Read Online Sea of Crises by Marty Steere - Free Book Online

home, and, because of a hurricane, it looked like the game would be pushed up a day. September 11. The plan, we were told, was to detonate a bomb in the parking lot of Pro Player Stadium. There were suggestions it might even be a dirty nuke. My assignment was to take out the leader.”
    “Take out,” Nate repeated. He was pretty sure he knew what Matt meant, but he was hoping he was wrong.
    “Eliminate, remove,” Matt said. Then he gave Nate a direct look. “Kill.”
    Nate said nothing.
    “It was a quick in and out,” Matt continued, his eyes back on the road. “I’d done it more times than I could count.”
    He puffed some air through his nose, a mirthless laugh. “I guess I’d been doing it too long. I knew it wasn’t my place to question the operation. But the whole thing didn’t make sense. Why just go after the one guy? And why not go after the bomb? What if it really was a nuke?
    “The target was a Palestinian-American who’d been in this country for almost thirty years. His dossier made him look legit. He was employed by a trucking company and was the union rep. Supposedly, though, he was a plant, a sleeper agent controlled by Hezbollah.
    “Too many red flags there, but I didn’t see them.”
    The back of Nate’s neck was tingling, and there was a heaviness in his chest. For a moment, he considered telling Matt to stop, but he knew he had to hear it.
    “He and his wife lived alone in a small house in the suburbs. I was supposed to make it look like a heart attack. We had a particularly nasty gas for that. I’d have released it in his car, and he’d have been dead before he got out of the driveway. Even if there’d been an autopsy, and, for something like that, there wouldn’t have been, detection would have been unlikely.
    “But I had a better plan. I slipped into the house early in the morning. Tied them both up. Told the man I’d start removing his wife’s fingers one at a time until he told me where the bomb was. He claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about. Said it had to be a mistake. Pleaded with me to let them go. ‘Course, they all did that. But there was something in the way he said it.”
    He paused for a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s what threw me off. But, then again, I’d already blown it. I didn’t know the kid was there. I should have.” He shook his head. “I should have,” he repeated.
    “When she came through the door, I just reacted. Head shot. Close range. The wife lunged at me, and I took her down the same way. At that point, I had no choice. I stood the man up. He was blubbering incoherently. I put the barrel in his mouth, wrapped his hands around the gun and fired. Then I tidied up and left.”
    Nate stared at his brother, trying hard to shake the feeling that he was looking at a stranger.
    “I should have been disciplined for deviating from the plan,” Matt said. “But I wasn’t. Turns out the police bought the whole murder-suicide thing, and, apparently, my superiors were even happier with that than they would have been with the heart attack.
    “It didn’t sit well, though, and it gnawed at me. For months. Finally, I realized I had to do something about it. I’d accumulated a lot of time off, so I took it. Pulled in some favors. Started doing my own investigation. All indications were that the guy was legit. I discovered he’d been active in local politics. He’d been running for the state legislature and was considered a shoe-in. But he’d also started playing a role in some of the national races. One of the Florida senate seats was open, and the election was going to be tight. And Florida was shaping up to be a battleground in the upcoming presidential election. From what I could tell, the elimination of my guy had an impact on both races.
    “Could have been coincidence, but, in my business, one of the first casualties is coincidence. What I couldn’t find was anything supporting the notion that the guy was involved in planning a