Shadow Tag Read online

  The two agents were sprinting across the road from the warehouse complex, waving at the passing cars and trying to flag one down.

  Khoury pulled up next to them.

  Malone started to say, “Thanks for stopping—” then he recognized them. “You? How did—”

  “Get in, Berry ordered.

  Reilly and Malone hustled into the back of the Audi, then Khoury hit the gas and powered away.

  “Where are they?” Reilly asked.

  “We lost them,” Berry informed him.

  “The main road leads to the river,” Khoury said as he scanned the area. “I say we just keep going, the odds are that’s the way they’re headed.”

  They careened down the wide road which veered left past a big Land Rover dealership before snaking along the Thames.

  They were blowing past the Battersea Heliport to their left when Berry shouted, “Stop. Right there.” He was pointing out from his window.

  Khoury slammed on the brakes and swerved off to the side.

  They all followed Berry’s lead.

  The Galaxy was parked on the tarmac in the heliport after evidently crashing through its thin metal gate. The two goons were by a small chopper that had its rotor already spinning. By the looks of it, they were arguing with the pilot, whose door was open—then the lead goon pulled the pilot out and flung him to the ground, gestured for his henchman to go around the front and get in, and climbed into the pilot’s seat.

  “They’re going to fly off,” Berry shouted.

  “This guy knows how to pilot a chopper?” Reilly asked in disbelief.

  “He did mention he took flying lessons,” Khoury said.

  The three others’ heads swerved slowly in unison to face him.

  “What?” he protested. “That’s what the guy said.”

  The others held him with their triple-deadpan gaze.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Khoury muttered, as he threw the Audi into reverse, backed up, spun the wheel, then charged ahead.

  Right at the chopper.

  “Raymond,” Berry said in a low voice as his fingers tightened around the handles next to him.

  Khoury didn’t let up.

  “Hey, buddy,” Malone said from the back, “There’s probably a lot of fuel in that thing. And it’s flammable. You do know that, right?”

  The Audi was still rocketing ahead.

  “Seriously, dude,” Reilly added. “We’ll get him. He’s got to land somewhere.”

  The revs kept rising.

  The chopper was just lifting off the tarmac.

  “Don’t worry,” Khoury said. “I’ve researched this.”

  And just as he reached the chopper, he turned the wheel slightly and the Audi banked left, and instead of crashing into the chopper’s main body, the Audi’s right front wing clipped its tail rotor. The spinning propeller ate into the car’s bodywork, slicing it up in a scream of grinding metal—but it was enough to break the blades, which flew off in pieces.

  Khoury piled on the brakes, hit reverse and floored the gas.

  The Audi pulled back just as the chopper, now without a tail rotor, started spinning around its own vertical axis, out of control. The chopper banked right, then left, going around like a spinning top, before it angled left, clipped the edge of the tarmac, and flipped over—crashing into the Thames in a huge white plume.

  The four men dashed out of the Audi and rushed to the river’s edge just as its dark water swallowed the chopper.

  They stared down as the last bits of its fuselage disappeared under the surface.

  “Shouldn’t someone dive in to try to rescue them?” Berry asked.

  Reilly looked at Malone, then they nodded grudgingly.

  “I guess,” Reilly said, as he started pulling his clothes off.

  Berry and Khoury walked off.

  “Wait,” Reilly called out after them. “You can’t just leave. We’re going to need your statements about what happened.”

  “We haven’t had lunch,” Berry shouted back. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “We’ll call the London field office tomorrow,” Khoury said. “I think we could both use some rest. Who should we ask for? What’s your name?”

  “Reilly,” the agent said. “Sean Reilly. And he’s Cotton Malone.”

  Khoury stopped dead in his tracks. Glanced over at Berry.

  Berry looked back at the two men, turned to Khoury, then shook his head. “They’re just messing with us. They must know who we are.”

  The two authors chuckled and walked away as the agents dove from the bank and into the murky river.

  THE END

  (or is it?)

  KEEP READING

  for exclusive sneak previews of

  Raymond Khoury’s next Sean Reilly novel

  THE END GAME

  and

  Steve Berry’s next Cotton Malone novel

  THE 14th COLONY

  Read on for a sneak preview of the next Reilly & Tess novel

  THE END GAME

  Available for Kindle on March 10, 2016

  ORDER NOW by clicking HERE

  Copyright © 2016 by Raymond Khoury

  1

  Allentown, New Jersey

  I really didn’t want to be here. Then again, who would?

  Three o’clock in the morning, me and my partner Nick Aparo, in our unmarked SUV, parked on a dark street in the middle of nowhere with the engine off, freezing our nuts off, watching, waiting for the go signal, making sure our target didn’t vaporize before we nabbed him.

  Don’t get me wrong. This is my job. I do it by choice. I do it because I believe in it, because I think what we do, as special agents of the FBI, is important. And the guy in our crosshairs on this particular night deserved our full attention, no question.

  It’s just that I had bigger fish to fry. But more on that later.

  Right now, all I can tell you is that we’d spent countless hours staring through the condensation-clouded windscreen and the snow flurries outside at the single-story house up and across the street, the one with the hypnotic, mind-numbing Christmas lights twinkling along the edge of its roof, and I was exhausted. We’d been at it for days.

  I watched my breath billowing out in front of my eyes as I zipped up my FBI parka, the cold metal of the zip reaching its endpoint against my nose. Any more coffee and there was zero chance of sleep when I finally made it home—in time to watch the sun rise as I zoned out against a deeply asleep Tess.

  Nick, on the other hand, had no such concerns. He was pouring himself yet another mug from the five-liter flask before sipping the steaming, bitter liquid like it had been lovingly made by his favorite barista. He looked ridiculous in his big, Russian-style fur hat, the flaps of which he had pulled right down over his ears, but nothing I said was going to make him lose it. At least he was watching the house with me and not sitting there flicking through an endless array of female Tinder offerings while subjecting them to the incessant vocal critique that usually accompanied his left- and right-swipes, which was his MO on previous stakeouts. Small mercies, I guess.

  The subject of our impromptu igloo huddle was called Jake Daland. Daland was the founder and head honcho of Maxiplenty, which had taken over from Silk Road not long after we had shut that online marketplace down. Daland was an interesting target, a nice change from the Jihadist scumbags hogging our work load. Besides choosing a tongue-in-cheek twist on a Newspeak term from George Orwell’s 1984 to name his site, he’d also come up with a neat way to try and avoid the fate of Silk Road by avoiding financial transactions altogether: no cash, no checks, no credit cards, no Bitcoins. Maxiplenty was a darknet barter-only site, an online marketplace where you could do anything you wanted—get drugs, guns, explosives, launder money, or have someone murdered—provided you had something you could trade for it. It was the hub of some pretty nasty stuff, which is why we were here, waiting for word that power had been cut to Daland’s house before we stormed in and shut him down.

&n
bsp; We weren’t alone. The whole team, including a couple of specialists from Cyber Division, was waiting close by, equipped with night vision goggles and, with a bit of luck, a little less frozen than us. The aim was to disconnect all the computer equipment—along with any battery backups—before we turned the power back on and began the bagging and tagging. I didn’t want Daland to have the tiniest window in which to hit some kind of nuke switch and wipe his hard drives.

  “Heads up, Reilly,” a voice announced through my earpiece. “Looks like it’s feeding time at the zoo again.”

  I looked out through the near whiteout on the other side of the windows and saw the now-familiar pizza delivery car with half a plastic forty-eight-inch pepperoni sticking out of the roof glide past.

  “More pizza?” Nick grumbled, peering out through the windshield. “How in God’s name can he eat so much pizza and stay so thin? Bastard.”

  I turned to face him, a slight grin on my face. “Maybe he doesn’t chase it down with a bowl of lasagna.”

  My partner was fairly legendary for his appetites, particularly when it came to Italian food and generously proportioned blonds. The former had provided something of a distraction when the latter ended up getting him divorced. Nowadays, he was happy to indulge in both, having finally come to terms with the court-appointed bi-weekly weekends with his eleven-year-old son. He’d also stuck with the spinning classes. I’d lost that bet, along with most of Twenty-six Federal Plaza.

  “What’s wrong with having a pizza as a starter? That’s how they do it in Italy, you philistine.”

  I smiled. “Maybe he’s got a gym in there.”

  His face got all bent out of shape. “At home? Alone? What’s the point of that?

  “The point of exercise being to meet the ladies, right?”

  “D-uh. But, hey, if I get to live a couple of extra years, that’s cool too.”

  The delivery guy—a new kid, I thought, although it was hard to tell, what with his thick coat and his hood up—kept his engine idling as he hurried up to the door and rang the bell.

  The snowflakes were getting meatier.

  I adjusted the screen brightness on the laptop sitting at my elbow. Four video windows showed the feeds from the cameras we’d managed to set up on our target. I concentrated on the feed from the camera facing the house’s front door, which was hidden inside a newspaper vending machine.

  Jake Daland—elegant as ever in a short, silk kimono over a deep V-necked white T-shirt that exposed a mat of black chest hair—opened the door with the same calm, nonchalant demeanor. No stepping halfway through the door, no furtively peering to left and right. Zero interest in what was outside the house at all. Either he knew we were out here and didn’t care, or—and though possible, it was by now fairly improbable—he didn’t have a clue that he’d been under surveillance for days.

  Daland took the pizza box and handed the delivery guy some money. The delivery guy seemed a bit thrown. They exchanged a few words as he struggled with his oversized puffer coat, fishing through its pockets, then shook his head, the cash in his outstretched hand.

  “What’s he doing?” Nick asked.

  “Daland must have handed him a large bill and the kid doesn’t have enough change.”

  Nick shrugged. “We’re so on the wrong side of the law.”

  They exchanged a few more words, then Daland waved the driver inside. The guy went in and the door closed behind him.

  Moments later, the delivery guy re-emerged. He was holding a gift-wrapped box from his most loyal small-hours customer and was turning it over curiously.

  Nick said, “Now he’s giving the guy a Christmas present?” He shook his head. “I’m telling you, Sean, we chose poorly. Poor-ly.”

  The delivery guy got back in his car and drove away.

  It was at that precise moment that my earpiece burst back to life. “We have a go. All teams: get into position.”

  Nick and I climbed out of the Expedition. We were wearing Kevlar under our FBI parkas, even though I thought it was highly unlikely we’d meet any armed resistance. Four SWAT members were already skulking up to the house’s front door, while two other agents, Annie Deutsch and Nat “Len” Lendowski, climbed out of another unmarked vehicle and approached from the opposite direction. We had other men covering the rear of the house. The tech specialists would wait till the house was secure.

  We fell in behind the SWAT guys. “One in position,” I said into my cuff mike.

  “Two in position,” came the confirmation from the rear of the house.

  “Hold,” the voice in my ear said. A brief moment, then it came back. “In five. Four. Three.” Two seconds later, the Christmas lights on Daland’s roof snapped off as the power was cut.

  We flipped down our night vision goggles and drew our sidearms as the SWAT team leader swung his battering ram through the door, but just as we were about to follow them in, an alarm burst to life inside me as my brain spontaneously highlighted something I’d seen as I walked up to the house.

  Something I’d barely noticed out of the corner of one eye.

  Lying innocuously by the edge of the curb, obscured by the shade of some parked cars, barely noticeable: a flash of red ribbon.

  The Christmas gift that Daland had given to the delivery guy. Discarded, tossed away like garbage.

  I was electrified with the feeling that something was wrong.

  “Nick! Car —now,” I shouted as I pulled off my goggles and stepped back, toward the sidewalk. I saw Deutsch and Lendowski looking at me, all confused, and just waved them on. “Go, go, go!”

  They disappeared into the house as I passed the gift and jabbed a finger toward it, telling Nick, “The gift’s a prop. He faked us out.”

  We hurried into the Expedition, Nick’s face shooting me a sizeable question mark as I slammed the big SUV into gear and floored it.

  We fishtailed away from the curb, with me shouting over the revs, “The delivery guy’s still in the house. Daland drove off in the pizza car.”

  Nick shook his head. “Bastard’s got a couple of minutes on us.”

  The roads were covered with snow, but the four-wheel drive of the Expedition was rock solid as it ate up the miles. There were no cars driving around, not at that hour, and we soon hit an intersection. I stopped, clueless about which way to go.

  “He knows he’s burnt,” I said. “Which means he knows everyone else is burnt too. So where’s he going?”

  Nick rubbed his face, trying to force his brain into gear. “Daland knows we’ll be looking for the car and it’s not the most discreet ride. He needs to ditch it fast.”

  “Yeah, but where? And swap over to what?”

  The onboard satnav flickered through screens as Nick worked it. I couldn’t wait for it to suggest some answers. I scanned the road’s surface and could just about make out a set of thin tracks that turned left.

  I followed.

  Nick watched as I turned onto another residential street, then his attention went back to the navigation system. Thick walls of snow were now making it increasingly difficult to see where we were going. Even at full speed, the wipers were straining against the weight of the heavy flakes and the trail I was following was getting progressively more shrouded by the new snow.

  We were going to lose him.

  I adjusted the traction control. “He can’t stay out in this. Either he’s got somewhere to lay low nearby or he’s got a fallback drive stashed somewhere.”

  Nick shook his head and said, “I can’t see him having that much foresight. Doesn’t seem in character.”

  I nodded. “A cab, maybe? Or maybe he’s ordering an Uber.”

  Nick grabbed the car radio’s mike. “I need the location of all twenty-four-hour cab companies around the target’s house.”

  Moments later, the radio squawked, “Millpond Cabs, corner of North Main and Church.”

  The radio squawked again, another voice this time. It was Lendowski. “Daland’s in the wind,” he said. “Th
e pizza guy is freaking. Daland told him he needed to avoid an angry boyfriend. Told him the guy’s girlfriend was in the bedroom and gave him three hundred bucks. Reilly, where the hell are you?”

  Nick nudged my arm and pointed urgently to the left. I swung the Expedition accordingly, heading west as Nick answered for us both. “We’re closing on him. You and Deutsch secure the house.”

  “Already done. Power’s back on.”

  “Are we good?” I asked.

  “We’ve got several computers. The hard drives were already over-writing, he had battery backups. We got what we could, but there’s also a laptop here with a missing hard drive.”

  “He pulled it. It must be on him. That’s what we need.” I gunned the V8 engine, the four-wheel drive now winning a one-sided battle against the fresh snow. The houses were larger now. Set farther back from the street.

  Nick pointed up ahead. “Five hundred yards more, then we need to cross over North Main onto Church.”

  I was scanning every alleyway as we moved. I peered into a lot shared by a fitness center and a gas station. Nothing.

  “Right there!” Nick shouted as he opened his window to take a better look. I slowed the SUV to a crawl.

  A narrow street ran about thirty degrees off our position. Almost completely obscured by snow-covered trees was the top of a giant pepperoni pizza.

  I swung the Expedition to the left, ready to turn right in another fifty yards.

  Nick gestured toward the fast-approaching junction.

  A single vehicle was midway through a left-hand turn onto North Main Street.

  As we got level with the vehicle, a Toyota Camry, I registered the “Millpond Taxicabs” livery. The cab had pulled away before I could look inside.

  I spun the wheel around, breaking hard. The Expedition skated a few feet in the original direction of travel, then completed the U-turn as the wheels regained traction.

  “That’s him.”

  Nick hit the siren as I swung the Expedition into the empty oncoming lane, accelerated beyond the Camry and swerved back into its path.