by Rachel Caine
“So you say. I have to say, Katie, the only thing that I see is you cutting a trail of destruction across the desert. If you’re planning on ever coming back this way, I’d suggest flying.” He paused for a moment; she imagined he was drinking coffee, and wished for a cup herself. “So let me get the facts straight. You were in hot pursuit of the kidnappers along I-10, and you were run off the road by an accomplice, who then tried to shoot you.”
“Yes.”
“And this accomplice is…”
“Under restraint at the accident scene.”
“And your car?”
“I had to leave it.” And boy, the Phoenix field office was going to kill her for that. “Engine block was cracked.”
She heard a pen tapping on the hard surface of a desk. “This is the last favor for you, amiga.”
“Last one I’ll need,” she said. “I promise. Thank you. And if you ever need anything—”
“I’ll hold you to that. Buena suerte.”
She needed all the good luck she could find, and said so before she thanked him again and hung up. Her second call—and pretty nearly her last, she thought as she spotted the glowing red battery bar on her phone—was to the Phoenix field office. It was a twenty-four-hour operation, but the agent who answered directed her to a voice mail, which was fine with her. The less explaining she had to do, the better, at the moment. That done, she called her boss.
Craig Evangelista answered the phone. He sounded wide-awake. “Katie?”
“Sir,” she responded. “I got your message.”
“Sorry, but you’re wanted in here for a full report as quickly as possible. Where are you?”
“On my way to Los Angeles,” she said. “About an hour out. I’ll catch an early flight from LAX.” She hesitated a second, then continued, “Any word when the task force is going to be on the ground?”
“They’re already in Los Angeles,” he said. “Landed there twenty minutes ago, deplaned and went straight to the local field office. They’re organizing a briefing now. You should probably go straight there and hand over whatever intel you have.”
“Yes, sir.” Another waste of time, unfortunately; they’d question where she got every piece of information, and they weren’t very likely to believe Stefan. Not until it was too late to do any good. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, Katie, you’ve got a hell of an unpleasant few days coming up. I can’t imagine OPR is going to give either one of us much of a break on this.”
The Office of Professional Responsibility never did, really. She said her goodbyes and hung up, turned off the phone and dropped it into her purse.
Effectively cutting herself off from help—not that, at this point, help would be forthcoming, except the kind that would put her on the sidelines and then on a plane going home.
They were speeding along I-10 in a blue Volkswagen Beetle, and Katie was in the back—an uncomfortable position for someone with long legs. She adjusted her knees, winced, and leaned against the window for a moment. She wanted to rewind the time, go back to that blissful hour—or two—in the motel, when it was just her and Stefan, lost in light. The world was gritty, hard and unforgiving, and she hated that he was chatting up the redhead in the front seat, although to be fair he wasn’t being more than pleasant. Katie couldn’t imagine being as cute or perky as the girl driving the car, whose name, she learned, was Marine. Not Marina…Marine, like the sea.
She was definitely in California now.
“So,” Marine was saying, “you’re both FBI? Are you working on something exciting? Like terrorists?”
“Terrorists?” Stefan shook his head. “No. But we are looking for a gang of kidnappers. They’ve got two girls, both a few years younger than you.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s horrible. So, you have a helicopter, right? Or satellite tracking them or something?”
“Chances of a helicopter picking out one white van in Los Angeles aren’t very good,” Katie said. “And satellite tracking for kidnappers isn’t exactly normal procedure.” Although she wondered, now, if it was something that Athena Force—in particular, Allison Gracelyn—couldn’t help out with arranging. “Stefan?”
He turned toward her, and she couldn’t resist returning his smile, albeit briefly. “You said you had more information about Teal.”
His smile faded. “I couldn’t figure out what she was doing at first, but I think she’s been trying to directly communicate with me for the last couple of times I made contact.”
“Still just vision and emotions, right?”
“Right. Sometimes a little sound, but it never makes sense, it’s just noise.” Stefan shook his head. “She’s signing messages. I should have picked up on it, but I thought she was sending them to Lena, not to me. I can’t read sign language, but she’s trying to tell me something.”
“Can you remember the signs?” Katie asked. He concentrated briefly, then began slowly shaping the signs, moving his fingers into each position and holding it until she nodded for him to go on. “That’s it?” she asked when he stopped.
“That’s all I saw,” he said. “Can you translate it?”
“SOS, and her name—Teal—and then call Athena Academy Glendale Arizona heading for Los Angeles. Unfortunately, nothing we didn’t already know.” He looked bitterly disappointed. “It’s all right. She may give us more current information in the next contact. If you’re willing—”
“Of course,” he said quietly. “I can tell you that they’re just outside of East Los Angeles, or they were before our crash. I recognized the area.”
That was another benefit to having Stefan along, apart from his visions; he had native knowledge of the city, and he’d be quick to recognize landmarks and navigate them closer to the target.
“I have a suggestion,” Stefan continued. “You’re right about the danger of getting civilians involved in this, and Marine shouldn’t be put in the middle.”
She nodded for him to continue.
“A fast pit stop at my parents’ house. It’s on the way. I can pick us up a car, something fast.”
“You can’t drive and do—what it is you do,” she pointed out.
“No, but you’re a hell of a driver, Katie.” He gave her a sudden, startling flash of a smile. “I’ll even trust you with the baby.”
“The baby?”
Stefan turned to Marine without answering. “You know how to get to La Habra?”
“Sure,” she said. “Is that where you live?” The girl was frankly checking him out. Katie suppressed a hot burst of irritation and gritted her teeth. Baby? What the hell was he talking about?
“No,” he said cheerfully. “My folks live there. Just get in the neighborhood, and I’ll talk you in. There’s an ATM on the way. I’ll get the rest of your money, and you can drop us at the house.”
Marine looked disappointed. Severely. Maybe she’d been hoping that his offer of payment would entail something else, maybe dinner and late-night entertainment. Which Katie wasn’t at all sure it wouldn’t have, had she not been along for the ride.
“Sure.” Marine sighed and shook her long red hair back over her shoulders. “Man, just when my day was getting interesting. Say, you don’t have any brothers at home, do you?”
“One,” Stefan said. “But he’s not at home. He’s off saving the world.”
Odd comment, Katie thought, but then Marine was asking about Stefan’s family, and she was content to listen as he talked about his mother’s psychic practice, his father’s pet-whisperer talents, the cheerful chaos of his childhood. There was love in what he said, fondness that was impossible to fake. Stefan loved his family very much.
That, unexpectedly, made Katie’s heart ache as she remembered the hole left in her by her absent mother. Stefan, damn him, was bringing up all kinds of feelings in her—inconvenient feelings, at an extremely inappropriate time. And she couldn’t seem to derail them, no matter what she tried. Something about him made her want to feel things, more than
she had in many years. He seemed to feel so deeply, so easily, and even though it came with pain—she’d seen that—he accepted it as the price of something good.
She’d never had the courage to do that.
“Tell me about your brother,” she said. Stefan, surprised, glanced back at her, then turned to face forward, to the road.
“Angelo. He’s a doctor,” he said. “The last I heard, he’s in Darfur. He’s the respectable one of the family. Well, not too respectable, or he’d be content with being a Beverly Hills doctor and raking in carloads of money. He gave that up two years ago, joined Doctors Without Borders, and we get postcards and e-mails from him when he remembers, usually one a month.”
“You worry about him,” Katie said.
“Of course I do. But he’s happy now, and he didn’t used to be, so…” Stefan shrugged. “A little pain for us, a good life for him. It’s better.”
Marine sighed happily. “I have got to meet your brother.”
Stefan blandly provided Angelo’s e-mail address, caught Katie’s eye again, and she didn’t have to be psychic to read his thoughts. Why not? Maybe she’s perfect for him.
She approved.
After all, he wasn’t handing over his own e-mail.
Stefan had another vision. She’d learned to spot it, although he concealed this one pretty well as a catnap with his head pillowed on the window glass. When he came back with a jerk, Katie reached over the seat to put a hand on the back of his neck in a caress, grounding him.
“I’ve got more,” he said after a few moments. His voice sounded wrong—thin and clogged. Katie leaned over the seat. He’d tipped his head back, and he was holding his nose. Blood leaked in a stream into his cupped hand. Katie cursed, grabbed tissues from a box in the backseat and helped him mop up the mess. Stefan kept some pressed to his nose.
“God, Stefan,” she murmured with her lips close to his ear. “You can’t keep this up.”
“I can, for another couple of hours,” he said. “Call it a blood donation.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about. If you’re busting up blood vessels in your nose from the pressure, you’re bound to be risking some in your brain, too. You could stroke out.”
“I won’t.”
“It wouldn’t be a failure of character!”
He gave her a look so full of stubborn resolve that she wanted to kiss him, nosebleed and all. “I can stroke out when this is over.”
Some people, Katie reflected, were just too hardheaded to suffer things like that. He probably had Teflon veins in his brain, anyway. She surrendered. “What’s happening?”
“Still in the van. They’re cutting through an industrial area, and traffic’s pretty heavy. No help to us in identifying a white cargo van there. Could be a thousand of them on the roads. And rush hour is going to start soon.”
Rush hour in L.A. was more like rush half day; it began stacking up around 6:30 a.m. and didn’t finish until after 9:00 a.m. Traveling west, they’d gained some time, but not enough, and traffic was going to slow them down. Of course, it would slow down the van, too. Hopefully.
“I need two things,” Katie said. “A cross street, real time, and your cell phone. Mine’s on its last legs.”
He handed over his phone. She turned on her own long enough to retrieve Allison Gracelyn’s number from it, then shut it down again—she’d missed three incoming calls, all from Craig Evangelista—and programmed the number in Stefan’s phone.
“Cross street?” she asked.
“I’ll have to go back in,” he said. “Teal can’t see very well right now. They moved her to the back.”
He wasn’t saying something important, she could sense it. She put her hand on the back of his neck again, gently. “What happened?”
He just shook his head. “Let’s stay focused,” he said. “She’s okay. She’s going to be okay.” He sounded as if he more wanted to believe it than actually did, and she felt a chill race through her body at the implications.
“And Lena?” she asked. “Is Lena okay, too?”
“Fine.” That, at least, he said without hesitation. “Teal’s running interference for her.” And it was, without a doubt, costing Teal. And therefore costing Stefan, too. “I have more signs for you.”
Marine was watching them curiously, bright-eyed, but she wasn’t saying anything. Apparently, she took her role as hired driver seriously. Katie focused on Stefan’s right hand as he carefully formed the signs, one after another. The first few were the same as Teal’s previous message—she must not have been sure that he was receiving it—and then it branched off. “North Soto, and passing Valley…I don’t think you need to go back in. She must have been looking out the windows before you dialed in. That’s probably why they pulled her to the back.” She had her cross streets, and a hot flicker of excitement started burning in her stomach. She dialed Stefan’s cell phone.
“Who’s this?” asked a strong contralto voice on the other end. Of course—Allison wouldn’t recognize the number, and she’d instantly know that. Being a math whiz allowed her to keep a permanent, instantly accessible database of such things in her head; being an NSA agent imbued her with serious paranoia about unknown phone calls to a very private number.
“It’s Katie Rush,” Katie said. “I’m on a borrowed phone, sorry, I know that’s not a good thing for you. It’s an emergency.”
Some of the tension left Allison’s voice. “Is this about the girls? Lena and Teal?”
“You heard.”
“Of course I heard. Everybody’s heard. How can I help?”
“A friend of mine had a good idea about using satellite tracking on the van the girls are in,” she said. “But you’re the only one I can think of with the resources to make that happen. Maybe.”
“Can you pinpoint a location and description?”
“North Soto and Valley, LosAngeles. White cargo van.”
“Do you have the plate number?”
Katie blinked. “You can match a plate number? From a satellite?”
“Not officially, no.”
“Well, unofficially, no, I don’t have a plate number. Do you think—”
“Hold on,” Allison said, and there was an instant silence that stretched on for a while. They were definitely getting close to Los Angeles—the suburbs were rolling by on either side, stretching off to infinity in rows of strip malls, houses, streams of cars moving either with or against them. The sun wasn’t up, but the horizon was growing lighter. Los Angeles was waking up.
“Right,” Allison said. “Do you know exactly when the van passed those cross streets?”
“Not exactly, no. We’re working with secondhand information.”
“Hmm. That’s a little more of a puzzle. What kind of time frame are we talking about?”
“Anywhere from five to fifteen minutes ago,” Katie said. “That’s a guess, but I think it’s pretty accurate.”
“Narrows things down,” Allison said. “I’ve got several possibilities. One’s still traveling in a straight line on the same road, so that’s probably our guy, but I’ve painted the others just in case he got tricky.”
“But you can track him?”
“Unless he goes underground—tunnel, parking structure, something like that—or unless he gets outside of the satellite’s range, yes. I’d have to retask the satellite to get him back, and that would require some paperwork I don’t think you have time for. And I don’t have adequate justification for, either.” Allison’s voice softened. “You doing okay?”
“I’m fine,” Katie said. She was, remarkably. Her ribs ached—more after the crash than before, and now she was about ninety percent sure there were hairline fractures—and she was so tired she could feel her whole body trembling with it. She was so tired, in fact, that she no longer craved sleep. “I want to finish this, but I’m pretty low on resources right now.”
“Name it and you’ll get it.”
“Backup when I call for it. There’s an FBI
task force that just landed, they’re at the local field office. I’d call myself, but I’m pretty sure that we might have to waste some time on questions I can’t answer now. If you make the call for me, you can cite need-to-know and scary black-box operations.”
She expected to hear amusement in Allison’s reply, but it surprised her by being completely sober. “I’m not so sure it isn’t,” she said. “This is no ordinary abduction, Katie. I’m sure you already ruled out sexual predators….”
“Not completely,” Katie said grimly. “Let’s just say that one of the men holding the girls isn’t someone I’d want babysitting.”
“But that isn’t the real intent behind it. This is a massive operation, Katie. I’ve been tracking it from this end, and the data flows are strange, to say the least. Favors are being called in at a rate that I can’t quite believe, and it’s stretching out to a lot of criminal organizations that normally don’t interact.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s take Timmons Kent,” Allison said. “He’s a drug trafficker and dealer. High level. Who does he interact with? To stay where he is, he has to be very careful. It’s a closed loop, very small interactive circles. Yet all of a sudden, Timmons is calling people outside of his own organization for favors. This includes the Salomon brothers, who promptly start calling their people on the west coast. This van’s been defying the odds, Katie. Between you and the state police, not to mention the resources of the FBI, these guys should have been found a half dozen times. Instead, they’ve been evading the search, and when they’re caught, they shoot their way out. Not normal.”
Katie remembered her previous conviction, that someone in law enforcement had been providing information. “Insiders,” she said.
“Big time. And not small ones, either. I can count at least three data ripples that are significant—”
“Allison, I have no idea what that means.”
“It means three people out there in positions to influence and direct the investigation have been compromised,” she said. “Bad guys are coming out of the woodwork on this one, and they’re blowing the covers of resources they probably worked very hard to get. That means this isn’t an ordinary abduction, or even an ordinary ransom kidnapping. This is something else. Something much bigger.”
