The Ghost Pattern Read online

  Chief Ramsay ordered the teams to split up and go below deck with a few hand gestures. He also gestured the quick unspoken signal for “be careful,” a rapid succession of the gestures advising them to listen and watch. Then he led one of the teams below deck, into the mess hall.

  The same horrific scene extended below deck. The floor was almost entirely covered in blood, and they had to be careful not to slip and fall. Someone had been killed with a hammer blow to the face, and had fallen on top of one of the mess hall tables, lying there with his eyes still open, gaping from the middle of the bloody, mangled mess that was left of his face.

  Chief Ramsay advanced cautiously, his weapon drawn, and froze in his tracks seeing someone alive, eating quietly at one of the tables. The man didn’t acknowledge anyone’s presence, seeming entirely absorbed in his thoughts. He had some difficulty cutting pieces of his visibly undercooked meat, but he continued nevertheless, unperturbed.

  Chief Ramsay approached a little more, then asked, “What’s your name, son?”

  “Jim,” the young man answered without looking up from his plate, continuing to chew his food.

  “What happened?”

  “Something happened…yeah…” Jim replied thoughtfully, as if trying to remember.

  “Who did this to you?” Ramsey insisted.

  “Everyone…no one…”

  Ramsey paused for a second, then changed his approach. The man must have been in shock after all that violence.

  “What are you eating, son?”

  “Me?”

  Ramsey nodded, encouragingly.

  “Charlie…He’s the best…I owed him that.”

  One of the men stepped a little to the side of the table, to see behind a row of pantry cabinets. “Oh, my God…” he exclaimed, then gagged. He yanked his mask off his face, covered his mouth with his hand, then made a run toward the sink, where he retched spasmodically.

  On the floor, right behind where Jim sat, a young man’s body lay ripped open savagely, as if wild animals had feasted on his internal organs. His nametag, still intact, read, “Charlie Hernandez.”

  ...4

  ...Thursday, April 21, 9:07AM PDT (UTC-7:00 hours)

  ...American Shooting Center

  ...San Diego, California

  Louie Blake tried his best to make his colleagues comfortable with the exercise he had in mind. He knew them well enough to know they’d be unhappy with the day’s agenda. Therefore, he had reserved the entire gun club for the morning, and he even brought everyone’s favorite coffee in steaming, tall paper cups.

  Alex Hoffmann was the first to arrive, only a few minutes late.

  “Hey, Lou,” she greeted him and gave him a quick hug.

  He made her proud. He was her protégé, although the ex-SEAL had twice her body mass and it was all muscle. She had recruited him from her first client, impressed with his initiative, quick brain, and relentless courage, all great assets for an undercover investigator. Not to mention his amazing hacking skills. Lou could break past any firewall, and crack any encryption.

  Steve Mercer was the next one to arrive. Their very own corporate psychologist, the man who helped them think through theories and profile their suspects. The man who brought calm to emotional storms and kept their clients steady and levelheaded during their biggest crises. The man she still loved, but couldn’t forgive. She made eye contact with him for a split second, then looked away.

  “I thought I had the address wrong, Lou,” Steve said instead of a greeting, but accepted the coffee with a wide grin. “What am I doing in a gun club?”

  “Wait for it,” Lou replied cryptically and winked. Steve smiled and leaned against the wall, sipping on the extra hot mocha latte.

  “Good morning,” Brian said professionally, entering the clubhouse, confusion written all over his face.

  Brian Woods was the business genius of the team, and their very own expert in the gadget technologies they sometimes engaged to help them in their work. His main expertise remained business though, and his classy demeanor made him look every bit the part. On many occasions, he had stayed behind in client organizations, serving as executive officer until leadership replacements were recruited, or until the client finished with the cleanup that many times followed their covert investigations.

  That was the team she had joined just a few short years before, as a young executive with a computer science background. Even to this day, she sometimes wondered why they had chosen her; why Tom Isaac, The Agency’s owner, had put his faith in her and her abilities. Since then she had accumulated a few decent notches on her belt, a few, yet challenging cases she had worked successfully, causing that self-doubt to start fading away. She finally felt she belonged.

  “Is Richard coming?” Alex asked, eager to see the rarely visible financial genius of their crew.

  “No, not this time,” Lou replied. “He’s on the East Coast and couldn’t make it.”

  “If I’d only known,” Brian said sarcastically and smiled while accepting his triple espresso from Lou. “Why are we here?”

  “Thank you, reluctant colleagues, for being here today,” Lou said, earning some chuckles as he spoke. “Per our boss and mentor, Tom, I am now in charge of your fitness, self-defense training, and gun proficiency.” The pride in his voice was both amusing and heartwarming.

  The two men groaned in protest.

  “I work with my brain,” Steve said, making a dismissive gesture with his left hand, still holding his latte in his right hand. “I don’t need any self-defense…I’m a shrink. I can talk my way out of pretty much anything.”

  “You’re not gonna talk your way out of this one, Steve, that I can promise you,” Lou replied.

  “I don’t need this either, I think I’ll head out,” Brian said, making a beeline for the exit. “Thanks for the coffee, mate.”

  “Not so fast,” Lou said, cutting across his path. “I was tasked to do a job here, and I will not fail.”

  Brian stopped and looked him in the eye. Then he relaxed a little. “OK, let’s see what you have. Although I have to warn you, I am a total klutz when it comes to guns and fighting. I am a businessman; I fight with numbers.”

  “What am I doing here, Lou?” Tom asked, surprisingly appearing out of nowhere. “I have tasked you to train the team. Why did you call me?”

  Unperturbed, Lou handed Tom the remaining cup of coffee.

  “Well, aren’t you a part of the team?”

  They all laughed, seeing how shocked Tom looked.

  “I’m not…Well…I don’t need this, you know. I rarely go undercover any more, I just stay behind—”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Brian said, grabbing Tom in a side hug, “what’s good for the goose, you know…”

  “Yeah, OK,” Tom conceded. “Lou, please remind me to train you on how to take direction,” he added with humor in his voice.

  Tom Isaac was the founder of The Agency, the man who had created their small investigative unit, focused solely on high-profile corporate clients. He was the one who brought them all together—their mentor, and their friend. To Alex, he was more than that; Tom and his wife, Claire, had become Alex’s family.

  “Ready?” Lou asked, and was immediately rewarded with a variety of grimaces, long sighs, and smirks. He didn’t seem to care.

  He opened a duffel bag filled with handguns. “Brian, what do you do if you have to fire this weapon?”

  “Umm…I examine it and, if available, I read the manual first,” Brian replied, and Alex couldn’t contain a chuckle. In all fairness, she had been the only one who had discharged a weapon in the past couple of years. However, without Lou’s diligent training in Krav Maga and firearms, she would have been toast a few times over.

  There was no way of knowing, before taking a client’s case, what types of danger they’d be facing. Most of them had worked for The Agency for more than ten years and their lives had never been in any significant danger. Corporate investigations sometimes bordered on boring
rather than adventurous, or even dangerous.

  Yet Alex had been held at gunpoint on her very first case. Gun proficiency was a good skill to master, even if one’s record didn’t support that belief. Sometimes, although seemingly benign at first, the cases they worked uncovered significant crimes being committed by people with either too much, or nothing left, to lose. That, in itself, was a recipe for danger. That was the reason why she had accepted to go through the rigorous physical conditioning Lou was imposing on her every week, complete with self-defense, close quarters combat, and timed target practice. Although, in all fairness, she still hated the crap out of that physical conditioning routine.

  “OK, that’s not going to work,” Lou replied, all serious. “You have to be ready at a moment’s notice. Today we’ll do basic gun safety, gun operations, and you’ll all handle these guns until your hand knows what to do before your brain even acknowledges it.”

  “Lou, please start with these two,” Tom said, “I really don’t think I need this much of—”

  “Nonsense,” Lou interrupted, “what would you like to start with? A Sig? Or a Beretta?”

  Alex smiled discreetly. Her protégé knew how to hold his ground.

  ...5

  ...Wednesday, April 27, 5:03PM Local Time (UTC+9:00 hours)

  ...Tokyo International Airport

  ...Tokyo, Japan

  Lila Wallace straightened her flight attendant uniform, getting ready for departure. The same uniform she wore almost every day for work without even noticing suffocated her now. She had tossed and turned for the most part of the night, thinking she’d be stuck on the same flight with Mr. Flying Asshole, the first officer and copilot.

  She forced herself to take a deep breath and swallow her tears. Even if he’d been a cheating bastard, fucking anyone in range who registered any life signs, she had to behave at her best, or risk being put on report by the flight’s commander, Captain Gene Gibson.

  Captain Gibson is a real gentleman, she thought. Too bad they don’t make them like that anymore. Gibson had tried to warn her, discreetly of course, but she didn’t listen. She dismissed the advice for caution expressed by Gibson, who had encouraged her to give the relationship some thought, and she’d fallen hard, head over heels, for the moronic first officer Andrew Klapov. Andy, as she had once loved to call him, had been her very own Prince Charming for about two weeks, which happened to coincide with the exact time it took him to get her in bed.

  She thought they had something real, and had never been so happy in her life. That lasted until their next flight together, when she’d assumed she had an open invite for Andy’s hotel room, and stumbled onto naked Andy performing cunnilingus on her colleague, Corinne. From between Corinne’s legs, Andy had looked her in the eye and smiled, licking his lips and winking at her. Heartbroken and disillusioned, she’d run out of there in tears, without being able to say a single word.

  Corinne never learned of Lila’s personal tragedy; she’d been carried away on the wings of mindless bliss at that dramatic moment, and hadn’t even noticed her coming into the room.

  From the scene of that crime, Lila ran all the way to the hotel’s business center, where she submitted a request for crew transfer, filled with typos and making little sense. Probably having seen such correspondence before, and understanding implicitly what had caused the request, the airline management had approved it, but it was to go into effect at the first of the following month. One more trip, that’s all she had left to endure. One more trip with Mr. Flying Fuck.

  On top of it all, their typical route, which was San Fran to London and back, had changed at the last minute, and that last trip had to be to Tokyo and back. Four days instead of three. Great…just great.

  She brushed her chestnut hair back and tied it neatly in a ponytail, then applied fresh lipstick and touched up her nose with the powder puff. She gently tapped, without smudging her makeup, the corners of her eyes with a tissue, to absorb the tears that had been welling there. No way was she going to look heartbroken over that prick.

  “Fucking bastard…” she muttered. “I so deserve better than this.”

  Then she grabbed her wheelie and walked out of the restroom, watching her reflection in the mirror, noticing in passing how strong, professional, and beautiful she looked. Not bad for a girl from Fayetteville, Arkansas. Not bad at all.

  Before stepping onto the jetway, she stopped for a moment to grab the flight’s manifest from the gate attendant, and gave it a quick look, hoping for a miracle. Nope, none to be found. Flight XA233, nonstop service from Tokyo to San Francisco, had 423 passengers checked in and ready to board.

  Well, it could have been worse, she thought, considering the plane’s capacity was 496. But an almost full cabin might be a blessing in disguise, keeping her busy, and making the fourteen hours go by faster.

  She trotted with confidence on the jetway, boarded the plane, and tucked her wheelie in the staff closet. She popped her head briefly into the cockpit, greeting Captain Gibson and completely ignoring the dick in the first-officer seat.

  Then she signaled the gate crew to start boarding, and took her spot in the first-class cabin, ready to greet the passengers.

  They started boarding quickly, first class followed closely by the rest of the passengers, some chatting excitedly about a conference or something like that. The conference travelers were scattered throughout the plane, but they seemed to know one another fairly well.

  As soon as a third or so of the passengers had made their way on board, she picked up the microphone and made her announcement.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Universal Air flight XA233, with nonstop service to San Francisco. Today’s flight will be almost full, so please be considerate when stowing your carryon luggage. Your smaller bag should fit under the seat in front of you. From the flight deck, Captain Gibson and First Officer Klap welcome you aboard Flight XA233. Thank you for flying Universal Air; we appreciate your business.”

  She hung up with a wicked smile, happy with the pun she’d made by calling the bastard Klap instead of Klapov, in reference to the sexually transmitted disease. She couldn’t resist turning her head to see his reaction.

  The bastard didn’t seem to care, but Gibson frowned gently in her direction, like a disappointed parent. It made her sad. She pulled shit like that and it felt great for a second, then it ruined her life. Reckless, that’s what she was. Reckless in her choice of men, and reckless again in how she dealt with the consequences of her own mistakes.

  She stood and filled a few glasses with champagne, the traditional welcome for the first-class passengers.

  The woman in 1A had already taken her seat, tucked everything out of sight, and was reading a magazine. She accepted the champagne with a smile and a whispered thank you.

  “You’re welcome, Ms. Bernard,” she replied.

  Lila, like all flight attendants who worked the first-class cabin, was required to know the names of their passengers and greet them by name. She only had four on this trip, so it wasn’t that hard. This passenger’s name seemed strangely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Adeline Bernard…an actress, maybe? She definitely looked like one.

  She moved on to 2B, where one Darrell Maldonado was loud on his cell phone. She offered him the champagne and he took it without skipping a beat in his heated phone conversation. She touched his arm gently to get his attention, and said, “You will need to end that call in a minute, sir, and switch your phone to airplane mode.”

  He dismissed her with a hand gesture, as if she was a bother of sorts, a mosquito buzzing him, or some other form of pest. In his dialogue with the other party on the phone, he inserted casually, “Oh, no, I’m still here, I got time. I just got irritated by something, that’s all.”

  Asshole. Maybe there should be an airline just for them. They already had the right pilots for that.

  She heard her colleague announcing roll call and crosscheck, and then she started demonstrating the safety features
of the Boeing 747-400. She did one more quick round in the first-class cabin, ensuring 2B was off his phone, then sat on the jump seat and prepared for takeoff.

  ...6

  ...Wednesday, April 27, 11:32AM Local Time (UTC+3:00 hours)

  ...Russian Ministry of Defense

  ...Moscow, Russia

  Vitaliy Myatlev ignored the loud growling in his stomach announcing the buildup of hyperacidity, and washed it down with his third shot of vodka for that morning. After providing a few seconds of deep satisfaction, the alcohol started burning what was left of his stomach lining, causing Myatlev to fidget uncomfortably and cuss under his breath.

  “Tvoyu mat,” he swore in his mother tongue, “this job is going to kill me.” He leaned back in his chair, unbuttoning his jacket and putting the palm of his hand on his bloated stomach, in an effort to soothe the pain. Maybe a smoke would help.

  He opened a new box of Arturo Fuente Opus X cigars, taking his time removing the clear packaging, and inhaling the scent released by the unsealing of the humidor. Then he chose one cigar, and carefully removed its wrapper, stopping at times to inhale the smell of the exquisite Dominican tobacco. That box of cigars had set him back thirty grand…he wasn’t going to let a stupid stomachache stop him from enjoying one.

  He clipped the tip with a golden cigar clipper engraved with his initials, a gift from an old business partner. Then he lit the cigar, taking his time, holding the tip above the open flame of his torch lighter, and puffing a few times. Then he let out a long sigh, together with some bluish smoke, but not even that calmed his pain.

  He opened the window and let in some fresh air, then took in the cityscape of downtown Moscow, with the massive Kremlin a little to the left, and numerous government buildings crowding the central area of the city.

  He used to like this game, but not anymore. For the most part, he still liked playing God, more than anything else, and did so every opportunity he got. But he hated being so close to his friend and unpredictable sociopath, President Abramovich. He hated feeling vulnerable, at Abramovich’s whim.