Craig Hickman - The Insiders

After the situation at Brattle House had been addressed and everyone was safe, Hap traveled to Bailey Island, where he confirmed what his two independent contractors had told him about Jones. He also discovered that one of the other men with Jones was Jules Kamin, who obviously hadn’t died in the explosion at his Manhattan apartment. The third man, he didn’t recognize. Hap had hoped for an opportunity to remove Wilson and Emily from the scene, but Jones’ surveillance was unyielding. He sent the two contractors back to their respective positions, inside the cabin of a lobster boat docked at the marina and near the docks on the other side of the island. Their assignment was to make sure none of the three men they’d been observing got near the loft or the sailboat. Hap was now taking personal responsibility for eliminating Jones, Kamin, and their accomplice.

Hap watched single-mindedly as Jones seemed to be waiting for a few more lights to go out before he unpacked the case he’d set down on the rocks next to him. Jones was skilled in the use of stingers, tear gas launchers, and other man-portable missile systems. It had been one of Jones’ passions since returning from Afghanistan.

Suddenly Jones pulled a cell phone from his pocket, listened for a moment, and spoke a few words. Then he returned the phone to his pocket.

He must be talking to Kamin, Hap thought. Kamin was waiting at the docks in a sixteen-foot fishing trawler on the other side of the island. Earlier in the day, a few minutes after arriving on the island, Hap had identified Kamin with Jones aboard the trawler surveying the loft and the cove. That was several hours ago. Now it was almost two o’clock in the morning. Most of the lights had already gone out along the island’s two slender peninsulas that formed Mackerel Cove.

Jones bent down, opened his carrying case, and withdrew a missile launcher. Before inserting the small missile, Jones placed the launcher on his shoulder and looked into the mounted scope.

Hap knew exactly what he was doing. Using the missile launcher’s computerized laser technology, he was taking a reading of the number of meters between him and the north facing windows of the marina loft. Jones then punched in a few numbers on the small keypad below the scope to program the missile for detonation once it entered the loft. The missile probably contained some sort of gas-chlorine, saran, VX, or phosgene.

Jones removed the long, slender mini-missile from the case-twenty-seven inches of carbon-fiber tubing less than three inches in diameter, with small fins on one end. It probably carried enough gas to kill a few hundred people, especially in humid weather like tonight. Even if the stinger missile took out the entire window before releasing its gas, everyone within a hundred meters could be dead within minutes, including Wilson and Emily in the sailboat two hundred feet away. The only sounds would be breaking glass and something akin to the whoosh of lighter fluid being ignited. Jones inserted the stinger and raised the rocket launcher once more to his shoulder, this time in preparation for firing.

Hap squeezed his trigger first. Jones’ head snapped back sharply, the back of his cranium disintegrating as pieces of red and gray matter splattered onto the mossy green rocks. His body collapsed on the rocks. Hap didn’t move, keeping the scope of his Lapua Magnum focused on his fallen comrade and then raising it slowly to view the highway. He remained in position on the wet, grassy knoll for another seven minutes, until the unidentified man with Jones and Kamin exited his car and crossed the highway, approaching the bluff above the abandoned pier. The man crouched down in the grass of the bluff, looking through his binoculars until he located Jones’ near headless body lying on the rocks. He immediately drew his weapon and looked around cautiously. Hap pressed the trigger of his Lapua Magnum again and the man was thrown back in spread-eagle fashion with a hole the size of a grapefruit between his shoulder blades.

Hap jumped up from his prone position and ran toward his car, which he’d hidden beneath a cluster of pines. His third target would not be so easy, but he was determined to finish this himself. Without turning on his headlights, he drove to the highway where he turned right and continued another two hundred yards before stopping. He quickly worked his way through the trees and brush to the eastern side of the peninsula and then along another bluff overlooking the ocean, searching for the fishing boat that had brought Kamin and the other two to the island earlier in the evening.

Suddenly, there was a steep rise in the terrain and a pathway with cobblestone steps that took him into a thick grove of trees. When he emerged from the trees he was in full view of the secluded cove below. He pulled out his binoculars to examine the small pier. But Kamin was a step ahead of him, having already spied Hap through his own binoculars. By the time Hap dropped to the ground in a prone position and flipped the safety on his rifle, Kamin was five hundred yards farther away in the sixteen-foot fishing trawler and about to disappear behind the point of the cove. The independent contractor got out of his camper and prepared to take the shot.

“I’ve got it,” Hap said into his collar microphone. He fired his third round.

Kamin collapsed to the floor of the boat, his right arm and shoulder completely severed from his body. He was struggling to get up when Hap’s fourth round caught him in the chest and propelled him overboard. Kamin’s lifeless body rode the waves for several seconds before sinking out of sight.

Hap returned to his car and drove back to the knoll near the marina, parking under the same cluster of pines. He waited a few minutes and then walked down the dirt road to the gravel ramp leading to the marina. His two independent contractors emerged from behind the marina store.

“Targets eliminated,” Hap said. “Thanks for the good work. If the local police show up before dawn, call my cell phone and talk to Ms. Kohl. Otherwise, I’ll let her know what happened here when I get to Boston.”

“You leaving now?”

“Yeah,” Hap said. “Let them sleep or do whatever they like, but don’t let them out of your sight.”

“You got it.”

Wilson — Bailey Island, ME

When the sounds of the lobstermen woke Wilson and Emily before dawn, the first thing they did was turn on the TV. Nothing. They watched patiently. Then, at exactly forty-eight minutes past six o’clock, it finally happened. The event his father had spent the best years of his life trying to accomplish. Disclosure: full and complete disclosure to the American public of an eight-year-long conspiracy to manipulate the price of company stocks traded on the New York and Nasdaq Stock Exchanges. The breadth and depth of the conspiracy’s impact was apparent on Anderson Cooper’s solemn face as he reported.

“CNN has just learned that a massive stock market manipulation conspiracy involving the nation’s largest corporations, over the past eight years, has been uncovered by the FBI. More than three hundred arrests have been made in the past twenty-four hours, with more expected today. CNN’s financial expert, Lou Dobbs, is here to help us understand what all of this means,” Anderson Cooper said as he looked over to Dobbs. “Lou, how could something like this go on for so long without being detected by the SEC, the Justice Department, boards of directors, company employees or shareholders?”

“That’s a question we’ll all be wrestling with in the weeks and months to come, Anderson, but one thing we’re certain of; the enormity of this crisis makes the recent mortgage credit debacle look like a misdemeanor,” Dobbs said, and then faced the camera. “Based on what we now know, the manipulations were orchestrated through what appeared to be normal business practices such as the hiring and firing of senior executives, company reorganizations, mergers and acquisitions, the spin-off of a company division to create a new publicly traded corporation, new product introductions, and the involvement of high-profile management consulting firms, all of them legitimate business activities.”