Pray for the Innocent Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  Also by Alan Orloff

  RUNNING FROM THE PAST

  (A Kindle Scout Selection)

  DIAMONDS FOR THE DEAD

  (Agatha Award Finalist for Best First Novel)

  KILLER ROUTINE

  (Book one in the Last Laff mystery series)

  DEADLY CAMPAIGN

  (Book two in the Last Laff mystery series)

  Also by Alan Orloff

  writing as Zak Allen

  FIRST TIME KILLER (thriller)

  THE TASTE (horror)

  RIDE-ALONG (suspense)

  Visit www.alanorloff.com for more information.

  To my wife, Janet

  To my sons, Mark and Stuart

  and

  To Grammy

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Excerpt: FIRST TIME KILLER

  Acknowledgments

  Also from Alan Orloff: RUNNING FROM THE PAST

  FIRST TIME KILLER

  RIDE-ALONG

  THE TASTE

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Cole Tanner eyed the back door of the generic warehouse, willing his heartbeat to slow. It was one of the less lethal talents he’d picked up during his years of training, both in the classroom and in the field, but one of the handier ones. He’d realized, somewhere around the fourth or fifth assignment, that it was a lot tougher to kill people if your pulse was pounding like a drum at an AC/DC concert. Somehow, though, he didn’t think he’d have any trouble with today’s target.

  He’d waited until 0900 to begin the operation. Everyone needed to be in place—the timing was critical. From his car, parked behind an abandoned building, it was a straight shot through the hole he’d cut in the chain-link boundary fence and across the warehouse’s back parking lot to the rear service door, about forty yards away. Tanner figured it would take Gosberg about sixty seconds to reach the car. A little less if he sensed trouble.

  He agonized over his decision to go through with it. Peter Gosberg was a good man, a truly decent man, whose goal was to make other people’s lives better. Gosberg was also a fine brother-in-law. His fine brother-in-law. When Tanner first met him, he’d seemed a little high-strung and a lot humorless. But once he’d gotten to know him better, Tanner realized Gosberg possessed many of the same qualities his Janie did, just in a male manifestation: compassion, intelligence, loyalty.

  Over the years, they’d spent a fair amount of time together, drinking beer and shooting the shit. Talking about politics, vacations, Gosberg’s cutting-edge research. Two government drones on different sides of the coin. Research and Operations. A symbiotic relationship.

  Tanner glanced at the syringe sitting on the center console of his rental car. Throughout his productive career, he’d eliminated a lot of people in a lot of ways. Some creative, some gruesome, almost all with torturous efficiency. Whatever the mission called for, he’d deliver. On time. Excellent results. Tanner hadn’t risen to the top echelon of wet work operatives by playing coy. The US government might be incompetent at many things, but training field ops to carry out their missions wasn’t one of them. They had it down to a science. And he’d taken to the training with the fervent dedication seen in the most effective killing machines.

  Unfortunately, the eighteen years in various special ops units had taken its toll on Tanner’s “machine.” He was leaking oil with every passing mile, misfiring on more than a couple of cylinders. Rusting out from the inside. Just about totaled. The army shrinks called it PTSD, an affliction common in Gulf War vets. They’d written a prescription for rest and therapy, and he’d tried both, but neither had managed to dent his all-consuming anguish.

  He’d been suffering from it for years—the debilitating feelings of despair, the crippling I’m-just-a-piece-of-worthless-shit thought spiral. Tanner referred to it as the Big Black Vortex. A deepening, darkening abyss that sucked you down, farther and farther, until you could no longer see the surface. And you knew—simply knew—you’d never see topside again. Too far gone. Worst of all, the Vortex eliminated all traces of hope. No escape. No mercy. No comfort. Not unless you took the ultimate step.

  Cole Tanner was not afraid to kill. He also was not afraid to die.

  Tanner had given a lot of thought to today’s mission. It would serve everyone’s purpose. Except Janie’s, of course. Poor sweet Janie. As his superiors so often reminded him, collateral damage sometimes couldn’t be helped.

  Pray for the innocent and pass the ammo.

  Tanner made sure the car doors were unlocked. He held up the syringe and tapped it lightly with his forefinger, then took a deep breath and punched a few buttons on his phone.

  The call got picked up after the first ring. “Hello, Pete. It’s Cole.”

  “Hey, man, how are you?”

  For a moment, Tanner thought about scrubbing the mission. Surprising Janie with his return to the States. Having a burger and a cold one. But the Big Black Vortex wouldn’t ever let go. Never. Unless . . . “Pete. I need your help.”

  “What’s wrong? Jane okay?” A waver in Gosberg’s steely voice.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Where are you?”

  No one knew Tanner had returned to the US. No one knew where he’d been lately, either. He’d bounced around from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya most recently, but before he’d deployed he’d told everyone he’d be out of circulation for a while, no specifics. They knew what that meant. No more questions. “Actually, I’m nearby. Listen, I need your help. It’s important. Urgent, in fact.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “You need to come out the back door of your building. Cross th
e parking lot. Peel back a hole in the fence. I’m in a white rental parked next to a rusted-out dumpster. I’m the only one here, so I shouldn’t be hard to find. But come quickly.”

  “What the hell—”

  “Take care, Pete.” Tanner disconnected the call and felt through the material of his shirt pocket to make sure the vial was still there. Reassured, he picked up the syringe with a steady hand. Once it found its mark, death would be quick.

  Forty seconds later, the back door of the warehouse swung open. Tanner made sure Gosberg was coming his way before he put things into motion. He’d broken his arm and both legs before and had suffered lacerations requiring fifty stitches, but the sight of a tiny needle in his arm always made him queasy. Just another one of God’s inexplicable jokes.

  When Gosberg was halfway across the parking lot, Tanner found a vein on his forearm, jabbed the needle in, and depressed the plunger. Who was this joke going to be on, Tanner thought, him or God?

  Finally, mercifully, the Big Black Vortex loosened its grip on Cole Tanner’s soul.

  #

  Peter Gosberg crossed the parking lot, heading for the back fence, confused. When was the last time Tanner needed his help? Something wasn’t right, and his gut was telling him—yelling at him—how much of an understatement that was. Hell, Jane hadn’t even mentioned Tanner was back in the country. And what was with all the cloak-and-dagger stuff, meeting in a deserted parking lot?

  There it was, the white car next to the dumpster. Just sitting there. Gosberg gave a half-hearted wave, but with the glare off the windshield, he couldn’t tell if Tanner responded. He arrived at the fence and pried back the cut-out portion enough to squeeze through, careful not to let the sharp edges snag his shirt.

  Five steps later, Gosberg knew his gut had been right to scream. Tanner slumped against the door, eyes closed. Had he dozed off? Highly unlikely.

  Gosberg rapped once on the window, just to make sure, then opened the door, quickly grabbing Tanner before he could fall out. Heart attack?

  He felt for a pulse, couldn’t find one. Immediately, Gosberg reached for his phone to call 911, but before he could dial, he noticed a syringe stuck in Tanner’s arm. Christ Almighty! He’d done this to himself. OD.

  He pictured his sister Jane slumped on the floor in hysterics, her life destroyed by this thoughtless, selfish bastard.

  But Cole Tanner wasn’t a thoughtless, selfish bastard. Not the Cole Tanner he knew. Far from it, in fact. The man who’d married his sister, the one he’d hung out with, was a damn decent guy. A true-blue American patriot. Not a coward by anybody’s definition. Something else was going on.

  An envelope poked out of Tanner’s shirt pocket. Gosberg grabbed it. Confidential for Peter Gosberg. He tore open the envelope, knowing if there was any hope of reviving Tanner, every second was precious.

  Gosberg unfolded the note and read it, slowly shaking his head. When he finished, he stuffed it into his pocket. Thought a moment. He’d been right and wrong. Cole Tanner was a thoughtless, selfish bastard, and he was also a true-blue American patriot. A fucking hero. Life was full of contradictions.

  He hit a few buttons on his phone. “Robinson. This is Peter. First, you have to disable the rear security camera. I’m pretty sure we’re overdue for some routine maintenance. Then you need to grab a gurney, stat, and haul ass out the back door and across the parking lot. Get Ehreng to help you. Look for me. Before you do anything, tell Imprezza to start prepping the O-room table. We have a directed donation coming in, and it seems to be in damn good shape. Let’s keep it that way.”

  Chapter Two

  In the control room, lab technician JaVane Robinson leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms above his head, wincing as his left elbow cracked. It, along with his left ankle, and right wrist, and both knees, had been cracking more and more lately, and his wife, Kyanne, had started teasing him about his graying hair. Shit, he knew everyone got old, but wasn’t his decline starting early? He’d just turned forty—too young for arthritis.

  Two days ago, the latest experiment had kicked off, and Gosberg had shuffled around the work schedule, giving them all extra shifts. He still had an hour and a half until Ehreng, assigned to the graveyard shift, came in at midnight to relieve him. Then Robinson could go home to his wife and prove how young he really was. Yeah, he was in the mood for a little togetherness, all right. It had been a few days.

  Outside, thunder boomed in the distance, as if to punctuate his thoughts.

  At the workstation next to him, Sal Imprezza stared at his e-reader, munching on some corn chips, every so often mumbling something unintelligible. Imprezza kept to himself most of the time, preferring to read or play games on his phone rather than jaw. To each his own, Robinson figured, but the quiet did get to him after a while.

  He gazed through the glass window at the body lying on the exam table in the adjacent O-room. It had been a stroke of good fortune to get such a healthy body as a donation. The first time he’d heard that term applied to their research subjects, he’d cringed. A donation. As if it were fifty bucks or an old car with a bad transmission.

  The donation was a human body.

  Someone must have decided that using the euphemism would help desensitize their emotions, allowing them to continue their research without feelings of guilt. It might have worked for some of the researchers and techs, but for Robinson, it had the opposite effect. No getting around it, their donation had once been a living, breathing man, full of his own feelings and emotions.

  But it wasn’t Robinson’s call. Just like it wasn’t his call to refer to the deceased Cole Tanner as Subject Foxtrot. That was Director Gosberg’s decision, and who was Robinson to quibble? He had to admit that Gosberg, despite his obsessive tendencies, was a true genius. He’d taken an idea, a “what if” question, and transformed it into the first steps of a reality. For years, people had been trying to apply human reasoning to computer data, and the field of artificial intelligence had blossomed. But Gosberg had flipped the equation and invented a revolutionary technology that allowed them to apply computer data storage techniques to the human brain, in situ, thus exploiting the brain’s unmatched reasoning capability and intuitive judgment.

  Their current proof-of-concept experiment was designed to see how much raw data a human brain could hold. So far, things were progressing nicely—there hadn’t been any problems as they’d slowly increased the data download rates.

  Thanks to the revolutionary Optic Nerve Adapter they’d developed, they were able to use the subject’s Optic nerve as a conduit to the brain to import information in digital format. Essentially, they were downloading e-books directly into the subject’s brain, quickly and efficiently.

  At this stage of the research, the content of the data didn’t matter—it was all about perfecting the process. To that end, they’d started with encyclopedias, then moved on to other reference works: dictionaries, thesauri, books of quotations, almanacs, cookbooks, field guides, product catalogs, anything containing large amounts of data.

  Fortunately, they had access to a wealth of digitized information. The Department of Defense had partially funded a system-wide digitization project at nearby George Mason University under a different grant, and they had its library collection at their disposal. College textbooks on everything from anatomy through zoology. Classic literature. Contemporary fiction. Doctoral theses. At the moment, they were cruising through popular fiction of the 1980s. In thirty-six hours, they’d already downloaded thousands of volumes into Subject Foxtrot’s brain.

  Without a glitch.

  And there were tens of thousands of volumes to go.

  A thunderclap boomed louder, closer, and Robinson instinctively checked the equipment monitor panels. He felt like an engineer at NASA Mission Control, sitting in front of a bank of LCD screens as a scientific exploration mission unfolded before him. But instead of space, they were exploring the frontiers of the human brain.

  All systems go.

&n
bsp; He glanced at the PET scanner they’d adapted to monitor the subject’s memory capacity. They’d developed an analog icon to display the status in much the same way a fuel gauge let a driver know how much gas was in the tank. Currently, Foxtrot’s brain was only 3 percent full.

  The human brain was an amazing thing.

  A radio played jazz softly in the background. When Imprezza had come on duty, Robinson had asked if he’d mind a little background noise, and his coworker had simply responded with a smile and a nod. Judging from past experience, he wasn’t worried about disturbing Imprezza—that guy could read through anything. Robinson wished he possessed the same kind of focus.

  The music on the radio cut off, replaced by a high-pitched beeping, which was followed by a warning announcement. Severe thunderstorms have entered the metro area; take precautions. More thunder sounded. Since Robinson had moved to the DC area ten years ago, he’d seen his share of rapid-onset thunderstorms, especially during the brutally humid summer months. And it was brutally humid; even though it was only the end of June, it already felt like August.

  Imprezza didn’t look up from his book.

  “Hey, Sal,” Robinson said, loud enough to be heard over the thunderclaps and the warning alarm on the radio. “Sal!”

  Finally, Imprezza lifted his head. “Yeah?”

  “We got some weather. How does your panel look?”

  Imprezza checked the monitors in front of him. “All normal.” He flashed a patronizing smile, as if he were placating a panicked toddler, then returned to his reading.

  Robinson ignored Imprezza’s unspoken dig and checked the power indicators again, just in case. Everything appeared fine . . . then a tiny movement caught his eye. Had the virtual needle on the backup generator’s power monitor just done a little jig? He stared at it for a moment to be sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. The end of his double shift approached, and it wouldn’t be the first time fatigue had caused him to misinterpret data.

  The needle fluttered again. No mistake this time. Something was wrong with the backup generator.