Target Response (18 page)

“Don’t get hysterical, Simon,” Carrollton soothed. “Kilroy is doing just what we want. Finding him and his last few remaining associates in a nation of 333 million is like searching for a needle in a haystack. We want him to come to us. Then we’ll have him. No lone handful of ragtag Dogs, cut off from all official Army assistance, can ever get by the MYRMEX guards we’ve got posted all over the Imperium.”

“They’d better not, because if they do you’re going to be right here with me,” Gunther said.

“That’s why I’m here now instead of in Lichtenstein. I’m betting my life along with yours and I say it’s a no-lose wager, no gamble at all,” said Carrollton.

“It’d better be,” Gunther fumed. He examined the mailing label on the envelope the package had come in. “What’s this business about the return address being the dead letter office?”

“Some of Kilroy’s twisted sense of humor, I imagine. Apart from any negative connotations a dead letter suggests, it also refers to the fact that for some time the Dog Team operated under the cover of Mercury Transport Systems, a private courier company.”

“And the sender’s name, ‘Peter Collinson’? What’s that all about?”

Carrollton scratched his head. “Beats me. None of my people have been able to figure that one out yet. The name doesn’t track with any of the known Dog operatives or aliases.”

“I can shed some light on that,” Knight offered.

The other two looked at him.

“‘Peter Collinson’ is a piece of slang from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, used primarily by railroading men. It means, simply, ‘nobody’—a phantom, someone who doesn’t exist,” Knight said.

“Where’d you pick up that nugget of information?” Carrollton demanded.

“I searched for it online,” Knight said, smiling meaninglessly.

Carrollton scowled.

“Some joker, that Kilroy! A real funny man,” Gunther said, his voice dripping sarcastic venom. “You could die laughing.”

“Let’s hope not, sir,” Knight said.

The other two gave him dirty looks. A knock sounded on the conference room door. It was one of Gunther’s executive assistants. Gunther told him to come in.

“Phone call for you on line five, sir,” the assistant said.

“What are you bothering me with that for? I’m busy. That’s what I keep you around for, to screen my calls,” Gunther said.

“This sounded important, sir. It’s a Dr. Dunkel.”

“Dunkel? What does he want?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Gunther, he wouldn’t tell me. Says he’ll only speak to you. An emergency, he says.”

“All right, I’ll take it,” Gunther said. “Get out!”

The assistant exited. Gunther picked up the phone, pushed the button for line five.

“Gunther here. Who’s this? Dunkel? What do you want? I sent you the check for this month—”

Gunther fell silent as the caller relayed his information. The news rocked him. He reeled, as if struck by a physical blow. Already pale, he took on a deathly white pallor.

The receiver slipped from his hands to fall clattering on the conference table. Gunther’s legs folded at the knees. He sat down hard in his chair.

Carrollton went to him. “What is it, Simon? What’s wrong?”

Gunther forced himself to respond:

“My wife—she’s been taken!”

Earlier that Saturday afternoon, Steve sat in the passenger-side seat of the cab of a Polar Pride laundry truck parked to one side of the Dunkel Wellness Center in the township of Mantoloking in south-central New Jersey.

Blazoned on both sides of the truck was the Polar Pride logo along with its motto: “Laundry White as the Driven Snow.”

Steve wore a white commander’s cap with stiff black visor, a long-sleeved white tunic and pants, and a pair of black boots. He held an M-4 carbine cradled in his lap, out of sight of anyone glancing at the truck.

“They’ve been in there a long time,” he said to the driver seated beside him.

The driver, Fred Osgood, rested his hands on the steering wheel. The truck idled, motor running.

“I don’t hear any shooting yet,” he said. “So far, so good.”

Like Steve, Fred was a Dog Team member, one of the last few such left alive. Since returning to the United States from Nigeria, Kilroy had managed to assemble a squad of veteran Dogs. In addition to Ireland and Osgood, he’d also collected team members Jessie Toler and Reuben Diaz, Jr.

The group had made its headquarters at a safe house in the town of Egg Harbor at the Jersey shore. Kilroy had laid out the whys and wherefores of the unprecedented onslaught that had been leveled at the Dog Team.

Behind it lay the hidden hand of financier Simon E. Gunther. Using his complete and unlimited control of brokerage house Saxbee Mangold’s Transworld Capital Fund, Gunther had assumed majority ownership of private security contractor MYRMEX. Gunther kept MYRMEX founder and owner Blaise Carrollton on as company CEO.

The Transworld Capital Fund and MYRMEX worked in concert with Nigerian strongman Minister of Defense Derek Tayambo to cut a billion-dollar deal to build an oil transshipment port in Lagos. Central to the deal was the understanding that the completed port would be bought by the People’s Republic of China. Rich, resource hungry, the PRC made its primary foreign goal in the Third World locking up future supplies of oil and rare minerals. The PRC had involved MYRMEX as a cutout to hide its part in the arrangement from U.S. intelligence. Once the completed port was in Red Chinese hands, Tayambo would ensure that Nigeria’s vast oil reserves would be sold exclusively to the PRC, cutting the United States off at the oil spigot.

The Defense Intelligence Agency sent an investigative team to Nigeria to probe the murky doings. The investigators had unearthed the Transworld/MYRMEX/PRC triumvirate and was about to head back home to Washington to make a full report to the Pentagon.

Rogue CIA agent Ward Thurlow, MYRMEX’s man in Lagos, alerted the Gunther interests to the DIA team’s threat. Gunther had ordered that the investigators be neutralized, that is, killed. Their homeward-bound plane was blown up in midair, slaying eight investigators and destroying their painstakingly amassed evidence. Kilroy and Raynor escaped the slaughter by virtue of their being away in the Vurukoo oil fields following up some investigative leads.

Raynor was killed but Kilroy escaped the net, feeding Ward Thurlow alive to the crocodiles. Kilroy had his own connections in Lagos, contacts and friends unknown to his Dog Team handlers and the CIA. They enabled him to surface in Lagos and assassinate Minister Tayambo with a sniper rifle.

Tayambo’s death monkeywrenched the Transworld/PRC oil deal. Vice President Johnny Lisongu, pro-Western in sympathies and aware that Tayambo had been killed by an American assassin, thereby securing his place as the new power center in the Nigerian governing cabinet, threw out the MYRMEX contract to build the new port and the PRC oil deal, negotiating a new arrangement with Washington.

Unaware of the extent of the Dog Team’s knowledge of his dirty dealings and fearing their vengeance, Gunther authorized MYRMEX CEO Blaise Carrollton to contract an elimination operation against the Dog’s strike force, the active-duty field operative assassins, who numbered about two dozen in all.

Carrollton farmed the contract to Clan Moray, a family dynasty of private assassins who’d been in the murder-for-hire game for more than a century. The Morays were paid a substantial sum along with a large block of stock shares in MYRMEX, allying their fortunes with that of the company.

A traitor inside the Dog Team apparatus gave the Morays detailed inside information about their targets, the active-duty operatives. Using the arts of subterfuge, deceit, and sudden death, the family killed some eighteen Dog Team members, all of them unaware that they had been fingered for death.

Gunther’s go-betweens communicated to Pentagon bigs the message that the Army’s assassination unit’s existence would remain a secret as long as the military took no action against Gunther, Transworld, or MYRMEX. Otherwise the explosive information would be leaked to Transworld’s many friendly contacts in the media, who would splash it all throughout the mainstream media, creating a firestorm of negative press that would adversely impact not only the Army and the U.S. military but the nation’s vital national security interests throughout the world.

The Army’s high command seethed at the blackmail but was forced to go along, at least until it could find some way of neutralizing Gunther and MYRMEX that would not unleash a torrent of damaging revelations about the Dog Team.

So much Kilroy had learned from his extensive contacts in the military and intelligence worlds, all of them confirmed patriots like himself who chafed at the bonds of unholy blackmail being forced on them by the Gunther/Transworld crowd. Many of them quietly, covertly helped Kilroy to gather the personnel and material for a counterstrike.

Having assembled Steve Ireland, Jessie Toler, Fred Osgood, and Reuben Diaz, Jr. and gathered them in the Egg Harbor safe house, Kilroy detailed the situation to them. When he had finished, Osgood said, “I get it—we’ve got to kill Gunther and his pals.”

Kilroy shook his head. “First, we’ve got to hit them where it hurts, in the source of their power—their pocketbooks.” He then added, “Then we’ll kill them.”

Which is why Steve and Fred were disguised as Polar Pride laundrymen early Saturday afternoon.

So were Kilroy, Toler, and Diaz.

They had stolen a Polar Pride truck and uniforms to invade the precincts of the Dunkel Wellness Center, an exclusive private clinic in New Jersey. The center was a place where rich folks sent their alcoholic, drug-abusing, or otherwise dysfunctional relatives and loved ones to be dried out and cleaned up.

Its founder, Dr. Ernst Dunkel, was none too particular about medical ethics when it came to the care and release of his charges as long as the checks from their relatives cleared. Families who had problem members best kept out of the public eye for one reason or another could pay and pay well to have the offending parties committed to the clinic and kept as prisoners under virtual lock and key for an indefinite amount of time—years even—with no hope of escape or release.

Such a captive was Faye Blaylock Gunther, the estranged wife of Simon E. Gunther. An attractive and intelligent woman of a certain age, she had made the mistake of too strenuously objecting to her husband’s countless infidelities. Worse, she had protested his appropriation and misuse of her own family funds, a mountain of money and assets that was the source of Gunther’s sudden and dramatic rise to the ranks of the superrich.

Faye was a Blaylock, an old-money dynasty that had made its pile back at the turn of the nineteenth century in the days of the robber barons, using railroads and timber and mining interests to acquire a multi-million-dollar fortune. In the twentieth century, shrewd management and investments had pyramided that sum into a billion-dollar bonanza.

As the last living heir of the Blaylocks, Faye was the inheritor of that fabulous wealth. As such she had been wooed and wed by Gunther. But when she made the mistake of objecting to his plundering of her family bequest, he took steps to neutralize her.

It was a tricky problem. Faye’s death would provide no solution. Her fortune was bound up in trusts and legal instruments that ensured that no spouse could profit by her death. If she died, the money would go to a tax-free charitable foundation created by the Blaylocks. Not only would Gunther fail to collect a red cent, but he would also be forced to provide an accounting of how some of those monies had been spent, a disclosure that would send him to a federal penitentiary for the rest of his life.

But if Faye was declared not of sound mind, her husband could force a power of attorney that would let him control her fabulous mega-fortune without having to account for it to any probing outsiders.

Enter Dr. Dunkel. Working in connivance with the corrupt medico, Gunther had his wife virtually abducted, imprisoned in the clinic, and declared insane, allowing him to take control of her assets.

That had happened five years ago. For five long years Faye Blaylock Gunther had languished as an inmate at the Dunkel Wellness Center. The first year went by in a chemical haze, as Dunkel and his minions kept her sedated with large doses of mind-numbing tranquilizers, the sort given to psychotically violent patients.

After that first year or so, Faye was sufficiently tamed so that the dosages were lessened. She was kept in a locked room but allowed the minimal comfort of books, music, and television. Several foredoomed escape plans resulted in the revocation of privileges and the renewal of massive drugging.

In the last two years, she had given up all attempts at escape, although the hope of ultimate freedom someday helped her keep her sanity. Which wasn’t easy, being surrounded as she was by genuinely disturbed if not crazy inmates.

When an orderly arrived this Saturday afternoon to escort her to Dr. Dunkel’s office, Faye had no idea what it was all about. She asked no questions, submitting meekly as the brawny orderly gripped her upper arm as he led her through winding fluorescent clinic corridors to Dr. Dunkel’s office.

Surprisingly Ms. Prymm, Dr. Dunkel’s receptionist, was absent from her post in the medic’s office. In her place was a young woman who looked like she was barely out of her teens.

She was Jessie Toler—thirty, but looking ten years younger than her actual age. She was five and a half feet tall, weighed about 115 pounds, and had curly brown hair, a youthful freckled face, and a slim physique. She was a trained Dog Team assassin.

The next deviation from standard routine came when the orderly balked at handing over Faye without an okay from Dr. Dunkel. Apparently the proper forms and protocol had not been followed.

When the orderly became obstinate, Jessie produced a gun and shot him. It was a dart gun, shooting a tranquilizer dart. The orderly took a few steps forward, staggered, reeling, and fell unconscious to the floor.

“Do you want to get out of this place?” Jessie asked.

“Yes,” Faye said.

“Do exactly as I say and you’ll walk out of here in ten minutes.”

Jessie locked the outer office door, leading a dazed and bewildered Faye into Dr. Dunkel’s inner office, where another surprise awaited.

Dr. Dunkel and his receptionist, Ms. Prymm, were handcuffed and gagged with strips of duct tape pasted across their mouths. They were being guarded by two white-clad men whom she would subsequently learn were Kilroy and Diaz.

Not only was Ms. Prymm gagged and handcuffed, she’d been stripped down to her underclothes and stocking feet. Jessie handed Faye a pile of folded garments that belonged to Ms. Prymm.

“Put these on,” Jessie told Faye.

“Who are you people?” Faye asked.

“Friends.”

Kilroy had designated Jessie as Faye’s handler, not knowing the woman’s mental state after years of confinement and thinking that Faye would feel less threatened if her primary contact was a woman.

Faye proved to be surprisingly resilient. Recovering from her stunned surprise, she quickly pulled on Ms. Prymm’s blouse, jacket, and skirt. The shoes were too large but Faye solved that by stuffing wadded paper into the toes and heels.

Kilroy and Diaz herded Dunkel and Prymm into a supply closet and locked them in. Then they, Jessie, and Faye exited the office, locking the outer door behind them. The three Dog Team members were armed with real guns that they kept concealed as they escorted Faye across the hall and down the stairs to the front entrance. They were prepared to use them but didn’t have to, because none of the few passing staffers took any interest in them.

Seeing the group emerge from the building, Steve went around to the back of the stolen laundry truck, opened the door. Faye, Jessie, Kilroy, and Diaz got inside, and Steve shut the door behind them.

The laundry truck rolled down the long drive to the main gate. The guard raised the electronically controlled bar gate, opening it. He responded with a cheerful wave to driver Fred Osgood’s two-finger salute.

The truck drove away with Faye inside it.

It was as simple as that.

At ten p.m. that same Saturday night, Steve breezed into the Imperium casino-hotel.

He was in pretty important company. Seated in the back of a chauffeured stretch limousine with Steve were General Lucian “Vic” Vickery, U.S. Army (Ret.) and C. August Villard, Esquire.

Vickery, a much decorated military man who’d served in combat in the first and second Iraq wars and Afghanistan, was a member of the MYRMEX board of directors. He’d been put in as a figurehead and kept out of the loop regarding the company’s nefarious doings.

He was back in the loop now. Big-time.

Villard was one of the nation’s leading corporate lawyers, specially recruited for the occasion. A briefcase filled with legal documents rested across his knees.

The limo was followed by a second, similar vehicle. In it were six smart lawyers from Villard’s blue-chip Manhattan legal firm.

Anticipating a foray from Kilroy, the Imperium had been closed to the public, its staff given the night off. The casino swarmed with heavily armed MYRMEX guards. None of whom dared resist the entrance of General Vickery and Counselor Villard. The combination of a MYRMEX board director and a high-powered New York City lawyer baffled the gun-toting brigade.

Following in the wake of the twin dynamos was Steve and Villard’s battery of six lawyers.