No Way Back (A Shannon Ames Thriller Book 5) Read online

  No Way Back

  A Shannon Ames Thriller

  TJ Brearton

  Published by Inkubator Books

  www.inkubatorbooks.com

  Copyright © 2022 by T. J. Brearton

  T. J. Brearton has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-915275-29-5

  ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-915275-30-1

  NO WAY BACK is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Contents

  Inkubator Books

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  ROUGH COUNTRY

  Inkubator Newsletter

  We hope you enjoyed this book

  Acknowledgments

  Also by TJ Brearton

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  For Bob Guth

  Prologue

  Sunday

  Kristie Fain crossed the avenue with a small group of pedestrians. Most of them stayed with her, moving east toward the train station. Behind them, the setting sun spread orange over the New Jersey skyline, sending long shadows up the Manhattan street.

  She wore her traveling clothes: comfy New Balance sneakers, black yoga pants, a white T-shirt. She’d need the hoodie tied to her waist once she was on the train.

  Everything else she had with her was in the suitcase she pulled behind her.

  Mateo had made fun of it before she left: “You look like a stewardess from the 1980s pulling that thing.”

  What would he know about the 1980s? He hadn’t even been born yet.

  “Why don’t you get a backpack? You’re not Avon calling.”

  Mateo made regular references to bygone eras, in part because he’d learned English from watching American TV as a boy. He sometimes displayed a distorted sense of American culture. True, Avon still “called,” but the company – with its indelible image of a middle-aged woman in a matching mauve outfit standing on your doorstep with her own rolling suitcase of powders and creams – still had that yesteryear feel.

  Mateo was Peruvian and had been her boyfriend for three years. Almost three years – it would be at the end of August, which was coming up fast.

  Anyway, backpacks made her sweat. And both New York and DC could be brutal in the summer. You spent more time walking in DC than most people thought.

  A rolling suitcase was fine.

  Until the wheel broke.

  Kristie slowed a little but kept walking, looking back at the suitcase as it scraped along the sidewalk. She was no longer rolling it, but dragging it. “Oh, what the hell …?”

  She went back to it and got a look at the wheels. As she did, the small group of fellow commuters, who’d gathered at Eleventh Avenue and accompanied her for the past minute or so, were passing her. One woman slowed like she might offer to help. But Kristie smiled, and the woman kept going.

  Both wheels appeared intact. Kristie pinched one between her fingers and it turned, no problem. But the second one was stuck. Peering closer, she deduced the problem.

  The pebble was small, bits of mica sparkling on its triangular surface, the perfect wedge to stop a wheel. She pried at it, but her fingernails scraped the surface. Not that her nails were long; they were medium length. She kept digging, thinking of how many years she’d been dragging around this suitcase – it had gone with her to Peru, Ecuador, India – until at last she got the pebble free. Without a second thought, she chucked it aside, righted the suitcase, and resumed walking. By now, the group was half a block ahead of her, closing in on Tenth Avenue, nearing Penn Station.

  The 500 block on Thirty-Third Street was long and a bit of a mess. Half of the street was sectioned off for construction. All the workers were done for the day, gone to wherever construction workers went when they weren’t jackhammering concrete. The bar, some of them, obviously. The others … to the gym? Straight home to their families?

  She always wondered about people. It was her secret obsession, really. What they were like, where they went, what they did. This obsession was both what had attracted her to journalism and the reason it hadn’t worked out. Her focus on the banal, the everyday, was at odds with a business model requiring the more lurid and sensational. Studying the micro-neighborhoods of New York’s five boroughs in detail worked as a single weekend piece, not a body of work.

  Why do we only get one life? She wanted to sip coffee from a terrace on Central Park West. Not to be rich, but just to have a moment to exist in that life. To know what it was like to grow up in the Bronx, or in Chelsea, or way out in Bed-Stuy. To love your neighborhood like your family. To fly its flag like your country. Life was too abundant in its diversity – it wasn’t fair to get just one.

  A noise behind her derailed her thoughts. She glanced over her shoulder at a man who was walking a few yards back. His shoe had scuffed the sidewalk.

  Apparently, not everyone who had crossed Eleventh Avenue with her had passed her when she was fixing the wheel. But the rest of them were up ahead – that group had just made the light and were hurrying across Tenth. Bye, friends.

  Continuing on, Kristie gave a sideways glance at a gantry crane, the cables dangling listlessly in the evening heat. This heatwave had to give out sometime. Every summer seemed hotter than the last. At least the train would have AC. And she’d have three hours to read.

  She relished these trips. She didn’t come back to New York every weekend. But last Thursday had been a big event. And she’d needed to talk to Mateo. To tell him a few things about how she saw their future unfolding.

  Which was that, basically, she didn’t. Not the way things were going, anyway. The long distance wasn’t working. Even though it was only three and a half hours by train, he never made the trip down to see her – she always came back to see him. Because he always had a show, or a painting to finish, or some other reason he couldn’t travel. It certainly wasn’t for lack of funding.

  She shrugged it off for now. She’d said what she’d needed to; it was time to let him figure it out. She had a lot ahead of her this week.

  Concrete berms blocked the
closed side of the road, laid out end to end. On the other side were three large corrugated metal storage containers. She wondered what was in them. Construction supplies, probably. Small offices for the men.

  So much life in this city. So many stories. You saw a hundred strange and wonderful things a day. People said you got used to it; you became inured to it. She’d been here three years. And so far it was still–

  Another scrape of a shoe off the gritty sidewalk. The sound of it stiffened the hairs on the back of her neck. Just a typical reaction, though. Progress was being made in the world, but women still had to watch their backs.

  She quickened her pace.

  Tenth Avenue was getting closer.

  God, this was a seriously long block.

  She heard another footstep. Much closer. Someone with longer strides than hers. Easy to accomplish – she was five feet five, not exactly long-legged. She gave another quick glance over her shoulder.

  The man had his hands in his pockets and his head down. A baseball hat concealed the upper half of his face. The lower half was both oddly white and oddly shadowed.

  All kinds of things in New York. All kinds of people. Street performers and homeless people and the mentally ill. Masters-of-the-universe businessmen and hot-dog vendors and celebrity movie stars all jostling together at any given moment. Mostly walking their dogs, it seemed.

  Still, the sight of that guy stirred anxiety. No doubt about it. That and the man-sized shape that seemed to be moving along with her on the other side of the covered fencing that bisected the road. Probably just the construction foreman staying late. But still.

  She took out her phone. It was instinct: the phone was a comfort, a lifeline to family and friends. Police.

  She’d just been texting with her roommate in DC; Rachel’s name popped up when Kristie opened the text app. She was able to do it all while she pulled the suitcase. A one-handed texting wonder.

  There. Just a few lines to Rach. It made her feel better to make fun of the situation. And maybe it would give the guy behind her a second thought.

  Watch out, man, this lady’s got a cell phone! And with more twenty-something white women at the other end of it, too!

  Kristie let herself smile a little. The intersection was just twenty yards away. A vehicle turned in and started rolling toward her. An SUV, oily black. Only the third vehicle to come down the long block since she’d started walking it.

  At last she reached the end of the covered fencing to her right. As she did, the man who’d been on the other side of it crossed the street just ahead of her.

  Something was wrong with his face, too. The shadows too big and deep, the white too pale and misshapen.

  Oh, God …

  He turned and came straight at her. The SUV sped up, then screeched to a halt.

  Kristie let go of her suitcase. She took a step back, then another. When she turned to hurry away, she ran straight into the man who’d been behind her.

  His head was raised now, the visor clear of his face.

  His horrible, twisted face.

  Oh God … Kristie thought again.

  … Not this.

  She tried to cry out for help, but hands seized her, and everything went black.

  1

  The sound of a scream rose and fell – just the squawk of a chair being dragged into place. The agent pulling it blushed and murmured apologies. Standing at the head of the conference room, Shannon sipped her coffee. She studied the group of men and women seated in the chairs arranged classroom style. The agent late to arrive sat and smiled and hoped to be forgotten.

  Monday morning. New office building. Sun spangling over the Hudson River in the distance, shining through the twenty-fourth-floor windows. Mark Tyler presided over the lectern beside her. What Tyler lacked in size, he made up for in personality. And style, she supposed. The creases of gray in his suit could cut paper. He wore his black hair pompadour style. He’d shaved probably an hour ago, but by lunch, he’d have a shadow.

  He gripped the lectern and cleared his throat. “Good morning, everyone.”

  The group returned the greeting.

  “I’ve met a lot of you already. Shaken your hands, gotten to know you. And you represent only a fraction of this great office. We have over two thousand agents, support staff, and task force members. Our territory has a population of thirteen million people.” Tyler paused, letting that sink in. “So I guess it’s true what they say – there’s the New York FBI … and then there’s the rest of the Bureau.”

  People chuckled, and some made faces, wiggled eyebrows. The New York Office wasn’t one planet in the FBI solar system – it was its own solar system.

  Tyler said, “Some of you have done your homework and know me. Some of you don’t, and that’s okay. Your boss, Ronald Moray, has retired, stepped down as ADIC, and I have been fortunate enough to take the reins. Before coming here to the NYO, I was the supervisory agent in charge at the Brooklyn-Queens Resident Agency. I was there for nine years, and I’ve overseen some of the finest agents in the Bureau. We’ve had our challenges, and we’ve had our triumphs. So, again, you may have heard my name; we may have worked together, or maybe not.” He pointed to Shannon seated on the dais beside him. “But who you probably do know are the women – and man – to my right. Special Agent Shannon Ames, Special Agent Charles Bufort, and Special Agent Jenna Reese. They’ve come over on the Mayflower with me, so to speak. This was a team I knew I needed to have.”

  Shannon bit her nails as Tyler continued; she didn’t relish attention. Bufort saw her doing it, and she dropped her hand away.

  Tyler said, “A little over a year ago, Agent Ames, still in her probationary period, helped to take down one of this city’s worst serial murders. The very next month, one year ago, she was on a case when former federal prosecutor Lucy Donato went missing. She did undercover work that led to the capture of a brutal South Bronx killer, and she just recently helped the Bureau, working with US Customs and Border Patrol, to take down an enormous piece of an immigrant-smuggling operation.” Tyler paused, then faced her as he continued. “And you won’t find anyone more sincere, more authentic, with more integrity, than Special Agent Ames. So I hope you show her all a warm welcome.”

  There was scattered applause, and Shannon felt herself blush. Mercifully, Tyler moved on.

  “Then there’s Special Agent Bufort.”

  The way he said it caused more laughter. Bufort made a face of mock offense: “Hey …”

  “Agent Bufort comes to us from the Midwest. He was with me at C-18 for five years – is that right, Charles?”

  Bufort nodded. While Tyler went on, Shannon took Bufort in, as if seeing him for the first time. It wasn’t, of course – she’d been working with him for a year. She knew he was from Missouri, but the shaggy blond hair had always suggested California. And no matter how finely tailored his suits, how combed his hair or smoothly shaven his round face, the tall Bufort had an ineffably shambolic nature. Like a surfer who’d wandered in from the beach in a sun-drenched daze, to somehow wind up at the FBI.

  He’d been working in the domestic terrorism unit when she’d started at the Brooklyn-Queens Resident Agency. But soon after that, Tyler seemed to be assigning him to the same cases Shannon was working. The Donato case, then those two months in the Bronx.

  Reese, too.

  Shannon had never seen Jenna Reese lose her cool; but that was the thing. You sensed this coiled energy beneath her meditative demeanor. Reese had a calm, calculating mind. Excellent pattern recognition. She did deep research with smooth efficiency. She wore her hair short and eschewed jewelry, yet in remembering her you would have sworn she had her nose pierced or a tattoo showing somewhere.

  Then again, maybe she did, and it was hidden away.

  Shannon had grown fond of her colleagues. No – that wasn’t strong enough. After a year, she was beginning to think she trusted them with her life.

  Bufort smiled at her as if he read her thoughts. But then h
e clapped. He was reacting to something Tyler said; they all were. The group of men and women gathered high in this building in downtown Manhattan were laughing again and clapping and breaking up. It was over. It was official. After talking about it for a year – really since she’d started working – Tyler had done what he’d set out to do. He’d taken over for Moray, the assistant director in charge. They were no longer limited by the Resident Agency. All major investigations went through the ADIC’s office, and the New York Office was that office. Some of the cases that would now reach her would never have reached her in Queens. She could wind up investigating a spy case, a top ten fugitive, or a huge white-collar crime. It honestly made her a little nervous. But she could handle it.

  “Ames,” Tyler said after everyone had been milling around for a few minutes. There would be several of these introductions for Tyler, but for Shannon, it was just today. This was her floor; these were her people – agents who took on a variety of cases, as opposed to other floors where the focus was highly specialized.