“No.”
Travers stood up, spread the man’s legs wide, and then kicked the scrotum again with the steel toe of his boot, as hard as he could. He’d popped at least one of the testicles with that strike, no doubt.
“Just kill me,” the kid moaned pitifully as Travers dropped his full weight down on the lower back once more. “Let me die.”
The pain was excruciating, Travers knew. But unfortunately for his victim, he knew how to keep it going, to keep him just on that edge, without letting him pass out. And he fully intended to do just that until he received the answers he sought.
“Please,” the man begged as he struggled for every breath. “I can’t take any more.”
“What’s your name?”
“I can’t— Okay, okay,” he yelled as loudly as he could when Travers started to stand up again. “I’m O’Hara.”
Travers eased back down onto the kid’s back. “O’Hara?” he murmured. “Ryan O’Hara?”
“Yeah,” the young guy gasped.
Travers hadn’t trained O’Hara like he had Nathan Kohler. Typically, he was only involved with one of every three new recruits. So it wasn’t like he’d recognize the kid. But he’d heard of him. “You shot the president in L.A.”
“Yes.”
“Shane Maddux sent you after me,” Travers muttered as his eyes darted around, as he tried to see anything through what little remained of the late afternoon light.
O’Hara had joined the RCS Falcon Division only recently, Travers knew, but he’d defected almost right away to join Maddux’s small gang of mutineers. That was what Travers had heard through the grapevine, anyway, and it was absolutely believable because that was the thing about Maddux: He had this way of convincing subordinates of anything, even something as insane as defecting from Red Cell Seven.
“You’re still working for him, aren’t you?” The realization rocked Travers. “Jesus Christ.”
O’Hara didn’t answer, didn’t confirm, but that was irrelevant. Travers took one more panic-stricken look around, then snapped the kid’s neck and took off.
As he ran, he skinned his pistol from the leather holster at the small of his back, chambered the first round, and let the smooth black composite barrel guide him through the forest. He hadn’t bothered to use the 9mm to take down O’Hara and the other kid, even though the odds had been two-on-one. He hadn’t wanted to kill them both right away so he could draw information — as he successfully had. But knowing Shane Maddux was involved in this made Travers draw his weapon even though he had no idea if Maddux was anywhere close or if he was half a world away. It felt as if he was close, and that was enough.
Trust your instincts.
So maybe it had been an instinct to draw his pistol, Travers realized — a survival instinct. Because once Maddux put you in his sights, he never stopped coming until the hunt was done and one of you was dead. Maddux had been involved in many hunts during his two decades in Red Cell Seven, and as far as Travers knew, the guy was still very much alive and free out there despite his defection — which meant all the other guys involved in those past hunts were dead. Travers had no intention of being Maddux’s next trophy.
He put his head down and ran faster. Shane Maddux was the only man in the world Wilson Travers truly feared.
CHAPTER 8
“Go, go, go!” shouted the leader over his shoulder as the van skidded to a stop at the outer edge of the strip mall parking lot.
Twelve minutes ago the three men in the back had opened fire with automatic weapons inside a huge Minneapolis mall that was now two miles away, spraying the holiday shopping crowd with a deadly hail of bullets. They’d killed nine people in the assault and wounded fifteen more, four critically.
When they were done, the three assassins had raced out of the mall and into this brand-new white van that the driver had waiting for them at the curb just outside the entrance.
“Come on!”
The three men piled out of the van and into the back of another van, which was parked in the spot immediately adjacent to the one they’d just pulled into, while the driver, who was the leader of the squad, raced from driver’s seat to driver’s seat. This second van was old, rusted, and painted a faded robin’s egg blue. The leader figured it would make for perfect cover with its dented sides and the ladder on top. He’d added that detail this morning just before the attack. He’d stolen the ladder from a painting company down the block from the Eden Prairie ranch house they’d been using for the last three months.
As the leader revved the engine of the second getaway vehicle, he glanced through the windshield. Two boys were straddling their bikes less than fifty feet away. Neither of them was more than ten years old, he figured. But they were both aiming cell phones directly at the two vans, obviously taking videos. They would die for it. And their parents would regret giving them such expensive toys at such young ages. Having so much money wasn’t a good thing. Flaunting it was worse. This population needed to understand that.
“Kill them!” he yelled, stabbing his finger wildly at the boys.
Two of the men jumped out of the back and fired. Job finished, they climbed into the van again as the leader sprinted to where the boys lay, grabbed their phones off the blacktop, and sprinted back to the van.
The chaos at the edge of the parking lot had attracted attention. A man coming out of a dry cleaner’s in the middle of the strip mall had witnessed the horrific scene of the boys being shot off their bikes. He’d called 911 immediately, contacting the emergency service as the leader was running back to the van after scooping up the boys’ cell phones.
Fortunately, a local policeman who hadn’t been called to the shooting two miles away was emerging from the post office beside the dry cleaner just as the witness was connecting with the 911 operator. The witness alerted the policeman to what he’d seen, and the cop made it to his squad car before the van had even exited the strip mall parking lot.
The chase was on.
Agent Radcliff burst into the Oval Office without knocking. “Mr. President,” he called loudly as he stopped just in front of the eagle woven into the carpet. “Sir, it’s important.”
“What is it?”
President Dorn sat in the wheelchair behind his desk, studying a piece of paper inside an open folder that Stewart Baxter had just placed in front of him. Baxter stood on one side of Dorn while Jane Travanti, secretary of Homeland Security, stood on the other. Travanti was tall and angular with straight blond hair cut short in a pageboy so it fell to just above her slim shoulders.
Next to Travanti was Wes Dolan, the director of National Intelligence. He was short, nearly bald, and had an all-business air about him.
A television sat on a table beside a wingback chair off to Radcliff’s left. It was turned on, but the volume was low, and no one seemed to be paying attention to it.
“You need to see something, sir,” he said, pointing at the TV.
“We’re about to go down to the Situation Room, Agent Radcliff. Can it wait a few minutes? I can watch whatever it is down there.”
Dorn looked exhausted, even more so than he had when Radcliff had wheeled him down here from the residence, and that had been only a few minutes ago. There were deep, dark circles under his eyes now, and he had a gaunt look about him, like he’d quickly gone from predator to prey. Or he had the weight of the world on his still-weak shoulders.
Which, of course, he did.
The president’s nurse stood near the table littered with medical supplies. She didn’t look much better. There was fear in her eyes, too, though it was a different kind. It seemed like she’d finally gotten the responsibility she’d been wishing for all her career — and now she was wishing she hadn’t.