by Blake Dixon
“The hell are you talking about?” he snapped. “I don’t—”
“Not now.” Jude gave him a look. “Okay. Natalie, where are you?”
“At home. Contemplating my glorious career as a file clerk.”
“What’s the address?”
“Why?”
“Just give it.”
She did. “Now tell me why.”
“Because we need to talk. We’ll be there soon.” He disconnected the call before she could say anything more.
Kane stared at him. “Why the hell aren’t we going to the field office?” he said. “We need a lot of agents with a lot of guns. Not one useless desk jockey who’s not even on the goddamned case anymore.”
“If Rubin took her off, that probably means she was getting close to something he’s involved in. And it means he’s probably got at least a few agents in there who know what he’s doing, or at least part of it.” Jude shook his head. “If what we’re doing gets back to Rubin, it’s over,” he said. “I don’t know the rest of the team, but I trust Natalie. And she’ll know who else we can trust.”
Kane slumped in the seat. “I think you trust way too many people, Boy Scout.”
“Lucky for you, you’re one of them.” He gestured at the phone. “Put her address in the GPS, so we don’t add ‘getting lost’ to tonight’s list of fuck-ups.”
“Fine.”
He waited while Kane programmed the phone, and then said, “Why would Ray Rubin have a little girl kidnapped, and then hire me to find her?”
“That’s the big money question,” Kane said. “Obviously, he has political motivations.”
“It’s Rubin. Everything is political with him.” Jude frowned. “When he first came to me with the job, I thought he was going for the chance to take Bromwell down after the whole witch-hunt failed.”
Kane made a choked sound. “Bit more than a witch-hunt,” he said. “The brass put a lot of effort into that mission. You know, the one I was on the inside of for a year.”
“But you never found anything.”
“Not on Bromwell,” he said.
Jude stared ahead on the highway, not focused on anything in particular. “So if the brass wants Bromwell out of the picture … why is Rubin working so hard to make sure the senator stays innocent?”
“Good question.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think we’d better find out the answer fast.”
Natalie Moore lived in a neat little blue house, situated in a neat little pocket neighborhood ten minutes from the Norfolk office. When she answered the door, her mood did not match her surroundings.
But when she led them to her neat little living room, where there was more light, the crankiness evaporated. “What happened?” she demanded. “And don’t tell me you’re fine.”
“All right, I won’t.” Jude’s smirk ended in a wince as he lowered himself onto the couch. At least it mostly hurt when he was moving now. Being still was merely painful. “I’m not fine,” he said.
“You don’t say.” She looked at Kane. “What about you?”
“Oh, I’m more fine than him.”
“We’re both on our feet, more or less. Right now that’s all that matters,” Jude said. “We have a serious problem.”
She bit her lip. “How serious?”
“You’d better sit down.”
She did. And he told her.
By the time she finished watching the short, poorly lit, but very convincing video, she was furious all over again. Only this time her anger had a new target. “Sick bastard,” she seethed. “He’s behind all of this?”
“It’s looking that way. Just keep in mind that we can’t be sure,” Jude said. “The Black Strings is not a small organization. They’re involved in a lot of shit at any given time.”
“But you think Valerie Noakes is in this building.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Kane, who’d perched on the arm of an easy chair, stood suddenly and paced a few steps. “One way to find out, right?”
“You want to raid the place,” she said.
“Yes, but we have to be careful.” Jude took his phone back and tucked it in a pocket. “There has to be a reason Rubin took you off the case. And he’s probably got inside people on the team, people sympathetic to his cause. Whatever the hell that is. That’s why we came to you first,” he said. “To find out who you trust.”
“I … don’t know.” Natalie’s gaze shifted, unfocused. “You might’ve noticed I’m not really a people person,” she sighed. “I don’t socialize a lot. Honestly, I’d have to say I never trusted anyone at the office but Rubin. Until now,” she added darkly. “Now there’s no one.”
“Great. Well, the three of us will never get into that place alone.”
“Maybe we can.”
Both of them stared at Kane. “Not happening,” Jude said. “You’re the one who said we need an army of agents.”
“Yeah, that was when it was just two of us. Now we’ve got three.”
“Three is not an army, Kane.”
“True. But one of us is a merc.”
Jude saw where he was going with this, and he didn’t like it. “So what, you’ll distract them by getting them to beat on you, while we sneak in and look for the girl?”
“No, thanks. I already met my beating quota for the week,” he said with a smirk. “But I can get us in — as long as we go right now, before Vecchio gets back from wherever. We just need a way to take out the roof guard.”
“That video,” Natalie said slowly. “You took it from cover, right? You had a line of sight from the vantage point?”
Jude raised an eyebrow. “I zoomed in quite a bit,” he said. “If you’re talking about taking a shot from the top of the gully, I’d say it’s a good four hundred yards to the roof. And they have a sniper patrolling up there.”
“No problem,” she said.
Kane coughed. “How is that not a problem?”
“Expert marksmanship badge, U.S. Army, plus first place overall in the national EIC four years running,” she said. “I can still bullseye at eight hundred yards. A thousand if there’s no wind.”
“Well, damn,” Kane said. “Guess you’re our man, then.”
“Excuse me?”
Jude laughed. “Trust me, that’s a compliment,” he said. “And we’d better get moving. If you’re sure…” He sent a questioning look at Kane.
“Hell, no. I’m not sure about anything,” he said. “Never stopped me before, though.”
“True. And you are still alive.”
“So are you, Boy Scout.”
“All right,” Jude said. “Let’s do this.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Jude and Natalie lay prone at the tree line, waiting for Kane. They’d armed themselves from Natalie’s considerable personal arsenal — she had a night-scope rifle and a Sig with a silencer, he’d taken a second Beretta and a sturdy blade. Kane stuck with the Glock and .22 he already had, but he’d also grabbed a boot knife and scraped together an IED with a remote cell-programmed trigger on the fly.
He wouldn’t tell them why he wanted the bomb.
“That’s a lot of mercs,” Natalie said softly.
“Yeah.” Jude shifted his position and looked through the field binoculars, also swiped from Natalie’s stash. A lone figure on foot had just rounded the curve in the gravel road. “There’s Kane,” he said. “Shouldn’t be long now.”
The plan was for him to get inside the building — somehow — come out the back and take out the single guard stationed at the back door. That would be the signal for Natalie to drop the roof sniper, and the two of them to hit the slope and join Kane.
He wasn’t looking forward to sliding down twenty feet of rough ground.
As Kane approached the fence across the front of the property, one of the two guards there waved at him. The other was already opening the gate. Kane walked through, bumped fists with both guards, and stood there talking with them for a minute.
Nata
lie adjusted her rifle, glanced through the scope. “What’s his deal, anyway?” she said. “It’s damned hard to tell whose side he’s on sometimes.”
Jude shrugged. “I gave up trying to figure him out a long time ago,” he said. “All I know for sure is he’s got our backs.”
“You trust him,” she said. “The guy making friendly with the mercs right now.”
He thought about the hotbox, three years of that shit, and who was responsible for putting Kane through it. For tossing him to the mercs in the first place. “Yeah. I trust him.”
“All right.” She didn’t sound convinced.
Kane was headed for the building now. He stopped at the front entrance, clasping hands, clapping shoulders. Said something that had one of the guards frowning and pointing down the drive. Kane gestured at the door, and a guard nodded and opened it for him. He went inside.
“Here we go,” Jude murmured. “Get ready.”
Natalie checked the rifle scope, made a small adjustment to the stand and got into firing position. “Tell me when,” she said.
It wasn’t long before the back door opened and Kane stepped outside. The guard reacted stiffly at first, but then smiled when he caught sight of Kane. He said something and held a hand out.
Kane took it. Grinned back. Then jerked the guard forward and jammed the boot knife he’d palmed into the man’s torso. Not once, but three times in rapid succession. The guard slumped against him, and he brought the twitching figure slowly down to the ground.
Where he finally slit his throat open.
“Now,” Jude said, only slightly disturbed by the guard’s violent death. He knew Kane had to keep it quiet, no gunshots. Still, that’d been just a little excessive.
Must have been personal.
There was a snap and a whine from Natalie’s gun. The sniper on the roof collapsed abruptly.
Jude gave an approving nod. “Nice shot.”
“Thanks. Let’s move.”
The slide down the steep, root-choked embankment was just as painful as he expected. While they covered the loose rocky ground between the slope and the building, Kane took the weapons and the CB unit off the dead guard and walked to one corner, then the other. Checking the perimeter. He nodded when they reached him. “One minute, and then we go in,” he said.
Jude frowned. “What are we waiting for?”
“This.” Kane took his phone out, dialed a number and hit send.
There was a muffled explosion from somewhere in the distance around front. Shouts and running feet responded, then the sound of a chain-link fence gate rattling open.
“Told ’em I saw a suspicious device by the access road on my way in,” he said. “That should keep a bunch of them busy for a while.”
Natalie blinked, smiled. “Good work.”
“We still don’t have much time.” If the compliment affected Kane one way or the other, he didn’t show it. He pulled the back door open and gestured. “Have to cover the ground floor first, and then the basement. I’ll take the front, you check the left rear quadrant. Wyland, take the right. The basement entrance is second door from the front in the main corridor. Take five minutes to search up here, then head down.”
“So you’ve been here before?” she said.
“No. I just know the right questions to ask.”
She nodded, pulled her Sig and went inside.
Jude glanced at the butchered guard, guts ripped open and blood from the red smile in his throat pooling on the hard-packed ground beneath his head. “What did he say to you when you came out here?”
Kane’s upper lip twitched. “I believe it was ‘no hard feelings.’”
“Oh.” Well, that’d be why the man died so badly. Must’ve been on the welcome-back beating crew. “See you in there.”
With a silent prayer that Valerie Noakes was in there waiting to be rescued, he went inside.
Jude only had to use the blade once, on a merc who’d come out of a bathroom in a side corridor, spotted him instantly and went for his gun. He made the death quick and left the body in a stall. No sign of the girl in his area. The place still seemed like a military bunker from the inside — barracks, kitchen, dining area. Soft rooms and storage. Not much else. He had made note of every exit he could find in the place, including a secondary set of stairs near the back entrance coming up from the basement.
The other two were already down there when he arrived, looking like they’d struck out too. And it didn’t look like they’d have much better luck finding Valerie in the basement. But they’d definitely found something.
“Holy hell,” he said.
“Yeah.” Kane glanced back at him. “No kid?”
Jude shook his head and surveyed the room. The basement was all one area, lined with rows of utility shelves four deep on either side of a central corridor. “This is a lot of contraband,” he said.
Natalie had her phone out, headed for the shelves. “Start taking pictures.”
The shelves were stuffed with file boxes, clear bags, plastic totes, loose items — all stolen goods, high-end stuff. Weapons, drugs, electronic gear, cash. A lot of it still had the evidence tags and labels from whatever law enforcement lockup they were taken. CIA, FBI, NSA. County sheriffs. Local cops. All of it together worth billions, easy.
No way the mercs could’ve gotten all this without inside access.
The three of them went through the rows, snapping photos. The amount of contraband in this place was mind-boggling. Some of the tags dated back five, six, seven years or more. Whatever this was, it’d been going on a long time.
Eventually they regrouped toward the back of the basement. Kane picked up an evidence bag from a shelf containing an elaborate-looking silicon chip card, turned it over thoughtfully, put it down. “Vecchio’s had a silent partner since the beginning,” he said. “An inside man. Everyone figured the partner was military or government, because Vecchio kept pulling access codes he never should’ve had from his ass on big jobs.” He looked at Jude. “When you’re brass, clearance is clearance. Right?”
“Yeah.” The enormity of all this was just starting to hit him. Ray Rubin hadn’t just contracted the mercs for a single operation. He was working with them, side by side.
He’d been working with them when he killed Sarah.
There was a crackling sound, a single tone from the CB unit Kane had taken off the guard. A male voice came from the speaker handset. “Cap, what the hell! I just found Wheels in the bathroom with his throat cut.”
“Shit,” Kane said, and then noticed the way Natalie was looking at him. “What? That one wasn’t mine.”
Jude raised a hand and shrugged. “He was on me.”
“Jesus, Wyland!” she said. “You couldn’t have been a little less conspicuous?”
“Didn’t have a body bag up my ass.”
The CB crackled again, a different voice. “You serious?”
“I’m staring right at him!”
“Who the hell … oh, fuck me. Tiger.”
“He’s here?”
“Yeah. Call the rest of them back from the road. Start searching.”
Kane let out a sigh, and then drew the Glock. “Well,” he said. “I guess we’re shooting our way out.”
“Or we could sneak out the back.” Jude pointed to the alcove behind the last set of shelves, with the secondary stairs he’d noted on the ground floor.
Kane looked, grinned. “Spoil all my fun, why don’t you,” he said.
“Shut up and move.” Natalie was already headed for the stairs.
It didn’t take long for Jude and Kane to follow suit.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Maybe we should’ve thought this whole exit strategy part through a little more,” Natalie whispered sharply.
Kane made a curt gesture at her and bent to the CB unit again.
“We can’t wait much longer,” Jude muttered. They’d made it out of the building, across the rock field. But before they could try to climb back up the s
teep incline, a bunch of mercs rushed out the back and found the dead guard on the ground. They’d been forced to press against the side wall of the gully, where a slight curve barely hid them on a direct sightline from the building, and wait for the excitement to die down.
That had been half an hour ago. For a while the shouting and running, the engines gunning and vehicles driving in and out, the sweeps with high-powered flashlights seemed like they’d never stop. But there was a gradual slowdown, and it’d been quiet for at least ten minutes.
Jude was worried they’d spread the search area — and if they didn’t go soon, someone would find the sedan parked suspiciously out of sight in the self-storage place.
“All right,” Kane finally whispered. He’d turned the volume on the CB far down and listened to the chatter. “They’re satisfied I’m not on the property. Let’s break for it.”
“So they think it’s just you,” Jude whispered back.
“Yeah. I’m officially number one on their most dead-man-walking list.” He gave a slight shake of his head. “You head up first, Moore.”
“Why? Because I’m a woman?”
He rolled his eyes. “Because you’re the best long-distance shot, and you can cover our asses if they posted another roof sentry.”
“Oh.” She made a small, choked sound, and started sidling along the gully wall toward the root-covered slope.
Jude waited a minute before he headed in the same direction with Kane pressing after him. “So if Rubin is this guy’s silent partner … do you think Vecchio knows you’re a CIA plant?” he said, keeping his voice low.
“Been thinking about that,” Kane replied in kind. “And I don’t think so, honestly. If he did know, I’d have been dead a long time ago.”
“You’re sure about that.”
“Not a hundred percent. But it’d make sense for Rubin to keep my identity secret,” he said. “I’d be useless to him if Vecchio knew I was a fed.”
Jude nodded slowly. “So that means Rubin doesn’t know your code name,” he said. “And he wouldn’t know the mercs are gunning for you.”
“Probably not. Why are you trying to figure this out?”
