by Jack Mars
Bill nodded again, his breaths coming jagged and rasping.
Reid let himself fall backward and sat on the floor, rubbing his face. It’s no more than nine to ten hours from here to Nova Scotia by boat. They left at four in the morning. It’s past nine at night.
His girls were on a plane, right at that moment, headed to Croatia. Maria’s plans of using the Coast Guard, the CIA, flying out by chopper… none of that would work. Not now.
“One more question, Bill, and then we’re done here. The American man with the green eyes—did he go with them? Or did he stay here?”
“He…” Bill choked and retched once. “He left. G-got on the boat. Hnnggh… left his car here.”
Reid sighed in dismay. Rais had taken his girls to Croatia with the intention that Reid would follow—leave the safety of the United States, leave what he knew, leave behind the police and jurisdiction.
Because he knows I will. He knows I’ll follow.
He wanted very much to kill the man laid out on the floor before him, his face purple, capillaries burst in his eyes. It would be easy; there was a letter opener on the desk. A slip of its tip into the femoral artery of his thigh and Bill the supervisor would bleed out on the trailer floor in less than a minute. It would be too easy.
He wanted this man to suffer, to live with what he had done. He took Bill’s wallet from his pocket and pulled out his driver’s license. “I’m keeping this,” Reid told him. “You can try to run, try to hide, but you’re going to be caught. You’re going to be arrested for what you’ve done here. You’ll spend the rest of your life in prison—and guys like you, they tend not to fare so well.”
Bill could only whimper.
Suddenly the locked doorknob of the trailer jiggled. Reid looked up sharply as someone banged a heavy fist on the other side.
“Bill!” A deep male voice. “Bill, you okay in there?”
Reid rose and parted the blinds over one of the small windows, only slightly—but still enough to see that no fewer than a dozen dockworkers were gathered directly outside the office.
The text. The message Bill sent, allegedly to his wife; he must have warned his guys.
“Open up or we’ll knock this door down!” threatened another voice.
Bill weakly lifted his head and tried to call out for help, but his voice was little more than a hoarse croak. Reid examined his options; he could try the rear door, but he had no doubt there were people there too. Instead he drew his gun.
A moment later the door burst inward, the lock breaking easily with a dozen large, angry men waiting on the other side.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The man immediately outside the door, the one who had kicked it in, was the large bald man that Reid had spoken to earlier. He filled the narrow doorway, shoulders heaving, gaze angry—and was met with the barrel of a pistol three feet from his face.
Reid had the Glock aloft, gripped in both hands. He didn’t want to shoot anyone, but he wasn’t lying when he told Bill that nothing, no one, would get between him and his girls.
For a moment neither man spoke; they simply stared.
At long last the large dock worker put his hands up slowly. “Hey,” he said. “Nobody needs to get hurt here, all right?”
“Back up,” Reid ordered. “Get back.”
The man took a step back, down the three wooden steps that led up to the trailer, all without taking his eyes off of Reid or the gun. The workers behind him backed up as well, slowly. Reid noted with some dismay that some of them wielded pipes, wrenches, lengths of chain—Bill had been right. They took care of their own.
They just don’t know that their own aids and abets human trafficking.
Reid stood in the trailer’s doorway, his gun up but not pointed directly at any one of them. He mustered a clear, strong voice as he said, “Most of you are likely innocent in this—maybe all of you. But if you make a move, I will shoot you.”
The large man at the head of the dock-working mob frowned deeply. “Innocent? What are you talking about?”
“Your boss, Bill, is part of a trafficking ring,” Reid told them. “He was helping a group of foreigners move abducted girls out of the country.”
“Nah. No way.” The big man shook his head. “I’ve known that man for sixteen years. I don’t believe that.”
You’d be surprised what people are capable of. He couldn’t help but think of his late wife, Kate, and his children, unknowing for his entire CIA career.
Reid knew he was not going to be able to convince these men of the truth—and there was no point in doing so anyway. He didn’t have to prove it to them; he had to prove it to the authorities. But he did have to make it off the docks alive.
He took the first wooden step down, tracking the barrel left to right as the dock workers spread, taking small steps backward and fanning out into a semicircle. They were looking for an opening, an opportunity to disarm him. And then…
“Jesus!” someone shouted. Without Reid blocking the doorway, the inside of the trailer was visible—as was Bill, lying on the floor, his face purple and one hand mangled and breath labored.
“Somebody call the cops!” another crew member said.
Reid moved off the last stair and kept the trailer to his back, sidestepping parallel to it. He needed to get back to the car, to get the hell out of there. The big man at the front of the crowd reached behind him; someone handed off a pipe wrench, nearly three feet long and at least twenty-five pounds.
That would crush my skull in one blow.
“Nobody needs to die tonight,” he reminded the crew. “Just back off, and I’ll leave—”
There was sudden movement in his periphery. A man with a handlebar mustache swung a length of chain, overhand, about six feet from him. Reid bladed his body, making himself a narrower target, as the chain whistled past his nose and smacked the ground angrily.
His reaction was all instinct. Someone had made a bid for him, and he returned it in kind. In a half second the Glock was up, under his elbow, and he fired a single shot.
The man yelped and fell as he took the bullet in the thigh.
The shot seemed impossibly loud in the open night air of the cargo port. The big man hefted the pipe wrench, bringing it up over his shoulder like a baseball bat.
Reid swung to his left and had the gun pointed at the man’s forehead before he could fully wind up. “Don’t,” he said hoarsely.
The large man froze, but kept the wrench back, over his shoulder, ready to swing. Two others hurried to their downed friend, who hissed breaths through his teeth as he gripped his thigh and groaned in pain.
I need to get out of here, now. He could make a run for it, sprint for the dirt bike he’d left behind, but his knee still wasn’t completely healed since he’d torn a tendon the month earlier. Some of these men looked like they were in good shape; he wasn’t confident he could outrun them. And if they caught up to him…
“You have kids of your own?” Reid asked the large man at the head of the dock mob. “I bet a lot of you do. Put yourselves in my shoes. My little girls went missing yesterday. And whether you believe it or not, your boss, he saw them. He watched them get put on a boat against their will. What would you do?”
“Not this,” the big man said somberly. “Not like this.”
“But you’d do something. You’d look for them. And if you knew that someone had seen them, and done nothing—”
“Let’s just rush him, Leon!” A man behind the larger one stared at Reid as he spoke to the mob leader. “He can’t shoot us all!”
“I can try,” Reid promised. “But I don’t want to do that. I just want to leave.”
The tension in the air crackled like electricity between them. Reid recognized this moment; the fuse had been lit and it was mere seconds before detonation, before these men got antsy, anxious, and did something brash. They wouldn’t stay at bay forever, and he would have to make some very difficult choices.
The lead man, Leon, tensed. The
muscles in his thick forearms stood out in sharp relief as he tightened his grip around the pipe wrench, ready to swing.
But then—he frowned. Leon pulled his gaze away from the gun for just a second, cocking his head slightly like a dog hearing a strange noise.
Then Reid heard it too. The sound of an engine, getting louder by the second. It was coming fast.
Tires squealed behind him, and an instant later the high beams came on, bright and blinding. The crowded dock workers squinted and shielded their eyes from the sudden blaze of light as a black sports car screeched to an abrupt stop just behind Reid, so close its right bumper nearly touched his thigh.
For the briefest of moments Reid thought it was the Trans Am that he had left behind in Virginia; he did a quick double-take and saw that it was a newer car, a recent model. Then a gruff voice called out to him through the open window.
“Get in.”
He didn’t wait around to wonder what was going on. With the gun still leveled at Leon, Reid took two quick steps backward and jumped into the passenger side of the car. His feet were barely off the ground before the driver slammed it into reverse.
Leon surged forward, swinging his pipe wrench down overhead. He caught the very front of the car’s hood, the wrench glancing off of it and leaving a sizeable dent as the car jolted backward.
The grizzled driver spun the wheel expertly. The back end of the sleek sports car swung out, fishtailing slightly, and then he threw it into drive while still moving. The driver mashed the gas pedal down and the car took off like a shot, doing sixty down the narrow cargo lane.
Reid breathed a heavy sigh. “Thanks again, Mitch.”
“Mm.” The bearded mechanic grunted in response.
Of course Reid had questions, but there were more pressing matters at the moment. He holstered his Glock and flipped the burner open as he did some mental math—the girls had a little more than a seventeen-hour lead on him. That was just barely enough time for the cargo ship to reach the southern tip of Nova Scotia, and for a plane from there to reach Dubrovnik, assuming that it was a direct flight path. With any luck, the plane they were on hadn’t landed yet.
He dialed Watson’s number. Pick up this time. Pick up…
The call was answered mid-ring, but Watson said nothing.
“It’s me,” Reid said quickly. “The girls were put on a boat to Nova Scotia, possibly one of the offshore islands, and from there a plane to Croatia. We need to contact all cargo depots in the province and have all planes grounded. Call the Dubrovnik authorities, have them send police to the airport to…” Reid trailed off. He heard nothing on the other line, not even the sound of breathing. “Hello? Watson, are you there?”
There was a long moment of silence before the woman on the other end of the line said, “Agent Watson is not available at the moment. But you can speak to me, Agent Steele.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Reid froze at the stern sound of the deputy director’s voice. “Riker,” he said softly.
Ashleigh Riker sighed irritably. “We told you, Zero. We warned you not to, and somehow you got Watson involved…”
“You’ve got it wrong. He had nothing to do with this,” Reid lied.
“He tipped his hand too far when he sent Agent Strickland leads through his own assets.” She scoffed through the phone. “I should have suspected something like this would happen.”
Reid pinched the bridge of his nose. If Watson had been discovered, then he no longer had an ally inside the agency; no tech to obtain satellite photos, no method of tracking leads. Worse still, the agency had the burner number—which meant they were undoubtedly tracking him at that very moment.
Then there’s no point in hiding anything from them.
“All right, listen to me,” Reid said quickly. “Rais has taken my girls out of the country. He made some kind of deal with a group of Slavic traffickers—”
“The assassin again,” Riker interrupted. “Do you have evidence? Did you see him?”
Reid grunted in frustration. “No. But I know it’s him—”
“And what were you going to do? Take on everyone by yourself? You tried that once before and it didn’t work out so well for you… or for us. Now you’ve already gone and made another mess—”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Reid said forcefully.
“No, you only injured and crippled them,” the deputy director shot back sardonically. “We connected the dots here. Two cops accosted in Maryland, the hotel clerk with the broken face, the shift supervisor at Port Jersey, a dockworker shot in the leg… You are out of control, again—”
Reid felt heat rising in his face despite the chilly air from the open passenger window. “We’re talking about my children here…”
“Yes, and we told you. This isn’t coming from me, or Cartwright, or even from Director Mullen. This is coming from the Director of National Intelligence. I would say you’re disavowed, but you were never really fully reinstated, so I don’t even know if I can disavow you.” Riker paused for a moment, her voice growing calm as she said, “Face facts, Agent Steele. You defied orders. You went rogue. You broke laws and interfered with an open investigation. Right now you are a criminal. You’re a vigilante that is considered armed and very dangerous. The FBI has been notified, as well as police departments across six states. If I have to alert Interpol, I will.”
“You don’t have to make this harder than it already is,” Reid implored. “We can work together. I’ve already gotten farther than Strickland on my own.”
“You made it harder on yourself.” Her voice was cold. There was no remorse in it. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to stop, right now, and you’re going to wait where you are with this phone number active until agents arrive. They will bring you back to Langley. If you do that, maybe, just maybe you’ll avoid prison.”
Reid gritted his teeth and glanced over at Mitch, stoically driving beside him. “I have another deal,” he said.
Riker scoffed. “You’re not in a position to make deals, Agent—”
“Shut up and listen,” he snapped. “I’m in a car headed north for Nova Scotia. I will turn it around and drive back to Langley, but only if you listen to what I have to say.”
The deputy director was silent for a moment. “How can I trust you’ll come in?”
“Because having my girls safe is the most important thing in the world to me right now. I can’t do anything alone with the information I have. You can. The agency can. If you do what I ask and find them, I’ll come in.”
“Tell me.”
“My daughters were put on a cargo ship that headed north at four o’clock this morning,” Reid explained quickly. “Its destination was a Nova Scotia depot, possibly one of the outlying islands. It would have arrived there hours ago; there’d be no way to catch up to it now, but I have it on authority that from there they would have been put on a plane and sent to Dubrovnik, in Croatia. Depending on the type of plane, they may not have arrived yet. We can search manifests, flight patterns, find out where they are and when they’ll get there. We can alert the Croatian authorities and get the police to the airport. If we have any agents in the area, we can get them there. Whatever we can do, do it, and I’ll come in. But we need to move now.”
“Fine. Consider it done.” Riker snapped her fingers to someone in the background. “But I’m sending a chopper to your location to pick you up. If I don’t see your face in the next hour, there won’t be a judge or a jury. Do you understand? There’s no due process for this. There’s only a hole.”
“Understood.” Reid snapped the phone shut, ending the call, and tossed the burner out the open window.
“You really think she’s going to do all that?” Mitch asked. “To find a couple of kids?”
“I don’t know.” I can only hope so. Reid stared out the window. Early on, Watson had told him that Cartwright was the one who put him up to it, had him help and supply Reid. Where was he in all this? What is he doing to hel
p me—to help my girls?
“Where are we going?” Reid asked.
“Taking you to an airstrip in Hatfield,” Mitch grunted. “There’s a plane there. Assuming you still need one.”
He nodded. “I’m not stopping until I see their faces.” No matter what he told Riker, he wasn’t about to trust the fate of his daughters in the deputy director’s hands—or anyone else’s, for that matter. He had already come too far for that. “Where did you hide the tracking unit?”
He could surmise, just by Mitch’s sudden presence back at Port Jersey, that it wasn’t just the Trans Am that had been bugged. Mitch had followed him here, and while Reid had no idea how he’d gotten here so fast—by helicopter, or maybe even by the same type of drone that had delivered him to the motel—the mechanic was definitely still tracking him.
“It’s in the bag,” Mitch grunted. “Silicon transponder sewed into the fabric.”
Reid scoffed. Maria was right again; he really couldn’t trust anyone in this line of work. “Let me guess, John told you I’d do something stupid…”
“You did.” Mitch kept his eyes on the road, not looking over, barely blinking. “Those men might have killed you back there on the dock.”
And I might have killed some of them, Reid thought. He scrutinized the man behind the wheel—the thick, unruly beard; small, squinting eyes; baseball cap pulled over his hair and brow. “Can the agency track me with it?”
“Not unless they have the frequency and know it’s you.”
Reid thought for a moment. He had tossed the burner because the CIA now had the number and could use it to find his location, but it had also been his only line of communication to Maria. “Can you get that info to Johansson?”
Mitch nodded once.
So he knows her too. “Who are you really?” he asked.
“Mechanic,” Mitch said simply. “Friend of John’s.”
Sure, Reid thought. And I’m just a history professor. “You knew me. Before the memory suppressor, you knew me, didn’t you?”
