Deep Sleep (Devin Gray #1)(8)

He stifled a laugh, drawing a funny look from Chase. Who was he kidding? He wasn’t going anywhere.





CHAPTER 4


Harvey Rudd fumbled for his phone, knocking it off the nightstand onto the hardwood floor, where it clattered and quickly came to rest, casting a dim glow on his side of the room. He’d just drifted asleep when it started buzzing. At least that was how it felt. Then again, as a tragically light sleeper, that was how it always felt.

Rudd woke several times a night for no explicable reason. Sometimes bolting upright in a panic. Most of the time just slowly opening his eyes, half expecting someone to be standing over him. He shrugged it off as a job hazard. His wife had suggested therapy. She was in the same line of work and slept like a baby.

He stretched an arm out to reach the phone on the floor, barely tapping it with the tips of his fingers. There was no way he’d be able to grab it without falling on his face. And he really needed to answer the call, or at the very least check the number.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, throwing the blankets off and sliding out of bed.

The call ended moments before Rudd could press “Accept.”

“Figures,” he said, taking a seat on the edge of the bed.

He scrolled through the call log, relieved to see an 800 number. They’d never used an 800 number before. Always a local area code, which was obviously some kind of redirect from wherever CONTROL called home. He assumed it was somewhere in the United States. They wouldn’t risk leaving any kind of electronic trail overseas. Rudd was about to lie back down when the phone vibrated again. Another 800 number.

An online retailer must have sold his number to a telemarketing company. Unfortunately, ignoring the call wasn’t an option. He hustled out of the bedroom and closed the door behind him, more out of courtesy than necessity. His wife could sleep through a home invasion.

“Hello?” said Rudd, expecting the usual several-second delay before the telemarketer connected to the call and somehow still managed to mispronounce his name.

Still, he had to be sure. Rudd stiffened when a female voice immediately replied.

“Stand by to copy access code.”

Damn. CONTROL had a job for him. Something that couldn’t wait for the morning. Rudd took off down the hallway for the kitchen, the one place in the house where he knew for certain that he could find paper and some kind of writing instrument. He flipped the switch in the hallway, bathing the kitchen in the harsh fluorescent light they never got around to changing. A quick dig through the junk drawer next to the sink yielded a pen and Post-it pad.

“Ready to copy.”

The voice recited the same twenty-digit alphanumeric code twice, and the call disconnected. Rudd took the Post-it into the dining room, where he’d plugged in his laptop before heading to bed. He sat at the table and logged in to the computer, waiting what felt like an eternity for the system to boot up.

He didn’t like the timing of this call at all. CONTROL hadn’t contacted him with a job in close to seven months. Long enough that he’d begun to wonder if they’d retired him and forgotten to pass along the news. At fifty-six, he wasn’t exactly a first-string operative anymore. A fact apparently not lost on his handlers.

Work had slowed to a trickle over the past several years. Mostly stakeout surveillance or some light breaking and entering to acquire information stored on electronic devices. Not that he was complaining. He’d spearheaded a hit-and-run on a US Army major in the parking lot of a strip club near Fort Campbell, but that hadn’t exactly been a complicated job. All the intelligence had been provided by CONTROL.

Rudd and his team had simply staked out the club for a week, until the major stumbled out a little drunker than usual one night and strayed a little too close to Route 41. Dead on impact with the pickup truck they had stolen a few states over. Rudd’s wife, Jolene, had facilitated both those tragic circumstances, sidling up to the major in the club an hour earlier and plying him with shots of bourbon. She’d even walked him right in front of the speeding truck. For the next few weeks, Jolene had looked her happy self again.

Back in the early days, after they’d settled in the Chattanooga area, Harvey and his wife had done jobs like that several times a year. “Wet work,” as their trainers called it. Mostly lowbrow stuff like the Fort Campbell strip club hit-and-run. No fancy poisons. No sniper rifles. No explosives. Rudimentary “make it look like an accident or a suicide” kind of assignments, with a kidnap and blind delivery job every now and then.

They had traveled as far north as Chicago and as far east as Norfolk for more complicated personnel-intensive jobs, but the vast majority of their work over the past thirty years had gone down a couple of hundred miles from Chattanooga. Atlanta and Nashville, mainly. None of it had fit any easily detectable pattern, and neither of them had given it much thought. They weren’t here to ponder their work. They enjoyed a very comfortable life—with a single condition: obey CONTROL. A simple arrangement that had suited both of them fine. One he had always suspected hadn’t been a coincidence.

When the laptop finished booting, he launched Tor Browser and navigated to a site on the “dark web” created by their handlers exclusively to communicate with the Rudds. Tor Browser’s nearly undefeatable anonymity tool, combined with the use of a deeply buried “dark” website, provided one of the most secure and untraceable ways to pass along detailed mission direction and intelligence. The days of bouncing for hours between dead drops or sweating a live meetup at some grimy countryside café had vanished overnight with Tor’s rise. The irony wasn’t lost on him that Tor had been created by the United States military to protect online intelligence community communications.