“We have DNA matches on Butler, Vincente, and Dawkins,” Mahoney said.
“Let me guess,” Sampson said. “They’re all dead men.”
Ned nodded. “Matthew Riley Butler was a DIA interrogator, supposedly blown to bits in an IED explosion in Iraq six years ago. Jesus Pedro ‘JP’ Vincente was a Green Beret who purportedly died in a firefight in northern Afghanistan four years ago. David ‘Big DD’ Dawkins was with SEAL Team Four. He supposedly died five years ago by rocket-propelled grenade during a secret incursion into Somalia. His body was never recovered.”
“What about the helicopter they used?” Bree asked. “I heard they found it.”
Mahoney nodded. “In a clear-cut about twenty air miles from where they attacked you. Shot to hell. Used to belong to a helicopter service north of there. The owner claims it was bought sight unseen and paid for in cryptocurrency by Matthew Butler, whom he identified from pictures. We’re trying to track the crypto back to the buyer.”
I said, “I know who the buyer was. M. He’s behind all of it.”
“You believe what Butler told you before he ran?” Sampson asked. “That he had no idea who M actually was?”
“I go back and forth,” I said. “But it makes sense when I remember that he called what they were doing a ‘movement.’”
“Suggests an ideology,” Mahoney said. “Fanaticism.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “With independent cells acting without knowledge of others but all under Maestro’s and M’s direction.”
“I can see some of that,” Sampson said. “But from Manitoba?”
Mahoney said, “We had Canadian Mounted Police check out the location. Middle of nowhere, six miles from the nearest building.”
Bree frowned. “But you were saying there could be other teams like Butler’s? That M could send other teams like that after you? From wherever?”
I nodded unhappily. “Butler said M was sick of me and John. Butler said he disagreed with M, but that’s why he was there.”
Sampson said, “With M paying a half a million for a helicopter on short notice to make it happen, I’m thinking we’ve gone and pissed M off again. I’m thinking things are not over between us.”
I wanted to believe otherwise, but I said, “Not by a long shot, I’m afraid.”
Chapter
105
Northeastern Massachusetts
Set up like an amphitheater with six stacked rows of workstations, the operations room was kept intentionally dim so the fifteen men and women working at their individual computers could clearly see the cinema-size screen mounted high on the front wall.
The big display was filled with a feed from a camera aimed from several hundred yards away at a small private jet parked on the tarmac of an unidentified airport.
On the top row of the amphitheater, a tall man in his forties with longish dark hair and a clipped salt-and-pepper goatee watched the screen intently, his arms crossed.
He adjusted the microphone on his headset. “Can we zoom in, Edith?”
To his right, Edith, a harried-looking brunette in her fifties, adjusted her eyeglasses before giving her keyboard a command.
The screen magnified, showing the Citation Jet and two men in dark sunglasses climbing down the gangway. Both carried machine pistols.
On the screen, a third, smaller, person loaded luggage into the hold from a cart. Finished, the handler shut the hold and, with a nod to the armed men at the bottom of the gangway, pushed the empty cart out of view.
“That was smoothly done, Mr. Vance,” the tall man remarked to the beefier man standing a few feet away from him.
“Flawless, Mr. Malcomb,” agreed Steven Vance, the CEO of Paladin Inc.
Ryan Malcomb, his tech-genius partner, was now tapping his fingers on the back of an unoccupied chair at one of the workstations.
A woman with a buzz cut on much of the left side of her head and the hair on the right dyed purple said, “They’ve got their flight plans cleared.”
“Excellent,” Ryan Malcomb said.
A younger man two rows down said, “Escalade’s at the gate.”
A few minutes later, a black Cadillac SUV rolled onto the scene and stopped near the gangway. Three more armed men climbed out.
One of them opened the right rear door and a woman exited. Dark pantsuit. Dark glasses. Jet-black hair. A stunning beauty.
Vance said, “Edith, make sure it’s not a body double.”
Edith adjusted her glasses and typed again, freezing the woman in a frame and setting it to one side of the big screen. A biometric model appeared and settled over the woman’s face.