Sworn to Protect Read online

  SWORN TO PROTECT

  A.K. AUGUST

  Copyright © 2020 A.K. AUGUST

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book 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 express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 9798645225698

  Cover design by: BEAUTeBOOK

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  ABOUT A.K. AUGUST

  CHAPTER ONE

  KATIE

  Think Katie!

  First aid, Resuscitation Annie. Two fingers above the Zyphoid Process, link hands, press down firmly, ten presses, airway open, two big breaths. Repeat.

  Where are the paramedics?

  Come on, Jonathan, breathe dammit!

  The Chief of Staff for Senator Hart was unconscious. I’d just interviewed him. Five minutes ago I was elated, not only to get someone at Colby’s level to speak to me on camera, but the sound bites he gave were fabulous, and I was excited to break down my gear and rush home to cut it into my documentary.

  That was until I found him convulsing on the floor after I’d stepped out to confirm the arrival of his car service. Now I frantically try to keep his blood pumping until the paramedics arrive, hoping I remember my CPR techniques correctly.

  People enter in a blur. I’m not sure who is who until a hand on my arm, an EMT tells me I can step aside. I teeter back and land on my rear, dazed by the situation, just watching the paramedics work.

  “Please let him be okay.” I plead. One EMT takes over compressions; another checks vitals, asking me a series of questions most I couldn’t answer.

  “What’s his name?”

  “What happened?”

  “Did he take any medications?”

  “Was he on drugs?”

  “Did he have alcohol in his system?”

  When questions stop, the EMT orders hotel security to help move Jonathan onto a gurney. As fast as they arrived, they were moving out, one EMT straddling Jonathan on the gurney, continuing the CPR. They are going to George Washington Emergency. The interview and my equipment forgotten, I grab my bag and run from the room so I could follow.

  I’d only just met Jonathan, but he seemed like a good guy and I have no idea if he has any family. Driving across town, I dial Jonathan’s office number hoping someone, anyone will answer.

  “Hello, Senator Hart’s office. How can I help you?”

  I quickly explain what happened and that I’m on my way to the hospital. After repeating several times to the bimbo on the phone that I didn’t know anything more than what I’d already told her, I hang up on her and pull into the hospital parking lot.

  The nurse’s station is dismissive. I’m told I have to wait. They didn’t know anything.

  I’m not good at waiting.

  My father calls it impatience. My mother calls it tenacity. However you label it, I’m not about to sit in a plastic chair and stare at the Home Shopping Network until someone behind the counter finally decides to be helpful.

  I ask where the restroom is and follow the pointed finger to the left, then pass the sign for the women’s toilet and keep moving down the hall, surveying curtained cubicles, looking for something familiar. Maybe one of the EMT’s or Jonathan’s shoes; I’d commented on them when he arrived for the interview, Louboutin’s he told me. The signature red leather sole was something I’d seen on women’s heels, but never on a men’s shoe, definitely out of my price range.

  I round a corner and stop. Directly ahead are the EMTs who took Jonathan as well as a couple of doctors.

  “How is he?” I speak to the doctors but glance around at the others, not sure who can answer my questions.

  “Who are you?” The doctors says. His nametag reads Dr. Hudson.

  One of the EMT’s spoke first. “She was on the scene, provided CPR before we got there.”

  “How long did you give CPR before Craig arrived?” Dr. Hudson asks, pointing to the EMT.

  How long? I rack my brain trying to piece together the events in a timeline. The interview ended at two o’clock, but I didn’t even know what time it is now. “Ah, I don’t know. It felt like a while, but it may have only been a couple of minutes?”

  Why is this important?

  “How’s Jonathan?” I ask again, a little frustrated.

  The doctor looks at Craig, then back to me, sympathy drawn over his face.

  “I’m sorry, he didn’t make it.”

  I feel the room spin. “What did you say?” My voice sounded hollow, almost tinny. Then the room went black.

  ANTHONY

  “Come on, Tony, have one more.” I agreed to meet Mark at Hamilton because I needed to unwind, wash off the stain of my assignment, and rejoin my real life. Mark is a lobbyist, and with that profession comes a lot of schmoozing, wining and dining, and partying, so if anyone can break my funk, he was my best shot.

  Unfortunately, after two beers I realized I’m not ready. Too much has happened, and I’m edgy; I need to pack up the bad stuff before I can go back to pretending life is predominately good like most people do.

  Mark had a knack for partying most of the night, then getting up and going to work, with no adverse side effects. He’d been that way since college. Me? I was a lightweight; even more now, since I wasn’t trying to keep up with Mark on a weekly basis. I’ve learned to keep reserve energy stored. I could pull all-nighters. It was practically a staple during my years in DELTA.

  But unlike the military where I had chunks of downtime after a big mission, and I’d get plastered with my unit, bonding, thanking the fucking gods we survived; life in the FBI held a nine-to-five quality. We were the original Men in Black, known for more humorless personalities and an operational protocol manual thicker than the Guggenheim Bible. As a lobbyist, exhibitionism was almost a requirement; the FBI preferred their agents to stay under the radar whenever possible.

  Drinking tolerance aside, I just returned from an undercover assignment, where I slept with one eye open for nine months, waiting for someone to mark me as a fed and try to shoot me in the back. I couldn’t relax around the throngs of people in the bar pushing and rubbing shoulders, a natural occurrence in most DC watering holes. My eyes were on a swivel, looking for a hidden weapon to be unleashed. It wasn’t rational; I knew consciously no one here would have a weapon.

  No one in this bar cared about me unless they thought I could benefit them. It’s the po
litical game; nepotism wins. And you don’t have to be related; just being good friends puts you in a position to have access. People do favors for their friends and expect their friends to reciprocate. When you’re young and starting if you don’t have a family to give yourself that built-in leg up, you have to find the right friends. Typical conversations in a DC bar involve three questions asked in the first five minutes:

  Who are you?

  What do you do for a living?

  And can you help me with my career?

  The answer to those questions will decide if that conversation lasts six minutes. It’s what you get with the revolving election door. Staffers come and go as their political bosses rise and fall.

  If you know how to play the game, you find a way to stick around. Your friends help. For good or bad, that’s the way the game works.

  I couldn’t play the game tonight. I was raw from the hyper-vigilance required while undercover and I can’t turn that side of me off. It’s been ingrained since my military training and saved my life in some of the shittiest locations known to man. My real-life existence was similar to being undercover just on a smaller scale. I’m always aware of my surroundings and anything that seems wrong for the environment will pull my focus, yet I’m able to enjoy the moment, the conversation.

  But I wasn’t in either space right now. My head was transitioning, one foot in my undercover world, one in my real world. Right now, everyone was a possible threat, even though that made no sense when I looked around the bar.

  It was too soon to be here.

  I turned down the beer Mark thrust toward me. “Naw, I’m good. I’m not feeling it tonight. But I promise to cut loose next time.” I reached in for the bro hug, tapping our shoulders with a couple of quick pats on the back, before slipping past him and heading out.

  Escaping the crowd, I breathed easier on the sidewalk and took a moment to remind myself that I was home. Just up the street, the White House glowed in the night, lit up from all angles, a symbol of our freedoms, our rights, our nation. What I went to war for, what I chose to defend every day. I grew up here and remembered when my dad, a policy advisor, would get excited working on legislation that “will change our world.” He was big on making things better and I like to believe he instilled that in me. He wasn’t happy that I chose to go the military route, but understood.

  I drove home but walked a bit around my neighborhood instead of going inside. It was a picturesque neighborhood in the northern section of Georgetown. Skinny cobblestone streets, 200-year-old brick brown-stones, and iconic gas lantern lights kept the old-world charm of the area alive. I stood in the middle of the street and looked at the beautiful houses. I grew up here and used to know all of my neighbors. The Kingston’s on the corner threw a big BBQ on the Fourth of July. The Jamison’s were across the street; in grade school, George and I played catch at the park a couple of blocks away; Sally Carroll and her parents lived in the red house with the blue door and Sally used to babysit me when I was five. But now, with the hours I keep and the undercover work that pulled me away for months at a time, I have no idea who lives next door.

  I was tired and delaying the inevitable. I had to go inside and see how much dust had accumulated in my absence.

  Turning the key in the lock, I ruminated that it would be so much easier if my parents still lived here. Then I’d be coming home like I’d been away on holiday, trying to sneak in late and not wake them; getting up early so I could sit at the kitchen island and tell Dad stories from my trip as he made breakfast. Mom was a great cook at everything except breakfast. Eggs to be specific. It didn’t matter how Mom cooked them; an egg breakfast would be a disaster. We couldn’t explain it. Dad spent years showing Mom how to cook scrambled eggs. Not tricky. Scramble them in a bowl, heat the pan with a little butter on low, and frequently stir so they don’t stick. I could do that when I was six. And Mom tried. She broke down in tears one day after making four batches of rubbery eggs that tasted like tree bark. We still don’t know where that taste came from. But I remember Dad, wrapping his arms around Mom, laughing. She got mad, tried to push away from him, but he held firm.

  He told her that finally, after ten years of marriage, there was one thing he was better at than her. That was all he needed, one thing. For the rest of her life, he’d cook her the best breakfast, and be happy that he could do that for her. She’d laughed and dried her tears and told him she’d gladly let him cook her breakfast for the rest of her life. And he still did, at least until she got sick and no longer ate breakfast. He now lives in a small bungalow in Virginia.

  After Dad retired, Mom thought it best to move somewhere on the water, with a dock where Dad could go out and fish whenever he wanted. Dad doesn’t fish. Never has. Never even expressed a desire to fish. But Mom knew if they continued to live in the city, Dad wouldn’t stay retired; he’d want to get back “involved” and help change the world for the better. Dad knew Mom was right. Even though he doesn’t fish, he likes the water and has a small boat he takes around the shore, or sometimes they’d just sit on the dock, soaking in the sunshine, reading.

  Now the Georgetown house was mine. I loved the house and the memories, but this house needed people, it needed a family. When I turned the lock, I wanted the patter of feet to rush up and greet me. I thought about getting a dog, at least it would be something, but I’d been doing undercover work with the FBI for three years and was gone more than home so I couldn’t be responsible for any living thing right now; the dead plant on my coffee table attested to that fact.

  The air was musty, DC summer heat having baked the inside. I turned the fan on high and opened some windows letting in the cooler evening air. I grabbed a TV dinner from the freezer, tossed it in the microwave and twisted the top off a beer, happy I didn’t return to a science experiment growing in my fridge. I put fresh sheets on the bed while my dinner heated up then sat down in front of a TV rerun of Cheers! to eat.

  I spent the weekend cleaning the house, catching up on TV, and going for a run in Rock Creek Park. It felt good to be back in the city. For the past nine months, I had been living in West Virginia, as a mechanic, worming my way into the local militia group. The FBI had gotten a tip that the WV Wolverines were building a fortress and stockpiling ammunition and explosives and were going to blow up the bridges around their land in an effort to isolate themselves and declare the land annexed from the US, free from taxes. This had been an ongoing theme in the western FBI branches, dealing with private ranches covering thousands of acres. My mission was to find out how real the rumors were. The second amendment allows you to keep and bear arms, and I support that, but not when you intend to use those arms to inflict harm. So if these lunatics wanted to hide out on private land and grow their crops and have legal guns, I wasn’t going to stop them; but if they had explosives, surely unlicensed, that was most likely not going to turn out well.

  I played it low key for the first month, arriving in town and getting hired at the garage where I knew the owner was a cousin to several members of the Wolverines. I didn’t spew my political philosophies or anger at the government. Those were rookie mistakes. These militia groups might be drinking some weird-ass cool-aid, but they weren’t stupid.

  They had to befriend you. You do a favor or two, turn your eye to shady issues, and then if you’re lucky, get invited to a family dinner. That could give you access to the property, but you still had to be aloof, pretend you didn’t care what they were doing. Just enjoy the food and drink and get home safely. After a few trips, you could poke around a bit. If you got caught, taking a leak would be a good cover story, but that only worked a couple of times. You hoped to stick around until they get drunk, sleepy, or just comfortable and start to talk. If you were fortunate, they would talk, and you wouldn’t need to sneak around for the evidence before you could get out.

  When I was undercover, I never really slept. My cover could get blown any time; some newbie agent comes sniffing around on the auspice of “helping” or wo
rse, actually arrests someone thinking the guy will spill the beans to the FBI. When that happens, everyone goes on alert, new faces are kept at arm’s length and scrutinized, and my days are numbered. I’d have to pull out and we’d lose months of work. Not to mention, raise caution with the group—it could be years before we’d get close again.

  The Wolverines were an interesting bunch. Most of the guys walked the talk. They just wanted to live in peace, on the land they paid for, and be ignored by the rest of the world. I could understand why the amount of taxes bothered these guys. They didn’t plan to use infrastructures the taxes contributed to and didn’t see how that benefited their simple life. The evil was born and bred in Eddie Lofton.

  Eddie Lofton wasn’t a local, wasn’t related to anyone in town, and he didn’t own the land. But Lofton was a gifted sociopath who talked a great game and convinced these innocent, simple people their dreams were too small and couldn’t be achieved unless they dreamed bigger. He had them believing that it wasn’t enough to own the land and pay off the mortgage, lead a simple life; hell, if they’d consulted an accountant, they would have found the taxes owed for that kind of lifestyle would be minimal.

  No. Eddie had the plan to blow up the bridges and brainwashed the group to help raise money and purchase the explosives. I don’t believe Lofton would’ve stopped with the bridges. I’m not even sure that was his plan. That was just what he said to get the others to help gather the supplies he needed. I think Lofton was looking at a larger target and was hours away from finalizing his real plan. If I hadn’t called in the raid, he would’ve taken off with the guns and explosives. At least that was what I’d been telling myself. I could’ve waited. It was 50/50. I saw it in Lofton’s eyes. Either he was going to bring me into his plan, or he’d figured me for a cop and put a bullet between my eyes. I hoped the intelligence gathered during the raid would point to Lofton’s real target and possible accomplices, although I think Lofton was alone. I never got any sense Lofton conferred or even communicated with people outside the Wolverines. He was a loner on a mission and stumbled on a way to get these people to help him.