Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(63)

“Maybe those government contracts include military work. Colorado is second only to Washington in the number of military personnel.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

I ran through the list in my head. In metro Denver we had Buckley Air Force Base. Colorado Springs boasted Fort Carson, Peterson, and Schriever military bases along with the Air Force Academy and the North American Aerospace Defense Command—NORAD. Farther south was the US Army Pueblo Chemical Depot. The number of personnel rose even higher if you added nearby Wyoming, with its F.E. Warren Air Force Base, nuclear missile silos, and training areas.

I knew from a recent training session on Colorado’s terror risk that we also had four hundred contractor companies that were part of the military-industrial complex and cleared by the Department of Defense. Even more mom-and-pop subcontractors serviced the big guys.

The Disaster Management Institute, which provided intensive training for military and law-enforcement personnel from all over the country, was also based in Denver.

“I can buy that they’d have an office here,” I said finally.

“That’s why you’re so sweet,” Sarge said. “Cause you’re fucking naive. If these are our guys, they ain’t in Denver to play patty-cake with soldiers.”

I ignored that and returned to scrolling the website.

As Kane had told his wife, the president and CEO of Vigilant was a man named James Osborne. Given his last name, James was presumably a member of the family who had founded Vigilant’s parent company, Valor. He looked barely north of fifty, and handsome in a spy-novel sort of way with a craggy face, cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a measured half smile, and a confident tilt to his chin.

I say, old chap. I suspect you’ve got a mole in your outfit. I can fix that for you.

Osborne listed his admittedly impressive credentials on a secondary page, along with that of his top staff. His CV included time spent working for the State Department in the Foreign Service, with postings in Ethiopia and Iraq. He boasted an impeccable education at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, graduating summa cum laude with a master’s in international affairs. He was a career army officer who’d done a stint during Desert Storm before ultimately retiring as a full bird colonel.

There were no personal details at all. No mention of a family or hobbies or his golf handicap. Osborne wasn’t running the kind of business where you shared that sort of thing.

If Kane had learned something about either Valor or Vigilant that cost him his life, he hadn’t gotten it on the internet.

Sarge finished off his first beer and moved on to the second. “If this Osborne asshole worked in State, like it says here, he could have been either a diplomat or a spy. A secret squirrel, as we grunts like to say. Rick worked with a lot of secret squirrels.”

“The Alpha tortured a man to death in Mexico City. He wanted to know about Rick Dalton.”

Sarge stopped with the bottle halfway to his mouth. “That makes no damn sense.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know Dalton can’t hurt him.”

“Which means he doesn’t know he’s dead.”

“We never processed his body.” Once again, the memory surfaced of the ghost I’d seen in Sarge’s apartment. “How do you know he’s not still walking around, doing whatever it is secret squirrels do?”

“I got the word.”

“From who?”

“That’s as much as I can say.”

I glared at him, but he didn’t relent. I looked back at Osborne’s picture. Why would the Alpha care about Dalton? Unless this particular secret squirrel could expose the Alpha’s nuts.

And no man wants his nuts exposed.

If I were casting for a movie, Osborne would make a great Alpha. Handsome, confident. A good dresser with precisely the right arrogance in his square jaw.

“So we got one candidate for the Alpha,” Sarge said.

“Maybe more if we can learn anything about Valor.”

A headache had been pirouetting on the corners of my brain; now it waltzed into the middle of the dance floor. I rifled through Paul’s desk until I found a bottle of ibuprofen, and dry-swallowed four caplets. I pushed the photos toward Sarge.

“Kane’s,” I said. “He had them in with the brochures.”

Sarge went through each photograph, then gave a low whistle.

“They mean something to you?” I asked.

“Not the ones of the buildings. Fucking piles of rocks in the middle of nowhere. But the strip club.” He looked up. His eyes carried a lot of steel. “Damn.”

“What?”

“When I was on the inside of the Alpha’s organization, or at least, as far as I ever got on the inside, I heard that he had a boarded-up club somewhere here in Denver. I wasn’t in the circle who knew where it was. I just heard the talk.”

“Why would he have an old strip joint?”

“For hiding things. Weapons. The occasional asset. Scuttlebutt was they also use it for doing things they don’t want anyone to know about. Like when they need to break someone who can’t be bribed or threatened. Men like your friend in Mexico.”

“They kill people there?”

“What I heard. The Alpha runs a mean business. But I guess you learned that the hard way.”