As she lay on the ground, the second car pulled up and Jae squinted to see a man’s black spit-polished dress shoes as he stepped from the passenger’s side. She heard him give quick instructions to the man who was now picking her limp body off the ground.
“Take care of her, but not here and get their bags,” he ordered, before getting into the car that Trevor was in then peeled down the exit ramp.
Jae felt her body being lifted and shoved onto the floor of the car before it started out of the garage. With her head pounding, Jae narrowly opened her eyes long enough to see the car slowly spiraling down the garage ramp.
As she was mentally planning a way to overtake the driver, she heard a voice coming through a cell phone or two-way radio. The driver was told to return to the facility when he’d completed his task. “I will,” the driver said.
Jae understood the order. Quietly inching her body around in the tight space of the floor in the back of the car, she was able to see the driver’s profile. He wasn’t a large man, but he was muscular, clean-shaven with crew-cut hair. She thought he, too, moved almost mechanically like a robot, like the man who shot her.
She needed to get out of that car and if she managed to do that, then her next task would be finding out where they’d taken Trevor. Assessing her situation, it would appear to be bleak and she had no weapon. Slowing her breathing, she channeled her focus on escaping.
“H-help me. P-please,” she groaned in pain. For the most part the driver ignored her as he continued the slow spiral down from the fifth level of the garage.
Jae frantically felt around the floor with her hands under her bottom, searching for something, anything she could use as a weapon. There was nothing, but did she notice he hadn’t put his seat belt on.
Using her feet, she eased the dangling seat belt backward until she could reach down and grasp it with her hand. Then she swiftly yanked it back and shot up from behind the driver’s seat.
At that exact moment, he glanced into the rearview mirror and saw her. His eyes didn’t register surprise, just a deadly glare as he stared straight ahead and fired two quiet, yet rapid shots into the backseat. It took Jae by surprise because he barely moved.
Jae twisted and contorted her body to the far left behind his seat to avoid the bullets but she wasn’t about to waste another second. He was already on the third level. She rose and looped the seat belt around his neck and twisted it tightly. Slamming on the brakes, the man reached up and pulled at the belt around his neck. Seeing the concrete barrier wall looming ahead was one thing, but hearing the metal of the car crushing against it was something else. Jae noticed the man was losing consciousness, but she didn’t have control of the car yet. She reached over his jerking shoulder as she struggled to pull up the parking break.
When the car jerked and rocked to a stop, Jae scrambled from the backseat to the front. The driver was out cold, but she was still holding onto the seat belt while the car was precariously close to a missing section of the concrete wall. The orange cones and yellow caution tape were probably lodged somewhere underneath the car. Jae frantically searching the floor for the gun, all the while praying no cars came around the ramp and slammed into the back of them.
Damn. She couldn’t find the gun, but she did find a cell phone. It was in the driver’s side door pocket. Just as she reached across his body for it, he regained consciousness. He suddenly grabbed her forearm in a mighty grip and Jae kicked the passenger side door until it flung open.
“You…will…die,” he said.
“Yeah, well, later for that,” she gritted through clenched teeth as she twisted the seat belt around his neck with all of her might, this time having a better angle at his side. She was surprised that he was still conscious and trying to push her out of the open door. Making a tight fist of her left hand, Jae punched him in the nose several times until it bled as he attempted to pull her across his body and fling her from the car.
With her breath caught in her throat, she held onto the seat belt even harder. But he was succeeding and Jae found herself slipping further across his body to the open driver’s side door. As a last ditch effort, Jae moved her feet and managed to hook them through the steering wheel. Now, she was practically hanging upside down as he continued to push her out of the car.
It was in that instant Jae saw a light. Well, not exactly a light.
She saw the gun.
It was underneath the driver’s seat, but now the driver was prying her feet from the sections of the steering wheel with his right hand, while tugging at the seat belt still looped around his neck with his left hand.
Half a second before he reached down to pull her hand out from under the seat where she had a tight hold on the steel frame, Jae grasped the weapon, angled it up, and fired the gun, hitting him twice.
With a final shove, the man sent her flying through an opening in the concrete wall.
* * * * *
Luke was sprawled out in some type of field by the tall, flapping leaves above him. Struggling, he curled onto his side by pressing his elbow into the soft earth. He needed a visual bearing. Unfortunately, that meant standing up on his two feet, something he felt he hadn’t done in a very long time. Disoriented, Luke wondered if he’d been sick because that’s how he felt.
I’m a Marine. I can do this. But as he thought that, he sensed his once powerful, well-toned body had taken a beating. He just couldn’t remember why or how.
Luke gritted his teeth against the pain ricocheting through his body and glanced up at the dark sky, listening to the sounds around him. There were no voices or traffic or running water, just bugs, summer bugs.
The sun had set and he would guess the time to be about twenty-two hundred hours. It had been very warm earlier in the day with temperatures in the high eighties judging by the warmth of the ground beneath him.
Grabbing a handful of the moist dirt, he brought it up to his nose and detected a hint of manure. A farm? “Wh-where?” he croaked out from a mouth that was as dry as the Arizona desert. Bringing his left hand up to scratch his head, he was shocked that his buzz haircut wasn’t there. Instead, he had a full head of hair. Looking up at his trembling hand Luke also saw blood and imprints on his wrist possibly from tight plastic flex cuffs.
Unexpectedly, memories seemed to flood Luke’s mind and it was almost too much to absorb.
As he became more alert and aware of his surroundings, Luke’s conscious mind was trying desperately to process everything that was happening. His memories of the past week or month or however long it had been were confused with flashes of pain, coupled with pictures and places. They were like spinning wheels moving faster than his muddled mind could lock on to. He tried to slow his thoughts and focus on one thing at a time, like how he’d gotten to wherever he was.
His chest hurt and he couldn’t take a deep breath. He blinked several times, but his vision was blurred and his head felt like he had the world’s worst hangover. When a warm gust of air moved across his face, stirring his hair, Luke blinked, touched his head again, and let his hand follow the length of his hair. He guessed wherever he’d been he must have been there a couple of months for his buzz cut to grow out long enough to touch his shoulders.
He strained his mind to remember how he’d gotten there, in what appeared to be a cornfield.
Think, man, think!
As he lay on the soft, warm ground, that night had fallen. Luke felt a tremendous pain at the back of his leg. Reaching down, he felt a bullet lodged in his body. Oddly he thought he’d never gotten shot so close to his ass before and chuckled. But his laughter died when he remembered it was Randy Cross who had shot and left him for dead. Had it not been for Luke dodging sideways, he was positive the bullet Randy fired would have hit him in his upper back, possibly killing him. The agent’s boyish looks hid his demented side.
Looking around, Luke found a large stick and used it as a wa
lking cane. He snapped off an ear of corn and then munched on it.
Lifting his nose, he smelled smoke, but not just wood smoke. It was the smell of smoking meat. Training his eyes to the darkness, Luke saw a billow of smoke from a structure in the distance. Perhaps that meant there was a farmhouse nearby.
Luke vaguely remembered the seconds leading up to when he had been shot.
After Randy pulled onto an access road, put the car in park, and came around the hood, he opened the back door. Luke allowed Randy to drag him out of the car. Not a small man by any stretch, Randy tried several times to dump Luke onto the ground. When Randy took a moment to catch his breath from the exertion, Luke had been getting his bearings as his eyes adjusted to the dark terrain.
Randy didn’t have a chance to pull the gun from his side holster. Luke curled himself into a ball and rolled in the direction of what he thought were hedges on a downward slope. When his body stopped rolling and he was able to get up on his feet, Randy was looming over him. Despite being lightheaded and disoriented, Luke took great pleasure in head-butting Randy in the stomach as hard as he could. He took Randy by surprise. It was the time Luke needed to half crawl, half limp, and then run blindly into the tallest thickets he saw. When he heard Randy gasping and cursing behind him, Luke was surprised Randy had stayed on him for a good one hundred feet into the field. And it was a mystery to him how Randy had such an amazingly accurate shot in that darkness to shoot him in the ass, although he’d missed Luke’s upper back where he’d been aiming at.
“Murderous, greedy bastard,” Luke groaned, short of breath from his exhausting walk. He eased down to the ground before he passed out.
* * * * *
Darius and the guys decided to do some fieldwork trying to catch up on a lead for another case.
By the time they left Baltimore to return to Alexandria, it was after five o’clock in the evening the following day. Darius was frustrated they had lost an entire day and he still hadn’t talked to Jae.
“Damn!” Darius shouted so loudly and so vehemently in the car, that McGuire pumped the breaks of the sedan, causing Mike, who was riding in the backseat, to slide forward with a groan.
“What’s going on?” Mike demanded.
Darius had two files in his lap. He had been flipping through one and jotting down a quick note. If what was in the file was accurate, he had reason to believe that two members of their team—namely Jae and Luke, if he was still alive—were in grave danger.
Ignoring the perplexed and inquisitive looks from Mike and McGuire, Darius continued to study the documents and then indicated for McGuire to pull the car over to the curb and stop.
Once they were parked, Darius explained to them that he had been reviewing the call logs made from Luke’s cell phone and that the last two calls went to Jae’s cell phone. The duration of the calls was exactly as Jae had told him. More disturbing was the cell phone tower location of both calls. They were made from Luke’s house and not from Fort Myers, Florida, where Luke had supposedly flown to for a special OP.
“As much as I don’t want to believe this, I’m convinced now more than ever that the mole has infiltrated our field office,” he said.
“Darius, do you know what you’re saying? I mean, we didn’t come up with much from that little powwow at your folks’ house,” McGuire said, referring to the notebooks that Darius had collected from them. “Or, did you?”
“What we should’ve done was gone after that shrink, Grant.” Mike snorted.
“Listen, I felt it best that we all brainstorm before chasing after Jae and Grant again. Besides, it was necessary for us to regroup after that scene in the motel.” Darius gave Mike a meaningful glance before continuing. “And, that’s another thing. Why did you two feel the need to pound away at him like that?”
“Did you forget the part where he had a gun, or that he could’ve overpowered Jae?” McGuire asked defensively.
“No, but she didn’t look like she was overpowered to me. In fact, she looked downright comfortable lying on top of the good doctor,” Darius said, ignoring Mike sucking his teeth.
“Now, you see, Darius, I don’t think you’re being objective because that night you only had eyes for your Lexus,” McGuire teased.
Darius reined in his temper, lest he reach over and strangle the grinning McGuire. Yes, he was more than miffed that Jae had the pleasure of driving his brand new car. The car he still hadn’t told his wife about. He was already counting the additional cases he was going to assign Jae once this mess was resolved.
Signaling for McGuire to drive on, Darius was concerned about Jae. Sure, she could handle herself in any situation. She was competent, a skilled markswoman with any weapon, and a level-headed agent. What bothered him was the obvious attraction she had for the doctor and he was positive it wasn’t one-sided either. He recalled how protective the doctor had been toward her on at least two occasions. His ringing cell phone jarred his thoughts off Jae.
“Yeah, give me some intel,” he answered, then listened without comment. The caller was responding to Darius’s request for information about the cell phone network outage they had experienced while in Montana. The outage hadn’t affected any other agents’ cell phones, only his team’s, including Jae’s and Luke’s. The caller also reported the outage resulted because the network cards in their cell phones had been remotely overridden to shut down.
The caller also informed Darius that Dr. Otis Holmes, a former FBI consultant, had called trying to reach him. But the day before Dr. Holmes had left the Pentford Institute, where he worked in the behavioral research department, and hadn’t returned. He’d indicated in his log that he was transporting a patient to the Park Sanitarium. Neither Dr. Holmes nor the patient had arrived.
After giving terse thanks, Darius snapped the cell phone closed and instructed McGuire to drive to the Pentford Institute. Flipping the file on his lap open again, Darius removed a four-by-six photo of Luke on the off chance there was some connection to the Pentford Institute.
Darius had a notion.
If he thought like Jae then she would already be ahead of him.
* * * * *
At home, Randy Cross anxiously paced his kitchen floor.
He’d been waiting for a call on his cell phone. It had been thirty minutes since he had watched Dr. Grant being wheeled into his room at the Pentford Institute and sedated. What troubled Randy now was that his second test subject hadn’t returned as instructed. He didn’t want to think the man hadn’t followed his instructions to dispose of Jae.
He had programmed the man to eliminate her—kill Jae Randall and bury her body in the woods.
As Randy’s pacing increased, so did his temper.
He had forced his wife Dana to flee from the kitchen in tears when she brought up the issue of their finances again. Unable to deal with her or her questions, he had finally yelled at her to get off his back and shut the hell up. He’d repeated what he had been telling her for months, that he was taking care of everything and to stop nagging him about it.
Checking his cell phone again, Randy muttered under his breath. “Everything will be fine as long as Jae is dead.”
* * * * *
Forcing her mind to remain calm, Jae assessed her situation. The blood was draining away from her hands as she dangled out of the car, tightly gripping the seat belt.
She wasn’t afraid of heights, but one quick peek over her right shoulder proved if she fell the outcome wouldn’t be pretty. There was no way she could swing her body and land safely on the garage level below. As she swiftly ran through the options in her mind, she knew her chances of falling straight down to her imminent death were great.
In the growing heat of the garage, perspiration ran down her forehead. With no way to wipe it away, the sweat slid into her eyes, stinging them.
Daring another glance down, she could hear the squeal of tires s
everal levels below her and knew cars were most likely exiting the garage. She didn’t even consider wasting her breath or energy to call down for help. She just needed to somehow lift herself up.
Jae dropped her right arm down to her side to get the blood flowing. How was she going to get herself out of this mess? And how was she going to get to Trevor before those men killed him?
Trevor. His name floated through her mind.
As hard as it was for her to do, Jae carefully switched arms by shifting her weight and dropping her left arm to get the blood moving. Then she moved her legs, slowly at first then increasing the momentum. With her right arm now stronger, she was able to maintain a grip on the steel frame under the driver’s seat while she swung her leg up to the concrete until she was able to pull herself up.
She immediately collapsed in a heap on the ground, happy to lie there until the numbing pain in her arms subsided and her pounding heart slowed to a normal rhythm again.
When she was finally able to stand, she gingerly walked around the car so close to the gap in the wall and opened the passenger side door. Carefully opening the door she eased in and now staring face to face with the dead man, his open eyes staring a hole through her. She reached under the driver’s seat and pulled out the gun. Using his jacket, she wiped his blood from the barrel of the gun before setting it on the dashboard.
She patted his clothing and checked his pockets looking for the cell phone. “Where is it, you shit bag?” she hissed. She spotted his smart phone wedged between the center console and the driver’s seat. Just as she grasped the blood-covered phone, it vibrated in her hand.
Wiping blood from the lighted screen across the shirt of the dead man, Jae stared down at the word Private on the screen. She guessed the ringleader was calling his goon to see if he had completed his task of killing her.
Backing out of the car, Jae noticed the smart phone was exactly like her expensive, agency-issued phone before dropping it, unanswered, into her jacket pocket. She also holstered the gun. With a renewed sense of urgency, she grabbed the two travel bags plus her satchel from the backseat of the sedan and hurried up the ramp and over to her Mustang.
Jae's Assignment Page 23
