Unintended Consequences: A Matthew Blackwelder Thriller

Part 1

Homecoming

Chapter 1

South Central, Los Angeles, California

The source of the dog’s rage was Kevin Williams, a filthy homeless man in raggedy clothes.

Under the street grime and foul body odor, he was maybe thirty, give or take a year or two. He stood in the shadow along a rotting, wooden six-foot high backyard fence enclosing a dilapidated house located just a few blocks from the Interstate 110 Freeway. The sharp bark echoed through the alleyway, dimly lit by a nearby corner street light.

The constant growl of speeding cars almost calmed him. He waited anxiously, his eyes darting from the near end of the alley’s entrance to the other in the distance. He surveyed the neighborhood, a collection of homes not long for demolition, though families—poor families—inhabited most of them. A few of the houses were already abandoned and boarded up.

A dark angular shape of someone appeared, seemingly magically, from the muted shadows of a fenceless backyard fifty feet ahead of him. The figure of a man took shape as it drifted in his direction. There was no discernible face, just the silhouette converging on him.

This would be the end of it all, Kevin thought.

He would get the name he needed and that would be it. Then his life could go back to normal. He was tired of lying. He was weary of being something he was not. He just wanted to get back to normal.

The dog, a mongrel, continued to bark, pulling hard at the chain that kept him away from the men.

What he didn’t see, hidden in the nearby high shrubs of the backyard adjacent to him, was a third man: Abel—not the name on his birth certificate but one taken to protect his real identity. Sinister with the look of a Marine combat veteran, Abel stood as if at attention, making himself a part of the scenery. Like a tree with a buzz-cut, shrouded in black clothing. His dark brown eyes focused in the dim light as he watched the homeless man slip from a shadow and meet with the other man. The roar of the freeway traffic made it impossible to hear and, in fact, that jump-kicked his anticipation for what he had to do next.

The two men were now standing face to face.

The dog continued to bark; salvia oozing from his mouth, his rage so intense.

Abel tried to read their lips but the shadows prevented that. When the homeless man shoved the other, he knew it was time to make his move or the wrong man might die. He’d simply have to end it without knowing what they’d said to each other. In a silent sprint toward them, Abel raised the .22 caliber High Standard Trophy with a four-inch bull barrel and a custom-made silencer. Within two heartbeats he pressed the gun to the homeless man’s right ear and snapped off three shots in two seconds. They sounded like throaty coughs, masked by the constant din from the freeway.

Kevin Williams crumpled to the ground with only a trickle of blood seeping out of his ear; he would never have another care in this world.

Abel had loaded his own ammo using lesser amounts of gunpowder than commercially available. He wanted their velocity lower than manufacturer specs. This was useful for his preferred method of assassination: get close, fire three rounds through the ear when approaching from the side or through the eye when going straight at the mark, whichever was most convenient. The goal was not to knock down and punch bloody holes in the target—he used bigger caliber weapons, like .45s, for that—but to achieve a guaranteed kill and leave no useful evidence behind. Yes, there would be powder burns, but so what? That was virtually untraceable.

They could examine the spent bullets, but they would be shattered into at least a dozen untraceable pieces. While the average citizen believed most of what they saw on those crime investigation television shows, he knew better. Few police departments had the time and resources dreamed up by television writers. The investigators weren’t nearly as smart or dedicated as the ones on the tube, either. The reality was most murder cases went unsolved. In this case, the coroner would find the victim’s brain the consistency of a plate of spaghetti.

Good luck with that, doc.

The man he’d spared, an African with deep tribal scars on his cheeks, stared at him. They knew each other. They had a history. There was no need for a verbal exchange.

The door continued to bark, baring his yellowed teeth in pure anger.

Abel reached down and pulled a gun from the pants waistband of the late Kevin Williams.

The African’s steely-eyed stare flinched for fraction of a second at the sight of the concealed weapon.

Abel grinned, he hated working with amateurs and wanted to kill this man too but that would not help his endgame.

Or please my boss.

He let the African walk away, knowing that the man did not feel the need to look back or fear receiving a slug in the back of his skull. He knew that the African understood that if he had been a target, he’d already be a corpse. So, Abel watched the African shift his deliberate stride into a leisurely jog and guessed he might have a smile on his face at that very moment.

The African took a deep breath as he put distance between himself and Abel. He had one more stop to make before he would sleep.

Against his experience, Abel allowed the African to dissolve into the cloak of night.

He pushed the gun he’d taken from his target into his own waistband and pulled out a four-inch LED Maglite from his pocket. The lens painted with an ultraviolet coating. He clicked on the light and quickly collected the three spent shells that glowed on the ground. Before loading, he’d dipped each round into a fluorescence solution so they would be easy to find in the dark. They were still warm when he slipped them inside his jacket pocket.

The dog’s uncontrolled rage finally paid off as the chain that restrained him popped loose from the steel poll. The dog made for Abel like he was a big piece of red meat.

Abel remained calm, raised his pistol and squeezed the trigger three times. The first two rounds hit right between the eyes and put the mutt down in his tracks. The third round was professional habit.

He policed his brass using the LED light and vanished into the same darkness as the African.

~~~~~

Chapter 2

New Orleans, Louisiana

Just before sunrise, the huge transport made way up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. It had sailed past a sleeping New Orleans whose shoreline pattern of lights continued to reflect the devastation of Katrina and BP despite all the restoration efforts of FEMA, celebrities and foundations.

At Berth 2, a night crew only unloaded a single 20-foot shipping container; the rest would wait for the first shift of the day. The man operating the heavy crane knew exactly which container to pluck from the ship.

The container had a distinctive logo: a series of four concentric circles, making it look like a target, except the bull’s eye was a bright red five-point star.

The shipping container by-passed the cold storage where its cargo should have been unloaded into the main dockside freezers so delivery trucks could drive their loads to distribution warehouses that serviced grocery stores.

Instead, the crane operator carefully lowered this particular container onto a waiting flatbed-equipped truck.

About an hour later, the semi-truck left its payload inside a warehouse storage yard on the outskirts of downtown New Orleans.

~~~~~

Chapter 3

Washington, D.C.

She’d won a full ride to Harvard Law, where he met her before he’d become a United States Senator.

They’d hit it off and became easy friends back then. She had teased they were like Salt ‘N Pepper, since she was African-American and he was Caucasian. He labeled their relationship as Ebony and Ivory, like Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. It was at Harvard they’d started talking about their ambitious plan purely as amusement.

Now Mallory Thomas-Taylor sat across from Senator Handley and smiled. He’d invited her to lunch to talk shop. He was a sitting member of the Committee on Armed Forces, and was about to ask her to join the vetting process for Assistant Deputy Director, National Security Agency. Since she figured important in his ambition, he’d already arranged to put her on the short list. This meeting was just a formality—gossipy assistants needed to see them meeting—since he’d already insured her selection and he told her so. The guarantee was made much easier by the likes of Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice and other women of color who trail blazed high-level posts on Capitol Hill.

For her part, it was her intention to become one of the most powerful people in the world and she fully understood that this appointment could ensure she’d stand next to him on his campaign trail.

The plan was already in motion. He needed someone to make sure it succeeded.

Born in New York City, Mallory’s parents worked for the U.S. Post Office. Both had done one hitch in the U.S. Army, both were headstrong, thus the hyphenated last name, ergo, she’d gotten her approach to life honestly. She’d worked her way through Fordham with help from scholarships and grants. Majoring in political science with a minor in French, she wanted to pursue a career in the U.S. State Department. After earning her B.S. it was on to Harvard Law in Boston. Her first appointment had been as a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where she became fluent in Bantu Swahili. She was then transferred to the U.S. Embassy in Paris, France, since she was already fluent in French and served there for another two-year tour. To complete the last year of her five-year probationary period, Mallory served at the U.S. Mission to the UN in New York and had just earned tenure. She was about to put in for her next assignment when Handley insisted on their meeting to discuss the next step in her career.

She was determined to help Handley see his plan through. Their shared future would no longer be a casual college joke. It would no longer be a pipe dream. She asked how it was going to happen, exactly, that she would someday be one heartbeat from the Oval Office.

Over cheeseburgers with steak fries and cold beers, he told her how exactly.

~~~~~

Chapter 4

Los Angeles, California

There were cars as far as the eye could see.

Sirens howled from somewhere in the distance, seamlessly meshing with the drone of idling cars that were literally parked on the Santa Monica Freeway near the 110.

The shrill wail broke his thoughts. Not so much thoughts as a persisting dread. The sensation had started building the moment he stepped in the taxicab at LAX.

Matthew Blackwelder stared out through the grimy window, his reflection muted, at the motionless sea of mostly luxury imports: Mercedes Benz, BMW, Lexus, outnumbering the Fords and Chevys and but not the Toyota trucks.

God, a lot of people drive trucks.

Muscular 18-wheelers and commuter vans sat expending exhaust from pipes on both sides of the driver’s cab. They were all at the heart of why most Americans thought their sons and daughters spilt blood in Iraq and Afghanistan and other God-forsaken hell holes around the world that the general public would never hear about.

Oil.

Gasoline.

Non-renewable fossil fuel.

He knew there was more to it than that. Certainly, access to the Black Gold gurgling beneath the deserts of the Middle East contributed, but the need to battle the terrorists went far beyond this simple notion. The world had always been a dangerous place.

Even before 9/11.

He knew because he was one of the people who experienced that danger. He was one of them who helped to create that danger.

It’s not just about cheap gas. Christ, in the history of the world, once prices go up, they never fall.

Why wasn’t America paying attention?

When the taxicab finally crept to the exchange where the Santa Monica and 110 Freeways shook hands, the traffic picked up and they headed south. He pushed the philosophical musing of oil and war into the deep recesses of his mind and replaced them with an Art of War guiding mantra…

Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt…

This principle had great significance to his new assignment because he would be operating on his home turf for the first time in his career. And for the first time, his family would be in harm’s way. The ones he loved could very well become collateral damage, a term which now hit home as never before.

Ten minutes later, the taxi stopped in front of a well-kept duplex. Before paying the fare, he thought about the driver’s promise that the freeway would be much faster than taking the ground streets and shook off the urge to say I told you so. When the driver had jumped out of the cab and approached to take his luggage, his internal Terror Alert alarm went to yellow. After 9/11, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security used colors to alert the public to the danger of a terrorist attack: green for low, blue for guarded, and yellow for elevated. Orange meant high and red meant severe. The oh shit level of alert, he liked to call it. The color coded system had been replaced by a new, simpler system: Imminent Threat Alert, which warns of a credible, specific, and impending terrorist threat against the United States and the Elevated Threat Alert, which warns of a credible terrorist threat against the United States.

He still liked the old system.

The driver’s ethnicity had pushed him from his normal walking-around-alert-level of blue to a more cautious yellow when he nailed the driver’s accent as Sudanese. He’d spent enough time in Africa to know the differences in regional Arab language and he had close-up and personal experience dealing with Sudanese terrorists. He’d decided the man was not a terrorist threat. He was just a cabbie hustling a living, fighting for the same American Dream as most immigrants.

Blackwelder looked at his Luminox dive watch: the glow-in-the-dark hands and numbers read 3:00 AM exactly. Why the hell the freeway had turned into a parking lot that time of morning was anybody’s guess. He supposed the sirens near the freeway exchange offered a general reason.

What he didn’t know was that the owner of a barking dog had come out to investigate the source of the dog’s irritation, found his dog shot and then found the dead boy of a homeless man. He then called the police and that had precipitated the traffic jam when a police car accidently slammed into another vehicle trying to take the off ramp.

Instead of giving the driver a hard time, Blackwelder offered him a more than generous tip and climbed out.

The cab pulled away, leaving him standing there.

He stood still and listened to the quiet. He was finally away from the chaos of maddening commuters. He was sure no one had tailed him from the airport. He’d carefully observed the cars teeming around the cab as they’d pulled away from the LAX baggage area and merged into the traffic logjam. Feigning having left something at curbside, he’d asked the driver to circle back through the airport. When he did, Blackwelder checked to see if another vehicle followed. When he was sure, he feigned having found the missing item and let the cab finish the loop before heading onto the 405 Freeway. There was no reason for him to believe anyone would follow him to L.A.

But old habits die hard.

He looked up and let his defense alert drop back to blue. The night sky was clear, the moon high and the cool breeze seemed to sooth his anxiousness. It was something he did whenever he arrived in a new place. No matter where you were in the world, that moon and sky was always the same.

He stared at the creamy beige stucco building and it struck him that the lone streetlight just up the block that forced long shadows across the browning front yard made his presence seemed almost surreal.

It was a nice neighborhood, well nice enough for this part of town.

He approached the unit marked number one, noticed the red 1986 Mustang GT convertible sitting in the driveway. The paint was new but it was one of those cheap Maaco jobs. The old vehicle was clean, probably the handiwork of one of those stay-in-your-car wash establishments that seemed to be located one per square mile in Los Angeles. Then he realized the car was the same one he’d borrowed from his father as a teenager. He’d lost his virginity in that old Mustang. Her name was Denise Brown, a tall and leggy girl with a butt so big you could rest you drink on it. He’d never used a condom before that night so the whole process was dicey, he remembered. She’d giggled at him and ended up putting the damn thing on for him. It