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  Espionage Games

  I N T E R C E P T

  A Jack Coyote Thriller

  Season 4

  J. S. Chapman

  Espionage Games

  I N T E R C E P T

  A Jack Coyote Thriller

  Season 4

  J. S. Chapman

  Copyright © 2018 by J. S. Chapman

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Weatherly Books

  Chicago, IL, USA

  This book is licensed for your personal reading enjoyment and may not be resold or given away to others. Reproduction in whole or part of this book without the express written consent of the author and/or publisher is strictly prohibited and protected by copyright law. Short excerpts used for the purposes of critical reviews is permitted. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

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  From the Author

  Ho-ka Hey! It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die!

  «»

  Tȟašúŋke Witkó (Crazy Horse)

  Oglala Lakota Chief

  1

  Grand Cayman

  Wednesday, August 13

  TODAY WAS A good day to die.

  There are moments in a man’s life when he wishes he had never been born. There are other moments when he wishes he were dead. And there are still other moments when a man doesn’t give a damn one way or another. Dead or never born, the conditions are metaphysically identical. Nonbeing is nonbeing. The dead experience adds nothing. Hopes and regrets do not exist. Bliss or damnation only occur in the dreams of the living and the nightmares of the dying.

  Whether Jack Coyote would live to see another day or breathe his last breath, his fate lay in the hands of the gods. It most definitely did not lay in his. He had blissfully arrived at the stage of noncaring. He would stay there for as long as possible.

  When he finally awoke to the noisy chattering in his brain and the harsh discomfort of his body, he stood at the crossroads of a predicament. Should he stay? Or should he go? His mind had shut down. His nervous system was paralyzed. He was halfway between heaven and hell, between past and future, sucked into a vortex reduced to a pinpoint of nothingness. As if newly born from the womb of his mother, he struggled to assemble the bits of information that would allow him to perceive position, state, balance, motion, temperature, and spatial perception. All had become fused into a single screaming unit. He was alone within himself. Time seemed to pass, but in stillness. The stillness eventually fled. Chaos entered. A stepladder to consciousness loomed ahead.

  The first senses he perceived were of taste and smell. The taste of blood. The odor of vomit. And the reek of bodily excretions. The first two were his. The third belonged to others.

  Next came hearing. The buzz of insects and the cawing of vultures followed by the pitter-patter of fine rain striking a tin roof. Pain rushed to the fore, a symphony of agonies in eight octaves.

  Awareness finally awoke within him. At first, a single neuron of consciousness floating in a symbiotic relationship with biological necessities. Then everything rushing back in an explosion. A sequence of scenes ran through his mind: of being run off the road, dragged from the car, transported to a shack, bound to a chair, and interrogated by an Austrian. An intruder entered, attended by drama. A spray of bullets followed. Violins rose to a crescendo and ended in a clash of timpani.

  The interior of the shack was stifling. The heat made his shirt cling to his flesh. His limbs were yet taped to the arms and legs of the chair beneath his beaten body. His eyes were still blindfolded.

  An hour later—or was it two?—he worked his way out of the bindings, weak and winded and sick.

  Three man lay sprawled in the remains of their defecated body fluids. Carrion flies had already arrived, their metallic blue-green abdomens busy at work. The Austrian lay nearest, spread-eagle on his back, jaw agape, an intact eye staring blankly at the ceiling, the empty eye socket equally unseeing, his throat yet oozing blood, the occipital region of his forehead rendered to jelly. What was left of his face was cyanotic blue verging on gray. He wore a quizzical look. Death had played a cruel trick on him, and he wasn’t laughing. His henchmen lay just inside the open doorway. The first man sat awkwardly, his bowed spine propped against a wall, his chin hanging toward his lap, his arms languid at his sides, his pants soaked with blood and urine and excrement, the palms of his hands turned upward in supplication. The second man was piled into heap of tangled arms and legs, his skull shattered, a single arm slung forward as if reaching for forgiveness. The flies seemed more interested in him than the others, probably because his blubbery body was tastier.

  Jack hadn’t known there was a woman, but there she reposed, slumped on the other side of the room, her slim throat sliced into silence. Blonde hair, even features, slender figure, legs spread apart, mouth slung open with astonishment, and faded eyes astonished by her sudden and unexpected demise. She had probably been pretty in life, but her body had dwindled to nothingness, her face but a withered mask, her pale skin clinging tightly to her skull, and her teeth protruding. Of the four victims, she had probably gone the least painful way, without seeing her attacker until the knife silenced her voice first before quickly snuffing out her life.

  The door of the shack clacked against the wall, forced open by stormy breezes that blew away some of the ripe stench of death. Jack staggered toward it, zipping up his jeans as he went.

  He stepped outside. The fading sunset cast an orangey hue over the greenery. Momentary dizziness overcame him. He pushed his head between his knees and gulped in fresh air. Rain washed away the stink of terror. Revived, he made it back to the main road and there retrieved his mobile from the mangled wreck of the rental car.

  He looked above and around, and drank in the scenery. He reached out a hand as if he could touch everything at once. The top of the sun made a brief appearance through rain clouds, hovering slightly above the horizon before sinking in the west and taking every bit of light with it. Even without the sun, the air was thick with heat. Yet Jack felt cold to the bone. He limped to the side the road and there vomited what was left in his stomach into the ditch. Then he climbed into the truck the thugs didn’t need anymore, lay his head back on the headrest, and shut his eyes. He made an inventory of his injuries. The little finger of his left hand might be broken, but the joints bent where they should, even if stiff and swollen. The slice above his brow probably needed stitching but had stopped bleeding for the most part, just sticky to the touch. His ribs ached with every breath. Everything hurt, most especially his cock, damn the sadistic bastard and his broom of torture.

  Today was a good day to die. Until he realized that dying is easy. It’s living that’s hard.

  2

  Vienna, Virginia

  Monday, August 18

  THE HEAD OF the Illicit Finance Methodologies division inside the Monetary Compliance Network—otherwise known as MonCom—appear
ed in the doorway of Cordelia Burke’s cubicle. His cajoling finger invited her to come with him. “Someone I want you to meet.”

  Forty-five minutes earlier, she had been wearing a natty yellow robe and staring out the window at a charcoal-gray sky that could have given her a glimpse of the Washington Mall had the columns of unremarkable buildings not obliterated the view. Her eyelids were sandy with insomnia and tears spent over the two men who figured large in her life. Her boss Jon Taggert, who also happened to be her lover. And Jason Pucinski, the boyfriend who followed her to Washington when she landed the job at MonCom but walked out on her two weeks ago. Or was it the week before? It was difficult keeping track of everything when one monotonous day blended seamlessly into the next with nothing to separate them, though having a significant other walk out on her should have been a seminal enough moment to mark permanently on a calendar page. With the dawning of a new day, she realized she had to purge both men from her life. She had to reclaim Cordelia Anne Burke, youngest child of Jimmy and Marietta Burke of Chicago, Illinois, and be her own woman.

  She left her gray-sided cubicle and dutifully followed Jonathan Taggert down the corridor and around the corner to his sizable office, comfortable enough to hold a desk, credenza, conference table, and several chairs. A single plate-glass window divided by the zebra stripes of floor-to-ceiling blinds diminished the view but still served as a scenic backdrop for others to look past him and around him but hardly ever at him. When he settled behind his curved desk beside the corkboard wall pinned with photos of his family—pretty wife Amy and their two adorable boys—it painfully brought home to Cordelia her single status and her on-and-off dalliances with this family man who cheated on his wife by sleeping with his toadying underling. She took one of the chairs opposite his desk but refused to meet the smugness on his handsome face, even at the expense of her abject misery. He was acting like a schoolboy with a secret, sleeves rolled just above his wrists, exposing a mat of soft dark hair and the bronze tan of a weekend sailor.

  He nudged his head toward a remote corner of the executive office. “Cordelia Burke ... meet Paul Farrow.”

  She had noticed him upon entering the office but pretended he was just another somber fixture in a somber office. From her first glimpse of him, sitting there in a chair too small for his hulking figure, with his rounded shoulders bent over a cell phone, she instantly knew his presence was a trap set out by a master. The intruder must have known it, too, for when he glanced up and met her eyes with his, he smiled shyly. Then he abruptly sprang to his feet like a soldier, shoulders flattening like epaulets, stiff and respectful. He was tall. Disconcertingly tall. Cordelia was forced to look up into his narrow gray eyes, which were focused on her from beneath an unruly thatch of light brown hair. An insipid smile crept up on his flushed face, making him look more like her kid brother than an equal. He cleared his throat and nervously tugged at his tie. He seemed to know her. He cleared his throat again, plainly uncomfortable.

  He held out his hand. They shook. He sat. She sat. And Taggert looked at them with the face of an axe and the eyes of a hawk. “We stole Farrow from logistics,” he said. “Proved himself useful over there. We’re borrowing him for time indefinite.”

  Paul Farrow wasn’t much to look at. His conservative style of dress, medium-cut hair, clean-shaven face, rail-thin physique, and self-effacing manner were off-putting. He was too stern and too formal and, it would seem, too much in awe of her, painfully so. They were probably the same age, even if he looked like the son of the neighbors down the street, the boring neighbors with the boring kid, the kind of neighbors whose idea of an exciting weekend was to mow the lawn and trim hedges, and the kind of kid who kept to himself, reading too many books, hanging out with geeky friends, doting on classic cars, and building computers from scratch. Cordelia never liked precocious geeks, and this was not the time to start.

  Taggert said, “Paul is your new partner.”

  Now she liked him less. She swallowed and sputtered but finally came out with, “My new ... what?”

  “You’re going to be a tag team. Work together. Eat together. But not sleep together. You’re going to hunt down our fox and bring him in.”

  He meant Coyote, the vanilla name wrapped inside the manila folder, and the subject of a manhunt. “Bring him in?”

  He smiled slyly. “Before the FBI picks him up. We want to make a deal.”

  “A deal?” she said, gulping with disbelief.

  “His cooperation in exchange for favors.”

  Cordelia didn’t want to ask him what kind of favors. “He could be anywhere. He’s off the map. How do you propose we find him?”

  “The old-fashioned way. Talk to everyone he’s ever met. Get into his psyche. Read his mind. Anticipate his moves. He has to be found, brought in, and debriefed. This directive comes from the highest levels.”

  “They want him,” Cordelia said. They was often bandied about to exert pressure and make toadies jump. They referred to nebulous figures of authority, not only inside MonCom, but deep within government, and usually involving the White House.

  “Badly,” Taggert said.

  She sniffed something foul in the air. This wasn’t just about the theft of several millions of dollars. Or the dubious circumstances befalling a GSA-grade government worker with the Homeland Intelligence Division. It was bigger. “Why? What has he done? Other than the obvious?”

  Taggert said just one word. “Classified.” When it came to the halls of government power, that this word was the only word that mattered.

  Cordelia thought about it. Something stank. “What’s going on, Taggert?”

  “Need to know.”

  She must have stumbled onto something huge. This wasn’t just a case of money laundering. Or a government flunky gone bad. Or even a threat to the banking system. It was a matter of national security. “How high does this go?”

  “None of your damned business.”

  “CIA? FBI?”

  “Everything done by the book.”

  “Department of Justice?”

  “Reports up the wazoo.”

  “White House?”

  “Other than that, you’ll have everything at your disposal. Travel. Expense accounts. The works.”

  She didn’t believe it, and wouldn’t have believed it but for the electrical shocks she could feel in her fingertips. She gave her new partner a quick look. He returned the look with a sanguine shrug.

  “I have a question,” Farrow asked, a grin on his otherwise vapid face. “Do we have a license to kill?”

  “Only to maim. Now get the hell out of here.” He hadn’t shouted the words but it produced the same effect.

  “Yes, sir!” Paul said, standing and snapping a salute. He was a skyscraper wearing a staid gray suit picked up on discount at the local mall.

  She gave Farrow an eyeful before rolling her eyes. “At ease, soldier.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He followed her like an obedient puppy dog to her cubicle, eager to perform in exchange for a treat. What she had for him wasn’t a cookie. After sitting across from him, this interloper having taken a chair beside her prefabricated desk in a workspace the size of a shipping crate, she leaned close, hands folded, hunching forward, voice low. “Just get this into your skull, Farrow. I’m used to working alone. I don’t want a partner. I didn’t ask for a partner. This project is mine. It has my name stamped on the folder. I did the background work. Weekends. All-nighters. You, on the other hand, did absolutely nothing but get into Taggert’s good graces, God knows how.”

  “Must have been my charming personality,” he said, grinning. He was hiding something, and she knew what.

  “Son of a bitch. You hacked my computer.”

  He cleared his throat and dragged at his necktie. “Hacked is a loaded term. Keylogged would be closer.” He said it smugly but had the decency to look embarrassed. He tugged at the necktie as if it were choking him. “What’s first on the agenda?”

  Sh
e remembered him now. One of the guys who dropped in on the whiz kids when they had their whiteboards out. Following along as they outlined this infiltration and that line of attack. Wearing natty jeans, a three-day-old beard, and sneakers, nothing like this squeaky-clean version. She was going to have to put up with him until she found a way to make him look lousy. “You can drive. Might as well be useful for something.”

  “Where to?”

  “His lawyer’s office.”

  “Ah,” Farrow said, “Martin Devlin. In his fifties. Prosecutors despise him, defendants adore him, and the press eat him up like tomorrow’s news. Born and bred Brooklyn, New York. Graduated from Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, bachelor’s degree in political science. Earned a full scholarship at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, also in Florida. Passed the Florida Bar Exam on his first try. Put in a stint as a prosecutor with the state and became notorious when he won the case of Cramer et al vs Cerebus Fidelity, both in trial court and before the Florida Court of Appeal. The insurance company was found to have misled the public by claiming its agents were independent brokers when they clearly were not. Left public service and set up a private practice, this time taking criminal cases against the state. After several petty cases, won notoriety when he defended a purported gangbanger accused of the execution-style murder of a rival gang member. The trial went down as the Gonzalez Decision, which held that all minors under the age of eighteen must be given their rights under the Fourth Amendment, held in juvenile detention for the duration of court proceedings, and tried as juveniles unless the case is so extreme the public would be in danger were the defendant held under less stringent arrangements. From there, he moved onto bigger cases, most involving defendants wrongfully accused and convicted under flimsy, often false evidence. Lost only one case. Relocated to Washington D. C., where he’s been heralded for his trial skills and Socratic arguments. Took on several high-profile cases, most of them political in nature. Has gone against entrenched government powers and won cases on behalf of whistleblowers and political figures accused of malfeasance, extortion, bribery, or any number of offenses. Clients have included a senator and two congressmen, who barely escaped the clutches of their political enemies. From what I hear,” he said bending close to her ear, “Marty Devlin is a name that must be whispered.”