“Fuck.” Jake looked up, and even in the dim light of the predawn conference room, he could see the solidarity in Jake’s eyes. “Anything you need, man. We’re here. Where’s Li, by the way? Tell me he didn’t kill the English asshole?”
“Like he bloody well could.” Simon Weston was damn quiet. He’d slunk into the room without anyone noticing. As the newest member of the McKay-Taggart Security Service’s team, the former MI6 agent hadn’t much tried to fit in with anyone past Ian. Ian seemed to have taken the man under his wing despite the fact that Simon had nearly blown up their last assignment. He’d been fooled by Eli Nelson, and didn’t Alex know that feeling. Despite his surly attitude, Alex felt a bit of a kinship with Simon. He knew damn well what it was like to get his ass handed to him on an operation. “Liam had other plans this morning, and this is just a friendly little info share. I can fill him in later.”
He’d pointedly not invited Liam this morning, and he’d lucked out because this was Liam and Avery’s weekly breakfast with Eve. Liam and Eve had gotten close over the years, and she adored Li’s new wife, Avery. They were the perfect distraction. Eve usually came in early, but Tuesdays were spent at a local café.
“Who’s Michael Evans and why does everyone look like their best mate just got run over?” Simon asked. He stood in the back, not bothering with one of the four seats left.
Alex directed his attention to the projection on the wall. It was a picture of a man he knew far too well. “This is Michael Evans, thirty-seven. He’s a homegrown terrorist. He ran a small commune in the northern section of Idaho. No name. Just two hundred acres and a belief that the United States government has grown corrupt. I’ll admit, it’s not just the US government Evans has a problem with. It’s mostly all of society. The FBI didn’t pay much attention to him until we discovered his ties to jihadist leaders in Mexico. Between 2001 and 2005, Evans made over fifty trips to Central America. The CIA marked him as a potential stateside contact for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and other associated groups.”
Simon nodded. “Yeah, I remember him now. He was all over the news a couple of years back. I was actually in the States when he was arrested. He grew drugs on that land of his and funded small cells. They bombed low profile sites, if I remember correctly. I found it rather odd that they didn’t choose high value targets.”
“Evans considered them to be very high value targets. Allegedly, he was the money behind fifteen clinic bombings across the US,” Alex murmured. Evans had managed to kill doctors, nurses, and patients, most of whom had only walked into the clinic for routine exams, but they made Evans’s hit list because the clinics were government funded and offered family planning. “He also targeted domestic abuse shelters. He liked to set those on fire. Evans isn’t really big on women’s rights.”
“He specifically targeted clinics where women got routine care and could procure birth control. In twelve of the clinics he targeted, no abortion services were provided,” Ian continued. Ian knew the file as well as Alex. It was this very case that had brought Alex to Dallas to found the company with his best friend. Ian was a head case half the time, but Alex owed him everything, and that was his only reason for having this briefing. If it weren’t for Ian, he would be on his way to the meet site right now.
“What’s his motivation?” Jake asked. “I know the case files, but I never really understood what he wanted. Obviously he’s a misogynist pig, but terrorists usually have a point they’re trying to get across.”
“Evans is a deep believer that modern America has stripped men of all their god-given rights. He wants to go back to the times when a man owned everything. When a man had full rights to his property and could enforce his own laws on that property, and part of the property included a man’s wives. Yes, I said wives,” Alex explained. “He had several wives across the country. He killed one when she turned state’s witness against him. He left behind the corpse of another woman when he fled his Idaho compound. Wherever he is now, we should be prepared that he likely has a wife or two and he won’t hesitate to throw them in the line of fire.”
“Charming,” Adam muttered.
“Yeah, well, he’s no prince.” Alex clicked through to the next slide. It was the one of Evans being hauled in. Evans was smiling at the camera, his handsome face looking more like a movie matinee idol than a mass killer. Those good looks had brought him hoards of women who wrote to him in prison or did an enormous amount of his dirty work.
Evans is a charismatic killer, Eve had written. He uses charm to draw his victims in, but in the end, he can’t consider himself a winner unless he beats a male he considers of equal worth.