Rogue (An American Ghost Thriller Book 1) Read online

  He put the papers into his briefcase and headed downstairs, where his wife was holding a mug of coffee. He pecked her on the cheek and took a sip of scalding, strong coffee. “Thanks. Gonna miss you, Madison honey.”

  She smiled. “Yeah, whatever. So, your case is packed. And your overnight bag too. Both in the trunk of the car.”

  “What would I do without you?”

  “Flounder.”

  Crichton smiled, knowing it was true.

  “Look, I’ll be back before you know it. Are you all organized?”

  She folded her arms. “What do you think?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “What’s the best number to reach you on?”

  “Let me call you. They’re five hours ahead of us, so I’ll give you a call before dinner every night. That’ll be around lunchtime here.”

  She hugged him tight. “I’m gonna miss you, Brad.”

  Crichton saw a sadness in her eyes. “Hey, stop worrying. I’m coming back, all right?”

  Madison put on a brave smile for him. “And don’t work too hard. Promise?”

  Crichton pecked her a final time on the cheek. “You worry too much, you know that?”

  Three

  Eight days out

  Nathan Stone felt sweat dripping off his nose as he did pull-ups on a horizontal steel bar fitted above the bathroom door, adjacent to his bedroom. He felt the endorphins rushing through his body. And the blood was flowing hard through his veins. His mood had begun to lighten.

  He wiped himself down with a towel.

  Afterward, he did an hour of yoga. It controlled the body and mind. He closed his eyes. Listened to his breathing. He felt calm again. More focused.

  Stone felt a euphoria wash over him. He opened his eyes and looked at himself again in the mirror. He frowned, then smiled, then frowned again. Was he getting used to this new face?

  Waves of tiredness washed over him, and he lay down on top of the bed.

  He felt himself drifting away. Floating on dark waters. He thought he heard his sister’s voice whispering to him. Reassuring him that it was going to be all right.

  A knock at the door snapped him out of his dreamlike state. “Hey, Stone,” a man’s voice shouted through the intercom. “Shake a leg.”

  Stone got to his feet as the door was opened. He was escorted down corridors to the same windowless room. A nurse took blood samples before he underwent a series of physical tests. Cardiovascular, body fat, muscle tone, heart rate, blood pressure, and a urine sample.

  When the tests were finished, Stone was handed a bottle of chilled water. He gulped it down. Then he sat on the examination table and lit up a cigarette. A knock at the door and the psychologist he’d seen the previous day walked in.

  The man took a seat opposite Stone.

  Stone dragged hard on his cigarette and stared across at the smiling psychologist. “What’s going on, Doc?”

  “You’re a new person, Nathan. New face. New ID. Everyone thinks you’re dead. In your line of work, that’s good.”

  Stone dropped the empty plastic water bottle in a trash can. “My line of work.”

  “Yes . . . a line of work you’ve excelled at for many years. We needed a job done, you did it.”

  Stone flicked ash onto the concrete floor. He knew what he was.

  “Do you remember your previous life?”

  Stone nodded.

  The psychologist pointed to his adjacent office, and they both walked through the doorway. Stone sat on the same seat as he had the day before.

  “Nathan,” the psychologist said, leaning back in his seat, “yesterday I showed you an image of this man.” He pressed the remote, and images of the politician again appeared on the huge screen. “How do you feel when I show you this man’s photo, Nathan?”

  Stone stared across at the psychologist and then up at the screen.

  “Answer the question.”

  “How do I feel?” Stone shrugged. “I feel nothing.”

  “Take a good look at his face.”

  Stone stared hard at the image.

  The psychologist looked at his watch. “It’s getting late. You need your rest. Nathan, can you do me a favor?”

  Stone shrugged.

  “I’d like you to go back to your room, lie down on your bed, close your eyes, and listen to any sounds you hear.”

  Stone nodded. He was escorted back to his room. The door was locked, and he lay back on his bed. He could hear his breathing. Deeper and deeper he felt himself falling.

  Then he began to detect the softest music he’d ever heard. Gentle. Soothing. Then a man spoke.

  “Nathan.” The voice of the psychologist echoed around his room. “Listen to my voice. Listen to the rhythm of my voice. The tone. The texture. Are you listening, Nathan?”

  Stone nodded, eyes closed.

  “That’s good, Nathan. That’s very good. The time is getting close, Nathan. The time you live for. The time when you will be free. Do you know what I’m talking about, Nathan?”

  Stone moaned his agreement.

  “We’ve got four words for you. Do you know what they are?”

  Stone shook his head.

  “It’s been a long time since you heard those words, isn’t it?”

  Stone moaned.

  The psychologist began to hum a tune. A tune Stone’s father had hummed whenever he’d come home drunk, crazy, and evil. An old lament. A lament for lost souls. “Can you see Daddy’s face again, Nathan? Can you?”

  Stone moaned.

  “You know what those words were?”

  Stone shook his head.

  “He said, Time to play, Nathan.”

  Stone said nothing.

  “Do you remember that phrase from your past?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Stone opened his eyes. The voice was familiar. A voice he’d heard hundreds of times. Ingrained in his mind. In his soul. He’d never seen the man before, until now. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “All coming back to you now?”

  Stone closed his eyes. “Oh yeah.”

  Four

  It was late morning and Jeff Patterson was finishing a three-thousand-word article for the radical libertarian magazine Beware the State at his loft studio in Dupont Circle. His cell phone rang. It rang a second time. Then silence.

  It’s the signal.

  Patterson logged off, finished his coffee, and headed out onto the broiling sidewalk. He walked the two hundred yards to the Metro station and took the Red Line to Metro Center. He arrived four short minutes later.

  He changed to the Silver Line and caught a train to East Falls Church.

  Patterson left the station and walked five minutes in the high humidity to the Benjamin Banneker Park. He felt the sweat trickling down his back. Through the thick summer foliage, he saw kids playing soccer. Then he saw the parking lot, his intelligence source sitting in the white Audi.

  Patterson walked over as the man opened the passenger door. He slid in and shut the door. His source was a white, late-middle-aged man with closely cropped hair, piercing blue eyes, and a thick neck. He wore a white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.

  “How you doing?” the man asked.

  “Good, Charles.”

  The man stared at Patterson with his penetrating blue eyes. “You’re not carrying a cell phone, iPad, or electronic equipment of any sort?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Been reading your articles. Interesting stuff.” The man glanced around as two female joggers ran past, his thick neck straining against his T-shirt in the process.

  “I’ve been snowed under. Doing three separate investigations. I haven’t heard from you for a while.”

  “Been out of town.”

  “Out of town? Do you mean out of the country?”

  The source just smiled. “Let’s just say I’ve been busy too. OK, let’s get down to business. I need to know that you’ve got connections on Capitol Hill.”

  “Let me tell you, the
list is getting smaller by the year. Only a handful will give me the time of day. So . . . what’ve you got?”

  “Jeff, I trust you. You’ve been straight down the line. And I appreciate that.”

  “That’s the only way, man.”

  “You know where I’m coming from. I’m a patriot first and foremost. But I loathe the encroachment of the state.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “OK . . . here’s where I’m at, Jeff. In my line of work, we operate on a need-to-know basis. We only know so much of what’s going on.”

  “Sure. Compartmentalized and all that, right?”

  “Right. So we both know where we’re coming from.”

  Patterson nodded but said nothing.

  “I have a friend—well, actually he’s a friend of a friend. And he started working as a highly paid contractor for the CIA a few months back. He’s an analyst.”

  “What does he analyze?”

  “Doesn’t matter. He got talking to his coworkers over recent months, as you do. Going out for a beer, the usual socializing. So anyway, he was out, and the guy he was with, a longtime CIA guy, gets blind drunk, so my friend’s friend, he drove him home.”

  “Sounds like a good guy.”

  “He is. Anyway, when he gets home, he realizes he put the drunk guy’s car keys in his own jacket by mistake.”

  “It happens.”

  “That’s right. So my friend thinks, OK, I’ll drive on over early the following morning to drop them off. But when he looked more closely at the bunch of keys, he noticed one of them was, in fact, a flash drive.”

  “Interesting.”

  “My friend’s friend is nosy I guess. What’s in it? Who carries a flash drive on a key ring disguised as a key? And then he starts thinking, what if it contains classified information? So he decides to check it out for himself.”

  Patterson nodded, not wishing to hurry his source. “What did he find?”

  “Intercepted NSA message. Highly classified stuff. Clearly, a major security breach. My friend’s friend was furious.”

  “Did he report it?”

  The man sighed. “No, he did not. He handed back the bunch of keys to his coworker the following day, saying ‘You dropped these, buddy.’”

  “Cool.”

  “But here’s the thing. The information on the flash drive unsettled him.”

  “So what did it contain?”

  The source turned and stared out of his window as a dog walker went past. “You’ll find out.”

  “How?”

  “He made a copy. I’ve seen the contents and decided that people need to know.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “You will. A friend of mine has slipped it into your mailbox on the ground floor of your apartment block in DC.”

  Patterson flushed. “What? How do you know where I live?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I just wanted to ensure that it would arrive in one piece at your place.”

  Patterson took a few moments to digest the information. “You want to tell me what it contains?”

  “It’s a kill list.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a kill list of undesirables. That’s what they call them. Undesirables.”

  “Who’s on the list? Who are they?”

  “Politicians. Journalists.”

  “What?”

  “I know it’s crazy.”

  “Stop shitting me. Journalists? Are you kidding me?”

  “You don’t know the half of it. Two names on the list I checked. They’re already dead. One skiing accident. One suicide.”

  Patterson’s stomach knotted. “Shit.”

  “There’s one name on the list that jumped out at me. The reason I wanted to contact you.”

  Patterson shrugged. “I’m listening.”

  “Jeff, it’s you.”

  “What?”

  “You’re on the list. You’re one of the people they want to kill.”

  Five

  Nathan Stone was drenched in sweat as he worked out alone in the facility gym. Punching bag, medicine ball, circuit training, sit-ups, ten-mile run on the treadmill, followed by weight training. When he was done after the two-hour workout, he was escorted next door to a boxing ring, where a tough-looking Hispanic kid was waiting for him. Toned muscles. Lean. Couple of gold teeth glistening under the lights before he shoved in a mouth guard.

  Stone changed into his boxing gear before entering the ring. He was aware cameras were watching his every move. But he knew what was expected of him.

  The bell rang.

  Stone moved toward his opponent, ducking and weaving from a flurry of sharp punches. A jab to the jaw and nose. He tasted blood. He felt a switch turn on in him, and a burning anger was lit deep inside.

  He led with a sharp jab and followed it up with a crushing right hook to the guy’s temple. The Hispanic kid collapsed in a heap, out cold. Nathan spat blood on the canvas beside the sprawled, unconscious youngster.

  In the underground gun range, he lined up a military sniper rifle. He shot from two hundred yards and five hundred yards. He hadn’t lost his touch. After a shower and a light supper of scrambled eggs, toast, and strong tea, he was back in the windowless room with the psychologist. The lights were dimmed. Up on the huge TV screen was a grainy black-and-white photo of Nathan as a young boy on the Lower East Side standing on the stairs outside their hovel of a home with his sister and father. He stared at it. He remembered it had been taken by a kind teacher who thought he was bright and would benefit from extra lessons after school. He had given Nathan hardbacks of Dickens, Brontë, Hemingway, Mailer. Then he gave him encyclopedias. He learned about the Romans. Ancient Greeks. He soaked up the information. He learned about exotic lands. Foreign countries. He learned the names of capital cities. He learned their populations. He couldn’t wait to tell his teacher what he learned. But then one day his father found out about the books. He found them under a pile of dirty clothes, then burned them. Burned them all. In front of Nathan and his sister. Nathan watched the paper burn as his father laughed. He felt the tears on his hot cheeks. As the paper turned to burning ash, he just stared, then sobbed.

  He felt himself begin to clench his fists tight.

  The psychologist leaned toward him. “Take a close look, Nathan. You remember those days? You remember that bum of a father? Alcoholic? Skid row thug? He beat you a lot, didn’t he, Nathan?”

  Stone didn’t answer.

  “It made you the man you are today. For better or worse.”

  Stone shrugged.

  “I’ve read your file, Nathan. I know all about you. I know all about what happened to your sister. Your father.”

  “You don’t know nothing about me.”

  “Oh but I do. I know everything there is to know about Nathan Stone, deceased.”

  Stone looked away from the screen.

  “Why do you think your sister killed your father with kitchen scissors?”

  “He was drunk. He was beating on me. She was defending me.”

  “Admirable.”

  “She’s not crazy.”

  “I know that. But . . . they’ve got to put her somewhere.”

  Stone sighed.

  “When was the last time you saw her, Nathan?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  The psychologist nodded.

  Stone flashed back to a blazing-hot summer day in New York only a few months before she killed their father. He was with Helen at the huge Hamilton Fish Park outdoor pool. She was making him laugh by pretending to trip headfirst into the turquoise water. Scores of neighborhood kids from around the Lower East Side cooling off, doing laps, having fun. He remembered she was the one who had taught him to swim when he was seven.

  “How is she?”

  “She’s good. We ensure she’s well looked after at all times.”

  “I’d like to see her again.”

  The psychologist shrugged. “That can be arranged.”

 
; “Where is she?”

  “Still in Florida.”

  Stone thought back to his sister smiling in the mental hospital in Miami. Her soft hands. The artwork she did as part of her therapy. He remembered that she had wanted to be an artist since she was a girl. Maybe an art teacher. That was her dream. She loved sketching. Drawing. She hid all her drawings from their father. He hated art. Anything to do with self-expression he viewed as odd. He mocked her dreams. Staring down at her with glazed, drunken-idiot eyes. She stammered defiance. But she was only ever met with wild laughter. You will amount to nothing, he screamed. You’re from a long line of nothings. Nobodies. Disparaging her with every word and look. Disdain. Helen cried herself to sleep. She once told Nathan about her wish to run away and go to Paris. She told him about the great artists who had lived and worked in the city, artists she had read about in the library. She talked about the great light in the South of France. She talked of Monet. Cezanne. He would listen as her eyes sparkled as she imagined what her life would be like. A dream that would turn to ashes. But even throughout the years of beatings and mental abuse, his sister continued to draw, finding safe places in the terrible room they called home. Under a loose wooden floorboard, where she would eventually hide the scissors with which she would kill their father, she also kept crayons, pencils, chalk, and paper. He loved when she drew. He watched her hour after hour in silence when their father was away. It made him feel calm. Happy.

  “You miss her, don’t you?”

  “She’s my sister.”

  “Family’s important.”

  “I’d like to see her again.”

  “And you will. But first there’s work to do.”

  “I’m ready. When do we begin?”

  Six

  Jessica Friel was glad to be on a shaded sidewalk out of the harsh heat as she jogged near her Capitol Hill apartment, Lana Del Rey playing in her headphones. She felt the endorphins surging through her body. She loved every tough mile. Running was her way to combat work stress. Her mind was processing all the emails and calls she’d be expecting when she got to the office. Political journalists, White House staffers, PR firms, corporations wanting to fund her boss’s political aspirations. The list went on and on.