War of Shadows

Book 7: Dan Morgan Thriller

by Leo J. Maloney

Genres: Spy Thrillers; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

“Dan Morgan is one of the best heroes to come along in ages.”— Jeffery Deaver From Black Ops veteran Leo J. Maloney comes a pulse-pounding thriller of an American agent on the run from merciless enemies—and unable to trust his allies. . . WAR OF SHADOWS Dan Morgan is a wanted man. Unknown assailants have targeted him—and his family. His home destroyed. His wife Jenny, presumed dead. His fellow Zeta operatives are missing in action, except his daughter Alex. Someone has declared war on Zeta, and the Morgans may be the only agents left alive. Pursued cross-country, Dan is driven by two things—protecting Alex and getting revenge against those responsible for killing Jenny. But he is unaware of who he’s truly up against. He suspects Zeta was infiltrated by double agents. Intelligence operatives from around the world are hunting him. And an adversary from Dan’s past is determined to destablize the world by any means necessary . . . Praise for Leo J. Maloney and His Novels ”Fine writing and real insider knowledge.”—Lee Child “Rings with authenticity.”—John Gilstrap “Everything a thriller reader wants.”—Ben Coes “The new master of the modern spy game.”—Mark Sullivan “A ripping story!”—Meg Gardiner

Release date: April 30, 2019

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 271

Sample

Highest Praise for Leo J. Maloney and his thrillers

For Duty and Honor

“Leo Maloney has a real winner with For Duty and Honor—Gritty and intense, it draws you immediately into the action and doesn’t let go.”

—Marc Cameron

Arch Enemy

“Utterly compelling! This novel will grab you from the beginning and simply not let go. And Dan Morgan is one of the best heroes to come along in ages.”

—Jeffery Deaver

Twelve Hours

“Fine writing and real insider knowledge make this a must.”

—Lee Child

Black Skies

“Smart, savvy, and told with the pace and nuance that only a former spook could bring to the page, Black Skies is a tour de force novel of twenty-first-century espionage and a great geopolitical thriller. Maloney is the new master of the modern spy game, and this is first-rate storytelling.”

—Mark Sullivan

“Black Skies is rough, tough, and entertaining. Leo J. Maloney has written a ripping story.”

—Meg Gardiner

Silent Assassin

“Leo Maloney has done it again. Real life often overshadows fiction and Silent Assassin is both: a terrifyingly thrilling story of a man on a clandestine mission to save us all from a madman hell bent on murder, written by a man who knows that world all too well.”

—Michele McPhee

“From the bloody, ripped-from-the-headlines opening sequence, Silent Assassin grabs you and doesn’t let go. Silent Assassin has everything a thriller reader wants—nasty villains, twists and turns, and a hero—Cobra—who just plain kicks ass.”

—Ben Coes

“Dan Morgan, a former black-ops agent, is called out of retirement and back into a secretive world of politics and deceit to stop a madman.”

—The Stoneham Independent

Termination Orders

“Leo J. Maloney is the new voice to be reckoned with. Termination Orders rings with the authenticity that can only come from an insider. This is one outstanding thriller!”

—John Gilstrap

“Taut, tense, and terrifying! You’ll cross your fingers it’s fiction—in this high-powered, action-packed thriller, Leo Maloney proves he clearly knows his stuff.”

—Hank Phillippi Ryan

“A new must-read action thriller that features a double-crossing CIA and Congress, vengeful foreign agents, a corporate drug ring, the Taliban, and narco-terrorists… a you-are-there account of torture, assassination, and double-agents, where ‘nothing is as it seems.’”

—Jon Renaud

“Leo J. Maloney is a real-life Jason Bourne.”

—Josh Zwylen, Wicked Local Stoneham

“A masterly blend of Black Ops intrigue, cleverly interwoven with imaginative sequences of fiction. The reader must guess which accounts are real and which are merely storytelling.”

—Chris Treece, The Chris Treece Show

“A deep-ops story presented in an epic style that takes fact mixed with a bit of fiction to create a spy thriller that takes the reader deep into secret spy missions.”

—Cy Hilterman, Best Sellers World

“For fans of spy thrillers seeking a bit of realism mixed into their novels, Termination Orders will prove to be an excellent and recommended pick.”

—Midwest Book Reviews

Chapter 1

Dan Morgan’s house exploded.

It was so sudden and devastating that Morgan’s mind instantly reacted. The husband, father, and classic car dealer part of him went into shock. But the part that was the experienced, knowledgeable, veteran operative of the C.I.A., and now the clandestine organization Zeta Division, went into overdrive.

He had just turned the corner at the end of the Andover, Massachusetts, street where he lived, feeling the comforting purr of the green 1968 Mustang GT his team had presented him with during their last mission. Ironically, he had reluctantly just admitted to himself that he was the happiest he’d ever been….that is, since his wedding day and the day his daughter Alexandra was born.

For once, everything appeared to be going great—both professionally and personally. Together with his team and even his family, he had averted a biological apocalypse. The organization he worked for had never been so respected within the intelligence community, his superiors had come to fully appreciate his abilities, and even the skeletons in his closet had been cleared by his coming clean to his family about his previous double life. And now that the extremely capable young lady who was once his baby girl had moved out, he and his wife Jenny were even talking about having another child. Maybe adopting one from Asia or Africa.

The father and husband in him remembered that he couldn’t wait to get home to her, the love of his life, when the unthinkable had happened. But the seasoned secret agent, to his growing rage, recognized the detonation.

It was what the experts called a “toothpick explosion,” where fuel and oxygen mix perfectly to render a house into a tearing, shattering, ripping, belching mass of glass, wood, concrete, brick, and metal shards in two blinks of an eye. The husband and father, teetering in shock, stomped on the brake, while the professional military and espionage operative dove to the seat, knowing what came next.

As the walls and windows of his once comfortable happy home erupted in a million swipes of death’s scythe, more oxygen rushed in to reignite the explosion’s source. Sure enough, less than a second later, a whomp that was both sound and pressure filled his ears, light blinded his eyes, and a fireball engulfed, then spewed the house-shaped debris like a horde of maddened wasps.

In the milliseconds that it took, Dan Morgan’s eyes snapped back open. The husband and father inside him prayed that it might have been a gas leak accident. The intelligence operative inside him snarled, bullshit.

Both personas tromped on the accelerator, sending the Mustang screeching down the street, over the curb, across the lawn, and into the flaming hole where his front door had been.

“Jenny!” he bellowed, certain his voice carried over the detonation’s dying roar. He had just been talking to her. With cellphones, she could’ve been anywhere, but he felt certain she had been talking from home. Even before the car stopped, half on the ruined porch, half in the burning maw where his front door had once been, he was vaulting out of it. “Jenny!”

The heat hit him like an angry monster’s slap. He felt his eyebrows singe, but he didn’t care. He charged through the conflagration, toward the stairs and the master bedroom. He opened his mouth to call out again, but the heat took that as an invitation and shoved itself down his throat like a hammering fist.

That stopped him. He stood, staring, at the wreckage of what had once been his beloved home. He couldn’t recognize it. It looked like someone had shredded his life and sprinkled it onto a sizzling volcano crater.

Dan Morgan had witnessed many an explosion, seen many a dismembered corpse, and smelled many a barbecued victim of fire-bombing. You couldn’t live the life he had lived in the military, the C.I.A., and now the Zeta Division without having such memories permanently branded in your brain.

But this wasn’t some godforsaken hellhole he was infiltrating. This was his home, and if he stayed here he’d join whoever had been caught there when it happened.

“Jenny,” he managed in a combination of a croak and a gasp as carbon monoxide stuffed his nostrils. He felt his flesh begin to crawl—not from fear, but from being baked. A combination of anger and remorse drove his spasming muscles.

Don’t be an idiot, he heard himself bark inside his own head. Hope is not your friend.

Dan Morgan had gotten angry before. Too many times. But he could honestly admit that this was the first time he had gone blind with helpless rage.

He staggered blindly until he hit the car with his side. He looked around wildly as his fingers scrabbled for the door handle. He saw that his back-porch door window was melting. The living room fireplace was a mound of flame. He heard his adjoining garage workshop collapsing as if Thor himself had just sledgehammered it.

The sweat and tears that managed to escape his eyes evaporated in less than a second as he fell back behind the driver’s wheel, jammed it into reverse, and tromped on the accelerator. The now battered and bent classic car tore back onto the lawn as if yanked by a steel cable. He only went back far enough so the gas tank wouldn’t explode and his clothes wouldn’t immolate before jamming on the brakes again.

As horrifying as the last minute had been, the next few were even more surreal. Reeling from shock and exposure, he saw his horrified neighbors all around him like a small squad of concerned ghosts, as burning shreds of what had once been his sanctuary rained down around them like flaming confetti.

He sat there, staring down the shock that threatened to paralyze him. Oh no, he found himself thinking. Not now. Don’t have time for you now. Somehow his agent’s systematic brain recognized each onlooker…save one. Dan all but vaulted out of the car as his neighbors neared.

There was a small, shadowy figure near the bushes on the other side of the house—a figure hidden from him by the night’s darkness, the flames’ distorting heat waves, and some sort of black outfit, complete with visored helmet. Dan took a step toward it, a quiet prayer of “Alex” escaping his lips.

But as soon as he said it, he knew it wasn’t his daughter. As he was about to take another step, he felt the hands and bodies of his neighbors close in on him. The shadowy figure disappeared behind the remains of the burning house.

Dan heard nothing the concerned citizens said, and felt nearly nothing they did to comfort and check him. Above their anxious, alarmed din, he heard a louder, commanding voice. It was his.

“Call 9-1-1,” it demanded. “Now! Use your hoses to keep the fire from your roofs and walls. Steve…Steve Richards!” He had called his most trusted neighbor.

“Here, Dan,” he heard the man say. “I have your dog, Neika. She staggered over seconds before it happened. I think…I think she’s drugged or something…”

Dan’s rage was about to engulf him again when he spotted an armored, tinted-glass SUV speeding by at the mouth of the street. He knew every vehicle owned by everyone for a mile around him. This was not one of them. And the dead giveaway was that its license plates were obscured.

“Take care of her, Steve,” he seethed, already hurling himself back into his car. “See… see if they can find…”

But his wife and daughter’s names were blotted out by the roar of his Mustang’s engine as he reversed back across the already shredded lawn. The neighbors scattered, mouths agape, as the GT squealed back onto the asphalt, did a smoking tire turn, and shot down the street as if fired from a cannon.

It was late, so the suburban streets were fairly clear, which made sighting the unknown vehicle easier. His catching the thing, however, was not. Even from a distance, there was no mistaking it—especially for an agent whose cover was that of a classic car dealer. It was a black Grand Cherokee Trackhawk—all seven hundred and seven horsepower of it. From the shark-eye glint of its exterior and windshields, it was most likely bulletproofed as well.

He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward before shaking his head. As if of its own accord, his left arm rolled down the window, letting the night air help wake him up. It also let in the sound of sirens approaching from the opposite direction. The father and husband part of him wished he could have stayed to help put out the fire and search the wreckage. The agent in him wanted to drive his Mustang down the Trackhawk’s throat.

What the hell happened, he thought, and more important, why the hell had it happened? His still addled mind tried to rifle through his personal list of enemies, then narrow it down to those who would be so sadistic to literally bring it home to him, but he soon decided that was a waste of time. Both lists would be one and the same, and too numerous to whittle down. There was a far more pressing issue to attend to.

He found his smartphone in his right hand, not completely remembering that he had grabbed it. He glanced at the rearview mirror to see fire trucks pulling onto his street and the flickering shadows of his demolished home. When he looked back, his eyes searched the dashboard, remembering how his family had all but begged him to have voice-activated, hands-free communication in his car, but no, he had to be the classic car purist…

His family. Had they been home when it happened? Blinking furiously, Morgan stabbed the buttons with his thumb, calling his wife’s number again and again.

No answer. He remembered Lincoln Shepard, Zeta’s resident communications wiz, telling him that no answer was worse than going to message. Going to message meant the phone still existed. No answer could mean the phone was destroyed…

The Mustang jumped, then shuddered as the cars went from Route Forty Two to I-93. Then it took all the GT’s five-liter V8 engine and nearly five hundred horsepower to keep up with the Trackhawk’s teeth-shaking roar, even on the sparsely trafficked highway. Dan watched the speedometer rise—a hundred miles an hour, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty…

The Trackhawk seemed to wiggle its rear at him, doggedly staying a steady four car-lengths ahead. The two vehicles stayed that way, mostly hugging the left lane, except for occasionally weaving around a speed limit idiot so closely that the state police would need a hair to measure how near they got to the slow-pokes.

A hundred and thirty… a hundred and forty…

Maybe I’ll luck out, Dan thought. Maybe there’ll be a speed trap or radar surveillance to ensnare us both. No such luck anywhere from Wilmington to Medford. Maybe I should call the highway patrol myself, Dan considered. But although the smartphone was still in his hand, he had more important calls to make.

He called his daughter, Alex, twice. The calls went to message. He called Shepard. That one also went to message. He called Cougar—his best friend and partner Peter Conley. Message. He called Lily Randall, he called Karen O’Neal, he even called the numbers he had for his boss Diana Bloch—something he almost never did. All went to message.

A hundred and fifty…a hundred and sixty…The speedometer trembled at the little red pin where the numbers ended. The Trackhawk was still, stubbornly, four car lengths ahead.

“Idiot,” Dan seethed, shoving the phone down on the seat beside him. Why bother with the phone when he had the Zeta comm-link in his ear? It was so comfortable and ubiquitous that he had forgotten it in the literal heat of the moment. He pressed his right ear canal to initiate the connection. The resulting shriek deep in his head all but sent the car into the median.

He regained control of the car in time to avoid a wreck, as well as wrench the tiny hearing aid from his auditory canal. It flew, like a dying bee, into the passenger seat’s well, bouncing on the floor mat beneath the glove compartment.

What the hell? Dan returned his full attention to catching up to the Trackhawk, only to find that despite the Mustang’s slowing and wavering, the SUV was still almost exactly four car lengths ahead. You damn bastard…

Morgan saw they were coming into Somerville. Then it would be Cambridge, and just beyond that, Boston. Neither of them could go a hundred and sixty there, not without committing vehicular homicide or suicide. But Dan could guess. Somehow, whoever was driving that SUV would stay four car lengths ahead. Whoever it was, they were that good—so good they could destroy his home, so good they could kill…kill his…

The father and husband inside him couldn’t even bring himself to say it—to even think it. But the seasoned operative could.

…wife…they could have killed my wife…

The Trackhawk took Dan by surprise by all but leaping off the highway onto an all-too-familiar exit ramp. The surprise only grew when the SUV started speeding down back streets along a route Dan knew very well.

His eyes widened as he realized the Trackhawk was moving as if the driver were a Zeta commuter. They were heading to the isolated parking garage that served as cover for the organization’s underground headquarters.

Dan tried to catch up, but the ’68 Mustang, as repaired and reconditioned as it was, could just not keep up, not after all the damage it had suffered at the house.

His fingers stabbed his phone’s digital buttons as his foot tromped on the accelerator. He practically slammed the phone to his ear as his other hand grew white-tight on the steering wheel. He was expecting Zeta’s answering message, so he could press a certain combination of numbers to get through, but that didn’t happen.

The phone rang once…twice…a third time as both vehicles got closer and closer to the corporate complex that secretly housed Zeta headquarters. The closer they got, and the more times the phone rang, the more tense Dan became.

“Come on, come on, pick up, pick up!” he found himself seething, his words drowning out the ringtone. He took his eyes off the tail of the Trackhawk to see if the phone was still connected.

In that second, he felt and heard the Trackhawk sharply turn. When he looked up, its taunting tail was disappearing down an alleyway, leaving him a view of the entire parking garage that filled his whole windshield.

He heard a click on the other end of the phone.

“This is AZ27F,” he snapped. “Code—”

He never got to finish his priority emergency message. The parking garage erupted like a volcano—a multi-tiered, billowing mushroom of flame engulfing the structure from its bowels to its crown.

The phone went dead.

Chapter 2

Dan Morgan didn’t remember jamming the Mustang into reverse. He didn’t remember slamming his foot on its accelerator. But what he did remember was whirling around as far as he could without losing his grip on the steering wheel, and driving as fast as he could—backwards.

The sound of his screeching Cooper Cobra Radial tires, complete with Outlaw II racing wheels, was drowned out by the concussive shockwave of the explosion, which was really saying something, considering the scream the car let out as Dan tried to make it retreat as fast as it had charged.

Thankfully the access road behind him was clear, not just because of the lateness of the hour, but because Zeta had purposely chosen an out-of-the-way location that was infamous for its remoteness.

Morgan kept his eyes locked on the roadway, not wanting to divide his attention or get distracted by the chunks of steel, glass, and concrete that were hurtling toward him. But, ultimately, after seeing that the road behind him was unobstructed and relatively straight, he forced himself to watch out, just in case a duck or dodge could save some part of him from being crushed by a cement cannonball, impaled by a steel spear, or decapitated by a glass ax.

But as his head turned, he spotted something far more important—an alleyway guarded by steel and reinforced concrete walls. The lessons he had learned from the escape and evasion driving courses he had taken at the CIA and Zeta came crashing back into his brain like water exploding from a dynamited dam, and the Mustang reacted to his braking and wheel-spinning like it had been waiting all its life to be used like this. If the bastards inside the Trackhawk were watching from some safe vantage point, even they might be impressed by the precise expertise of the maneuver.

One second the Mustang was speeding backward like a stone hurled from a vicious bully’s slingshot, and the next it had “drifted” until it was perpendicular to the sidewalks. Seemingly just a split second before a wall of spinning, smoking shrapnel slammed into it, the Mustang shot forward into the alley mouth as if kicked. The car chunked to a stop in the alleyway like an oiled ammo magazine sliding into the butt of an automatic weapon. But Morgan didn’t even have the time to exhale as a hailstorm of rock, iron, and crystal smashed and scratched the street like a monstrous cheetah’s claws.

As fast as the monsoon of debris started, it rolled to a halt, quickly followed by a billowing cloud of dust that made a great smokescreen for him. In these years after 9-11, builders had been more careful about their construction materials, so Morgan felt relatively secure that he wasn’t inhaling carcinogens—that was just about the only thing he felt safe about.

He took a moment to acknowledge he was alive before Jenny’s guardian-angelic face settled onto his mind’s eye like a lace shroud. No, she can’t be dead, he thought before he let rage blind him again. This time, killing whoever’s responsible just might bring her back, he lied to himself. Maybe not, he concluded as the dust settled, but that won’t stop me from killing whoever they are.

Having unconsciously gone through the five stages of accepting death in two seconds flat, Morgan resisted, with consummate effort, slamming his car back onto the roadway to try finding the Trackhawk. Given the expertise of their detonation and driving, it was unlikely those obvious pros would let him catch them unawares.

Instead, he tried forcing himself to think clearly, taking his first long breath since turning the corner on his street, which seemed like a lifetime ago. And with that breath came the enormity of the situation. Someone had not just destroyed his home, but the entirety of Zeta HQ—an accomplishment that boggled Morgan’s mind with its brazenness.

He imagined how the enemy could have gained access to both locations, let alone set enough explosives to do what he’d witnessed in such a way that no one, in either location, had noticed them doing it. Whoever was in that Trackhawk, or whoever they represented, was impressively capable, vindictive, sadistic, and deadly serious. And here Morgan was, alone, cut off from his team, his organization, and all their equipment.

“Where’s MacGyver when you need him?” he heard himself mutter, before falling back on his training. With the silty dust of the explosion still shielding him, he slipped out of the car. He stayed outside just long enough to make a cursory examination of the area and retrieve the Beretta A400 shotgun from the trunk.

Ever since a shotgun had saved his wife’s life three missions ago, they’d always kept one in the trunk of each and every one of their motor vehicles, as both protection and a good luck charm. At the thought of it, and her, Morgan’s eyes grew dark once again as a heart-rending “greatest hits video” of their relationship assailed his brain like a cloud of stinging nettles. Morgan knowingly crushed them as he got back behind the wheel, shoving the gas-operated, semi-automatic, camo-clad weapon beside him on the passenger seat.

He hit the rectangular tab of the spring-lock opening of the gun box he had affixed under the passenger seat. When he straightened again, he was holding his high-strength, light-weight, stainless steel, friction-reducing, double-action, five-shot Ruger LCR snub-nose thirty-eight revolver.

Morgan looked at both weapons, feeling some of the power the explosions had taken away returning to him. He had personally chosen these guns for good reasons. The Beretta could interchangeably fire any shell, from the lightest Olympic loads to the heaviest magnums, without adjustment. The Ruger was made of aerospace-grade 7000-series aluminum, and had a shrouded hammer so there’d be no snagging on holsters or clothing. As any gun man could tell you, an automatic, no matter how expensive or well made, could jam. His Ruger revolver never did.

The thought made him feel the weight of his standard side-arm, snug in his shoulder holster. Although most of his fellow field agents preferred Glocks or HKs, Dan depended on his trusty double action, non-slip, .380 Walther PPK.

So much for his personal high-caliber equipment. As he sat there, he continued his survey, sensing his stainless steel Smith & Wesson H.R.T. (Hostage Response Team) black knife in his boot, and the Boston Leather blackjack in his back pocket.

Morgan smiled grimly despite himself, as more violent memories knowingly started crowding out loving ones. Especially gratifying was the look on his enemies’ faces when they’d thought he was helpless, only to have a molded lead weight inside a four-ply, heavy gauge leather pocket smash their skulls or pulverize their bones.

And all he wanted to do was unleash all this weaponry on the occupants of the Trackhawk. But he also didn’t want to commit suicide. Whoever these guys were, they had eradicated his life and career in a single hour, and more than likely, would not be impressed with his paltry armaments.

Dan gripped the steering wheel with one hand and slammed his other on the dashboard. He wasn’t Zeta’s Sherlock Holmes, he was their bluntest blunt instrument. It was not his job to plan, just attack. He was Zeta’s human version of the steel-shank and molded lead-weighted truncheon he carried in his back pocket. He looked up as the last of the silt settled, thinking furiously, or at least as furiously as Dan Morgan could—which, on second thought, was very furiously indeed.

What crowded to the front of his mind was what Zeta had hammered into him and all the other field agents. Linc had called it the R.B. Protocol—referring to the Red Button that no one was supposed to ever push in countless comedies and cartoons. Peter Conley had called it D.A.C.—rhyming with “gack”—harkening back to the ludicrous instructions given to schoolchildren in the event of a nuclear attack: Duck and Cover. But Paul Kirby, Zeta’s officious, obsequious second-in-command bureaucrat with the bug up his bum, called it the Zeta Office of Risk Management plan in case of emergencies. He would.

According to Kirby, what Morgan was experiencing now was Z.O.R.M. Ultra, i.e. the worst case scenario. The man’s annoying acronyms coursed into Morgan’s head like bee sting venom. The instructions had been clear: if Zeta was eradicated, his responsibility was to destroy all comm devices so they couldn’t be traced by the enemy, go underground, and wait for reassignment. As if controlled by Zeta puppet-masters, Morgan’s hands came up with his cellphone.

“Cell phones suck,” Lincoln Shepard had told him—a sentiment Dan heartily agreed with, but for different reasons. For their internet technology expert, however, they sucked because they were so easily bugged. “Cell phones were basically made to be traced,” Linc had maintained. “As ancient as they now seem, there’s a reason organizations like the Internal Revenue Service still use faxes.”

“They like to torture everybody with screeching dial tones?” Morgan had retorted. Dan, like every working man, was not exactly a big fan of the I.R.S.

Linc had laughed. “Actually, yes. Faxes are basically unbuggable. Even if you can find a way to hack them, the gobbledygook you get makes you slave for every translated word, and the few words you’re able to decipher might not even go together.”

Now, Dan thought as he wrenched the SIM card out of his smartphone, where in this fresh hell can I find a fax? As he crushed the SIM card, rendering the smartphone nothing more than an expensive paperweigh. . .