Rudd and his team had simply staked out the club for a week, until the major stumbled out a little drunker than usual one night and strayed a little too close to Route 41. Dead on impact with the pickup truck they had stolen a few states over. Rudd’s wife, Jolene, had facilitated both those tragic circumstances, sidling up to the major in the club an hour earlier and plying him with shots of bourbon. She’d even walked him right in front of the speeding truck. For the next few weeks, Jolene had looked her happy self again.
Back in the early days, after they’d settled in the Chattanooga area, Harvey and his wife had done jobs like that several times a year. “Wet work,” as their trainers called it. Mostly lowbrow stuff like the Fort Campbell strip club hit-and-run. No fancy poisons. No sniper rifles. No explosives. Rudimentary “make it look like an accident or a suicide” kind of assignments, with a kidnap and blind delivery job every now and then.
They had traveled as far north as Chicago and as far east as Norfolk for more complicated personnel-intensive jobs, but the vast majority of their work over the past thirty years had gone down a couple of hundred miles from Chattanooga. Atlanta and Nashville, mainly. None of it had fit any easily detectable pattern, and neither of them had given it much thought. They weren’t here to ponder their work. They enjoyed a very comfortable life—with a single condition: obey CONTROL. A simple arrangement that had suited both of them fine. One he had always suspected hadn’t been a coincidence.
When the laptop finished booting, he launched Tor Browser and navigated to a site on the “dark web” created by their handlers exclusively to communicate with the Rudds. Tor Browser’s nearly undefeatable anonymity tool, combined with the use of a deeply buried “dark” website, provided one of the most secure and untraceable ways to pass along detailed mission direction and intelligence. The days of bouncing for hours between dead drops or sweating a live meetup at some grimy countryside café had vanished overnight with Tor’s rise. The irony wasn’t lost on him that Tor had been created by the United States military to protect online intelligence community communications.
After entering the alphanumeric code on the Post-it, followed by his username, into a text box that appeared on the screen, a page containing a single link appeared: OPERATION SUMMARY. He clicked it and read the two-page document line by line—twice.
Rudd shook his head. He had a bad feeling about this one. CONTROL was essentially throwing two borderline-retired teams that hadn’t worked together in several years at a fairly complex hostage-rescue mission. In other words, a mad scramble to keep a kidnapped VIP from disappearing. To make matters worse, the target was on the move—and CONTROL wanted the teams together and moving to intercept in under two hours. No small feat, considering that the team comprised eight operatives spread across four states.
At least he didn’t have to coordinate their routes. The initial rally points had been selected for each team. He needed to be in Gadsden, Alabama, which gave him a little over thirty minutes to assemble the suggested gear and retrieve the van he kept at a nearby outdoor storage lot. He checked his watch and determined he needed to be driving out of the garage in less than fifteen minutes. Not a problem. The only question left was what to do about Jolene. CONTROL had not included her name on the roster, which meant exactly what it implied. For whatever reason, they didn’t want her involved in the operation.
Rudd resolved to tell her right before he walked out of the house, to minimize the uncomfortable scene guaranteed to unfold. Being sidelined wouldn’t sit well with her, especially since they were unlikely to see a high-stakes mission like this again. Ever. But CONTROL had their reasons—and the Rudds had never failed to obey CONTROL. On second thought, he decided the better approach would be to leave a note on the kitchen table and slip away without waking her. He’d rather face Jolene’s wrath in the morning than CONTROL’s. The latter didn’t accept apologies. Not that Jolene was the forgiving type.
CHAPTER 5
Helen Gray jolted awake, hands locked in a death grip on the steering wheel. Her car was still on the two-lane road, slightly over the center line—traveling twelve miles per hour faster than the last time she remembered checking. She eased the sedan back into the right-hand lane and slowed to match the speed limit. The last thing she needed right now was to draw the wrong kind of attention.
A staccato series of thumps against the back seat, coming from the trunk, reinforced that sentiment. Getting pulled over would radically complicate an already thorny situation. She’d face an unthinkable question, requiring an immediate answer: Was the life of a police officer worth sacrificing to prevent a national catastrophe?