briefly disappeared inside the garage. After a few seconds, he reemerged and quickly walked back over. “Engine’s cold on the Beamer, as are the ones for the Tahoe and the sweet candy apple red Porsche in the third stall.”
“Let’s take a look around,” Mac suggested. “Dara, Detective Kaufman and I will head around the back. You and Detective Herdine watch the front.”
McRyan and Kaufman went around the left side of the house, peering in windows. Mac looked in the corner window, which was for a smaller eating area just off the kitchen that opened into a large area of couches, chairs and a fireplace with exposed beams thirty feet up to the ceiling and that’s when he saw it. “Ahhhhh, shit,” he groaned.
“What? What did you see?” Kaufman asked.
Mac took off running around the back of the house, up onto the patio to the wall of twenty-foot-high windows looking out to the lake and pointed inside. “That.” Mac holstered his Sig. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he muttered in disgust.
Framed in the large windows looking out to Lake Michigan was Peter Checketts. From an exposed beam twenty feet up, he was hanging by a rope around his neck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Suicide? Seriously?”
Kristoff buckled his seatbelt as the pilot told him they were ready to take off. He was leaving a team of two behind to monitor the situation at Checketts’s, to make sure what he left behind was interpreted properly by the authorities once they arrived and in time they would arrive. He hoped it would be a day or two; given it was a Saturday morning and Checketts lived alone, there was a decent chance that would be the case. He wanted it to go down as a suicide. Given the victim’s financial circumstances, it would be easy for the police to piece it all together if they were so inclined.
He took a sip of his wine. As he looked out the window while the plane taxied, he made a mock toast to Foche, his comrade in arms.
Kristoff met Foche when they were both with the General Directorate for External Security, the French equivalent of the CIA. Foche was five years his junior but he’d identified him as an exceptional candidate to be a field agent and Foche had not disappointed. They served their country ably for years around the world. However, a joint intelligence and military operation in Afghanistan in 2002 with the United States went awry. It was Kristoff’s operation but it failed, not due to his planning or execution, but because of an American security breach in Kabul that caused Kristoff and Foche to walk thirty men into a Taliban ambush in Kandahar. Kristoff, and by extension Foche as his right-hand man, were the scapegoats for the French. The two intelligence officers were moved out of the field, professionally humiliated and moved to a desk in the General Directorate where they would be quietly phased out. Their careers in the field were over. Field work was all the two men knew. It was all they wanted to do. It was what they were built to do.
Then the Bishop rescued them.
The Bishop knew what really happened in Afghanistan, knew of their exemplary records and of their capabilities. What the Bishop needed was two men who could speak multiple languages, operate in the shadows, hire the right people, be ghosts when need be and have little compunction about killing if and when it was necessary. In return for this risky work they would be paid handsomely.
They’d both gotten their hands dirty in Afghanistan and long before for menial pay and love of country. Now, they would be paid beyond their wildest dreams to do the kind of work they were built to do. Their boss of the last ten years had lived up to every commitment that had been made and then some. Their loyalty to him was absolute. If the Bishop needed something, it was done, no questions asked.
Kristoff and Foche always knew it could come to an end. Their work was dangerous but they were elite. Until last night, they’d never failed, rarely came close to harm and never were remotely close to being identified. That was all no more.
Foche was in custody and fighting for his life. He was shot three times in the chest. Kristoff was surprised to find him still alive. He thought the police would assume he was removed from the house to be dumped. With that thought in mind, that would