Search and Destroy JT Sawyer (books to read in your 30s txt) 📖

Adam Hunley walked back to his vehicle, climbing inside and immediately blasting the air-conditioning. He looked at the two-story hovel of a café whose roof he’d just been sweating atop, grateful for the loaner vehicle from Roth’s oil-processing facility across the border in Colombia.

Two more hours then I’m out of this rathole.

He figured it was best to avoid flying into and out of Caracas given the current tension between the U.S. and Venezuela over trade sanctions and with his former status as an ambassador. Plus, it was far easier and safer bribing the guards near the Colombian border, an hour’s drive to the northwest.

Since retiring from Foreign Affairs, he had used his previous connections around the world in his consulting business, connecting wealthy CEOs with government leaders in third-world countries to further their mutual interests, which mostly centered on the hydroelectric, petroleum and coal industries.

Hunley viewed himself as an economic adjuster of sorts who forged a path through murky international relations, helping financial lenders, corporations and malleable political leaders in suffering nations to come to a mutually agreeable contract so billion-dollar energy projects could unfold without the entanglement of government regulatory commissions. It rarely entered his mind that his business only benefited a handful of local politicians in his target country while providing decades of impoverishment to the rest of the population. The considerable consulting fees he received from the construction firms and oil companies in the U.S. who were contracted for their work abroad was more than enough to further diminish his skeletal morality.

He caught a glimpse of Rimaldi leaving the café, watching as the man stopped by his car to talk to some teenagers squatting under the shade of a cypress tree.

He marveled at the presidential candidate’s vitality, recalling when he was filled with such passion in younger days. He seems to intuitively understand what people want—and want to hear—except he’s sincere as hell. God, he’d never survive in DC.

Hunley shook his head. I’m not even sure he’d make it through his first term here without someone popping him off for being so goddamn upstanding. But as long as he’s willing to sign off his oil to Roth, he’ll do.

As Hunley pulled away from his parking spot, his thoughts shifted to the villa and winery beside his second home in Tuscany that he’d be able to purchase in a few months as the image of Rimaldi faded from his rearview mirror.

He pulled out his cellphone, dialing an unlisted number.

“Yes,” said a young woman named Michele Henderson who served as Hunley’s personal problem-solver on the dark web.

“Are you in a secure place to talk?”

“Hang on,” she said as a door slammed in the background. “Go ahead.”

“Everything is getting underway with the candidate. He’s even more suited to being president than I expected. And with the overwhelming support of the Venezuelan elite who’ve fled here for Miami and Dallas over the years, we should have a smooth transfer of power with Rimaldi.”

Hunley made his way onto the highway. “I need you to get a hold of Landis. Tell him to send the contract to the email address I’ll send you. Rimaldi already knows what’s expected of him. In a few weeks, he’ll fly up to Texas and meet with Roth and myself at the ranch to finalize things. It’ll be on Roth’s private jet, which will depart from Colombia, so there’s no issue with customs. See to it that those logistics are all taken care of, then get our usual three-man team down here to begin working with Rimaldi.” He was referring to his economic hit squad, comprised of his lawyer, public relations expert and oil lobbyist, who would begin grooming Rimaldi.

“I’ll get right on that as soon as I hang up. Also, I spoke with Landis earlier. He was pretty on edge. Said the operation at Burke’s house had a snafu with one of the security guys surviving the blast—somebody who turned out to be undercover agency.”

He clutched the steering wheel, gritting his teeth. “What? Shit! This was supposed to be a straightforward job.”

“Said he needs me to burn this guy Shepard in the media…expose him as a rogue agent and leak his identity so he takes the fall for all the deaths. Now, that’s something I can certainly do, but I’m going to have every intel analyst out there looking for me once that story hits. I’ll have to go dark for a few days until I can get up and running with some new hardware.”

“Understandable. Just get back in touch with me ASAP. There’s too much riding on everything now, and I’ll need your services more than ever.”

He turned onto the entrance ramp for the highway, gazing at the sooty waters of the bay ahead.

“And one more thing…this morning I heard about a botanist with the geographic society down here who believes she discovered a rare orchid along the Colombian border. It’s in a region of virgin jungle that Roth’s petroleum engineers indicated was an oil-rich valley that we’ll have to doze for the extraction rigs. Contact my usual asset in Cartagena and tell him to take care of the woman before this gets any more publicity.”

“Consider it done.”

12

Langley

Patterson heard a knock on his office door then saw Lynn Vogel and her assistant, Jessica Quinn, enter.

Vogel had been the chief targeter for Shepard’s team for the past four years. Her sole focus was to identify then gather intel on a single individual to learn their habits, preferences, daily routines and travel patterns to provide the SD operators with the data they needed to plan and execute their mission. She was a meticulous woman whose cyber-skills were as refined as Shepard’s sniper craft, both of them working together to eliminate threats in far-flung places, and Shepard often joked that he heard Vogel’s voice more than he did Cassie’s.

Having begun her service to the country in the navy’s cryptography division, Vogel had risen through the ranks at Langley and rarely missed her mark as an analyst.

The analyst’s long