Endangered Species: PART 1 (2 page)

It was mid-April and the temperatures in
Dingle ranged from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties Fahrenheit,
or from 6°C to 12°C. Whelan, who slept naked regardless of the
temperature, grabbed a pair of well-worn denim cutoffs from the top
of a chest that stood at the foot of the bed. He quickly and
quietly slipped into them. He thought momentarily about reaching
for the SIG SAUER P226 MK25 he kept in a special holster attached
to the sideboard of the bed, but decided against it. It had been
converted from the original 9mm to .40 caliber. With three family
members and a guest in the house, that weapon would be too
dangerous to use. An errant slug could rip through the walls and
strike an innocent victim.

The Kel-Tek KSG shotgun would have been his
weapon of choice. Its internal dual tube magazines each held six
rounds of three-inch 12 gauge shells. The chamber held a
thirteenth. He clenched his teeth in momentary frustration. He’d
let his oldest son, Sean, practice field stripping it. It was still
in the room Sean shared with his younger brother. Whelan was six
feet two inches and two hundred twenty-five pounds with no
measurable body fat. And he had those unique genetic gifts. Unless
there were armed intruders in the house, a firearm would be
overkill.

The Dingle peninsula, in
Southwestern Ireland, juts out into the wild and stormy
Atlantic
. As a result, the area
experiences a more difficult and unpredictable climate than almost
any other location in Ireland.
Whelan was
grateful that this night was one of the rare calm moments. It made
it easier for his ears to distinguish aberrant sounds. He paused in
front of the closed double doors that opened into the hallway and
listened intently. Somewhere in the house he heard something that
didn’t belong. It sounded like a muffled cry. It was there for just
a moment, and then it was gone.

He flattened himself against the left panel
of the door and slowly cracked open the right panel. Nothing moved
in the hallway. He heard only silence. Moving quietly, he eased the
door open farther and slipped through it, closing it softly behind
him. Somehow the gesture made him feel that Caitlin was more
secure. Gliding silently along the hall dimly illuminated by
nightlights, he reached the door to his sons’ room. It was open a
crack. He hoped it was because one of the boys had gone to the
bathroom and neglected to close it all the way on his return.

He glanced through the crack and neither saw
nor heard anything out of the ordinary. Gently pushing the door
open, he slipped into the room. Except for the two boys curled up
in their respective beds, it was empty. As he was about to turn and
leave, Sean sat up. Whelan quickly raised a finger to his lips
cautioning silence. Sean looked at him for a moment then raised his
hands palms up in the universal questioning gesture. Whelan pointed
at each of the boys then at their beds, signaling that they were
not to get up. Sean nodded his head.

Whelan stepped back into the hallway and
continued noiselessly toward the staircase at its end. There were
no guests staying in any of the other rooms on the top floor.
Nonetheless, he checked each room before moving on. He descended
the stairs quietly and carefully, still straining to hear
something, anything, besides the normal sounds an old dwelling
makes in the night. He thought he heard a bedspring squeak followed
by what sounded like a shoe scraping against the wooden floor.

It was a slow time of year for tourists in
Dingle. Only one guest room was occupied that evening. A retired
spinster schoolteacher, Miss Elenora Tankersley from Sheffield,
England, had been an annual visitor for several years, preferring
to come during the off season when rates were at their lowest. She
was an excellent guest, always prim and fastidious. She demanded
the same room every year. Her days were spent strolling the
surrounding countryside between the frequent rainstorms, or alone
in her room editing her memoirs, which she intended to publish one
day. Brendan and Caitlin Whelan wondered how such a solitary and
introverted soul could have memoirs that would interest anyone.
Although she was invited frequently to join the Whelan family for
dinner, Miss Tankersley preferred to dine alone at one of the pubs
she favored in Dingle. Following dinner, she would retire early.
Tonight hadn’t been an exception.

Whelan paused at the bottom of the stairs.
Miss Tankersley’s room was two doors down the hall and on the left.
Her door was open, as were the other empty guestroom doors. That
was an anomaly. A very shy and private person, she always kept the
door closed when she was in her room. His adrenaline level began to
climb. He moved swiftly to the first open door, crouched very low
against the jamb and peered quickly into the room. Empty. He edged
along the hallway to Miss Tankersley’s room and repeated the
process.

This time he saw something. There were two
men in the room. One was stretched across an inert body on the bed,
Miss Tankersley’s. The man clearly was pinning her down. The other
man was holding a pillow over the elderly woman’s face. Both men
were large, but that wasn’t what stopped Whelan from rushing into
the room. It was the Makarov PM 9mm suppressed pistol being
brandished by the man pinning the victim’s body. Whelan silently
cursed himself for deciding not to bring the Sig with him. He
needed a plan, and quickly.

As his mind raced to connect the necessary
dots, the man who was smothering Miss Tankersley slowly raised the
pillow. He placed two fingers against her neck above the common
carotid artery. After a moment, he glanced at his companion, smiled
and nodded. The second man rose slowly from his victim’s lifeless
form and spoke softly to his companion. Whelan recognized it as an
Eastern European language and thought it might be Ukrainian, a
language he had encountered in the recent past.

He quickly edged away from the doorframe and
backed along the hall to the room nearest the stairs. Ducking into
it, he flattened himself against the wall just inside the door. He
could hear the two men as they exited the late Miss Tankersley’s
room. They were coming down the hall toward him. They would have
completed a search of the second floor and eliminated anyone there.
It was Miss Tankersley’s misfortune to be on holiday at the wrong
time. Whelan knew they would take the stairs to the third floor
where his wife and sons were. He harbored no doubts about the men’s
intentions.

As they walked past his hiding place, Whelan
sprang out behind them. He grabbed each man by the nape of his neck
with a grip so tight it all but paralyzed his victims. He smashed
their heads together with bone-crushing force. Only a handful of
individuals with similar genetics were capable of such power.
Instantly unconscious, the men collapsed. Whelan cursed silently as
the Makarov fell from one of the men’s hand and hit the floor with
a dull thud. He pinned their bodies with a knee in each man’s
chest, and wrapped a hand around each of their exposed throats. His
fingers and thumbs closed around the pharyngeal muscles, aortae,
trachea, and esophagus with such power they nearly met in front of
the cervical vertebrae. He leaned forward from the waist then
suddenly straightened and yanked his arms upward with all of his
power. It ripped most of the anterior portion of each victim’s neck
completely free of the body—a huge wolf dismembering lesser beings
that threatened his mate and their pups.

He wiped his gore-covered hands on the dead
men’s clothing, picked up the Makarov, checked its magazine, and
rose to continue the hunt.

Chapter 2—FBI Field
Office, Albuquerque, NM

Mitch Christie stared out the bulletproof
glass window of his office in the bombproof FBI Field Office
Building. It was a full-size window, an improvement over the sliver
of glass in his old office at HQ in Washington. The sky above
Albuquerque, New Mexico was cornflower blue and cloudless. He was
oblivious to it and the striking beauty of the rugged spine of the
Sandia Mountains rising in the distance. His mind was momentarily
blank. It was better that way, he knew. Troubling thoughts kept
trying to intrude, interrupting his efforts to concentrate on the
task at hand. Barely two months ago the Bureau had relieved him of
his duties as Supervisory Special Agent on the most important
investigation of his career. The transfer to the Albuquerque Field
Office as Assistant Special Agent in Charge was a demotion, not a
lateral move. He wasn’t sure he’d ever make the adjustment to the
dry Southwestern climate. As if on cue, an area on his right calf
began to itch. It was one of many similar areas that covered his
body, as his skin struggled to adjust. The lining of his nasal
passages was still dry and bleeding.

He had been struggling all
morning to put together notes for the
Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force
meeting that afternoon. OCDETF, a combination of
federal, state, and local investigative and prosecutorial agencies,
was tasked with expanding and intensifying the U.S. government's
anti-drug mission. It conducted collaborative long-term
investigations against major drug trafficking
organizations.

He was co-chair of the Task Force along with
a captain from the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department. He hated
the OCDETF part of his job, and knew that was contributing to his
difficulty concentrating on prepping for the meeting. He continued
to gaze out the window, almost sightlessly. There was more to the
problem than having to work with the Task Force.

He had come to realize that he hated his
whole job, every aspect of it. Christie had been an FBI agent for
almost twenty years, since his graduation from law school. For
years the job had been the focal point of his life. That’s where
the damage had been done. Without realizing what he was doing, he’d
allowed the demands of the Bureau to supersede those of his family.
Now, they were gone. His wife, Deborah, had left him almost a year
ago. Their two kids, Brett and Samantha, sixteen and fourteen, had
chosen to live with their mother in Maryland. Thinking of them, of
what he had lost, triggered the knot in his chest again.

Subconsciously, he raised his coffee mug to
his lips as if swallowing might wash the discomfort away. The
coffee was cold. Stone cold. He quickly spit it out and thumped the
mug back on his desktop. A few drops sloshed out and stained his
blotter. He continued to hold the mug’s handle in a tight grip. His
other hand slowly reached for his abdominal area and began to
massage a familiar spot. It was just below and to the left of his
solar plexus, over his stomach. He reached involuntarily for the
upper right hand drawer of his desk then remembered. There was no
Mylanta. Its manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, had recalled the
product some time ago. It still had not returned to the market.

He sighed and dug in a
pants pocket for his package of Rolaids.
It’s a hell of a thing that it’s come to
this
, he thought.
Lost my family, developed a disloyal stomach, and hate my
job
. He remembered when he started with the
Bureau. He had been on a fast track to achieving his goal: the rank
of at least Assistant Director, then follow his wife’s urgings and
retire with a nice pension by the time he was fifty-five. The next
step would have been to find a cush, non-stressful job as an
executive with a private security firm. Now, those dreams were
gone.

But it wasn’t just the
demands of the Bureau that had ruined his world. That damn Brendan
Whelan was the real culprit.
Jesus, I hate
that Irish bastard
, he thought. His hand
tightened on the flesh of his abdomen as a sharp wave of pain
coursed through his stomach.
Him and his
gang of misanthropic genetic mutants, the so-called Sleeping
Dogs
. They supposedly were the blackest of
black ops groups, and were supposed to have been killed in a plane
crash twenty years earlier. The long, hard slide in Christie’s
career had started when the late Harold Case outed the Dogs on the
orders of his former employer, ex-Senator Howard Morris. In the
process, it got Case killed along with Morris’s puppet master, the
billionaire Chaim Laski. Now Morris, a once-powerful politician who
had enjoyed the inside track to his party’s nomination for
president, was a nonentity.

Christie had heard that
Morris was now a pathetic figure, too terrified of everyone and
everything even to leave his home.
Serves
him right
, Christie thought
bitterly,
the meddlesome, self-promoting
sonofabitch
. His actions ultimately led
that old Cold Warrior, Cliff Levell, and his shadowy group of super
patriots, the Society of Adam Smith, informally known as the SAS,
to reactivate the Dogs. As the Bureau’s Supervisory Special Agent
in the Harold Case affair, Christie’s job had been to find Case’s
killer. Eventually, evidence led to the discovery that the members
of the Sleeping Dogs unit were alive. Worse, the Society had
engaged their services to thwart what it saw as the threat
of
Marxist domination from the party of
Howard Morris and the current president of the United States.
Another sharp pain sliced through his stomach and Christie
reflexively tossed another Rolaids into his mouth.

He turned away from the window and looked
over at his desk, specifically the framed picture of his family. It
wasn’t enough that, despite his best efforts and the tremendous
pressure Christie had been under to break the case, he was unable
to make much progress. No, he remembered, Levell had perceived a
threat to Christie’s family. He honored a deathbed pledge he had
made to his wife’s father, a fellow Marine who had saved Levell’s
life in a firefight in Vietnam. He had the Dogs kidnap Christie’s
wife and children and hold them in protective custody. It didn’t
matter so much that Levell had been right; that Laski’s Ukrainian
thugs really had intended to harm his family. What did matter to
him was his wife’s reaction.