King's Ransom Page 8

  As they drew ever closer to him, Carson realized the second vehicle was also an SUV. And he watched as its driver hit the brakes and deftly swept in behind the assassin.

  The action was blocked from his view but he could hear the devastating rounds splitting the air. When the black SUV’s back end suddenly dipped, he realized the other driver had finally taken out one of the composite run flats. A shower of sparks rose from the rear of the vehicle, its back right rim grinding against the pavement.

  Carson saw the next move before it happened. He looked on with admiration as the mystery driver executed the Pittman maneuver perfectly. The new SUV gracefully swept to the left of the black vehicle and drew even with the back fender well. Then, in a violent motion, the driver jerked the wheel to the right.

  The resultant collision sent the black SUV reeling. The vehicle’s weight shifted hard with the momentum and the rim was forced to bear the full mass of the machine. The driver tried desperately to turn out of the contact, but was unsuccessful. The back end fishtailed and sank into a rut, which sent the whole rig vertical.

  The black SUV flipped through the air, clearing the guardrail and toppling head-over-tail down the steep embankment on the other side. Seconds later, an enormous orange fireball filled the sky.

  The assassins were dead. But now Carson had new problems. He was unarmed and had an unidentified assailant approaching his six.

  Almost poetically, the old dodge chose that moment to breathe its last. With a final heaving gasp, the engine died and Carson guided the truck onto the shoulder.

  As the vehicle slowly approached him from behind, Carson produced a knife from his duffle. He knew he wouldn’t last five seconds against that submachine gun, but he refused to lie down.

  He would stay in the fight. He would die an honorable man’s death.

  When he climbed from the truck, the battered door nearly fell off its hinges. Carson winced as pain tore through his body. Every step was torturous, but he held his head high, watching as the SUV pulled even with him and stopped.

  The window started to roll down and Carson held up the knife. “Don’t expect me to—”

  He had intended to say he wasn’t going to go down quietly. But as it turned out, the shock drove the words from his mouth.

  There was only one person in the vehicle, and it was a woman.

  Agent Rachel Sampson unlocked the door and said two words: “Get in.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Carson kept the knife raised as he stared in disbelief. “Who the hell are you?”

  Sampson was nonplussed. “I think what you meant to say was thank you.” She reached behind the seat and sat a white box on the console beside her. “Get in the car. You look like hell.”

  He glanced at the white box then back at the woman. “Who are you?” he asked again. By this point he already knew, but he needed to hear her say it.

  “You know who I am. Now, for the last time, get in the car.”

  Carson turned and started walking back toward Lee’s.

  There was something he had to do before he left Wytheville. Plus he needed a few minutes to think. The sudden arrival of Rachel Sampson was concerning on multiple levels. Was the CIA having him followed?

  What have you gotten yourself into, Colton?

  He peered over the guardrail. As he suspected, over a hundred feet down the slope, wedged between two trees, the black SUV was charred beyond recognition. Any documents or revealing information inside it were in similar condition.

  He continued down the road and listened as Sampson followed him.

  It took longer than anticipated, but he finally found the man lying on the pavement. His neck was broken, there was no doubt about that, but he also had a compound fracture in his right leg. At least three inches of his femur were exposed.

  The man was clearly of Eastern European descent. The features were dark, the eyebrows heavy and brooding. The man’s hair was closely cropped, military-style, and it was jet black, matching the brows. His nose was large and crooked and he had dense black stubble covering his face.

  He wore a black jacket, jeans, and gray combat boots. Carson rifled through every thread clothing and produced only one item of interest—a phone. Other than that, the man was clean.

  The phone was dead, so Carson slipped it in his pocket and turned around, finding Sampson parked a hundred yards back up the road. She drove slowly toward him.

  Yet again, Carson had a decision to make.

  He didn’t trust her. Not even a little bit. But he was a hundred miles from nowhere and his truck was out of commission. If he wanted to call someone to come get him, he would have to walk a ways to find cell service, then wait at least three hours for someone to arrive. That was time he didn’t have.

  Despite his disinclinations, Carson opened the door and climbed into the Land Rover. The seats were leather and the vehicle smelled new. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he never would have believed it had just been used to kill someone.

  “Find anything?” she asked.

  He ignored her question and asked one of his own. “Is the Agency going to clean this up?”

  “Why would they?”

  “Because if that dead guy in the street somehow gets linked back to his employer, that employer may talk. That’s not good news for Langley. It’s obvious certain highly placed individuals are nervous. So I’d say they’ll have a team here within two hours.”

  Carson wasn’t sure he believed what he was saying, but he hoped it was true. If not, he would be linked to the violence. It was his truck that had been shot to hell and left at the scene.

  Sampson pushed the white box off the console into his lap. “Clean yourself up before infection sets in. And don’t get any blood on my seats.”

  Carson held his eyes on her, trying to piece it together. “Why’d you follow me?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t.”

  “Like hell you didn’t. I guess you were just taking a casual stroll through Wytheville on this fine evening?” He nodded toward the backseat. “The submachine gun sorta kills the casual vibe, by the way.”

  Carson opened the box and took out a pair of medical scissors. He went to work on cutting his shirt free from the wounds. The pain was substantial.

  “I didn’t follow you,” she repeated.

  Carson grunted and finished cutting a square out of his shirt. He took a water bottle from the kit and poured it over the wound, using a piece of gauze to soak up the bloody water and wipe the area clean. Once the dried blood and detritus had been wiped away he could see what he was doing.

  “Care to share how this happy coincidence happened then?” he asked, wincing as he prodded the wound with a pair of tweezers. There was shrapnel beneath the skin. “You meet my brother in Lexington, and then by some divine chance, eight hours later and two hundred miles away, you save my life?”

  “You’re welcome for that, by the way.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Truly. But you might as well quit the cloak and dagger. I don’t like being lied to, so maybe it’d be better if we just didn’t talk.”

  For the next several minutes, that’s exactly what happened. Neither of them said a word. Sampson drove and Carson cleaned his gunshot wound.

  After he was satisfied the shrapnel was gone, he lifted the tail of his shirt and bit down on it as he poured peroxide over the damaged tissue. A few seconds later, he did it again. He was applying an antibiotic salve when Sampson broke the silence.

  “Your brother and I met at a park this afternoon. We talked for a short time and then he left. I watched him drive away and I saw a black Chrysler pull onto the street three cars behind him.”

  Sampson kept her eyes fixed on the road. “I tailed the Chrysler into a neighborhood. I saw no sign of Connor, but after an hour or so another vehicle pulled alongside the car.” She gestured behind them. “The black Tahoe. As you now know, there were three people in it. They talked briefly with the person in the car then took off. When th
ey did, I picked up the tail.”

  Despite being in enormous pain and trying to stitch his shoulder, Sampson now had Carson’s full attention.

  “Four hours later I was here, in Wytheville. I followed them as far as the gravel turnoff, then turned around and found a dirt road about a mile back to the west. I found a tucked-away spot where I could see the main drag and waited.” She gave him a meaningful look. “The next vehicle I saw came by about two hours later.”

  “Me.”

  She nodded. “When you and your friends came barreling back down the road, guns blazing, I figured I better get involved.”

  Carson’s head was spinning. “So the guys that killed Lee were also keeping watch on Connor?”

  Sampson looked concerned. “It would appear so.”

  Carson leaned back against the seat and tried to steady his breathing. A series of images erupted in his mind.

  The lock on the gate. The tree across the road. The note on Lee’s kitchen table.

  The lock was obviously a replacement. The assassins had sawed or torched their way through Lee’s lock, then replaced it with the one Carson found.

  The fallen tree had nothing to do with the storm. It’s trunk had not been torn from the ground; there were no dangling roots or splintered edges. The stump had been smooth across the top. The tree had been sawed down.

  And then there was the note. We will never forget.

  The truth washed over Carson in a wave of nausea: the former Unit members were being targeted. The assassins had known Carson would come to Lee’s. And there was only one way that was possible, only one way they could have predicted his movements.

  “They have Colton,” he whispered.

  Sampson was unwavering; she already knew.

  The bastards had used Colton as bait.

  Carson’s cell phone rang. He prayed Mendez was calling with good news. But when he saw the screen, his face scrunched with confusion.

  “Lucian? Is everything okay?”

  The old man was coughing and it took him several seconds to gather himself.

  “Lucian!” Carson screamed. “Are you hurt?”

  “Carson,” Lucian wheezed. “You need to get…home. Something’s… happened.”

  Fresh panic burned in Carson’s gut. Lucian coughed several more times then finally came back on the line.

  “Carson…your parents’ house is on fire.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They made it back to the interstate in just over thirty minutes. Sampson took the onramp at eighty miles an hour, and when they merged onto the interstate they were somewhere north of a hundred.

  Carson held his cell phone up to the windshield and cursed under his breath.

  No service.

  Sampson had her phone sitting on the dash but it was useless too. Carson had been trying to call Connor ever since he heard the news from Lucian. If he hadn’t been sure they were being targeted before, he sure as hell was now and Connor needed to be warned.

  Recognizing the futility of pointing his phone toward the sky, he sat it on the dash next to Sampson’s and went back to stitching his shoulder. He nearly had the narrow wound sewn shut when a thought occurred to him.

  “Why follow the black car?” he asked.

  Sampson glanced over, then refocused on the road. “What do you mean?”

  “Connor blew you off. Plus, you obviously know our background. You know we don’t want anything to do with the Agency. So why follow the car? Why not just forget it and drive back to Langley? Tell them we declined your assistance?”

  Sampson grinned coldly. “When you say Agency, I assume you’re referring to the Central Intelligence Agency?”

  Carson said nothing.

  “I’m just asking,” she continued, “because if you are, and you have the experience I think you do, then you realize no one just declines an assignment.” She shrugged. “I was assigned to assist you in recovering Colton. That’s what I intend to do.”

  She was a good liar. He had to give her that.

  “You and I both know it’s not that simple,” said Carson. “The folks at Langley are experts at covering their own asses. My brother was taken in Paris on the same day he was scheduled to meet with an agent stationed in Lebanon. With all the shit going on in Syria, the last thing the Agency wants is undue attention.”

  Sampson tapped her fingers on the steering wheel.

  “But you just voluntarily risked your life. You followed a black truck full of assassins into the wilderness, then jumped into a nasty gunfight for a guy you don’t even know. That’s a lot to risk for CYA, Sampson. That’s some pretty impressive devotion to a cause. And I must say, you don’t strike me as a rule follower.”

  She looked over at him. “Is there a reason you’re interrogating the person who just saved your life?”

  “People don’t do what you did back there just because some asshole in a suit tells them to. I want your motive. Not the Agency’s. Yours.”

  She was quiet, but Carson saw the tension in her face. It was a microexpression.

  “What is it, Sampson? Why are you here?”

  The tension fled just as quickly as it came. When she replied, her voice was calm. “Let’s just say our interests are temporarily aligned.” She tapped the brakes and they dipped below a hundred. “And if that’s not good enough for you, Carson, then you can get your inquisitive ass out of my car.”

  Their eyes met but Carson looked away.

  “I’m confident you’d greatly regret that decision,” said Sampson. “Because if you want any chance of getting your brother back alive, you need my help. And despite what you might think, it really is that simple.”

  Carson registered the truth in what she was saying. Now that Lee was dead, he had, at most, four capable soldiers. And considering how the night had gone thus far, the odds of that number being further reduced were favorable.

  Reality pressed in on him. If Lee and Chuck were both dead, that led to a few logical conclusions.

  One, they were up against a formidable enemy. Two, they were shorthanded.

  The third conclusion had already been stated—they needed Rachel Sampson’s help. She had proven herself capable; what she hadn’t proven was that she was worthy of trust. Unfortunately, Carson wasn’t in a position of leverage.

  “We’ll see,” he said, then re-immersed himself in finishing his stitches.

  • • •

  Ten miles south of Beckley, Virginia, they finally found cell service.

  When Connor answered on the fourth ring, Carson started breathing normally again.

  He apprised his brother of the events in Wytheville, including the murder of Lee and his family, his own brush with death, and the timely arrival of Rachel Sampson.

  Connor was silent for a while, processing the shock and trying to make logical sense of it all. It didn’t take him long to arrive at the same conclusion: the men that killed Lee were likely linked to Colton’s disappearance, and they were using him as bait to lure in former Unit members.

  How and why they had done it was undetermined, as was the role Rachel Sampson played in all of it. But Connor agreed they should at least discuss Sampson’s extended involvement. She was a talented asset, and the gravity of the situation was multiplying by the minute.

  Carson then told him about the Eastern European and his burn phone. Connor was significantly better with electronics and promised to give it a look.

  They stayed on the line while Connor gunned up and secured the perimeter around his property. When he gave the all clear, Carson promised his brother he would see him sometime before dawn and clicked off.

  There were several items he had purposefully omitted, most notably the fire. That was not news to deliver over the phone.

  Six calls to Mendez, no answer. There was little doubt things had gone badly in Dothan; Carson just prayed at least one of the two, Chuck or Troy, was still breathing. He had eventually given up and thumbed him a text. Things went sideways in Wytheville. L
ots of developments, none good. Call as soon as you can.

  Carson made one more call, to an old football buddy from high school. They chatted for a few minutes and Carson asked for a favor. The man gladly obliged and the former teammates clicked off. After checking his messages and seeing that Mendez hadn’t replied, Carson put his phone away.

  An hour later, they arrived in Coal Creek. Carson gave Sampson directions and flashing red lights soon came into view. There were two fire trucks parked behind the store, the entirety of Coal Creek’s fleet, and both were sitting idly.

  Several volunteer firemen stood near the trucks but none were busy working. When Carson saw what was left of his childhood home, he understood why.

  There was nothing left to do. The house was almost completely gone. The roof had caved in and the walls had come with it, leaving a splintered pile of wood and brick. No visible flames remained but smoke was still rising, which meant the disheveled mass of memories was still burning underneath.

  Carson climbed out of the Land Rover and stood transfixed, watching as the final remnants of his boyhood were charred and lost forever. He closed his eyes and breathed in the acrid scent. He would never forget the smell.

  A fireman approached and touched Carson lightly on the shoulder.

  “I’m right sorry, Carson. The blaze went up s’fast there wuddn’t a damn thing we could do.”

  Carson had known the man since Elementary School. His name was Randy Acton. When he turned toward him, Randy looked aghast.

  “My Lord, Carson! What the blue blazes happen’d to ya?!”

  Carson ignored the question and replied to Randy’s apology instead. “It’s okay, Randy. I know you guys did all you could.”

  Randy started shuffling his feet. “Eh, Carson?”

  Carson saw him glance meaningfully at Rachel then look down, studying the ground.

  “What is it?” Carson asked. When Randy shifted his eyes toward Rachel again, Carson told him it was okay, that he could say whatever it was in front of her.

  “Well, it uh, it looks like we’re dealin’ with arson here.”

  Carson already knew that, but he needed details. “How do you know?”