No Exit

by LENA DIAZ,

  Which was why she was standing here now.

  She tossed one of the pens onto a nearby decorative table, wondering why she’d even bothered to pick them both up when she’d known all along that she only needed the one. She stepped to the board and wrote a new name in the “Enemies” column: Jace Atwell.

  She wrote it in red.

  Chapter Three

  Jace idled his car outside the wrought-iron fence in front of the rather unimpressive Equalizers’ headquarters as the security gate rolled back. At least now he knew why everyone called it home base, emphasis on the “home” part. The men and women he now worked with had somehow managed to establish their base of operations in a mud-colored ranch house on the outskirts of a middle-class suburb in one of the few places in Boulder without a mountain view.

  As soon as the gate was open wide enough for him to fit through, he hit the accelerator and zoomed up the driveway. He’d half expected Austin to make him wait, just to be obstinate. But as soon as he’d pulled up to the security camera, the gate had buzzed and began to move. Similarly, the garage door rose as he approached it. In spite of the kid’s lousy attitude, at least he had the sense not to play games when every minute counted in their efforts to find Ramsey.

  Once he pulled in beside a dark-colored van, the garage door immediately reversed direction to close behind him.

  Austin didn’t greet him at the door that led into the house, but he’d left it unlocked. Jace hurried through an ordinary-looking laundry room, then stepped into an expansive family room that was anything but ordinary.

  An elevator of all things, was to his immediate left, its thicker-than-normal steel doors standing open. A few feet from the couches and chairs were a dozen state-of-the-art computers and monitors covering a countertop that ran the length of the left wall. Rows of guns, magazines of ammunition, and Kevlar vests hung in glass-fronted cases above the computers.

  But it was what sat in the middle of the room that made him pause: Austin Buchanan, in a wheelchair, his legs amputated below the knees, and raised burn scars peeking out from under the edge of the collar and cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt.

  Ah hell. Every impatient word Jace had tossed at Austin had his face turning hot. He stepped forward, hand extended like a white flag of surrender. “Hey, man, I’m really sorry about how I spoke—”

  Austin’s lip curled in derision. “Don’t bother. I hate it when people get a personality transplant the second they see this damn thing.” He popped a wheelie and shot across the floor, stopping in front of one of the computers. “I’ve made zero progress in the traffic-cam department. You’d better have a backup plan.”

  Jace dropped his hand. He might as well get a picture of a donkey, paste it to his forehead, and start braying like the ass he’d become.

  “Well?” Austin called out, the raspy quality of his voice making sense now. His vocal cords had probably been damaged in the same fire that had given him those burn scars and taken his legs. “You bullied your way in here. You gonna gawk like a tourist or help me find Ramsey?”

  Jace hurried across the room, noting as he did so that the floor and windows, even the walls, were covered with bumpy sheets of gray metal. As he sat beside Austin, he waved toward the wall in front of them. “I imagine all this sheeting interferes with cell-phone signals.”

  “That’s kind of the point, genius. We use a landline in here, with encryption algorithms to scramble the signal.” He typed something into the screen in front of him, then swiveled the monitor toward Jace, revealing a map of Boulder with red lines and dots marked on it.

  “I noted the areas you already searched, and the route Ramsey was supposed to have taken,” Austin said. “While I couldn’t break into the traffic cams, I did use a satellite street-view app to locate some key cameras near Ram’s house and the highway exits the van might have passed when it went down the mountain road.” He tapped the screen. “If we can get the video on these here, here, and here, we can narrow our search grid.”

  Jace slid the keyboard in front of him. “Did you reach Mason?”

  “Left him a message. Everyone’s pretty much incommunicado right now, at least until they’re out of the danger zones on their current missions. I’m all you’ve got. Deal with it.”

  “Then that’ll have to be enough. Get me to the main traffic screen, and I’ll see what I can figure out.”

  Austin eyed him with open skepticism as he pressed a function key, bringing up the traffic monitoring system. “Somehow I don’t see you as a computer hack.”

  “I’m something way better.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A Navy SEAL, with years of intelligence-gathering ops under my belt. Watch and learn.” He punched up the log-in screen.

  Austin rolled his eyes. “How sure are you that you can break in? Because if you can’t, we need to brainstorm other ways to—”

  “I’m in.”

  “What the . . .” He peered over Jace’s shoulder and let out a low whistle. “How did you do that?”

  Jace typed the necessary commands to locate the camera he wanted. Then he jumped the video to the time frame that he was most interested in—the window after the van left him and Melissa.

  “Well,” Austin prodded. “How did you hack in so fast?”

  “Would you believe I used an algorithm I cooked up on the way over?”

  He snorted. “Hell no.”

  Jace smiled and fast-forwarded to another section of the video. “As soon as I saw the main screen, I realized Boulder is using a modified version of an off-the-shelf package that I studied as part of my computer training. Since I already knew about a glitch that would let me in, I gave it a try, hoping the bug wasn’t fixed in the latest release. It wasn’t.”

  “In other words, you tried a log-on and password a programmer built into the system so he could backdoor in whenever he wanted.”

  “When you say it that way, it’s not nearly as impressive.”

  “I wasn’t impressed anyway.”

  “Yeah. You were.”

  He frowned but didn’t argue the point. “Why aren’t you looking at the cameras by Ramsey’s house to figure out where he went this morning?”

  Jace scanned another section of footage. “I’m making an educated guess.”

  “A guess?”

  “I’m assuming ski-mask guy forced Ramsey to tell him about the rendezvous. And that he would have kept Ramsey with him in case the information didn’t pan out, and he had to interrogate him again.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “I very well could be. But I’m hoping that I’m right because it will save a lot of time.”

  And, possibly, Ramsey’s life.

  An image of the white van going down the mountain road popped onto the screen. Both of them leaned toward the monitor, trying to see inside the van.

  “No one’s in the passenger seat,” Austin said. “And the driver’s face is blocked by the sun visor.”

  Near the bottom of the mountain, the van slowed and turned onto a gravel road before disappearing from view.

  “I know that road.” Austin’s jaw was tight with strain. “When we planned this mission, I used that same satellite app to scope out the surrounding area in case the mission went south, and one of you needed me to plot an escape route. That particular road is a dead end, isolated, no houses around it. And right behind it? The old city dump.”

  Jace shot him an alarmed glance, then noted the time on the video freeze-frame. When the vehicle came back into view, only six minutes had passed. There was only one reason he could think of for the driver to head down that road and return so quickly. He went there to dump Ramsey’s body.

  He shoved his seat back and stood. “Keep scanning through the videos. See if you can pick up Ramsey’s movements earlier in the day in case I’m wrong about his being in that van.”

  JACE SHINED HIS powerful Maglite out the driver’s window onto the tire tracks that he believed belonged to the van. Than
kfully, it hadn’t snowed again this evening, so the trail down the gravel road was fairly easy to follow. He kept well to the right side of the road so he wouldn’t obliterate the tracks. Leaning halfway out the window, he watched for the telltale sign of a change in the tire impressions that would tell him when the van stopped, or if it pulled off into the woods at any point.

  A snapping sound had him hitting the brakes and jerking the light toward the trees and winter-dead brush crowding in on either side of the car. He eased his right hand down to the pistol holstered on his belt and listened intently.

  Snap. Crunch.

  He grabbed his gun and aimed it out the window. A possum ambled out between two pine trees, its pinched white face and eyes reflecting like beacons in the flashlight beam. Jace let out a pent-up breath and shoved his gun back in the holster. He stomped the gas, sending the possum running back into the woods and the car moving forward.

  Two minutes in, he reached the dead end Austin had told him about. But more importantly, he’d reached where the van had pulled to a stop. The gravel had shifted as the van braked, leaving a sliding impression that might as well have had a sign saying, “Bad guy stopped here.”

  “Austin,” he said, knowing the phone in the console would pick up his voice, “looks like he stopped at the end of the road instead of just turning around. I’m getting out to see if I can find anything.”

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Austin’s voice rasped through the speaker.

  “You and me both.” This felt like a setup, an ambush waiting to happen. But it wasn’t like he had anyone to call for backup. Keeping the line open, he shoved the phone into his jacket pocket so Austin would be able to hear him. Hopefully, Mason had gotten Austin’s message by now and could get here in a hurry if the worst happened. Although, at this point, Jace wasn’t sure what “the worst” would be. They already had a man down, or at least missing. And that was pretty much the worst-case scenario.

  After pulling out his pistol and scanning the trees closest to the car, he made a run for the cover of the nearest pines, then aimed his flashlight back toward the road. No gunshots. No shadows moving toward his car. All clear. Or so he hoped.

  He shined his flashlight toward the spot where the van had stopped. And then he saw it—a trail. Footprints, distorted from the gravel, making it impossible to gauge the shoe size. But definitely big, a heavy man—or a man carrying something heavy. Or someone. The prints led into the trees and disappeared where the snow thinned and gave way to rocky soil and pine needles sheltered by a thick bower of branches overhead.

  He moved the light back and forth as he walked the grid, from rocky soil to light snow and back again.

  “Jace?” Austin’s voice crackled in his pocket. “What’s going on?”

  He bent his head so his mouth was closer to the phone. “I lost the trail. He definitely came this way, but . . .” He frowned and squinted in the dark, shining his light about three feet away. Something was there, an imprint. A shoeprint?

  “Jace? Did something—”

  “Hold on. Wait.” He rushed forward and crouched down. Yes. That was definitely the impression of a heel, too crisp not to be recent. He frowned and pressed his fingers against a dark spot on a dried-up leaf then lifted his hand in the light. Blood, already turning tacky and brown.

  Wind whistled through the trees, making an eerie, mournful sound. He aimed the light back at the road, then all around him, in a slow circle. But when he didn’t see any movement, or hear anything more than the branches clacking together in the wind, he shined the light back on the blood drop. A foot in front of it was another, and another after that. He rushed forward, following the trail. Thirty feet in, the trail abruptly ended.

  At Ramsey’s body.

  Jace cursed viciously and dropped to his knees to check for a pulse. But that was just a formality. Judging by the amount of blood on the side of Ramsey’s head, he’d probably bled out long ago. And even if he hadn’t, since he was only wearing jeans and one of his trademark NASCAR T-shirts, he’d probably succumbed to hypothermia within minutes of being dumped like garbage on the side of the road.

  “What is it?” Austin demanded. “Damn it, Jace, what’s going on?”

  “I found him.” He pressed two fingers against the side of Ramsey’s neck.

  Silence reigned on the other end, as if Austin was too afraid to ask the next obvious question.

  “He’s . . .” Jace frowned and pressed harder. Faint, but it was there. A pulse. He pressed his hands against Ramsey’s chest. It barely moved, his breaths were shallow, but he was definitely breathing. “I’ll be damned. He’s still alive.”

  “Thank God,” Austin whispered. He cleared his throat, as if embarrassed. “What happened to him?” he demanded, back in control. “Has he been shot? Is he—?”

  “Give me a minute.” He ran his hands down Ramsey’s body, checking for injuries. “He has ligature marks on his wrists and ankles. Ski-mask guy must have cut off whatever he used to tie him up and took it with him so he didn’t leave evidence. There’s a deep laceration on his scalp, like maybe he was pistol-whipped. There are bruises down the side of his face and on his abdomen. But no gunshots. No knife wounds or obvious broken bones. He’s unconscious. I’m guessing his head wound is our biggest worry. No telling how hard he was hit.”

  He took a quick look around, then put his gun and flashlight away to free his hands. He scooped Ramsey into his arms, grunting from the effort of lifting a man nearly as tall and brawny as he was. “I’m taking him to the hospital.”

  He draped him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and shuffled back toward the road.

  “I’m sending GPS coordinates to your phone,” Austin said. “Devlin knows a lot of people around here, and several of them are doctors. I’ll get one of them to meet you at his private office.”

  “Remember the part where I said Ramsey has a head wound? Unless your doctor has an MRI and a neurosurgeon in his pocket, I’m taking him to the trauma center at Boulder Community Hospital.”

  “No way. You can’t go to BCH. Cardenas has feelers out all over the city for any former enforcers that pop up on the radar. Ramsey will be fish food there.”

  “Then you’d better figure out an alternative, fast.” He reached the car and settled Ramsey into the front passenger seat.

  From the swearing and loud computer keyboard clicking coming through the phone, Austin was obviously pissed. But at least he was trying to figure out another plan.

  Jace wasn’t waiting, though. He knew from experience how dangerous and unpredictable head wounds could be. He’d lost several good men in overseas ops because there wasn’t sufficient expertise to handle those kinds of injuries. Nothing was going to keep him from making sure that Ramsey got the medical attention he needed, not when there was a perfectly good trauma center nearby.

  He hopped into the driver’s seat and peeled out, spitting gravel from underneath his tires as he raced toward the highway.

  Chapter Four

  Melissa clip-clopped down the long hallway toward her office, courtesy of a broken heel, as she tried to see around the book bag in her arms—thanks to an equally broken shoulder strap. She was also balancing a full and very hot cup of coffee that she desperately wanted to drink but was very much afraid she was about to wear.

  This was karma for lying to her father earlier this morning when she’d turned down his offer of a ride to work. After giving him the lame excuse of needing to get there before him for a conference call in another time zone, she’d called a cab.

  Big mistake.

  The taxi had smelled like the drunk it had probably taken home a few hours earlier.

  Her nerves were already frayed from last night’s encounter with the gunman. Especially since her call to the police station when she woke up revealed that the detectives had no leads. Now, thinking about the true reason she’d needed to get here early, her temper was reaching a boiling point.

  This is what you’
ve forced me into, Father. Spying and sneaking around to figure out what’s going on. Why can’t you just tell me the truth and stop the lies?

  She caught a quick glimpse of Stefano as he zipped down an adjoining hallway about twenty feet ahead. She was about to call out to him for help when her always maddeningly chipper administrative assistant flitted past the same intersection just as quickly as Stefano, in spite of her advanced years.

  Melissa changed her mind about calling for Stefano, knowing that Jolene would turn around to help, too. Dealing with the happy Pollyanna before getting a few dozen gulps of caffeine into her system might be dangerous for one or both of them.

  Somehow, she managed to navigate the last leg of her journey into the reception area, then her office, without a disaster, and kicked the door closed behind her with a satisfying thud.

  With her broken shoe clinging to life by the strap around her pinkie finger, she continued her desperate balancing act in the general direction of the massive cherrywood monster her father had gifted her with last Christmas. As with so many of his presents, she’d had to weigh her hatred of it against her love for her father. Unfortunately, love won, and she was stuck with the beast: the desk, not her father.

  When she reached the behemoth, she ever so carefully set the coffee down, without spilling it. Score! She let out a huge sigh and relaxed her shoulders, surrendering her purse, her book bag, and her broken shoe to the plush carpet below.

  Stretching her arms and flexing her hands and feet, she tried to straighten out everything she’d contorted earlier. Then she yanked off her stubbornly remaining shoe, let it drop to the floor beside its twin, and reached for the heavy book bag.

  A tanned, masculine hand shot in front of her and plucked the bag off the floor as if it were weightless.

  She whirled around, bringing up her fists in a boxing stance.

  The man who’d saved her yesterday stood a few feet away, his eyes widening and his mouth crooking up in a ridiculously charming grin as he set the bag on top of her desk before holding his hands up in mock surrender.