Riggins pulled the 5.56 mm bullet from his jacket pocket and slammed it onto the dashboard. "He broke into my house, Tommy. He bypassed a monitored ADT security system, walked past my bedroom, left this on the kitchen counter, and locked the door on his way out. We didn't just rob the wrong guy. We robbed a phantom."
"I ran his name, Garrett. The Department of Defense blocked the query. Tier 1 clearance. You know what that means?" Kessler wiped the rain from his face, his eyes darting frantically around the dark parking lot. "He's Delta, or DEVGRU, or CIA Special Activities. It doesn't matter. He's a professional killer with the backing of the federal government, and we just stole a quarter-million dollars from him."
Riggins gritted his teeth, his survival instinct warring with his greed. "He's one man. We have a whole task force. We have badges. We go to his shop right now, kick the door, plant a kilo of fentanyl in his desk, and arrest him. If he resists, we put him down. He's a civilian now. He bleeds like anyone else."
Kessler looked at Riggins as if he were completely insane. "You think a guy who can wipe an offshore account and goes through your house without waking you up is going to let you just walk up to his shop with a bag of fake drugs? He's watching us right now, Garrett. I guarantee it."
Kessler was right. Two miles away, sitting in the back of an unmarked, heavily armored black SUV, Edmund Hayes was staring at a bank of four illuminated monitors. He was wearing a tactical headset, sipping black coffee. On the top-left screen, a red GPS dot blinked steadily over the Decatur strip mall. Edmund had attached a magnetic GPS tracker to the undercarriage of Riggins's Charger while Riggins was inside stealing his money. Through the headset, Edmund could hear every word the two detectives were saying; Cole, Edmund's DOD contact, had bypassed their cell phone microphones, turning their own devices into hot mics.
"We need to move the stash," Kessler's voice crackled through Edmund's earpiece. "If he can find my offshore accounts, he can find the physical cash. We have over three million in cash and seized assets sitting in that climate-controlled storage unit off Route 85. If he gets to that, we're dead. The cartel guys we stole half that money from will kill us if we can't pay them their kickbacks."
"All right," Riggins replied, his voice heavy with panic. "We call Sergeant Miller. We get him to meet us at the storage facility. We load the cash into the vans, move it to the secondary safe house, and figure out how to handle Hayes tomorrow."
In the SUV, Edmund allowed himself a grim, fleeting smile. The trap was set. They were doing exactly what he wanted: when you apply overwhelming, inexplicable pressure to corrupt men, they don't fight back; they run to protect their largest pile of treasure.
"Cole," Edmund said quietly into his mic. "They're moving to the primary cache. Route 85 storage facility."
"Copy that, Commander," Cole's voice replied from Fort Liberty. "I've got eyes in the sky. Repositioning a Keyhole satellite to provide overhead thermal. Are you green-lighting the secondary phase?"
"Green light," Edmund confirmed. "Call the suits."
Edmund put the SUV in drive. It was time to show them what a real raid looked like.