“It looks good, Rach. I may have to disappear for a small amount of time, but we have a plan. It’s a good one with full backing from Paul. The bad news is the guy is a world class hitter. He’s already stalking us by the GPS signal John cloned from his phone. Paul told me shoot him in the head even if it’s in front of a hundred witnesses. I don’t have any choice but to take him out, Rach. He’ll kill us all if he makes it to his tools of the trade. He’s a long range killer. He doesn’t have anything like that with him, so it gives us a small edge I plan to exploit before he gets into a position advantageous for him.”
“I screwed up first setting you on a course to pay closer attention to everything and everybody, and then I screw up again by baiting an assassin in your skill set. Wow, I’m doing great,” Rachel said. She shifted Quinn’s form carefully as he slept in her pack carrier. “Thanks for letting me know the details.”
“I needed you to know. This was not your fault. It was my hair-brained idea to do a psycho scavenger hunt on a family day to Salem. Like I said, you’re right about my losing focus. No way does this happen today if I had thought about it with some degree of awareness. We’re on the problem now. John and Gus will split duties on tracking while we find a spot where I can upset his plans.”
“There was a time when I thought life was a bowl of cherries. Now I think it’s a bowl of pits.” Rachel kissed Nick. “I guess we soldier on until you work whatever magic tricks you still have in the bag.”
“It will be a bit more straight forward than that. No magic trick will get this guy. He’s the real deal. Sometimes I have to prove I am too.”
“Jean already suspects everything from wet work to aliens landing, complete with government conspiracies and pirates.”
“Pirates?”
“She suspects you’ve been warned about a pirate attack on the Salem Ferry,” Rachel explained.
“I think I’d rather take on some pirates,” Nick replied. “A couple of our stops on the Rachel tour of Salem are pirate related, right?”
“Yes. There’s a couple of them today I read good reviews on. I figured the ghosts, pirates and witches would really keep the kids energized through the Salem visit. I didn’t know you’d hook us into a real live adult scare fest. We’d better get started.”
Nick grinned. He had no regrets over anything. He said the right words for everyone around him to hear, but outwitting a Felix Moreau and taking his life would be a one on one challenge he had not had for quite a while. Nick liked the edge he engineered in cloning Moreau’s phone. Let Felix worry about our meetup.
*
Felix Moreau looked at the communique encoded to him from his contact in the states. It said ‘Run. Don’t walk… run. McCarty’s the real deal. Delta Force, CIA affiliation, and contractor with DOJ as well as the US Marshal’s service and FBI. Suspected assassin of NSA Chief Frank Richert. Dismantled Tanus Import/Export and Fletcher Exports as viable employers. Confirmed kills in the hundreds. Unconfirmed unimaginable. Get the hell out of Dodge, Felix’. Moreau nearly threw the tablet into the wall of the coffee shop he stopped at after confirming McCarty’s group was heading toward the Hawthorne House.
He had heard of McCarty… a New York Times Bestseller list novelist who wrote an assassin series, and was rumored to be a badass hitter. Until now, Moreau thought McCarty was some kind of clown who talked up his real life to sell books. Now he’s being told McCarty’s like Moreau, only more deadly. He didn’t believe for a second McCarty was on the hunt with his family in tow. Felix knew he could run and McCarty would never find him if he left now. It would mean putting off the best payday he’d had in a year. Moreau would be forced to delay the kidnapping of billionaire April Hutchen’s Granddaughter he had planned meticulously for later tonight while the family stayed in Salem. The delayed kidnapping meant formulating an entire operation again from the ground up.