A Cheap Price to Pay

By Carroll N. Jackson

No information available at this time. Author will provide once available.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664198173

Book preview

PROLOGUE

THURSDAY DECEMBER 22

Stuart Mills snapped out of an empty daydream, his heart racing and both hands with a death grip on the steering wheel. He checked his rear-view and side mirrors, then torqued his neck for a frantic glance over each shoulder. Where was he? Was there cause for panic? No answers quickly came to mind, which was a rare and puzzling state of unawareness for a man priding himself on scrupulous attention to detail. His foot had just been yanked off the accelerator and was now poised to stomp on the brake pedal, but why? He neither saw nor sensed danger in any of the three southbound lanes. Feeling nonplussed and more than a little foolish, he dropped his foot back on the gas pedal. A little more time was obviously needed to process this fuzzy state of affairs… Just a little more time.

His disorientation slowly began to fade as he reviewed the events leading up to the here and now. He was driving to the airport, he recalled. Yes, that was it: he was going home for Christmas. Home…

Shit! He was going to overshoot the airport exit! To make matters worse, he was trapped dead to rights, smack dab in the middle of a high-speed automotive peloton, no safe way out. His reacted with a whimper, bemoaning his fate, and then he spat out a curse, blaming a vengeful God for this unholy predicament. A devout Christian, he quickly retracted that blasphemy: God wasn’t behind the wheel, he confessed out loud, glancing skyward in repentance. It was he, Stuart James Mills, who had proceeded along the road like a middle-of-the-pack lemming, oblivious to everything except the asshole right in front of him.

He tapped his brake twice and frantically twisted his neck to again check over his inside shoulder, then tugged at the blinker as he swerved toward the last—and approaching way too fast—exit for Boston’s Logan Airport. Motorists along this heavily traveled section of Route 1 engaged in a nerve-wracking game of chicken on a daily basis. Fortunately, the young woman behind the wheel of a silver Mercedes SUV on Stuart’s right flank decided not to play today. Any other day she would have, unwilling to be bullied by another arrogant male driver, but her responsibility to safely transport three preteens to a school-sponsored Christmas party ruled out that option. She flashed her headlights and slowed down just enough to create a three-car-length gap, about the bare minimum needed for that macho asshole to merge into the exit lane.

Stuart saw the opening and committed. With a silent prayer, followed by an internal whoop of banzai, he swerved hard to the right at fifty miles an hour and squeezed in. Phew, threaded the needle, he exulted. A caring God must be watching over him today.

The new lane, impossible not to notice, was slathered with iridescent yellow surface paint. This apparently inexhaustible supply of paint had allowed for a multitude of parabolic directional arrows and tapered rows of chevrons, visual prods designed to funnel drivers into the proper lane. A forgiving, obnoxiously-loud rumble strip had been provided for the grossly inattentive and/or the utterly clueless.

The sympathetic suburban mom then scolded him with an extended honk, commuter speak for You’re welcome, asshole. Chastened, Stuart belatedly gave her a backward wave of apology. His teenage daughter once called his My bad gesture dorky. He smiled at the remembrance of her. It would be good to be home for Christmas... Home…

A prolonged sigh percolated from his chest: saved once again by the kindness of a stranger. He began to tingle with anticipation: the final leg of his journey lay just ahead. After three grinding weeks away from his northern Virginia home, he had finally concluded the last of his nine audits, all of them related to Massachusetts companies that had applied for outside financing.

For the most part, these applications came from mid-sized businesses that found themselves in arrears with various tax obligations, or from sketchy retail operations that lacked the capital reserves needed to purchase inventory for the upcoming year. Smaller banks and lending institutions in the Northeast relied on Stuart’s post-audit appraisals to determine credit lines. Like a triage doctor in a war zone, he had the heartless job of rejecting the clearly hopeless cases. Only the most viable would receive an infusion of funds, the true lifeblood of all enterprises.

A negative rating from him often spelled doom for an undercapitalized business, but sympathy never entered into the equation. Capitalism was economic Darwinism. He had been taught that harsh yet fundamental truism at the Wharton School of Business, where a crusty old professor of Corporate Finance constantly reminded his students that Miracle Cures 101 was NOT to be found in the curriculum. There were winners and losers, he preached, and no one was guaranteed so much as a participation trophy. If you got your ass handed to you in the mean old business world, expect no sympathy. Big boys’ games, big boys’ rules he would chant with didactic fervor. Never was a smile shown, only a fixed hellfire-and-brimstone glare that would stay with his students until their dying days.

The late-afternoon traffic heading toward the airport flowed in a heavy but steady stream. Stuart was well aware that he had barely beaten the worst of the weekday rush-hour madness that typically turned Boston’s major arteries into colossal parking lots. He breathed deeply through his nose and allowed his shoulders to heave in relief when, blessedly, he arrived at the Bargain Rent-a-Car returns lot.

The bare-bones rental company, he knew, provided sporadic shuttle service to the close-by terminals, but he decided that he would hoof it today. He was running a little late, and a brisk walk, even with the added burden of the suitcases, wouldn’t kill him. All that remained for him to do was sign off on the piece-of-shit rental car, grab his luggage from the trunk, and hustle his fanny over a short distance to the terminal. He was booked on the six o’clock shuttle to Washington. He felt safe, over the worst that life and his job could inflict on him. And he was going home.

Home. No more economy motel rooms, with their stained and lumpy mattresses, unreliable hot water, paper-thin walls that failed to muffle the blaring televisions and enthusiastic liaisons from abutting rooms, and hit-or-miss thermostats that led to some wildly fluctuating temperatures. An end to chain restaurants and their generic food that sustained without satisfying. No more POS rental cars, even though his superiors would notice and appreciate the savings. Thirty-eight, he thought wistfully, too old for the rat race.

Stuart drove with the grain over the anti-theft steel teeth into the snow-free Bargain return lot. An attendant wearing voluminous tan coveralls and hunter orange gloves waved him over to an empty slot. Slot thirteen, Stuart was quick to observe, the numerals stenciled in yellow paint on the pavement. He lapsed into a wry grin; he wasn’t at all superstitious but sure as hell had reached his lifetime quota of iridescent yellow. He waved in recognition of the attendant’s directive and pulled into the indicated stall.

The lot worker began barking out some instructions, but the roar of an outbound jet smothered his words. Stuart rolled down the window of his no-frills rental and poked his head out. An icy gust of wind swept in from Boston Harbor, causing his exposed windward ear and the tip of his nose to tingle unpleasantly. Within seconds he felt a freezing/burning sensation, as painful as the stinging aftermath of a slap on a cold cheek. He gasped and tucked his head back into the warm shelter of the car, a comforting palm now cupped over the afflicted ear. Maybe he should wait for the shuttle, he began to think. Hell, an unprepared man could die from exposure in this merciless harborside cold.

The Bargain employee approached Stuart’s car on the driver’s side. The man had a familiar face. Very familiar. It reminded him of … of him! The resemblance was eerie, right down to the chestnut-brown mustache and the thinning, longish hair. The closer the man got to him, the more shocking the resemblance became. In a chilling moment of prescience, Stewart felt a current of dread pass through his body, most intensely in the area of his loins.

Despite these clamoring warnings from his primal instincts, he failed to undertake a single proactive measure to protect himself. He watched, frozen, as the attendant withdrew a skinny screwdriver from the deep side pocket of his mechanic’s coveralls. The man bent down at the open window, chanted a few indecipherable words, and then executed a savage backhand thrust that drove the spiked tool through Stuart’s left eye and into his brain. Thereupon, with the modulated intensity of a chef whisking a hollandaise, the assailant began to scramble neural pathways. Stuart, unable to reverse the thrust nor arrest the subsequent stirring motion, spastically slapped at the invading hand. Seconds later he slumped forward against the shoulder harness, his limp arms flopping to the sides of the steering column. Although clinically dead, Stuart began to twitch in postmortem spasms. A few gruesome seconds later, the corpse lay still... Stuart would not be home for Christmas.

The assassin didn’t pause to admire his handiwork, although a cursory inspection satisfied him. There was some milky fluid draining from the eye, plus some expected blood, but the absence of gunshot residue made for a clean kill: with no residue of explosives to detect, TSA sensors wouldn’t squawk when he passed through airport security.

He swatted the man’s lifeless right arm away from the steering wheel and leaned farther in to yank the keys from the ignition. He was able to ignore the sour stench that released bowels typically produced... Death was rarely a dignified affair. He easily withdrew the weapon, a common woodworker’s awl, from Stuart’s eye and tossed it onto the rubber floor mat in the back.

He walked casually to the trunk and opened it with the retrieved rental key, then returned to the driver and unbuckled the dual restraint harness. After a 360 degree scan of the vicinity, he hauled out the inert body and dragged it to the rear of the car. Whereupon, with an explosive burst of strength, he hefted the one hundred and sixty pounds of dead weight and dumped it into the trunk with the indifferent care typically afforded to a sack of garden mulch. Confident that no one could see him in the deepening twilight, he rummaged through Stuart’s jacket pockets until he recovered the dead man’s wallet and a crumpled airline voucher, a flimsy printout of an on-line purchase.

Next he removed two Samsonite suitcases, set them aside, and then gently closed the trunk. The job here was finished. It had been easy. He unzipped his full-body coveralls, stepped out of them, then kicked the oil-stained garment beneath the rental.

Farouk Aziz now projected the image of an archetypal suburban commuter: Carol Reed argyle sweater under a Patagonia down winter coat, burnt-orange corduroys, and barely-scuffed hiking boots that had never strayed far from paved paths. He wore no sensible hat, but his fifty-dollar imitative coif had been safely preserved by way of a copious application of styling gel. He strode to the rear of the lot and through a double-hinged pedestrian gate. His superiors, staying warm with a flask of Irish whiskey inside the weakly-heated mechanics’ shack, wouldn’t notice his absence until it didn’t matter. They’d seen the last of him.

Farouk hated Boston. Cold, gray, dreary December Bah-stun. He often comforted himself with the thought of an eternally warm Paradise. No cold, no infidels, and best of all, no Americans.

Outside the gate a nondescript, metallic-gray van was waiting for him, its engine running and the heater on full blast. He pulled open the unlocked passenger door and dumped the suitcases between the front bucket seats, just behind the gear shift, then smiled as he settled into the shotgun seat. The Americans were such cowboys, he mused, right down to these silly frontier names they revived every couple of generations... Bluster, nothing more.

He briskly rubbed his arms to exorcise the cold. He didn’t speak. A darkly handsome young man behind the wheel greeted Farouk in Farsi, this particular dialect distinct to their common birthplace, a bleak and remote village at the foot of the Zagros Mountains in western Iran.

"Sshh," Farouk cautioned.

The young driver, dressed from cap to sneakers in Nike apparel, bowed at the rebuke. He knew better. This was not the time to be overheard speaking a Middle Eastern language, not this close to Logan. All of the airport security personnel, plus federal, state, and local law enforcement, were on heightened alert at every transportation hub in the country. Americans, he had witnessed, were never slow to reach for their guns, especially when they were reacting to specific Internet threats from those Sunni fanatics pledged to ISIS.

The van was parked on the hard shoulder of a six-lane road that led to and from the airport terminals. A turnaround lay just ahead. The driver pulled into the lighter outbound traffic, put on his blinker, then merged left to reverse direction.

Holiday travelers jammed the unloading zone in front of the Corridor Airlines terminal. Taxis, limousines, minivans, and private cars spewed forth passengers and misty pollution in equal measure. The young driver honked and bullied his way to the curb like a lifelong Bostonian, then swerved into a choice spot under the watchful gaze of an airport policeman. The vigilant cop stared intently at them for several unblinking seconds. Sensing nothing amiss, nothing hinky, he redirected his attention toward a boisterous clutch scurrying away from a Holiday Inn minibus.

Adopting a commuter’s frazzled attitude, Farouk climbed out of the van with outward reluctance. He reached back inside to grab the two suitcases and then headed toward the terminal’s outer doors. He utilized the curbside luggage check-in to rid himself of the dead weight. Two luggage claims and a fresh boarding pass were handed to him in a crisp Corridor Airlines ticket packet. Outwardly composed despite the recent infusion of adrenaline, he calmly insinuated himself into a bulging line at the security check-in. The line shuffled forward at a deliberate pace. Although there was some minor grumbling and groaning, the line was moving. After a tolerable fifteen minutes, he stepped forward to begin his run through the security gauntlet.

Farouk showed his ticket and photo ID to an initial-screening agent. The heavy-set black woman carefully scrutinized the photo on his ID, in this case a Virginia driver’s license. She looked up, down, and back up a final time. Smiling joylessly, she returned his possessions and wished him a pleasant flight and a vapid happy holiday.

His next step was the carry-on screening. He dumped his loose change and other incidentals from his pants pockets, along with Stuart’s ticket folder and wallet, into a shallow plastic tray. His boots were next, in a truly clumsy procedure. The Patagonia jacket was last to go into the mix, but a young TSA employee was having none of it; he wagged a gotcha forefinger, then pointed to his own belt, tapping its buckle by way of explanation. With a put-out sigh and unapologetic shrug, Farouk stripped off his belt and dismissively tossed it onto his pile of personal effects. Next he manhandled the mounded tray onto the waiting conveyor belt, which carried it through an x-ray screener, without incident. Then Farouk unhurriedly stepped into the WBI, or Whole Body Imager, the Orwellian scanner that had evoked so much virally-driven outrage in the recent past.

Farouk was waved through after the brief procedure detected nothing anomalous or threatening, either on or in his body. Once he had retrieved his loose items and slipped his belt and winter coat back on, there remained but one final hurdle—passing the scrutiny of the only visibly-armed agent inside the terminal. The unnervingly alert man, posted at the terminus of the security inspection zone, wore a dark-blue airport police uniform and sported a matte black Beretta on his hip. At present he was intently scanning Farouk for possible tells. His gaze never once slackened, but he displayed no elevated concern and casually tossed his head to signal good to go. Farouk knew to look the cop squarely in the eye, then shared an acknowledging nod with him prior to strolling into the terminal proper.

Having completed his pass through the security perimeter with little hassle, Farouk began to breathe more easily. He ambled past a busy Corridor Airlines courtesy counter, where a crush of bargain hunters had queued up to avail themselves of the perks, freebies, and individual attention promised in the airline’s latest promotional campaign. He homed in on a nearby departure board. The super-sized LED monitor showed that all flights were running on time. Corridor Airlines Flight 360 was scheduled to depart from Gate 8 for Washington, DC, in forty-five minutes.

Farouk didn’t dally and strode purposefully