Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(9)
“Of course,” she lifted her nose in the air, doggedly following him into Fort frickin’ Knox.
When they finally reached the huge steel doors of the factory, he pulled some sort of strange-looking key thing from his pocket and slid it into an even stranger looking hole in the door—one she hadn’t noticed because it was concealed behind a rivet. A series of clicks and beeps sounded, followed by a mighty clang.
The huge metal door swung open with a whispered groan.
Yeah, just a chopper shop. Right.
Chapter Two
Washington, DC
Sitting in his long black sedan, parked in the grease-stained lot of a 7-Eleven, Senator Alan Aldus watched a young black man in a holey wife-beater flick a cigarette butt over his scrawny shoulder before sauntering toward a silver Mercedes parked by the hose-strewn air machines. The guy’s sagging jeans showed a laughable amount of underwear, and his shoes probably cost the dumbass more than he made in a month.
Kicks was the term the kids were using nowadays. Morons.
Aldus watched the window of the Mercedes lower, saw the quick exchange and the gold cufflink on the wrist of the other car’s driver. That little bit of jewelry all but screamed wealth and affluence, and Aldus figured he was witnessing one of America’s great government officials out buying his daily ration of self-prescribed anesthesia.
It didn’t surprise him. Nope, not here in Washing-sin DC. There were more secrets and more secret obsessions in the U.S.’s great capital than anywhere else in the world. And it was the possibility of having one of his secrets revealed that had him flipping open his ringing cell phone. “What?”
“She’s stopped in Chicago.”
“Hmm,” he ran a hand over his face, then hastily checked his reflection in the rearview mirror to make sure he hadn’t disheveled his hair.
Good. Not a single follicle out of place. The twin gray streaks at his temples were pristine as always. He dyed them, of course. At fifty-five, most men would crow over still having a thick head of sable brown hair, but in his position, the silver added a reassuring touch of maturity. It led people to think he harbored some secret wisdom beyond the norm.
He liked to believe they were right.
He did have an uncanny ability to see what needed to be done and then do it, no hesitation, no wavering. He considered himself a man of action, leaving the doubting Thomases of the world to stew and hash out every little thing. Whole countries could rise to power and fall before some of the world’s leaders ever finished spell-checking their dossiers.
He’d come to realize nothing would ever change the snail-like pace of the U.S. government, so he’d decided his only course of action was to work around it.
The irony of that stance given his position wasn’t lost on him. But they could debate and harangue and review and debate some more. While those sluggish wheels turned, he took it upon himself to implement solutions.
Of course, there were those who wouldn’t understand that and many who certainly wouldn’t condone it. But who were they to judge him? Complacent fools living safe and sound inside their pretty little homes, cocooned from the rank evil that hung like a slimy, black cloud over so much of the world.
They were all idiots.
But powerful idiots, capable of toppling the pristine image he’d so carefully and scrupulously built over the years. An image he fancied would eventually have him sitting pretty at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
He shot his cuffs with their ivory-and-platinum links and tapped an impatient finger on the steering wheel.
Alisa Morgan was proving to be problematic. She had the files, whether she knew she had them or not. Grigg Morgan had mailed them to her; that much they’d been able to determine soon after Morgan’s death. But all the searches of Ms. Morgan’s home and work had come up empty—which could mean only one of two things. She was either carrying the files on her person, or she’d squirreled them away somewhere. The solution to either scenario was simple, a quick snatch and grab. Kidnap the woman, shake her down, and obtain the files. Easy as one, two, three.
Or at least it should’ve been. Unfortunately, his man in the field had a little problem with that scenario.
Aldus could not abide a strictly moral man, and ex-CIA agent Dagan Zoelner was turning out to be just that. Unfortunately, Zoelner was also the absolute best at what he did. So Aldus had gone along with Zoelner’s plan to simply watch Ms. Morgan until Zoelner could determine a way to obtain the information from her without resorting to strong-arm tactics.
At least he’d gone along with Zoelner’s plan for a little while. Then, he’d become impatient…
Now he regretted his eagerness to end this thing once and for all.
The botched mugging had caused her to flee to Chicago, which was a goddamn pain in the ass.
Not that he thought Nathan Weller knew anything. If he did, Weller certainly would’ve cracked under the hellish torture of those Hezbollah militants, because nobody knew how to wring the truth out of a man better than the bloody Lebanese.
Of course, he thought with gnawing unease, those Hezbollah boys hadn’t been able obtain the whereabouts of the files from Grigg Morgan, and they’d had him in their clutches for three whole days, so perhaps they weren’t as proficient at extracting information as they claimed.
That thought was more than a bit disconcerting. The only reason he’d allowed Weller to live after he escaped the hard death Aldus had planned for him, was Aldus’s certainty that Weller knew nothing.