Memories of the Past: A Nick Hunter Novel (A Nick Hunter Thriller Book 3) Read online

  He followed her inside. The house, clapboard on the outside, was immaculately modern inside. The entry hall was modestly decorated, painted in pastel colors. She closed the door behind him and touched a switch below the light switch. Nick was aware of the faintest humming sound.

  “Vibrates the windows,” she said. “Stops anyone using a laser on the glass to pick up the vibrations from conversation in the house.”

  Nick nodded. It was an elegant and simple solution.

  “Now, Mr. Thurlow,” the woman said. “You match the image I was sent, but just to confirm; what is your real name?”

  “Nick Hunter,” he said simply.

  She nodded. “Good. Now, I’m sure you’ve been informed that I am here to provide you with whatever assistance you need from Splinter. Beyond that, I want to know what happened. George was a good man… and a friend. Finding who killed him, and why, is more than just a professional concern to me. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” Nick said. “And I’ll do my best.”

  She offered him a weak smile. “That’s all any of us can do. From here on in, as much as possible, we will remain in our identities. You will call me Miss Klass. I will treat you as I treat most of the staff. They all think I’m a bitch, but that was always the plan. The more they hated me, the more they liked George. Good cop, bad cop routine works on most people.”

  Nick gave her a slight nod. “Yes, Miss Klass, and if I need assistance?”

  “Provided we’re alone, ” she said. “I can hook you up with just about anything you might need.”

  “Are there staff in the building now?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Not inside, no. There are security people outside though.”

  “Good.” He didn’t need to act the role just yet. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  She sighed. “Put simply, our entire security system failed. Someone entered the property undetected by the security staff, the sensors, or even the cameras. Whoever did this, was an expert. The cameras, for example, were all blinded by low-power lasers set to their exact scanning frequency. The power level wasn’t enough to trip any alarms, but it was enough to blind them.”

  “And then?” Nick pushed.

  “Whoever it was, they just walked up to the back door. We assume they knocked. George was found just inside the door with two bullets in his heart.”

  Nick frowned. “And no one heard the shots?”

  Klass shook her head. “Nope. The bullets the doctors… recovered, were SP-16 rounds; designed for Russian silent pistols.”

  “So,” Nick said, his face blank. “Someone walked to the back door, having evaded all the expensive security here, shot their target without anyone hearing them, and then walked away without being seen. And, you have no records of any of this.”

  Klass nodded slowly. “Put simply, yes. I know, that doesn’t give you much to go on.”

  “What do the cops say?” Nick asked.

  “The MPD could find no evidence and no motive. They’re stumped. The Feds are busy with their own investigations, but given George’s role in Splinter, and the fact that we don’t want to advertise that, we doubt they’ll find anything.”

  There was one question Nick had to ask, even though he hated doing so. “Could it be an inside job?”

  She shook her head. “The organization is very careful with the people it employs. The information we have access to, the tools we can use, give us a high degree of confidence in that regard.”

  “Anyone can be gotten to,” Nick countered.

  “True,” she agreed. “But we’re confident we could spot it. Our algorithms would flag any unusual behavior.”

  “Okay, I’ll assume you’re right for the time being,” he said. “I’ll work on the idea it was someone outside the organization, but if I find evidence that it wasn’t, that it was someone inside, I expect you to follow it up.”

  She nodded. “Agreed.”

  “Right,” he changed the subject. “You have the police files I take it?”

  “And the FBI ones,” she added. “You can access them from the computer in George’s study.”

  “Good, I’d like to have a look through his files, whatever he has on his hardware, and anything he might have on paper.”

  She nodded, and then set her face back into a look of distaste. “Follow me.”

  She led him upstairs and showed him into a wood-paneled room. Unlike the downstairs area, this room looked like it hadn’t changed since the house was built. The only concessions to modernity were the computer on the desk and the large screen on the wall across from it.

  “You have his codes?” she asked Nick as he sat at the desk.

  Those had been included in the material he’d been given earlier. He nodded and powered up the computer.

  “I expect to be informed of anything you find,” she reminded him as she walked out.

  Two hours later he leaned back in the chair and rubbed his temple. Both the Metropolitan Police and the FBI had drawn a blank. Their reports were detailed, and in the end, useless. They had no leads and no suspects. Much of the remaining material he’d looked at had been the usual; emails to various friends, bank details, bills to be paid. There was nothing that gave him any idea as to why this man had been killed.

  He stood and looked around him. On one wall was a print of a George Innes landscape. He took a step closer. No, not a print, an original. That painting itself was worth more than the Chevrolet outside.

  There were some photographs of people on the other wall. He recognized George Pierce, the dead man, in most of them. One, in particular, caught his eye. It showed a smiling George with a well-built man and an attractive red-haired woman with piercing blue eyes. Both looked familiar. He tried to turn, but found himself unable to look away. The redhead’s eyes seemed to be drawing him in, swallowing his mind.

  She is lying in bed, asleep. Her skin is smooth with the slightest sheen of sweat. Her chest rises and falls softly under the light sheet. On her face is a calm, soft smile. He leans forward and kisses her on the forehead, inhaling the scent of her.

  He is walking down a street. She is ahead of him, reaching for the door of a diner. Panic wells in his chest. No, she can’t. She has to... A massive blast explodes into the air just behind her. She vanishes in the smoke and flame.

  He rises from the back seat of a car and wraps the piano wire around the young man’s throat, yanking back hard. The man’s struggles fade quickly as his blood pumps out over the seat leather.

  He is in a hole in the ground. The man he’s pulled down into it with him struggles, but he slides the knife between his ribs, staring into his victim’s eyes as his life slips away.

  He is walking down a trail in a forest. Behind him, he can hear a man begging for his life. He ignores the sound. In the distance, a wolf howls. He smiles.

  He is in a well-appointed office. The man at the desk says something, but he pays no attention. In front of him is a package of C4. He is wiring it up to the door of a safe.

  The whir of helicopter blades deadens any other sound. The vehicle’s movement stops and he drops to the hot sand, his rifle up, his eyes scanning. Movement on the ridge above draws his attention. He snaps off two rounds and watches the figure drop to the ground, the RPG falling from his dead hands.

  She is in front of him, her eyes dancing with happiness. She throws her arms around his neck and kisses him. Then she draws back.

  “Of course,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me for months. I love you. I want to be your wife.”

  Nick’s mind spun. His eyes rolled back in his head. He fell to the softly carpeted floor.

  “Naomi,” he whispered.

  Chapter 4

  He awoke lying on a soft bed. The sheets were crisp and smelled freshly laundered. For several seconds, he simply lay there, unable to put together what had happened.

  “You might try opening your eyes and sitting up,” Miss Klass told him.

  He did. The
room, he saw, was clean and tidy, well decorated, but lacking much in the way of personal touches.

  “A guest bedroom?” he offered.

  “Very good,” Klass said from her seat beside his bed. “Your deductive abilities still work, anyway.”

  “What happened?” he asked her.

  She shrugged. “I found you on the floor of the office. It looked like you’d had some sort of seizure.”

  “I saw things,” he started. “In my mind. A... woman. She died. I saw myself killing men. I think I killed. I don’t know... Am I a killer? Was I a criminal?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Why do you think I can help you?”

  He finally sat up against the pillows. “Deduction. You work for Splinter, so do I. You seem to be well informed about the organization. I was told the dead man was my grandfather. You seem to have known him well. Therefore, you should know something about me.”

  “Very good,” she said, though she wasn’t smiling. “I was against bringing you in on this. I worried that the things you saw here might trigger something. I was right – not that it makes me happy to say so.”

  She opened the drawer in the cabinet beside the bed and drew out a folder.

  “Read these,” she said. “They might help. I’m going to make us a drink, and then I’m coming back. Assuming the material in that folder doesn’t put you into another seizure, we might be able to move forward. Remember, though, you are not here to learn about yourself. You’re here to find who killed George.”

  She dropped the folder on the bed and walked out the door. For a moment, Nick simply looked at the unmarked cardboard. He was conflicted. Whatever was in there might tell him something about himself, but what if he didn’t like what he found? What if he was some sort of criminal? How could he reconcile that with what he was now? How much of him was the person he thought he was?

  He drew in a deep breath. Not knowing would be harder, psychologically, than knowing. The only way to clear his head was to know. He grabbed the folder and opened it.

  The first document was a classified FBI report on a car bombing in the town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The report concluded that the attack was part of what had been an ongoing process of intimidation by representatives of a drug cartel. Among the victims, was a woman by the name of Naomi Green. The name brought a dampness to his eyes. He could swear he hadn’t known her, but somewhere, deep in his mind, there was a gaping hole at the mention of her name.

  The second document was also from the FBI, and also marked ‘Classified’. It seemed to follow on from the first and described how a single individual had killed the ten men from the drug cartel operating in Gatlinburg. Six of them had been hunted down in a nearby forest and picked off individually, another three had been killed in a house just outside town, and the tenth was reportedly garroted in a car in broad daylight. Gatlinburg’s sheriff, suspected of a corrupt relationship with the criminals, was also reported killed in an explosion linked to the assailant.

  He flicked the page over. The investigating officer had made a tentative identification of the killer as one Logan Pierce, based on the interrogation of a single member of the cartel who lived long enough to describe his attacker. CCTV footage from the town corroborated the theory in part. There were images, rather grainy on the paper, of Pierce in town.

  The final document was an army KIA report on the same Logan Pierce. According to that, Pierce was killed in a helicopter crash in southern Afghanistan. Given the fact that the US military was not officially operating in Afghanistan anymore, the report concluded by saying that the public record would show that the helicopter crashed on maneuvers in Kuwait.

  He put the documents down, staring at the ceiling. It wasn’t that hard to put the images in his head together with the material he’d just read.

  Miss Klass returned and put a cup of coffee on the cabinet for him. She took her seat and gave him a questioning look.

  “I’m… I was… this Pierce man?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “I killed those men?”

  She nodded again.

  “I was in the army?”

  Another nod.

  “What happened? The paper says I died?”

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Ahh… confused, uncertain. Why?”

  Her face was grim. “I want to make sure we can do this. You’ve had issues before, and I don’t want to drive you off the deep end.”

  He shook his head. “I feel fine, really. No visions, nothing.”

  “Okay,” she nodded. “George, your grandfather, was a senior figure in the black-ops world. In his younger days, he’d been a field operative. When he got older, he started working behind the scenes here in DC. He was intelligent, driven by a need for justice, for Americans to be able to feel safe in their homes.”

  Nick nodded. He felt the same.

  “George was one of the driving forces behind Splinter. The idea was to take capable individuals from the various services and enhance them. Mostly, this was in the form of brain modification, improved reflexes, virtually perfect memory, better night vision, those sort of things. Operatives would have their past erased. Minor plastic surgery would alter their appearance, at least enough to fool facial recognition systems. Identifying details would be scrubbed from the network. They would be anonymous.”

  “Me, for example,” Nick said.

  “Yes,” Klass agreed. “But George never wanted you to join the program. He knew there was some risk. However, the Feds had a pretty good idea that it was you who hunted those cartel enforcers in Gatlinburg-”

  “I did do that?” Nick asked.

  “Yes, you did,” Klass replied softly. “I understand why. You and the Green woman were due to be married.”

  “Naomi,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, Naomi,” she agreed. “At that point, George brought you in on the program. The anonymity it offered would protect you, and you had no problem with putting your past behind you. Your supposed death helped with that.”

  “But amnesia?” he asked. “Wasn’t that a bit too much?”

  “It wasn’t intentional,” she assured him. “The technology was cutting edge, well ahead of anything that had been tried before. There were two test subjects, you and one other. Neither worked as well as planned. You suffered total retrograde amnesia. The other, well he suffered a major personality issue.”

  “What?′ he asked.

  “Sociopathology,” Klass told him. “He lost all of his empathy for others, any consideration for how his actions might impact other people. After the two failures, if you’ll excuse the expression, the government shut down Splinter.”

  “How does that work?” he asked her. “I’m still here, you’re still here. We’re doing our jobs.”

  “You might say we went into the non-profit field,” Klass said with a wry smile. “George, and several of the others involved, knew they’d created something useful. It’s not just you, there’s a whole group behind this, people with expertise in many areas, particularly in the information field. There’s no system on Earth they can’t get into. You are the… kinetic asset is the term most often used, but you are part of a much larger operation.”

  Nick was still confused. “But how is it paid for? Where does the kit come from? Wh-”

  Klass cut him off. “Think it through. Ex-military and spook technicians plus senior ex-intelligence people. These guys have no problem getting their hands on anything they want. They would make the perfect super-villains, but luckily they chose to work the other side of the street.”

  “But that means…” Nick was struggling to put his concerns together. “What I do… the killings… they aren’t legal, not authorized.”

  Klass nodded. “That’s true, but tell me, Mr. Hunter, have you ever felt that what you were doing was wrong? Have you ever felt that you made the world a worse place by your actions?”

  Nick thought for a moment. Had he? The people he had killed had been preying on othe
rs. He’d removed threats to normal people’s lives, to their happiness. Leaving any of those people alive would have made the world a worse place, not better. He shook his head.

  Klass smiled. “Then it’s not a problem, is it?”

  Nick shook his head. “I’m not sure… I…”

  Klass picked up the folder and put it back in the drawer. “Now, we need to get back to the subject at hand. I don’t have any more time to babysit you. What do you have on George’s killer?”

  Nick shook his head. “Nothing… I… My name was Logan?”

  Klass gave him an angry look. “Yes, but that’s not-”

  This time Nick cut her off. “Someone called me Logan. On a recent mission in Vegas. If they knew who I was…”

  “Then they would know who George was,” Klass finished for him.

  Chapter 5

  In George’s old study, Klass was busy running a search across multiple criminal databases. Nick kept his eyes on her, making sure to keep them away from any family photos.

  “Obregon,” he told Klass. “That’s the only name I got. Family name, that is. Slater called him Mr. Obregon.”

  Her fingers ran over the keyboard much faster than he’d thought they could. She moved the mouse, hit various commands, and studied the results in a way that made Nick quite certain she knew exactly what she was doing, and that she knew a lot more of the information side of things than he did.

  “I’ve got two possibles,” she told him. “Have a look.”

  He recognized the copper-skinned man. “That one.”

  “You sure?” she asked, and then corrected herself. “Of course you are. We gave you a virtually photographic memory. Hmm, Thiago Obregon; chief investigator and fixer for the Sapzurro Cartel. That’s the outfit you took down in Gatlinburg.”

  Nick’s mind was racing. He pulled another office chair over and sat down.

  “Sapzurro,” he said slowly. “I was tracking their local enforcer before I got pulled off the mission. He’s here, in DC.”