Operation: Midnight Rendezvous

by Linda Castillo

  In the background he saw what could be a bare mattress. A beat-up bucket. There were no windows, and only one wall was visible, made of what looked to be some type of corrugated steel.

  He wondered if Angela had snapped the picture from a tiny camera hidden on her person. Had this been part of her mission? Had her cover been blown and she’d been murdered before she could report back to the agency?

  “What the hell were you onto?” he whispered.

  The floor creaked behind him. In one smooth motion Madrid snagged the pistol off the desk and spun. Surprise rippled through him at the sight of Jessica Atwood standing at the bedroom door.

  Her eyes flicked to the gun leveled at her chest and she went white. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Frowning, he set the pistol on the desk. “You’d be wise not to sneak up on a man when he’s armed.”

  She wore an oversize T-shirt and a pair of drawstring pants she must have found in the dresser. Her feet were bare. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Another thing he shouldn’t be noticing.

  He’d left her sleeping with Nicolas a couple of hours earlier. He wished she’d stayed in the bedroom. She was pretty, and he didn’t want her distracting him from his work.

  He turned back to the photo.

  “My fever broke,” she said. “I’m feeling better. Clearheaded.”

  “The antibiotics must be working.”

  A pause. “What are you doing?”

  Madrid didn’t answer. He didn’t want to engage her; he still wasn’t totally convinced she was innocent. On the other hand, the more he thought about the circumstances surrounding Angela’s death, the more he came to believe there was something sinister going on in Lighthouse Point. Something that went far beyond Jessica Atwood.

  “Does it tell you anything?”

  He turned, gave her a look he hoped conveyed his annoyance. “What?”

  “The photo.”

  Realizing he was staring—and that she’d noticed—he tore his gaze away from her and looked at the photo. “Maybe.”

  “Hard to tell much with the graininess and bad lighting.” She came up beside him and looked at the photo. “They look scared.”

  That was the first thing that had struck him, too—the terror in the women’s eyes. “I’ll bet the farm they’re being held against their will.”

  “In a place where there are no windows. No light.” She leaned closer. “I don’t see any doors.”

  He let her think aloud. “Except for where the photographer was standing. Might be a door there.”

  “A cave, maybe? A truck?”

  “A container,” he said. “Cargo.”

  She looked at him, nodded. “You’re right.”

  Madrid scowled at the thought. Human smuggling was an ugly business. He knew it happened overseas. Was it possible someone was operating in the United States? He was going to have to call Sean Cutter. He only hoped the head of MIDNIGHT would tell him what he needed to know. They hadn’t exactly parted on friendly terms.

  “Do you think Angela stumbled upon something she shouldn’t have?” Jess asked.

  “I think her murder is just the tip of the iceberg. I think we’re dealing with something large scale that involves a lot of very bad people.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “I don’t understand how that involves Nicolas and me. We don’t know anything.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Her gaze flicked to his. Madrid steeled himself against her beauty. Against the attraction simmering low in his gut. He listened hard to the little voice telling him, Don’t go there.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Are you sure Nicolas didn’t see anything?”

  “He can’t speak.”

  “Maybe they’re not willing to risk their lives on the possibility that one day he will, or maybe communicate what he saw.”

  Her eyes widened. “My God. You think he saw the murder?” Jess pressed a hand to her abdomen. “Poor little guy.”

  “That’s just one scenario.”

  “What’s the other?”

  “Maybe they’re not after Nicolas. Maybe they think Angela told you something before she died.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what she was onto. Names. Locations. Something damaging to them.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Her killer doesn’t know that.”

  A tremor went through her, but her eyes took on a look of determination. Against his will he found his respect for her bumping up a notch.

  “What kind of person could be so cold-blooded?” she asked.

  “The kind of person ruthless enough to deal in human cargo.”

  “You mean smuggling?”

  He lifted a shoulder, let it drop. “It’s my best guess.”

  She absently rubbed her hand over the bandage. “We can’t let them get away with what they’ve done.”

  “I don’t plan on it,” he said.

  “What if they run?”

  “If there’s a container ship sitting somewhere in the United States with human cargo on board, they’ve already got too much invested.” He gave her a hard look. “You can bet they’re not going to leave two loose ends dangling.”

  Realization darkened her eyes. “You mean Nicolas and me.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  Shaking her head, she motioned toward the door where the little boy slept. “He’s already been through so much. He’s an innocent kid who’s just lost his mom. He doesn’t deserve this.”

  Madrid felt something go soft in his chest. Sympathy, he realized. For a little boy who would never know his mother. For a mother who would never see her child grow up. “Do you think he’ll be able to tell us anything?”

  “I don’t know. Angela and I were talking about it one day. She told me communication problems are common with autistic children. They tend to go inside themselves, into their own world, and Nicolas is no different.”

  “Can he draw? Or if we showed him photos, could he identify a killer?”

  “I don’t know him well enough to say.” She shrugged. “All I know is that Angela loved him more than anything in the world. She worked with him daily. She’d enrolled him in a special school. She even took him to equine therapy twice a week. She was a great mom.”

  “Did she tell you Nicolas is gifted?” Madrid asked.

  “I knew.” She turned questioning eyes on him. “How do you know that? Angela didn’t talk about that much.”

  He didn’t answer. Angela had told him the last time he’d talked to her. That had been almost a year ago. Madrid wished he’d done a better job of keeping in touch.

  “He plays the piano like a little fiend,” she said fondly. “From chopsticks to Chopin.”

  “He also does high-school level math.”

  She turned a surprised gaze on him. “How do you know so much about Nicolas?”

  “I knew Angela once,” he said. “A long time ago.”

  “She never mentioned you.”

  “I’m not the kind of guy you talk about.”

  She contemplated him. “How did you know her?”

  Because he wasn’t quite sure how to answer, Madrid steered the conversation back to the topic at hand. “In any case, I think Nicolas saw something that night.”

  “The murder,” she murmured.

  “We have to find a way to reach him without traumatizing him further. The question is how.”

  She jumped when a gust of wind rattled a loose shutter. Madrid stared at her. Even sleep-rumpled and recovering from a fever she was pretty. Her face was as smooth and pale as porcelain, her mouth as wet and soft as some exotic tropical fruit. He wondered what she would taste like if he leaned close and brushed his mouth against hers.

  Pulling himself back from a place he didn’t want to go, he stood abruptly and started to walk away. “Get some sleep,” he growled.

  “Madrid.”

  He stopped, but didn’t turn to her.<
br />
  “Why haven’t you turned me in?” she asked. “Taken me back?”

  He thought about the exchange with Cutter and knew at some point he was going to have to fix things. “I like to know who the good guys are first.”

  “The good guys don’t shoot at an unarmed woman and innocent child.”

  He didn’t need to be reminded of that. “An innocent woman doesn’t run when the police tell her to stop.”

  “They would have shot me on the spot. I didn’t want to end up like Angela.”

  He turned and gave her a hard look, searching for a lie, finding none. “Get some sleep. I’ve got some calls to make.”

  Unclipping his cell phone from his belt, he turned and walked away.

  MADRID LISTENED to the bedroom door close, then dialed the number from memory. Even though it was going on one o’clock in the morning in D.C., fellow MIDNIGHT operative Jake Vanderpol answered on the second ring.

  “I thought it might be you,” Jake growled.

  “That’s because I’m the only person you know who’s in enough trouble to warrant a call at this hour.”

  “Cutter told me what happened.”

  “Grapevine must be busy.”

  He sighed. “Madrid, you screwed up big-time.”

  “Not the first time.”

  “Might be the last. Cutter is royally ticked.”

  “He ought to be more ticked at Angela’s murderer than me.”

  “You know Cutter will do right by her.”

  “Cutter thinks this is business as usual. It’s not, damn it.”

  “He thinks you’re a loose cannon.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “Your attitude isn’t helping.”

  “I’m not in this to rack up points.”

  “Good thing, because you’re not.”

  Silence hissed over the line for an instant. “I need a favor.”

  Jake groaned. “I knew that was coming.”

  “I need to know what Angela was working on.”

  Jake swore, then noisily cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about what happened to her, man. She was a good agent.”

  “Yeah.” Madrid closed his eyes, surprised by the powerful swipe of grief. He hadn’t loved her for a long time, but there had always been something between them that neither time nor distance could dull. “Cutter won’t talk to me.”

  “Neither should I if I want to keep my job.”

  “I need to know what she was into, Jake.”

  “Maybe you ought to let Cutter handle this the way he thinks it should be handled.”

  “I need to do this.” Madrid tried to keep the desperation out of his voice, but he didn’t quite succeed. “Damn it, don’t stonewall me.”

  Jake sighed, but the sound was fraught with resignation. “I’ll do some digging, see what I can find out.”

  “I need to know what Angela was doing in Lighthouse Point, California. I need to know if she’d been sending reports back.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Find out everything you can on the local PD here.”

  “They dirty?”

  “Too early to tell, but I don’t like how the dots are connecting.”

  “I’m liking this less and less.”

  “And dig up everything you can find on Jessica Atwood. She’s originally from Phoenix. Recently divorced. She and Angela went to college together.”

  “Any particular reason why you’re interested in Atwood?”

  “She’s in this up to her neck,” Madrid said.

  “Hope this is worth it.”

  “It will be.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “I owe you, Vanderpol.”

  “You can bail my ass out of the doghouse when Cutter relegates me to filing reports and answering the phone.”

  At that, Jake disconnected, leaving Madrid alone with his thoughts and the patter of rain against the roof.

  JESS WOKE with her heart pounding hard against her ribs. She wasn’t sure what had wakened her. The cottage was quiet. Dawn hadn’t yet broken; the single window was still dark. She could hear the wind whipping around the eaves, the low rumble of thunder in the distance, the ping of rain against the roof.

  Movement on the other side of the room sent her bolt upright. A scream hovered in her throat for an instant before she realized it was Nicolas. The little boy was at the window, rocking back and forth.

  “Mah-mah,” he said. “Mah-mah.”

  Sympathy washed over her with such force that for a moment Jess had to blink back tears. He looked so small and alone. He’d lost so much.

  The need to hold him, reassure him, sent her from the bed. At his side she knelt and put her arm around his little shoulders. “Hi, sweetie. Are you okay?”

  “Mah-mah. Mah-mah.”

  She brushed the hair away and kissed his forehead. “What are you doing up at this hour?”

  Jess didn’t know much about children, even less about children with special needs. He seemed agitated, but she didn’t know why. She had no idea how to calm him. “It’s going to be okay, kiddo.”

  “Mah-mah.”

  She tried to gently guide him back to the bed, hoping he would sleep, but he resisted. It was as if he didn’t want to leave the window. “Mah-mah. Mah-mah.”

  “It’s okay, sweetie.”

  “Mah-mah!”

  “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  The bedroom door flew open. A yelp escaped her as she spun. Mike Madrid stood silhouetted in the doorway, a tall, menacing figure with a gun.

  His eyes flicked from her to Nicolas and back to her. “Get dressed.”

  The tone of his voice snapped her out of her momentary stupor. “What is it?” she asked in a low voice.

  “We’ve got company.”

  For an instant she was too shocked to speak. Then the fear took hold. “Who? How did they—”

  “I don’t know.” Crossing to the window, he parted the curtains. “Are you strong enough to run?”

  “I think so.” She glanced at Nicolas. “I’m not so sure about him. He seems…upset.”

  “I’ll take him.” Madrid turned to her, pulled back the slide on the pistol. “I said get dressed. Now.” He turned back to the window.

  Jess grabbed her clothes off the chair next to the bed. She stepped into her jeans, dragged the sweatshirt over her head. She looked wildly around for her shoes, found them near the door and jammed her feet into them.

  “Where are we—”

  The window shattered. Glass pelted Madrid and tinkled to the floor. Rain and wind whipped the curtains into a frenzy. He reeled back, then dropped to a shooter’s stance and fired off six rapid-fire shots.

  “Take Nicolas out the front,” he said over his shoulder. “Run down to the beach.”

  Darting across the room, she took the boy’s hand. He was still rocking, whimpering like a hurt animal. Through the broken window she heard shouting. She glanced at Madrid, and a fresh wave of terror enveloped her. As if in slow motion she saw him raise the pistol and fire. Someone from outside returned fire.

  He swung around, his face angry. “Run, damn it! Go!”

  Tightening her hold on Nicolas’s hand, she sprinted toward the front door, flung it open. Rain and cold greeted her like a slap, but she barely noticed. All she cared about was getting the little boy to the relative safety of the beach.

  “Come on, sweetie,” she said as she took him across the deck and down the steep wooden stairs where the ocean pounded rock and sand.

  She could feel the pain in her arm coming to life now, the throb keeping perfect time with the wild beat of her heart. But Jess didn’t slow down.

  When they reached the wide stretch of beach, the crash of the surf was deafening and salty spray dampened her clothes. The horizon was gray with the promise of dawn. She looked around, but didn’t know which way to run.

  Nicolas tugged her arm to the left. For an instant she debated, then went with him. The sand sucked at her sho
es as she ran. The ocean roiled to her right; to her left jagged rocks jutted from the sand, offering the perfect cover for an ambush.

  She was midway to a neighbor’s wooden stairs when a man lunged at her from behind a rock. Jess screamed, swung around to run in the opposite direction. The gunshot that hit the sand less than a foot from them stopped her dead in her tracks.

  “Stop right there or I swear I’ll kill you both where you stand,” said a guttural voice.

  Dizzy with terror, Jess raised her hands to shoulder level and slowly turned to face the man. “What do you want?” she panted.

  “I want you dead.” His mouth twisted into an ugly smile as he leveled a deadly looking pistol on Nicolas. “Both of you.”

  “Don’t hurt him,” she cried. “He’s just an innocent little boy.”

  The man looked about as sympathetic as a snake about to devour a mouse. With the gun never wavering from Nicolas, he tugged out his cell phone. “I got ’em. On the beach just south of the house.” He paused. “Do you want to talk to them or do you want me to do them right here? Okay…” he said, and hung up.

  Do them…

  He’s going to kill us, Jess thought, and her heart went wild in her chest.

  The gunman’s rodentlike eyes sought hers as he raised the pistol to her chest. “This ain’t your lucky day,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  Jess couldn’t believe her life was going to end this way. The only decision left was whether she was going to make a run for it and take a bullet in the back or put her arms around the frightened child at her side and wait for the killing shot.

  “Please don’t,” she said.

  Beside her, Nicolas gripped her leg, keening as he rocked back and forth. I’m sorry, Angela, she thought. In the back of her mind she wondered where Madrid was. If he’d been shot or perhaps already killed…

  Dropping to her knees, Jess put her arms around the little boy and turned her back to the man. She closed her eyes and held Nicolas tightly against her. “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered.

  But the lie broke her heart.

  A wave crashed off to her right. The wind buffeted her. At some point the rain had soaked clean through to her skin. The precious last moments of her life…