“It happened in front of me. I chased the kidnappers to the border. I phoned the FBI but wasn’t sure if they’d be a help or a hindrance. I’ve a feeling there’s an awful lot of dirty money flowing around down here. I decided to keep it to myself.”
“The local police?”
“Nope, just me!”
“I’ll be with you in four hours!” replied Vincent firmly.
“No,” Sean almost shouted. “I’m better on my own. If I need bodies, I’ll give you a shout. In the meantime, I need to know where that call came from and everything about the Mexicans and who the other Sean worked for, particularly any American contacts, it seems that’s what the Mexicans are after.”
“I’m on it…but Russians?” he pondered again as he ended the call. Their involvement had obviously fazed him more than the kidnapping of young James Fox.
As Sean stood up, a burgundy baseball cap hanging on the far wall of the bedroom caught his eye, the Native American image proudly adorning its brow, one he was all too familiar with — The Washington Redskins, Sean’s team. A number of other Washington Redskin paraphernalia adorned the desk below the cap that was proudly displayed on the wall. Why, of all teams, would the boy support the Redskins? The team Sean had spent his childhood watching with his father. Sean began to wonder if he really was suffering from post-traumatic stress. The boy looked like him, the dead Sean was his double and he had to admit if he were ever going to settle down and get married, Katie Fox pretty much fit the bill. Perhaps he really had lost his mind.
“Sean!”
Sean heard Katie’s desperate shout and snapped back to reality. There had been another Sean Fox. He wasn’t going mad and hadn’t lost his mind but it did mean there was one more action point beyond getting the boy — finding out just who the other Sean Fox had been.
Sean got up and joined Katie in the hallway, extremely agitated and gesticulating wildly towards the front of the house. “The Mexicans,” she struggled to get the words out, tears were flowing again. “A truck just pulled up outside!”
As the front door crashed open, Sean grabbed his Glock only to realize he’d left it downstairs.
“Shit!”
Chapter 22
As Vincent relayed the IMEI and SIM numbers to one of his duty managers, he couldn’t stop thinking about Sean’s last words.
Vincent had looked into every detail of Sean’s Fox life from the day he had walked out on the NCS. Rumors were abound that he was working in Afghanistan, he was in Iraq, he was body-guarding a Saudi Prince. Only after his death did they find the truth, or at least what they thought was the truth. He was working as a gun for hire for one of America’s largest drug smugglers.
A number of pieces, of course, had not fit: the marriage, the birth of a son, all of it kept hidden, nobody knew anything of the wife Katie or son James. Vincent Black was the closest thing to family that Sean Fox had had and yet had been unaware of Sean’s marriage or son. It had been the most bizarre of findings but everything fit. Katie’s story fitted with Sean’s pattern of work, times and dates. When he was in country coincided pretty much with her memories of him being at home. His rehabilitation period, everything fit.
The move to Laredo and job with Fat Jake coincided with Sean’s resignation. Sean Fox, one of the CIA’s most decorated spies had led a double life. It was of course exactly as he had been trained, he just wasn’t supposed to play that trick on his master and certainly not on the man who looked on him as his own, Vincent Black. The deceit had hit as hard as the death had and had left Vincent with a very tainted memory of a man he had treated as a son. Vincent knew it was the deceit that kept him from the funeral and nothing at all to do with the drugs. Nothing would have kept him from Sean’s funeral but it seemed, at the time, Vincent didn’t know who was being buried; it certainly hadn’t been the Sean he had known and loved, not the Sean he had held as a baby, less than a day old under the watchful gaze of his best friend and proud father, James Fox.
Vincent and James had met at WestPoint and although they were rivals for just about every competition the Officer Training Academy had on offer, James was always victorious. James Fox was a star amongst stars. Nobody doubted that he would, one day, become the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief military officer in the United States; it was just that nobody predicted he would do it so young. Certainly it was inconceivable that anyone in their forties could rise so high so fast but James Fox proved them wrong. Being 'the youngest’ could just about be tagged to everything he had ever achieved: youngest Major, youngest Colonel, youngest General. Had it not been for the year of his birth coinciding with James Fox, Vincent Black would have graduated top of his class with the highest scores in the history of WestPoint. Instead, he was destined to be the graduate who finished just behind James Fox, the institution’s most outstanding cadet ever.
However, such was the bond the two had created, Vincent did not grudge James one ounce of his success or achievements. In fact, thanks to James, Vincent found his niche and moved, rather than into the army itself, straight into the intelligence business where he raced through the ranks, almost as fast as James had in the army. It was there, within the Central Intelligence Agency, that Vincent had found his calling and rose to the rank of Director of Clandestine Services.
Twenty-five years had passed since the worst day of Vincent’s life. The call had come into him at eleven pm. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had been involved in a car crash, his friend James Fox was dead, killed instantly. James’ wife Myriam was hanging on but chances were slim to nil. Vincent had rushed to the hospital and found fifteen year old Sean Fox lost and helpless, staring at the door that led to his mom. Vincent took him by the shoulders and both walked in. Myriam’s eyes opened briefly and seeing her handsome son, she mouthed the words 'I love you’ and gave a look to Vincent that was the clearest message he had ever received. 'Look after my baby’. Myriam’s eyes closed and never reopened. She knew her son would be OK.
Each and every time he thought of that moment over the last three months, he had hated himself. Not going to Sean’s funeral would have haunted him for the rest of his life.
Vincent became Sean’s guardian and although they set off on a rocky footing — a recently orphaned teenager was no easy introduction to parenting — as time passed, they became more friends than parent and son. Sean was a chip off his father’s block, a natural athlete, intelligent and stubborn, a perfect candidate for WestPoint. The only setback was that Sean had no intention of following in his father’s footsteps. Sean wanted action. WestPoint was for desk jockeys, for guys who wanted to play soldiers. Sean wanted to be a soldier. After an extremely difficult year of frayed relations, an agreement was reached. Sean could go in as a grunt but only if he attended college first. Vincent was immovable on the point; an education was the least he could assure Sean’s parents.
With the war in the Gulf kicking off and the wall falling in Berlin, Sean chose to study the Middle East and Arabic. A champion in various sporting activities, he had his choice of universities with full scholarships and chose Harvard. It, he assured Vincent, had the best program for what he wanted to do. However, it was the only university in the country which did not offer Sean a scholarship. Sean’s junior American kick boxing crown, his quarterback of the year award and swimming titles were all meaningless, especially to Vincent’s bank account which was about to take a pummeling. Sean, it seemed, was going to teach Vincent a very expensive lesson. If he interfered, it would cost him and cost him dearly.
Sean graduated top of his class and had recruiters knocking at his door. Six figure starting salaries and offers to pay off all of his loans flooded in. Vincent fielded a number of the calls, although Sean was happy to leave them to the answering machine. He had only one plan. On the day of graduation, he walked out of the hall and straight into the nearest army recruiting station. From there, he became one of the most over qualified soldiers to walk through the doors. Despite numerous calls to convince him to enter WestPoint, from pretty much every member of the Chiefs of Staff, the son of WestPoint’s greatest ever graduate and youngest Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, entered basic training with an Option 40 contract for the Rangers. Sean sailed through basic training, airborne training and the Rangers Indoctrination Program. A tour of duty followed before he was finally installed in Ranger School. Sixty-one days later and proudly displaying his yellow and black Rangers tab, Sean posted his application for 1st SFOD-D, Delta Force.
Seeing Sean graduate from Ranger school was one of Vincent’s proudest moments. The young boy whom he
