River of No Return : A Jake Trent Novel (9781451698053)

by Bertsch, David Riley

  “Drop it.”

  A voice from behind. The doorway. A female voice. Pleasant except for its mandate. His target had turned the tables. She’d hidden elsewhere in the lab after the first spate of gunfire, explaining why Jake hadn’t seen any more figures in the office.

  Stupid. He was rusty.

  “Drop it.” Again. The soft air of a Chinese accent. “Don’t turn around.”

  Jake did as she asked, bending down and placing the Glock on the carpet.

  “Keep your hands up and walk backward.”

  Again Jake submitted, slowly walking toward her with his hands up. He knew better than to mount a counterattack. There would be better opportunities when his captor’s adrenaline had flushed through her system. For the next ten minutes or so, she would have a hair trigger—a shoot first, ask questions later attitude.

  Meirong led Jake into the office, the room with the window. She’d killed the lights. Jake couldn’t see inside, but he could hear labored breathing. A wounded man.

  She was gathering some items from the desk’s drawer with the light of her phone. Jake heard the jangle of a key set.

  If she was going to lock him in somewhere—a closet or a storeroom—his chances of escape were slim.

  “C’mon.” She pushed Jake from behind down a short hallway that opened up into a workshop of sorts. Ground zero? Was this where they were developing the GPSN? The space was empty, and only the dim auxiliary fluorescent lights were on.

  She steered Jake along the left wall of the laboratory to a door in the far corner. Meirong ordered him to sit on a cluttered desk and went to unlock the closet.

  She was smaller than he’d realized, probably under ninety pounds. Her dress was plain, a white blouse and black dress pants. She made brief eye contact with him as she spun around from unlocking the door. He tried to detect something, anything that would give him an idea of her mental state, so that he could use it to his advantage. Her face was apathetic and her breathing normal. She didn’t seem afraid.

  “Stay there.” Meirong pointed the gun squarely at Jake’s forehead and then quickly turned to pull a stack of boxes from the electrical closet to make room for her prisoner. He wanted to sack her, make his move while she had her back turned, but she was still on edge. It was too dangerous.

  “Get in.”

  Jake’s window of opportunity was closing. He walked into the tiny room.

  Meirong didn’t slam the door shut. Instead, she sat back on the desk where Jake had just been and relaxed a bit but kept the barrel of the gun trained on him.

  “Who are you?”

  Jake had to think quickly. “I’m here to protect you.”

  She laughed. “Did my father send you?”

  Jake sensed hostility in her voice. “No. Canart was going to hurt you. Take advantage of you.”

  Another chuckle. “Everyone takes advantage of me.”

  “We are trying to set you free.”

  “And you are who? The American government?”

  It seemed to Jake she knew a hell of a lot more than the CIA was aware of.

  Before Jake could speak again, she affirmed his suspicion. “I know what I am worth. To any country, not just China.”

  “I am here to help you, not enslave you.”

  “The senator did not have me enslaved.”

  She was loyal to Canart. Jake could use that to his advantage. “I can help him, you know. I am a trained medic”—which was a lie.

  “Stay here.” She was up quickly and slammed the closet door.

  He’d missed his chance. Now, Jake’s only company was the buzzing electricity. Modems, circuit breakers, and phone routers. There was no ceiling fixture in the room, but the various pieces of equipment in the closet emitted thin beams of colored light from their power buttons.

  Jake took a seat on the floor and felt a tug in his pocket. His phone. Meirong had neglected to confiscate it. He texted Divya.

  Meirong has me captive. I’m okay. Believe Canart was the one shot.

  Her response came quickly.

  Stay safe. Calling Wright.

  Jake used the phone’s flashlight app to look around the closet for anything useful. There wasn’t much. Two cases of printer paper, a mop, and a spool of Cat 5 internet cable.

  He held the phone up to examine the doorknob. It was a traditional lever knob with a simple key lock from the inside. Unusual, but not unheard of—key locks were considerably cheaper than the inside toggle-lock variety.

  He turned and inspected the rear wall where the electronics were mounted. The circuit breaker was centered on the wall. Jake opened the gray steel swing. The top switch was marked MAIN.

  The flashlight on the phone turned off as a text arrived from Divya.

  If you are not in danger, stay put for now. We are tracing your cell location.

  Jake shook his head in frustration. They were using him to find Meirong.

  I am in the big building on the northeast corner of Heise Road and 26.

  Stay with her. Wright’s orders

  was all Divya responded.

  Dammit.

  Jake looked back up at the circuit breaker and decided it couldn’t hurt. At the very least, it would improve his chances to interact with Meirong again and disarm her.

  He pulled the switch from left to right, killing the power to the entire building. An unnerving silence replaced the buzz of technology.

  It took a few minutes longer than he expected. When Meirong finally opened the door, there was blood on her hands. She slipped past Jake, gun trained on him, and flipped the switch back to the left. When she came back past him, he could hear her breath, shaky and fearful. She was losing her cool.

  The equipment on the wall beeped and blinked as it started up.

  “Don’t do that again.”

  “I told you I can help. He’s losing too much blood.”

  Had the prodigy shed a tear? Maybe it was sweat. Her face was ashen, her eyes desperate and vacant.

  “Get up.” She led Jake at gunpoint back through the laboratory and into the front office.

  Senator Rick Canart was on his side with his knees drawn toward his chest, almost into a fetal position. He was holding his breath now, clearly in pain, and letting it escape in a swift huff that was half-exhale, half-moan. He didn’t regard Jake or Meirong.

  “Left side,” she said, going to him.

  “I have to move you again.” Meirong grimaced with him. She was more focused on her lover’s condition than she was on Jake. He was going to use that to his advantage.

  Jake helped Meirong move the portly politician to his back. His breath came shallow and fast now. Rapid breathing and heart rate. Hypovolemic shock. His organs were dying. The pooling blood around him hadn’t spread into an expansive tarn as it did in the movies. Instead, it absorbed into his clothes and rested in small clotted puddles on the laminate floor.

  Estimating his blood loss at more than two liters, Jake didn’t give the senator any real chance of surviving the gunshot, but he kept that to himself. The wound was several inches below his heart, in the left middle of the abdomen. Canart couldn’t speak or move on his own, other than occasional winces of pain.

  “I need clean water and some clean towels,” Jake said

  Meirong was still too sharp to leave him alone in the room. “Let’s go.” She walked him at gunpoint to one of the lab tables, under which sat a file cabinet with two drawers.

  “In there.”

  Jake bent down and opened the drawer and grabbed a roll of paper towels. “This won’t be enough.”

  “It’s all we have.”

  “He needs a hospital.”

  “No.” She gestured for Jake to stand up, and then led him back into the office. From behind the desk, Meirong pulled several bottles of drinking water.

 
Jake opened the senator’s dress shirt and began wiping around the wound. If Canart could feel the pressure, he didn’t show it. His eyes were only slightly open on their upper halves, and they stared up toward the ceiling.

  “I need to apply pressure to the wound. Do you have anything we can wrap?”

  Meirong silently backed off, the gun aimed at Jake, and pulled a sleeping bag off the couch adjacent to the desk.

  “I need a knife.”

  She shook her head.

  “Then I need you to cut strips from the bag, four inches wide and long enough to tie around his torso.”

  She went back to the desk, grabbed a pair of scissors, and did as Jake asked.

  “Bring it to me.”

  Finished, Meirong brought the first tether over.

  “When I lift him, slide it under.” After she did as he asked, Jake tied the compress of wadded paper towels in place with the strip of nylon from the sleeping bag.

  “Good. Now go cut some more.”

  The senator moaned and closed his eyes.

  “He’s dying!” Meirong pleaded, and moved toward them.

  Jake stopped her. “Keep cutting.”

  The life was seeping out of the embattled senator. Not that it mattered to Jake. He was still a machine with one goal in mind: saving Charlotte Terrell.

  When she came back with two more strips from the bag, Jake made his move. He reached up to take the makeshift bandages but instead grabbed the prodigy’s left hand, which held the pistol. He forced the barrel up and away, where it harmlessly discharged into the drop ceiling. A flurry of mineral fibers fell down on them.

  The scuffle lasted no more than a couple of seconds. Jake stood up and aimed the pistol at Meirong, who was on her knees beside the senator.

  She bent over him and let out a cry. “He’s not breathing!”

  “I’m sorry.” Jake caught his breath, bent down next to the hysterical woman, and grabbed the nylon, which he repurposed as constraints.

  “You need to stand up.”

  Meirong was disconsolate, hands trembling with adrenaline and the emotional shock of her lover’s death. Jake put her hands behind her back and tied them. Then he walked her over to the departed senator’s swivel chair and tied her to it by her waist.

  “Goddammit!” He didn’t mean to say it aloud. How the hell did I get here? Adrenaline waning, the human was creeping back into him.

  He wiped the blood from his hands on the remaining paper towels and took out his phone. He was surprised to find his own hands trembling.

  “Divya. I have Meirong. The senator is dead.” The prodigy whimpered at Jake’s words.

  As Jake listened to Divya’s instructions, he pulled aside the blinds and checked the parking lot.

  “Got it.” Jake ended the call.

  He turned and untied Meirong. “We’re leaving.”

  “Let me stay here with him.”

  Jake didn’t respond. He led Meirong around Senator Canart’s body and through the office door to the hallway, opened the door to the parking lot, and looked around once more. Still empty. The senator’s secrets had worked against him. His staff and family, all in the dark, weren’t able to save him. He scrambled out and grabbed his Mariner from the carpet and returned to Meirong.

  “Let’s go.” Jake hurried her through the lot, around the corner of the building, and to the street where the Charger was parked. He loaded Meirong into the passenger seat and took off south toward the highway.

  50

  WASHINGTON, DC. OCTOBER 29.

  9:45 P.M. EASTERN STANDARD TIME.

  The Office of Human Rights and Special Prosecutions looked like an ordinary workplace. It was located on the fourth floor of an Indiana limestone structure on Pennsylvania Avenue, a couple of blocks from the White House and next to Freedom Plaza.

  The staff was small—six attorneys, who, like Jake Trent, were also law-enforcement-trained special agents. Others were located throughout the Eastern Seaboard in various branch locations.

  Each special prosecutor had an assistant, a cream-of-the-crop graduate from a top law school.

  Barry Schue, early forties, of average height but athletic, was still at his desk, to his wife’s chagrin, along with his assistant. It was another late night at work, but his understudy probably cherished the opportunity to impress his superiors. At least that’s how Schue rationalized it. He would have felt that way in his younger days.

  They were seated inside Schue’s office poring over pages of documentation on the rural ransack organized by Xiao and his young daughter. The evidence was sufficient to prosecute both of them. The question was whether, after the judgment, it would be possible to impose a sentence. This was a part of the business for which Schue couldn’t sufficiently train the assistant. It was the last hurdle in closing a case. Getting your man into custody.

  Wright had hinted all along that Meirong’s prosecution might become a casualty of foreign relations—spy business, really—and that irked Schue. The job of the Office was to pursue justice, not make concessions and play political games.

  Why the hell did Wright object to her prosecution anyway? At the very least, she was an accomplice to crimes against humanity. At worst, she was the mastermind. What was in it for Wright and the CIA?

  “Justin?”

  The young assistant looked up from the pile of paperwork spread on the carpet.

  “I’ll look through the rest of this. Can you get me a quick bio on the point man for the agency on this?”

  “Assistant Director Wright?”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  Divya had returned to Langley, where she had access to all her contacts and the full resources of the agency. The building was dim and cool. She started up her laptop, put some coffee on in the break room, and called Wright.

  “I’ll fly out and pick up Meirong,” Wright told her. “As soon as we get her, we’ll begin the process to get Charlotte Terrell back.”

  “I’d like to stay on. I’d really like to be out there myself. He’s a friend.”

  Wright became incensed. “You have a serious problem with authority, Divya. Do not question my command.” He hung up before she could say anything more.

  Asshole.

  Divya went to the break room, poured a cup of coffee, and sat back down at her desk. She was anxious, tapping her fingers on her desk, feeling idle. She called Jake and told him the plan.

  “Lie low until Wright contacts you tomorrow.”

  Be careful, she forgot to say. Don’t get yourself killed.

  She anxiously plied through the Canart/Xiao file for a few minutes before turning back to her computer. She went to a flight search engine and typed “Idaho Falls” in the destination field. “Dulles to Idaho Falls. Depart 5:18 am EST, arrive 8:48 MST.” She supplied her credit-card information and clicked purchase.

  On her way home her cell phone rang.

  “Divya? It’s Schue.”

  “Yes?”

  “You need to stay away from Wright. Tell Jake the same.”

  51

  HEISE HOT SPRINGS. OCTOBER 29.

  10:45 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME.

  Jake perched the Charger on a high, sandy shoulder above the dirt road to Ririe Reservoir, where he could see any vehicles coming or going from the highway. Back to the west, he could see the glow of Idaho Falls, and to the east the scattered outposts that sat along the southern fork of the Snake.

  The reception was spotty, but he checked his phone often. Nothing since Divya had called half an hour ago.

  Heavy snow continued to fall. There were four or more inches on the ground. The night was gray rather than black—the thick clouds reflected light pollution back onto the snow-covered high plains, which returned the favor, lending a dull glow to the atmosphere.

  To keep Meirong comf
ortable he’d left her in the car, out of the snow. Jake sat on the hood. He needed the fresh air.

  Around 11 p.m., Jake got back into the Charger and turned the heat on. Meirong was shivering from the cold, but her emotional state seemed to have calmed.

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” Jake was playing good cop. “I need some information. There is a woman in Jackson. A friend of mine. Did you put a GPSN chip in her?”

  “I haven’t put a chip in anyone.”

  Her face looked as though she was telling the truth. “Did the senator?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This friend is not unlike you.” Jake let his words sink in. “Very special. Very smart. She had a heart attack that nearly killed her. Is that how your wolf died?” Jake guessed.

  “Fibrillation. Ventricular fibrillation. What’s her name?”

  “Esma. How does it kill?”

  “Like a pacemaker resets the heart. Electrical pulses,” the prodigy said. “They can remove it. It was just a prototype. A trial.” She touched her left shoulder with her right hand. “It won’t activate during the procedure.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She nodded but appeared disappointed. “The technology isn’t there yet.” A frown.

  “Thank you.”

  Jake took the keys out of the ignition, grabbed an extra shirt from his pack in the backseat, and draped it over Meirong.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Jake walked through the ankle-deep snow, uphill from the Charger. To the west, a rock promontory jutted out into the night. Jake carefully climbed its slippery face, found stronger reception, and called the hospital.

  Dr. Antol was on the night shift.

  “It’s Jake Trent.”

  The woman took a moment to place the name. “The cardiology expert?”

  “How is Esma?”

  “Fine. Doing better.”

  “Good. I need you to listen to me carefully.”

  Jake explained, and the doctor seemed to listen, intrigued by the bizarre story.

  “We’ll take a look,” she promised.

  After he got off the phone with the hospital, he called J.P. and filled him in. “If Dr. Antol doesn’t find anything, you need to get a second opinion.” Jake was still concerned about whether Dr. Antol would take him seriously. J.P. sounded confused, but compliant.