Love Inspired Suspense April 2015 #2

by Dana Mentink

  Seeing it was safe enough to unfurl themselves from their place on the floor, Shaun loosened his grip on Lexie. She lay still in his arms.

  Shaun’s heart squeezed as though placed in a vice. Please, God. Don’t take her from me. Not like this.

  Emotion took over as he struggled to recall the Agency’s bomb protocol training. He drew blank after blank, all logical thought replaced by fear that the motionless woman next to him might stay that way. Why had he let his last hour with her be one of rejection and anger?

  “Lexie,” he whispered, taking her head in his hands. “Can you hear me? Please wake up.”

  He pulled her back into the safety of his arms and kissed her forehead as a ringing in his ears grew louder. Faint screams sounded in the distance. Other passengers? He should call for medical assistance. And security, too, to let them know where he and Lexie were, that they’d survived the blast. Why hadn’t anyone tried to call him yet? Surely they’d heard the bomb go off and were no doubt evacuating the remaining passengers from these lower decks as quickly as possible.

  Coming to his senses, Shaun reached for his walkie-talkie, but it was no longer on his belt. Had it fallen off when he hit the floor? He scanned the area around them, hope sinking as he spotted pieces of the device scattered across the floor, about five feet away. From where he lay, the damage appeared mostly superficial, but he couldn’t be sure until he had it in his hands again. If the main components inside hadn’t been too badly damaged—

  Beside him, Lexie moaned. Shaun’s heart tightened again. “Lexie? Talk to me. Can you hear me?”

  She pressed a palm to her forehead and coughed, eyes squeezed shut. “Barely. You sound like you’re shouting at me from a mile away. What happened?”

  “Someone set off a bomb in the elevator.” And they’d done an excellent job of it, too. The more he contemplated the sequence of events that had to have happened to place them in this position, the angrier he grew. “Perfectly timed, down to the wire.”

  Lexie peered up at him. “In the elevator?” She paused, realization dawning. “Oh, of course. The beeping. Apparently, I need to watch more spy movies. How naive of me.”

  “Not naive at all. Think about it. What kind of person sets off a bomb on a boat?”

  “Are we going to sink?” Stark terror crept into her voice, and Shaun clasped her a little tighter. He loosened his grip when she coughed, hoping she didn’t see the redness creeping into his cheeks.

  The ship creaked and groaned around them. Footsteps pounded on the deck above, but no one had yet ventured into the blast hall. The blast damage appeared to have been contained to around fifteen feet or so on either side of the elevators.

  “I don’t think so,” he finally said, hoping his voice sounded steady enough to be reassuring. “I think this was localized. Specific to this hallway, I mean.”

  Lexie groaned and rolled away from him, both hands on her temple. “To this hall? But that doesn’t make sense. Why set off a bomb down here, where there’s barely anyone around? And next to the elevator? The only people around are—”

  “You and me.” Shaun pushed himself up onto his elbows, wincing at the sharp jabs of pain throughout every part of his body. Yesterday’s bullet graze on his shoulder burned with the agony of a reopened wound. “We were the only people around at the time of the blast.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. How could the bomber know?”

  “That’s exactly what I’d like to find out.” Setting off a bomb inside an elevator with no one else around would require careful calibration and some very specific circumstances falling together perfectly. “It’s a lot of trouble to go to, pulling off something like this. I agree it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not just shoot us?” Lexie said, echoing his thoughts.

  Downed electricity. Lack of civilian casualties. Limited blast radius. How had they been targeted? The whole thing spoke of careful, professional planning. He’d thought the Wolf would be feeling desperate and start making mistakes by now. Shaun had underestimated their opponent, and it had almost cost them their lives.

  But we’re still alive.

  Shaun sat bolt upright, visually scanning the hall once again. “Can you stand?” he asked Lexie. She hadn’t complained of any injuries, but she seemed like the kind of woman who’d break her leg and then try to shake it off as a sprain.

  To his relief, she nodded as he helped her to her feet. “What’s going on, Shaun? You look…frantic.”

  He was, and he wasn’t in the mood to hide it this time. “I hate to say it, but we can’t stick around here. Whoever set off that bomb is going to come looking for us to make sure they got the job done.”

  After the events of the past day and a half, Shaun knew one thing with absolute certainty—he did not want to meet the Wolf head-on in the middle of an exploded hallway.

  They were sitting ducks so long as they stayed here. They’d be easily picked off with no witnesses or repercussions, which meant they were exactly where the Wolf wanted them.

  FIFTEEN

  Lexie shivered at the look on Shaun’s face. His usually serene, contemplative expression had been replaced by one of untethered urgency.

  “We have to move,” he said, offering his shoulder to lean against as she tested her legs. Though she stood without pain, her whole body felt as though it had been hit by a freight train. Her back ached, but nothing appeared broken. “We don’t have much time.”

  He picked up the smashed walkie-talkie and a handful of the outer casing’s broken pieces, wearing his frustration clear on his face. Lexie wished she knew what to say, but last she’d checked, working at Lead Me Home hadn’t offered the kind of physical and psychological training that accounted for potential bombings and repeated threats on her life. All told, it was a marvel she was still standing.

  Shaun fiddled with the radio for a few moments to no avail. “It’s too damaged,” he grunted, tossing it back on the floor. More pieces of the device popped off and scattered as it hit the ground. “Let’s move.” He turned around to lead the way, but a reddish glow from the walkie-talkie’s landing site drew Lexie’s attention.

  She grabbed for it, despite Shaun’s pleas to leave it and get moving. The reddish throb came from inside the device, visible now that additional pieces of the outer casing had fallen off. Lexie pressed her index finger inside the radio and pushed a stray wire out of the way, revealing a tiny red LED that pulsed with a steady rhythm.

  Lexie didn’t have to be a trained spy to recognize that piece of equipment. She dug the rest of her fingers inside and pulled the LED and its sticky base out of the device. “Uh, Shaun?” She held it up and watched his eyes widen in the dim emergency lighting. “This is a remote GPS tracker, right? I think we’ve discovered how somebody knew when to set the bomb off.”

  Shaun crossed the space between them in a heartbeat, grabbed the component out of her hand and threw it on the floor. He stomped the heel of his boot down, smashing it into thousands of tiny pieces. “Not anymore,” he muttered. “Try tracking us now.”

  As much as she appreciated his decisive action, a more disturbing prospect came to mind. “This is a security walkie-talkie, Shaun. We got it from those guys before the library gassing, right?”

  Shaun nodded, placing a finger to his lips. He gestured for her to follow him, and they moved out of the ruined hallway in silence. Despite the heavy sounds coming from the deck above, Lexie didn’t spot another soul as she and Shaun made their way through the halls of passenger cabins, listening at each door for any out of place sound.

  Despite Shaun’s reassurances that the destroyed GPS finally gave them the upper hand, Lexie looked over her shoulder every few minutes, unable to shake the feeling that they were being watched. Between Josh’s missing walkie-talkie and the GPS tracker inside theirs, Josh had hit number one on their suspect list. Who knew the ship better than a person on the security team? It made sense to place trackers inside the walkie-talkies to keep tabs on all t
he team members. He could move around the ship with stealth and avoid detection that way, but it still didn’t account for how he could have killed the engineer and cleaned up within the short time frame. Another accomplice? A few minutes on a computer would help narrow down or rule out the remaining names on the passenger list. For her part, she had a strange feeling about Reed, but Shaun hadn’t mentioned the man, so she’d been trying to put it out of her mind—she couldn’t draw the connection anyway, and Reed seemed a little too clueless to be in on a major scheme.

  And as badly as it stung to think that someone so close to them might have played them all along, Lexie hadn’t forgotten about Shaun’s deliberate truncation of their almost-kiss. This hot and cold flip-flopping game they played needed to stop. It hurt too much to continue teasing her heart this way. The next quiet moment they had together, she’d give him an ultimatum: to make something of their undeniable connection, despite the difficulties, or to forget it altogether.

  The latter sounded far easier. Less messy and complicated for her too-busy, no-time-for-a-relationship life. So why did such a large part of her heart hope he chose the former?

  Lexie stopped abruptly, lost in her thoughts, when Shaun held up his hand and stopped in front of another cabin door. He pressed his ear against it, then motioned for her to do the same. Leaning in, Lexie’s heart leaped into her throat when the faint crackle of static became audible through the door.

  “Open channel,” Shaun mouthed. He pointed at her and then at the floor. Stay put.

  Lexie stepped behind him, just as she did when he’d checked her room for intruders that very first day. The door creaked open without resistance, causing Lexie’s hopes to plummet. Someone hadn’t bothered locking the door. Not a good sign.

  No light filtered through the door crack, save for the harsh red-orange glare of an exit sign’s ubiquitous lighting, and the only sound from within was that of a crackling walkie-talkie. Shaun crouched low and Lexie followed his lead. In a sudden burst of speed, Shaun aimed a low kick at the door, sending it flying open as he tucked and rolled into the room, coming up into a crouch with his gun in his hands.

  Lexie froze in place seeing the weapon. Hadn’t Shaun lost it in the engine room? He must have retrieved it since then, but the image of Shaun with a protective weapon in his hands made the danger of the situation all the more real.

  He waved her into the room, and she pointed to her eyes and shrugged. See anything?

  Shaun signaled thumbs-down as he swept the room. He checked the bathroom while Lexie peered under the bed, but the crackling noise of the walkie-talkie sounded loudest at the front of the room, near the closet. Shaun positioned himself to the side of the closet to have a full view and clear aim in case anyone waited inside for an ambush. Lexie fervently hoped that the only ambush would be from three frightened young women, eager to get back home to their families.

  Lexie held up three fingers, tucking them away in a silent countdown. Three…two…one…

  At zero, she yanked back the closet door and ducked aside as Shaun aimed inside the storage area…and immediately dropped his arms.

  “Empty,” he said, ending the facade of silence. “Except for that.” He reached inside and pulled out the walkie-talkie, its top light lit to show the channel had been left open.

  “Someone beat us here.” Lexie’s heart sank. “They were here, though. I’m sure of it.”

  Shaun knelt and crawled inside the closet, patting down the space with his hands. He stood up with his palm open. A tiny object in the center sparkled in the room’s poor lighting. “They made sure we knew it, too. Smart girls.”

  Lexie carefully plucked the small, silver earring stud from Shaun’s hand. “From what Maria’s sister tells me about her, this sounds like the kind of thing Maria would do. The girl has a bright future ahead of her.” She swallowed, thinking about the kind of future Maria would have if they didn’t find her. “Or at least, she should. She will.”

  “We’ll make sure of it,” Shaun said, tucking his gun back in his belt. “But we have to get out of here. Whoever tracked us through GPS knew we were coming down here, and they beat us to it. This walkie-talkie wasn’t left behind by accident—” A thump from outside the room confirmed Shaun’s words. “It’s not easy to navigate out there with just those emergency lights. Let’s move.”

  Shaun took Lexie by the hand, and they moved as one to the exit. Just as Shaun reached the door, a black ski-masked figure appeared in the doorway. Lexie screamed as Shaun immediately drove his left elbow upward into the person’s face. A muffled grunt was followed by a return swing, but Shaun followed through with a right hook that sent the attacker flying backward into the wall.

  “Come on!” Shaun pushed Lexie in front of him and they took off down the hall in the opposite direction from where they’d come. A bang split the air and a sharp jab like a bee sting pricked Lexie’s leg. She pushed it from her mind and kept moving as several more bangs followed. Behind her, Shaun grunted, but it sounded more like anger than pain.

  “Are you hit?” she tried to call over her shoulder, but Shaun only gripped her upper arm and kept them moving. “Who was that?”

  “I think,” he said between exhales, breath coming fast and laborious, “that’s our elusive friend the Wolf.”

  Lexie’s heartbeat pounded triple time, and she sucked in gulps of stuffy air to try and quell the waves of nausea that threatened to overtake her. “How did he find us? You smashed the GPS.”

  Shaun grabbed her hand and pulled her around a corner. “He drew us right to that room. He knew we were coming. Probably checked the blast site first, didn’t see bodies and—”

  “Can’t you just shoot him?”

  Shaun chuckled, a humorless sound. “A firefight in this lighting is pointless. Notice that his shots are random? I’d rather save our rounds for a clear view. Right now, we run. Moving targets are much harder to hit.”

  Footsteps pounded toward the corner where they’d hidden. Shaun gripped Lexie’s hand again and they were on the move, passing corridor after corridor, running blind in the dim lighting.

  Lexie’s lungs burned, her legs wobbling like rubber bands. The stinging sensation in her leg had increased to a full burn, and wetness tickled her skin as they ran. Was she leaving a trail for the Wolf to follow? She tried to look back, but the emergency lighting made it hard to see anything against the dark gray carpeting of the halls.

  And then, like a lighthouse in the middle of an ocean storm, Lexie caught sight of a red-lit exit sign. By the time she realized what she’d seen, they were already past it.

  “We need to go back,” Lexie hissed, tugging on Shaun’s shirt. “There’s an exit. I think we can get to another deck from there. Maybe emergency stairs. But, Shaun, my left leg really hurts.”

  Despite the darkness, she couldn’t mistake the look of incredulity on Shaun’s face. “Wait, were you hit? He could be right behind us. How far back?”

  “Maybe thirty feet? I’m hit but I can walk.” She desperately hoped she hadn’t miscalculated. “And we haven’t seen another exit yet.”

  With a nod, he turned around and squinted into the shadows. Then he tore off his right shoe, pulled off his sock and pushed up her pant leg. He tied the sock around her wound and put his shoe back on. “It’s just a graze, but it’s going to sting for a little while. The sock should absorb any more blood.”

  “Thank you.” Lexie could no longer hear the footsteps that had dogged them—where were all the passengers?—but for some reason, that made it that much worse. She imagined their ski-masked pursuer waiting around a corner to jump out at them. “Can we make it to the exit?”

  “I think we’ve lost him, but we may only have a few seconds. Go!” Shaun gave her arm a reassuring squeeze as fear flared in her gut. If she’d misjudged, they were done for. It was a marvel neither of them had been killed so far, considering all the bullets fired, but it appeared Shaun had been right in his statement that shooting in the dark was a wa
ste of ammunition.

  Lexie led the way back to the exit, certain that at any moment, shots would come firing out of the dark and it’d be over. The dim red glow of the word Exit felt like both a lifeline and a flashing neon sign saying “here we are!” She sprinted the last few feet to the door and placed both hands on the crash bar. Her surprise at its bitter coldness lasted only as long as it took to push the door open. A blast of frigid Atlantic winter air took her breath away in an instant, drying out her throat and nostrils.

  Lexie’s eyes swept from left to right as Shaun came through the door behind her, her heart sinking as goose bumps raised along her arms. They’d leaped out of the frying pan…and into the freezer?

  *

  The instant Shaun realized they’d stepped from the warmth of the indoor passenger deck to an outdoor winter wasteland, he tore off his puffy vest and threw it around Lexie’s shoulders. The vest wouldn’t keep out the cold for long, but it might stop Lexie from catching a chill while they determined their next move.

  The outside deck sparkled in the moonlight, the result of a foggy day’s condensation turned to freezing drizzle. The night’s shift in temperature left a thin coating of ice on almost every surface across the deck—floor, railings, the nearby deck chairs. Shaun shivered, his plaid cotton shirt offering little barrier against the cold. He’d last longer than Lexie outside, but if they didn’t figure out a plan soon, they’d have simply exchanged one deadly situation for another.

  “Do you think he saw us?” Lexie asked, keeping her voice at a near-whisper. “If he didn’t see us or hear us exit, maybe he’ll search for a little while and give up. We can find a place to hide and outlast him.”

  Who’d outlast whom was what Shaun felt afraid of. “Or he’s about to burst through these doors at any second.”

  He and Lexie were sitting ducks—neither they nor their attacker would be able to move quickly on the icy deck, and their attacker would have the simple advantage of remaining in the doorway to finish the deed.