Fatal Exchange (Fatal Series Book 1) Read online

  Fatal Exchange

  Russell Blake

  2nd impression. Copyright 2011 – 2016 by Russell Blake. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact:

  [email protected]

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  Contents

  Books by Russell Blake

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Excerpt from Fatal Deception

  Books by Russell Blake

  Co-authored with Clive Cussler

  THE EYE OF HEAVEN

  THE SOLOMON CURSE

  Thrillers

  FATAL EXCHANGE

  THE GERONIMO BREACH

  ZERO SUM

  THE DELPHI CHRONICLE TRILOGY

  THE VOYNICH CYPHER

  SILVER JUSTICE

  UPON A PALE HORSE

  DEADLY CALM

  RAMSEY’S GOLD

  EMERALD BUDDHA

  The Assassin Series

  KING OF SWORDS

  NIGHT OF THE ASSASSIN

  RETURN OF THE ASSASSIN

  REVENGE OF THE ASSASSIN

  BLOOD OF THE ASSASSIN

  REQUIEM FOR THE ASSASSIN

  RAGE OF THE ASSASSIN

  The JET Series

  JET

  JET II – BETRAYAL

  JET III – VENGEANCE

  JET IV – RECKONING

  JET V – LEGACY

  JET VI – JUSTICE

  JET VII – SANCTUARY

  JET VIII – SURVIVAL

  JET IX – ESCAPE

  JET X – INCARCERATION

  JET – OPS FILES (prequel)

  JET – OPS FILES; TERROR ALERT

  The BLACK Series

  BLACK

  BLACK IS BACK

  BLACK IS THE NEW BLACK

  BLACK TO REALITY

  BLACK IN THE BOX

  Non Fiction

  AN ANGEL WITH FUR

  HOW TO SELL A GAZILLION EBOOKS

  (while drunk, high or incarcerated)

  About the Author

  Featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and The Chicago Tribune, Russell Blake is The NY Times and USA Today bestselling author of over forty novels, including Fatal Exchange, The Geronimo Breach, Zero Sum, King of Swords, Night of the Assassin, Revenge of the Assassin, Return of the Assassin, Blood of the Assassin, Requiem for the Assassin, Rage of the Assassin The Delphi Chronicle trilogy, The Voynich Cypher, Silver Justice, JET, JET – Ops Files, JET – Ops Files: Terror Alert, JET II – Betrayal, JET III – Vengeance, JET IV – Reckoning, JET V – Legacy, JET VI – Justice, JET VII – Sanctuary, JET VIII – Survival, JET IX – Escape, JET X – Incarceration, Upon a Pale Horse, BLACK, BLACK is Back, BLACK is The New Black, BLACK to Reality, BLACK in the Box, Deadly Calm, Ramsey’s Gold, and Emerald Buddha.

  Non-fiction includes the international bestseller An Angel With Fur (animal biography) and How To Sell A Gazillion eBooks In No Time (even if drunk, high or incarcerated), a parody of all things writing-related.

  Blake is co-author of The Eye of Heaven and The Solomon Curse, with legendary author Clive Cussler. Blake’s novel King of Swords has been translated into German, The Voynich Cypher into Bulgarian, and his JET novels into Spanish, German, and Czech.

  Blake writes under the moniker R.E. Blake in the NA/YA/Contemporary Romance genres. Novels include Less Than Nothing, More Than Anything, and Best Of Everything.

  Having resided in Mexico for a dozen years, Blake enjoys his dogs, fishing, boating, tequila and writing, while battling world domination by clowns. His thoughts, such as they are, can be found at his blog:

  RussellBlake.com

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  just join my readers’ group here:

  http://bit.ly/rb-jet

  Chapter 1

  A shriek ripped through the bunker, and then slowly tapered off to a moan, punctuated by congested gasps and feeble gurgling. At first it was hard to tell the gender of the screamer by the timbre of the emanation, but the moan gave it away.

  It was a man.

  The noise was coming from a room at the end of a dimly lit hallway, concrete construction, everything painted a sickly olive-green and reeking of disrepair. Behind the chamber’s steel door stood two men in brown uniforms of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. A third man wearing a short-sleeved pleated dress shirt sat at a metal table upon which rested an old wooden box with a hand crank, and what looked like a weathered carpentry kit, with all the usual tools present. There were other, more arcane instruments strewn over a small rolling stand, and a tray containing rubber gloves, an apron, and a Dremel.

  The floor sloped gradually to meet the drainage grid in the far corner, where an old faucet intermittently dripped water. Illumination was dim on the periphery but brighter in the middle of the space, where a large lamp hung from the ceiling, housing a bank of hundred-watt incandescent bulbs.

  The air was putrid and ventilation was poor, the interrogation facility improvised on relatively short notice. The building had originally been a holding cell for prisoners offloaded from returning naval ships—powerful climate-control and air-moving machinery had never been deemed necessary.

  All three men focused their attention on a naked Asian man in his late thirties, strapped to a metal chair directly below the lights. His head rested on his chest, where a thin thread of saliva and blood slowly trickled down his concave ribcage. The screaming had stopped, replaced by sobbing and whimpering, high pitched and eerily reminiscent of a cat in heat.

  The smaller of the uniformed men approached the seated figure. He leaned in close and spoke softly in Burmese.

  “Where is it?”

  The man in the chair groaned. The uniformed man tried again, reasonably.

  “Where is it? We know you took it.”

  The subject didn’t register the words. Annoying. The officer had so many more pleasurable things he could be doing. Right now he was running late for a rendezvous with one of the young ladies he favored with his charms, as well as the odd food voucher or handful of coins.

  He pressed onward. “We don’t wish to make this last any longer than it has to. It would be a shame to have to bring your family into it, but you’re leaving me no choice. How old are your two daughters? Eight and ten, I believe? Think of them. Answer the question. For them.”

  The man slowly raised his head and regarded the officer with his remaining eye. The other had been ruined earlier in the discussion. The pain had to be excrucia
ting.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I swear.” The words ran together in a hoarse mumble.

  The officer shook his head and sighed. His tryst would have to be delayed; this was going nowhere. Shrugging his shoulders, he reached into his pocket and retrieved a pair of white foam earplugs, and then turned to the man in the short shirtsleeves and nodded.

  The man cranked the handle on the old wooden box. The victim shrieked again, an otherworldly sound that bespoke unimaginable horrors. A pair of worn blackened wires ran from the old hand generator to the seated man's naked form. The smell of burning hair and flesh mingled with the other noxious odors.

  “Where is it? What did you do with it?”

  More gurgling.

  The taller officer removed his round wire-rimmed glasses, carefully cleaned the lenses with a handkerchief, and addressed the man in the shirtsleeves.

  “Use the drill.”

  The shirtsleeved man nodded and removed from his bag a device that resembled a dog muzzle, with straps on the back terminating in metal hooks. His fingers clawed into the victim’s scalp, and he forced the man’s face into the contraption. The front section had a hinged mechanism controlling two short metal rods, now plunged inside the victim’s mouth. The rods were grooved, worn down by the many previous sets of teeth which had ground them.

  He secured the metal hooks to the chair back and tightened the straps so the victim couldn’t move his head. Then, with a practiced twist, he turned the lever on the side of the mechanism, forcing the subject’s mouth open, allowing access to his dental plate.

  Pausing for a moment, the shirtsleeved man considered his shoes, now soiled with the accumulated expulsions. Aggravating, but there was nothing to be done about it. He hoped they’d wash clean.

  Turning, he donned a plastic apron with emblazoned with an incongruous faded image of a dancing crab, and selected the Dremel, a tiny high-speed jeweler’s drill used for polishing and grinding work. He inserted the bit—a small tapered cone with serrated edges running from the tip to the base that was useful for boring holes in stone or metal—and tightened the shaft.

  The victim’s eye went wide as the screech of the high-pitched motor filled the space.

  “So, my friend, is there anything you want to tell me before we start?”

  ~ ~ ~

  Overhead loudspeakers blared flight arrival and departure information in Korean, as well as in Japanese, Chinese, and English. The terminal was congested, even though its ultra-modern interior was designed specifically to accommodate heavy traffic, and the din of conversations battling with ceaseless announcements created a kind of low-grade pandemonium. Seoul was a major hub for travel into China and the Far East, and on any business day there were a lot of busy people with important places to go, most of whom apparently had to do so while having animated discussions on their cell phones.

  Seung waited restlessly in the ticketing area, half an hour early for his meeting. Thin, with a fashionably mod haircut and a studied air of disinterest affecting every mannerism, he was dressed in jeans and leather jacket in defiance of the brooding heat outside the airport’s doors.

  He hated crowds. Airports were the worst. The noise and bustle were grating on his already raw nerves.

  Fidgeting with his black briefcase, he scouted his surroundings and spotted a restroom icon. He studied the crowd, quickly glanced at his watch, and then moved toward the facilities. Of course there was a line. Forced to wait a few minutes for a toilet to free up, he passed the time imagining he was boarding one of the big 747s on the tarmac and flying to Fiji or Bora Bora. Maybe one day. One day soon.

  The end stall vacated and he entered and locked the little compartment door, exhaling a sigh of relief to be out of the throng. After confirming the latch was secure and there was no visibility through the door joints, he pulled a small zippered wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and carefully opened it, using his briefcase as an ad hoc table.

  He painstakingly emptied half the contents of a tiny plastic bag into an old metal spoon, and then extracted a small bottle of water and added a few drops. He inspected the mixture and, with a trembling hand clutching his cigarette lighter, he melted the powder in the spoon bowl. Very slowly, he returned the lighter to his jacket pocket and removed a disposable syringe from the wallet. Gripping the orange plastic cap with his teeth, he freed the little needle and sucked the liquid into the syringe.

  The tricky part concluded, he replaced the cap and held the syringe in his mouth while he repacked the kit, taking care to reseal the bag’s tiny zip-lock top.

  Seung rolled up his left jean leg, exposing a network of bruised discolorations. He removed a length of surgical tubing, tied off just below his calf, and slapped at the vein. That one looked good for another week, and then it would collapse like the ones in his right leg.

  Oh well. He’d have to still be alive next week to care. There were no guarantees.

  He popped the cap off the needle again and slid the metal into his ruined vessel, drawing blood into the syringe and mixing the amber fluid with the viscous crimson from his vein. Satisfied, he depressed the plunger, emptying the contents into his bloodstream. This was only half a hit, really just a maintenance dose—he didn’t want to nod off on the job. He released the tubing and felt a warm rush through his entire system, running up his leg to his heart, and then into his throat and up to his head.

  It was heaven.

  Even half a hit made life bearable, at least for now, and he could focus better if he wasn’t jittery and jonesing. His eyes began to close and it was only with tremendous effort he kept them open. He drifted, his lids getting heavier, heavier.

  The neighboring stall door slammed and abruptly jolted him back to full consciousness.

  Think. Put your kit away, stand up, and get busy.

  He looked at his oversized steel watch; his meeting was in five minutes. Shit. He fumbled, stuffing the kit and syringe into his breast pocket, and then blotted the blood on his ankle with some toilet paper and slapped himself in the face several times.

  He flushed the toilet, grabbed his briefcase, and exited the stall, flipping on a pair of sunglasses to lessen the impact of the lights on his dilated pupils as he approached the ticketing area.

  Ah. There was his target, a fifty-something man with a suit bag draped over his shoulder, carrying an identical briefcase.

  Seung caught his eye, set the briefcase down on the floor next to his right foot, and pretended to play with his cell phone. The older man walked over and asked if he had the correct time, which Seung made a display of providing. He admired the younger man’s phone and put his bag and briefcase down next to the other briefcase, asking to see it. Seung showed him the most compelling features—it really was unbelievable what they could do these days with technology.

  Smiling, the older man retrieved his suit bag and the younger man’s briefcase, and thanked him for the demonstration.

  Seung sauntered to the terminal exit while the older man quickly made his way through customs, his diplomatic passport ensuring he was waved through security.

  He was right on time for his flight: Korean Air to San Francisco. Settling himself comfortably in the first class seat, he placed the briefcase in the small dais at the base of his pod, which reclined into a bed for the long trip over the Pacific.

  As was his custom, he got some water from the stewardess before take-off and took a small white pill—Xanax, to ease his nerves during the flight—and closed his eyes. The hard part, getting his hands on the briefcase, was over. Now he just had to keep his meeting and he’d be golden, three hundred thousand dollars richer. Not a bad day’s work.

  The stewardess made her final passage through the cabin, checking to ensure everything was secure, and within minutes they were hurtling down the worn tarmac and up into the cold gray sky.

  Chapter 2

  Traffic sucked. It was getting late, and rush hour started at about three-thirty in downtown New York. />
  Tess dodged a cab pulling out of a space on her right and swerved around a bus offloading its passengers. She was pedaling hard; she had ten minutes tops to get to her last stop of the day. Horns honking were just part of the incessant background music of the city streets. She’d learned to tune it out to keep her mind on the immediate objective: getting from point A to point B in as little time as possible without getting flattened.

  Right now, her goal was a building on West 22nd off Avenue of the Americas , sixth floor, and she’d just gotten out of the Village—which meant making it by the time the company had guaranteed delivery was going to be a stretch.

  The last drop had been to a jerk-off who’d wanted to chat her up. It happened more often than not with single-partner attorney firms: a powerful, successful, relatively young guy would see her walk through the door with his deposition draft, and what should have been a one-minute stop would often turn into five or six minutes of trying to extricate herself. And those minutes were her edge on making the next stop on time.

  She really hated the single-partner law firms.

  Tess had been at work since seven that morning. She always deliberately kept her appearance low-key. No makeup, loose knee-length cargo shorts, and spandex tank tops beneath baggy t-shirts seemed to minimize undesired attention from horny men in suits. She wasn’t looking for a dating service when she was on the job. She had packages to deliver; that was the gig, and all that she wanted to focus on.

  And she was way behind schedule.

  She cut across Union Square Park and up Broadway, figuring she would cruise down West 23rd to Sixth Avenue—usually an easier run than battling all the way up Sixth—and with luck she’d be no more than five minutes late. She’d found she could wiggle about five minutes of leeway out of customers if she explained it was a traffic issue. If the recipient was female, she’d tell the truth: the asshole at the last office had drug out the signing process to flirt, setting her timeline back.