Betrayal Read online

  DJ blinked. “Crypto what?”

  Carbon shook his head, exasperated at DJ’s inability to climb out of the technological Dark Ages. “Cryptocurrency. Digital money. There are all kinds now, but in the beginning, there was only one. You can use it to buy stuff or exchange it for cash. There is a finite amount of it which has made its value climb. The only way to get it is to buy it or mine it.”

  DJ had heard of the stuff but truthfully didn’t know anything about it. “Mine it?” he asked.

  Carbon nodded. “Yeah. You mine it with software on the internet. That is a really simple explanation, but, yeah. Didn’t you say these contractors you killed were Asian?” DJ nodded. “Well, then this all makes sense. Think back to when North Korea was making all kinds of trouble, threatening nuclear annihilation of the U.S. if we didn’t lift sanctions. The dictator had no real way to make money. Not legally, anyway. He was starving for cash. The country was on the verge of economic collapse. He wasn’t too concerned with his people starving. He was worried about how he was going to get his next sports car.

  “Hackers caught wind of one of his plans to make money. He put a bunch of his tech geeks in a room and had them start mining cryptocurrency as fast as they could. A whole army of them in a room working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, generating the stuff. He used it to build giant resort-styled mansions and fund his nuclear ambitions. It was rumored that he stashed a bunch of it for his retirement one day. Supposedly, he planned to sneak out of the country and disappear, set up a new identity for himself, and live out the rest of his life in luxury somewhere. Now, I’m not one hundred percent certain it was his stolen cryptocurrency on that drive, but it makes sense based on how much of it there was, where the meet point was located, and the fact that those contractors were probably North Korean. I’ll bet you anything that a few of his own people stole the drive, figured they would never be able to break the encryption, and offered it to that Russian general in exchange for three bags of money.”

  Carbon looked around at them, his anger and frustration causing him to repeatedly clench his fists. “Agent Seymour learned about the exchange and set up a plan to steal it all for himself. This was never about securing the secrets of the American military. This was nothing more than a good old-fashioned heist. This was about money and a lot of it.”

  Coonie spoke up from the front of the boat. “How much are we talking?”

  Carbon shrugged. “No way of knowing for sure, but based on current prices, somewhere north of a billion dollars.”

  Coonie’s mouth fell open in shock. “Well, there you have it. A billion reasons to kill us.” She snorted as another thought hit her. “I would have killed all of you for far less. Kidding. Maybe.”

  DJ ignored the joke. “Just one flaw in their plan. They didn’t kill us.”

  The satellite phone suddenly rang in Cash’s hand. He glanced down and then up at DJ. “It’s Abbi.”

  Chapter 10: When Things Go Boom

  Sam Kenny pulled alongside the aging fishing trawler and grabbed the rope that was tossed to him. First, he secured the box with the data drive in his small pack. Next, he shouldered his rifle, disconnected the compressed canister for keeping the raft filled with air, and punctured the sides with his knife. It wouldn’t take long for the inflatable to lose its buoyancy and the weight of the outboard to carry it to the bottom of the ocean. Finally, he hauled himself on board the trawler for the next leg of his journey.

  From here he was to travel due north. The extra fuel onboard would take him to a small Russian fishing village called Nel’ma. It was remote and isolated, well off the beaten path. He would meet his next contact there, a former deep undercover operative who had functioned as a mole within the Russian intelligence community for nearly two decades. He had since been labeled as dead after vanishing over ten years ago. The reality was he had simply decided to retire from his life as a double agent. He had met someone, a young Russian woman, who had captured his heart. The former secret agent had decided to settle down and live out the rest of his life with her. Agent Seymour had helped arrange the disappearance and divert any questions the CIA might have. The double agent’s happiness in retirement was short-lived. His bride was gone now due to cancer. Even though the former agent was older, out of shape, his best years behind him, Agent Seymour found a use for him once more. He would get paid a handsome fee for transporting Sam from one side of Russia to the other, all the way to Finland. Sam had only to sit and wait for the man to show up.

  It would have been risky to hop on a plane and make the trip. As connected as the security cameras were at all airports, and as cooperative as the Russians were being on the hunt for global terrorists, he would certainly be spotted by facial recognition software. No doubt the CIA would have him uploaded to a database as soon as DJ Slaughter made it back on that sub.

  Every mission has complications. It was a fact of life for an operator, but not killing DJ Slaughter was a big one. Sam’s original plan was to wait until they got to the coordinates for meeting the Vermont. They would shut down the engines, lash the two boats together, and wait for the sub. With everyone within spitting distance and suspecting nothing, Sam could have picked off the entire team with headshots and then headed to meet the trawler.

  Carbon threw the plan into the trashcan. He wasn’t supposed to try and hack the drive. With him successfully breaking in, the entire ruse was just a phone call away from being blown up. It wouldn’t even need a call. All Carbon would have had to do was send a message from his tablet computer explaining what was really on the drive, or worse, email the entire contents. Agent Seymour and his team would have been placed on every watch list there was, with every intel organization alerted to be on the lookout. The longer it took for people to become aware of what was going on, the easier it was going to be to escape.

  Sam called an audible and attempted to kill the team while they were in motion. He was certain he had wounded a few of them, he had shot Latricia through the head, and it was unlikely Argo had survived the ambush. Still, Sam had failed. He was lucky to have escaped with the drive at all. By now, a call had been placed to the CIA. Agent Seymour, Sam, and the others were going to have to move slow and careful if they were all going to get away. Especially Seymour, who was still in the U.S. supervising things on that end.

  Sam lived by a few rules as an operator. The first: early and often. This meant that at the first sign of something going south, notify your supervisors. Sam had followed this rule to the letter. As soon as bullets stopped being hurled in his direction, he used his satellite phone to contact Agent Seymour and inform him of what went down. He also called the farm, the place DJ called his base of operations, and notified the agents on-site to not kill Abbi but take her and the baby prisoner. They might need her for leverage in subduing DJ and whoever remained operation of his tea.

  To say Seymour wasn’t happy was an understatement. Still. Sam still got away with the drive intact, so the man wasn’t furious. The nearly 2.9 billion dollars in cryptocurrency was safe and secure. All would be forgiven once Sam delivered the small case and its contents.

  The second rule was a statement ground into his head while serving as an elite warrior for the military: don’t see the problem, see the solution. The solution was simple.

  Slaughter was going to come after them. It didn’t matter if the CIA sanctioned it or not. It didn’t matter if they gave the team access to intel or not. DJ would harness that big brain of Carbon’s to hunt down both Agent Seymour and Sam. According to the profile written about Slaughter, the man was worse than a starving street dog with a bone when he decided something needed to be done. He couldn’t let go. He would use every resource and spend any amount of money required to hunt down the agent who set them up and the team member who betrayed them.

  See the solution, not the problem. DJ Slaughter and his team needed to die. The sooner, the better. This meant that Sam needed to call another audible.

  As soon as he was on
board, he killed every crew member of the trawler, tied them all to a spare boat anchor, and threw them overboard. He wasn’t going to that small fishing village on the shores of eastern Russia as ordered. He turned the boat south and began plotting a route that would take him into the Philippines. He had twenty-grand in cash stashed in the bottom of his bag that would help him along the way. He wasn’t planning on stealing the drive and keeping the contents for himself. Sam was sure Agent Seymour had enough seedy contacts throughout the world to find Sam if he tried to run. Instead, he was only taking a detour. He would still rendezvous with Agent Seymour as planned. Besides, it would have taken nearly two weeks waiting for his contact and negotiating his way across Russia. There was plenty of time to kill Slaughter. Sam knew Agent Seymour would use Abbi as planned, but he also knew how good DJ Slaughter and his team were, even on a bad day. How much more effective would they be when motivated by revenge?

  No, let Seymour do what he was going to do, but Sam had already screwed up once. He needed to make sure for his own safety that the job was finished exactly as originally planned.

  Sam dialed Agent Seymour to tell him of the change. He was sure the agent would insist Sam stick to his orders, but that was too bad. When it came to self-preservation, Sam followed no one’s orders but his own.

  __________

  Sara Anderson had a problem. She loved blowing crap up. This, of course, was often considered illegal. Getting your hands on the chemicals and equipment for making things go boom could be challenging at times, and it was easy for accidents to occur. Make no mistake, by now she had acquired enough knowledge and experience to overcome such challenges, but in the beginning, when she was just finding her way, just a raw acolyte with a fetish for the rapid expansion of gasses, she often got herself into trouble. Thankfully, none of it resulted in jail time or missing appendages. She should have sought counseling for her problem. Instead, she sought training and permission. She found the one place she could receive tutelage in her craft and be sanctioned to indulge herself.

  The United States Marine Corps gave her a great start. It taught her many fundamentals and gave her the discipline she desperately needed. Still, it wasn’t enough. She needed more. After eight years swaddled in digital camouflaged clothing, she applied for the Central Intelligence Agency. She had all the traits they sought, so they scooped her up.

  Now, don’t get her wrong, the CIA was great. It gave her even more access to specialized materials and pointed her at bad guys who needed extermination by more thorough and less secretive means. After all, what was the use in blowing crap up if there wasn’t a little blood involved? More importantly, she began to make contacts outside of the agency who made her realize that she could become very wealthy doing what she loved. As an assassin, she could focus on improving her craft, exercise her creative side, bank a lot of cash, and for the most part, obliterate people who largely deserved eradication. In short, she got paid a lot of money to have fun. How awesome was that? If you’re doing what you love, it ain't work, right?

  Yesterday, an old friend she had met in the CIA reached out to her with a lucrative offer. Agent Seymour needed her to erase a guy who was currently hospitalized. This was a challenge, and it was what compelled her most to take the contract. It wasn’t challenging because she had to infiltrate a hospital, no, of course not. It was challenging because it was maybe the most secure hospital in the world. One would think, anyway. After all, Walter Reed sat on an Army base.

  Now, one might think you would have to breach two layers of security to gain access to the hospital. This wasn’t true. The hospital needed rapid access for ambulances and easy access for visitors, there was a gate located off Rockville Pike Road that ran right in front of the storied building. Across the street was a visitor’s parking lot. She could park a stolen vehicle there, take the visitor’s tunnel under the street, flash an ID provided by Agent Seymour, and waltz right in like she owned the place. Wearing a disguise, of course. The place was covered in cameras that recorded everything.

  When she first was presented with the offer, she got nervous. Walter Reed is where Presidents and members of Congress were treated. She didn’t need that kind of heat, but Agent Seymour assured her the target was a vet. She asked, why a vet needed killing. None of your business, she was told. Just kill the target and anyone who might be visiting him.

  Challenge accepted.

  Here’s the deal when killing a target in a hospital: unless you are a visitor, almost all the medical staff know each other. Regardless of the size of the facility, doctors know doctors, nurses know nurses, phlebotomists know phlebotomists. You get the picture. So, you can’t pretend to be one of those. Somebody is liable to notice you and either call you out or point security in your direction. It can get real messy when that happens. Can’t pretend to be a visitor either. The staff tends to pay attention to them more to ensure they don’t go where they aren’t supposed to. No ma’am. No sir. To pull off a job in a hospital, one needs to be invisible. And no one is more invisible than a janitor with a cart full of cleaning supplies. If anyone asks a question, you just mumble about being on your way to clean up vomit and people will steer clear. Wouldn’t you?

  Agent Seymour even provided the room number the target was located in. John Argo was on the second floor with a view of the front lawn. Easy sneezy.

  She entered the hospital with no problem, pretending to be a visitor, crying and carrying on about the condition of her brother, flashing a fake driver’s license that would have fooled anyone, and signing with her borrowed name of Joyce Smith. Bags were screened at the entrance, and she had to step through a metal detector. She left any weapons behind, and the X-ray machine thought the lunch in her bag was legit. It looked just like a sandwich, two juice boxes, peanut butter with celery sticks for dipping. All a lie, of course. This wasn’t her first attempt at fooling bomb-sniffing dogs or X-ray machines.

  Inside, Sara flagged down an orderly, explained she was a new employee, flashed her baby blues at him, and learned where the janitorial closet was on the second floor. He was so enamored with her flirtations, he never noticed she had swiped the bundle of keys from his waist or bothered to ask why she wasn’t in scrubs. Orderlies always had keys to the janitorial closets. They had to clean up all sorts of vile messes. For this reason, many of them were quite invisible themselves.

  From there, she found a bathroom, removed her first layer of clothes, exposing her pale green hospital scrubs, and clipped on her fake badge. She also tucked her first layer of clothing, along with her purse, into a red plastic hazardous waste bag. She wore gloves as she did to not leave fingerprints on the bag. She dumped the contents of the juice boxes on top and tied the bag closed. The fluid would begin to create fumes that would permeate the clothing and destroy any DNA evidence found inside. Sara then crushed the boxes flat and dropped them into a pocket of her scrubs. She carried the bag through the hallway with no one batting an eye and dropped it into the first trash can she saw.

  On the second floor of building A, she found the janitorial closet and used her pilfered keys to gain access. Inside, she found exactly what she wanted. Three janitor’s carts stood in the middle of the small room. She scanned the bottles on the shelf looking for cleaners and floor strippers. It didn’t take long to find one that fit the bill. According to the chemicals listed on the bottle, it contained an ingredient that would do nicely. Next, she scooped her peanut butter with one gloved finger into the bottle, resealed it, and shook it vigorously. The compound that resembled peanut butter quickly broke apart and began to dissolve. In a few minutes, the mixture would become a powerful explosive. While she waited, she ate her sandwich and munched on the celery sticks. If anyone interrupted her, she would turn on her charm and beg to not be reported for eating in a cleaning closet. If that failed, she could always kill them. The Marines and CIA had taught her all the skills needed to metaphorically flip off someone’s light switch.

  When she was done eating, Sara tucked the r
emainder of her lunch, the sandwich bags and small plastic container she had kept her peanut butter in, into the deep pockets of her scrubs. Finally, she placed the modified floor stripper bottle onto a cart, pulled her latex gloves tighter, and pushed it out into the hallway.

  Time to make things go boom.

  It took her only a few minutes to locate John Argo’s room. She hadn’t expected security outside the room, and there wasn’t. It wouldn’t have mattered of course. The explosive on her cart would take out everything in a twenty-five-meter radius. She could have simply parked the cart along the wall outside, and let her little friend take care of the rest. Still, with no security, she could push the cart inside and verify the target was there.

  He was.

  Sara had been provided a picture of the man she was to kill. She found him slightly reclined in a hospital bed attempting to watch the TV. Poor guy was having a hard time of it. There was only one other person inside: a short, overweight woman, chattering on about how real gumbo didn’t have tomatoes in it. Her recipe was the best, the woman promised. She would make him some just as soon as he got out of here to prove it. John Argo nodded and grumbled, flipping the channel on the TV.

  Sara smiled politely and pushed her cart off to one side. She stepped in front, keeping her body between the cart and the other occupants to shield her next activity from view.

  She opened the bottle and set the cap aside. Next, she pulled out an ink pen from her scrubs and hit the plunger three times fast. Just like it was supposed to, a tiny LED began blinking red. She grinned to herself and dropped it inside, resealing the bottle. The pen was a sophisticated detonator on a seven-minute timer. Through the opaque bottle, she could see the pen softly winking. This was going to be so cool, she thought to herself. She lifted a white cloth towel from her cart and draped it over the bottle to hide the flashing light of the detonator. She would have liked the bottle to have not been translucent, but this would work fine.