Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(43)
And that only proved you could take an operator out of the field, but you could never un-program a man who’d been programmed.
Dagan himself was a bitter, shining example of that unsavory fact.
The CIA didn’t want him anymore after the unhappy little goatf*ck in the Sandbox, but he hadn’t been good for anything besides this…this work. This skulking about in shadows, gathering Intelligence, abstaining from the women and the scotch he so loved because there was always a national security secret to be uncovered and he was the goddamned best at making sure no one uncovered them.
Case in point: he chose that particular coffee shop because it was across from the only highway access for fifteen blocks in any direction and he determined it was his best bet for catching them if and when they emerged from their compound via any route other than the front gate and, like usual, following his instincts had paid off.
Now the question became, where the hell were they all going?
As he tailed the trio up the onramp onto southbound I-94, he figured he had a pretty good idea. They were going to retrieve the files.
If the damn things even existed. He was really beginning to wonder…
“Sonofa—”
He blinked in disbelief as two bikes peeled off. One took the nearest off-ramp, a big loop that would swing them back north. The other motorcycle veered onto westbound I-290, while the third continued heading south.
He had a split second to make his decision.
Swiveling in his seat, he cursed and squinted a look at the bike on the off-ramp. Nope. That wasn’t the ghostly gray beast he’d seen Nate Weller mount last night outside Red Delilah’s, and he would lay odds there wouldn’t be anyone but Grigg’s best friend tasked with this particular mission. Craning his head to the right, he got a quick glimpse of the bike heading west. Another negative.
So that left the southbound chopper.
Back to Jacksonville?
***
“What the f*ck do you mean you’re out, Zoelner?” Senator Aldus shouted into his cell phone as he pulled his government issue black sedan into the parking lot of a rest stop off I-95.
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Could not f*cking believe it. He was going to have that insubordinate cretin deleted. That’s all there was to it.
“Like I said, you aren’t paying me enough to go head to head with former sergeant Weller. And I’ve been made, sir. Weller is onto me. So I’m out.”
Dagan Zoelner’s voice didn’t sound the least bit contrite, nor the least bit frightened. And that wouldn’t do. It simply would not do.
Aldus felt his head threaten to explode. It was going to burst through his skull and discharge gray matter all over the cream leather interior of his car, because he was SOL if Zoelner quit. There was no one else who could do the job. No one else he trusted to quietly snatch Alisa Morgan and shake the location of those files out of her.
“What about the money, Z? You need that money. Or have you forgotten about your brother and that spot of trouble he’s in?”
Christ, families were nothing but weakness and misery.
Lucky for him, he’d learned long ago how to prey on that weakness in others and had worked damned hard not to allow himself the same Achilles heel. His wife thought they were childless because he’d had a bad case of the mumps as a young boy. The real truth was he’d known right from the start he never wanted to have someone who could be taken from him, held for ransom, or used as blackmail. So he’d gotten a vasectomy two weeks before he’d said his “I dos,” and he hadn’t regretted that decision in all the years since.
He was untouchable, his reputation unblemished, a man destined for great things. That is, if he could ever get out from under the dark shadow of Grigg Morgan and those f*cking missing files.
Things were getting complicated. He absolutely hated when things got complicated. Of all the loose ends on this deal, he had only one left to tie up, and it was proving to be so much harder than it should’ve been.
She was one small woman, for Christ’s sake. She should’ve been taken care of months ago along with everything else.
It’d been easy to drop a bug in the ear of those bloodthirsty Hezbollah quacks, giving them the whereabouts of the covert operatives who’d killed their esteemed leader, Hassan Kassim, in exchange for them torturing the whereabouts of a certain set of files out of the pair. It’d been just as easy for him to alert the local Syrian militia to the Hezbollah operatives working in their backyard once those same operatives were of no more use to him. And, likewise, it’d been a piece of cake to make sure that nosy-ass Delaney and that shithead Morgan were crucified after they’d had the audacity to break into his secret computer files…or at least they’d tried to.
It was a bit of tragic irony who’d done the actual crucifying in Morgan’s case. Christ, when he’d read that report detailing Grigg Morgan’s death, even his hardened stomach had shriveled at the horror of it.
So…he’d managed all of that, but somehow he couldn’t manage to get his hands on one untrained, uninformed woman?
It was absolutely beyond the pale, and he’d reached the limit of his patience, especially when Zoelner quietly informed him, “There are other ways for me to get the money.”
Aldus ground his jaw so hard his eye sockets ached. “Is that so? Who’s going to hire you, Z? Who wants a washed up ex-CIA agent who managed to get his whole team and two civilians killed? No one, that’s who. No military, no government body, not even one of those contractor outfits. Because they’re not going to trust you, Z. No one’s going to trust you. So your best bet to get that cash to poor, misguided Avan is to stick with me.”