by Blake Dixon
“Jury’s still out on that one.” He tried to brace himself, but it still hurt like hell when he moved. Sitting up was as far as he could manage at the moment. “What the fuck just happened?”
“I got the address for their operation. The hard way.”
“Yeah. Thanks for the heads-up.”
“I did mention they’d made you, and I warned you. Twice.” Kane let out a breath, rolled once and stood, then walked toward him. “Apparently, the boss decided not to bring me in on the big operation after all,” he said. “He wanted to start me off small. I was supposed to meet my crew here, and then head out of state for some bullshit smash-and-grab gig. So I had to improvise.”
“Your crew.” Jude shook his head. “So you really are the team leader.”
“A team leader. One of many. But hey, you can’t lead a dead crew … so I guess I just tendered my resignation.” He cocked his head and frowned. “Need a hand?”
“I’m fine.”
“Right. I damned well know I broke something when I hit you.”
Jude glared up at him. “I noticed.”
“Had to get you on the floor somehow,” he said with a shrug. And held a hand out.
After a long moment, Jude took it.
Boosting to his feet was agony, but it subsided some when he stood still. “So now what?” he said.
“You’re asking me?”
“I don’t see anyone else in here capable of answering questions.”
Kane huffed a breath. “I just about got you killed, and you still trust me,” he said. “You have the address you wanted. Why the hell haven’t you shot me yet?”
“Keep asking. Maybe I’ll change my mind.”
“You should.”
“Goddamn it, Kane, I’m not going to shoot you,” he said. “Yeah, the trust thing was a little touch-and-go for a while there. And I did think you were going to kill me. But you had to be that convincing, didn’t you? If I didn’t buy the act, no way in hell they would.”
Kane glared at him. “Maybe it wasn’t an act.”
“I’m still alive. Seems like strong evidence to me.”
“You don’t—” He broke off suddenly, shook his head. “Thanks for taking out Shank,” he said. “Let’s go check this address.”
“Lead the way. I have no idea where we are right now.”
“Good thing I drove your car over.” With a half-smile, Kane turned and started across the warehouse. Then he stopped abruptly and picked up something off the floor. “You should probably hang onto this,” he said, and handed Jude his badge.
Jude sighed. “Damned thing just won’t stop coming back to me.” He stuffed it in a pocket. “All right. Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Turned out the place he’d been held was actually a warehouse, maybe five or six blocks from the basketball court. Not too far. Still, Jude was damned glad Kane had driven the car there. Walking around was not pleasant right now.
He could manage driving, though. Especially if it meant getting one huge step closer to rescuing Valerie Noakes.
According to the GPS, the address was around twenty-five minutes away. They’d agreed to make this a reconnaissance mission — get as close as possible to find out the layout, the surrounding environment, the numbers they were looking at. Kane had assured him they’d need backup, and he didn’t doubt it.
He also didn’t doubt Natalie would be completely up for a raid when they brought the news back, despite the recent falling out. Most of her frustration stemmed from wanting to find the girl just as bad as he did.
They’d been on the road maybe ten minutes when Kane said, “There’s something you should know.”
For some reason, those words chilled him more than any the man had ever spoken to him — and Garrett Kane said a lot of chilling things. It was his tone more than the sentiment. Soft. Hesitant. Uncertain.
Everything that Kane absolutely was not.
“What is it?” he said, not sure he wanted to know.
Kane didn’t respond. Just when Jude thought he’d changed his mind about telling him, he said, “Rubin … fuck. Tell me why you trust me, Wyland.”
“Because you do the job.”
“That’s not it.”
Jude tightened a hand on the steering wheel. He could’ve said you’re not the monster you think you are, but Kane wouldn’t buy that either. He’d have to be specific. “Remember when we got sent to Chicago to take out the head of that smuggling ring, and there was a war going on between the smugglers and a local gang?”
“And I saved your ass from sniper fire, big fucking deal,” he said. “That just proves I’m a good soldier. Watching your partner’s back is part of doing the job — you saved my ass a time or two in the field.”
“Yeah. Including back there, fifteen minutes ago. But I wasn’t talking about the sniper.”
“So what did I do, rescue a kitten from a tree or something?”
“No.” Jude glanced at him. “We were headed for a meeting with an inside man we had with the smugglers, and we heard gunshots from some shitty apartment building. Minor gang war, and not even the gang that was tangled in our mission. Completely unrelated. But you saw a little boy screaming on a fire escape, and you took off running.”
“Wow. Screaming kid and gunshots. Anybody would’ve—”
“You didn’t just save the boy,” he said. “That kid was the youngest of four in one of the apartments. Their mother had been killed in the crossfire, and the oldest sister had been trying to get them all outside when a couple of gang members busted in. The boy was screaming because he couldn’t get back inside, and they were raping his sister right in front of him.”
Kane’s jaw clenched. “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “I killed those gang boys. Shot one, caved the other one’s fucking skull in.”
“That’s it. Just talk about who you killed,” Jude said in tight tones. “Don’t talk about the way you climbed four stories up a rusted fire escape, fell ten feet when one of the ladder rungs broke and kept going anyway. How you took a bullet in the arm fending off the gang, how you refused to leave those kids alone until the cops could get through and take them somewhere safe. Don’t mention any of that. Because that might make you sound human.”
He was silent for a long moment. Finally, he said, “You’re still a pain in my ass. But thanks for that.”
“Yeah, you’re welcome.” Jude smirked. “Now that you’ve completely sidetracked the conversation, what were you going to tell me?”
“You’re not going to like this.” The soft, uncertain tone was back. Kane stared out the windshield and drew a shaking breath. “A few hours before you showed up at the hotbox, I got a phone call. The only one I ever had in that place,” he said. “It was Ray Rubin.”
“Jesus.” The deputy director had contacted Kane while he and Natalie were on a plane headed for him. He couldn’t imagine a single good reason for that. “What did he want?”
“To offer me a deal. My freedom, for…”
When he didn’t continue, Jude said, “For what?”
“For killing you.” His voice dropped to a near whisper. “I was supposed to make it look like an accident.”
Jude’s head throbbed sickly as he recalled Kane’s words back in the cell. You take me out of here, you’re a dead man. He’d been trying to warn him even then. “Were you going to do it?” he said.
“Are you dead right now?”
“So no, then.”
Kane nodded and looked out the window again. “I thought about it,” he said. “I had to think about it. That place … well. You saw it.”
“Yeah, I did.” And he couldn’t blame Kane for considering the deal. “What made you change your mind? When I offered to let you go?”
“No.” A crooked smile tugged at his mouth. “I changed my mind the second I saw you standing there, looking like you’d march right back out that door and slaughter every damned guard in the place. When you said my name like that … like you
’d burn down the world if you could take back what they did.” He shrugged. “And you didn’t even know the truth.”
“The truth about what?”
“Sarah.” He took a deep breath, let it out slow. “That’s the reason I asked why you trust me. Had to make sure you’d believe this,” he said. “I didn’t kill her, Jude. She was dead when I got there.”
He almost drove the damned car off the road. It was a long minute before he got himself under enough control to speak. “Who killed her, then?”
“Rubin. And no, I don’t know why.” His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. “I was supposed to get away from the mercs when they put the hit on Sarah. He told me to just show up for the job, and he’d take care of it. He didn’t tell me that killing her was how he planned to do it. Then he said if I took the fall for Sarah’s death, he’d break me out clean.” One fist rammed the dashboard, making Jude flinch. “Instead, he shipped me off to the hotbox and left me there.”
“All right,” Jude said thickly. “When we finish this job, we take out Rubin.”
“How?”
Anger pulsed red behind his eyes. “With a bullet, if we have to,” he said. “But he’s going down.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
The address was a sizable single-story cement block of a building tucked at the bottom of a steep gully, just beyond a thin strip of forest that bordered the back of the storage unit property.
And it was crawling with armed mercs.
Jude had parked the sedan toward the front of the sprawling self-storage place, behind one of the buildings so it wouldn’t be seen from the road. They’d walked the rest of the way. It took a few minutes to figure out exactly where the GPS was showing the address, since the vehicle access was a crushed gravel drive that circled around at the bottom of the gully, coming in unseen from Holland Road.
Now they were hunched at the lip of the sheer slope overlooking the place, hidden by the trees. Watching.
The back end of the property was open, since the only way there was down the steep twenty feet of ground below and across a sloping field of loose, jagged rock. The building itself looked like a military bunker, only bigger. Barred windows, solid steel doors, coiled barbed wire encircling the perimeter of the flat roof. The gravel drive leading to the place went through a gate in a chain-link fence topped with razor wire that blocked off the gully, wall to wall. Two mercs guarding the gate, three at the front entrance, two around the back, one on the roof. More wandering the property at irregular intervals.
“Hell of an operation,” Jude muttered under his breath.
“Yeah. Like I said, maybe too big for one kid.” Kane squatted on his haunches with his back against a tree trunk, motionless. “Could be the Noakes thing is secondary to whatever else they’re involved in. But if they do have the girl, she’s here.”
Jude watched a man with a high-powered rifle emerge from the access shed on the roof and approach the lone guard up there. They exchanged a few words, and the original guard headed for the shed while the new arrival took his post. “Snipers. They have a guard rotation,” he said. “Kind of formal for mercs, aren’t they?”
“Not so much for mercs operating inside the biggest concentration of military bases in the country.”
“Good point.”
Below, the front doors of the building opened from the inside, and a tall man in black fatigues and combat boots stepped out with a phone to his ear. It didn’t look like he was having a happy conversation. “That’s the boss,” Kane said. “Vecchio.”
“What, you mean they don’t call him Bullets or something?”
“Just Vecchio. No one knows his first name, or if that’s even his real name.”
“Terrifying.”
Kane shrugged. “He is, actually. I wouldn’t cross him.”
Great. A man Garrett Kane wouldn’t cross was not one he wanted to go up against.
The distant sound of tires crunching on gravel drifted across the gulley. Light swelled from the patch of night around the far wall, where the access road headed back toward the main road, and a vehicle came around the curve. A dark blue sedan with tinted windows.
Nothing to get excited about, Jude told himself. Plenty of cars like that, including every government-issue ride. He couldn’t make out the license plate at this distance, but he could see faces well enough that he’d recognize a familiar one.
If this was the guy who’d tried to run him down, it had to be proof Valerie was here.
The sedan stopped at the gate, idling. From the building entrance, the man called Vecchio waved at the guards and started toward them. One of the guards rolled the gate back to let the sedan through.
Vecchio stopped at the end of the drive and glared at the approaching vehicle, folding heavily muscled arms. The car stopped ten feet back, the driver’s side door opened. A man in a suit got out.
Jude’s breath caught. It wasn’t the mystery assailant, but he recognized the man instantly.
Ray Rubin.
“What the actual fuck?” Kane hissed.
“Yeah. Exactly.”
Ray approached the leader of the mercs and said something. The man responded curtly. After a pause, Ray reached inside his suit jacket — and Vecchio’s hand went to his gun.
“Son of a bitch,” Jude whispered. He patted his pockets, found the phone he’d retrieved after the mercs left it in the car when they took him in the warehouse, and pulled it out.
Kane glanced over. “The hell you doing, Boy Scout?”
“Getting evidence.” He felt for the wake button on the side of the phone. Below them, Ray was handing a thick envelope to Vecchio.
“Are you insane? They’ll see the light!”
“Cover me, then.”
With a harsh curse, Kane shrugged his jacket off and held it like a curtain in front of Jude’s arms. “If that roof sniper shoots me, I’ll haunt your ass for the rest of your very short life,” he grunted.
“Duly noted.” Jude shielded the phone, tapped to the camera settings and turned the flash off in video mode, then pressed a hand to the screen. “All right. Lower it,” he said.
Kane did, grudgingly. “I think your bullet plan was a better idea,” he murmured.
“Maybe. But if he’s dead, he can’t clear your name. Or Sarah’s.”
“If you say so.”
Jude focused on the tableau in the gully. Ray was still holding the envelope out, arguing with Vecchio. Holding his breath, he framed the pair on the phone screen and zoomed the image as far as he could. The shot was dark, not nearly as clear as he’d hoped. But maybe the techs could clean it up.
When he tapped the record button, the phone emitted a tiny flash of light as the image auto-adjusted. On the roof, the sniper’s head whipped in the direction of the tree line.
“Great. We’re dead,” Kane whispered.
“Not yet.”
A moment later, the roof guard shrugged and went back to walking the perimeter.
Jude let out a careful breath and resumed watching. Ray said something, shook the envelope for emphasis. Finally, Vecchio took it. The merc leader opened the envelope and removed a fat stack of cash.
Kane leaned in. “You getting this?”
“I hope so.” Jude didn’t dare move his hand off the screen, which was still giving off a faint, flickering ambient light. He’d tried to keep the phone absolutely still once he started recording — but with the beating he’d taken, it wasn’t easy to hold a position.
Vecchio was counting the cash. He finished with a grin, said something that Ray clearly disagreed with. When Ray replied, the grin vanished. Vecchio said something else.
Another long pause. Ray half-turned and gestured stiffly at the sedan, then walked to the driver’s door.
And Vecchio headed for the passenger side to get in with him.
“Time to go,” Jude said. He tapped the screen to stop the recording. Another tiny burst of light.
A single shot from the roof responded to t
he flash. The bullet hit right between them, exploding a shower of splinters from a half-rotted log buried in the ground.
Jude tensed to run, but Kane whispered harshly, “Don’t move.”
He almost asked why. Then he realized if the sniper saw zero motion in response to the shot, he wouldn’t fire again. Probably. He hoped.
Because if the two of them had to start an all-out war with this many mercs, they’d lose. Quickly and badly.
The guard still stood with his rifle aimed at the tree line, watching. He did a slow sweep, reached down with one hand and pulled a CB unit from his belt. Spoke into it. Then, after another gradual pass with the rifle, he lowered it and went back to pacing.
“Right,” Kane said. “Now we run.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Once they were back on the road, headed toward Norfolk, Jude dialed Natalie’s cell and put the phone on speaker. It took her four rings to answer.
“What?”
He frowned and glanced at Kane. Obviously, her mood hadn’t improved. “Natalie, it’s Jude,” he said.
“Yeah, I know. I have you in my address book. Are you calling to rub it in?”
“Uh. Rub what in?”
She heaved a breath. “I take it you’re not calling from the office. You really don’t know?”
“Cut the dramatics, Moore,” Kane said. “We don’t have time for this.”
“Oh, good. You got him back. And I’m on speaker.” Her tone was completely flat. “Look, if you managed to find something out, you’ll have to bring it to Agent Wells. I’m off the Noakes case.”
Jude blinked in surprise. “What?”
“Director Rubin took me off, a few hours ago,” she said. “He said … how did he put it? That my mishandling of Bromwell constituted gross negligence and I’ll be lucky to get a new assignment alphabetizing files in the archive room. Or something like that.”
Damn. That was not good news.
“Just tell me this,” Natalie said. “Was it you, Kane?”
