Erasing Faith(28)

“Goodbye, Faith.” He stared at me for another moment, his eyes roaming my face as though they were memorizing my every feature. Then, he turned on his heel and walked away.

“So that’s it?” I called after him, unable to let him leave without some kind of explanation. “You’re just going to walk away, Wes?”

He didn’t turn around — he was almost out of sight.

“What about fate?” My voice cracked on the last word.

“Don’t believe in it, Red.” His words drifted back to me through the night, a disembodied specter. “Never have, never will.”

I pressed my eyes closed so I didn’t have to see him disappear into the dark.





Chapter Fourteen: WESTON


NO SHIT SHERLOCK



“Abbott,” I clipped into my phone.

“Identification?” The coolly detached female voice was as familiar to me as my own.

“01908.” I rattled off my personal ID tag from memory.

“Verified,” the voice confirmed. “Hold for connection.”

I waited about thirty seconds, listening to the faint buzz of white noise over the receiver as I was patched through to Command. You’d think the f*cking CIA had enough left over in their trillion-dollar budget that they could’ve at least sprung for some canned hold-music.

Breathing hard, I tried to ignore the burning in my calves. The call had come in the middle of my run, and stopping so abruptly after jogging nearly ten miles of Buda’s rolling hills was enough to give even the fittest person shin splints. There was no avoiding it — when Command called, you answered. No exceptions.

Finally, Benson’s voice crackled over the line, his tone curt, sharper than a whip.

“Abbott. You haven’t checked in for twelve days. I need a status report on Szekely.”

I took a deep breath and prayed for patience. Dealing with Benson was a bigger pain in the ass than a f*cking colonoscopy. Handlers were rarely a joy to work with, but Benson brought an all new level of asshattery to the job.

“Surveillance is in place on the exterior office doors.” I stepped off the deserted running path and positioned my body against a nearby tree, so I had an unobscured view of anyone approaching. “I’ve got nothing inside yet — there are armed guards posted at every exit point. Not Rent-a-Cop types, either. Paid hitters, each with a long list of bodies on his resume.”

“We need eyes inside that building.”

No shit, Sherlock.

I somehow managed to hold in the retort. “I’ve been tailing three of Szekely’s top men — all of them are Hungarian ex-army intelligence, black ops. They take care of anyone who Szekely considers a threat or who so much as looks at him the wrong way. I’ve bugged their home landlines, but that has limited value. They do almost all their business on company cell phones. I’m working on access.”

“And Szekely’s main compound?”

“Impenetrable. Cameras, bodyguards, attack dogs. State of the art security system, with motion detection and heat sensors. You put your f*cking pinky toe on his property, his head of security knows about it.”

“This man is running one of the biggest crime syndicates in Europe and no one’s ever seen his face. We’re the best intelligence organization in the world with the most sophisticated technology known to man, and we have nothing more than a grainy surveillance photo of his profile from two decades ago,” Benson said brusquely, as though I were somehow at fault for the agency’s twenty-year-old shitty intel.

“Man’s a ghost.” I shrugged.

Benson sighed. “Have you at least been able to confirm that Szekely is using the couriers to transfer arms and correspondence to his assets in the city?”

“Nothing definite, yet,” I hedged, hoping to steer the conversation in another direction.

“Abbott.” I could easily envision Benson leaning back in his chair, his doughy arms crossed over his chest in exasperation. “It sounds to me like you’re sitting on your ass, enjoying a Hungarian holiday. You’ve been there three weeks — I expect something more than phone taps and nanny cams. Where are you with infiltration? I assume you’ve isolated a mark, by this point.” He scoffed.

I scraped the knuckles of my free hand against the rough bark of the tree.

It was easy to be pompous and peremptory from behind a desk. With his overweight, out-of-shape ass parked firmly in a plush leather chair, the only thing that made Benson break a sweat these days was Free Doughnut Day in the company cafeteria. He wouldn’t last a day out here. He had essentially no field experience. He probably hadn’t picked up his gun since he left The Farm. And here I was, reporting my every move to him.

Bureaucracy at its finest.

“Well?” Benson prompted impatiently.

“I have a mark,” I bit out, Faith’s face flashing in my mind.

“Excellent. I expect some intel on that front within the week. And Abbott?”

“Sir.” The word curdled on my tongue, sour as spoiled milk.

“If you can’t deliver, I will assign someone else to this mission. Keep me informed.”

He clicked off.

I slid the phone carefully back into the bicep-holster I used while running, took a deep breath in through my nose, and punched the tree with so much force, every knuckle on my right hand split wide open.