Sam Wick Rapid Thrillers Box Set Read online

  “Just over a year.”

  “Who are the usual suspects here?”

  “The Venezuela intelligence agency, specifically its director, Henrique Arias Cárdenas. His team had been surveilling Carlos and Karina for the last three months.”

  “So why are we acting now?”

  “This time their President seems to have lost his patience. He is pretty riled up by the negative publicity he is attracting because of Carlos’ articles on his government’s repression of dissent, often through violent crackdowns on street protests, the jailing of opponents, and the prosecution of civilians in the military courts. His columns have consistently raised concerns about poor prison conditions, impunity for human rights violations, and harassment by government officials of human rights activists and independent media outlets. Even Russia, Venezuela’s closest ally, has asked them to take remedial measures. This seems to have blown their President’s fuse. He met Henrique two days ago and has been assured by Henrique that Carlos will be taken care of. How and why? We don’t know for sure yet.”

  McAvoy tapped the keypad. A new image appeared on the screen of a rugged face with a deep scar running from the right side of the temple to the jaw. There was no name on the photo. “This is one of the best-known operatives of the Venezuela Intelligence Service and we suspect that he will be leading this.” McAvoy clicked again, and a new grainy image showed the same man walking past a large signboard of the Vienna International Airport. He wore a large brown hoodie and military boots, his hands in his pocket. A small carry bag was slung over his shoulder. “This photo was taken at eight this morning outside the departure gate.” He clicked again. The next image showed the same man getting into a Toyota. “We have run the license plate.” He clicked again. “This is the photo of the car’s driver who picked him up from the airport.” McAvoy paused and let the team absorb the details of the second man on the screen: clean shaven, trimmed hairs, no visible scar marks. There was a mole just under his right eye. “His name is Felipe Massa, a known operative of the Venezuela Intelligence Service in Austria who works under the cover of a travel agency.”

  “How reliable is this Venezuela source of yours?” Jessica asked.

  “He is someone deeply rooted in Venezuela political circles and has been a critical asset for us in the past too.”

  “How do you want this to go down?” Wick asked.

  “Venezuela has been a blow-hot, blow-cold ally for quite some time now, so this has to be dealt discreetly. No big bang please.” McAvoy clicked and the image on the screen changed. “This is the front of Venezuela Consulate in Vienna. The building is at the Prinz Eugen-Straße. The number of personnel of Venezuelan descent are somewhere around fifteen, including the Ambassador. The rest of the staff consists of locals. Names, addresses, and photos of everyone on the staff are in the manila folders in front of you. You’ll also find the blueprint of the building in there. In Vienna, Jakob is our asset who will be your driver and the single point of contact for ammunition, cash, id proofs and anything you need. He will also get your things transported into the consulate. In case anything goes wrong, he is the man you can rely on to get you out.” McAvoy paused to see if anyone had any questions. “A private jet will take off from the Spangdahlem Air Base at 1200 hours. That gives you fifty-three minutes from now,” he continued. “Any questions?”

  There were none.

  “People, ideally we would like you to get in and out as quickly as possible. We’d like to be able to play this off as a minor skirmish rather than a full-blown operation,” he added, looking at Wick. “All the best.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Venezuela Consulate, Vienna, Austria

  The corner office Ana Sofía was walking towards, was her next step on the corporate ladder. For the last nine months, ever since she had been posted here, she had set her sights on the chair that lay behind the heavy doors, the chair on which her boss currently sat.

  A tall brunette, Ana walked right past the two administrative assistants and the security officers and entered the ambassador’s office without asking for permission. Once inside, she closed the heavy door and approached her boss’s desk, which was the size of an aircraft carrier.

  She had a certain air of confidence about her, a sense of purpose to her every step. Her instincts about her surroundings were bang-on. As a minister-counselor in Venezuela’s consulate in Austria, she had perfected the art of walking the thin rope between expectations and reality.

  She was a fighter. Her struggles had started the day she graduated from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (Central University of Venezuela) thirteen years ago, and she’d been fighting ever since. Her rise to the top was a testament to her spirit, but it also signified the tough road to the top faced by women all over her country.

  Her hatred of losing pushed her more than her desire to win. This was key to understanding what made her tick.

  Men found her irresistible. Some found her harsh and even more were taken aback by her brash tactics, but she only cared about those who mattered to her in the larger scheme of things. Graceful at 5”10’, with the legs of a Nordic goddess, and eyes like Audrey Hepburn’s, she tended to dress conservatively—sober pantsuits, skirts stopping slightly above knee, black hair pulled back in a low ponytail—yet she wasn’t afraid to sex up her look when she knew it would be worth the effort.

  Her road to glory had been paved with some not very laudable moments—including some one-night stands with her ex-bosses, the last one being more than seven years ago.

  Some of them had been insipid, while a few were extremely torrid—some of the best sex she’d ever had, and definitely the best sex they’d ever had. She wasn’t ashamed of them but preferred not to repeat them as she gained more and more confidence and subtlety in her dealings with power.

  But each encounter came with a deal. A deal to ensure that her star would not stop rising. And rise she did. Still, in her mid-thirties, Ana was now very close to her ambition of becoming an ambassador. She now stood before the man whose job she planned on taking soon.

  Carpio was on the phone, and from his end of the conversation, she knew he was talking to a person of importance, but not the President. His voice was measured, and he was listening, instead of indulging his usual habit of dominating the conversation.

  Carpio frowned as Ana entered his office without knocking, but she remained unfazed and there was little he could do about it. She took blatant advantage of his weakness in indulging her. To give credit where it was due, she did have an uncanny knack for getting things done, and for that she was invaluable. There was also excitement and apprehension associated with her. She was like a commanding hurricane, and he relished the power to control that hurricane if and when he wanted to. That was the reason he put up with her tantrums.

  Carpio replaced the handset, wondering if he should tell Ana about the next day. She would get to know of it for sure, but he wanted to tell her himself, just to see how she would respond to the unexpected tidings.

  He had barely put the receiver down when she started right off the bat, “Have you seen the ratings? They are a fucking disaster! The President is going to lose.” She waved her hand in the air for emphasis. “And when that happens, you, me, and everyone else are going to be thrown to the wolves. What do you plan to do when the shit hits the fan?” Ana felt the odd feeling of someone else watching her. She turned and found two men sitting on the presidential couch in the corner, away from the desk and the door. There was no way she could have seen them sitting there, yet there they were. Instinctively her demeanor changed. She stared at the one who had a scar running from the right side of his temple to his jaw and felt a sense of unease.

  “Ana, meet Joaquin and Felipe. They are here at the President’s request.” Carpio gestured at the two men while he peered at her face and decided to curb his instincts to tell her anything. She would be fine without this little piece of information.

  CHAPTER 5

  Inside the aircraft, Wi
ck sat in the front, far away from his nearest neighbor Mac, who was keenly watching his every move.

  “Stop staring at him like that,” Stan whispered, nudging Mac.

  “He is weird.”

  “None of our business.”

  “What if he gets us all killed?”

  “You are not going in there with him, Jessica and I are.”

  “What if he gets you killed?” Mac asked.

  “Not gonna happen,” Stan whispered.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Shut up and do what Jessica asked you to.”

  “You mean what he asked for, through Jessica.” Mac murmured.

  “Whatever, just do it.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Mac refocused on the laptop screen

  “How far are you from hacking into the consulate server?” Jessica asked. She was sitting right behind the two of them and had overheard their conversation.

  “Not very. Will be done once we land.”

  Wick opened his eyes, turned around and gazed straight at Mac. “Can you extract the details of all the passengers from Venezuela who have landed in Vienna over the last forty-eight hours?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Mac felt naked to the stare. Wick had that effect on people as if he knew their darkest secrets.

  “Thanks,” Wick said and turned around. He didn’t smile, didn’t say anything else.

  Mac shook his head and peered back at the laptop screen. Jessica glanced at Wick who was checking his phone. She had worked with him a couple of times in the past. But this time he seemed a bit off. She didn’t know what to make of her observations but decided to keep her thoughts to herself.

  In thirty minutes, they were going to land at Vienna International Airport.

  CHAPTER 6

  The stillness in the air was in stark contrast to the storm brewing inside Wick. The information he had come across during his just-concluded mission in Poland had shaken him to the core. He wasn’t one to be easily perturbed, but what he had learned had made him question his very existence.

  Flashes from his childhood swirled in his mind. He had been an orphan as far back as he could remember. He had struggled through boarding school, bullied and beaten mercilessly at times. What made it worse was he had no one to write home to, to ask for advice or simply to vent his frustrations. He also had no friends, no bond with anyone at school. An average student, his presence or the lack of it made no impact on anyone, anywhere. He used to try to imagine how his parents might have looked by conjuring images out of thin air based on some distant memory, but nothing ever materialized from his efforts.

  From as far back as he could remember, his only real connection to the outside world was a PO box. On the fifth of every month there was an envelope with his name on it, with enough bills tucked inside to sustain him over the next thirty days. There were never any sender’s details on it. If he needed more money, he had to put a requesting letter in the same box with the reason and the date by which he needed it and the money reached him within the next seven days. He had done that only once in his life, just to see if someone would actually respond to his letter. He got the money by the sixth day. Never did it again.

  He had originally tried to find the man who sent him the money, kept an eye on the post office during his days off, but never spotted anyone suspicious. After some time he made peace with the situation. It wasn’t worth it. Whoever his patron was, he clearly wasn’t interested in meeting him in person.

  Around his fifteenth birthday, along with the cash, he received a note and a West Point Military Academy brochure. The crux of the letter was that his benefactor wanted him to go to the West Point next. If he decided not to pursue that career option, he was free to seek his interests elsewhere, but without the monthly financial aid. Sam checked the brochure. Relevant pages and sentences had already been marked. He had to respond within the next twenty-four hours, writing his answer on the back of the same letter, and placing it back in the box in the same envelope.

  Sam had not thought about his career options till then and, despite the fact that the choice had literally been shoved down his throat by dangling a financial carrot, he found that he kind of liked the prospect of being in the forces. One of the reasons was that they would teach him to fight. If nothing else, it would be satisfying to get even with his bullies in the language they knew. It didn’t take him twenty-four hours to respond. The next communication was on the usual date, and it gave him a list of resources and instructions about the things he needed to do to get into the academy. From that day, getting into the academy became his only goal.

  His life became a whirlwind after that. Eventually, to protect his sanity, he had to stop thinking about his parents and about that mystery patron. The monthly communication stopped the day he graduated from the academy and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US army.

  His life had been very busy since then, getting dropped into dangerous places and then trying to get out of there alive. Until two weeks ago. He had been sent to Poland. His job was to extract a man called Albert who was being held captive by the Polish Mafia. The mission wasn’t a complete success. When Wick had found him, he had already been injected with a lethal virus. Despite the best efforts of a team of doctors, couldn’t make it to US soil, succumbing during the journey.

  The scene was still vivid in his memory.

  Lying on a bed, Albert was studying Wick, who was resting on a nearby chair, examining the doctor’s report. The attending nurse had gone for a coffee break. The doctor had left just before her. There was nothing they could do. Albert was at a point of no return. Wick was frustrated, but he had done what he was ordered to do and could do nothing more.

  For Wick, there was no despair in death. It had lost its shock value a long time ago. He had seen too much bloodshed on the battlefield for a dying man whom he had only known for the last eight hours to have much impact on his psyche. He had no idea why Albert had needed to be extracted. He cared little about the motives of his bosses as long as he got enough intel to survive in the battlefield. That was why he was such an important asset for the TF-77. He was clinical and asked few questions, a requirement for this kind of job.

  Albert recognized his end was near. The virus had already consumed his liver and lungs to the point of no salvage. He had expected to meet his creator in that dank cell, but Wick and the doctors had extended his life, even though only by a few hours. But he couldn’t just die, not just yet. Not after seeing Wick.

  He made a growling sound and waved a weak hand, gesturing for Wick to come closer. Wick was surprised, but he got up and approached the stretcher.

  Death made one rest one’s hopes on the slimmest possibility. Albert was at that stage and Wick could understand. He knelt beside the stretcher and leaned forward to hear what the man had to say.

  “Remember… me?” the man asked

  Wick had no idea what he was talking about. He hadn’t even known of the man’s existence till about eight hours ago. The confusion must have been evident on his face because Albert's expression changed.

  “Your… father… knows… me.” Each word was a struggle.

  “My father.”

  “Worked… with… him… long… ago.”

  Wick still had no idea what the man was talking about. “Do you know me? Who’s my father?”

  This time it was Albert who was surprised. He didn’t know what to say next. Was he wrong about this man’s identity? Maybe he wasn’t the one. Maybe he had made a mistake.

  “Did… you… go to West… Point?” he uttered each syllable very slowly.

  “Yes.”

  “0…9…1…3…2…7… you… know… that?” The man had begun to shiver, his breathing shallow.

  “How do you know that?” It was the code to Wick’s locker at West Point. No one knew about it, even at the academy.

  “Your… father.”

  “My father,” Wick asked. “Who is he?”

  “He… came… with… the…
President?” The man was now rambling as if in his sleep, his eyes wandering aimlessly.

  “President?”

  “Your mother… good. Your father… killer.” The man was speaking almost to himself now.

  “Doctor!” Wick shouted looking at the door, then turned back to the man. “Albert, talk to me! Who are my parents?” Albert was losing consciousness. Wick got up and rushed to the door to see if the doctor was on his way.

  “Lau…ren,” the man murmured. His eyes closed, his fists clenched as if he was trying to avert death.

  “Lauren!” Wick hurried back to him. “Who’s Lauren? Is she my mother? What’s her last name?” Wick grabbed Albert by his shoulders and jerked his weak body, trying to resuscitate him. “Doctor!” he screamed again. A man appeared at the door. The nurse followed him.