoned village on the Iraqi side of the border. He hit pay dirt in that unnamed village. While hiding under floorboards to recuperate, he found a cache of 30 one-kilo gold bars. He claimed squatters’ rights on the gold and when he saw a patrol jeep racing into the town, he fled, guns blazing, with more than sixty-six pounds of bullion that afforded him the financial means to hire a boat in Hatay, Turkey, and then sail to Crete and then into the dangerous port of Naples, Italy. He took the train to Zurich, still in possession of twenty-five gold bars. The price of gold at the end of 2003 had edged up to $400 an ounce. He delivered his spoils of war to a discrete private bank on the Bahnhofstrasse. It became the initial $350 thousand investment for a paramilitary startup. He bought a new name and did all in his power to embrace a new outlook on life: cynicism and unmitigated self-interest.

  Burke was his middle name and that is the only thing he kept from his past. Maybe keeping his middle name had been his singular hold on where he came from and the man he once was.

  Through a simple online search, he learned he was listed as MIA and presumed dead. He had been awarded a Purple Heart and a Medal of Valor posthumously. He would thank Grayson for doing something that would make his parents proud, but he knew anything Grayson did was for himself and himself alone. Dead. Burke decided it was better that way. But he was sad that meant not telling his parents he was still alive. Maybe better for them to think he was dead. They wouldn’t like the man he had become.

  Any chance of rediscovering his lost faith was destroyed when he made a dangerous trip back to Baghdad. From two-hundred yards away, Burke spun a 2.75-inch-long sniper bullet from an M24—the US Army’s adaptation of the Remington 700—through the left eye of Lieutenant Colonel Dan Samblin, the man in charge of the MPs in Iraq, who ratted him out to Grayson. Grayson was already stateside or he would have died the same night.

  Why had he let Grayson live? That was the man who had ruined his life. Maybe he was afraid to find out what else the man had done to those whom he loved after he disappeared off the grid of the living.

  Fifteen years had passed. He had built a very specialized and successful business that was fifty percent payment up front and fifty percent upon completion of assignment. The margins were enormous.

  Maybe this had not
hing to do with Grayson but for some reason it had his scent wafting over it. He wondered for the millionth time why he had let the man live.

  So what now? Drop the GPS transmitter in the pocket of someone catching a flight in the opposite direction as he was heading as a diversion? Destroy it and make a run for it? Or use it as bait?

  The answer was obvious.

  The homeless man was still sleeping in the same doorway. Burke had the cab stop so he could jump out. He dropped a $10 bill in the man’s begging cap and said, “God bless you.” The man never responded. He was good and stayed in character, the only reason he was still alive.

  He hopped back in the backseat of the cab and told the driver, “JFK. British Airways terminal. Last flight leaves in ninety minutes. There’s an extra fifty for you if you can get there in less than thirty.”

  He reached in the side pocket of his Harris Tweed jacket that he used to dress up his jeans for international travel. He looked at the GPS from every angle. He needed a new supplier. He didn’t have anything this powerful and small.

  Let’s see if this reels in whoever wants to know where you are before your flight leaves.

  His flight to Paris—he wouldn’t be taking British Airways to Heathrow in London—would give him a chance to plan how to start working up the food chain to discover—or if it was Grayson, confirm—who had hired him. The only question was if no one made a move at him in the airport. Hold it and let them know where he was—or slough it off on someone and confirm he had discovered it.

  He looked at his phone. No text messages. No word from his watcher outside Alexander’s townhome or the man who just arrived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to see if he could discover what happened to Pauline. There wouldn’t be anything from the latter. He knew Jules had killed her or secreted her to a spot where he would never discover her in time.

  He tapped a game app icon with a smiling frog to check his electronic bulletin board. A message had been posted to a new thread with two files. He tapped the first image file.