The Red Menace #2 Read online

  Recipe For Disaster!

  Take one psycho beauty hell-bent on revolution.

  Add millions in illicit cash.

  Stir in one counterculture army.

  Simmer in a political pressure cooker until it explodes into America's streets.

  A devastating attack in the heartland leaves a stunned nation reeling. Claiming credit for the unprovoked strike is a new radical group called the People's Brigade. Even as bodies are being pulled from the rubble, this heretofore unknown group loses no time launching assault after assault in cities across the country.

  America's intelligence agencies are flying blind and can only stand helpless as the violence escalates...until a desperate MIC tosses Patrick "Podge" Becket and Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright into the fray. The two men quickly uncover a scheme that links the People's Brigade to underground radical groups in every state in the union, all answerable to a lovely young sociopath called Daisy.

  The gal's got looks, brains, money and an army of men willing to die for a cause.

  Our side has the Red Menace and Dr. Wainwright.

  The bad guys haven't got a chance.

  Drowning in Red Ink

  The Red Menace #2

  James Mullaney

  James Mullaney Books

  Copyright © 2021 James Mullaney. All Rights Reserved.

  “THE RED MENACE” TM & © James Mullaney. All Rights Reserved.

  Cover by Mark Maddox

  James Mullaney Books, October 2021

  Available in paperback from Bold Venture Press

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior express written consent of the publisher and the copyright holder.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Drowning in Red Ink

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  A Note from Jim

  About the author

  Other books by James Mullaney

  To the alphabetical A-Team:

  Donna, Jerry and Micah,

  who get these tomatoes to market.

  Drowning in Red Ink

  Prologue

  He hated messes, despised disarray. There was a place for everything and everything should be in its place. As far as Milo O’Hara was concerned, there was never a compelling reason why every T should not be crossed and every I should not have a neat little dot hovering above it.

  Disorder was the one thing that Milo O’Hara detested more than anything else in this life. Bedlam existed outside his office in the Becket International, Incorporated headquarters in Honolulu, Hawaii. O'Hara knew anarchy lurked out there, just as he knew there was nothing he could do about it. Let the world have its Kent States and Vietnams. Within O’Hara’s four air-conditioned walls was precision, order.

  Milo O'Hara pressed a pencil into the automatic sharpener at the edge of his desk and appreciated as he always did the efficient whir of the device. He removed the pencil, blew any shavings or graphite powder into his wastebasket, smiled approval at the sharpened tip, and replaced it in the pencil box at the edge of his desk.

  His smile evaporated the moment his door sprang open unexpectedly and a young man pushing a wheeled cart entered the room.

  “Mail call,” the boy grumbled. He was fifteen with a deep tan and unhappy eyes that were directed at the beige carpet.

  O'Hara could see out the open door that his secretary was not at her desk. He glanced at the clock on the wall. 12:39 p.m.

  “I'm eating lunch,” O'Hara said.

  The kid tore his eyes from the rug and his half-mast gaze fell across the sandwich, potato chips and orange on O’Hara’s desk. “Oh. You want me to come back?”

  O'Hara shook his head and sighed. “No, no. As long as you’re here. Just a second.” He fussed a little around the surface of his desk, which involved repositioning his half-eaten ham sandwich, as well as a couple of pens and a lava rock paperweight, before he finally waved a testy, beckoning hand. The boy obediently rolled his cart over to the desk. For an interminable twenty seconds, the kid flicked through the stack of envelopes before finally depositing a handful of mail into O’Hara’s “in” basket.

  “Thank you,” O'Hara said. “In the future, however, if it's between twelve and one, I'm at lunch and I don't want to be disturbed.”

  The kid nodded something that approached primitive understanding and wheeled his cart from the room. He obviously didn’t shut the door properly, because a minute after he left it popped back open. With another prolonged sigh, O’Hara got up and closed the door properly.

  Milo O’Hara had no idea what to make of this modern generation, with its crazy hair, hippie clown clothes and total lack of anything remotely approaching a work ethic.

  This boy was the son of one of the ad men on the fourth floor. The kid obviously didn’t appreciate the job that had been handed to him, and his constant sour mood was definitely a poor reflection on his father. O'Hara had heard the boy grousing to one of the secretaries on two separate occasions that he’d rather be out surfing with his friends on his days off from school than working at Becket International. O'Hara wouldn’t mind granting his wish with a pink slip, but for the fact that the ad man had gone to Mr. Becket personally to request the job for his son. Patrick Becket was a wonderful man, the best employer one could hope to have and Milo O’Hara would take a bullet for him — albeit a metaphorical one, as accountancy was not a profession that afforded many opportunities for one to hurl oneself in front of crazed gunmen out to murder one’s boss — but more than anything else Mr. Becket was a soft touch.

  Mr. Becket was also lately an absentee boss. Becket International’s primary business was computers, but there were a few other companies rolled into the small conglomerate. Mr. Becket had lately been off on some other business in Africa and, if rumor was true, Cuba. Not that O'Hara trucked in rumors.

  Patrick Becket could afford to traipse around the world. It was his right as the boss, and it gave Milo O'Hara a little frisson of pride to know that Mr. Becket trusted him to manage the affairs of Becket International while Becket was away.

  O'Hara returned to his desk, scarcely noticing the perfect, cloudless blue Hawaiian sky through the louvered windows. Paradise thrived unnoticed at his back as he finished his ham and cheese and munched the last of his chips. He put his orange in his upper right drawer for his three o’clock break, and sat back to wait for his lunch break to end. When the second hand on his wall clock spun to 1:00 pm, he dusted his hands and readied himself for an afternoon of productive work.

  He started first with the mail that had been sitting in his basket for twenty minutes, and only then did he notice the very official lo
oking envelope mixed in with the rest. It was addressed to the Chief Financial Officer of Becket International. O'Hara was as close as anyone could get to that title absent Mr. Becket himself. And, in Mr. Becket’s absence, the envelope had found its way to Becket International’s chief accountant.

  The return address was the Internal Revenue Service, Washington, D.C. O'Hara had no idea what the company could be getting from the IRS at this time of year, and he had never heard of the assistant director whose name appeared on the envelope.

  Frowning, O'Hara tore open the envelope.

  “‘Dear Patrick Becket,’” he read with an impatient sigh, scanning the words quickly and reading a few aloud at random. “‘…hereby given notice that you are…’” O'Hara paused, stunned. “Delinquent? That’s…that’s not possible.” He began scanning more determinedly. “Compounded...fees and penalties...eighteen million dollars? Are they out of their minds?”

  O'Hara snatched up the envelope from where he’d placed it on his desk. Walton Chambers Assistant Director, Internal Revenue Service. The name was the same on the letter, typed neatly with the IRS man’s signature written in large, florid script above.

  If this was a joke, O'Hara could not imagine anyone who would think it was funny. His mouth was dry. He could feel an acid mixture of deli ham sandwich and potato chips churning in his gut.

  He reached for the phone but before his hand had even touched the receiver, he withdrew it.

  Mr. Becket was still off the islands. The CEO of Becket International had called O'Hara at home three days before to check in. If the rumors were true and Patrick Becket had been in Cuba, he’d been lucky and made it out before the sudden turmoil that had engulfed that Caribbean country. It had been in the papers for days. Something about rockets accidentally launching from a Cuban base, the Russians assassinating Fidel Castro and the beginnings of a civil war, with a democratic faction coalescing which was threatening to toss out both the Castroite Communists and the Soviets.

  But Mr. Becket had missed all that. He’d informed O'Hara that he was on the East Coast of the United States, but did not elaborate on his whereabouts.

  O'Hara hated the thought of dumping some crazy IRS mistake into his employer’s lap, but eighteen million dollars. That was an amount even jet-setting Patrick Becket would feel in his back pocket.

  The accountant finally screwed up his courage. Leaving the phone on his desk, he crossed the room and stuck his head into the next room. His secretary in her beehive hairdo and eyeglasses shaped like a cat’s eyes seemed surprised to see her boss’ face outside the four walls of his office four hours before quitting time.

  “Beatrice, call Shirley upstairs. Find out if she knows where Mr. Becket is.”

  “Right away, Mr. O'Hara.” She scooped up the receiver on her thick yellow office phone.

  “And Beatrice,” he added before she could place the call. “When you’re through, call downstairs. I want the last ten years of company books brought to the conference room immediately. Have all the accounting staff meet me there in ten minutes. Let them know we’ll be working late. All night if we have to.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. O’Hara. Will you be needing me to stay at work late as well, sir?” his secretary asked.

  O'Hara pressed a palm to his forehead. He felt dizzy. Chaos had dropped like a bomb into the perfect order that was his daily life. “Yes. Work. The whole floor will be staying at work until I get this sorted out.”

  He shut the door and leaned his back against the cool, painted wood. To his empty office he said, “And with luck, we’ll all still have our jobs when Mr. Becket gets back from wherever the hell he is.”

  Chapter 1

  Across the Pacific, across the continental United States, in a gloomy corridor in a somber building where somber men with somber faces daily held somber conversations on somber matters, the world had recently grown a whole lot more somber.

  Anatoly Drubkik stepped from his quarters in the Soviet Mission in New York City and glanced down the long corridor.

  There was a window at the far end, or so Anatoly assumed. He had worked at the Mission for three years yet had never dared check to see what was behind the burgundy drapes lest someone see him and report him to the KGB. To look for a window could be construed as searching for an escape route, an offense that could result in prison or worse. The thick drapes concealed the presumed window; drapes that were never drawn, not in winter to welcome in the sun’s cheery warmth or in summer to release the stifling heat that made the upstairs floors of the Mission feel like a Russian steam room.

  A carpet ran along the length of the corridor, worn white up the middle where many a diplomat’s cheap shoes had scuffed. There were no furnishings in the hallway beyond a small table on which sat a community telephone. Private phones were not allowed in the rooms of junior diplomats. If one wanted to use the telephone, one theoretically placed the call from that phone which connected to the switchboard downstairs. But using that telephone was frowned on, and everyone Anatoly knew considered it a KGB trap. Why use that phone unless you had something to hide? The phone was covered with dust. Everyone went downstairs to place telephone calls.

  There were light fixtures — possibly bugged — in sconces on the walls, and a few pictures of heroes of the Revolution were nailed to the ugly red wallpaper. Lenin posed dramatically in one oil painting, hand raised to the future, while crowds of adoring proletariat hung on his every word. From another more recent painting, Leonid Brezhnev glared sourly at passersby. The artist had been ordered to render the current Soviet leader handsome and heroic, but genetics had stubbornly thwarted the impoverished Estonian painter’s every attempt. In the painting, Brezhnev looked like a dyspeptic, melting wax toad with a single caterpillar eyebrow. The artist was now serving a sentence of unspecified duration in a Siberian labor camp for the high crimes of talent and accuracy, and the painting had been relegated to the top floors of the New York Soviet Mission.

  Comrade Brezhnev kept a beady eye trained on Anatoly Drubkik as the diplomat closed his door and headed down the hall.

  Anatoly did not lock his quarters. No one but the ambassador locked doors at the Mission. If you locked a door you had something to hide. The KGB would search your quarters either way, but they would haul you in for days of questioning and possibly have you shipped back home if they found your door locked. And, God knew, Anatoly did not want to give the secret police any more reason to jump at shadows these days.

  Whatever had triggered the world-changing events that were going on in Cuba at the present moment, Anatoly did not know. He did know that the entire Russian government was tying itself into knots at the potential loss of a prominent Soviet client state, arguably the most prominent client state. The psychological aspect of Cuba’s proximity to the United States alone was worth its weight in rubles, and its loss to the West on the Politburo’s collective psyche had been incalculable.

  Whatever was going on in the diplomatic world, the Soviet Mission to the United Nations was at the heart of it, and the past few days had been an unrelenting nightmare to the diplomatic staff. Anatoly had scarcely gotten five hours sleep in the past three days.

  In the gloom of the dusty corridor, and in his sleep-deprived state, Anatoly Drubkik did not notice the leg sticking out from the supply closet until he tripped over it.

  The papers he had been clutching close to his chest went scattering across the threadbare carpet.

  It was no wonder Anatoly had not seen the man who had tripped him. He could barely see him now. All he could see was a pair of shoes sticking out into the hall.

  The man was obviously passed out drunk. Still, Anatoly instinctively kept an angry curse from reaching his lips even as he reached for his scattered paperwork. Silence was a skill learned early in Russian, where the wrong word at the wrong time could mean years of imprisonment. Nearly everyone at the Mission, from cooks to drivers to most of the diplomatic staff, were KGB agents, and if one valued one’s life one did not get on the
bad side of a ranking KGB officer.

  As Anatoly crawled around on his knees snatching up papers, he leaned back to see the man’s face. Only once he saw that it was a young pastry chef with no likely ties to the KGB and who was, most importantly, out cold, did Anatoly bravely speak.

  “Idiot. Fool,” he grumbled. “You are a drunken disgrace to the great Soviet Socialist Republics. I will personally see your drunken carcass on the first Aeroflot back to Moscow.” Anatoly kicked the leg of the unconscious young man. “There is no room in the Glorious Revolution for besotted clods.”

  Two startling things occurred so quickly in the next instant that the shock of each momentarily cancelled the other out for Anatoly Drubkik. The first came when he kicked the ankle of the pastry chef and the closet door squeaked open, revealing a stack of bodies arranged like a tidy pile of Lincoln Logs inside the small room. The second was the voice that spoke in English very close to Anatoly Drubkik’s left ear.

  “If you’re cashiering drunken idiots out of Russia now, you’d better give the boys in the Kremlin a heads-up before happy hour.”

  Out of the corner of his left eye, Anatoly saw a brief flash of crimson. He twirled to find himself face-to-face with a smiling man.

  The man wore a mask that covered his hair and was pulled down over his nose. It resembled an old executioner’s mask, except this mask was red, not black. He wore a matching black cloak that closed around his clothes.

  “Frankly, I don’t see prohibition catching on for Mom Russia,” the masked man continued. “Maybe you could start small. Like, say, impose an eighty martini lunch limit on each Politburo member and see how that goes. Oh, gee, where are my manners? Hey, there, hi, there, ho, there, comrade.” A gloved hand waved to Anatoly. It appeared black in the dark folds of the cape, but when it snaked into the dim light of the corridor it turned bright red.