Extraction (John Taylor #8) - Chapter 13

Washington D.C.

Kara rode back on the bus, trying to work out what she was going to do. There were a lot of things she needed to work out before she could do something about Packer. She’d already talked to Robles about him, and she was certain that if something suddenly happened to Packer, Robles would notice and put it together. She had to be smart about it like Taylor would.

She got home and headed up to her room after she and her best-friend slash roommate agreed on what to get for dinner. She popped her window open and looked over the security system connection. When they’d moved in, Taylor, being the paranoid over-planner that he was, had given the security system a once over, and explained it to her as he did. Of course, it was unlikely that he would have realized his off-the-cuff explanations would have helped her circumvent them a year and a half later, but here she was. The window alarm sensor was basically two rectangular pieces of plastic that used magnets to trip a switch. When the magnet was in place, it completed the circuit and the alarm showed the window as closed, and when the magnet was moved, the circuit would break and the alarm system would notice it.

Taylor had then gone on a rant about how surprised he was that the expensive security that Mary Jane’s mother had paid before she started getting Secret Service protection had used something like this and not something less able to be tampered with. He admitted that the thickness of the wood on the window would make it hard for someone to trick the sensor from the outside, but someone on the inside could disable it using another magnet to fool the sensor into not switching.

Kara had stopped by a hardware store on the way home and gotten a flat, strong magnet that she hoped would do the job. She put the magnet in place and carefully closed the window, so it wouldn’t dislodge her decoy, and then went to have dinner.

Kara spent the entire meal very concisely trying to stay in the moment and hold conversations while her brain was several miles away, worrying about Packer and thinking over her plan for getting in and out of the house without being seen. Mary Jane did ask once or twice if everything was all right, but Kara played it off as being distracted about stuff at school, and let Mary Jane make her own assumptions from there, probably thinking it had something to do with a boy.

It always amazed Kara how her friend had bounced back from their ordeal in Russia, although she hadn’t actually been abused in any way. It had been terrifying and she had her own trauma from it, but nothing had happened to put her off dating. While she hadn’t returned to her partying lifestyle, she’d started dating again a few months later and guys were something she thought about a lot. Kara had zero interest in guys, or anyone for that matter, which was something Mary Jane had never been able to wrap her head around.

They finished up dinner and Kara said she was tired from a long day and excused herself. Once in her room, Kara changed out of the jeans and t-shirt she’d been wearing and into a dark hoodie without writing or identifying marks on it, and dark pants. The time ticked by slowly as she waited. She needed to run a test on the alarm and she needed everyone asleep before she made her move. It was getting to be early morning in Somalia and she worried that the later she waited, the more chance Packer could okay the hit he’d put out on Taylor. The only thing she had going for her was Packer saying he wanted to talk to the person before agreeing to pay them for it.

She heard Mary Jane go to bed and was pretty sure the alarm had been set. Thankfully, as an adult child, her friend only had a couple of agents at any given time, and it wasn’t enough for stuff like regular patrols around the house or anything. Her first step was to test if she’d really disabled the alarm or not. Holding the magnet in place, she pushed the window open and listened for several minutes.

She’d accidentally done this a few months before, opening her window for fresh air late at night, setting off the alarm. One of the agents had come and knocked on her door, asking her if everything was alright and if she just opened her window, so she had an idea of what their response time would be. Time ticked by as she waited three times longer than that, just to be sure. No one came to check on her or ask about the open window. It wasn’t a hundred percent proof, but it would have to do.

She was on the second floor, but that wasn’t a significant problem, since her room was above the dining room, which had this nice bay window, whose roof sloped down, getting her halfway to the ground before she had to jump off. She was pretty sure it wasn’t meant to hold the weight of a person, but she was very light, usually hovering around ninety pounds. Still, she lowered herself gingerly to the outcropping roof and tested it before putting her weight completely on it. Thankfully, it held as she reached up and pulled her window most of the way down, just short of bumping against the magnet, since she didn’t want to accidentally dislodge it while she was outside.

The lights were off in the dining room as she swung her head down and looked around, checking that the coast was clear, before making the short hop to the ground. And just like that, she was on the ground.

A brick wall ran around the house, which wasn’t a problem. She hoisted herself over it and went through their rear neighbor’s yard and out to the street. Step two was getting to Packer. She’d paid enough attention when Taylor and Whitaker had discussed cases that she knew police could backtrack things like taxis and buses once they had a suspect, so she walked a mile before flagging down a cab, making sure to do it on a major road, to make it that much harder to track the ride back to her. She sat back as the driver took her to a spot not far from Packer’s apartment and collected herself for the next step of her plan.

Somalia

Taylor paced the small hut they’d shoved him in, and chewed on the problem. He’d gotten a good look at the village both getting into the central building and as they marched him to their single room prison, and the odds of making an escape didn’t seem good.

He might be able to get past the two guys standing outside the hut guarding him, and the village itself still had just gotten started for a day, which meant people bustling everywhere. He might have a chance if they held him all day and through the night, when maybe he could get away in the dark, but the way Gehdi spoke, it didn’t seem like he’d have that much time.

Taylor had known he was taking a serious risk when he walked into the village and he’d planned out several ways this could have gone bad, but finding out someone had put a bounty on his head specifically had not occurred to him. The only real option was to appeal to his captor’s mercenary nature, but he didn’t know who he was bidding against or how much they’d offered up for grabbing him. While he was prepared to commit to money he’d have to get from Wheeler, since he was confident that the CIA, or at least Wheeler, wanted this targeting system bad enough to be willing to throw some money at it, he’d have to find a way to convince Gehdi that he could make good on the money before Gehdi was able to kill him, which was going to be tough.

Taylor had pissed off a lot of people over the years so the list of people who’d want to put a bounty on his head was pretty large, but the timing was a little too specific for anyone but Northbridge. What Taylor couldn’t figure out is why they let him come if they were just going to kill him off. It was possible they really hadn’t had a choice without others in the company getting wise to what was happening, which supported the idea that a group working inside Northbridge were behind the targeting system being sold off, something they wouldn’t have wanted others at the company to learn about. If that were the case then it would make sense to get rid of Taylor in a way that looked like he’d died as a casualty during the rescue attempt rather than stonewall his involvement entirely.

But if that was the plan, then why did they wait until their men on the ground had been all but wiped out. Why even let him get this far. If it had been Taylor he would have gotten rid of the liability the moment they hit the beach, before he could become a liability during the mission to recover the tactical system. They’d even had the opportunity when O’Brien had gone after the kid but Stone stepped in before they could come to blows.

It didn’t make any sense, but it was all academic, really. The only way out now was to get his offer out before Gehdi could have his men get rid of him, and hope he could get a big enough number from Wheeler to counter their bid.

The door cracked open, stopping Taylor mid-pace as one of the guards came in, rifle at the ready.

“Come on,” he said in Arabic.

The guy was sloppy, waving Taylor to leave but not getting out of the doorway himself, which meant he’d have to let Taylor into arm’s length pull the weapon up to let Taylor pass. Had Taylor wanted to, he could have almost certainly gotten the man’s weapon away from him, but he probably couldn’t do anything about his partner without firing the borrowed weapon, which would end his escape attempt then and there. Instead, he squeezed past the guard and let them lead him to Gehdi, who was sitting in the same chair he’d been in when Taylor left.

“It appears you have made some people very unhappy,” he said, giving Taylor a smile that was somewhere between friendly and wolf.

“If I’m not pissing off assholes, then what’s the point,” Taylor retorted.

“I see. Well, these particular assholes want to speak to you before we kill you, and they want video of your death, which they have asked to be particularly gruesome. I don’t go in for that kind of thing normally myself, but the right money makes any of us adaptable, doesn’t it?”

“There’s money in it for you if you work with me too. I can beat their offer.”

“Are you hiding it on your person? It would need to be a significant amount of money to change our minds, and I don’t believe you were carrying that kind of cash. Did you hide it before coming into my town, perhaps?”

“I have to make a call, but I can get it.”

“Or you can tell someone where you are and have your American friends send a drone to my home. I think not. But, we do have to make a phone call. Apparently, the condition of the price on your head is the person who wants you dead wants to talk to you first.”

Taylor had a sneaking suspicion about who that might be. Putting a price on his head could have been anyone involved in the sale of classified material, but wanting to talk to Taylor before Gehdi killed him meant the grudge was personal. Even if Stone or one of those guys had escaped and was behind this, which was unlikely, they didn’t have that kind of personal grudge. The only person that Taylor knew of that did was Packer and this kind of thing was just up that little weasel’s alley.

Washington D.C.

Packer walked briskly out of his apartment, trying to repress the desire to rub his hands together in anticipation. Putting out a call for one of these thugs to take care of his problems for him had been a long shot, and he was sure his partners were starting to doubt his ability to handle situations like this. They might not be ruthless, but they were good at covering their own asses and if they thought he was going to hurt them, he could see his partners trying to preemptively get rid of him before he could.

Packer had always been aware of that and had set up some contingencies of his own, just in case. Not that he was going to need them, since it looked like he’d managed to pull another one out of his hat.

Actually, this was going to work out so much better than his original plan, he’d almost wished he’d pulled this idea out sooner. Originally, he was just going to have Stone off Taylor in the compound along with the hostages, so that if anyone looked back at what happened they would just count him among the casualties. When he’d first been settled with Taylor he’d known he’d have to have the man killed, since they couldn’t leave any witnesses behind. While he would admit to a certain amount of glee at getting some payback for what Taylor had done to him, at the time it had just been a means to an end.

Now though, Taylor would know who was behind his death and the last thing that sanctimonious prick would ever think was how he shouldn’t have screwed over Edward Packer. He rubbed his hands together with glee at the thought before pulling out his cell phone and looking up the number they’d sent him to call.

A sound caught his attention and Packer’s head snapped up. There was no way anyone could know what he was about to do, but that didn’t keep him from being a bit paranoid. Besides what he was about to do, this was Washington D.C. and crime was a thing even in the nicer areas, so he’d have to be an idiot to not be a little concerned by other people out walking at night. The worry lasted right up until he saw what had made that sound.

Walking his way was a small girl, maybe even a child, in a dark sweatshirt, the hood pulled up and her head down, hands in the front pouch of the oversized sweatshirt. He couldn’t really see her face but he could tell it was a girl from her shape, even through the baggy clothes she wore, and the way she walked. The clothes themselves looked to be of good quality, which also crossed off homeless or someone who wouldn’t fit in this neighborhood.

Packer’s phone rang, diverting his attention from the girl, since she was clearly not a threat. This phone call would get their plan back on track, Packer back on track to get the riches he deserved, and get revenge that he’d been waiting for over the last nine months. He wasn’t going to let anything distract him from it now.

“Yes?” Packer said, answering it.

“I was told you were the man to speak to.”

“Yes, I … what are …”

He paused as the girl he’d written off stopped right in front of him. Packer was about to demand to know what the hell this girl was doing until she lifted her head all the way and he saw her face for the first time. He recognized her instantly.

Taylor’s annoying kid hadn’t really had anything to do with what happened with Taylor, but he’d bumped into both before the attempts on Caldwell’s life and during the investigation that ended with Packer being blackballed. She was the Caldwell kid’s friend and was always around whenever the campaign was back in D.C.

He was confused, trying to work out why this kid, of all people, would be standing here in front of him in the middle of the night. It had thrown him badly enough that he didn’t even notice the gun until she had it all the way up and he was looking straight down the barrel.

Packer had a brief flash of anger as he tried to figure out how Taylor had managed to turn this around and beat him again.

Besides the bullet, that was the last thing that went through Packer’s brain as the area around him lit up in a false daylight and plunged back into darkness.