The Suppressor by Erik Carter (best free novels .txt) 📗

stairs, smiling broadly, blonde hair tossing, one outstretched arm gesturing grandly toward an idling limousine.

Nice.

SkyTrail Aviation was a real class act. Such a pity he’d never see them again.

Laswell nodded at the flight attendant, stepped past her to the limo, then nodded at the suited limo driver—a twenty-something guy, also wearing a massive smile—who held the rear door open for him and introduced himself as Ricky.

Laswell squeezed through the doorway, into cold air conditioning, and plopped into another comfortable leather seat.

A moment later, the limo eased to a smooth, crawling start, and Ricky’s voice came through the intercom.

“You’re heading to Bayfront Auditorium, correct, sir?”

“Correct.”

Back in Virginia, Laswell had probed Suppressor for locations in Pensacola where he could go should he need to make a trip down south. Pensacola Bayfront Auditorium, he’d been told, was a massive building that sat at the very end of a pier downtown, right in Pensacola Bay, surrounded by water on three sides. It was a very public spot, and located right in the thick of things. A perfect Watchers location. Hidden in plain sight.

“Very good, sir,” Ricky said. “But please understand that since that’s downtown, it’s going to take us quite a while. A lot of traffic. We got the Tristán Festival tonight.”

“I’m in no hurry.”

But, really, there was a time concern. A big one. Massive. He checked his watch. It read 7:47, which made it 6:47 there in the Central time zone.

A little over an hour until Burton’s deadline.

He took his cellular phone from his pocket, flipped it opened, and dialed Suppressor. One ring, then a message.

Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. To leave a message—

He flipped the phone shut.

The bastard had turned his phone off.

Off!

An hour before all hell broke loose.

Laswell’s fingers curled into fists. And he thought of Briggs, the older man’s insistence that Laswell was making a huge mistake with Silence Jones.

He pushed the thought from his mind and dialed Nakiri.

“Yes?”

“Where is he?”

“Don’t know. Tried him twenty minutes ago, and the call went straight to voicemail.”

“Same here. Shit!” Laswell sucked in a breath, forced it back out through flared nostrils. He thought for a moment, and decided that the best thing to do was stick with the plan. Rationality always trumped emotion.

“You’re an observer tonight, Nakiri,” he said. “Assets don’t work in pairs. If Suppressor can’t finish the job, you finish it for him. But if he gets himself in trouble, that’s his own damn fault. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Be prepared.”

He hung up and looked out the window. The limo was moving a steady click down a four-lane thoroughfare lined businesses and lush with trees. The traffic issues Ricky had mentioned were not yet apparent, but from the maps Laswell had studied, he knew they were still a few miles outside downtown.

In the distance, the pink streaks in the sky grew brighter. What had evidently been a gray, miserable day was going to have a magnificent sunset.

And possibly a calamitous ending.

If Laswell’s brand-new Asset putzed out.

What the hell was Silence Jones up to?

Chapter Sixty-Five

Silence floated in nothingness.

The skin-receptor-neutral temperature; the entirely dark environment; the buoyant water; the potent earplugs—all of it had come together to do its job.

He’d truly been deprived of his senses.

And sucked out of reality.

Images had come and gone, his mind flipping through the slideshow of the last year of his life. Trying to stay on track, to focus on the task at hand. But he kept seeing slides of C.C.

And often the same slide.

The one that showed her lying dead in a pool of her blood.

He forced the image away. There was an objective he was to conquer. Stopping Burton.

So he had to stay focused.

The solution to the issue was in his mind. Somewhere. A detail in the fog. A whisper of a memory. It had to be there.

His mind went to New Orleans. How he, as Jake Rowe, had foiled Burton’s plot there, the beginning of Burton’s deeper hatred for him—the hatred, Jake feared, that had led to C.C.’s murder.

But did it have anything to do with the task at hand, with stopping Burton’s plans with the terrorists?

He didn’t think so.

No. No, it didn’t.

Stay focused.

What would C.C. say he should do?

She would tell him to focus.

Focus, love.

Burton. The smile, always there, smeared on his face, framed by locks of his dark hair. Nothing about him was real. Always hiding something. The twitching energy in the eyes.

Silence was back in the chair. Tied down. Burton’s living room, facing the projector screen. His view alternated between two Burtons at once—the flesh-and-blood one at his side and the video image on the screen, both of them grinning, four dark eyes twinkling. C.C.’s screams. The group of men closing in on her. Odom twirling his blackjack.

Focus.

Charlie had warned him. Charlie Marsh, the overgrown kid brother, waves of hair flopping down into his eyes. He’d told Silence—had told Jake—that he shouldn’t have crossed Burton in New Orleans, that Burton’s plan was huge.

Charlie looked up at Jake, standing by his side in the warm opulence of the Farone mansion.

Charlie wasn’t a smart man, but he was intuitive. And he was right. More right than he’d known.

Before the bullet had crashed through his skull. In that dark alleyway.

Jake had been in the passenger seat. The musty smell of Charlie’s Taurus. Ambushed. Set up. Burton had led them to a trap. He’d taken Charlie from Jake. Insignificant compared to taking C.C., but a loss still. Burton had taken so much from him, and—

Focus, love.

Focus. Yes. Refocus. Breathe. He took in a deep breath, through his stomach, a diaphragmatic breath, exhaled.

His body bobbed in the water, his toe brushed the back wall, and he left the trance. He was back in the pod.

For only a moment.

Then he was with Charlie again. In the mansion.

I’m telling ya, Pete, it’s coming soon, Charlie had said. Burton’s gonna take over the operation. What are we gonna do?

Burton had done more than take over the Farone crime syndicate. He’d done more than destroy