The Cure Page 5
A shadow leapt across the room, huge and dark, with the stealth of a panther. There were nauseating sounds of bones being cracked and broken, and terrible sounds heaving from human chests. And then there was silence, punctured only by the dim sounds of the T.V. in the background.
11
The black Suburban tore down I-90 toward the South Dakota state line. Four highly-trained and battle-tested men rode in the vehicle as it cut through the cool predawn air. Jaco Ivanov rode in the front passenger seat, his teeth grinding in gleeful anticipation as he checked his watch. Just after five o’clock. The scientist should be already dead. All that was left now was to exterminate the terrorist vermin he’d brought into the country.
After receiving his 21 million-dollar payday, he’d be able to finish his negotiations for the castle he’d put an opening offer on last week. One of the wealthiest families in his parents’ home country owned that magnificent property, but found themselves in dire straits, needing to sell. Owning it would give him and his only sister, who had moved back to Bulgaria, oligarch-like status. It was time for him to start living like a king. With this payday, he’d have the finest of everything for the rest of his life.
He and his men were dressed in full body armor, armed with an arsenal of weapons ranging from pistols to close-range combat machine guns and explosives. Jaco had made sure his team was prepared to take the terrorists down fast and hard. It wasn’t his style to mess around in these situations.
At 5:03 AM, as scripted, Peter Rains’ intel specialist at the CIA uncovered intelligence that revealed the location of the terrorist safehouse, and their plan to escape the country in a soybean container headed to the Middle East. Everyone needed to be dead by the time the FBI got there. Upon their arrival, Jaco and his team would surrender the mission to the Feebs and disappear into the morning sun, never to be seen again. By midday tomorrow, 21 million would be deposited into his offshore account. And not that he cared, but he and his team would be instant heroes for taking down the bad guys he had brought into the country.
He just loved the irony of his plan. It made him feel almost as special as the money.
12
The dome light flared to life to reveal the redhead, who had killed Steve and Alice, lying dead on the floor next to Gracie, a single gunshot wound drilled through his skull. The short terrorist who had killed Anna lay motionless with blood pooling around his head. The leader and the clean-shaven young man were on the ground, unconscious.
“Unc?” Gracie cried out, astonished. She scrambled to her feet and ran to him.
Bic hugged her. “There’s blood in your hair.” He pulled away. “You alright?”
“Everything…” she began. “Everyone is gone.”
“You’re safe now.”
She fumbled around her words. “The world… thinks I’m a terrorist.”
“Gracie…” he paused looking hard at the men he’d just taken down. “These men are terrorists. Someone went through a lot of trouble to set you up.”
“How did you even find me?”
“I have resources,” he said, turning away.
“These men… the money…”
He looked back at her. “Gracie, please, I can see it in your eyes. Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”
“Seriously, Unc, how did you find me in the middle of nowhere?” Any answer would have only prompted more questions.
Bic looked down at the emerald heart pendant he’d given her for high school graduation. He took it gently in his fingers.
“You remember when I made you promise you’d wear this always?” There was no fondness in his voice.
"Y-yeah… of course I remember.”
He looked at her like he was waiting for something to click. “Always,” he said. “You do wear it always. I know you do.”
And the reality hit. “You gave me a pendant with a tracking device in it? You lojacked me??”
“To keep you safe.” He shrugged.
She didn’t have time to register the meaning of the act, feeling only betrayal. But she glanced around at the corpses strewn at her feet, and she clasped the pendant. It was more than a mere token of his love for her. It was life itself. A surge of raw emotion made her tremble.
“Unc, what are you not telling me? Oh my God, I can see the lies all over your face.”
“I promise you, I had nothing to do with this, Gracie—why would I ruin our dream?”
One of the men on the floor started to come to. Bic put his massive leg on the man’s chest to hold him in place.
She stared in disbelief. “I need you to answer me.”
Bic stared down at the writhing figure who struggled to speak.
“Was my company funded by terrorists?
“No,” Bic said firmly, staring at her with his white eyes.
“Where did all those millions of dollars come from?”
“Gracie, the money has nothing to do with terrorists, I promise.”
“Then where’d you get it?
“There’s nothing in this world more important to me than you. I would never hurt you.” He kept dodging.
“This isn’t a hard question to answer. Where did the ten million dollars come from?”
“The money came from me.”
“Really. Your consulting business? God, how could I have been so stupid?”
“You want to know about my business?”
“I’m a wanted terrorist. I deserve the truth.”
The man from the floor reached out for Gracie’s leg.
Bic lunged down, immediately binding, then gagging, the man.
He looked up at Gracie. “I promise I’ll tell you everything. Right now, we have to leave.”
“I’m calling the FBI. I have to clear my name. You have to explain to them where the money came from.”
He spoke sternly. “Gracie, I understand you’re confused, but turning to the government would be no different than giving yourself back to the terrorists. Right now, as we speak, there are men on their way here, very bad men who are coming to clean this mess up. I’m sure of it.”
“How could you possibly know this?”
“I’ve dealt with these situations before. They don’t care about the lives, they just want to discredit you. Killing you is part of that.”
She let out a slight chuckle of disbelief. “Unc, if this is really you, then you’ll understand. I’m sorry, but you always taught me to be honest and tell the truth. It’s always served me well, so that’s what I’m going to do. You gonna try and stop me?”
He gently placed his hand on her arm. “Gracie, wait. Think about the news. How quickly the CIA leaked all that evidence to the news about you being a terrorist. There’s only one reason they’d bother to frame you instead of just killing you with everyone else.”
"You keep saying ‘they’. Who the hell is ‘they’?”
“People who want you dead because of what you have.”
She thought for a moment. “The cure?”
“Terrorists don’t frame people and give them credit for their acts of terror. They’re usually pretty quick to claim that glory for themselves.”
“What in the world am I involved in here?” She said as she sank down on the couch, her face in her hands. “How can you be sure your ‘consulting business’ isn’t part of this?”
“I have nothing to do with any of this and neither do you—that’s the point. Well, other than your cure. You have to trust me. This was all premeditated, planned down to the minute.” His mannerisms quickened. “We have to go now.” He bent down and finished binding and gagging the other two men on the floor.
“You do that awfully well,” she said flatly.
He looked at her pleadingly. “I’ll explain everything. Yes, I’m not exactly who you thought I was—but just in my job. I am and always will be your Uncle Bic who loves you dearly and wants nothing more than the best for you. And that’s why we need to go.”
“They will lock you up and throw away the key, and that’s the best case scenario. Worst is you die during transport to the field office.”
She watched in disbelief as Uncle Bic yanked the two bound men from the floor by the backs of their shirts. It was like watching a guy heft his luggage.
“Running is what guilty people do,” she said, rising.
“And survivors,” he said. “Come on.”
13
The black Suburban drifted down the narrow dirt road at about five miles per hour with its headlights off. In the distance, with the faint gray backdrop of the eastern horizon, Jaco could just make out, above the fields of soy, the clump of thick trees surrounding the terrorists’ safehouse.
“Pull over right here,” he said when they were about 200 yards away from the trees. He glanced at his watch: 5:25 AM.
The driver pulled off the road at a 45-degree angle. Soybean plants snapped and crackled under the tires as the vehicle slogged into the field, sinking a good four inches into the loosely-packed soil.
“We’re gonna need our NVG’s, boys,” Jaco said quietly.
One of the men in the rear seat, whom Jaco knew only as Herzer, reached into one of the equipment boxes in the back of the Suburban for the night vision goggles. The men finished their prep by sliding high-capacity magazines into their sidearms and MP5 submachine guns, making sure each firearm had a round chambered.
The team stepped out of the vehicle into the thick, fuzzy-leaved plants. The vegetation was thigh high and reeked of wet earth. A slight breeze shook the leaves of the plants ever so slightly, giving them the appearance, in the eerie green of the NVGs, of a sea of hands waving in the air, like a stadium at a sold-out rock concert for aliens.
Two men exited the rear of the vehicle then worked quickly to throw a mesh camouflage net over the vehicle.
Jaco gave the signal to move toward the trees. They crouched low as they made their way toward the target. The only giveaway of their approach—if anyone had the senses to detect such a subtle hint—was the quieting of the grasshoppers jumping out of their paths as they cleared row after row.
At the tree line, Jaco got his first visual of the front of the house. He noticed two things instantly: the picture window of the family room, brightly illuminated from within, and the terrorists’ nondescript white cargo van parked in the driveway.
Jaco put his fist up and signaled to the team: two in front, two to the rear. The men going to the rear of the house stayed within the coverage of the tree line as they moved toward their position. Jaco waited until they had time to take their places before gesturing the final man, the mercenary Herzer, forward. They slid to the rear of the van for coverage. As Jaco knelt behind the vehicle, he caught a glimpse of something from the corner of his eye.
He pulled out a mini-flashlight and pointed it at the dirt next to the van.
“What in the hell?” Herzer breathed as he crouched low behind the van, anticipating gunfire in response to Jaco’s reckless action.
As quickly as Jaco had turned the light on, he turned it off. He glanced at Herzer and whispered, “There was another vehicle here.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Be ready for anything,” Jaco said as he flipped off the safety on his MP5, prompting Herzer to do the same. They darted toward the front door with their weapons at port arms, ready to unload the 30-round clips into anything that moved.
At the door, out of the line of sight of any of the windows, Jaco gave the signal. Herzer, who was crouched under the living room’s picture window, pulled out a flash-bang grenade, pulled the pin, and paused—a lot longer than any sane man would have. Then, without looking, he heaved the grenade through the window above him.
It crashed through the window and landed with a loud metallic thud on the floor. An instant later, a deafening bang sent a pulse of light throughout the house. Jaco didn’t even bother to see if the door was open as he drove his heel into it, knowing he had a good 5 to 10 seconds of complete blindness and disorientation on the part of his enemy for easy kill shots once he busted through.
There was nothing to shoot. One terrorist, shot through the head, hung by his wrists from the ceiling fan in the middle of the room, his feet dangling two feet off the floor. No sign of the others. Not good.
“The rest of the house is clear,” announced one of the two men who’d come in the back.
“I thought this was gonna be an easy job,” Herzer snarled as he looked at the dead terrorist hanging in the air, his MP5 still in a combat position as he scanned all possible points of attack. “Already dead is too easy or too hard.”
“Sometimes you actually have to earn the money I pay you,” Jaco snapped as he noticed a small, square piece of paper tucked under the dead terrorist’s right bootlace. Scowling, he snatched it up. As he unfolded it, all he could think of was how badly he was going to hurt whoever had foiled his perfect plan.
In black ink, all caps, the note read: IT’S PORK CHOP EATIN’ TIME!
“Cut the lights, now!” Jaco shouted as he flipped down his night vision goggles. “Exit as you entered.” He let Herzer go ahead of him, just in case an ambush awaited. When it was clear nothing was going to happen to the merc, Jaco followed with extreme caution, his senses on high alert.
“Someone’s running through the field to the north,” one of the rear-entrance men reported by helmet radio.
“Track him down and take him out,” Jaco replied. “We’re right behind you.”
He made his way quickly along the tree line in a zig-zag pattern, making sure to use every tree possible to block potential sniper fire. Herzer followed on his heels. Once he made it to the rear tree line, he peeked around the trunk of his cover and saw the pursuit: his men were running full tilt after a single man who had a 300-yard lead.
Close enough.
Jaco nodded to himself, then gave the order. “Clear to engage.”
The chatter of automatic weapons fire rang out, even as the commandos continued to dash toward the fleeing man. He watched confidently as they quickly adjusted their fire to drop the runner.
He went sprawling like a bag of rocks. After he dropped, Jaco’s men slowed to a jog, MP5s still braced against their shoulders and at the ready, advancing toward the location of the man they’d just hit.
“Status,” Jaco said into the radio clipped to his shoulder.
“This guy’s ankle was tied to a stake in the ground, with enough rope slack to run in a small circle. Threat is neutralized.”
“Ignore him for now,” Jaco replied, “There were four terrorists. We have two left and the scientist. Keep your eyes open.”
“Behind those trees on the left,” Jaco heard one of the men say through the radio.
The men with their MP5’s drawn walked toward the tree.
Approximately 20 yards from where they’d dropped the target, a massive form surged upward from within the camouflage of the soybean plants like an enormous wolf spider leaping from its den. Before the operatives could react, the large man simultaneously jabbed large combat knives into each man’s gut. The massive man lifted them in the air, one in each hand, before dropping them to the ground. The whole spectacle was eerily silent, the smooth death of two men without disruption to the predawn quiet.
Jaco stared in awe. The two long knives gleamed in the waning moonlight like the fangs of some terrible beast.
The figure vanished, as silently as he’d appeared, almost leaving Jaco to wonder if it had been an optical illusion. There was another hired gun at the scene.
Jaco’s lip twitched into a half smile. This was starting to get fun.
14
A thousand yards south of the farmhouse, concealed behind a massive pair of burr oak trees within a vast sea of soybean plants, Gracie sat in the old pickup, arms wrapped around her torso and shivering, her brain laboring to keep pace with her po
unding heart.
None of this made any sense.
No more than a couple hundred yards away she had seen Bic just pop up and kill two men like he’d been doing it all his life. She loved Bic Green, her uncle.
But Bic Green was kind, her benefactor and biggest fan. This man… he was a murderer. What she saw stained every moment of family and closeness she had felt since her mom died. She hated this monster.
She couldn’t handle this. Anger, fear, and a cold, calculating detachment took over.
She started the pickup and accelerated out from behind her cover, plants snapping and thumping as she plowed through.
She gazed through her rearview and saw Bic spring from the cover of the soybeans. He was now heading in a full sprint toward her, his mouth open, roaring something she couldn’t hear.
Gunshots cracked into the passenger side of the truck. The window blew out.
Cutting the wheel to the left while ducking her body below the window line, she kept her body low, foot glued to the gas. Bullets popped and rattled into her vehicle.
She was going to make it to the road even if it killed her.
15
Bic sprinted at an angle to cut off the two gunmen’s path to Gracie, a smoke grenade spewing thick clouds of gray in one hand, a blazing 9mm in the other. The gunmen retreated into the tree line surrounding the house, vanishing into the woody predawn shadows, and as Gracie continued to drive toward the road, they turned their fire on Bic. Only their muzzle flashes gave them away.
Mission accomplished, as far as he was concerned. Gracie was out.
He chucked the grenade to create a wall of cover while unloading the remaining rounds of his Glock 19. He reloaded while in full sprint, then set off another grenade and threw it into the tree line of the house. This new wall screened his path to the front of the property.