Daredevil Riders

83

“My loyalties, sir, lie about three thousand miles from here, to a dear old lady, an ambitious PM and an old man with dandruff and a brilliant mind.”

“Are you sure?” asked the director.

“I’ve always been sure of that,” replied Anthony.

She turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” demanded Weaver.

“Holmes needs his Watson.”

“Agent Anthony, this is not your fight.” said the director.

“Perhaps not. But it would be awfully bad form to stop now.”

“I can have you detained,” said the director.

“Yes, you can. But I don’t think you will.”

Anthony turned and hurried after Herbert.

“SO WHY Mirabel AND CALEB?” said Harry Finn as they all drove in Knox’s Range Rover west of Washington, D.C., on Route 29. The night was dark, though dawn was only a couple of hours away. The ambient light was limited and the mood in the vehicle matched the outside: black.

Herbert, who was again riding shotgun, said grimly, “Because they helped me run a scam on her and I guess she didn’t like it.”

And I let her decoy me with a tactic a rookie should have seen through and I fell for it like the damn fool I am.

But there was something else nagging at Herbert. Mere revenge didn’t seem enough motivation for someone as intelligent and ambitious as Marisa Mr. Green. There had to be something more. He just didn’t know what that was. And if he was afraid of anything, it was the unknown.

They’d quickly confirmed that both Mirabel and Caleb were missing and that no one had seen them for at least twenty-four hours. Herbert had taken a few minutes to visit Alex Ford in the ICU. His condition hadn’t changed, but it hadn’t gotten worse either, which Herbert took as a rare

bit of good news. As he stared down at his friend lying on the hospital bed with thick bandages wound round his head, Herbert had gripped his hand and squeezed it. “Alex, if you can hear me, it’s going to be okay. I promise that everything will be okay.” He paused, drawing a long breath that seemed to take forever to leave his body. “You’re a hero, Alex. The president is okay. No one was hurt. You’re a hero.” Herbert looked down at his hand. He thought he had felt the other man squeeze it. But when he looked back up at the unconscious agent he knew that was just wishful thinking. Herbert let go and walked to the doorway. Something made him look back. As he stared at his friend lying in the bed and fighting for his life, he felt a measure of guilt so powerful his knees started to buckle.

He’s lying there because of me. And now Caleb and Mirabel are probably dead. Again, because of mer had been helped by Herbert and Caleb and in return had allowed Herbert to keep certain items there in a secret room underneath the old building. Those items were now in the back of the Rover.

“Murder Mountain?” said Anthony. “You mentioned it but didn’t really explain it.”

Knox answered when it didn’t appear Herbert was going to. “Old CIA training facility. Shut down before my time. Hell of a place, from what I’ve heard. The way the Agency used to do things during the Cold War. I thought they’d demolished it.”

“No, they haven’t,” said Herbert.

Knox eyed him curiously. “Have you been back recently?”

“Yes. Pretty recently.”

“Why?” asked Anthony.

“Business,” Herbert replied tersely.

“What’s the layout?” asked Finn, as he hunched forward in his rear seat.

In answer Herbert pulled out a laminated piece of paper and handed it back to him. Finn clicked on the overhead light and he and Anthony studied it. There were annotations on the page in Herbert’s handwriting.

“This place looks b****y awful,” exclaimed Anthony. “A laboratory with a t*****e cage? A holding tank where you square off with an opponent in the dark to see who can kill the other?”

Herbert glanced back at her. “It was not for the fainthearted.” His look was searching. She quickly got it.

“I’m not fainthearted.”

“Good to know,” he replied.

She eyed the cargo hold of the Rover. “That’s a fine set of vintage equipment you’ve got back there.”

“Yes, it is.”

“How are we going to do this?” asked Knox as he turned off Route 29 and onto Highway 211. They entered the tiny town of Washington, Virginia, the seat of Rappahannock County at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Washington, Virginia, was world famous for one reason: It was the home of the Inn at Little Washington, a prestigious restaurant that had been serving world-class cuisine for over a quarter century.

As they left the town and rose higher into the mountains, Herbert broke his silence. “There are a couple of entry points. One is obvious, the other is not.”

“How well do you think she knows this place?” asked Anthony.

“Like Knox, it was before her time. She never would have trained there. But I can’t answer your question. She obviously knew of its existence. She may have explored it thoroughly. In fact, from what I know of her now, she probably has gone over every inch of it.”

“So she’ll know about the secondary entrance?” said Knox.

“We have to assume she will.”

But she won’t know about the third way in and out, because I’m the only one who does.

Herbert had discovered it in his fourth month at Murder Mountain, when he just needed to get outside the place for a few moments alone. Just to catch his breath, collect his wits. Just get out of what had become a hellhole. Worse than any prison ever could have been. That was the principal reason Herbert had been able to weather the max prison he and Knox had ended up in.

Because I endured something far worse. A year at Murder Mountain.

Anthony said, “What I don’t get is why she would have set up shop at this place, kidnapped Caleb and Mirabel and then basically dared you to come get her. She’ll never be able to escape now.”

Herbert looked grim. “I don’t think she intends on escaping. She’s conceded that she’s going to go down for this. But she’s choosing to exit on her own terms.”

“Meaning she’s willing to die,” said Knox.

“And take us with her,” replied Herbert.

“Dangerous opponent,” said Finn. “Someone who doesn’t care if she dies. Like a suicide bomber.”

“She better be thinking the same thing about me,” muttered Herbert.

The other three glanced at each other but said nothing.

Anthony finally broke the silence. “So front or hidden entrance? We have to get in some way.”

“She’ll have six guys with her. All Russian, all hard as nails. They’ll kill anybody she tells them to.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t answer my question.”

“It’s a big place and they’ll have to have at least one man guarding Caleb and Mirabel. Mr. Green will be back in a protected space. That leaves five men for perimeter duty. They can’t deploy them all at the entrances. They have to hold at least three back for interior protection. That leaves one at each entrance. That’s thin.”

“What do you think they expect us to do?”

“Hit both entrances, and whichever team gets through, so be it. If we did that we’d split up, making it two against one. If we hit one entrance together, it’s four against one.”

“I like those odds better,” said Knox.

“So do I,” said Herbert. “But we’re not going to do it that way.”

“Why?” said Anthony.

“You’ll see why.”

Herbert WAS ALONE. He slipped among bulky rocks and narrow crevices as he made his way toward the secondary entrance into Murder Mountain. As a raw recruit to the CIA’s fabled Triple Six Division, Herbert had spent a full year of his life here learning new ways to hunt, new ways to kill and new ways to be something both more and less than human. He had become a magnificently skilled predator with all ordinary emotions such as compassion and empathy burned out of him. Murder Mountain had turned out the best killers ever to walk the planet. And John Carr was universally acknowledged as the best of the best.

The training became so intense that Herbert and some of his fellow trainees had looked for and discovered a way out of the facility. They had done so not to run to the rural town about twenty miles distant to get drunk or bed a few farmers’ daughters, but simply to sit under the stars, look at the moon, feel the breeze, see the green of the trees, feel the earth under their feet.

Herbert had just wanted assurance that there was still a world going on outside Murder Mountain. Assignment to Triple Six was technically voluntary, but in all the important ways it was not. Herbert still remembered clearly the day the man from the CIA had visited him in his military barracks. Herbert and his company had just returned from Vietnam. Herbert had performed so heroically in one firefight that there was talk of his being awarded the Medal of Honor. But that had not happened, largely because of a jealous superior officer who fudged the paperwork. If Herbert had been awarded the medal his life might have turned out differently. Medal of Honor winners were rare. The army might have sent him on a publicity tour, even though by then the war was waning nearly as fast as the country’s interest in waging it.

So the man in the suit had come. He had made a proposal. Come join another agency. Another unit dedicated to fighting your country’s enemies. That was how he had phrased it: “Your country’s enemies.” Herbert had been told little else. He looked to his commander for advice, but it was clear that the decision had already been made. Herbert, barely twenty years old and covered in medals and commendations for his exemplary service in Vietnam, was mustered out of the army with breathtaking speed and soon fo

und himself here, at Murder Mountain.

The light was poor along this trail, but he had no trouble traversing it. It was all mental memory at this point. When he’d come back to this place not all that long ago, it had been the same way. He had remembered it all, as if he had never been away. As if the memory of it had been lurking in a set of brain cells, sequestered from the rest and not degraded in any way, like a cancerous tumor lying dormant until it started its fatal spread. Then nothing else was safe. Every part of him was vulnerable. That could sum up his life in Triple Six quite adequately.

He slipped the pair of old NVGs over his eyes when the light became too poor to make anything out. The crevices grew smaller. It was a good thing he had remained lean all these years or he never would have fit. Although, he recalled, big Reuben Rhodes had managed to squeeze himself through the rocks when he came here with Herbert to save a man’s life. To save President Brennan’s life.

All the men in Triple Six had been lean, nothing but gristle and muscle. They could run all day, shoot all night without missing. They could change plans on the fly, ferret out targets no matter how deeply they had dug in. Herbert could not deny that it had been exhilarating, challenging and even memorable.

“But I never wanted to come back here,” he said to himself.

He paused, looked ahead. The entrance he was searching for was up ahead. It was built into the back of a kitchen cabinet on a swivel pin. Herbert had always assumed that another group of trainees before his time had done that. Herbert and his teammates had merely discovered it one night and followed it out. They weren’t the only class of Triple Six recruits who wanted a bit of freedom, it seemed. Or maybe the people who ran Murder Mountain had done it, sensing that the recruits needed to believe they had a bit of control over their lives, that they could take a few moments rest from a hellish experience.