by Blake Dixon
Jude almost proved his point by screaming at him, but he managed to throttle back.
“You make a mistake because you’re angry, and you are never going to forgive yourself. Trust me. I’ve got some personal experience with that.” Kane held out a placating hand. “Calm down. That’s all I’m saying.”
“All right.” Jude closed his eyes, took a deep breath. A long exhale expelled some of the fury. “All right,” he said again. “I just … we need to find her.”
“I know, man. We will.” Kane nodded at the phone in his hand. “Who are you calling?”
“Dottie Noakes.”
“The kid’s mother?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I want her to confirm that Bromwell could be Valerie’s father.”
Kane frowned. “Then what? We still won’t know where she is.”
“No. But at least it’s a start.”
“I guess,” Kane said. “Hey … where’s your laptop? I want to check something while you call her.”
“In the trunk. I’ll pop it.”
Jude pulled the trunk release. While Kane got out of the car, he swiped to his address book and tapped Dottie’s cell number.
This time she knew who he was. “Mr. Wyland,” she answered breathlessly. “Please, tell me you’ve found something.”
“I might have. But I need to ask you a personal question,” he said. “And you have to be completely honest with me, or I can’t help you.”
“Anything,” she said, just as Kane slid back into the passenger seat and opened the laptop. “Anything at all, if it’ll save my daughter.”
“Okay. Tell me this, then,” he said. “What are the chances that Sam Bromwell is Valerie’s father?”
A resounding, shocked silence responded.
“Mrs. Noakes? I need you to answer.”
“I…” She hitched a breath, and then burst into sobs. “It was one time,” she said in a wavering voice. “Not even an affair. Just a drunken mistake.”
“So there is a chance?”
“No! How could you know about this? I mean…” She sobbed again, made an effort to compose herself. “Gary is aware of my … indiscretion with Sam,” she whispered. “We worked through it. Put it behind us. There was a chance, a very small chance, but Gary never cared. As far as we’re both concerned, Vallie is his daughter.”
Jude clenched a fist. “Well, at some point he must have started caring,” he said. “He had a paternity test done.”
“No, that’s not possible. He swore he’d never—”
“He did. I just saw the results,” Jude told her. “Gary Noakes is not Valerie’s father.”
“Oh, my God,” Dottie rasped. “My God, what are you saying? You think that my husband…”
Kane tapped his arm. “Didn’t Moore say they have a cabin on a lake somewhere?”
“Hold on, Mrs. Noakes. Don’t hang up.” He covered the phone. “Yeah. Lake Smith, I think. Why?”
“Look at this.” He turned the laptop sideways. On the screen was a zoomed image, a paused frame from one of the ransom videos. Gray concrete wall. “See those marks on the concrete?” he said. “Light brown, kind of wavy?”
Jude squinted. The marks were barely visible, but definitely there. “What are they?”
“Water table stains. It happens to foundations near bodies of water, or areas where the drainage is bad,” he said. “So ask her if their cabin has a concrete basement.”
He relayed the question.
“Yes, it does,” Dottie replied, startled. “It was originally built as a small home, but Gary had it converted. Why?”
Jude looked at Kane, nodded. “I think you’d better give me the address.”
Chapter Forty-Five
They were a mile or so out from the cabin according to the GPS when Kane said, “You know, maybe we should’ve called Moore for backup.”
Jude raised an eyebrow. “Since when does Garrett Kane call for backup?”
“Since he’s kind of started to enjoy the little things in life,” he said. “Beer and cheeseburgers. Not living in a metal box. Those things.”
“I told you, you’re not—”
“Going back. Yeah, I know.” He sighed at the window. “I’d just rather be alive to experience the rest of not going back.”
“We’ll make it.”
“Mm-hm.”
Jude slowed the sedan as the road swung into a steep curve. It was all woods on either side, and they hadn’t passed a building in miles. The Noakes cabin was in a very private place. “Even if we had called for backup, we might not have gotten it,” he said. “You know the Agency. Rules and regulations, proper channels. Bureaucracy all the way. Besides, none of this is actual evidence, and the girl might not even be there.”
“You’re right. This is the way to go,” Kane said. “Storm into the unknown, guns blazing.”
“Absolutely.”
“How many security guys could they possibly need to guard a five-year-old kid? We don’t need backup.”
“No, we don’t.”
“And no one should know where we’re going, either. If we don’t survive this, they’ll definitely make the same insane leaps of logic you did to figure this all out. By tomorrow morning.”
Jude rolled his eyes. “Fine. Text Moore, then.”
“Good idea.”
Just as Kane got his phone out and held it up, there was a high-pitched whine from somewhere outside. A jagged hole about an inch around seemed to appear in the passenger side of the windshield. And the phone exploded into fragments.
Suddenly, the world was filled with gunfire and breaking glass.
“Get down!” Jude shouted, ducking as low as possible himself while he slammed on the brakes. The sedan squealed and shuddered to a stop. More shots, more shattering windows.
He thunked the car in reverse and hit the gas hard. Without looking where they were going. “Better hang onto something,” he said, glancing at Kane bent double in the passenger seat.
“What? There’s nothing to hang onto!”
The sedan raced backwards, fishtailing wildly. A volley of shots imploded the windshield and showered them both with a hail of broken glass.
“Fuck this,” Jude growled. He jerked himself straight, grabbed the wheel and twisted to look out the back window, easing more speed from the car. A few more gunshots rang out as he hauled back around the steep curve he’d just rounded.
He’d gotten halfway through the curve when the back end spun out and the sedan lurched off the road, smacked a tree and stopped with an abrupt, shuddering jolt he felt through his whole body.
Next to him, Kane coughed and stirred. “We dead?”
“Not yet.”
“Guess we’d better run, then.”
“Right.”
Jude had to kick the driver’s side door open. By the time he stumbled around to the passenger side, Kane was out and leaning against the wrecked sedan, listening. “They’re on foot,” he said. “But they’re coming. More than one.”
“Yeah, I got that impression from all the guns.” He could hear them, low voices and flat footsteps. Coming down the road. “We cut through the woods,” he said, sweeping the forested area just beyond the car. “We’re already on the lake side, and the ground slopes down enough that they won’t see us from the road. We can follow the shore to the cabin.”
“Sounds fun.” Kane pushed himself erect and started toward him, picking up speed. “Go fast. I’m right behind you.”
Jude nodded and sprinted into the woods.
The embankment wasn’t too steep, the ground fairly level at the bottom with sparse trees that afforded a view of the narrow strip of shore encircling the lake. Jude kept to the trees, running at full speed for maybe two minutes before he slowed and listened for Kane. There was a few irregular, crackling footsteps somewhere behind him, and then nothing.
He stopped to look. Kane was twenty feet back, leaning against a tree.
As he pivoted and ran toward him, the other man
flapped an arm. “Keep moving,” Kane called. “I told you, I’ll be right behind you.”
“No, you won’t.” He could already see the dark stain spreading across Kane’s left shoulder. He’d been shot. “Where did it catch you?” he said when he reached him.
Kane gritted his teeth and pushed up. “Keep moving. You wanna save the kid or not?”
“So do you.” He was already going for the knife on his belt, the one he’d kept after the raid on the merc bunker. “I’m cutting your shirt off. Try to kill me if you want.”
“We don’t have time for this.”
“Shut up, Kane.” He sliced the t-shirt, tore it away in two parts. Kane hissed when it cleared his shoulder. Clean, angled entrance wound near his collar bone, no exit wound. Probably the bullet that shattered his phone. “I’ll tie this off so you don’t bleed to death, and then we’ll keep moving,” he said.
Kane snorted, but he braced a hand on the tree to give him a better angle. “Still a pain in my ass,” he muttered.
“Also your partner, whether you like it or not. At least until this is over.” Jude twisted one of the shirt halves into a fabric rope, looped it twice around Kane’s shoulder and tied a tight double knot at the top. The other he folded roughly in half, stretched the band around to cover and secure the first, and tied it beneath his arm. “You’ll still have some mobility this way, until we can get the bullet out,” he said as he shrugged free of his jacket and handed it over. “Put this on.”
After a fraction of a second, Kane took it. “Thanks. Partner.”
He’d no sooner slipped the jacket on when there was a crackling snap from the woods, not far behind them. Someone stepping on a stick.
They shared a glance and ran.
Jude drew his weapon as they plunged into the deeper cover of the woods along the embankment, and noted Kane doing the same. “Try to stick close,” he called. “We don’t want to shoot each other.”
“Does that mean we skip the shoot-anything-that-moves strategy?”
“Not necessarily. I like that strategy. Just, you know … anything but me.”
“Deal.” Kane darted left, grabbed a slender tree trunk with his right hand and swung around to fire a single shot behind them. There was a shout, a rustling thump. A quick flash of a smile from Kane. “He moved.”
Two shots answered from the direction he’d fired.
Kane fired back as he pivoted the rest of the way and kept running. “How many do you think there are?”
“Don’t know.” Jude planted a foot, spun and fired. Someone behind them dropped. As he pushed away, a bullet zinged off a tree not two feet from his head, and he barely missed catching the ricochet with his face. “More than two,” he said.
“Apparently.”
They kept moving, trading shots with largely unseen pursuers. Kane brought down at least one more. Soon the occasional rustle and snap behind them slowed, and then stopped altogether.
“Maybe we lost them,” Kane said, still running. He’d fallen slightly behind, and his breath was coming harder.
“Yeah, maybe. Start angling left, toward the shore.”
“Where they can see us?”
“Where we can see them.”
“Right.”
Jude pushed through a thick tangle of brush, skirted a deadfall and canted left. He stuck to the sloped embankment for maybe twenty more feet, then loped into the sparsely wooded level field and slowed. Just as he glanced back looking for Kane, a gunshot cracked from somewhere ahead of him.
The bullet grazed his arm as he brought the Beretta up, throwing off his own shot. He missed the figure that whipped out from behind a tree and ran straight at him. The man from the sketch, the first assailant. Chaz Morrigan.
Morrigan got another shot off first. Jude dove beneath it, rolled once. As he came up, a booted foot kicked the gun from his hand. He heard a finger snap.
He was reaching for the second gun when the boot pressed on his throat, and Morrigan said, “Didn’t I tell you to back off?”
Jude grabbed the ankle and twisted. His off-balance assailant dropped to a knee, and he rolled away and gained one foot.
He had a hand on the gun when knuckles met his jaw with a resounding crack. His vision doubled and swam.
“We haven’t been introduced.” He felt Morrigan rip the gun away from him. “They call me Beast, because—”
A flat crack rang out. There was a gurgling sound, and Morrigan thumped over with a bullet in the center of a bloody mass where his eye used to be.
“Yeah, that’s nice,” a voice behind him said. “They call me Kane. Because that’s my goddamned name.”
Jude blinked and Kane was in front of him, extending a hand. He took it without hesitation. “Thanks,” he said, boosting to his feet.
“No problem. You all right?”
“Fine. You?”
“Fine.” Kane grinned. “Still a couple of fine men, right here.”
“You know, I kind of miss Saigon. Good times.” Jude collected his weapons, one by one. “Hard part’s over,” he said. “Let’s go get the girl.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Dark clouds had been building overhead all morning, and the occasional ominous rumble of thunder rolled across the lake as the wind picked up, driving the water to lap eagerly at the shore. Lightning forked down on the horizon and flashed spangles over the lake.
Just as they drew within sight of the dark green, red-trimmed cabin, the skies opened up with a vengeance.
Blinking against the pouring rain, Jude gestured to a small outbuilding at the edge of the property alongside a path leading to the dock and the lake. He and Kane sprinted for the building, pressed against the back wall beneath a narrow eave.
“Well, at least we’ve got sound cover,” Kane said as he swiped rainwater from his face. “How many did you count?”
“Five.” They’d seen armed guards around the cabin, apparently on high alert and strolling the perimeter despite the rain. Must’ve been in radio contact with the team that’d run them off the road. “Could be more, though.”
“Good eye. I only spotted four.” Kane’s color was down, his movements slightly slowed. The half-ass patch job on his bullet wound wasn’t going to keep him going much longer. “So how are we doing this?” he said. “Split up, front and back?”
Kane had scoped out the cabin with satellite archive imagery and Agency records on the way here. They knew there were two entrances, ten windows, one ground floor and one basement. Nothing on the inside layout, though. Ideally they’d run the split he just suggested to approach the place — but Jude knew he was running out of steam, even if he wouldn’t let on.
“Got a better idea,” he said. “You stay here and cover me. I’ll make a run on the place.”
“Hey, you know what that idea sounds like? Bullshit.”
“You’re not dying out here, Kane.”
“Neither are you. We’re partners, remember?” Kane checked the cartridge on his Glock, slammed it back home. “I’ve got five rounds and a full peashooter,” he said, meaning the .22. “You?”
“Full magazine, plus one.”
“Plenty of bullets between us.”
“Fine. We split up, front and back,” Jude said, drawing the fully loaded Beretta. “I’ll take the back.”
“Of course you will. That’s the fun side.”
“Yep.” The guards would see anyone coming across the back expanse far sooner than the wooded front area, and most of the fire would be concentrated around back. “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it.”
Jude nodded. “See you on the inside,” he said. “Go.”
They went.
The rain helped. Jude managed to take out two guards before a third noticed him and opened fire. He dove behind a colorful plastic child’s playhouse, his heart aching for the little girl it belonged to as the guard blasted holes in the toy. Valerie Noakes would never be the same after this experience.
But damn it, she was going to be alive.
He popped aside, traded shots with the guard as a second one ran to join him. Distant gunfire marked Kane engaging more of them out front. He waited for a break in the shooting, then pushed from cover on the opposite side. This time his shot found its mark, and a guard dropped.
The second guard fired, plowing a bullet into the ground inches from him. Jude pulled back, crouched and looked through the little glass-less window on his side of the playhouse. There was a fist-sized hole in the plastic on the other side, with a straight line to the second guard.
He dropped the bastard in one shot.
Alert for more movement, Jude sprinted around the playhouse on a full charge for the back door. Rain muffled the sporadic pops of gunfire from the front of the house. Hopefully, the sound would draw any other guards here.
The back door was locked. He socked the muzzle of the Beretta against the strike plate, pulled the trigger. Splinters and sheared chunks of metal exploded in a small cloud.
He kicked the door open and burst in weapon-first.
This was a laundry porch. Empty. He moved up to stand beside the door on the opposite side of the narrow room, peered into the door’s arched window slightly. No movement. The handle turned when he tried it, and he yanked the door open toward him, waited.
When no one shot through the entrance, he swung inside.
Next area was a dining room, or maybe a breakfast nook. People like Noakes with a lot of money tended to give rooms cutesy names. There was a closed door ahead, probably leading to a living room, or maybe a den or lounge. To the right, an open entryway with a step up to the kitchen.
Usually, kitchen meant basement door. He headed that way.
The rain had picked up again, drumming on the roof and tapping a musical high-toned staccato against the windows. He spotted a wooden door set into the left-hand wall across the kitchen, past a granite island counter. Looked to the right, into the open area leading to a front hallway. No movement there.
Just as he tensed to cross the kitchen, something small and hard jabbed at the space between his shoulder blades. “Drop the cannon, soldier,” a voice said.
