Distressed: Enemy Of The State- Book 1 Read online

  “Hey.” Mark’s words snapped him out of his daze. The old man had the same look in his eyes as they did when he was chewing out a greenhorn on his first trip out to sea. “You’re past asking, needing, or wanting, Captain. You’re in the storm now, and the swells are only going to get higher.”

  Dylan knew he was right. Things were going to get worse before they got better. If he wanted to make it out alive and not end up in a jail cell, then he’d have to get something that both parties wanted. He knew the government wouldn’t pardon him for his involvement just because of his son. “They’re running with some high-tech gear on the boats. Radar jamming, cloaking. It looks like military grade. I might be able to—”

  “Local authorities believe that the death of veteran harbormaster Dayton Clowdy was suicide, and no foul play is suspected.”

  The news caught both Dylan and Mark by surprise. Dayton Clowdy had been the harbormaster at their docks for twenty years. When Dylan gave his report to the agent who was on scene, she had asked about him, told him that he hadn’t reported their trip the day they were boarded by the terrorists at sea. Cooper said she thought he was working with the terrorists, but what she didn’t know was who the terrorists were working for. Perry.

  Dylan shot up from his seat. His chest felt tight. He sprinted into the living room then out into the front yard. He hunched over, resting his palms just above his knees. A sour pit churned in his stomach, and he fought to keep it down. Was this his fate? Just waiting for Perry to finish him off whenever he didn’t need him anymore? Maybe. All he knew was if he didn’t do something soon, then his fate would be like that of Dayton Clowdy. Just another disguised suicide and a name in the obituaries.

  Chapter 3

  Kasaika rose from his prayers and rolled up his mat and tucked it in the corner with his other belongings. The one window in his room bathed everything in orange as the sun showered its fading light into the sky outside. Looking out into the trees and wilderness of this country had caused him to long for home. He never thought he’d miss the rolling hills of sand, but here in the noisy warehouse where there was little rest, it was all he could think about.

  The death of Amarah had hit him harder than he thought. Kasaika barely knew the boy, but he was still just that, a boy. His detestation for Perry had only grown since then, but the rest of the organization allowed Perry to keep his seat at the head of the table, so long as he was able to deliver. And even Kasaika had to concede that their operations had run efficiently smooth with the intelligence that Perry provided. In the end, Kasaika justified his relationship with the devil to help his kingdom of heaven. And every news feed that he saw, telling him of their crippling of this nation, only fueled his desires.

  The warehouse was busy as usual, men rushing back and forth, loading rifles, guns, bombs, whatever was required for the next attack. The massive floor was broken down into units, each dealing with a section of the country and each group boasting to their neighbors how many they’d killed. It was a game Kasaika didn’t take part in. It didn’t matter the individual number, only the total. He’d watched thousands of his own people die at the hands of tyrant rulers, foreign armies, and skirmishes amongst themselves. All Kasaika cared about was paying back that number two-fold.

  Kasaika picked up a ration meal and a bottle of water and made his way to the far corner of the warehouse. A large metal shipping container had been placed there in which Dylan’s son was kept. Kasaika pulled at the heavy door, and the metal cringed as it opened.

  The fluorescent lights from the warehouse flooded the darkened tomb up until the last ten feet of the container, which was where Sean lay hidden. “Food, boy.” Kasaika tossed the box of rations, and it skidded across the rusted floor. The water bottle he tossed rolled a little farther. The waste bucket was already by the door, filled. Kasaika grabbed it and went to shut the door when the boy appeared from the shadows.

  “My dad.” Sean stood half bathed in light and half in darkness. His hair was oily and messy, and his clothes were soiled. “Tell me.”

  “He’s still alive, boy.” Kasaika had told the boy about his father, how they were using him. Sean took a few more steps into the light, his face twisted in the effort of relief and grief. “You want me to tell you how many people he helped kill today?” The boy’s fists clenched at his sides, and Kasaika smiled.

  “My dad will come and get me. He’ll do whatever it takes.” Sean was as thin as a rail, no older than Kasaika’s own nephews and nieces.

  Kasaika set the bucket of waste down and stepped inside the metal tomb, his heavy feet ringing through the container with each step. To the boy’s credit, he did not back down. “Your father will die by our hands or the hands of your government. Either way, you will not make it out alive.”

  “Then why are you taking care of me?”

  Kasaika knelt down to meet the boy at eye level. The smell stung his nostrils and eyes, and up close he could see the resemblance of the boy’s father in him. The look of wild fear in his eyes, held together with a quiet reserve. “Leverage. You’re alive so your father can die.”

  Sean shoved Kasaika hard with both arms, but the boy’s weight and force weren’t enough to throw Kasaika off kilter. Kasaika palmed the side of the boy’s head and knocked him to the ground. “But remember that we don’t have to keep you in one piece to keep you alive.”

  Kasaika shut the door, and once against sentenced the boy to darkness. He tossed the waste bucket outside and did not return it. He found his brother-in-law, Sefkh, and joined him in a meeting with Perry.

  “Shut the door,” Perry said.

  Sefkh locked the three of them in the room. Kasaika stood opposite Perry and glanced down at the papers under the glow of the lamp. He picked one of them up, his jaw dropping slightly in awe. “This is it?” He looked to both Perry and Sefkh.

  Perry reached over and snatched the paper from Kasaika’s hands. “Yes.” Perry placed the paper back into the pile with the rest and adjusted the watch on his wrist. “Sefkh will fill you in on the details, but the shipment we need is coming in less than three days. There are no others. If we want to finish this strike, then we will need this device.”

  “Tell the captain he will be needed,” Sefkh said. “We’ll be using the river as the main escape route.”

  Perry meandered over to Kasaika, his hands running along the edges of the table. “You’ve been taking care of his boy?” Perry stopped once he reached the other side. His body leaned against the table, his arms and legs slanted at an angle that Kasaika would have believed would snap his bones in half.

  “I have,” Kasaika answered.

  Perry stepped around Kasaika, moving toward the front of the room. He shifted his head from side to side then abruptly turned. “I understand that you had a problem with the way I handled Amarah.”

  “I may not agree with your methods, but I cannot argue with your results.”

  Perry laughed and clutched his stomach, waving a finger at Kasaika. “It sounds like Western capitalism is growing on you. Thinking about buying some stocks, Kasaika? I can guarantee that right now everything is cheap. The financial markets are in ruin, and people are selling whatever they can just to make ends meet, and how long have we been at it? A week? And we haven’t even begun to show them what we are able to do.” Perry squeezed his fist so hard the large, lumpy knuckles on his hand cracked from the pressure. “This is our time. And I need men who are willing to do what needs to be done.”

  Kasaika looked from Perry to Sefkh, his brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

  “The boy will have to die eventually,” Sefkh said.

  “And I want you to be the one who does it.”

  Kasaika had killed men, dozens. His country had been so ravaged by war and conflict that it was the only thing he’d known for most of his life. When he was a boy, he watched soldiers, grown men, mow down women and children in villages. He hid under the ruins of an old building where his father had put him when the war factions c
ame. But in all the wars he’d fought, in all his fights, he’d never killed a child. He wavered slightly, shifting uncomfortably with Perry so close to him, watching him with those eyes. Kasaika had never seen anything so alive and dead as Perry’s eyes. “What good will the boy’s death bring us?”

  “There will come a time when I need the captain to lose all hope in his life, to break him. Right now he’s holding onto the belief that he can somehow get his son back. It’s his last shred of hope, a connection to a life he still thinks he can have. We need him to believe that. And one day soon, that same hope will strangle what life is left in him. He’s justifying everything he’s doing in the name of his family,” Perry said.

  “Why don’t we just kill the captain?” Kasaika asked.

  Perry cocked his head to the side then quickly rolled up the shirt sleeve of his left arm and thrust the scarred and disfigured flesh in front of Kasaika’s face. “Pain,” Perry said. “It’s what all of this is about. People don’t understand why we suffer, why we bleed, why we have spent our lives washing ourselves in the blood of revenge. It is pain, Kasaika. The same pain that you witnessed in your country, the same that I have in my own. It has controlled us, and we will control it!”

  Both Perry and Sefkh smiled. Kasaika took a step back. “Control? The only control is with Allah. He decides who will suffer and who will be granted entry into his kingdom. Not us. This is folly, Sefkh. We may be winning the war, but we are losing our souls!” Kasaika’s body shook. His feet kept the pace of retreat until he backed into the wall, into the shadows of the room. Perry and Sefkh still remained in the light, their faces twisted in the yellow of the lamp above.

  “Souls?” Perry asked, taking a step out of the light and joining Kasaika in the darkness. “Your soul, like that of every other man in this fight, is poisoned. Tainted by the very same men who proclaimed love for another god, and as such marked me as the claimer of souls.” Perry was covered in shadows and had pinned Kasaika against the wall. “And I will take your soul when it is time, just like the others.”

  The moments when Kasaika was a boy, when soldiers had come to his village, when he first experienced the horrors of war, had always caused a chill to ripple down his back. It was a shaking that plagued him through most of his childhood, because his young mind saw nothing but the devil. As he grew older, he understood that the men he saw were only instruments of the devil, sent to do his work. But standing there in the hot dark, his back against the wall, staring into Perry’s face, the chills returned. This man was no instrument. Kasaika was present with the devil himself.

  ***

  Dust kicked up from the tires of Cooper’s vehicle. The road she’d traveled had turned from paved to dirt more than two miles back. Telephone lines and light posts had been replaced by trees and shrubs. She kept the car slow and looked around, searching for the marker that the harbormaster had told her about. She reached for her cell. No signal. The GPS coordinates on her phone had stopped working, and she was left with nothing but her own two eyes.

  The trail continued for another few miles then opened up into a small field. She saw the old bench that the harbormaster had told her about. She parked the car then shut the door behind her. The field was nothing but grass with a few trees jutting up in the middle. “Like a needle in a haystack.”

  Cooper dusted the bench for prints, finding more than she expected, and took as many samples as she could. She looked for footprints, tire tracks in the area, something left behind, anything that would give her a hint as to who had made the drop.

  And whoever had done it knew what they were doing. Once Cooper made it out of the city, there weren’t any traffic cameras for the last ten miles to the site. Even if she obtained the video files, she wouldn’t know what type of car to look for or what traffic cameras to check.

  A cluster of leaves from a bush rustled to her left, and Cooper unholstered her pistol. The shrubs and trees that circled the field were thick, and she squinted to try and get a better look. She was deep enough in the woods for it to be anything. But if it was a bear, she didn’t think her 9mm would be enough to bring the beast down.

  The leaves rustled harder, and Cooper had her finger on the trigger when a pair of hands revealed themselves, palms facing her. “Come on out. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  What parts of the man’s face that weren’t covered with a thick beard were covered with dirt. The man had wild hair matted on the top of his head, and the clothes were tattered and soiled. A breeze rolled by, and Cooper wrinkled her nose from the sour stench of the man’s odor but took her finger off the trigger. “You alone out here?”

  The man, keeping his hands in the air, gave a nod. Cooper holstered the weapon, and the man lowered his hands. He stood there sheepishly, slowly rocking from side to side. He was rail thin, his bony fingers rubbing the dirty soot from his arm. “Have any food?” He gaped at her, hoping for a handout; what teeth remained in his mouth were stained yellow.

  “Yeah.” Cooper nodded. “I think I’ve got some granola bars in the car.” She searched the glove compartment and found the box, still almost full. She took the box with her but only tossed the man one of the bars. He ripped it open so fast that Cooper thought he was going to eat the wrapping along with it. When he was done, he licked the inside of the wrapper, crumbs dotted around his mouth. “You live out here?”

  “Yeah.” The man let the wrapper fall to the ground then eyed the box in Cooper’s hand eagerly. He didn’t look like he’d been out here because of the attacks. The man had been homeless for a long time.

  “Have you seen anyone come out here lately?” Cooper tucked the box back behind her, and the man’s eyes tried to stare through her, but when that didn’t work, he looked up at her face.

  “Someone was out here. Two men.”

  That was a start. Cooper took a step forward, trying to ignore the growing stink the man emitted. “What did they look like?”

  The man held out his arms in a circle around his stomach. “One was big. Fat. Old looking. He was the one who came here last.”

  Dayton. “And the other?”

  “Skinny. But dressed really nice. Had a suit, nice car. Looked rich.”

  It was more than Cooper had started with before, but looking for a rich man with a nice suit and car didn’t exactly narrow her search field. “Can you remember anything else about him? The type of car he drove? Hair color, skin color, anything?”

  “It was a black car. New. Looked brand new. Not sure what kind.” The man wrinkled his forehead; no doubt using his brain was something he hadn’t done in a long time. “White guy. Bald.” He tapped his finger on his lips. “And he had a pin on his jacket.”

  “A pin? What kind of pin?” Cooper asked.

  “It was a flag.”

  The box of granola that Cooper had behind her back dropped to the dirt, and she almost fell with it. A black Crown Vic, white guy, rich, flag pin. There was only one type of individual who fit that description. The terrorists destroying the country had someone inside the United States government helping them. And Cooper had an idea who it might be.

  ***

  The elevator was full of Homeland, FBI, CIA, and other government officials. Perry was crammed in the back corner, watching the floor numbers change. It pinged on the seventh floor, and the elevator slowly emptied. Perry adjusted the flag pin on his lapel and followed the others down the hall.

  Every top-level government official was in attendance, and the president himself was on the video screen along with the joint chiefs. Ever since the attacks, the president had gone mobile on Air Force One, operating the entire country from the plane. “Gentlemen, we’ve received intelligence that the terrorists have information regarding some of our nuclear components. We’ll be relocating those resources we have to a remote facility in the Midwest. We’ll need the coordinated efforts of all your departments to ensure that everything runs smoothly.”

  The director of the FBI, sitting at the front of the tab
le by the screens, swiveled around to address the rest of the group once the president was finished. “With local law enforcement so backed up handling the chaos in the cities, we’ll only be using federal employees and military troops. Deputy Director Perry, can you bring us up to speed on the transportation?”

  Perry buttoned his jacket and cleared his throat, rising to address the others. “We’ll have six armed escorts, as well as a chopper crew in the sky above. The route itself isn’t challenging, but the distance is. At over six hundred miles, there will be plenty of opportunities for the terrorist group to try and pin us down, but the CIA has helped us fortify those locations with undercover agents, scoping the area to make sure it’s clear. If any of those points become compromised, we’ll use one of our alternative routes, which are listed in the dossier.”

  Perry seated and waited for the others to go over their assignments. He resigned himself for the rest of the meeting, making sure to nod on the proper cues, comment when needed. He’d made a career of blending in, molding himself into the masses, while gaining the trust of those around him. Fools. He would have pitied them if he didn’t enjoy pulling their strings so much. He had to make a concentrated effort not to look as though he was reveling in his own pleasures, watching those around him squirm and fidget. They were bugs, waiting to be squashed under the pressure of his boot.

  Chapter 4

  Mark’s snoring had been relentless for the past several hours, keeping Dylan awake on the couch in the living room. Not that the snoring contributed to Dylan’s insomnia; the fact that it was still blazing hot even in the night, along with his restless mind, didn’t make for the best sleeping conditions. He’d lain there staring at the ceiling since he’d set down for bed and hadn’t received a wink of sleep.

  Dylan pushed himself from the couch, the springs squeaking but not enough to cut through the logs being sawed in the bedroom. He stepped out onto the front porch and pressed his palms into the peeling paint of the rail that flaked off from his touch.