Three weeks in, and the house was nearly torn down from top to bottom. Rule knew that his father had to have hidden the videotape somewhere in the house. He never found it. However, what he did find was nearly just as good. Two years earlier, Rule’s parents had their basement refinished after a hard storm flooded it. When the contractors got into the renovation, it was discovered that the foundation of the house was tilting, which caused a long crack along the base of the floor. The floor was jackhammered and then redone. While the floor was being jackhammered, Rule remembered his father joking around and pointing to an area in the floor saying that it would be the perfect place to hide something that you never wanted found.
Rule didn’t think anything of it at the time, but when that memory came back he immediately pulled up the wood floor in the area where his father had pointed and then broke up the concrete with a jackhammer that he rented. Lo and behold there was a small metal box inside the floor, about four inches in length and width. Rule opened the box and inside was a flash drive. When Rule plugged in the flash drive, Dennis appeared on the monitor sitting behind his desk in his home office.
“Rule,” he said, “if you’re watching this then that means I’m dead. I don’t know how I would have died or how you would have found this flash drive, but nevertheless here we are. I pray that you are doing well. There are some things about me that I’ve never told you. Things that if you knew could very well threaten your own life. You are my only son, Rule, and what I did, I did to protect you, your mother, and your sisters. Now, listen to me very closely because what I’m going to say could affect a lot of important people.”
The video went on for close to an hour. At the end, Dennis told Rule that he loved him. And like any good spy, Dennis ensured that the flash drive self-destructed once it was done. After watching the video, Rule didn’t eat for two days. He learned that the videotape that the Russians were looking for was only the tip of the iceberg. Dennis had secrets on things that could topple governments. And if Rule needed proof, Dennis instructed him to go to the cabin in Barrow, Alaska.
Now he was there. The cabin was cold inside, both in temperature and personality. There was an old couch that pulled out into a sleeper. There was an oil lamp on top of a wooden side table next to the couch. There was wood already chopped and stacked next to the fireplace. Rule placed the wood in the fireplace, and within a few minutes the room warmed up.
He stripped off the heavy coat and snow pants. He pushed the couch away from the wall and looked down at the floor. His father told him that if he looked carefully enough, he’d be able to tell which floorboards were loose and could be pulled up. At first glance, Rule didn’t know. However, as he continued to look, he saw that one of the boards had a slightly larger gap between the other boards. So he pulled up the board and then the one next to it. In the floor was a plastic ziplock bag that held several flash drives. Rule lifted the bag and put the wooden planks back and pushed the couch back against the wall.
In the next several hours, Rule sifted through the flash drives with his laptop. Each flash drive held more graphic secrets than the last. Then he got to the one that had the shootings. Dennis converted what was on the videotape to the flash drive. Rule saw everything. How it went down and who was involved. Rule now understood why Uncle Happy had tried to cross him. These flash drives were worth a fortune in the wrong hands. There wasn’t a government on the planet that wouldn’t pay top dollar, or kill for that matter, to get ahold of them.
Especially the Russian one. As horrible as it was that those women and children had died, like Rule and Jacob suspected, it wasn’t necessarily what happened but who was involved. That year, 1983, was thirty-one years ago. An early twenty-something-year-old man who probably had no aspirations of running for office could get caught on a video like this and probably think nothing of it. But what if that twenty-something-year-old man grew up to be a fifty-something-year-old leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world? What would happen if the Russians had proof that the current President of the United States had killed innocent kids?
World War III?
Was that what Lev Oborski was trying to start?
Coincidentally, at that moment Rule’s cell phone rang. He looked at the number and didn’t recognize it, but somehow he knew who it was.
“Uncle Happy,” Rule said.
“You know, don’t you?”
“I do now.”
“You’re smarter than him, Rule. We tried to buy him off, but he wouldn’t take it.”
“It was you, wasn’t it? You killed my father.”
“Rule?” Uncle Happy said in a fatherly tone. “You can walk away from this an extremely rich man. I mean the kind of money that billionaires have.”
“You killed them all. That’s why there was no forced entry. They trusted you. They loved you.”
“Rule, this is your only chance. I don’t want to see you die. Just hand everything over, and I promise you that I will make this right.”
“The only promise here is that I’m going to kill you. And when I’m done with you, I’m going to kill Lev Oborski.”
“I’m sorry to hear you say that, Rule. I was hoping that this would end differently.”
“Is that what you said to my father before you cut open his stomach, you bastard?”
“You had your chance.”
The line went dead.
Rule wanted to scream but didn’t. He packed up his things and put on his snow pants and coat.
Now that he knew everything, his next mission was to find Uncle Happy because that was what he did best.
Look for the Rule Series to begin in 2016.
Preview of the next Jacob Hayden adventure entitled, “Within.”
Prologue
He opened his eyes, looked at his hands, and didn’t recognize them. The hands were pale with gangling bony fingers and large blue veins snaking underneath the skin. He extended the fingers and saw long, black, razor-sharp fingernails.
The hands felt sticky. He smelled the strong stench of rusty iron and turned over the hands to see that the palms were painted in blood. He looked along his arms and saw that his sleeves had been ripped and shredded.
Then he looked around and noticed that he was in an abandoned room with graffiti-covered walls and a dusty concrete floor covered in trash. A large dingy blanket hung over a window with a few candles providing dim light to the room.
He didn’t know why, but an impulse overcame him and he raised his palms to his lips. He inhaled the rusty smell, opened his mouth, and let his tongue glide along his palms until the blood covered it. He closed his eyes and swallowed.
Then he heard a whimper.
He turned around and, in a corner, saw a woman with short, brown hair stripped down to her underwear lying on the floor with duct tape covering her mouth. Her arms and feet were tied with a noose and her body was ravaged with open wounds.
She looked at him with desperate eyes full of despair. He knelt down and with one of his hands, brushed some of her hair away from her face, and saw dark, smeared eye shadow covering her cheeks. He should have been surprised, but he wasn’t. The woman whimpered again, but instead of pulling the tape from her mouth, he glided the tips of his fingernails along her face, menacing with torment.
She started to cry, but he didn’t feel sorry for her. Instead, he laughed.
His voice didn’t sound the same, but that didn’t stop him from laughing with a low and muffled voice.
“You’re going to die slowly,” he told her.
Then he lowered his right hand to her neck and pressed his long nails against her until they punctured the skin.
The woman cried through the duct tape, “Plee . . . no!”
He pushed the nails deeper into her neck until blood gushed from the wounds.
The woman cried in agonizing pain.
He stood up and watched as a puddle of blood filled the floor just behind her head.
The woman tried to wiggle free,
but he just watched. Minutes stretched on, and the woman squirmed in pain. Death was ready to take her. Her body jerked a couple of times, then it stopped. He knelt back down and looked into the woman’s vacant eyes that stared unblinkingly back into his.
He removed the duct tape from her mouth, leaned forward, and pressed his lips against hers.
“You are just the beginning. The world will soon believe in me.”
The End
Other Books by Charles Prandy
Jacob Hayden Series
The Avenged – Book 1
Behind the Closed Door – Book 2
The Game of Life or Death – Book 3
Stand Alone Novels
The Last of the Descendants
To be notified of future works by Charles, please go to www.charlesprandy.com.
The Game of Life or Death: A Detective Series of Crime and Suspense Thrillers (The Jacob Hayden Series Book 3) Page 23
