Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  "They're good. All is well."

  "It sounds like someone got shot," GJ said, no longer able to hide the concern racing through her brain. They were acting as though the abrupt cut-off of one of the howls was no big deal.

  "It's plausible that they did," Wade said, "but it's either a completely fatal shot or not too damaging. Either way, any survivors can come in on their own two feet—or their own four feet."

  The thought passed through GJ's brain again about the physiology of the people. She pushed it aside. Though all of this was scientifically fascinating, there was no time now to linger in her curiosity. In the strictest sense of it, if she didn't protect these people, she would have no science to study.

  Around the table, they talked, hashed out options, and made a plan. The number of weapons in the arsenal at each home was discussed. And again, the thought shot through her brain: not only was there a militia outside, but there was one inside as well. The numbers were looking better and better. Though the people outside were armed and protected, the people inside had something those outside didn't: a serious survival instinct. They also had something to protect, something that appeared to be sacred to the heart of each of them.

  That helped, she understood. It meant they would hopefully each make similar decisions. Though Walter might be, GJ was not ready to command a unit of thirty, each of whom had a different agenda.

  The group at the table hammered out the best places to stash guns and to set shooters. Who should hold grenades, smoke bombs, flash bangs, and the other things GJ had never expected to find in a family farming compound in the middle of the Ozarks. But after her training, after the cases she'd seen at Quantico, she probably should have. It was fifteen tactical minutes later before the cellar door shuddered again.

  Another furry nose nudged it open, and another wolf slipped through as the door tried to push him down. He made it anyway, yanking his leg up quickly at the last moment to avoid getting it slammed as the door fell shut. It was another four or five minutes before the human emerged from the bedroom that the wolf had ducked into. And again, Will looked at his newcomer.

  GJ had been wrong. He was a she. Will greeted Cherie by name and asked her, "How many?"

  Cherie offered a prompt, "Eighteen."

  Mentally, GJ was tallying the numbers when the tinkling of glass, once again, brought her sharply to her feet. Gunfire followed. Only this time, it was close, too close. This time the sound came from the next room.

  45

  Walter watched as GJ sprang to her feet, her own feet not far behind. They ran for the room where the others were guarding Shray Menon. He was their most valuable asset, and Walter was pulling her gun from its holster, racking the slide, and getting ready to aim.

  Even as she made her way through the short distance of the house, it was GJ who held her arm out, as if to hold Walter back.

  "They're losing him," GJ said calmly of the people in the room who were supposed to be guarding their find.

  Walter nodded angrily, "Yes, they are.” They didn't need Shray Menon enough to fight for him. None of them felt their own lives were worth his, and so when it came down to it, those coming in would have the advantage, and they would win by sheer force and determination. They wanted their leader back.

  But GJ shook her head at Walter. "No, they're losing him on purpose. It's okay."

  Walter wasn't sure how in the ever-loving hell that was okay. They’d brought Shray here on purpose. So why lose him? GJ had tackled him, hauled him back, and they’d interrogated him. He was likely still useful for information. They would have already gotten it if they’d not been so rudely interrupted by arriving wolves, distant gunshots, howls, and new army members coming in to plan out tactical maneuvers.

  "I tagged him," GJ whispered. "Out in the woods, before I tackled him, I put a tag in his pocket. He's trackable. I didn't tell you. We didn't have time. I meant to."

  "Oh," Walter stuttered as the idea took root. “Good thinking." It sounded like something she or Eleri or Donovan would have done. And yet, here GJ was, already picking up on the standards in Nightshade, tracking her victims. They heard the window break again. There were shouts, a few random shots. As far as Walter could tell, no one had been hit. There were no yelps, screams, or cries of pain so it sounded like they were doing exactly as GJ said. They were putting up a good show, but letting Shray get away.

  The others from the table crowded the hallway behind Walter. GJ turned and looked at all of them, very carefully in a very low voice, explaining a plan that she hoped would not carry into the other room. If Shray knew he'd been tagged, then the whole thing was useless.

  If they sweep him, if he figures it out, Walter thought, if he puts his hand in his pocket and discovers the bug, it’s all useless. But she didn’t think he would. He seemed to barely believe that GJ was a real, card-carrying FBI agent. To carry the thought out further—that she might be using spy tech against him—was something Walter didn’t think would happen quickly.

  She turned to the others and whispered, "You, stay here. You are defending the house. Wade and Christina are in charge."

  Looking between the two of them as though she had the authority to do so, she pretended she did and issued the command. "It's up to the two of you to figure out who the most senior officer is. GJ and I are going to track Shray. I have the skills, and GJ knows the quarry. If he loses his GPS tracker for any reason, then we need to be there so that we can follow him all the way to the end. We need to see where he goes and who he meets up with."

  She was thinking about cars—for Shray, for them—but GJ asked her first, "Are there any vehicles? Any keys that we need? Anything that we need to know if they hop into a car?"

  Walter had several tracking devices in a small pouch on the back of her belt. It was almost like one of the tactical belts cops wore, but not quite as bulky, and nowhere near as obvious. So she had them if she needed them, but they weren’t useful unless one of them could get close enough. "If they get to a car, we may not be able to follow any further. If we can at least touch the car before they drive away, we can track it. If we can get something sticky on the tracker, then we might be able to throw it at the car from a short distance and still trace it."

  "Won’t they hear it hit?" Will asked.

  "Maybe," GJ said. "Hopefully they'll think it's gravel. Worst case scenario, they have to stop to get the tracker off, which buys us a little more time."

  Walter couldn't find any flaws with the plan, and they asked around the house if there was anything sticky they could use. This was not what she’d imagined when she joined the Nightshade Division.

  Sure enough, one of the men hopped up from the table and came back quickly, bearing some kind of putty that actually had a good, tacky feel to it. Probably for hanging posters or something. Walter didn't ask—she was just grateful. She added it to the small pouch at the back of her belt. With weapon in hand, she turned to GJ. "We have to go now. If we're tracking him on foot, we have to get out of here."

  "Back door," Will said. "Wade, show them."

  And like a shot, they were off. Out the back door, quietly down the steps, following the instructions Wade gave them to get around to the side of the house. Walter caught a glimpse of a man she believed was Shray Menon heading deeper into the woods and just out of sight. GJ had pulled up her phone, dimming the screen and turning on the blue light shade.

  They used every advantage they could to hide themselves as they walked through the night. Over GJ’s shoulder, Walter watched Shray’s tracker aiming away through the trees. Thankful for the information the device provided, they took advantage of the opportunity to stay safe and hidden. Now they headed straight out from the side of the house, at a ninety-degree angle from where they would have gone if they’d followed the man’s footsteps.

  Cutting wide afforded them cover, but it meant they would have to be fast and silent. Walter knew the drill. She only hoped GJ could remember her training well enough. She worried that her yo
unger partner hadn’t had quite enough practice at it.

  The man walked for thirty minutes with the two of them trailing along at an angle. If he had food, he didn't stop to eat it.

  If they had food, Walter thought, she would have eaten some of it. But they didn't. There'd been no time. The strike had come at the window unexpectedly, suddenly, and they'd been out the door just as quickly with no time to prepare. GJ hadn't even told her that she'd smacked a tracker on the man. It was a brilliant plan, but they could've done with some extra help. Extra readiness. They stayed to the west of him, and after tracking him for about forty-five minutes, Walter noticed a form in the distance ahead.

  The man sat, small and silent, directly between them and the path Shray Mennon was cutting through the woods. Their quarry walked with purpose, confident of exactly where he was going. Walter was bothered by this. It meant these people knew the grounds, and that they’d been here many times before today.

  Though it was tempting to ignore the form crouched and trying to hide from them, Walter found they couldn't just take a wide berth and ignore him. She watched as the shape in the woods shifted slightly. The man’s rifle swept slowly from side to side, almost like sprinkler watering a garden. They were going to have to take this one out.

  Sighing quietly, Walter examined her options. She didn't enjoy knowing she was going to jump this person, and would likely wind up killing them. For a moment she tried out alternate scenarios as they crept ever slowly closer. The first goal was to get as close as possible without being detected. What she wanted was to tie him up. Zip-tie his hands and feet, bind him, gag him, leave him in the woods. But there was no scenario she could come up with to make that plausible. In every outcome she thought of, his friends would find him.

  Chances were there was a check-in system. She knew she would have it if she were leading this operation, so she had to assume they had it, too. She had to assume they were three steps ahead. It was the only way for her to always know that she could win. Which meant, bound, gagged and zip tied, her quarry would be detected as missing. He wouldn’t answer his call and someone would come and check on him. Any reasonable person in the woods at night would have some kind of a knife, and that would be it. He’d be free again.

  Her quarry would be back up on his feet, as dangerous as before—except, now with information. He would know there were two women following Shray Menon. Information of what they looked like, what their sizes were. And Walter didn't doubt for one second that she was highly recognizable with her prosthetic hand. The leg could be hidden. At this stage of her recovery, it would take someone who knew well what kind of limp or movement a prosthetic leg would make to detect that with the pants on. But the arm—the hand especially—could not be hidden. It meant that, as soon as this person uttered anything about her prosthetic hand, she was completely identified. She was likely already a target. Possibly GJ was, too.

  The one thing she hoped was that GJ's grandfather's involvement made GJ the kind of target that they would bind, gag, and zip-tie—not the kind they would kill. Still Walter harbored no illusions about her own uselessness to them. They would kill her on sight.

  She didn't want to kill the person in the woods. She'd seen several of them face-to-face so far, and she didn't like what she saw. They came from all walks of life. Young, old, Asian, black, white, southern accents, and those who sounded like they came from a distance. If it hadn't been for their uniform style of dress and expensive gear, they would've been quite the motley crew. So, she and GJ snuck ever closer. This was going to be a sniper situation. One shot, one kill, and she wasn't going to make GJ do it.

  She motioned to her partner, hands and mouth moving in sync to convey the message with zero sound. "You, lookout. Cover my back."

  GJ nodded and held up her fingers showing off the number six, indicating that she had Walter's. Closer, Walter settled in, barely seven meters away from her quarry and she waited for her eyes to adjust.

  Though she could see well enough now in the moonlight, the shadows under the tree were harder to pick through. She stared at them until they became just a little clearer. Just enough to see the strap under the chin. The edges that the Kevlar vest made, where it bulked up the wearer. She lined up her gun. A nine millimeter was not the ideal sniper weapon, but it was what she had, and she was plenty close enough. She wasn't shooting soft, silver bullets.

  She sighted her target with a trained eye. Deep breath in, out through her nose, slow her heart rate.

  Pull the trigger.

  With a silent jerk at the sound of her gunfire, he fell over.

  46

  Walter stayed still where she was, keeping her breath slow. Behind her, GJ still scanned the area, weapon up and ready. Her partner had not seen the man fall, and in fact, as he toppled backward Walter had changed her assessment. It was a woman.

  This was merely a piece of information. She made no gender distinction when she killed. It was an insult to women everywhere to think they were somehow more delicate. They weren't. She wasn't. GJ sure as hell wasn't. GJ's vulnerabilities were all her own and had nothing to do with gender.

  After they'd crouched, unmoving, counting out the full thirty seconds, Walter slowly inched them forward. She waited for the sound of a shot out of nowhere. They had no Kevlar. They should have. For all the cool toys they had, they had no tactical vests, no helmets.

  Again, she was three steps behind, but protective gear was big and bulky and she had yet to find a way to transport what she needed in her pockets. She could carry five trackers, a gun, zip-tie handcuffs, and all her other tools for the space cost of one tactical vest. So now she waited for a sting and fire of a bullet to rip through her side. It was a feeling she’d felt before, so she knew when it didn't happen.

  They inched forward, again and again. All the while, GJ watched her phone. Walter pointed to it and GJ nodded, giving a small thumps-up in the very, very light glow. Good, they still had a tracker on Shray Menon. This had been a time-consuming stop, but Walter wanted to leave no eyewitnesses behind.

  In the end, she realized she was going to have to risk moving faster, so they could maintain their tail—even though it would give someone who'd been lurking and waiting for them the opportunity to make a sudden move, it had to be done.

  Walter leapt forward, covering the body and getting her fingers jammed into the pulse point. The body didn't so much as jerk as she laid on top of it. Whoever she’d been, she was gone now. Dead.

  Motioning to GJ, Walter started forward and they picked up their pace. They didn't know, but they had to assume that this one person was the station for an entire area, and with any luck they’d just cleared it. Without luck, they'd feel the sting of bullets. But again, if they were going to follow Shray it was a tactical decision they had to make.

  GJ picked up her pace, impressing Walter with the quietness of her footsteps. She even managed to get a slight bit ahead of Walter. Following the tracking device, looking up ahead, and trying to get a good visual on one of the men who’d helped raise her.

  They watched as the little bead on the phone screen followed what wasn't a map, but only an open green space in front of them. There were no roads or any marked spaces via GPS, so the dot that was Shray’s tracker just moved and moved and moved.

  They slowly crept behind it trying to close the distance as they went. They’d lost a lot of ground taking out the person in the woods, but Walter couldn't regret it. It had needed to be done.

  Their brisk pace brought them closer and closer to the advancing dot, but then it stopped. GJ motioned to Walter and, though they moved quickly, they understood. They would be coming to a halt soon.

  Shray had reached either his destination or an important point along the way. Maybe he'd run into somebody. Walter could only hope that they would get a visual. As they got closer she got her wish. He’d run into another person, one of his own. And they were speaking. The other person wore no tactical gear.

  Next to her in the silence,
GJ gasped.

  GJ felt the hit as hard as the time she'd been shot dead in the middle of Hogan's Alley, a simunition taking her straight to her heart—or straight to her tactical vest. Either way, it had knocked her backwards. Though they were simulated ammunition, they still packed a wallop. So did this.

  Shray Menon was in the woods in front of her and speaking to her grandfather. She ducked and tried to hide, not ready for the sensation she felt. Luckily, Walter was also tugging her down to keep them both out of sight, to keep the two men from turning in their direction.

  Her grandfather wasn’t supposed to be out here, she thought. Actually, none of them were. All of this was wrong, and GJ was working hard to wrap her brain around it.

  On some level, she'd been denying this to herself for quite some time. She'd known what was in her grandfather's basement. She'd known the lab existed. It had taken a while to come to grips with the fact that his artifacts, his bones, his human skeletons, had no appropriate provenance. That could only mean they were stolen. But she’d ignored the possibility that the remains belonged to somebody, some family, some human being that her grandfather had completely disregarded, and now he was here. In these woods. With the people who’d been hunting a fellow NightShade agent’s family.

  Shray's very presence was almost absolute proof of her grandfather being involved, but still, until she'd seen him, she'd shaken it off. She’d twisted her thoughts into pretzels, trying to figure a way that her grandfather might not know what was going on. Maybe Shray was at the heart of the organization. But no. He was an assistant always. And it was her grandfather who ran things. At the heart of this was the famous—and soon to be infamous—Dr. Murray Marks, because this was going to be the end of things for him. And that end was going to happen at GJ's hands. He was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, she knew.