True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(23)



He took off his glove and typed a two-word text back to whoever had sent the photos and address:

It’s done.



Blackthorn Global Security Headquarters, Bethesda, Maryland. July 19. 5:17 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Victoria was half-asleep on the vinyl couch in the employee break room, her phone clutched in her hand, her head on the hard armrest. Her phone vibrated, waking her up. She opened her eyes and squinted at her text screen.

It’s done.

She smiled. About fucking time.



Seattle, Washington. July 19. 2:18 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

Ian powered off the phone the instant he got the “delivered” tag on the text message. He went to the sink and dropped the phone into the disposal.

Margo followed him. “What was the point of that?”

“I’ve either convinced them we’re dead or did something so outside of their regular protocol that they’ll know we’re still alive.” Ian ran the faucet and turned on the disposal. It chewed the phone with a labored grinding and then jammed up with a mechanical whine. He turned off the disposal and shut off the water. “Either way, I hope it bought us a few hours.”

“To do what?”

“Run,” he said.

He started for the door that led to the entry hall.

“Wait.” Margo gestured to the assassin. “Aren’t we going to clean this up?”

“Hell no. We need to get as far away from here as we can and we don’t have time to waste.” He opened the door, careful not to let the dogs in. “Are you coming?”

She nodded and walked out with him. “I’m going to get a terrible review on Yelp.”

It was a funny thing to say and he found it reassuring because it told him several important things:

She was a fighter.



She had her shit together.



She was going to stay with him and not go running to the police.



She understood they were both fucked.





“They’re dead.” Victoria called Cross, waking him up for a second time that night to tell him the news.

“Finally,” Cross said.

He hung up the phone, settled back into the sumptuous bed in his office apartment, and thought about what he’d done and what was yet to come.

From an operational standpoint, he was glad that Ludlow and French were dead. But he took no pleasure in killing them or the hundreds of people in Honolulu. They were all innocent civilians. But it had to be done for the greater good.

He considered himself a patriot and for years it had sickened and disturbed him to see the CIA’s resources and abilities decay due to bureaucratic incompetence, political cowardice, and public apathy while the terrorist threat to America intensified. On top of that, the agency was crippled by ridiculous legal restrictions imposed on it by people more concerned with privacy and civil liberties than with the survival of the country.

The answer was obvious to Cross: Give the CIA’s job to Blackthorn. They had the technology, the people, and the freedom to do it right. But it wouldn’t happen through politics as usual. The biggest hurdles wouldn’t be getting the public to agree to the outsourcing of the CIA’s key responsibilities to Blackthorn or dramatically limiting the government’s oversight into their activities. It would be repealing all of the laws and international treaties that stood in the way of America doing its necessary spying, stealing, and killing effectively.

To make it happen, Cross used history as his guide. It had taken 9/11 to get the Patriot Act passed, and with it the sweeping relaxation of civil liberties that gave domestic law enforcement agencies the broad, and deeply intrusive, surveillance powers they’d sought for decades. It also made the government secretly eager to go far beyond that, at least until Edward Snowden ruined things.

Cross knew it would take another attack, one that terrified the public and outraged politicians, to expose the CIA’s impotence and give the president the moral imperative to give Blackthorn the nation’s covert operations, free of any legal or bureaucratic restraints.

Ludlow came up with the idea of the plane crash, and how to do it, but it was Cross who refined the plan and targeted Hawaii so it would echo back in the nation’s consciousness to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.

Cross had crashed that plane for the good of the country and, yes, for the money it would bring to Blackthorn. He didn’t think the windfall profits clashed with his patriotic motivations. Blackthorn would spend the money better, and more productively, for the security of the nation than the CIA would.

And why shouldn’t he, and the people who worked for Blackthorn, be generously compensated for the hazardous duty they undertook, personal sacrifices they made, and emotional burdens they endured on behalf of their country?

No one deserved that compensation more than he, the man ultimately responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children. He’d need all the luxuries and indulgences money could buy to help him live with that. Not that he had any regrets about doing it. The dead were patriots who’d sacrificed their lives for the future safety and prosperity of their families and their country. In his business, he firmly believed the ends justified the means.

But when he pulled up his sheets, laid his face on his soft pillow, and tried to imagine those nubile nymphs sewing his Egyptian sheets, the only faces that came to his mind were those of the screaming passengers of TransAmerican 976.

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