Hidden Allegiance: A Jackson Quick Adventure
HIDDEN ALLEGIANCE
A JACKSON QUICK ADVENTURE
Tom Abrahams
OTHER WORKS BY TOM ABRAHAMS
JACKSON QUICK ADVENTURES
ALLEGIANCE
ALLEGIANCE BURNED
MATTI HARROLD NOVELS
SEDITION
INTENTION (OCTOBER 2016)
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A POST HILL PRESS BOOK
ISBN: 978-1-61868-886-6
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-887-3
HIDDEN ALLEGIANCE
A Jackson Quick Adventure Book Three
© 2015 by Tom Abrahams
All Rights Reserved
Cover Design by Ryan Truso
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Post Hill Press
275 Madison Avenue, 14th Floor
New York, NY 10016
http://posthillpress.com
For Courtney, Samantha, & Luke
You do you. No Ragrets. Not a single letter.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: IN THE BLIND
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
PART TWO: NIGHT VISION
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
PART THREE: CLARITY
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
EPILOGUE: AFTER IMAGE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dreamed before.”
—Edgar Allen Poe
The sand squeaked underneath Liho Blogis. The sun was barely a distorted reflection on the waves crashing against the coral outcrops dotting the inlet.
Blogis was aware of the noise and made efforts to tread lightly as he moved up the beach on Oahu’s North Shore, hoping the crash of the waves was enough to mask his approach.
They would never hear him coming.
He thumbed the safety on his suppressed Makarov pistol. The so-called PM was Blogis’s weapon of choice. He’d retrieved it from the cold, dead hand of a Soviet police officer in 1988 and it was as much a trophy as it was an effective bloodletter. At twenty-six ounces, it was heavy in his hand by modern standards, and Blogis thought its blowback design was more accurate than pistols using a recoiling or articulated barrel.
A man’s gun.
He’d surveilled the house on the inlet for three weeks, acting as a surfer, a tourist, a bum. The plastic surgery he’d undergone after having the bullet removed from his body provided ample cover from his targets. They would not recognize his new nose, enhanced cheeks, or his longer, blond hair.
The bungalow was fifty meters up a tangled hill, covered in palms and underbrush. There was a single window lit with a lamp on the second floor. It was a hallway outside of the bedroom. He knew the targets typically arose in forty-five minutes.
Blogis, a student of many disciplines, was an amateur somnologist. Knowing the human sleep cycle was a valuable tool in his arsenal of intelligence and violence.
He knew that roughly ninety minutes after the couple fell asleep, they’d enter REM, otherwise known as Stage Five. REM was dream sleep. If he timed it right, as he had so many times before on similar missions, he’d surprise the pair at their most vulnerable: during a long period of REM right before they awoke. With their voluntary muscles momentarily paralyzed, they’d be unable to quickly respond. By the time they knew what hit them, they’d be dead.
Blogis checked his watch before glancing over his shoulder. Nobody was on the beach, but there were the silhouetted bodies of a half dozen neoprene-suited surfers straddling their boards, bobbing rhythmically, awaiting a swell just beyond the mouth of the inlet.
There were so many parallels between surfing and his chosen line of work. Both required unique skills, unmitigated patience, the love of control, and the urge to bridle powers much greater than oneself. Both required a tradecraft that was counterculture, a subset of rules and laws which were grossly misunderstood by anyone beyond the boundaries.
Blogis crouched in the palms, his feet digging into the dirt under the weight of his body, and he momentarily lost himself in the surf, eyeing a lone warrior who braved a large wave gathering momentum behind him. The surfer popped from his chest to his feet, crouched, then slipped into the brief curl of the water as it broke against the coral.
The surfer crashed against the loss of the wave’s energy, and Blogis refocused on the bungalow. He checked his watch again and inhaled deeply, ready to initiate the task, when he heard a man’s voice behind him.
“Howzit?” The man was smiling. “I don’t mean a bodda you, Brah.” He was speaking Da Kine Pidgin, Hawaiian slang.
Blogis glanced back at the bungalow’s lone lit window before spinning on the balls of his feet to face the interloper. He caught the surfer glimpse the Makarov and raised his finger to his pursed lips.
“You Cock-a-roach this hana?” the surfer whispered, a smile snaking across his face, revealing a toothy grin. His right shoulder bore a large, black patterned tattoo that stretched from his neck to his bicep, sloping across the top of his chest.
“Stealing?” Blogis tilted his head, keeping the Russian handgun at his side. For the moment. “You’re wondering if I am here to break in and steal things?”
“Fo’real,” the surfer nodded, the smile disappearing. “I got a mo bettah way to do it.”
“Do you?” Blogis looked past the local at the longboard stuck into the sand halfway to the tideline on the shore.
The surfer nodded again and Blogis gestured him up the hill, toward the back door.
The young man, who Blogis estimated was no more than eighteen or nineteen years old, started toward the stranger. He’d climbed two or three steps when Blogis stopped him with a pair of suppressed slugs; one to the center of the boy’s chest, the other in the space between his thick eyebrows. That shot thumped the smile from the surfer’s face and he crumpled to the sandy dirt, landing partly on a clump of silvery Hinahina.
Blogis scanned the beach and the surf. Nobody was close enough to see anything, so he returned to the mission at hand and inched quietly up a short set of wooden steps to the rear door. It was a twelve-paneled door with a simple lock that Blogis handled with ease, and then he slipped inside, quietly pulling the door closed behind him.
He was in the kitchen. The smell of pineapples and soap filled his nostrils as he got a better sense of his surroundings. Across from him was a granite counter, and to his left a washing machine. He walked to the counter and saw a half-empty twenty ounce bottle of Dr. Pepper, and a pair of cellphones plugged into an outlet, both of them blinking to indicate they were fully charged. Next to the sink, on the other side of the counter against the wall, was a wire ba
sket full of mangos. An uncut pineapple sat next to the basket. There was a juicer, taken apart with its plastic parts flipped upside down on a stack of paper towels.
They had tried to make this a home.
How naive.
Blogis moved to his right and around the floral-patterned loveseat that separated the kitchenette from the living area. An old steamer trunk served as a coffee table between the love seat and a wall-mounted flat panel television. A laptop sat open on the trunk, its dark screen in sleep mode. He walked past the television and into a narrow hallway. At the end of the hall was the door to the lone bedroom. He stepped quietly, Makarov primed, past the lit wall sconce to his left, a window at shoulder height to his right.
Nearing the bedroom door, he heard the soft rhythm of jazz, an alto saxophone chirping a riff against the backdrop of trombones, a double bass guitar, and drums. Blogis paused at the door, listening to the refrain before gripping the handle and turning it. His left shoulder pushed into the door and it opened into the room.
Underneath a thin yellow sheet was the shirtless man on his back, left arm hanging off of the full-sized bed. Draped across him was the woman, sleeping in shorts and a loose tank top. Her long, tanned leg was wrapped around his thighs, her right hand on his chest, her face nuzzled into his neck. Her dark hair covered her face, but he knew who she was.
He slid alongside the bed, leaning over her, placing the barrel of the Makarov in the small of her back as he whispered into her ear.
“Bella,” he said, trailing the gun up her back and along her spine, “it’s time to get reacquainted with your daddy.”
Bella winced, her eyes still closed. But she didn’t move. Neither did the man next to her, the one who’d saved her life too many times to count. Blogis had timed this perfectly.
He pushed the barrel into the back of her neck and pulled the trigger.
PART ONE: IN THE BLIND
“There are no secrets that time does not reveal”
—Jean Racine
CHAPTER 1
Her screams, followed by the gasps of hyperventilation, wake me for the third night in a row. Neither of us is sleeping. How could we?
I wrap my arms around Bella, trying to calm her.
“Him again?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
She nods through her sobs, her chest heaving as she struggles to catch her breath. “It’s always the same,” she says. “I mean, little details are different, but Blogis always finds us. He’s one step ahead of us.”
“It’s okay,” I assure her. “He can’t find us here.”
Her sobbing softens and her breathing slows, replaced by the crashing of the Pacific waves outside.
I flip on the camping light hanging from the center of our four-person tent, squinting against the instant LED brightness that envelops the space we’ve called home for two weeks.
“You don’t know that, Jackson,” she says, rubbing the light and tears from her eyes. “He found us in Hawaii. He can find us here.”
“First of all,” I remind her, “we were stupid to handle Hawaii the way we did. A bank account, a rental house, frequenting local restaurants. The North Shore is not secluded enough.”
“And this is?” she asks, slipping out of her sleeping bag, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Northern California is secluded enough? We’re driving distance from San Francisco, Jackson!”
“We talked about this, Bella,” I put my hand on her foot, rubbing her toes with my thumb. “We’re off the grid. We don’t have a phone; we hiked more than six miles to get here. This is backcountry camping. There’s nobody within earshot of us. We haven’t seen another human being in more than a week.”
She looks at me, her eyes swollen. “So are we going to stay here forever? We can’t do that Jackson.”
“I know, Bella. We need time to disappear, figure our next move, and go on the offensive.”
“You say that, but we haven’t done anything since we’ve been here. We sleep, we hike, we eat, we…” Her cheeks redden at the thought of what else we do.
“You’re on the offensive as far as that’s concerned.” I squeeze her foot, trying to lighten the mood.
She rolls her eyes. “Whatever. My point is —”
“I know your point. We need to refocus. Liho Blogis is looking for us. We should figure out a way to find him first.” I check my watch. “The sun’s about to come up. Let’s go for a walk, get some air.”
“You’re always too calm about this stuff,” she sighs. “I imagine your dreams are much sweeter than mine.”
I smile but say nothing. She doesn’t need to know about my dreams. There’s no point in rehashing the recurring nightmare that was my childhood, no purpose in telling that on the rare occasion I don’t dream about my parents’ deaths, I dream of hers.
“C’mon, we need the exercise and the distraction. Let’s hit the beach.”
Bella pulls her hair back into a ponytail, flipping a hairband from her wrist onto the back of her head. She slides on a pair of worn hiking shoes. “I’m ready.”
I unzip the vented flap that serves as an entrance to our home, inviting a cool breeze into the tent, and Bella crawls past me out onto the sand. I pop her on her behind and join her on the ankle-high grass outside of the tent. My knee aches as I stretch and stand upright. I can tell it’s going to rain even before I look out at the ominous vista in front of us.
Wildcat Beach sits on the southern end of Point Reyes National Seashore. For twenty bucks cash a night, we’ve crashed here anonymously. Parked on a bluff between the ocean and the green Wildcat Lake, our spot has afforded us time to think, plan, and, for better or worse, dream.
“It’s breezy today,” she remarks. “The wind doesn’t usually get like this until the afternoon.” Her head’s turned back toward me so I can hear her. She’s wearing a gray fleece pullover and what are best described as black yoga pants.
“Wanna walk down to the beach?” I ask her, nodding toward the sheer cliffs to our right.
We spend the next ten minutes carefully crabbing our way down to the wet, thick-grained sand that forms a narrow pre-high tide strip between the cliffs’ edges and the water. A trail of sea foam fights the wind, failing in its efforts to stick to the sand. A spray of chilled foam spatters our faces and we grab hands.
“I love you,” she says, her eyes fixed in the distance ahead of us, as though she’s looking for a place where we’ll truly be safe from the chaos that’s followed us since we met. There’s no port, though. It’s just an endless cascade of tan cliffs, brushed with shades of green.
“I love you too.”
“You’ve never told me why you chose Quick as your last name,” Bella says, swinging my hand in hers. “I mean, I know you wanted to distance yourself from your parents, but…”
“It wasn’t really that so much,” I explain. “During my brief foray into the television news business, a news director told me that ‘Jackson Ellsworth’ sounded too provincial. He told me to come up with a stage name and to do it quickly.”
Bella laughs. “So you went with the most obvious choice available.”
“That’s why I’m with you,” I tease, stopping beyond the surf’s reach on sand that’s wet enough to feel firm and pulling her into me. “You were the most obvious choice.”
“Oh, Mister Ellsworth,” she says, “that’s not very provincial of you.” She giggles and kisses me on the lips.
“What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know,” Bella shakes her head and buries her face in my chest. “It sounded good.” She slips her hands under my arms and around my back and water rushes around us, soaking our feet. Neither of us move, content to hold each other.
“That’s cold,” she says. “And this is my last clean pair of socks.”
“Just turn them inside out. That’s what I do.”
<
br /> “Your socks are so disgusting they could stand up on their own.”
“They’re ankle armor.”
“Quick,” she says.
I laugh and gaze out past the surf, which is angrier than usual. Off the coast there’s a thick blanket of swollen gray clouds.
“A storm is coming,” I remark, noticing that the rising sun is still hidden behind the cliffs to the east. The spotlights of sunshine that had begun to dance on the Pacific have disappeared.
The wind dies for an instant and there’s the distant high-pitched hum of an outboard motor. It’s spinning and grinding intermittently against air and water as the boat dunks the propellers into the rolling waves before popping up to meet the next challenge in the cold surf.
Bella stops walking, her hand dropping from mine. “Do you hear that?” She snaps her head to the west, looking for the boat.
“I hear it.” It’s getting closer and we’re about to have company.
***
There are only three ways to get to Wildcat Beach; hiking, biking, and by boat. And I’m not even sure that boating is technically allowed. That’s why, when we fled Hawaii, we chose this spot. It’s secluded, hard to get to, and there’s a nearby private airport in Santa Rosa.
We left Hawaii within a few hours of getting a phone call from Liho Blogis. We’d thought he was dead, that I’d killed him in Germany. He’d survived and, somehow, found us hiding from the world on the island of Oahu.
We couldn’t afford to wait for him to come knocking on our door, so we left. A cab picked us up at the airport in Santa Rosa, dropped us off at the ranger station at the Bear Valley Visitor Center, and we’d disappeared. For weeks we’d avoided anyone’s radar. And right now somebody with a boat was braving dangerous conditions to land at our campground.