Tainted Asset: A Travis Bishop Thriller Read online

  Travis shook his head, “Do you know anything more?” Part of Travis wanted to believe that she had the wrong person. “Are you sure it’s me? The CIA doesn’t normally go after people who don’t work for them anymore.”

  “Unfortunately, I’m sure it’s you. I wanted to warn you. I know you’ve got skills you can use to defend yourself. I’m only telling you to be prepared, that’s all…” Her voice drifted off. “Listen, Travis. I know you’re an honorable man. I heard all about how you saved your president and the way that you drove that car bomb into Lake Pontchartrain during the Mardi Gras attack. I’ve gone through your record myself. I can’t understand why there would be a kill order out on your life, but there is. Someone had to trigger it.”

  Travis gripped his hands into fists, “I have no idea. Like I said, I’ve been out for five years.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, Travis. I don’t know what to say.”

  The two of them started to walk again, turning back the way they’d come. A knot the size of a boulder formed in Travis’s gut. It hadn’t been that long since he’d gotten caught up in a terrorist bomb plot in New Orleans, led by Rashid Sharjah. A few months before the Mardi Gras bombing in New Orleans, he’d stopped the assassination of the president. And now this? Something didn’t make sense.

  “I don’t know what to say, Catherine.”

  “A thank you would be appropriate, I suppose,” Catherine said, sounding decidedly British.

  “In that case, thank you.”

  The two of them walked in silence for the next minute, options filling Travis’s head, a habit he developed during his time with Delta Force and the CIA. Faced with any problem, his mind would quickly begin taking the problem apart and then figuring out the best way to put it back together to get things right again. Travis shook his head. If what Catherine was saying was true, the quiet life he’d been living at Bishop Ranch might temporarily be over, at least until he could figure out what was going on.

  If he could do it before someone came to take him out…

  3

  Travis felt like a man drowning. Every breath seemed more valuable than the last. As he and Catherine walked back toward the stables where the horses from Bishop Ranch were spending the night, Travis wondered what to do next. Part of him wanted to pack everything up and head back to Bishop Ranch. At least there, he’d have his war room, complete with all of his guns and weapons. He’d have something of a tactical advantage. It might at least give him a fighting chance at defending himself.

  But he knew, the reality was that if the CIA wanted to get to him, they could get to him anywhere. He could run to the ranch, but he couldn’t hide. Not that he was a man prone to hiding. That wasn’t his style.

  An uncomfortable silence fell between him and Catherine as they wove their way through the dark buildings of the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds. Up ahead, from the slight rise where they walked, he could see the glow of the main arena lights lit up the distance, like the star at the top of a Christmas tree. The rest of the fairground buildings spread out around it were dimly lit, only sparsely placed overhead lights offering any break from the deep darkness that covered the fairgrounds.

  Up ahead, the buildings narrowed, only wide enough for a golf cart or pedestrians to get through, the smell of piles of acrid manure filling the air, a line of green dumpsters with black tops shoved up against the concrete block building. Travis stared straight ahead, walking with Catherine, lost in his thoughts.

  Over his shoulder, he heard a rustle and saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Travis’s breath caught in his throat as a man dressed in black charged at him out of the darkness, the glint of a knife in his hand. Travis pivoted toward the man, squaring off with him, putting his right hand up in defense of Catherine, blocking the man from getting to her. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw her small form take two steps back and then disappear into the darkness.

  Without time to think or call after her, Travis held his hands up in front of him glaring at the man, who had the blade extended toward Travis. He didn’t say anything. A split second later, the man lunged toward Travis, closing the distance between them, the blade ripping through the flesh on his right forearm. Travis grunted. He didn’t bother to look at the wound. He didn’t have time. The man lunged at him again but missed. As the blade passed by Travis on his left side, Travis caught the man’s wrist with his right hand, twisting it. The man yelped, the blade dropped with a clatter onto the gravel.

  Travis didn’t waste any time. He kneed the man in his gut, sending his attacker to the ground. Travis and the man grabbed for the knife at the same time, both of them getting a hand on the handle. The man twisted Travis's wrist and managed to push him back. Travis's eyes got wide as the knife blade got closer to him. The next time the man lunged, Travis grabbed at the man, covering his attacker’s hand with his own. He pressed down as hard as he could, drawing the blade upward on the man’s free hand, slicing the inside of his wrist, severing the tendons, making his fingers useless. The man cried out. As he did, Travis twisted the knife around and drove the blade upward into the man’s gut, piercing the flesh and sending the metal deep inside of the man’s abdomen. Blood immediately began to pour out, the man dropped to his knees and then onto his side with a grunt.

  Travis staggered backward, his breath raspy, unconsciously grabbing for his right forearm. He watched as a pool of blood poured out of the man’s abdomen, staining the chalky, gray gravel with crimson. The blade must have penetrated the man’s abdominal artery. Travis stared at the body on the ground. If it was arterial bleeding, the man had probably less than a minute to live. Even the most talented trauma surgeon would have a hard time saving him at that point. Travis knelt over him, looking at him, “Who hired you?” he hissed.

  The man gave Travis a weak smile, a trickle of blood rolling down the side of his cheek. He didn’t answer.

  “Who hired you? Tell me!”

  The man still didn’t answer, his eyes glazing over and then rolling back up in his head.

  Travis leaned over, putting two fingers on the man’s neck. The man’s skin was still warm to the touch, but he was gone. Travis stood up, staggering a little, the adrenaline from the attack catching up to him. He glanced down at his arm, but it was nearly impossible to see the damage in the darkness. He looked over his shoulders in both directions. Catherine was nowhere to be seen. Where she’d gone, he had no idea. But he knew he needed to disappear just as she had.

  Walking away from the scene as quickly as he could without attracting attention, he took the flannel shirt off that was over his T-shirt and quickly wrapped it around his arm, trying to make it look like he was carrying his shirt and not using it as a bandage for the wound on his arm. He could hear the whoosh of blood in his ears from the adrenaline of the attack, a trickle of sweat running down the side of his face. Catherine had been right. Someone was coming after him, but who?

  More importantly, why?

  4

  It took Travis another four minutes of winding his way back and forth between the buildings to get to the trailer. He found the one belonging to his ranch perched in a long line of them, fumbling in his pocket for the keys. He opened the door to the equipment area, knowing there was a first-aid kit inside. As he pulled the door open, he heard a voice call out behind him, “Travis?”

  For a second, he thought it was Catherine, or at least he hoped it would be. It wasn’t. It was Georgiana Stevens, one of the owners who’d flown out to see her horse run in the Derby. “Travis? I wanted to talk to you for a second about Gambler.”

  Travis gritted his teeth together. It was bad enough that he was in pain but even worse that it was one of the owners that had found him. They always managed to call or interrupt at exactly the wrong moment. His relationship with the owners was much like the relationship between a shark and a pilot fish. The sharks needed the pilot fish to nibble parasites off their leathery skin underwater but in the process, the pilot fish were constantly annoying the predators.

  That’s a bit how Travis felt when it came to dealing with his clients. He needed them. Their investment in his training program paid the bills and kept the lights on, but their incessant questions, demands, and unfulfilled hopes and dreams made his life complicated.

  “Georgiana, this isn’t a good time. It’s the middle of the night. Come and find me in the morning.” Travis stepped inside of the trailer and turned the light on, opening a tack box and fishing the first aid kit out. As he turned around, Georgiana was standing just inside the doorway, blocking his exit. She hadn’t left.

  “Oh my God! You’re bleeding. What happened?”

  “Nothing. Where’s George?”

  “I left him at the bar.” She glanced at Travis, “Here, let me help you.”

  Travis frowned as Georgiana stepped closer to him. The last thing he needed was George Stevens seeing Travis coming out of the inside of the trailer with his wife at two o’clock in the morning. Travis shook his head. How the two of them had managed to get together with their names nearly identical, Travis wasn’t sure. “No, I’m good,” Travis said, taking a couple of steps toward the door. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

  “Why?” Georgiana frowned, “Are you worried about George?” She shook her head, “Don’t be. He’s on his fifth whiskey. He’s not going to be leaving that bar anytime soon.”

  Travis elbowed his way outside, past Georgiana. No matter what she said, he wasn’t spending any time in any trailer with any woman, except one of his choosing. And it wouldn’t be a married one, that was for sure. Setting the first-aid kit on the step. Georgiana followed and then stepped in front of him, “Seriously, Travis. Let me help. I was a nurse before I married George.”

  Travis sighed. Georgiana wasn’t going to take no for
an answer. “Let me take a look at that.” She frowned. “Looks like you got sliced pretty good. Somebody get you with a knife?”

  “Yeah, a drunk guy from a bar in town. It’s no big deal,” Travis lied.

  “How’s the other guy?” Georgiana smiled, leaning down and picking up a package of gauze. She tore it open and dabbed at Travis’s arm with the soft fabric. Travis winced. “He’s okay. I got the brunt of it,” Travis lied again.

  “Hold your arm up in the light so I can see better.” Travis did as instructed. “It looks like you need stitches. I can wrap it up for you temporarily to slow the bleeding down, but you probably need to get yourself to an emergency room and let them have a look at it.”

  “Okay, will do.” Travis had no intention of going to an emergency room. Any public places were going to be out of bounds until he had a better sense of the threat against his life. Crowds provided too much cover and too much distraction, not to mention the explanations that would be needed if he had to defend himself. No, he’d have to lay low until he figured out what was going on and how to stop it.

  Humming to herself, Georgiana tore a few more packages of gauze open, laying them across the wound on Travis's arm and then wrapping it deftly with a rolled bandage. As she tied off the ends, she cocked her head to the side. “Looks like you got lucky. Just surface damage. Can you move your hand okay?” Georgiana’s voice was soft as she cradled his hand in her own.

  He pulled away. “Yeah. Seems to be fine.”

  Georgiana frowned as if it suddenly occurred to her why she was standing there. “I’m sorry you got hurt. Will you be all right to ride in the morning?”

  Travis pressed his lips together and closed his eyes for a moment. Georgiana was trying his patience. His owner’s compassion only went as far as it didn’t impact the performance of their horse. People that invested in reining horses, but didn’t ride them, were quick to make demands and even faster to jump ship from one trainer to the next, looking for the hot rider that could earn them the points and the reputation their horse would need in order to get into shows like the Run for a Million at the end of the summer show circuit in Las Vegas, an elite level, invitation-only, reining competition where the winner took home a purse of a cool million dollars to be split between the trainer and the horse owner. The money was only second to the bragging rights.

  Travis narrowed his eyes and adjusted his baseball cap on his head, “Yeah. I’ll be fine. I just need to get some rest. Like you said, it’s a surface cut. That’s all.”

  “You’ll have that arm looked at?” Georgiana said, her eyebrows raised.

  Travis grunted, “Yeah, that too.”

  As Travis locked the trailer door and walked back towards the barn, he could hear Georgiana behind him, “Oh, and by the way Travis I wanted to ask you…”

  Travis kept walking.

  Travis continued to the end of the line of the trailers and then circled back, waiting to make sure Georgiana had disappeared back in the direction of the bar where she’d left her husband. Sure, it was entirely plausible that George was in there drinking, but Travis had bigger things on his mind than having someone see the two of them leave the bunk in his trailer. It wasn’t a good look, not one that his reputation could afford. The reining community was small, the top riders in the industry numbering fewer than a dozen, the rest of them, including Travis, trying to chase the top. The last thing he needed was some sort of a scandal with an owner, whether true or not, to damage his reputation.

  Waiting as he watched Georgiana walk away, Travis looked down at his arm flexing his fingers. Georgiana was right about one thing — he was lucky. The knife simply sliced the skin on his arm. There didn’t seem to be any damage to the tendons, muscles, or ligaments that would prohibit him from operating his hand. He couldn’t say the same about the man he’d left behind. Travis glanced in his direction, listening, waiting to hear sirens.

  Travis waited another couple of minutes, watching for any sign that Georgiana was still lurking in the shadows. There was one more thing he needed to get out of his trailer if what Catherine had said was true.

  Circling back toward the long line of sleek metal vehicles used to haul the horses, each one fancier and more elaborate than the next, Travis moved silently between the trailer next to his and the one he’d used to bring the horses in. By all standards, his was a relatively plain, gooseneck model with a combination bunk and tack storage area, hooks, and foldable saddle trees attached to the walls. He looked over his shoulder as he approached the door, double-checking the shadows. Travis didn’t expect the man he’d stabbed to try again. That man had lost his life. But if there was one thing Travis knew about a kill order is that once it started, whoever placed the order would send assassin after assassin until the job was done. They would be like cockroaches coming out of the corners until the target was dead or the order was rescinded, if it could be….

  Travis shoved his key in the lock and turned it, rattling the door handle to get the tack room door open. He stepped inside, closing it behind him. Flipping the small interior light on, he looked down at the plastic bag they carried for trash. It was filled with wrappers from the first-aid supplies Georgiana used, some of it tinged crimson with his blood. Travis stepped in front of a secured storage locker that had come with the trailer underneath the lower bunk. He lifted the mattress to expose the lid. When he’d bought the trailer, he noticed the locker itself was fine, made of metal with reinforced hinges, but the lock itself was something that a two-year-old and a paperclip could get open if given enough time. He’d spent one afternoon replacing it with a fortified version. Taking a key from his key ring, he inserted it in the lock and opened it up. Inside were the typical things to keep secured while at a horse show, extra cash, his wallet, and a couple of silver inlaid bridles that he didn’t want to walk off. Pushing the bridles to the side, he exposed another locked box.

  On the day that Travis had refitted the lock on the storage box, he’d added another secured compartment to the floor of the interior of the one that came with the trailer. This one had a combination lock and a fingerprint scanner, much like that lock he used on the war room back at the ranch. He keyed in the code and pressed his thumb to it, hearing the lock pop open. He lifted the top off, exposing a Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, already loaded and in a holster, five boxes of ammunition, and a K-Bar tactical knife with a seven-inch blade. In addition to those things, there was a flashlight, a long piece of paracord, and a tactical pen. From inside the box, he pulled out the gun, quickly unfastening the wide leather belt that he wore with the silver buckle. He stuffed the bloody shirt he’d been wearing in the trash bag, grabbing a light jacket from one of the hooks inside the tack room and laying it on the edge of the box.

  Fishing the holster through his belt, he attached it to his hip, then checked his gun to make sure it was loaded. Satisfied, he stowed it in the holster, pulling the jacket gingerly over his injured right arm. Travis glanced down inside of the box, blinking. He stared at the assortment of other weapons that were inside the box. The only other thing he grabbed was another fully loaded magazine filled with nine-millimeter brass, hollow point, ready to fire.

  As he locked up the remainder of his weapons and closed the storage locker, replacing the mattress on the bunk, he closed his eyes for a second. If they were coming for him, let them come. They’d have a fight on their hands.

  In the meantime, he needed to find Catherine and get some answers.

  5

  CIA Director Tom Stewart broke down from a run to a walk as he heard his phone ring. He wore gray running shorts, a matching gray T-shirt, and a light jacket in the cool morning air, paired with high-tech, long-distance running shoes in a palette of lime green, citrus yellow, and gray. Feeling slightly annoyed that he had to break his stride, Tom pulled his phone out of the waist pack he wore, frowned for a second, narrowed his eyes, and then took the call.