ONE
2011
As they sat on Brophy’s patio sipping a beer, Sandy suddenly felt something was wrong. It wasn’t that they had fallen silent, nor that their reminiscing abruptly took on a jagged feel to it as they spoke. It was something else. Something external. And dangerous. The realization was like a precipitous temperature drop, invisible yet certain.
Brophy felt it, too. Sandy saw it in his eyes. Both men sensed it, and both had long ago learned the absolute essential lesson of trusting that instinct.
Sandy’s mind whirred through possibilities.
Are they deploying?
Already set up?
How long have they been watching?
Are we bugged?
“You get mosquitoes this time of year?” Sandy asked his old friend.
“Not since I moved here.” Brophy lifted his nose in the air and sniffed. “But feels like that could change.”
“I should probably ex-fil,” Sandy said, keeping his tone conversational and his expression unchanged. If they were only being watched and not listened to, he didn’t want to tip them off that he knew they were there.
“All right,” Brophy agreed easily. He scratched his thick black beard thoughtfully. Then he added, “You probably don’t want to take a cab, I figure.”
“No,” Sandy agreed.
Brophy stood and limped over to the sliding glass door. He slid open the screen and reached around the corner to a key rack near the door. He retrieved a single key on a ring and tossed it to Sandy. “It’s for the Jeep in the garage. I’ll give you a minute to get behind the wheel.”
“What are you going to do?”
“My knock-around-town car is in the driveway,” Brophy said. “I think I’ll take it to the store. Hell, I might even call back through the front door to my old Army buddy about how I’ll be back with more
beer soon.”
His eyes bore into Sandy’s.
“I’ll rev twice if I see anything,” Brophy added.
Sandy nodded, and followed him inside. As Brophy limped toward the front door, Sandy gathered his few possessions together. He slipped through the kitchen to the door leading to the garage. Once in the garage, he got into the Jeep, quickly rolling down the driver’s window. He found the automatic door opener clipped to the visor and rested his thumb on the button, waiting.
Twenty seconds later, he heard Brophy calling to him from the front porch. “Back in ten,” came the muffled voice. “7-Eleven is just up the road.”
He waited.
A car started on the other side of the garage door. Sandy leaned toward the open window, listening carefully.
The engine revved loudly.
Once.
A moment later, the pitch of the engine changed as Brophy put it in gear. The car pulled away.
One engine rev.
Brophy hadn’t seen anything.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t anything there.
There is. I know it.
Sandy hit the button on the remote. The metal garage door rose in front of him. He started the Jeep, got the feel of the acceleration and tapped the brakes. Once there was enough clearance, he slid the Jeep into gear and shot out of the garage.
Without thinking, he pressed the button on the door remote as soon as he was clear.
At the end of Brophy’s short driveway, he slowed momentarily. He glanced left. The rear end of Brophy’s beater that he used for errands was already two blocks away.
Sandy turned right.
As soon as he pulled onto the street, they emerged. Two cars sprang from the curb up the street to form a V in the roadway. Eight or ten men and women on foot spilled out from various hiding places, including two that burst out from behind Brophy’s house. All wore the blue windbreakers favored by the FBI and Marshal’s Service and leveled their sidearms at him. One man with a bushy mustache carried a shotgun. He spotted Agent Lori Carter beside him, her gun out and pointed his way. Along with several others, she was shouting orders at Sandy, but their voices were indistinct.
He could see their expressions, though. That told him everything he needed to know. This might have been set up as a capture but it could easily devolve into an execution. Perhaps that was what they preferred, especially Carter.
He’d understand if it was.
That didn’t mean he had to accept it.
Sandy gunned the engine and headed straight toward the impromptu barricade.
TWO
Three days earlier
Special Agent Lori Carter sat on a metal folding chair inside the FBI evidence locker. Boxes filled with paperwork surrounded her. Stray items seized from the residence of Sandy Banks were piled nearby. The open box lay between her feet as she slowly removed each piece of paper and examined it before setting it aside. Once she got through the entire contents of the box, she’d return them, secure the lid, and move on to the next.
This was the third box of the morning.
There were eight more stacked behind her.
Carter sighed. She brushed a stray lock of her dark hair out of her eyes and reached for her coffee. The liquid had gone cold, but she drank it anyway. She glanced at her phone. Her brows went up when she saw it wasn’t even technically morning any longer. She’d been at this for hours.
The item in her left hand was a cable bill. She perused it quickly, saw nothing out of the ordinary, and set it aside. Then she dug into the box and withdrew the next piece of evidence.
“Evidence,” she muttered dismissively. The crime scene techs had seized any and all paperwork in the entire house, which filled the eleven boxes currently surrounding her. Carter had no one to blame but herself; she’d ordered them to be that thorough. Now, she wasn’t exactly regretting it, but she was certainly reaping the brunt of the result.
She examined a credit union statement from seven months ago. The figures in Banks’s checking and savings accounts ought to be enough to dissuade anyone from going into the hit man business for the money. Not only had her investigation shown the man lived an ascetic, nearly monastic lifestyle, he did so on a shoestring budget. Or he dealt largely in cash. Though, if that was the case, she didn’t see signs of him spending any of those elusive funds on anything material.
Maybe he was a true believer, she thought, not for the first time. A zealot for justice.
That made her grind her teeth. Vigilante justice was just a rationalization for revenge, as far as she was concerned. While working the Banks case, her partner, Scott, had expressed a looser view. He even went so far as to suggest the people Banks and
his crew of ex-cops took out—and took out were his words; she said murdered—deserved their fates. The world was a better place without them, Scott told her.
She’d detected a whisper of admiration in Scott’s words when they had that conversation. Almost as if he halfway approved of what the Four Horsemen were doing for over a decade. At the time, she wrote it off as a ridiculous law enforcement fantasy she suspected a lot of other cops shared as well. But she had a much stricter view of what justice meant. It didn’t include being judge, jury, and executioner.
Scott’s fascination with Banks melted away when the felon shot him in the thigh after murdering an innocent woman. Those were some of the most terrible moments of Carter’s life. Her partner bleeding from an arterial wound while she was in a face-to-face standoff with the serial assassin they were trying to catch.
For whatever reason, Banks had spared her and chosen to flee. She managed to slow Scott’s bleeding enough to keep him alive until medics arrived. But she would never forgive Banks for almost killing a good man. His call from the Rutherford Hotel to tip her off to the local cops who were the masterminds of the assassination ring didn’t absolve him. Nothing would. That one act of shooting her partner, above all others, had sealed his fate in Carter’s mind. She would hunt him mercilessly until he was found and brought to justice.
She’d have to do it without Scott, though. Shortly after he’d awakened and had some time to process the event, her partner told her he was going to put in for a disability retirement. She urged him to give it some time before he decided. But Scott was
certain.
“Life is too short to chase shitheads around,” he said. “Especially when you have to play by rules and they don’t.”
“It’s the rules that make us better than them,” she argued.
“No.” Scott shook his head with certainty. “All the rules do is make us lose.”
“Scott…”
“None of it matters,” he insisted. “I just want to be with my family.”
His voice had been so resolute she stopped trying to dissuade him. Instead, she pivoted to being supportive. That was what being a partner meant, at least to her.
While she waited for her feckless boss, Special-Agent-in-Charge (SAC) Edward Maw, to assign her another partner, the closest thing she had to it was her confidential informant (CI), Brian Moore. The former officer and Horseman cut a sweetheart deal, gaining temporary freedom while Banks was at large in exchange for his efforts and cooperation in catching the fugitive.
Carter didn’t like Moore. He’d tainted his badge and, by extension, all badges. While she thought his cooperation was beneficial, she knew it was based largely on self-preservation. Only the fact that he’d eventually see time in a federal prison served as some consolation.
She realized she’d been skimming the last few pieces of evidence while lost in her own thoughts. Dutifully, she retrieved them from her done pile and reviewed them again.
A rent receipt from last month.
The warranty for a laptop.
Year-old discharge
papers from a minor emergency that showed an ankle sprain.
She paused. The laptop warranty was probably for the one seized from the residence. It was currently with computer forensics, a support unit backed up almost as far as the one processing DNA. She hoped there’d be some clue where Banks might flee on that hard drive. Maybe his Internet search history would prove illuminating.
The door to the evidence room opened and slammed shut. She heard a terse greeting and reply between the clerk and whoever arrived. A moment later, Brian Moore appeared in the doorway to the small storage room. He held up a white bag in his hand.
“Jimmy John’s?” he asked.
As if in response, Carter’s stomach growled.
Moore grinned and reached into the bag. “I got you Turkey, no mayo,” he said.
Carter frowned, but realized she was hungry now, so she accepted the wrapped sandwich when he offered it. Moore dragged another folding chair into the tight confines of the evidence locker and took a seat. Together, they unwrapped their sandwiches and ate in silence.
They were almost finished when Carter asked, “Did you think about what I asked you yesterday?”
Moore finished swallowing a bite before answering. “You mean about family or friends?”
Carter nodded tersely. What else could she have meant? That was the only question she’d asked him to think about over the course of the evening after they finished another meticulous search of Banks’s residence.
“No family I ever heard of,” Moore said. He took a bite and spoke while he ate. Thankfully, he kept his lips drawn tautly, so she didn’t have to see the food while he chewed. “He said once he was an only child. His parents passed away while he was in the military.”
“No other relatives?"
“None that were close or that he knew.”
That sounded lonely to Carter. She and her sister may not see each other very often, but she still prized the closeness they shared. And she couldn’t imagine losing her parents so young.
“Sandy always said that was part of what made him so perfect for Cal’s project,” Moore said, pushing the last of his sandwich into his mouth and wiping his hands on a napkin.
“That he had no attachments?”
Moore bobbed his head while he chewed. Then he swallowed and added, “Same with me, in a way. I was a late-in-life baby, so my brothers and I were never close. When my parents passed—”
“What about friends?” Carter interrupted.
Moore took the interruption in stride. He paused, thinking. “Outside of the four of us? I don’t think he had any. The guy rarely left his house. He was a monk or something.”
“You mean hermit,” Carter said. “A monk is something different.”
“Either way, he kept pretty much to himself. The rest of us had some kind of life outside of the project, ...
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