Girl Under Fire (A Sam Hemming FBI Thriller Prequel), Julia Payne [ebooks online reader txt] 📗

and the old kerosene in the tanks, it came off differently. This was where the Subway line passed, and if I could smell the subway from here, it meant that the wall was porous.

That gave me an idea.

Chapter 3

Second Generation in Service

 

My family, the Winchesters, are all about service. My father was a colonel in the army, having been through the hell they called Vietnam. As a young soldier, his boots first hit the tropical soil of the Southeast Asian country early in its long and deadly lifespan. He served a total of three tours, was shot twice, and received a Purple Heart for his service.

In his last tour, his unit took on heavy fire and was trapped in a swampy marsh. For three days, they held out as Charlie surrounded them. The fighter squadron that was supposed to napalm the area and cleared a path for his unit could not fear that they would hit his men. For three days, they held out without supplies – just what they had carried out that morning when they set out to secure the underground network that Charlie used to navigate the rainforest.

The thoughts of her father were triggered, no doubt, by the sensation of being in one of those musty underground networks – or at least, that's what she imagined them to be when he told her stories growing up.

Every once in a while, she would stop just to make sure that there were no other sounds to indicate the presence of the enemy. She had solved the puzzle of the unfamiliar smell, but it occurred to her that she had not heard a train go by in a long time. If the subway line was indeed behind that wall, she should have felt the rumble of one pass in the time she had been in the basement.

"They must have shut the line down because of the blizzard," I whisper to myself, somehow carrying on a conversation with myself felt comfortable, as though I was not alone. I may have been one of the few female front-line agents in the Bureau, but no one likes being alone when there is a threat vector just over your head and one that is brutal enough to have taken out the entire highly trained FBI SWAT team in under a few minutes. Plus, I had already read about Nyke. I never felt the fear of facing him since I had the tactical team's entire might. They've taken down some really nasty pieces of work, and as long as they were on my six, I had nothing to fear. But they were no longer on my six. Now the fear had found its way to the surface, but as much as I felt the weight of grief press down on me, I also realized those men were dead, and if I didn't focus, I would be next.

Time was not on my side, Nyke's meetings, according to Interpol intelligence usually only lasted about two to three hours. Not only were the exchanges done at nighttime, but it was also the only time in the year he met with his lieutenants on the continent. The men assembled upstairs had come from Chicago, L.A., Miami, and Phoenix. They represented the leadership of the syndicate that Nyke had created over the last fifteen years. When they had arrested him in London, all the lieutenants from his British operations had assembled.

Money laundering was just the most visible part of the syndicate. They had other significantly illegal operations. They needed to launder the money because of all the illicit cash that flowed into their coffers from their activities. You name it. Prostitution, counterfeit goods, slave labor, drugs, alcohol, organ harvesting, and contract killing were just some of the things they did worldwide, and all of it generated billions every year.

Putting Nyke away was a high priority for the FBI because the U.S. Treasury had calculated that the total economic impact of the Nyke Crime Syndicate on the global economy was nearly a trillion dollars annually. Interpol saw it that way, too, but they could never pull it off.

As I thought about all the factors that were at play two floors above me on the streets of downtown New York, I found myself staring at the west wall of the basement. It looked like a solid push could break through and, if my calculations were correct, it would open up the basement below the building Nyke was currently in.

I looked around for something I could use. I couldn't see anything. Well, at least I couldn't see anything I thought I could use. I put my wet shoulder into it. It moved a little but not enough to break through. I was confident I could find the tools I needed to penetrate the wall. It was, after all, a construction site. I hurried back up the brick staircase and got to the floor just below the ground floor. Looking around, it didn't take long to find a sledgehammer. It must have weighed about fifty pounds and would be the perfect tool.

Within two minutes, I had managed to make a hole about the size of a melon. It was enough to look inside the space behind the wall. A rush of cold air washed over me as I looked in to see if there was any light or any sign of life. There wasn't any. It was then the moment of truth. I placed my flashlight in the hole and looked around. It was a clean basement. No furniture. Just a cement floor and plastered walls. At the end of the large space was a door. It showed promise.

I decided to pull more of the bricks apart. I realized that they had been plastered on the other side from where I stood, and that was the reason they didn't come down when I put my shoulder into