Witness Protection Unraveled (Protected Identities Book 3)

by Maggie K. Black

  She pressed her lips together and drove. Seth was teasing her and she didn’t have to rise to the bait. But that didn’t stop the answer to his question from circling through her mind. Because she was about to take on the riskiest mission of her life to unmask the vicious crime lord who’d forced Travis into witness protection and didn’t want to do it without him.

  Travis had been one of the best she’d ever worked with, in the grueling and exhausting work of taking down those who preyed on the most vulnerable. While he’d worked too long hours and was frequently worn down from forgetting the basics like eating or sleeping, he’d also been relentless and thorough, and had this way of having her back that made her feel invincible.

  The sheer relief and elation she’d felt four years ago when they’d finally taken down the Chimera’s entire Canadian operation had led to heartbreak when somehow a fluke missed gunshot had led to the crime lord himself getting away and escaping the country, forcing Travis to fake his death and give up his life in law enforcement for good.

  But things had changed since then. She’d been part of forming an elite, off-the-grid team that had worked hard to undo the damage of the theft and sale of the witness protection files. They’d gotten smarter about protecting people’s identities and one of their own, Seth, was himself in witness protection. With the right tactics and new location, they could completely hide Travis from the Chimera, too, while he helped her stop him once and for all.

  “Because we could use someone like Travis,” she said eventually, trying and failing to keep her thoughts to herself. “He’s the best I’ve ever worked with. He risked everything to take down the Chimera. We thought the crime lord had escaped the country and gone underground for good, until his name popped up in your dark web data analysis of the secret identity file auction. If I’m going to track the Chimera down and stop him for good this time, I need Travis. I know he can’t ever go undercover again, but he can still be my handler back at headquarters with you.”

  Was she reminding herself? Reminding Seth? Or practicing out loud what she was going to say to Travis? When he hadn’t replied to her voice mail, she’d assumed he might not think the phones were secure, and so had decided to come to him in person.

  Everything had fallen into place with the Chimera operation at rapid speed. Seth had identified his cover operation as a holiday complex in Victoria three days ago. She’d applied for a job as a hostess the next day and was set to start her cover life there on Monday. Everything was in place. All she needed was Travis. She glanced to the clouds above and prayed he’d say yes. He just had to.

  “Why are you so set on this guy when it’s his fault your first mission against the Chimera failed?” Seth asked.

  Something bristled at the back of her neck. “The mission didn’t fail,” she said. “The Chimera’s entire operation was taken down, all of his henchmen went to jail and dozens of women he’d trafficked were freed.”

  “Travis’s file says he had the Chimera in his sights and missed the shot.”

  “The file doesn’t know him,” Jess said. “I do. We worked fifty-two cases together.”

  “How did he miss the shot?” Seth asked.

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.” Which was a bit of a cop-out answer, considering she’d been in his earpiece at the time. “I didn’t have eyes. The Chimera ran. Travis took the shot and missed. It could’ve happened to anyone.”

  Seth shrugged. “The file says it was officer error.”

  “And your file says you used to be a criminal,” she shot back.

  Seth snorted. “People change. Or so I’ve heard.”

  She knew he wasn’t the slightest bit offended at being reminded of his past. Seth was like a duck that way. Everything rolled off his back. Yet she was slightly irked at his good-natured banter and wasn’t sure why. She’d worked with Travis for years and had no doubt he’d beat himself up to no end about missing the shot. Besides, she was giving him a chance to redeem himself by finally taking the Chimera down for good.

  “His file also says he racked up a whole lot of speeding tickets,” Seth added.

  She ignored him. Seth didn’t say anything for a long moment. Instead the former criminal hacker now mostly reformed member of her team, kept typing away furiously on the laptop balanced on his knees. Then he frowned.

  “Please, tell me we’re heading straight to Tatlow’s Used Books and Café,” Seth said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I just picked up an ambulance dispatch to that location,” Seth said. “Elderly woman, potential fall.”

  “Yeah, Travis had mentioned his landlady had an accident.”

  “Plus there’s this.” Seth pushed a button and a small child’s voice filled the car.

  “Maynaise. Maynaise.” The voice was young and scared, but also very determined. “This is Willow Tatlow with my brother, Dominic. We’re in Uncle Travis’s apar’ment. Uncle Travis has been captured by the Shiny Man. Send rescue. Over.”

  Jess gasped. “What is that?”

  The town ahead grew closer. Seth played the little girl’s voice again on repeat.

  “I don’t know, that’s all I’ve got,” Seth said. “It sounds like she was sending it on a very short-wave radio signal and then changed to a different channel looking for a response. I’m guessing a walkie-talkie or baby monitor. Tell me you know what that was about.”

  “Not a word.” She could see the bookstore ahead on her right now. An ambulance was parked by the front door and a small crowd had gathered. She pulled up a few doors down and watched as an elderly woman she recognized from her intel as Travis’s landlady, Patricia Tatlow, was wheeled out the front door on a stretcher, flanked by a couple she didn’t recognize. Her eyes were open, which Jess took as a good sign. A tall, winding fire escape crawled up one side of the building, facing the bakery next door. She glanced up. There were windows open on both the second and third floors.

  “I’m going in,” she said. “You’re coming with me. So stash your computers and grab us both an earpiece.” She yanked her long, blond hair free from its ponytail and shook her head so that it fell around her shoulders almost all the way to her waist. She didn’t normally wear her hair down. At five foot two, with the type of eyes people sometimes called “baby blues,” adding natural blond hair to the mix made people assume she was more of a peppy cheerleader than a veteran RCMP detective. Came in handy for hiding earpieces though.

  “Need I remind you our entire plan was not to blow his cover,” Seth said.

  “I’m not going to blow his cover,” Jess said, taking the earpiece the second it appeared in his hand. “We’re going up the fire escape.” Thankfully, Seth was tall enough to grab the bottom rung of the fire ladder and pull it down, so she wouldn’t have to jump for it. “If anyone asks, I’m an old friend, you’re my brother and we’re coming to surprise him. Now, come on.”

  They exited the car and strode down the sidewalk, weaving their way through the gathered crowd and then slipping into the alley between the bookstore and bakery. Seth yanked the fire ladder down and they started up. The first second-floor window they reached opened into a kitchen. She glanced at Seth. “I’ll take this floor, you take the third. Got it?”

  Seth nodded and ran past her, his footsteps clanking as he went. She slid through the open window and entered a narrow kitchen. Two chairs, one with a booster seat, sat at a small table, along with a high chair. The wall was covered in pictures, taped up in every possible space. Most were colorful splattering and scrawling done no doubt by a child. But a few were more artistically sketched drawings of a woman with long, flowing, blond hair, her face completely turned away from the person drawing her. Jess felt her heart stutter a beat. Even without a face, the woman in the picture looked an awful lot like her.

  Jess slid through the door and came out into a hallway. More doors stood to her left and there was a
staircase to the third floor on her right.

  “I’ve got the kids!” Seth’s voice crackled in her ear. “They’re safe.”

  Jess thanked God. She could hear a child’s voice babbling in the background.

  “Willow says she saw Uncle Travis on a monitor screen being attacked by the Shiny Man,” Seth added.

  “Just keep them safe,” Jess said, “and hang tight.”

  A bang sounded from somewhere to her right. She ran back into the hall, grabbed another door handle and threw it open.

  And, for the first time in years, laid eyes on Travis.

  Her heart caught in her throat. Her former partner’s back was up against the wall and there was a handgun pointed to his head. His attacker wore a bulky, orange-reflective jumpsuit, like a construction worker, work gloves and a creepy, buglike silver respirator mask with large bulbous filters on either side of his face.

  The figure in reflective gear shouted at her in an electronically distorted voice that he’d put a bullet through Travis’s head if she so much as moved.

  Travis’s dark brown eyes met hers over his attacker’s shoulder, somehow looking so achingly familiar and yet completely new in ways she didn’t have time to process. And as she read all the conflicting emotions flickering through his gaze, it was as if all the years they’d spent apart were ripped away like unwanted pages from a book.

  Somehow she knew exactly what he wanted from her.

  Not rescue, but a distraction.

  She nodded. I got it.

  Don’t blow my cover. His eyes seemed to plead.

  I won’t.

  “Hey, you! Stop!” She yanked her weapon from her ankle holster and held it up with both hands. “Right now! Drop your gun!”

  The gunman glanced toward her and Travis struck, smashing his palm into the side of his face and knocking him sideways. The man stumbled toward her. Something small flickered in his other hand. Then came the light—sharp, bright and blinding—searing her eyes and robbing her of her vision. A fist struck out at her, catching her off guard and sending her stumbling.

  “Jess!” She heard Travis’s voice calling her name.

  But she couldn’t see where he was. She couldn’t see anything at all.

  TWO

  The light was like nothing she’d ever experienced before, blinding her eyes so suddenly and completely that all she wanted to do was press her hands over them. Instead she closed them, tightly. Her heart pounded wildly as, for a moment she stumbled, fighting the urge to drop her weapon in case it misfired.

  Then a pair of strong hands grabbed her shoulders and she felt herself being pulled into a muscular chest.

  “It’s okay, Jess.” Travis’s voice was in her ear, firm and reassuring. “Just breathe. I know it hurts and it’s scary, but it’ll pass. Now, I’m going to take the gun from you, just for safety’s sake.”

  “Thanks.” She let him take it. She didn’t know how he knew that was what she’d been most worried about, only that somehow she knew what he’d be most worried about, too. “Willow and Dominic are safe upstairs with my colleague, Seth.”

  The long sigh of relief she felt move through his core told her she’d been right.

  Then she heard him pray and thank God. Huh? The Travis she used to know had given up on his faith long ago and used to roll his eyes whenever she’d prayed.

  “How do we contact their parents?” she asked.

  “Their parents are gone,” Travis said. “They were friends of mine. Geoff and Amber Tatlow. Both cops. Amber went back to work part-time eight weeks after Dominic was born. They were both working at a roadside impaired driving checkpoint on the highway, just pulling drivers over to make sure nobody’s drunk, overtired or impaired, like cops do across the country every long weekend. One drunk driver apparently panicked and tried to drive around the road stop, injuring three people in the process and killing Geoff and Amber.” She felt Travis shrug. “Their grandmother, Patricia, is all they have now.”

  And him apparently.

  “I saw Patricia being rolled out on a stretcher and into an ambulance,” Jess said. “She looked conscious. I think a man and woman got in the ambulance with her.”

  “That was probably Willow’s new kindergarten teacher Alvin and the baker’s daughter Cleo,” Travis said, and there was something both coplike and familiar in how he was giving more detail than was necessary. “One of them will contact me as soon as there’s news. They’ll know I’m with the kids and Kilpatrick is the kind of town where people keep everyone else in the loop.”

  She heard him set her gun down on the desk. Then he wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly. She wasn’t sure if the hug was because she’d been blinded or if he was happy to see her.

  “You said there was no active threat against me,” he said, an edge to his voice that belied the softness of his hug. “You said my identity hadn’t been compromised.”

  “There wasn’t,” she said. “It hadn’t.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked and, even with her eyes closed, she could sense him searching her face.

  “Yes.”

  “Then how...why are you even here?”

  “You weren’t returning my calls,” she said, “so my colleague Seth and I drove out to see you.”

  “The same Seth who’s with Willow and Dominic now?” Travis asked.

  It was bizarre. He was grilling her and holding her at the same time.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “Seth Miles, the hacker. Remember hearing about him? He only hacked criminals, there was a warrant out for his arrest, he got hunted by really bad guys and then ended up in witness protection.”

  Travis blew out a long breath. Yeah, she wasn’t surprised Travis remembered the man’s name, considering the stir he’d made a few years back. Not that he probably had any idea who Seth had become since then.

  “Now he’s my team’s tech guy,” she said. “He’s like an obsessive savant when it comes to all things online and he picked up a distress signal Willow sent through the baby monitor’s short-wave.”

  “Whoa,” Travis said.

  She pulled back out of his arms slightly, tried opening her eyes and saw nothing but a wall of white swimming with indistinct dark shapes. She gritted her teeth. So much for hoping she could do anything for a moment other than stand there helplessly and pray Travis was right about the light thing.

  “Your turn,” she said. “Who’s the Shiny Man? Where did he go? What does he want? And what did he hit me with?”

  “I don’t know who he is or what he wants.” Frustration filled Travis’s voice. “He showed up when Patricia was closing the store, confronted her in some way and then ran upstairs where I found him. He went down the fire escape and he hit us both with some kind of high-brightness tactical flashlight. Illegal, I’m guessing, but temporary. His whole get up, from the reflective gear to the respirator mask, could’ve easily been slapped together from an online tactical gear store.”

  “So, probably not a pro. And much sloppier than anyone the Chimera would ever hire, so I expect there’s no connection there.” Jess opened her eyes again, thankful to see less white and more splotches. “But apparently the kind of criminal to plan ahead, considering he was in disguise. Did he steal anything?”

  “No.” Worry moved through Travis’s voice. “My laptop and tablet computer are all still here, along with some emergency cash I had in a jar on my desk.”

  There was a matter-of-fact dryness to his tone. It was reassuring, and Jess suddenly realized how much she’d missed it. There’d often been a sharpness to his voice, too, that other people had thought of as rude. Maybe it had been a little intense, but she’d liked the fact it was direct and to the point. He’d never been one for compliments or affection. He’d never even hugged her, until now.

  Travis stepped even further back, her hands slipping down his arms and
coming to rest just below his elbows. She felt the strength of muscles under her fingertips. His chest had been unexpectedly strong, too.

  The Travis she’d known hadn’t exactly been weak but, with the exception of his time on undercover assignment, he’d definitely been a desk jockey. But this new Travis felt like he could fell trees with an ax. Her mind flickered back to the sketches of the woman on the kitchen wall. Was he now an artist, too?

  She looked up into Travis’s face and blinked as slowly it came into focus. His eyes were worried and his strong jaw was clenched. He reached for her hand and took it in his. While she knew it was only to guide her, somehow that didn’t stop the warmth of his touch from spreading through her limbs. She tapped her earpiece to keep herself from focusing on it.

  “Seth, I’ve got Travis. He was attacked by someone who got away by shining a tactical light in my eyes. How are the kids?”

  “Good.” Seth’s voice came back in her ear. “I’m sitting in the playhouse, holding Dominic while Willow is telling me about all her favorite books. Apparently one of them has the cover on upside down.”

  “Willow really loves books,” Travis said, and Jess realized he was leaning in close enough to pick up Seth’s voice in her earpiece.

  “We’re on our way.”

  Travis picked up her gun, removed the clip and helped her slide it back into her ankle holster. Then Travis straightened and took her hand. When she pulled it out of his grasp, he didn’t question it. Her vision still wasn’t great, but she’d rather use the walls for guidance if need be than be led around.

  They walked out of his study and back into the hallway.

  “There’s a lot of people gathered downstairs,” Jess said as they started up the stairs to the third floor. “It’s like the whole block turned out to make sure Patricia was okay.”

  Travis paused halfway up the stairs, as if a new thought had just hit him. “Please tell me you didn’t blow my cover.”

  Jess shook her head. “No, we came up the fire escape. Though the Shiny Man might’ve heard you call me ‘Jess’ and definitely knows I was carrying a gun.” Although she’d done her best not to sound like a cop when she’d pulled it.