Free The Widow's Strike by Brad Taylor Page A

on the move. Target’s with her.”
    Decoy said, “Roger.”
    All I could do now was wait for phase two of the mission, either getting married up with the cloned PDA or getting a Prairie Fire alert from Jennifer requesting backup. I prayed mightily that it would be the former.
    It had been forty-eight hours since my meeting with Izzy, and we’d used every bit of that time conducting reconnaissance, from developing a pattern of life on Piggy to finding out the procedures for vehicle transfers of prisoners. I’d visited Knuckles twice during that span, ostensibly to make sure he was well, but in reality to glean as much information as I could. On the last visit, I’d seen someone had played drums with his face again and was convinced I was doing the right thing. Unfortunately, the prison didn’t agree with my assessment. Getting him out had turned into a long string of dominoes, with every one a potential single point of failure.
    The prison was fairly new, in the northern section of Chiang Mai outside the city proper. Built to relieve overcrowding at the old prison downtown, it was now overcrowded as well, housing both people serving time and people awaiting sentencing and subsequent transfer to a permanent facility. That was the only good thing, as prisoners were moved out daily, thus making it routine.
    My stroke of genius was to use this routine and convince them that Knuckles was being transferred to Bangkok, the theory being that Chiang Mai would forget him once he was out the doors, and Bangkok wouldn’t check on him until prodded by the State Department—which would never happen. With the bureaucratic chaos that was Thailand, he wouldn’t be missed for weeks—if not years.
    Unfortunately, because of Knuckles’s little fight, Piggy had moved him into the newest section under his personal command. This made his transfer no longer routine, as Piggy himself had to approve the release, and we’d never pull off this charade against anyone with a reason to stop it. A single phone call would be the domino that fell flat.
    I had to get Piggy out of the prison, and I was using Jennifer to do so. Remembering his comment on our first visit, I knew he’d run at the chance to hop in the sack with her. All she had to do was pretend like she was reluctantly doing it for a quid pro quo for Knuckles. The naïve American about to learn a hard lesson in life.
    When I’d given her the mission she’d balked, saying, “Why do I always have to play some sort of floozy? Surely there’s something else I can do to get him out.”
    I’d said, “Jennifer, we need him out of the prison for an hour. A coffee break won’t cut it. Given the drive time to his house and back, that means only thirty minutes of stalling. Thirty minutes and you can flee the house like you misunderstood.”
    “Come on. Did you see that guy? You’re putting me in a house by myself with someone who wants to attack me.”
    Like an ass, Decoy had blurted, “Yeah, but you’re good at that shit. I remember what you looked like in Prague dressed like a hooker.”
    I saw her eyes water, and she left the room. Too late, I realized she was reliving the attack on her just months ago, and now, callously, I was throwing her directly into what she feared the most.
    Decoy said, “What did I do? What was that about?”
    “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
    Besides Jennifer, there were just two people on earth who knew what had happened to her: me and the guy who’d done it. Since I’d slaughtered him with my bare hands, that left only me, and Jennifer wanted to keep it that way. Nobody else on the team had a clue, and now they were potentially about to misjudge Jennifer’s reaction as her not being able to handle the stress of mission profiles because I’d been blind to her specific fear. I couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t have them questioning her capabilities for the wrong reasons, because it might prove catastrophic under fire.
    I stood and said,