Neeley spoke up. “These guys want revenge, right?”
“Yeah,” Gant answered.
“And they’ve been taking it on family members,” Neeley continued. “Wanting to make those they feel wronged them suffer.”
“Correct,” Golden said.
“But the ones they’re really angry at are the players, the ones that betrayed them,” Neeley said. “I don’t think suffering is going to be sufficient payback for our targets. I think they want their victims to suffer but ultimately they’re going to want to take them out. Kill them. Pain first, then death.”
Gant considered that. “So they’ll circle around and come back after the principals after they’ve hurt them via family members? That’s not too smart. We’re on the case and the principals can be guarded. Better than this was done,” he added, noting Golden’s look of contempt.
“So they have a plan in anticipation of that,” Neeley said. “One we’re not seeing yet.”
Gant nodded. “Definitely. And everything that has happened so far is part of it. There’s a progression and we need to figure it out.” He looked at Golden. “That’s your job. You say you can predict behavior. Let’s do some predicting.”
The sound of a chopper echoed in the distance.
“If we’re not going to Alabama,” Neeley said, “where are we going?”
“DEA headquarters,” Gant said. “I want to find out the truth behind what happened in Colombia because I have a feeling even Colonel Cranston and Foley here really didn’t know the full story of what happened to that team.”
Consciousness crept into Emily slowly. An awareness of a sound, an engine running, the rumble of tires on asphalt. The sniff of a scent. The feeling of something hard beneath her. But not sight. Even when she opened her eyes there was only complete darkness and she realized she was blindfolded once more.
From the sound and the feel of the metal floor beneath her, she pieced together that once more she was in the van. And it was moving. Her hands were bound behind her. The blindfold pressed in tight against her eyes. She was surprised he hadn’t pinched shut her nostrils so she couldn’t smell, but she realized that wasn’t important to him.
Why would he move her?
It didn’t make sense. Of course, Emily knew, making sense of this insanity was probably a waste of time. On the other hand, she had nothing else to do than think about her current predicament.
Something had changed. The thought came to her unbidden, flashing out of the recesses of her subconscious. She also realized that she was a means, not an end. Moving her meant that her death was not the goal of her abduction. The crazy man driving the van wanted something more out of this.
Her suffering?
But he could have left her chained to that damn tree, Emily thought. This made no sense.
She cursed to herself as the van made a sudden, high speed turn and her body tumbled against the side, the metal hard and unyielding.
She wasn’t scared any more. She realized that with a strange, very calm wave of awareness.
She was angry to the point of counter-balancing the fear.
How dare this man she’d never met, who she had never done anything to, treat her like this?
Enough thinking. Emily felt around with her hands, searching. She scooted along the floor of the van. Bumping into objects. Until she found the edge of a metal stanchion. It wasn’t exactly sharp, but it was the best she could find in her current state. She put her back to it and began to rub the tape binding her wrists together.
“There’s something odd about this team,” Golden said.
Both Gant and Neeley stopped what they were doing and looked up at her, waiting for amplification on the statement. They were in the back of the black Gulfstream, flying toward Washington. They all had copies of the case file the Cellar had accumulated so far and were reading through, trying to find what they had missed.
“And that is?” Gant asked.
“They’re a team,” Golden said, “but they’re operating individually. I’ve never heard of that.”
Gant frowned. “You told me that there have been numerous pairs or small groups of people who act out like this.”
Golden nodded. “Yes. But they always acted in concert in the same place at the same time. Because having the other person there as a witness and participant affirms what they're doing and makes them bold. The other, weaker person — or people in this case— may feel that participating is his only way to be accepted or cared about. He's easily manipulated through his vulnerability, low self-esteem and neediness. Team members feed each other and the whole often becomes greater than the sum of its parts.”
Gant considered that. “But you’re talking about your normal, run-of-the-mill killing teams. Civilians.”
“There is no such thing as normal when you discuss killers,” Golden said.
“OK,” Gant acknowledged, “but you’re wondering how these guys are operating as a team yet separately. Your theory was that one of them, most likely Forten, was the instigator and the other two, Lutz and Payne, were followers. What you’re missing is that all three are way outside the bell curve. They were in Special Operations — the elite. They were trained — and trained in a way most civilians could never understand — to operate both as members of a team and individually when needed.
“Forten might have been the team leader, but I don’t think he’s the one instigating the other two to act. I think they’re all doing this because they want to. They have to. Whatever happened to them down in Colombia was so bad it turned all three into single-minded entities of revenge. To the point where Lutz was prepared to — and did — kill himself rather than be captured.”
Neeley stirred. “I just read the file today, but it seems to me that they were captured in Colombia by the drug cartel. Most likely tortured badly. I think it makes perfect sense they would prefer death over imprisonment again.”
“If we project that forward,” Golden said, “then ultimately they are on a suicide mission.”
Gant didn’t like that one bit. “That gives them a big advantage.”
“How so?” Golden asked.
“They can take bigger risks than we can,” Gant said. “It also means that whatever their end goal is, they don’t mind dying to achieve it. You give me three guys who are willing to die and I’ll take out any target in the world. Nine-eleven proved that.”
“That was more than three,” Golden noted.
“Four,” Gant said.
“’Four’?” Golden was puzzled. “There were—“
“Nineteen hijackers,” Gant finished for her. “But I think only the man in charge in each plane knew what was really going to happen. I suspect the others thought they were really doing a hijacking and would make demands, not use the planes as bombs.”
That brought a long silence. Golden was the one who finally broke it. “You asked me to predict what our targets’ goal is. They’ve been inflicting suffering on those they feel betrayed them somehow. Foley was the first primary that they killed and—“
Neeley interrupted. “I’m not sure the plan was to kill Foley. I think it might have been planned as a snatch operation on the wife and we foiled it. Grab the wife, leave the partial cache like they did with the Cranston girl.”
Gant considered that, as he also processed that Golden had used the term ‘targets’ rather than ‘perps’. “So their plan hit a speed bump. One, they didn’t grab Foley’s wife, so whatever role she was to play isn’t there anymore. And Payne isn’t there to play any more either.” He shook his head. “They’d have a back-up plan. A go-to-shit plan.”