Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

child for Special Forces. The other one was just like him. Like they grew them in a lab. The guy dealing with Deckart gave him a quick and violent shove. A short sharp rebuke. Then he turned and looked at me. His eyes closed sleepily for a fraction of a second. Not a blink, more like a kind of acknowledgement. Of what, I wasn’t sure. Then he said something harsh to his pointy-eared colleague. Harsh and fast and completely incomprehensible to me, because he wasn’t speaking English or whatever language they speak up in the tribal territories, he was speaking Russian.

The Russians cut through the crowd and into a matte black Hummer, idling behind Mister Lawrence’s gold one. Chapman was still looking at me through the window, expressionless. As I looked at her, I thought of the eight-pointed star she’d drawn on the paper napkin. I was going to get to find out who that was for very soon, and hopefully what it meant. Because one thing was for sure, it wasn’t meant for me. The vehicles moved out and her look went with them. Out of the parking lot and onto the road back toward the airport.

By the time they were gone, the mist was crawling in from the rainforest. A touch thicker than it had been on the way up. The crowd had dissipated and Deckart and Willets were gone. I took a tour around The Rendezvous to see where the Humvees had come from, and if there was another access road that I had missed. There wasn’t. The vehicles had been parked alongside the building, butting up against the woods.

I used Deckart’s phone to call Ellie while I walked back to the Toyota.

She picked up on the first ring. “Yeah?”

“Keeler.”

Ellie exhaled, like she was relieved. She said, “I spoke to Dave. We shouldn’t say anything on the phone. My place, one hour.”

I said, “No, I need you up here at the Rendezvous. Immediately. How long will it take?”

She was silent for a moment, weighing it up. Down the line I could feel something like the tension in her cognitive functions. She wanted to ask why the Rendezvous, but knew that the discussion was a bad idea over the cellular line.

Ellie said, “The Rendezvous, huh? Ten minutes.”

I said, “Parking lot, immediate left. Find me.”

I thumbed the disconnect button. Climbed into the Toyota’s cab and closed the door. The parking spot gave me a good view. The place was far from empty. I took brief stock of my feelings. I was calm and alert, enjoying myself. The minor ruckus hadn’t even remotely dented the evening. On the contrary, the touch of violence had only elevated the experience.

And I could still taste Amber Chapman.

The mystery and the puzzle, all wrapped up in a tall blonde package. I thought about her and allowed my thinking to associate freely, and move from Amber Chapman over to Hagen, then to George Abrams and Valerie Zarembina. The mental threads were hooking up and locking into place gracefully, like they had meant to tie in all along. My thinking even extended out from those people to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I thought I had it pretty much figured out, but confirmation was going to happen real soon.

I reached over to the glove compartment and removed the Smith & Wesson special and the Glock 19. The S&W was a pretty gun with that comfortable blue rubberized grip. There were five rounds chambered in the rotating cylinder. But each .357 round packed a punch, so they’d be made to count. The Glock held a full magazine, plus one in the chamber. Which made sixteen rounds. Add the extra mag from the Nazi assassin and the total was thirty-one.

I laid the weapons down on the passenger side seat. One beside the other, with the spare magazine between them, like a little collection. I climbed into the rear and racked back the bench as far as it would go, sunk down and settled in to wait and watch.

Forty-Four

Once the warm air hanging over the water strikes cold land, it forms a mist and starts to roll. Then, it has two choices. Either to double down and thicken into fog, or dissipate, becoming nothing more than wet ground. At the moment, the stuff hadn’t decided one way or the other. It was okay remaining as a rolling mist. I sat in the back of the Toyota, waiting for Ellie, and considered from which direction the recipient of Amber Chapman’s message would most likely approach.

The roadhouse front door faced south east. Which meant it was facing town. Port Morris is a couple of hundred miles from the nearest inhabited place with a population over five hundred, but that’s as the crow flies. You can’t just drive from Port Morris to anywhere else. You’d need to throw together some kind of travel cocktail. A boat and a car would do it, but it would take around ten hours. A plane and a boat and a car would cut that down to eight.

I was pretty confident that whoever was coming was traveling up from Port Morris, just like I had. Which reduced the question to a binary choice. Direct or indirect. I thought of what I would do in that position. And the answer was always going to be the indirect approach.

If it was me, I would drive up via one of the logging trails. Then I’d come in on foot through the woods. Slowly and silently. That would give me the option of not showing up, if I thought there were issues. I would choose my route on the basis of tactical and strategic factors. Strategic in the sense of my exfiltration. Tactical with respect to local features, like the direction of the wind and the topography. But there was no wind. Just the low hanging mist inching up from the creeks and channels. Ellie was taking her time. My breath began fogging up the inside of the windshield,