Brady Hawk Series, Books 4-6

by R. J. Patterson

  Amir disappeared for a moment behind a curtain at the back of his booth. He emerged carrying a small box.

  “I am not here to judge, only to serve the needs of my customers,” Amir said as he handed the box to Blunt.

  Blunt took it. “What do I owe you?”

  “Five hundred U.S. dollars.”

  “Five hundred? Are you out of your mind?”

  Amir shrugged. “That is my price. If you know of another store where you can purchase such an item, I suggest you go there instead.”

  “Three hundred fifty and not a penny more,” Blunt said.

  “Four hundred and it’s yours,” Amir countered.

  Blunt grunted and fished out the money from his wallet. He handed it to Amir, who smiled big as he took it.

  “You are an extortionist,” Blunt said.

  “I have mouths to feed, children to clothe, a wife to make happy.”

  Blunt turned and walked away, hoisting his cane in the air, the box tucked snug up against his body with his left arm.

  “See you soon, Amir.”

  Blunt stepped back into the current of the crowd drifting along the main thoroughfare. A couple boys bumped into him as they ran by, knocking Blunt off balance. As he started to tumble, one of the boys snatched the box and started to run. Blunt, however, regained his balance and use the crook of his cane to hook the boy’s right ankle and send him sprawling to the ground. Blunt knelt down and picked up his box. He looked into the boy’s eyes, which appeared to tremble.

  “Pick on someone your own age,” Blunt said before he stepped over the boy and continued along.

  Blunt was ready to get back to his room and relax, but not until he installed the camera. He couldn’t truly relax until he finished, and even then, could he actually relax? He doubted it, but it was worth a try.

  Blunt’s phone buzzed, interrupting his train of thought about how he was going to install the camera. He would’ve ignored it altogether if it hadn’t been for the caller’s name pasted across the front of his screen. It was someone he hadn’t talked to in a while but needed to for the sake of his own security as well as his operatives’.

  It was General Johnson.

  CHAPTER 16

  ALEX WATCHED THE DAYLIGHT spilling through the cracks in the floor turn faint as the hours ticked past. She supposed Hawk shouldn’t have been gone more than half an hour, yet darkness was about to set in and still no word from him. She grew annoyed at McGinn’s apathetic response to Hawk’s absence.

  “Aren’t you going to do something?” she asked, huffing after she did.

  “Do what? I’ve already told you the first twenty times you asked that question that I can’t really do anything without jeopardizing this mission.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Alex said. “There isn’t going to be a mission without Hawk. You can’t stay here forever. You’ve got no idea what’s going on in the real world up there right now. We’re just two caged little animals, though I’m clearly more upset with this arrangement than you are.”

  “Simmer down, princess. I’m sure your cowboy hero will return any moment now.”

  “You’ve been saying that several hours now, and it hasn’t happened yet.”

  McGinn growled. “Fine. I’ll go check on him. But you stay here and keep your prying little eyes to yourself. I’ll know if you looked at something.”

  He glanced up at the lights. She hadn’t even considered that McGinn had surveillance in the room.

  McGinn put on his cap and opened the door to the tunnels. He had almost exited the room entirely before he turned around and poked his head back inside.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon,” he said.

  “I’ll be waiting for you, dear,” Alex said with an exaggerated eye roll.

  Alex listened until his footsteps faded down the tunnel just outside the door. She wanted to punch herself in the face for being so careless. As careful as she was, she never considered McGinn would have placed surveillance in what amounted to a panic room in a basement. She had no one else to blame but herself.

  Maybe he’s not such an amateur after all.

  Whether he was a professional or amateur, she didn’t care; she simply needed to doctor the footage in the event that McGinn happened to review it. Or maybe someone else was watching.

  Whatever the case, she needed the video gone twenty minutes ago.

  CHAPTER 17

  HIS EYES OPENED SLOWLY as he regained consciousness. His side ached from what he assumed was the impact of the vehicle that hit him and Emily. That was the last thing he remembered. He tried to move, but the ropes tethering him to the wooden chair prevented any serious mobility. The piece of cloth tied snug around his face tasted like a cocktail of dirt and sweat and wreaked of mold.

  Due to the lack of bright light, Hawk couldn’t tell how big the room was. A lone bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting an ominous shadow on him. The light’s reach wasn’t more than ten square feet, which left Hawk to wonder what lurked in the darkness.

  “Emmm-ahhhhh-leeeeee,” he tried to shout through the gag. He tried twice more with his muffled voice but to no avail. Equally concerning as her absence was the fact that his cries for her didn’t seem to attract the attention of anyone. He sat in the room alone for another fifteen minutes before he heard a door swing open.

  Hawk whipped his head in the direction of the sound as light from the outside flooded into the room. It was enough to give Hawk a glimpse of what kind of environment he was truly in—a stark one. No other doors nor any other exit points, with the exception of a window in the corner.

  Good to know.

  A medium-built man strode across the room, his hands clasped behind his back. He stopped a few feet short of Hawk and looked him up and down.

  “So, this is the great Brady Hawk,” the man said before breaking into laughter. “You don’t look so great right now.”

  The man, who sported the nametag of General attached to the left side of his jacket, removed Hawk’s gag.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Hawk asked. “Who are you?”

  The General clucked his tongue and wagged his index finger at Hawk. “I ask all the questions around here. Is that clear?”

  “What was that?” Hawk said, feigning as he couldn’t hear.

  The General put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, stopping just inches from Hawk’s face.

  “I asked is that clear?” the man said.

  Sensing an opportunity, Hawk lunged toward the General and clamped down hard on his ear. Hawk bit harder as the man squirmed in an effort to escape. As the General thrashed about, he gave Hawk all the leverage he needed to get off the ground and turn the tables on his captor. Hawk tried to maintain his balance long enough until he got into a position to let the General break a hard fall. Hawk came crashing down on the man as the chair splintered. Immediately, Hawk found himself free and grabbed the rope, but not before he snatched the General.

  Hawk worked furiously to tie his new prisoner up.

  “You yell for your guards and I’ll break your neck right here without another thought,” Hawk said. “Do you understand me?”

  The man nodded.

  “So, tell me General, where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t play games with me. I know you took her—and for all I know, she was the original target.”

  The General chuckled and shook his head. “Oh, no. It was you all along. You were the primary target.”

  “Where is she then? And you better not say dead or else I’m going to rip you apart right now.”

  “I’ll tell you,” the man said. “Come closer.”

  Hawk edged closer but wasn’t about to get as close as the man had been when Hawk summoned him.

  Instead of saying something, the man spit into Hawk’s eyes.

  “I’ll never tell you anything,” the General said.

  Undeterred, Hawk knelt down next to the man. “So, tell me, General, how good are you at ar
ithmetic?”

  The General seemed shocked by the question, taken aback by the oddity if not absurdity of it. “Do you mean math?”

  “Yes, math. How good are you at it?”

  The General smiled and shrugged. “Good enough to know your odds of making it out alive are decreasing with every second you keep me tied up here.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Hawk said as he began to pace around the General. “Let’s start first with some basic questions, like how many fingers do you have?”

  The General started laughing and ignored the question.

  “I’m serious, General,” Hawk said. “How many digits do you have on your hands.”

  “Ten,” the man finally said.

  “Now, we’re going to play a little game,” Hawk said. “I ask a question, you tell me the answer. If you don’t tell me the answer, we do a little subtraction problem.”

  “What’s one idiot minus a brain equal?” the man said. “Give up? A dead idiot.”

  Hawk glared at him before picking up the man’s gun off the floor that he’d lost during their initial struggle.

  “I’ll never tell you anything,” the man said.

  “I can be persuasive when I want to be,” Hawk said, tapping the barrel of the gun against the palm of his hand. “So, let me ask this one more time—where is my friend?”

  The man spit in Hawk’s face again.

  Hawk shook his head. “Subtraction it is then.”

  He knelt down behind the man’s chair and grabbed his pinky finger. “Ten fingers minus one finger equals …”

  The man’s shoulders slumped as he said nothing.

  “Nine fingers,” Hawk said as he ripped into the man’s hand, slicing off his right pinky. “Or seven if we’re being technical and classify thumbs as different appendages.”

  The man let out a guttural scream.

  “Now where is she?” Hawk asked again. “I can do this all day long if necessary.”

  The General sucked in a breath through his teeth and exhaled, his face grimacing. “Okay, okay, I’ll talk. She’s in the building next to this one.”

  “I swear if you hurt her, I’ll come back and kill you.”

  “She wasn’t the target. You were.”

  “Me?”

  “I don’t even know who she is.”

  Hawk grabbed the man’s hand again. “Who sent you?”

  “I don’t even know the guy’s name.”

  Hawk narrowed his eyes. “Is that so?”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you.”

  There was pounding on the door.

  “Sir, are you okay?” a man shouted through the door.

  “Don’t say a word,” Hawk said, training his gun on the man.

  “I’ll tell you what you want to know, but I’ve got to say something or my guards will come crashing through the door, and you won’t have a chance.”

  Hawk sighed. “Fine.”

  The man took a deep breath and shouted. “This maniac has me. Help!”

  “Wrong answer,” Hawk said before shooting the man in the head.

  A pounding began against the door. Hawk scanned the room for the lone remaining exit—the window.

  Two more thumps against the door. Hawk hustled up to the window and pushed up. It refused to budge.

  He then backed up halfway across the room.

  Another loud thump at the door.

  Here it goes.

  Hawk broke into a dead sprint for the window. He hadn’t taken more than ten steps before the lock gave way and the door flung open. Despite the commotion, Hawk didn’t look back, instead leaping and diving head first through the window.

  As he hit the ground outside, shattered glass rained down all around him. Blood trickled down his face while the sounds of gunfire echoed from the room above. He scrambled to his feet and tried to get his bearings.

  Looking around the compound, his concern for Emily grew.

  There was no other building.

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE FACING ALEX was finding the location of the storage device. She inspected the camera lodged in the light fixture and determined it was wireless, leading her to believe it was likely still in the room. She checked the room’s lone closet to find nothing but clothes strewn about, most drooping halfway off hangers. She paced around the room, looking for a spot in the floor where McGinn could hide the device. But there wasn’t anything readily apparent.

  Alex then resorted to tapping the wall in search of a hollow area. When that yielded no results, she removed the two pictures from the wall.

  There you are.

  Alex smiled and found a black metal box with blinking lights that was plugged into a special electrical outlet built into the hidden area. She carefully rotated the box toward her and found a small screen on the back. After a few seconds of fiddling with the controls, she managed to turn on the screen. A navigational bar appeared at the top, allowing her to scroll through previous day’s recordings. The fact that the device was motion activated made it easy for her to eliminate the images of her without drawing too much suspicion.

  Alex deleted all the images up until the day she first walked into the room. In a perfect scenario, she would’ve deleted more so that it didn’t seem so coincidental that the camera stopped recording the day she arrived there. However, she knew that if she deleted a few weeks prior to when she and Hawk came to Berera and McGinn had checked the footage during that time, she would’ve been busted for sure. At least the current situation gave her the chance to talk her way out of a situation.

  She was about to put the box back in place but decided to snoop around on it for a few more minutes. Refusing her curiosity was next to impossible, no matter how dangerous the situation, which was why she was hacking into the security feed in the first place. She smiled and shrugged before continuing to poke through the device. It wasn’t long before she discovered a large archive with little of interest. Then she pushed another button that opened another archive—at least that’s what she thought it was at first. Alex quickly realized it actually wasn’t another archive; it was a live feed, and she could see McGinn.

  “What are you up to, you little weasel?” she asked aloud.

  She pushed another button, revealing a different camera angle. Another button and then another camera.

  Alex leaned close to the screen and squinted. The image in the background looked like the weapon they were supposed to be retrieving. She scrolled through the images again, confirming her suspicions.

  He’s at the warehouse where we’re making the exchange. What does he need me for? He’s already tapped into the feed.

  She swallowed hard as another thought percolated.

  Or maybe something else is going on here.

  If he had wanted to kill Hawk and Alex, McGinn could’ve done it a long time ago. But she’d never felt easy around McGinn from the moment she met him. She needed to talk to Hawk about this, not to mention the other documents she’d found, and time was running out. An opportunity to confide in Hawk about these revelations had yet to present itself. And for the moment, she didn’t even know where Hawk was.

  CHAPTER 19

  EMILY REFUSED TO ACCEPT her fate as four guards surrounded her. Handcuffed to a pipe running over her head, Emily’s body was stretched far beyond comfort. Her feet were planted firmly on the ground, but her arms extended upward as the blood drained down, causing a tingling sensation in her hands and fingers. The skin around her wrists had been rubbed raw as she struggled to find a moment to relax.

  “Allah has been good to us,” one of the men said.

  “No,” another man said with a grin spreading wide across his face. “The General has been good to us, allowing us to indulge in some of the spoils of battle.”

  “I’m not a spoil, you asshole,” Emily said. “I’m a woman.”

  The guard shrugged. “Woman … spoil of war … person to pleasure me … all the same in my book.”

  Emily tried to restra
in her tongue, but she couldn’t. Not that it would matter. She knew where this was headed, and she figured she might as well make it as unpleasant as possible for the guards.

  “You have a book? You know how to read?” she said, sneering at the man.

  “You think your insults are going to bother me?” the guard asked. “I like my women feisty, especially American women.”

  Emily snickered. “I bet the only type of woman you’ve ever had are the kind you had to—”

  Whack!

  The guard backhanded Emily in the face. “I suggest you keep quiet.”

  “I thought you just said you liked your women feisty.”

  Holding up his index finger, the guard wagged it at Emily. “I said feisty, not dead.”

  “Oh, I’m very much alive. And I’m going to kill you in a few minutes.”

  All four of the guards broke into laughter.

  “I wasn’t joking,” she said.

  One of the other guards, who’d been looking Emily up and down while licking his lips, spoke up. “I’d like to go first—break her in.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “You don’t want to do that. It simply means you’ll be the first to die.”

  The guard walked up to her and threw his head back, breaking into a guffaw. He then ripped her blouse open.

  “Touch me again, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”

  The guard smiled. “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

  Emily yanked down hard, freeing her wrists from the cuffs. Pulling up on the bar over her head, she brought her knees up even with the guard’s head and wrapped her legs around him. The other guards started pointing and laughing. Based on their reactions, Emily was quite certain that not a single guard in the room had any idea they were all about to die.

  After a quick twist of her legs, she heard the guard’s neck crack. He crumpled to the floor in a heap.

  “Who’s next?” she asked as she approached the guard who’d been in charge for most of her detention.

  The guard whipped his gun out and pressed the barrel of it into Emily’s chest. “I think you are.”