Search and Destroy by JT Sawyer (top non fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

Burke had built it for his wife as a meditation and reading room apart from the main house, but he often joked that it was him who used it the most.

Standing before the entrance, he heard the soothing sound of the winding brook below. The smell of lilacs from the bushes along the side overrode the traumatic odor of burnt wood, and Cal could see why Burke had coined this his second office.

He shined the light up at the wooden board attached above the doorway, which bore a symbol he was grateful to finally behold in person.

)ooo(

Andromeda.

42

Lynn Vogel was tapping her fingers on the edge of her desk in her office at Langley, her eyes scanning the digital files she had surreptitiously obtained from the databases of three prominent newspapers that had leaked the story on Shepard.

Patterson had assigned her the task of tracking down the perpetrator by any means necessary, but even with her advanced cyber-intrusion skills, she was finding it challenging to turn up anything, which surprised her at every turn, given her training and the scope of resources at her disposal.

But I will find you, no matter how long it takes.

Vogel leaned back in her seat, craning her head up to stretch her stiff neck muscles. She glanced over at the stack of palm-sized drones on the table by the door, recalling that she had loaned one out to Shepard before he disappeared.

Vogel leaned forward with renewed vigor, pulling up a separate screen on her computer then looking up the GPS codes for the data chips embedded in the drones, pulling up the one that Shepard had borrowed.

Her finger hovered over the GPS code as she debated the implications of her actions. Do I really want to know where he’s been or where he’s at now? She wasn’t worried about someone finding out that she knew his location, since her laptop was the only access point, but she knew the overbearing mother hen in her might be sticking her neck out too far.

This is bullshit. Just do it. This is Shepard, for God’s sake.

In all the years she’d known him, she knew him as a man of integrity and honor who had served his country with distinction, putting the other lives on his team before his.

He can’t go down in the books as a criminal. This whole thing has been a setup, and now he’s just supposed to take the fall for it? Fuck that.

She shook her head in disgust then clicked on the number. The imagery indicated a batch of different locations. Vogel pulled up the first one, which revealed an address on the upper west side of Bethesda. She recognized it from an online news article about an oil lobbyist who had been killed by a bunch of Colombians over an apparent drug deal gone bad.

She searched through the other locations, matching the coordinates with the addresses, which pulled up satellite images of the neighborhoods and any corresponding local and federal law-enforcement dispatches associated with them.

One was for a dilapidated house in an impoverished region on the fringe of Baltimore, Maryland. The police report indicated that nearly a dozen gang members had been slain there that were affiliated with the same Colombians that had struck the oil lobbyist.

Vogel took a deep breath, continuing. She found three different hostels spread around two cities, the most recent of which was last night.

Cal must be staying there, changing locations every night or so.

The last prominent point where he had lingered for a considerable time was an address for a residential location thirty minutes northwest of the Pentagon. It was in a relatively affluent neighborhood that Vogel had looked at a few years ago with her ex-husband.

Her mouth hung open when she saw the photo of the deceased taken by the FBI agent on scene last night.

God, that’s Tim Rourke. He was in on this? Did Shepard…

She paused her train of thought as she read the notes, which stated that Rourke died of an apparent heart attack, along with a report indicating that nearly $10,000 in cash was found on his desk.

Cal, are you really killing our own now? She tried to dismiss Cal’s presence at the home as coincidence, recalling Rourke’s ruddy complexion and overweight features, but the crime scene was just too similar to Cal’s MO.

Vogel watched one of her analysts walk by the window that overlooked the tac-ops center below her office. She thought about the people who worked under her then about other case officers in the building whom she interacted with on a daily basis, wondering if any of them could have been involved in the mass murder at Burke’s place.

And what about Patterson or even Foley? They also knew about Perseus. She shook her head. Christ, they can’t be involved.

She scrolled back up through the GPS coordinates, deleting them all except for the last location. Nothing stood out other than that it was currently active, and from the looks of the signal, Cal was on foot.

Her eyes widened when she saw it was the Burke estate, then she noticed a flurry of internal dispatches and chatter from both police and federal agents who were funneling towards that location.

Shit, get out of there, Cal!

Vogel had been the eyes and ears of Shepard and his SD unit for so long that she just wanted to reach out through the computer and warn him. In another reality, she would have sent a Predator drone or a Blackhawk. Now, she was going to watch it all go down and was utterly helpless to protect someone whose safety she had been responsible for during countless incursions across enemy lines.

He’ll go down in a flurry of bullets. They’re not going to take any chances this time.

Her eyes darted along the ceiling, her pulse quickening. She grabbed the encrypted cellphone on her desk and feverishly typed in a message to the only person she could trust right now.

Then she stared at the screen, waiting for a response.

“Pick up,