by S. S. Segran
“What’s it say?” Marshall asked. “I just read the first part.”
“He goes by Rupert Nolan. No idea if that’s a real name or an alias. He’s lived just outside of Salt Lake City for the past eight months. From the UK, but came in on a… year-long B-2 visa? That’s odd. Those are almost impossible to get, especially if you’re eligible for the Visa Waiver Program.”
“Maybe he’s got friends in high places?”
“Oh, come on.”
“All I’m saying is that we don’t know the scope of what we’re dealing with, but considering the number of abductions circling around smart kids, I think we just might be shoving our heads into a lion’s mouth here. A very big, very dangerous lion.”
Gwen chewed on her thumbnail as she stared at the phone. Buildings flashed by her window but she barely even saw them. When Marshall spoke again, his voice was softer. “G, you’ve felt it, haven’t you? The ripples?”
“There’s always some small ripple or another,” she muttered, even though she knew that wasn’t what he meant.
“Right, because that’s life. But these ripples… the frequency of the disturbances in the fabric… they’re not abating. They’re growing. Something’s up. It has been for a while now.”
Gwen squeezed her eyes shut, pinching the bridge of her nose. Of course she’d been aware of it, as was probably every other Sentry around the world. The fabric was something everyone with Dema-Ki blood could sense, a dimension of consciousness where events affecting humanity leave trails. Just like ripples on a pond when a rock is thrown, the larger the rock, the stronger the ripples.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” she said firmly, “because we’re not bowing out of this. Look, the guys even found his apartment. Let’s pay Mr. Nolan a visit, hm?”
On the outskirts of the city, they parked across from a resort-styled complex that looked more like a collection of cottages and townhomes than actual apartments.
“Swanky,” Marshall said. “What’s the plan, O Fearless Leader?”
As she drank in the view and mulled over his question, Gwen’s gaze fell upon a well-built man in a blue t-shirt and black shorts heading toward the apartment’s parking lot. She glanced down at the picture in the email, then back at him to confirm. “Would you look at that. That’s our guy.”
“Hey, great timing. So what are we gonna—Gwen? Gwen! Where are you going?”
She was already out of the car. “Wait here!” she hissed. “And get the twins on a conference call!”
It took only a few seconds to cross the street and vault over the low stone wall. “Hi!” she called out.
Rupert Nolan, who’d just reached his small gray car, looked up at her, startled. She came to a halt beside him, making a show of breathing heavily with her hands braced on her knees.
The man tilted his head at her. “You all right there, love?”
Ooh, that’s a nice little accent he has, she thought, straightening up and flashing him a smile. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been better. I’m trying to meet up with family but my phone died and I don’t remember the address, and—ahh, you know what, never mind. I’m being a bother.”
His face was unreadable as she turned to leave. Come on, come on, she pleaded silently. Don’t be a total douchebag and let me walk away…
A hand reached out and lightly touched her arm. “No, it’s fine. Honest. D’you need to borrow my mobile?”
She faced him again, eternally relieved. “If you’re okay with that, yeah. That would be super great.”
As the man unlocked his Android phone and passed it her, she was painfully aware of his suspicions simmering just beneath the surface. She tried to look as relaxed as possible and stepped a few yards away, then dialed Marshall’s number. He picked up at the first ring. “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me,” she said. “I’m using someone else’s phone ’cause mine died. Aw, do I hear the twins in the back? Hi, babies!”
“Hullo, Gwen,” a new voice chirped. “Ah, I haven’t been baby-talked to since I was in nappies. It feels strange. Anyway, it’s just Gareth here. So what’s up?”
“Right, so, I’m kinda lost. That’s what happens when you’re so used to tech, right? Could you give me directions to your place? I don’t have a GPS.”
“G, do you want Gareth to trace the phone?” Marshall asked.
“Yes.”
“Agh!” Gareth yelped. “You need to give me a minute to set up! And then another three for the device to do its job! Also, Gwen, there’s an app you need to download onto the bloke’s phone for this to work!”
“Uh, you’re breaking up,” she called, so Nolan could hear. “Could you repeat that?” Then in an urgent whisper she said, “Guys, he’s all-around suspicious. I’m surprised he even lent me his phone. I don’t know how long stalling will work, or how I’m even going to download an app without him noticing.”
“You’ll have to figure it out,” the Welsh Sentry insisted, though not without sympathy. “Okay, so I want you to listen to me closely, then put us on speaker, all right?”
Gwen kept the phone pressed to her ear as Gareth rattled off his instructions, then she said loudly, “Yeah, yeah, okay, I’ll wait.” She looked back at Nolan, shrugging helplessly. “I’m so sorry! It’s a full house and everyone’s hectic—it’ll just take a minute!”
The man jerked his head in acknowledgement but didn’t respond. Gwen made sure he was watching as she put the call on speaker so she could look down at the phone, then made a lazy turn so her back was to him. “You’re on, Marshall,” she murmured.
While Marshall created a background din as though he were chasing after uncooperative children, Gwen’s fingers flew over the phone screen. She located the app Gareth needed and downloaded it, her heart thudding. A glance back at Nolan showed that he was starting to look more than a little impatient. She gave him an apologetic smile. When she was certain he wasn’t moving from his car toward her, she faced away again. Once the app appeared on the home screen, she opened it and as quietly as she could, recited the decimal-formatted codes that appeared in two separate boxes.
An agonizing thirty seconds ticked away. “Gareth,” she begged, hushed.
“Almost there!” the Welsh Sentry breathed; Gwen had to strain her ears to hear him over Marshall’s decoy chatter.
“Is everything all right?” Nolan asked, his voice right at her ear.
She squawked and leapt back a good five feet. “Jeez!” she exclaimed, clutching her chest to play up her surprise.
Nolan’s unreadable eyes held hers. “I’m sorry for startling you like that, love. I just have somewhere to be, and—”
“G, I’m here!” Marshall said, huffing over the speakerphone. “Those kids, I swear! They’re gonna wear me out real fast. You got a pen and paper?”
Gwen looked up at Nolan, repeating the question with her expression. He loped back to his car and as he did, she hastily buried the downloaded software in the Android’s app drawer. He returned with a pen and a small notepad and she scribbled down an address Marshall must have quickly made up.
“Thank you so much,” she said, hanging up the call and handing Nolan back his phone. “Again, I’m so sorry about this. I’ll get out of your hair now. Have a great day!”
She turned and slowly walked across the parking lot, loitering until the man had gotten into his car and driven away, before clambering over the thigh-high wall and hurrying across the road. Once she was safely buckled into the Mustang, Marshall left the apartment complex behind.
Gwen released the breath she was holding with a drawn-out groan. “That was close.”
Marshall clenched and unclenched the steering wheel. “You scare me sometimes.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.”
“I know. It’s just, even after all these years, you’re still ‘jump first, look later’.”
“I prefer to say I’m making leaps of faith. So, did Gareth get what he needed?”
“Yes. Now he’s k
eying in all the information into his program.” Marshall gave her a sidelong glance. “What made you think Nolan would lend you his phone?”
“Frankly, I was prepared for him to give me a cold look and tell me to ‘bugger off’ or something. I don’t know. It was a gamble.”
“A lot of what you do seems to be a gamble.”
“Yeah. And my luck’s been quite good so far.”
“Don’t get too cocky, G.”
Gareth called back fifteen minutes later, and Gwen picked up. “Everything okay?” she asked, prepared to hear that the whole thing had been a failure.
“Aye,” the other Sentry replied, and Gwen could hear his grin through the speaker. “I’ll send the data to Marshall, and you can continuously track the fellow. Keep in mind that the accuracy could be off by anywhere from twenty to fifty meters.”
“You’re amazing. Thank you.”
“You did the nail-biting bit, Gwen! I’m proud of you for thinking on your feet so fast.”
“Do not encourage her,” Marshall complained.
“Oi, leave me out of this. I’m only here to help. And now, if you’ll pardon me, my brother’s yelling because we’re late for tea with a mate. Good hunting to you both!”
Marshall pulled over to the side of the road and took his phone from Gwen once the call ended. He tapped the screen a few times, then tilted the device so they could both look at it. A small blue dot on a map that looked like it was made in the early 2000’s pinged as it moved.
“Gotcha,” he said, eyes gleaming. “Nolan, we have you now.”
For the entire day and most of the next, the blue dot stayed within the city limits. It was only the following night that, an hour past midnight, the dot emerged heading northwest on Highway 15 toward the Great Salt Lake. As the Sentries followed, keeping back a few miles, the dot stopped and disappeared from the screen for a few moments before reappearing, moving much more slowly.
“He must be on foot now,” Gwen surmised.
They drove on a while longer before a small, rundown factory complex came into view, right on the lakeshore. Marshall stopped the car. “You have got to be kidding.”
Gwen leaned over the dash, peering at the buildings, all connected with elevated walkways. “What?”
“That’s Vector, Utah. I read about it when I came back, trying to catch up on stuff in the state. Sprang up a couple years ago supposedly as a competitor to US Magnesium. Really out of the blue. Then within months it was run into the ground and abandoned. Pretty weird, but for some reason no one really looked too deep into it.”
“Seems like an ideal place to hold stolen kids, no? Let’s check it out.”
“Fine, but this is strictly recon, G.”
“Of course.”
They parked on the other side of the road, the red car hidden away by foliage and trees, then made their way across the asphalt to the pebbly shore. They stuck to the shadows, keeping away from areas highlighted by the moon, and moved around the concrete-and-brick structures. All around them were broken windows and graffiti-clad walls.
Marshall looked down at his phone, then grunted. “The trace is gonna be inadequate here. We’ll have to use our eyes. Let’s get to a higher vantage point.”
They slunk toward a rusty fire escape ladder against one of the buildings and clambered up the three-story structure, pulling themselves onto the flat rooftop. Then, moving at a crouching run with Marshall taking point, they navigated the complex, easily leaping over gaps between buildings and crossing on top of the boxed walkways. Gwen couldn’t stop a grin from tugging at her lips; it wasn’t quite like being on the open road with her motorcycle, but it was a thrill nonetheless.
Marshall dropped to one knee, holding up a fist. “How much you wanna bet that the only lit office in this entire place is where our guy is?”
Gwen knelt beside him. Light spilled out from a walkway two buildings over. Without a word, the Sentries scaled down from the rooftop and slipped through a shattered window. They both made quiet sounds of displeasure; it was musty and mildewy inside, and it clearly reeked of animals that had made the building their home.
As they traversed the space, Gwen admired the way Marshall moved; he was surefooted and constantly alert, wielding a certain rugged grace that came with experience. He cleared each room with practiced ease before leading her to their target walkway.
Voices and the tail-end of a chuckle forced the Sentries to drop into hiding behind a few discarded desks and filing cabinets. Careful to avoid patches of small, cracked tiles, they peeked around the corners.
Six men sat in chairs or leaned against various office furniture with a few desk lamps turned on. Gwen immediately spotted Rupert Nolan among them in navy cargo pants and a black shirt, looking through some papers on a clipboard. The rest of the men were similarly garbed with firearms against their hips.
“Okay, okay, enough of this,” one of them, an American, announced roughly. “Rupe, you ready?”
“Get on with it, mate” Nolan sighed, pencil poised over clipboard.
“All right. Time is 2:45 a.m., biweekly meeting is a-go. Wes, how’s the cargo?”
Another man spoke up. “We shipped out the street rat last Thursday. Regarding the Riverdale girl we acquired a few nights ago, we’re still waiting for location confirmation from HQ, so we’re stuck with her until then.”
“And that brings our total to… Rupe?”
“Eleven,” Nolan replied. “I heard the Vermont and Minnesota chapters have thirty apiece.”
“We don’t get to choose which kids we pick up, Rupe. And anyway, one more to go and we’ve made our quota here.”
“Hold up,” a fourth man joined in. “I thought the Riverdale girl was our last one?”
“It was last minute.”
“Aw, man, I brought Cuban cigars to celebrate!”
“Save them. It shouldn’t take more than a few days before we’re done here.”
Gwen felt fire rage through her veins as she listened the traffickers discuss their plans for the final abduction. They should be thrown in jail with the key tossed to the bottom of the ocean.
A cool hand slid to her cheek and turned her face. She found herself looking at Marshall. He held a finger to his lips, head shaking, and mouthed, “Recon only!”
She gritted her teeth. Her fury worked its way into her bones. How many parents and guardians had she seen weep as they spoke about their missing charges? Too many. Their faces had been on her mind every day since she started looking into these cases. Even the children and teenagers living on the streets had friends who sorely missed them. The kids deserved none of this, whatever this was.
But the traffickers?
Gwen’s nails dug into her palm as the fire coursing through her turned to steel. She leaned further out to get a closer look at the men’s features. All of them had an air of insolence, and the entire place seemed to reek of pride and smugness. If she had it her way, she would’ve leapt out and taken them all head-on.
She leaned a little more, and a fissured square tile beneath her hand suddenly snapped. The sharp crack brought the men’s conversation to a halt.
“What was that?” one of them muttered.
“We need to go,” Marshall whispered urgently. “Come on.”
“They’ll see us!” she hissed. “Then they’ll either kill us or disappear, and we’ll be empty-handed!”
“If we leave now, we have a clear shot to get away. Then we can pass everything we have to the authorities—”
“These guys are like ghosts. They’ll be long gone before the cops get around.”
“And you want to, what? Grab them?”
“Yes. At least one for interrogation.”
“What? Absolutely not.”
“Marshall, we’ll have nothing if we go now.”
Marshall’s expression flickered, as though he considered agreeing with her idea. Then he started to move backward toward the exit. “No. We’re not even equipped to—”
&nbs
p; But Gwen had already gripped a four-foot length of rusty pipe. She emerged from behind her hiding place, deftly dodging Marshall’s desperate grip. “Hey, asshats,” she snarled. “Batter up!”
The men scrambled for their weapons, booming at her to stop. She flung her pipe toward the nearest trafficker and dropped to the ground as a few shots rang overhead. Sliding under a desk and grabbing a discarded drawer, she popped up on the other side and launched it at a second trafficker.
In the midst of it all, a sudden panic set in—she had no idea what she was doing. She’d never been in a full-on gunfight before and was now starting to grasp that her act-first attitude had gotten the best of her again, and in the worst way possible.
As she prepared to leap over filing cabinets that lay askew, an impact hurled her sideways through a glass window. Her panic kicked into overdrive when she realized she was dropping over the side of the walkway toward the lake below.
It took a second to register that Marshall was holding her against him, a hand cradling the back of her head as wind whipped past them.
The next second, cold water devoured them.
They plummeted deep into the lake. Marshall’s hold on her never once loosened. They kicked themselves back to the surface, gasping for air. Bullets hailed down around them. One clipped the side of Gwen’s arm and she swore vehemently at the men leaning through the windows of the office walkway thirty feet up.
“Dive!” Marshall barked. “Don’t pop up until we reach the shore!”
They disappeared under the surface. She swam away from the bullets in the water, then inhaled deeply. It felt like her nose and lungs were being pierced with a multitude of blades as water flooded her respiratory tract. She fought past the burning agony until her vision darkened and her body grew heavy. At last, she released her grip on consciousness.
She came to a few seconds later with a start, the searing discomfort now gone. Her lungs had switched to aquatic respiration, aiding her in metabolizing oxygen molecules in the water. Just ahead, she saw Marshall sinking deeper and deeper into the lake.
