Credible Threat Read online

  CREDIBLE THREAT

  A Blake Jordan Thriller

  Ken Fite

  The Blake Jordan Series

  The Senator: A Blake Jordan Thriller – Book 1

  Credible Threat: A Blake Jordan Thriller – Book 2

  August 2016

  Copyright © 2016 Ken Fite

  All rights reserved worldwide.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Find out what happens to Blake.

  ONE

  PAUL HARTMANN WAS still, listening to the rhythm of his little girl breathing as she slept peacefully next to him. At around midnight, a bad dream had awoken little Bella, causing her to run out of her room and climb into her parents’ bed, further complicating her father’s plans. Paul always welcomed his daughter to sleep in his bed whenever she was scared. But tonight was different. Tonight, he had hoped for a few hours of shuteye and worried about waking his daughter when five o’clock rolled around.

  Hartmann lifted his head and leaned to his right to check on the time. The green display read 4:59 AM.

  After taking a deep breath to calm his nerves and convincing himself that he couldn’t delay any longer, Paul lifted the thick linen bedsheet that Bella had stolen most of during the night and tried not to wake her. Hartmann climbed out of bed as quietly as he could so that he wouldn’t disturb Judy, either.

  Just before he got to his feet, the bed squeaked and Paul heard his wife’s breathing stop for a few seconds.

  Please God, don’t let her wake up, he prayed.

  When the breathing resumed and he was sure that Judy had fallen back to sleep, Hartmann placed both hands on the bed, leaned over, kissed his little girl on the forehead and mouthed I’m sorry.

  As the man walked out of the bedroom and stepped into the hallway, he made sure to stay as close to the wall as he could. Paul knew that was the best spot to walk to keep the floorboards from making any noise.

  Hartmann used the nightlight just outside of his daughter’s bedroom to keep from running into any toys along the way. He took his time walking downstairs and went straight to the bathroom next to his office where he had hidden a change of clothes. After changing, Hartmann stared at his reflection in the mirror.

  After combing his dark, thinning hair, Paul set the comb down on the sink and unbuttoned a shirt pocket, pulling out the handwritten note that he had penned the night before, and thought about where he could put it for Judy to find when Bella’s stirring would finally wake her up and she’d come downstairs looking for him.

  Hartmann grabbed the doorknob, twisted it, and gently pulled open the door.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Judy asked, standing at the doorway.

  Startled, Paul shoved the note in his pocket and took a step back while his wife followed him into the bathroom and closed the door behind her in an effort to avoid waking up Bella. “Are you seeing that woman again? Is that where you’re sneaking off to? Why are you trying to break this family apart, Paul?”

  Hartmann grabbed his wife and spun her around so that she was no longer blocking him from the door. “Will you let that go? I told you, it was a wrong number. I need to leave now. I’m going to be late,” he said.

  “Leave for where? Who sneaks out of their house at five o’clock in the morning? Cheaters, that’s who.”

  “Keep your voice down, you’re going to wake up Bella,” said Paul, staring down his wife before pulling the door open and walking to the foyer to find his shoes. Hartmann sat at the end of the stairs as his wife followed him and again blocked him from leaving as he finished tying the other shoe and stood to leave.

  “I’m not going to let you do this. If you walk out this door, don’t expect me to let you back in.”

  For a brief moment, Paul hesitated and considered telling Judy the truth. It would have made things a lot easier for him. But he decided that keeping his wife in the dark would help keep Judy and Bella safe.

  “Not sure when I’ll be back. We have another job out of state to handle,” said Hartmann as he stepped outside and climbed into his truck. “I’ll call later tonight so I can talk with Bella before she goes to bed.”

  His wife followed, pulling her light blue robe tight against her body and trying to stay warm. Before she could decide what to do, her husband had already backed out and started driving away from their home.

  Judy Hartmann stood at the edge of the driveway, watching the fading glow of the brake lights as her husband turned the corner at the end of their street and disappeared.

  As soon as her husband left, Judy walked back inside and locked the door behind her.

  She picked up her cell phone and activated a program for locating family members that she had also installed on her husband’s phone several weeks before – the last time he disappeared after she caught him talking to another woman.

  She grabbed a blanket from a downstairs closet and sat down on the couch, holding the phone with both hands. She watched the marker that represented her husband move across the map on her phone’s screen. “Where are you going and why are you doing this?” Judy whispered as she watched her husband maneuver the icy streets of Chicago, leaving their Oak Park neighborhood, heading toward downtown.

  Twenty minutes later, the marker representing Paul stopped moving.

  Judy almost didn’t notice it as she had spent the last several minutes in what felt like a trance, trying to figure out where he might be going. When she realized that her husband’s truck had stopped, she zoomed in on the screen to find his location. Paul drove slowly on Congress headed east.

  Judy decided that Paul must be getting close to his destination and had an idea. She’d go find him.

  She ran up the stairs and flipped on the light in her bedroom. “Mommy?” said Bella as she squinted her eyes and was blinded by the bright light shining in her face. “Where’s Daddy?” she asked.

  Judy ignored her daughter, removed her robe, and started getting dressed. “Come on, baby girl, we have to get going,” she said as she picked up her daughter and started walking back toward the stairs.

  When she finally got her daughter into the minivan that had been parked in the driveway next to Paul’s truck, Judy looked back at her phone again. The marker representing her husband was gone.

  Judy sat motionless, trying to figure out what had happened. After a few second
s, she called her husband, but the call went straight to voicemail. She tried to access the tracking application from her phone again and confirmed that her husband could not be located. “Why’d you turn your phone off?” she asked.

  “Mommy, I’m tired,” said Bella from the backseat. “I want to go back to sleep.”

  Judy Hartmann unbuckled her seatbelt, stepped outside the car, and opened the door to let her daughter out. They carefully climbed the icy driveway and stepped back into the house. “Pick me up,” demanded Bella and her mother carried her back up the stairs and tucked her back in bed.

  Judy turned the light off, sat down next to her daughter, and stared out into the darkness of her room, waiting for her eyes to adjust. “I want Daddy,” said Bella and Judy turned to rub the little girl’s back.

  “I know, sweetie. Daddy will be home soon. Just close your eyes right now and go back to sleep.”

  TWO

  WHEN HE APPROACHED downtown, Paul Hartmann’s hands began to sweat. He wiped them on his jeans as he drove his truck down Congress and slowed down just before he reached Michigan Avenue.

  Hartmann hung a right just after passing Wabash and pulled his truck into the Congress Plaza Hotel parking garage. He drove to the gate and pushed a button to dispense a ticket which he took and placed on his dashboard. After the bar lifted and he passed underneath, Paul noticed a sign with prices for parking.

  “Twenty-five dollars?” he asked in disbelief. Paul let his foot off the brakes and moved forward, anyway. While he didn’t want to be late, he had no intention of paying that kind of money to park downtown.

  Once inside the garage, Paul drove to the third level and pulled into an open spot. He picked up his cell phone and stuffed it in the glovebox before getting out of the truck and grabbing a heavy coat from the backseat. Paul walked to the end of the garage and found a set of stairs at the far corner.

  He jogged to the ground level, watching the steam surround his face every time he exhaled. When he got to the corner of Congress and Michigan, Paul noticed a marquee across the street that read 16 degrees.

  A burst of wind from Lake Michigan hit Paul’s face, causing him to flinch and close his eyes for a moment before he ran across the street and walked in the direction of Buckingham Fountain.

  Paul walked around the gigantic fountain, unable to locate the woman that he was supposed to meet.

  “I’m here,” Paul said, circling the fountain and looking all around while getting sprayed by ice-cold water whenever a gust of wind from the lake caught the sprays from the fountain at just the right time. “Where are you?” he yelled over the constant hiss of the fountain which drowned out the sound of the occasional car driving past him on Lake Shore Drive. Paul thought it was loud enough to drown out footsteps, too.

  Not being able to hear someone walk up made Paul nervous. More than nervous – it made him paranoid.

  Then there was the darkness. It was hard to make anything out at five-thirty in the morning, two full hours until daybreak. The only light came from the fountain, which had an eerie glow that alternated between red and purple. Paul looked up and noticed a few lights were coming on inside many of the nearby skyscrapers making up the Chicago skyline and wondered for a moment if anyone could see him out there.

  He thought about his warm bed back in Oak Park and wished he could still be next to his little Bella.

  As soon as Paul passed the north side of the fountain, he felt the presence of someone watching him. Paul jerked around and stared into the dark bushes of Grant Park, desperately searching everywhere for someone to emerge and feeling his heart pounding hard in his chest.

  Then he saw her. The silhouette of a woman wearing all black began to form as she walked out of the bushes and headed in Paul’s direction. She wore a heavy coat with a scarf wrapped around her neck. She was beautiful and knew how to get what she wanted from a man. She scared the hell out of Paul.

  “Were you followed?” asked the woman.

  “Of course not. Nobody’s out on the roads at this time.”

  “And your phone?”

  “I turned it off before I left the house like you asked me to. It’s in the car,” Paul said and looked over her shoulder and off to the side trying to figure out if they were alone. “Now tell me why I’m here.”

  The woman smiled. “You know why. You need money. Ten thousand, if I remember correctly.”

  “I want the money I worked for already, the money you owe me.” Paul looked away toward the skyline.

  “You need to do one more favor for me and then you’ll get paid for both jobs. Twenty grand.”

  “Give me the money and I walk. I don’t want to be involved in any of this anymore. Do you know–”

  “Mr. Hartmann,” said the woman, interrupting Paul and taking control of the situation. “I suggest you do me this favor before things get more complicated for you.” She reached into her coat and pulled out a picture of his daughter and turned it around for him to see. A black and white still taken from outside Paul’s home let him know that the woman and whoever she worked for knew exactly where he lived.

  Paul walked closer and looked down on the woman. She lifted her hand as if to say stop and Paul saw a man step out of the shadows from behind her, holding a gun that was pointed straight at him. Paul took a step back and noticed that the man was holding a small aluminum briefcase in his other hand.

  Paul refocused on the woman and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “What do you want me to do?”

  She motioned to the man behind her to hand the briefcase over to Paul, who reluctantly accepted it.

  “I understand you have an important assignment later this morning. Correct?”

  Paul hesitated, realizing that the woman knew more about him than he thought, and finally nodded yes.

  “Good. You will hide this somewhere inside the vehicle where it cannot be found. When you get to your final destination, you will hand it off to one of my men. Then you will get paid. Do you understand?”

  Paul tried to open the briefcase, but it was locked. “Where’s the key?” he asked before shaking it twice.

  She stepped away from Paul with a concerned look in her eyes. “Mr. Hartmann, please don’t do that.”

  Paul felt his heart skip a beat as it pounded harder than it ever had in his entire life. He held onto the small briefcase with two hands and stretched them out in front of him. “What the hell’s in this thing?”

  The woman dropped the photo of his daughter and Paul watched it fall to the ground, only to get picked up by another gust of wind that carried it away back toward the entrance to Grant Park.

  “Hide the briefcase. Get it to my man. Get paid,” she said as Paul watched her disappear into the night. The man she was with followed and, a moment later, he was gone, too.

  The nearby buildings caught his attention again. He watched a few more lights turn on inside the skyscrapers. The small briefcase felt very heavy to Paul and he wondered again what might be inside it.

  Paul carefully set the briefcase on the ground and sat down at the edge of the fountain, trying to focus and make sense of what had just happened. Another gust of wind blew in from Lake Michigan, spraying water on him. He had a decision to make that would change the rest of his life.

  Could he really pull off conning one of the greatest intelligence agencies on the planet?

  THREE

  THE FLIGHT FROM Chicago took less than two hours. Just long enough for the Boeing 737 to hit a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet before the pilot started the slow descent and final approach to Washington Dulles International Airport.

  “Blake, we’re about to land,” Jami said softly, putting her hand on my arm so she wouldn’t startle me. I opened my eyes and turned to see her smiling at me. “How did you sleep?”

  “I didn’t,” I replied, turning my gaze to the front of the plane as I watched the fasten your seatbelt sign light up and we heard the pilot begin to speak, letting us know that we would touch down in ten mi
nutes.

  Jami was still staring at me. A little thing she did whenever she was bothered by something, I learned. “What’s wrong, Jami?”

  “I’m worried about you,” she replied. “You’re not eating, you’re not sleeping. You’ve been in this funk for months. When are you going to be you again?”

  “Maybe this is me,” I said, growing too impatient, too quickly. “You’re not on the clock, you’re on vacation. Can you stop with the interrogation?”

  Jami turned away and smiled at a little boy who ran past her back to his seat, followed by his apologetic mother. She didn’t speak again until the American Airlines aircraft landed a few minutes later. “You should text Chris and see if he’s here already,” she said as the plane inched its way toward the gate.

  “He’ll be here. If he was late, he’d let us know,” I replied as Jami and I stood and I grabbed our bags from the overhead compartment. “You know, we should have just rented a car or taken a cab to the hotel.”

  “Blake, Chris is your friend. This is what friends do. Besides, it’ll give you two a chance to catch up.”

  Twenty minutes later and we walked outside, bags in hand, to find Chris Reed. I started to pull out my cell phone to give him a call since I didn’t see him at first, but before I could call, Chris waved us down. Jami and I walked over to his black Tahoe as he jumped out and jogged over to greet us.

  “Agent Jami Davis, how the heck are you?” asked Chris and I watched him give Jami a big hug.

  “Hey man,” I said when he turned to me and we shook hands, followed by a quick embrace.

  “Blake Jordan, great to see you. Let me help you with your bags,” he said as he placed our luggage in the back of his SUV. Jami insisted that I sit in the front seat. A moment later, Chris drove off. “Where to?”

  “To the Hay-Adams, Hoke!” Jami joked, doing her best ‘Miss Daisy’ impression from the backseat.

  Chris turned to me and laughed. “What is this, Driving Miss Davis?” he asked and Jami snickered.

  “She’s excited about Inauguration Day tomorrow, can’t you tell?” I added.

  “I can see that,” said Chris as we left the airport and headed east. “I knew you two wouldn’t miss it.”