Once Quiet (Jack Widow Book 5) Read online

  SCOTT BLADE

  aBlack Lion publication©

  ONCE QUIET

  a JACK WIDOW mystery

  Scott Blade

  www.scottblade.com

  The Jack Widow Series

  Gone Forever

  Winter Territory

  A Reason to Kill

  Without Measure

  Once Quiet

  Name Not Given (Coming August)

  S. Lasher & Associates Series

  The StoneCutter

  Cut & Dry

  Stand-Alone Novels

  The Secret of Lions

  Copyright © 2017 Scott Blade

  All Rights Reserved

  Visit the author website:

  scottblade.com

  The Jack Widow book series and Once Quiet are works of fiction, produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination and/or are taken with permission from the source and/or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or fictitious characters, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This series is not officially associated or a part of any other book series that exists.

  For more information on copyright and permissions visit scottblade.com.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The publisher and/or author do not have any control over and do not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express written permission from the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published by Black Lion, LLC.

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  The Author

  Name Not Given

  To Rocio, for the days, I remember.

  For the nights, I can never forget.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE FOUR WATCHERS WERE ONLY supposed to watch, not intervene, not interfere—no matter what. They were told this, ordered this. They were only supposed to take notes and observe and record and remember, for their client, who had convinced them that she was an officer of the law. After all, she had a badge, an important one, too. It was an accredited shield of justice, a silver badge in a formal leather case, like in the movies.

  It looked real enough.

  They had been following her instructions for the last ten days without deviation. Even though they were told only to observe, they were used to having more than just field glasses with them. They had expected more. An agent of such a top-shelf investigative organization would certainly have access to a big budget. But that’s all they were given: a pair of field glasses, a phone number—her personal cell, and an address of the family that they were to watch.

  The fact that she hadn’t given them a budget and the fact that she was using them in the first place indicated that the whole operation wasn’t legal, which was fine by them. They weren’t fans of the law anyhow, but they respected her motives. Family is family. They got that because they were family.

  Also, they respected the dollar amount that she offered to pay them for their assistance.

  The field glasses had been mailed to them from the internet. That’s why they had to improvise. They had to acquire their own surveillance equipment. That was a bummer, but they needed the money and they did agree to do the job. They liked the dollar amount of how much they could expect in compensation. It was all good.

  The watchers’ client had given them strict instructions not to interact with anyone or anything that they saw, no matter how unusual the situation seemed. Especially, they were warned that any violence wouldn’t be tolerated and shooting from a Marine-issued M40 sniper rifle would qualify as violence.

  The M40 wasn’t the only weapon that they had. Each of them was armed with side arms: two Berettas and two Glocks. Their client hadn’t mentioned to them that they shouldn’t be armed. But they were country boys after all.

  They took the warning of no direct action with a grain of salt, because they figured she was supposed to say that. She was obligated to say that because of her status in the government.

  She had struck them as a woman who was on the verge, like she knew that she was going to have to give the green light on violent action eventually. All she needed was a little push.

  And what else were they going to do to the family that lived in the house? They weren’t just documenting their comings and goings for no reason.

  The watchers figured it must’ve been for recon sake. What they weren’t sure of was if they were also the assault team or if she was merely using them to build up the intel for an assault from her SWAT guys. They hoped for the former.

  However, the temptation for immediate violence had crossed more than one of their minds. The oldest two watchers, in particular, had these thoughts. Going in and taking everyone out in the main house would’ve been easy enough. Not their first night, or the rest of that whole week, but now, today, it would be very easy. It’d be easy because yesterday the lady of the house and that wrangler in charge had fired everyone—all their cowhands. Well, all but two, but they were going to go too. No doubt.

  They had sent them away. The cowhands were unemployed again, which made the watchers a little mad because for guys like them finding work in Montana was difficult enough and that was how it used to be. Now, finding work for roughnecks and cattle wrangle
rs and ranch hands in the state was very hard, damn near impossible.

  Yesterday, there were ten cowhands on staff, but they had been sent packing.

  The four watchers couldn’t hear the conversations. They didn’t have audio surveillance equipment. But they were positive that the conversations were all one-sided and it went along the lines of no money left and times were tough and so on and so forth.

  A conversation that cattle ranchers had had numerous times with numerous workers over countless years in the region.

  The watchers had heard these same conversations themselves.

  They had recognized some of the cowhands that were let go. They had seen them around town. One of them they even knew on a first-name basis. And the rest, they didn’t. Some of the ones they recognized seemed upset and a couple of them seemed doubly so.

  The one that they knew fell into this category, which was good.

  The watchers thought that when the time came, they could approach some of them, persuade them and add them to their cause.

  The first watcher suspected that there was no SWAT assault team waiting in the wings. He was pretty sure that their client was going to have them kill the occupants of the house, maybe not right away, but soon. That may not have been her original intent, but she would come around. He was pretty sure.

  They reckoned that she would call for an assault on the property because of the way she had talked about the husband, in particular. Something that her agency wasn’t supposed to take part in, not without courts and legal warrants, and judges’ signatures or without directors’ approvals and endless red tape.

  They were told that the husband was a part of a massive injustice. He was an American traitor of sorts. They assumed, from what she had said, that his crimes were so bad that she didn’t even care about what happened to the children. They assumed that if the children died in the crossfire that’d be acceptable, that’d be something she would overlook, like a casualty of war.

  At least, that’s what they assumed. She never said any of that.

  Besides the husband, the wife of the family was some kind of foreigner, and to them that was part of the problem. They didn’t care much for foreigners.

  This one was a real looker though, the type that no man could resist. She was Eastern European, maybe Russian, maybe Ukrainian, or maybe one of those Slovak women. They weren’t really sure. They didn’t know much about her. Not that it mattered.

  Then there were the children. As far as they were concerned the children of a traitor and a foreigner were expendable. There was a bullet for each one of them. Not a problem.

  CHAPTER 2

  JACK WIDOW HATED TO BE IN THE SAME PLACE TWICE.

  But when he heard about Route 93 from a small group of college kids who smelled of weed and talked loud enough for him to overhear every word that they had said, he knew that he wanted to check it out.

  The college kids were standing across from him at an opposite corner of a highway onramp. They were hitchhikers like him, kindred spirits.

  Widow had started from Colorado, not the top of Highway 93, which would’ve made sense. But he hadn’t started there because he hadn’t been there yet. He was casually passing through Denver, for no real reason other than he had to be someplace. He was just a guy who went here and went there.

  Widow was used to going nowhere because he never had any plans to go anywhere, not directly. That’s before he heard these college kids talking. They weren’t talking to him, not directly, but indirectly. One of them had said something to the effect of “look at that hobo.”

  Which didn’t offend him because he was a hobo, technically. And he had been called worse. He didn’t mind the term.

  Jack Widow had started years ago on a personal mission to find his mother’s killer. He used to be an undercover Navy cop, secretly embedded with the SEALs as one of them. Which meant that he had to walk the walk and talk the talk. There was no faking his way among the special operator units. If he had been just a regular guy who was pretending, the SEALs would’ve sniffed him out in less than a second. So, he had to be the real deal, which meant that Widow was in a SEAL team.

  He trained with them. He was stationed with them. He went on deployments with them. He had been in firefights, dodging bullets with them. And he had shared beers with them and even gotten into bar fights with them at his back. He felt a part of them.

  If he were asked what he did in the Navy and could be one hundred percent honest, then he would say that he had been a Navy SEAL with no mention of being an undercover NCIS agent.

  He had been a part of the most elite special operations unit in the world. But he was never truly one of them, not all the way. Because he had a secret that none of them knew.

  Widow hadn’t started in the SEALs. In fact, you could say that his original Navy records were less than stellar. He liked to joke that he had almost as many admonishments and behavioral reprimands as he had medals. Which wasn’t factual. It was just an exaggeration. He had plenty of medals, but there were notable blemishes in his original Navy records about his rebellious nature.

  After he had been discharged from the Navy the first time, he was approached by his old C.O., Rachel Cameron. Only she wasn’t a C.O. because C.O. stands for Commanding Officer. And she hadn’t been an officer at all. She was a civilian. Technically, her title was Special Agent in Charge of Unit Ten, in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Which was a civilian agency that was run by the United States Department of the Navy.

  Civilian because it was believed that the Navy and Marines shouldn’t investigate themselves, an opinion not shared by the Army. It was believed that the job required federal agents of the special variety.

  Rachel Cameron had been one of those agents.

  Back then she was about fifteen years younger than she was now. Still, she was older than Widow. How much? He never knew. She was a mystery to him in many, many ways.

  Widow had been hand selected for a special project. He had been tested and analyzed and debated over with a select group of guys from the Navy, the DOD, the Pentagon and a couple from God knows where else, until it was determined that he was least suited to wear a uniform on the job because of his lack of following orders that he didn’t like, which made him the best candidate for Unit Ten.

  It turned out that was exactly what they were looking for, a guy who could betray his uniform, if it was so required. A guy who could blur the lines in order to achieve the objectives set out by Unit Ten. All of this was supposed to be for the greater good, of course.

  Widow was sent off to Quantico and trained and mentally armed to be the main point operator in Unit Ten. This all meant that he was going to act as an undercover agent, only not just against foreign enemies, but also domestic ones.

  Unit Ten was still in operations to this day. But Widow was out. He had been out for a while. This meant that he wasn’t in the loop on current mission objectives or the state of play for Unit Ten.

  However, since he knew that Unit Ten was still around, it was a reasonable assumption that they had new undercover faces to use in their missions. Even though he had once been their primary asset, they must’ve replaced him by now. Otherwise, they wouldn’t still be operating.

  After months of rigorous exercises preparing Widow to live a double identity, he was sent back into the Navy as one of the only NCIS agents to be an officer in the military at the same time. He joined the SEALs, passed the training exercises, exams, and Hell Week and made it into the SEAL teams.

  The truth was no one in Unit Ten expected him to make it that far, except for Cameron. She knew he would.

  Widow was then a full-fledged SEAL, but that was a layer above his real job. He went on missions with the SEALs, most of which were successful. His primary objective was to maintain cover at all costs short of treason and murder.

  Many times, he had to use his position in the SEALs to investigate, recon, discover, and identify bad guys and terrorists. And more times then he’d like to admi
t, the bad guys were among the good guys.

  There’s no amount of training that can prepare a cop for having to arrest one of his own. And he had to do this more than once. It was his job.

  Normally, he outsourced the arresting part to the regular NCIS agents. He did all the heavy lifting and they took all the glory. But that was fine by him. One thing that the SEALs have a lot of is mottoes. One of them is “The Deed is All. Not the Glory.” It was one of the longer mottoes. He also heard guys say “Bros Before Hoes.” So, he didn’t spend too much thought on mottoes.

  The point is that having to arrest your brothers is hard, but learning that one of your brothers betrayed his country in the first place is worse.

  On the front lines, the other guys in his platoon were like brothers, more so than his teammates in Unit Ten. It was hard to have to go into a firefight, trusting the guy next to him, and later discover that that same guy was violating the Military Code of Justice and his country. It was hard to have once trusted a brother-in-arms in a gunfight to have his back and later to have to arrest him for treason.

  Back then, Widow had led two lives, which made him almost forget the one he had left behind. On his last assignment, they’d told him that someone had shot his sheriff mother in the head, way back in Mississippi. He left his standing orders, which were completed anyway, and went back.

  That particular mission was wrapped up anyway. No harm. No foul. But once he crossed that bridge, once he set foot back into the depths of a long-forgotten past, he wasn’t coming back.

  The townspeople that he had grown up with had taken him to be a drifter. He never corrected them. He used this cover to find his mother’s killer. And find the culprit he did.

  Widow handled that situation the same way he had handled other issues in the past. He righted a wrong. He’d killed the responsible party.

  Afterward, instead of going back to the NCIS, he just kept on walking.