Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [28]
CHAPTER 13
“Well, that’s it,” Fargo Ford said as he closed the encrypted cell phone. “Mission over.”
Brad Parker stopped pacing the motel room floor and frowned at his partner. “They’re not even going to let us look for the guy.”
Ford shook his head. “Nope. We’re done. Stick a fork in us.”
“No thanks.”
“We don’t have any choice in the matter,” Ford pointed out. “We’ve been ordered back to Langley for debriefing. We’re supposed to catch a plane out of here tonight for DFW, then switch planes there and proceed straight on to Washington.”
“When does the plane from Corpus Christi leave?”
“Eight o’clock.”
“That gives us several hours,” Parker said.
“Several hours to do what?”
“Go back to that hotel and see if we can pick up the trail of our target.”
Ford shook his head, and yet he knew exactly how Parker was feeling. It was incredibly frustrating to go through everything they had, to survive the dangers that had faced them, and yet in the end everything they’d done had to be considered a failure. They didn’t have the target or the laptop that must have contained vital intel.
“After all that trouble at the hotel, if we go over there don’t you think they might be looking for us?”
“Really? Who got a good look at us?” Parker asked. “The target, and the two guys who were trying to kill him.”
“You’re forgetting about the security cameras,” Ford said. “By now the cops are bound to have studied that footage. They probably have our faces out there. Hell, we may even be on the news, for all I know.”
“If that’s true, don’t you think they’ll be watching for us at the airport?”
Ford’s frown deepened. “You’re right. And yet the orders were to catch that flight this evening.”
“Something’s not right here, Fargo. These people we’re up against… they know too much. They get things done too quickly.”
“Like we’re fighting our own people,” Ford mused.
“You said it, not me. But I can’t help but wonder.”
The two men looked at each other for a long moment, both of them obviously deep in thought. For years they had served their nation, putting their lives in jeopardy again and again with little thought for their own safety, traveling the wild places and the back alleys of the globe in search of America’s enemies. Neither man was the sort to make speeches or wave the flag. They were pragmatists who believed they were doing a job worth doing well.
But in recent years, they had seen unwelcome changes creeping over the country. They had watched as the intelligence community became more and more political, and those politics increasingly leaned to the left. They had seen operations fail because the higher-ups had tied the hands of the men in the field. They had seen important information ignored because it conflicted with some bizarre notion of political correctness, sometimes with tragic results. They had seen power concentrated more and more in an elitist minority centered in Washington, with branches in the national news media in New York and in the entertainment capital of Hollywood. To those people, the honest opinions of the vast majority of Americans just didn’t count anymore.
As much as Ford hated to admit it, he didn’t really know who he was working for anymore … or if he could trust them.
“You’re talking about going off the reservation,” he said now to Parker. “I don’t know if I’m ready to do that.”
“I’m talking about getting to the bottom of this and finding out the truth. If we’re being set up, I want to know about it.”
Ever since Parker had been hurt on that mission several years earlier, he had been more reckless, more of a loose cannon. It was like he knew he was living on borrowed time anyway and didn’t care about his own safety anymore.
But that didn’t mean he was wrong about what was going on here. Something didn’t smell right to Ford, too.
“All right,” Ford said after a moment.