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

Shepard watched the last man duck and run, weaving between the vehicles as he made his way back to the gray van. The driver was unleashing what sounded like a machinegun into the median near Carter, who was pinned down.

He saw Tremblay lying on the pavement, bleeding out from a stomach wound twenty feet away near a Lincoln with flattened tires. Shepard grit his teeth, knowing he had to use this chance to escape. He looked at the drainage basin to the right that led through the tree-lined creek under the bridge.

Just go!

He silently chided himself then zig-zagged through the vehicles towards Tremblay. Kneeling beside the agent, he shoved aside the man’s weapons then set his AK down, applying pressure to the seeping wound with his hands.

The agent groaned, his eyes fluttering in horror as he looked up at who was rendering aid. Tremblay shuddered out a breath, then his head slumped back onto the pavement as Cal continued to stem the bleeding.

Cal heard the gunfire stop and looked up to see the van screeching away. Before he could grab the AK, Carter was already running towards him, her rifle fixed on his chest as people began peering out from their vehicles.

She came to a halt on the other side of Tremblay, looking at her wounded partner then up at Cal.

“You could have gotten away. Why didn’t you keep running?”

“And let your partner die?”

She sucked in a deep breath, a trickle of sweat running down her cheek. “It’s over. I know about your work for the CIA, and we found Symtex in your basement, just like the type used in the explosion at Burke’s place. My director received some incriminating evidence that is pretty hard to refute. He gave us orders to either bring you in or take you down.”

He scrunched his eyebrows together upon hearing the revelation about the planted evidence, knowing that whoever had set him up had far-reaching connections and funding. “Whatever you think you know or have been told about what happened is a smokescreen to divert you away from the real players. I didn’t kill my friends, and I sure as hell wasn’t behind an explosion that would take my wife’s life.” He turned towards her. “Did you even know she was pregnant?”

“I’m sorry for what happened, but I have to play this by the book. Afterwards, I can look into your allegations.”

“There’ll be no afterwards. They will send someone with my skills to remove me from the equation. Anyone with the ability to manipulate the media and plant evidence in a home as secure as mine is not going to be stopped by the walls of an FBI cell. They can’t have people like myself roaming the countryside.”

“I’ll do what I can. You have my word.”

“That’s not enough.” He shook his head, keeping his hands on Tremblay’s abdomen. “You seem like a good woman, Carter. At the risk of putting you in the crosshairs, I suggest you anonymously look into Project 284. It may shed some light on what has gone down these past few days. There’s a much larger picture than either of us knows about at this point. This isn’t even about me. I was supposed to die with everyone else in that house.”

He heard the sound of sirens in the distance. “You can stay here and save your partner or arrest me, but you can’t do both…so decide.” He lifted his hands from Tremblay’s abdomen, the blood flowing freely.

“Don’t…no!” She shoved her AR at Shepard’s face.

He stood, slowly backing up. “Take care of your partner and let me get on with what I need to do.”

Carter narrowed her eyes, a vein throbbing in her neck. She slowly lowered the rifle then rushed over and knelt down beside Tremblay, putting her weapon on the pavement as she frantically tried to stop the man’s seeping wound, catching a glimpse of Shepard disappearing into the tangle of wrecked vehicles.

24

Diamond T Ranch, West Texas

Adam Hunley sat on a leather chair on the third-floor balcony at Roth’s sprawling home, enjoying the desert vista that extended for eighty miles to the north. He drained his second martini just as Roth entered from his office, which took up most of the upper level of the 14,000- square-foot estate.

Little of the space in the office was actually dedicated to running his business empire. Instead, the interior resembled a wildlife museum with mounted heads and full figures of trophy animals from around the globe—sambar, oryx, jaguar, gazelle, Kodiak bear, leopard, wildebeest, caracal and even a massive caiman from South America.

Despite his lust for international safaris in exotic locations, his prize possession came from North America—a rare albino grizzly bear taken from the Alaskan coastline during a hunt on private land. The taxidermized beast stood a full six feet taller than Roth when he was beside it, which he often was during video conferences with his senior staff in Houston, as if the bear was a silent partner.

Roth walked to the wood railing, leaning his meaty hands on the varnished spruce logs and scanning his kingdom below. He thrust his chin up at the sky as if in defiance then shook his head.

“What is it now?” said Hunley, waving off a fly near his ear.

“Fucking Landis. He had one job—to get Shepard out of the picture. Now he’s in the wind. That’s not the kinda guy I want lurking in the shadows.”

“Henderson destroyed the man. He’s got no credibility, and the Feds think he’s behind the explosion at Burke’s place. She even painted him as a sociopath who used his own wife in his cover story then got rid of her with the others that day. The man is on the run, probably halfway across the world by now, holing up in some tin shack in Guam.”

“He was supposed to end up in a shootout with the Feds. I thought that was the whole damn point of leaking his identity.” He pounded his fist on the wooden post beside him