Burn: A Sam Jameson Thriller, page 1
Burn
A Sam Jameson Thriller
Lars Emmerich
Contents
Copyright 2017
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
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Untitled
Copyright 2017
Lars Emmerich
Polymath Publishing and Consulting, Inc.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this book are fictitious or used fictitiously.
1
It was August. My personal Chernobyl happened in March, and I was still a long way from okay.
I walked out of the movie theater and into the brutal Charleston heat the same way I had walked in nearly three hours before: alone. I’d shown up early to get a good seat and catch the previews, because I had nothing better to do. Solo moviegoing, along with solo dining and a solo yoga practice and a solo existence in the tiny little studio apartment I now called home, had replaced a career and a long-term relationship.
I was upset as I walked out of the theater, because the movie had turned into a love story. I avoid love stories like the plague. Too painful, on account of a man named Brock James. We were made for each other and we had an amazing life together. I was as happy and content as I’ve always dreamed of being. And then, in March, Brock left.
Of course, I handled it exceptionally well. I left him 473 phone messages, wrote several thousand emails, and sent him two billion text messages.
Replies: zero.
At some point during this amazing display of dignity, I quit my job catching spies for the Department of Homeland Security. I also sold my home and just about all the things inside of it—everything reminded me of Brock, so everything had to go. Then I drove south out of DC and kept driving until I happened upon an intersection somewhere in the middle of South Carolina, where for no good reason I turned left. Then I drove until the road ran into the ocean.
I wound up in Charleston. It seemed as good a place as any and I had grown tired of driving, so I rented an apartment. There was no need to find a job, because I had saved plenty and invested over the years. I didn’t need to work, but I definitely needed something to do. Solo yoga, solo dining, and solo moviegoing didn’t quite fill the void, but they kept me from totally losing my mind.
Looking back, it all seems pretty pathetic. But I’m allergic to cats and I don’t have an interest in knitting or needlepoint, so I had no idea what to do in my premature spinsterhood. Just how premature will have to remain my little secret. Let’s just say that I’m too old not to have a family but too young to give up on the idea. That should put you in the right ballpark.
I put on my sunglasses as I left the theater. I didn’t want anyone to see my eyes, because they were red from crying at the damned sneak-attack love story. Normally the movie poster and previews will give you a clue about those kinds of hazards, but not this one. It was like stepping on an emotional landmine, and I thought it was a dirty trick to pull on someone.
I started sweating a few paces outside of the theater. Walking around Charleston in the late summer is like walking around inside a bowl of soup. The air is hot and soggy and sticks to the inside of your lungs, and on the days when there is no breeze, which in my brief experience was every day, your clothes cling to you like a bad date.
Not that I would know much about bad dates. I hadn’t been on a “real” date in years and I had no plans to ever do so again. Ever.
At the time, I hadn’t been in Charleston but a few months, but my feet knew the route between the movie theater and my apartment well enough to carry me between the two destinations pretty much without my involvement. That freed my mind to ruminate on all the crap I’d left behind in DC. More accurately, I ruminated on all the crap I’d carried with me from DC.
One gem of an episode ran through my head with alarming regularity during that period of my life. It involved a park in Alexandria, Virginia, six months earlier on a dreary February day. I had a team of counterespionage agents with me. It was my op. I wore an earpiece and spoke into a radio mic, and I had a difficult decision to make.
I issued the order to apprehend a terror financing suspect named Tariq Ezzat. He was a middle manager in a gang of loosely affiliated minor criminals who sent fistfuls of pilfered cash back home to Asspackistan in order to fund global jihad. In case you’ve been on an extended bender (I’m not judging), global jihad is a thing that people under the influence of a certain religion do that involves angry internet videos and an occasional suicide bombing. I spent most of my career at Homeland trying to keep all the global jihad contained somewhere else on the globe.
Tariq Ezzat didn’t have a history of violence and I didn’t expect him to be a problem, but on that day in the park, as my men closed in around him, he took off at a sprint toward a mother and her five-year-old daughter, pulled his gun, and shot the little girl through the heart.
Sarah Beth McCulley was her name. She died right there in the park, right in her mother’s arms, her blood spreading in a widening pool around her little body. When she died, so did an important part of me.
People blamed me for the tragedy—the US Attorney General even obtained a grand jury indictment against me. But as it turned out, the Director of National Intelligence, a man named Alexander Wells, along with a senator named Oren Stanley, had conspired to engineer the tragedy. They were up to their eyeballs in illegal activity, and while I didn’t know it at the time, my investigation was bearing down on them. They had Sarah Beth killed to stall the investigation, and they went after me over her death as a way to make sure the investigation stayed dead. It was a horrific episode, and I’m sure it took decades off my lifespan.
As I wandered around Charleston for weeks on end in a terminal funk, I tried to come to grips with my toxic levels of unresolved anger toward Oren Stanley and Alexander Wells. All of that angst was a bummer, because there wasn’t any way for me to exact even a small amount of revenge. Both of them were already dead. A legendary über-spy named Artemis Grange sliced Oren Stanley’s throat, then engineered an explosion in downtown DC that killed Alexander Wells—and nearly killed me too.
Artemis Grange gave Wells and Stanley what they deserved, but the two of them lived on in my mind, which twisted itself into angry knots about seventy times a day. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about what had happened and how it had laid waste to my life and many others. I still struggle with it to this day.
I had gotten out of the habit of paying careful attention to my surroundings. Disciplined counter-surveillance measures had saved my life countless times during my career catching spies, but in the aftermath of everything that happened over the past few months—witnessing the little girl’s death, climbing out from under a federal indictment, losing Brock, barely surviving an explosion that killed a dozen people, and walking away from my career—I simply didn’t have the energy. I guess I also assumed that since I was done with the clandestine world, it would also be done with me, and I wouldn’t need to spend my life looking over my shoulder. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
As Wells and Stanley and Artemis Grange and Sarah Beth McCulley and Brock James—that perfect, beautiful, amazing bastard of a man who wouldn’t return my calls—swirled around in my head, I absently pulled my apartment key from my pocket and pushed it into the lock. The door opened and I walked in.
The apartment was small and outdated. But for the meager furnishings that came with the rent, it was empty. I’d fled DC in March with just a few suitcases. I donated the pile of things hadn’t sold at the estate sale, where people kept wondering who died. “Me,” I started to answer a few times, but I caught myself before it tumbled out of my mouth. It was just too pathetically weepy and wildly self-involved to say something like that out loud, yet the sentiment wasn’t entirely off the mark.
I tossed my keys onto the table in the kitchenette and they skidded to a stop just shy of an acrylic award from Homeland. “To Special Agent Samantha Jameson, in recognition of your hard work and dedication.” I remember especially well the case that earned me that worthless slab of plastic because “hard work and dedication” involved death by torture and electrocution. A friend and fellow agent kept my blood moving until the paramedics arrived with
It was an e-ticket ride, but I didn’t get a raise or a promotion or a handshake from the president, or even one of those cheesy gift cards. Instead, they gave me the same bulk-ordered hunk of junk they hand out to the Bureaucrat of the Quarter and the Pencil Pusher of the Year. It’s a worthless piece of throwaway crap that cheapened my sacrifice, I felt, yet it’s the only memento from nearly two decades at Homeland that I chose to keep. I keep it as a reminder, in case I’m ever tempted to ask for my old job again.
Also on the table was the ticket stub from the movie. It had evidently gotten tangled up with the keys in my pocket, and must have fluttered loose when I tossed the keychain on the table. The ticket stub rested face-down, its edges curled up. Written in red marker on the back was a message: Sam, we need to talk. —PK.
2
The message on the ticket stub hit me like a bucket of cold water. I’d been walking around in maudlin self-absorption, completely oblivious that someone was watching me.
Whoever PK was, he or she had gone to a lot of trouble to get a message to me. But why hadn’t he just called? I still had the same cell phone number, because Brock was going to call me at any moment to confess that the breakup was just due to a little bit of temporary insanity, and I didn’t want to hamper that process by throwing a new phone number into the mix. So why didn’t this PK person just call? If they didn’t have my number, they could have just spent a dollar online to find it. It’s 2017, and mankind sent robots to Mars years ago, after all. Finding a phone number isn’t tough.
The familiar rush of adrenaline hit me as I puzzled over the note. The sensation excited me, and then it convicted me. It reminded me of the pathology that had caused me to stay in the spy game long enough to scare away the man I waited my whole life to fall in love with. He’s tall and brilliant and handsome and funny, and he left because he grew tired of wondering when my job would kill me.
I shook my head. I had walked away from that life for a good reason, and I wasn’t about to be shoved right back into it by some hand-scrawled note on a movie stub. I might not have been in a terrific place in my life, but I had learned my lesson, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to jump back into the fray.
But I couldn’t help wondering who PK was, and I found myself doing a mental inventory of the PKs I’d run across over the years.
Paul Krause? Our paths briefly crossed over five years ago on a case. A punk college student self-radicalized on right-wing propaganda and hatched a plan to punish those evil tax-and-spend liberals with a fertilizer bomb. He left breadcrumbs all over the Internet and practically begged to be arrested. Kind of comical, but also tragic. It taught me a good lesson about why people join radical movements: because people are batshit crazy.
I couldn’t imagine why Paul Krause and I would need to talk. I hadn’t answered my phone recently, but I did check the messages regularly and Paul Krause hadn’t called. As far as I knew, he was still on the job as a DC Metro police investigator, so it would have been more than a little weird for him to slip a note to me in South Carolina.
Scratch Paul Krause off the list.
Phil Keating, maybe? That was going back a while. We dated at one point, maybe a dozen years ago, though our “dates” were really just brief and sordid sweat sessions in seedy hotels. It was more than a little scandalous, because we were seeing each other while I was still drinking heavily and while he was still my (married) boss. We both survived, somehow, but I couldn’t imagine why Phil Keating would ever need to track me down in secret. I could see how maybe on a lark he’d look me up and drop a line by email or whatever, but the whole secret note thing seemed a non-starter.
I racked my brain for more PKs. There weren’t any more rattling around back there.
Except, of course, for the one PK I was certain I would never, ever hear from again. And if it was that particular PK, I had no interest in talking to him. Everything was still too fresh and too raw, and I had made too much progress reinventing myself.
Okay, that last part was a lie. I was stuck in a rut like nobody’s business. But I still had no desire to talk to him. As far as I knew, he was still a great guy, but he was very deeply involved in the clandestine world that I no longer wanted any part of.
I decided to ignore the note. I suppose I was suspending disbelief, pretending that the issue, whatever it was, would go away if I didn’t bother with it.
But those were low odds. PK—whoever he was—had already put plenty of effort into contacting me. It was clear that he’d watched me long enough to get a feel for my pathetic little solo routine at the movies and my pathetic little dinners for one. Then he’d found a way to sneak his message to me while I was busy being miserable and feeling sorry for myself. He probably wasn’t going to just go away.
The whole thing left me feeling unsettled and slightly violated. But I don’t know what I expected, really. It wasn’t like I had gone into witness protection or anything. I hadn’t even bothered to get a new cell phone. Tracking me down would have taken a competent person about sixty-nine seconds.
More than the sense of violation, though, came a feeling of exhaustion. I had spent most of my adult life in the clandestine world, with all of its outrageous dangers carefully hidden in plain sight. Dead drops and brush-passes and cyber espionage and follow-the-money games and even a real shootout or two had been a way of life for me, but it had worn me thin. When I walked away last March, I had it in my mind to leave all of it behind for good.
I looked again at the ticket stub and immediately resolved henceforth to do all of my movie watching and exercising and eating and sleeping in my apartment. If PK wanted to talk to me, then he was going to have to come knock on my door. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go out of my way to give him an opening.
Great idea. It lasted for all of two days. My fair skin started to take on a pasty translucence, and I began to go stir-crazy, so I took a deep breath, stepped out of my hovel, and took myself to another movie. I went to a new theater this time, just to change things up.
The film was forgettable. That happens when you watch a lot of them. You burn through all the good ones pretty quickly and end up lowering your standards and suffering through some dreck. After the mediocre movie, I stopped for dinner at a restaurant called the Chop House. The place is a carnivore’s delight, with desserts to die for. It’s on King Street, just a half-dozen blocks from my apartment, and just a stone’s throw from my movie theater.
My movie theater? I really needed to get a life.
The food was fabulous. I ordered the moose steak, medium rare. It still had an attitude, which is how I like it. I was about halfway through my meal when the PK I thought I would never, ever see again sat down at my table.
He startled me, of course, but I recovered. “I gave at the office,” I said. It was the best I could do on such short notice.
PK smiled. Peter Kittredge. He looked different from the way I remembered him, but he was still handsome as hell. His broken arm had healed, and while I wasn’t exactly at the peak of my observational powers the last time we were together, I could have sworn he’d had some work done since then. I decided to take the subtle approach.
“New chin?” I asked.
Kittredge blushed. “It’s great to see you,” he said with a small chuckle.
“You could have just called.”
“Would you have answered?”
