“That should leave him with three,” Scott said quietly.

“Jack, I’m going to shoot up the hall… high… ceiling. One of you can come over here. Then I’ll need cover to break for the bedroom door ten feet up the hall,” Warren whispered.

“Roger that,” Scott replied.

Warren stuck his head out and pumped eight shots from his sidearm into the top of the bedroom doorway at the end of the hall. At the same time, Scott burst across the hallway into the bathroom almost bowling Warren over. One shot rang out in response.

“Two left,” Scott said flatly.

“Ok, Warren… go for your door on three,” Jack said.

A few seconds later, the hallway once again lit up with the sound of gunfire as Warren raced up the hall toward the bedroom, diving to the side when he got to the first doorway.

“I’m in,” he said on the radio a moment later.

“What’s the play, Warren?” Jack said.

They could hear a thudding from the bedroom as they waited for a response from Warren.

“I’m going to go through the wall behind him. I need him distracted… only for a moment. I think I can get the rest of the way through in one hit.”

“Roger that,” Jack replied. Then he yelled out, “Ron March, this is Jack Dixon. What’s your plan? We can still fix this.”

“Go away, man.”

“I can’t do that, Ron. Why don’t you let Vivian go, then we can square everything away. Nobody else has to get hurt today.”

Jack snuck a look around the corner just before another round from the pistol struck the wall just below where his head had been. At the sound of the gunshot, Warren slammed into the spot he’d selected on the wall. As promised, he broke all the way though and emerged in the bedroom.

Ron swung around at the explosion of sound off to his side, seeing the man emerge from the wall, stumbling a couple of steps into the room, then charging him. He shot his last round at the man, point blank. The gun clicked just before Ron was lifted from the floor, losing his grip on Vivian. The man carried him across the room and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break out the sheetrock around two studs.

Jack rushed down the hall, pulling Vivian away and shielding her from the other men with his body.

“Warren, I have her. I have Vivian.”

Scott rushed into the room behind Jack and rolled to the right toward where Warren was pushing Ronald March into the wall, his forearm across March’s throat. He pulled Warren off the other man and dropped March to the floor, cuffing him.

“Warren, I got this. Jack is taking your wife downstairs,” he said.

Warren started running back up the hallway, but stumbled at the top of the stairs, collapsing and then rolling down the hardwood steps.

“Jack, I think Warren is hit,” Scott said into the radio.

At the bottom of the stairs, Jack turned back, releasing Vivian. Warren rolled into a heap at his feet.

“I need medical, right now. Chestik is hit,” Jack yelled for the benefit of the communications person outside. “Warren, I have you, relax, ok?”

He rolled Warren onto his back on the flat part of the floor and started stripping away the gear that prevented him from seeing the extent of the other man’s injuries.

“GSW in the leg, another in the shoulder.” Jack said into his comm. “Vivian, I need you to help me,” he said over his shoulder.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her down to kneel next to him. She looked down at her husband but there was no recognition in her eyes… she didn’t seem to understand what was going on.

“Hold this on his shoulder,” he instructed her. “There is something wrong with Vivian,” he said quietly in his comm. “I think she is drugged… she seems out of it.”

A moment later two more men rushed through the remains of the front door to work on Warren. A few minutes after that, he was loaded into an ambulance.

As Scott hauled Ron down the steps, Jack walked up and got in his face. “What did you give her?” he said, his eyes flashing with intensity.

“Nothin’… just a little something to take the edge off… help her to not fight it.”

“What is it?” Jack asked again, each word exploding from him.

“Just a little special K, man.”

Jack turned away. “Female may have Ketamine in her system. She was non-consensually drugged,” he said into the radio.

“Your problems are a lot bigger than they were before, March,” Jack said, turning back. “You should really start thinking about who you can sell out to save your miserable ass.”

A moment after he cleared the threshold, two of his security men followed and flanked the door. They peered in through the window to watch the gathered crowd in the room; neither of the burly mercenaries keeping watch on the property outside off the balcony. Perez didn’t want to be disturbed by any of his guests, but there was little to fear from his own domain.

Titus backed the young woman to the rail at the edge of the balcony as he pressed the length of his body against hers. She smiled confidently, occasionally sipping her own brandy as his hand slid down her lithe body. Her own free hand snaked around his shoulder as she pulled him closer to her and whispered something in his ear.

He stood and took the drink from her hand as she gave him another seductive grin. He turned and handed the two drinks to one of the bodyguards a few feet behind him. As he turned back to her, he watched as she pulled the hem of her dress up her thighs revealing a pair of sexy, thigh-high stockings and nothing else under her slinky red dress. She knew he was married, and that his wife was not only a beautiful woman, but she was standing less than fifty feet away. But she also knew that he would be terribly generous to her in trade for her attentions. Their marital arrangements were not her problem.

***

Half a mile away, just outside the boundaries of Perez’s property, Warren Chestik laid on a ridge. He blended into the surrounding foliage perfectly… so perfectly that twenty-minutes before, one of the regular patrols of the property boundary had passed within a dozen feet of his position. His camouflage had been designed to seamlessly blend into this very spot.

He watched as several people stepped onto the balcony. He slowly reached out to the end of his scope and flipped open the cover. As he sighted in on the balcony, he recognized Perez and his security. The young woman was unknown, but he knew she was likely just his momentary companion.

Chestik watched as the old man pressed himself against the woman, groping her as she willingly played along. He preferred to not injure her, but Perez would not be stepping back inside his home again.

The old man took her glass and gave her a toothy smile. When he turned back around, Chestik took careful aim with the modified Barrett sniper rifle. The flight time of the round would be approximately one second, flying twenty-six-hundred feet from his position to that of his target. He had already calculated in the thirty-plus feet of drop that the projectile would experience during its flight.

Perez froze as he watched the woman. Chestik squeezed his trigger, and then watched his target. He could see from the other man’s face that he had seen, but not recognized, a muzzle flash as Titus’s forehead crinkled and he looked up from the woman. Just as the realization of what it could have been dawned on him, the projectile passed less than a foot over the shoulder of his date, through Perez’s chest, then the back of the knee of one of the security men, and finally embedded itself into the floor of the ballroom, just inside the door.

As both Perez and the security man crumpled to the floor, the report of the rifle could be heard. The scream of the young woman drowned out the echoes as the sound bounced between the buildings of Perez’s compound.

At this time, all of my titles are available through Kindle Unlimited. If you are a member of KU, any title in the KU universe is free for you to read, including all nine of my books. At least, nine as I write this post.

The order I would recommend is as follows…

• Planning Vengeance
• Dig Two Graves
• You Don’t Know Jack
• Who, What, When, Why?
• Grafton
• Unknown Caller
• Triple Cross
• Lies and Omissions
• Second Chance

That is slightly different that the order in which they were released, but that loads all of the main-line Dixon-Prince books at the front, and then sneaks in the others… which also have Dixon-Prince references. Really, though, you could read Lies and Omissions before or any time during the series. Triple Cross and Second Chance could also be read any time, but there would be minor spoilers.

“Dirk, I have an idea,” she said when Dirk laid the handset back in the cradle. “I didn’t want to say anything while Mr. Dixon was on the phone, because I don’t know if we can even do what I’m thinking…”

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That we hack into all of the carriers and steal their location data, then we filter it to find phones that showed up around the time Chance’s phone showed up where it was found, and then track any phones away from there and see where they are now.”

“That’s crazy. Can you write a program to sift the location data?”

“I think I might have something almost written… I can modify a tracking script I wrote for tracking IP addresses that were trying to attack us. I think I can have something in about an hour. It’s already designed to deal with a large database.”

Dirk put up his fist so she could give him a bump. “I’ll get the location data for you. Go do your thing.”

Jenny got up and left the room. As she headed down the hall, she grabbed her assistant, Cory, from his office just down the hall from hers. “Come on, Firefly, we have work to do,” she said. When he heard her use his old military callsign, he knew she was serious. She only used it when she was giving him a hard time, or when the problems in front of her were big.

He grabbed his tablet from his desk and took off from his office after her.

Two minutes later he was sitting in a chair next to her, reading over her shoulder as she modified one of her data sifting programs.

“You know your idea is crazy, right?” he said an hour later as he finished the stress test.

“Yeah… but I think it might work. We have nothing to lose.”

***

Dave felt the needle stick him in the leg despite the shock to his system from the taser. He went from paralyzed awareness to unconsciousness in moment. When he woke up, he was in a sitting position, his wrists tied behind his back and a bag over his head.

“Pam, are you here?” he said quietly. He knew that she could be there and still be unconscious, or that she might not be there. He also knew that there could be someone else in the room with him or them. Dave didn’t want to give away anything, but he needed to know that Pam was unhurt.

“Dave? What’s happening?” she replied, barely controlled panic in her voice.

“Are you ok? Are you hooded, too?”

“I’m ok… a couple of bruises. But I can’t see anything.”

“I’m glad to know they haven’t hurt you. I’m sorry you got caught up in this, but we need to be careful. Don’t say anything that helps them,” Dave said, his voice barely above a whisper. He still had some tricks up his sleeve, but without knowing their situation at all, he didn’t want to show his hand.

“Dave, I’m really scared.”

“I want to tell you everything will be fine, but I just don’t know. I’ll do whatever I can to try to protect you.”

Bryce had been able to freeze and seize not just the primary accounts but accounts up and downstream. The haul had been massive, but more importantly, it had destroyed the entire operation. Internal wars had broken out, with factions of the cartel blaming each other and attacking, looking for the upper hand. Even after over a decade, they hadn’t been able to rebuild from the ashes.

He wanted to utilize the same plan. He’d even done some illicit dry runs on the Merida Group. Neither Deke nor Owen knew exactly how ready he’d been for that particular order.

***

Raul walked up to Deke. Even before he approached, from across the room Raul could see the man was broken. He put his hand out to shake but found himself pulling Deke into a hug. “We’re going to strike them down,” Raul whispered in his boss’s ear.

“Do it, Raul,” Deke whispered back, still clinging to his Chief Engineer.

“I am using Dirk Bryce’s playbook. Are you good with that? You said scorched earth.”

Deke stepped back and looked into the other man’s eyes. There was an anger reflected in the engineer’s eyes that he’d seldom seen before. He didn’t know where it came from, but he respected it and it reflected his own rage. Deke took Raul’s hand and looked into his eyes, “End them.” Both men nodded.

Deke turned away and walked to the front of the chapel. He looked down at his beautiful wife, her hair splayed across the silk pillow of her casket. He leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips. “I’m so sorry, Helena. But the people that did this won’t get away with it.” He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. Looking at her, she looked just like she was sleeping.

More than anything he wanted to rouse her, to gently let her know it was time to wake up. And when he tried harder, he would see how damaged and broken she truly was. That was the nightmare he’d had for the last several nights. He’d failed her a million ways, but this time he would not. The people that killed his wife would pay dearly.

“Are you ready, Deke?” Owen said, walking up to him. “There are a lot of people that are here to pay their respects.”

He glanced up. Raul was at the back of the room talking into his phone. When he saw Deke look at him, he flashed a quick thumbs up, then returned to his call. Jimmy was sitting in one of the pews of the chapel with Jill Takanata. She had her arm around the boy and was comforting him. There were two other security guards in the room. Helena would have hated that they had to have security for her funeral, but she would have understood it, and to keep Jimmy safe, she would have accepted it. What she would have hated more was that part of Deke was still at work… even as he made preparations to bury her.

Deke nodded to his friend. Owen opened the door and let in the crowd that was milling around in the vestibule. Deke wiped his face and tucked away his emotion.  All he had to do was make it through the next couple of hours, then he could finally grieve in private.

***

Owen and Taki bookended Deke and Jimmy as they walked back to one of the armored, black Excursions that the company owned. Dutch and three other guards climbed into an identical truck ahead of them. The two vehicles pulled out of the cemetery and turned toward the cabin. From where they were, it would be about an hour’s drive.

Deke put his arm around his son’s shoulder and pulled him closer. At five years old, he understood what death meant, but the finality was only now sinking in. As he realized that his mother would never hug him again, that he wouldn’t be able to show her his latest drawing or have her tuck him into bed with a kiss on the forehead, tears started to fall from his eyes in earnest. Even with the few words he’d been able to utter to his father, or that Taki had told his father he’d uttered to her, the older man knew exactly what he was feeling.

“Jimmy, you know I talk to Mommy every night. I know that she isn’t there… but I still talk to her. You can, too,” Deke said.

“Can she hear you?”

“I think she can, son. I think she’s in heaven watching over us. I know that more than anything she would want to watch you grow up… and if she can’t do it here, heaven for her would mean watching you from there.”

“Ok. I’ll try that. I have her picture in my room… I’ll talk to her picture. It won’t be the same, but you’re probably right… she probably can listen to us. I just wish she could talk back,” Jimmy said.

“Me, too, buddy. Me, too.”

The Excursion made the turn onto Ridgeback Road. As much as everyone hated it, there was no way to drive to the cabin without driving past the spot Helena had died. They would have gone somewhere else, but father and son both felt closer to her at the cabin. It was the place she loved to be more than any other. Without warning, the other Excursion exploded in a fireball in front of them, lifting off the ground and landing on its side. Owen slammed on the brakes. He smacked the shifter into reverse as the big diesel engine revved. The rear tires spun as the axle hopped, looking for traction. There was a Suburban behind them, and as they backed toward them, it turned to block the road.