Assassination Authorized Read online

  She bit, scratched, and kicked all over the lobby until a solid blow from a massive fist rendered her unconscious.

  Chapter 2

  Stacy Crawford surveyed the three children for whom she was now responsible. They had driven all night. The girls had slept most of the way.

  In West Virginia, Stacy pulled into a used car lot and looked over the selection. A two-year-old Toyota Camry seemed in good shape. She asked the price and told the salesman she would be back in an hour to pick it up. She drove to the local branch of her bank and withdrew cash from her savings account.

  She gave the salesman a phony name for the car title and drove around the block to where the girls were waiting in the rental car. She called the car rental company and told them the rental car had been stolen. She would deal with the problem when she was safe in Texas.

  Over lunch, the girls related their harrowing experience. They were still awed by their mother’s strength and bravery. So was Stacy.

  “Where is Mommy?” Kimi asked softly.

  “She’s fine,” Stacy said. “She’ll come for you when it’s safe.”

  “Where are we going?” Lindsey asked.

  “Texas.” Stacy smiled. “Your mom is from Texas.”

  “Oh, yeah. She has taken us to visit Grandad Daniel. He lives in Texas.”

  Trust no one! Mariam’s words echoed in Stacy’s head.

  “What do you do for a living?” Lindsey asked.

  “I’m a rancher,” Stacy replied. “I raise cattle and horses, a few goats, and chickens.” She didn’t add that the oil and gas on her land were what made her very wealthy.

  Kimi clapped her hands. “Do you have any baby goats?”

  Stacy grinned. “I do. They’re just like puppies. You can pet them.”

  They spent the night in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Stacy picked up I-20 in Birmingham the next morning. Roll Tide, she thought as she cruised through Alabama. I-20 took her all the way to Benbrook, Texas, and her ranch that wrapped around Benbrook Lake.

  Stacy’s Lazy S Ranch was two thousand acres of coastal grass and oak trees. It was situated between the lake and the vast acreage owned by the Devon estate.

  “We’re lucky. School’s out,” Mary said. “We can spend the summer with you.”

  “Uh-huh,” Stacy said. She wondered what she would do with three little girls all summer. She had a sinking feeling Mariam Reynolds wasn’t coming for them any time soon, if at all.

  ##

  Walid Farouk ground out his cigarette on the floor of the coffee shop and glared at the counter girl, daring her to reprimand him. “Coffee. Black,” he growled.

  Steam floated up from the hot beverage as he poured sugar and cream into it. He wanted to kill something or someone. His mind raged over the loss of his youngest brother. How had he let it happen? How did a woman who weighed less than a hundred pounds overpower him and take his life?

  Although he had personally dragged her lifeless body to the river and tossed it in, guaranteeing her death, he was certain that the body bay patrol had dragged from the river was Mariam Reynolds. He would not let her live. He would make her pay for his brother’s death.

  He had been hesitant to participate in the fanatic scheme to kidnap Tom Reynolds’ wife and daughters. The idea was to frame Reynolds for the death of his family, ruining his chances of being elected president. It was imperative that Reynolds lose his bid for the presidency in order for the Islamic State to survive. Reynolds had made it clear his first item of action would be to destroy the ISIS caliphate.

  Walid feared Reynolds’s retaliation. He knew if Reynolds were elected president, he would hunt down the members of Walid’s terrorist cell and imprison them for the death of his family.

  Walid considered killing Darwin Davis, the US Representative who had deemed Walid’s cell the People’s Socialist Party to attract America’s uninformed snowflake generation. Davis had cooked up the insane idea of kidnapping the wife and daughters of a US Senator who was running for president. Walid knew better than to trust the stupid infidels whose only concern was maintaining their power base and hiding their own illegal activities that would come to light if Reynolds became president.

  They had planned the abductions to coincide with Congress’s Independence Day period of adjournment, knowing Reynolds always worked late at night. The stunt had briefly cast a bad light on Reynolds, but his ironclad alibi had sealed the fate of their failed plan to discredit the man. If anything, their plan could result in Reynolds garnering the pity vote of softhearted Americans.

  Like the surviving mad dog from a ravaged pack of hounds, Walid licked his wounds and made up his mind to go deep underground and regroup. He now had a better grasp of the shadow personnel protecting the president. General Abigail Carson would be his first target when his cell resurfaced.

  Chapter 3

  Dr. Mecca Storm took the familiar white envelope from her patient, a handsome, muscular man in his midforties.

  She removed the card from the envelope and glanced at it. She knew, without looking, what the card said. “Please take care of this gentleman for me” was neatly printed in black ink on the stark-white card.

  “I truly appreciate you seeing me after hours,” the man said.

  “Who recommended me to you?” she asked.

  “A friend of a friend.” The man flashed a smile and lowered himself into the chair across the desk from her. “I was told you’re the best in the business.” His easy manner and relaxed demeanor told her he was a man confident of his place in the world. A place she knew he might not occupy for long.

  “Mr. Reynolds, how may I help you?”

  “Please, call me Tom.” He flashed his easy smile again.

  A heavy silence weighed on the room as she waited for him to begin talking.

  “Tom, how may I help you?” She prodded again.

  “If you read the papers, you already know who I am and why I’m here.” For the first time, he seemed uneasy.

  “You’re a United States Senator and a person of interest in the disappearance of your wife and three children.” Mecca spoke softly, watching his face for any emotions her words might elicit. “You’re the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. You’re a very powerful man and are considered the top contender in the next election for president.”

  “I see you’ve done your homework.” The easy smile was back.

  “Did you kill your wife and children?”

  His head snapped back as if she’d hit him with a hard uppercut. The smile disappeared from his face. “No! God, no.”

  “Well, now that we have that out of the way, what can I do for you, Senator?”

  After Tom Reynolds left, Mecca looked at the white card with its perfect lettering. She called patients bearing the card her “special patients,” and she had received more special patients than usual this year.

  ##

  Mecca was still replaying her visit with Tom Reynolds in her mind when the cab stopped in front of her Upper West Side apartment. She paid the driver as the doorman opened the cab door and greeted her warmly. “You’re home late tonight, Ms. Storm.”

  She smiled. “It has been a long and interesting day, Paul.”

  Alone in her apartment, she ordered Chinese food, poured a glass of wine, and walked out onto the terrace. She never tired of her view of the Hudson River. She collapsed onto the lounge, leaned her head back, and reveled in the unseasonably cool breeze.

  Tom Reynolds. The man’s face flashed before her as she recalled the distress in his eyes as he discussed the disappearance of his family. She wasn’t sure whether the distress was caused by their disappearance or the investigation of him as a suspect.

  Reynolds’s wife and three daughters had disappeared during a shopping trip in New York. They just vanished. Their driver had dropped them at Macy’s Herald Square before noon. When they failed to call him at the appointed time, he began calling Mrs. Reynolds’s cell phone. After several calls, Mrs. Reynolds answered
and told him they had taken a cab back to the hotel. She would call him tomorrow. On closer questioning, he couldn’t swear it had been Mrs. Reynolds’s voice.

  Authorities traced the family’s movements through credit card purchases, which stopped at the restaurant where they had dinner. No one recalled seeing them after that. A check of the cab companies showed no pickup of four females from Macy’s. It was as if they had eaten, paid the bill, and vanished.

  Reynolds had been in his office in Washington. Although most of his colleagues had deserted the “Hill” early for their Independence Day period of adjournment—politician-speak for vacation—he had stayed late to finish work on several matters he needed his office staff to handle while he was gone. His chief of staff had reported that he had left her office a little after nine. Both of his administrative assistants had reported that he had not left his office, as they could hear him recording information using the voice-activated software that made notes and then transcribed them into a Word document. A check of his computer showed the data had been entered during that period.

  The doorman rang to inform Mecca that the deliveryman was on his way up. As she sat down to dinner, she turned on her laptop. A quick check of her Swiss bank account verified that the usual quarter-million dollars had transferred into it. It was time to go to work on Tom Reynolds.

  Chapter 4

  Jericho Parker pulled Mecca Storm’s file from the double-locked drawer in the heavy metal desk. Jericho had been protecting Mecca for over five years. An honor student, graduating at the top of her class, Mecca had received numerous scholarships from medical schools that recognized her genius and wanted to add her name to their list of distinguished alumni.

  Her work in the field of therapeutic hypnosis had received rave reviews from the psychiatric community. She had finished her bachelor’s degree in two years and a medical degree at Harvard in four years. She was editor of the Harvard Law Review. Graduating Summa Cum Laude, the top psychiatric hospitals had vied for her to do her residency in their facilities. After her residency, she devoted seven more years to research, honing her knowledge and absorbing everything she could from those considered the elite in her field. Wherever Mecca went, lucrative government grants followed to fund her research. The psychiatric community was surprised and disappointed when she suddenly left research and opened a private practice.

  Fluent in five languages, Mecca worked with wealthy, influential patients from all over the US and other countries. Her client load was heavy, and she often worked fifteen to eighteen hours a day.

  Jericho flipped through the photos of Mecca Storm. At 5’8”, she was an imposing figure, tall and slender. A true natural beauty with long, dark hair, she looked more like a movie star than a doctor.

  Both of Mecca’s parents were doctors with a successful practice in Albany, New York. Mecca and her older sister, Teagan, were highly regarded in their chosen medical fields. She adored her parents and her sister and visited them as often as possible. She commented that the Hudson River tied them together.

  Jericho’s job was to keep her safe and make certain no one interfered with her work. Her file gave no indication why she was so important to the United States government. Although Jericho knew all there was to know about her routine, they had never met.

  ##

  Mecca never took anything for granted. When patients told her their stories, she listened attentively, watching for the telltale signs of half-truths or outright lies. After one session, she could tell if a patient was being open and honest with her or guarded and secretive. She was never wrong. As her second session with Tom Reynolds began, she knew he was hiding something.

  “Tom, I feel you’re holding back information I need to know in order to help you,” Mecca said, speaking softly but firmly, carefully articulating each word as if he were a child who might not understand what she was saying. “I can’t make a recommendation to the authorities unless you’re completely honest with me. We are all working hard to get your name removed from the suspect list, so you can get on with your life.”

  “Dr. Storm, I believe I’m being framed, and I don’t even know how to stop it. Mariam and I have certainly had arguments over living in Washington. She wants to raise the girls in Texas, but she would never leave me without an explanation. She’s not that kind of woman. She would confront me and tell me she was leaving.

  “Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like Mariam took the girls and left me—or worse.” Tom cocked his head and glared at Mecca. “Supposedly she cleaned out our savings account and the girls’ college fund, almost a million dollars. Why would she do that?”

  “Did you give this information to the police?” Mecca asked.

  “Of course! They interviewed the bank officer who handled the transactions. Mariam withdrew the cash over a three-month period. The bank official called me a couple of times to alert me to the withdrawals, but I was too busy to be bothered with our personal household issues. I was sure it wasn’t important. I never returned her calls.

  “I looked at the security tapes of Mariam’s transactions, and honestly, the woman on the tapes is not my wife. She resembles Mariam, and everyone keeps insisting it is, but it isn’t.”

  Mecca made a note to obtain a copy of the police report and the tapes. She didn’t like being fed bits and pieces of information whenever Reynolds deemed it necessary for her to know something.

  “What do you think is happening, Tom?”

  “Dr. Storm, my wife is an heiress. She didn’t need the piddling amount of money in our savings account, but I do. I barely have enough money to retain a lawyer. Most people think I married her for the money, but that’s not true. I love my wife, and I love my daughters. I would never hurt them. I’m worried sick about them.

  “You’ve seen what a media circus this has become. It has eclipsed the presidential election, and I believe that is the intent of whoever is behind this. I think my family has been murdered, and I’m being framed for it in order to give the other party an excuse to drag my name through the mud and cost us the election. These people are ruthless, and nothing will stop them. They wouldn’t think twice about killing my family. Yes, I’m hiding something—sheer terror!”

  Mecca closed her eyes. “Your family has been missing almost a month. Has there been a ransom demand?”

  “No.”

  “Who inherits your wife’s estate in the event of her death?” Mecca asked.

  “It is to be divided evenly among the girls,” Reynolds said. “If all of them preceded me in death, I would inherit everything, billions. A great motive for murder, right?

  “As long as Mariam’s father Daniel Devon is alive, he will be the sole administrator of the estate,” Tom added.

  The intercom on her desk buzzed, reminding her of her next appointment. “Same time next week,” she said with a smile.

  Tom Reynolds left by the private entrance to her office, an entrance used only by clients who presented the white referral card. She usually handled two such patients a year. Their names never appeared on her calendar or in her accounting. As far as the records of Dr. Mecca Storm showed, such patients never existed.

  ##

  Jericho loved it when Mecca went to Broadway plays or musicals. She wasn’t so fond of the opera, but it was beginning to grow on her. She was even beginning to recognize songs from the various operas they had attended over the years. Of course, only Jericho knew they were a couple. Mecca was completely oblivious to her existence. If Mecca ordered tickets, Jericho automatically received a ticket for the seat directly behind her. For the more popular theaters, she had standing box seats, and so did Jericho. Her apartment was right below Mecca’s, so she was aware of those times the doctor paced the floor. On occasion, Jericho silently removed threats to her: a friendly drunk, a not-so-friendly mugger, and a stalker who had become obsessed with her. The drunk and mugger had simply faded into the crowd when Jericho shoved the Ruger into their back, but she had been forced to kill the
stalker.

  Mecca was in great demand, both professionally and socially. She attended many benefits and political black-tie events, moving easily among senators, governors, and visiting royalty. She had many suitors who escorted her around town, but she never took any of them home with her. For that, Jericho was thankful. Dr. Mecca Storm was the epitome of what a proper, chaste woman should be.

  Five years ago, when Jericho was assigned the job as Mecca Storm’s invisible bodyguard, she was upset. Life as she knew it ceased. Mecca’s life became Jericho’s life. Where she went, Jericho went. Where she dined, Jericho dined. Jericho was thankful Mecca disliked sushi. Although Jericho hated to admit it, she knew she now looked forward to every moment she spent watching Mecca. Sometimes during a play or musical, she had to suppress the urge to reach out and touch her hair. She couldn’t imagine life without Mecca Storm, and the doctor didn’t even know Jericho existed.

  A former member of the Navy’s Special Operations Team, Jericho had escaped the war with only a small metal plate in her head. She was tall, beautiful, and deadly. Extremely intelligent, fluent in seven languages, and an expert in all forms of combat, she had never failed a mission. Her transition from special ops to Secret Service agent had been an easy one. She was considered one of the nation’s top agents when it came to protecting government assets. She did whatever it took to keep her charge safe. Although she preferred intimidation, killing came easily to her when all else failed.

  Jericho had no idea why Mecca was so important. She did know not to ask questions. It was a sweet assignment for her. She was so important that the government wanted to keep Jericho as happy as possible in her assignment. The government paid all of her expenses. Everything she did charged to a limitless credit card, and she had received a clear deed to her five-million-dollar apartment. Of course, she knew the only reason her apartment was so grand was that she had to be below Mecca’s. Funds were automatically deposited into accounts for her homeowner’s association, utilities, etc. Every two years a new black vehicle appeared in her parking place with the title and insurance card in the console. The vehicle title and insurance were always in her name. She banked her annual income of $200,000 in a savings account. In exchange for being a kept woman, she gave up all semblance of a personal life. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, she belonged to Mecca Storm.